Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

The agency person was a woman with a pulled-back, noisy face. Her suit looked like an artistic vase she’d been placed in up to her neck. When she smiled at me, it was like a buzzer going off. I could tell right away that my parents didn’t know what to do.

“Can you assure me that our daughter will be taken care of?” asked my mother.

“Absolutely!” said Mrs. Agency. She spoke of roommates, vigilant concierges who monitored the doors, benevolent chaperones, former models themselves.

“Aren’t there a lot of homosexuals in the fashion industry?” asked my father.

Mrs. Agency emitted a joyless laugh. “Yes, there are. That’s another reason your daughter will be as safe as a kitten.”

My father frowned. I felt forces vying in the room. He sighed and sat back. “I just wish you didn’t have to interrupt your school,” he said. And then I was on another plane, humping through a gray tunnel of bumps. I stared into the sky and remembered Daphne at the airport, closing her face to me. She hugged me, but there was no feeling in it, and when she pulled away, I saw her closed face. Sara didn’t hug me, but when she turned to walk away, she looked back at me, the sparkle of love in her eye like a kiss. Droning, we rose above the clouds and into the brilliant blue.

When the plane landed, it was morning. Invisible speakers filled the airport with huge voices I couldn’t understand. I walked with a great mass of people through a cloud of voices, aiming for the baggage claim. I was distracted by a man in a suit coming toward me with a bouquet of roses and a white bag that looked like a miniature pillowcase half-full of sugar. His body was slim and his head was big. Deep furrows in his lower face pulled his small lips into a fleshy beak. His lips made me think of a spider drinking blood with pure blank bliss. Suddenly, he saw me. He stopped, and his beak burst into a beautiful broad smile that transformed him from a spider into a gentleman. “I am René,” he said. “You are for Céleste Agency, no?” Yes, I was. He took one of my bags and handed me his roses. He took my other bag, put it on the floor, and kissed my hand. In a flash, I understood: Seeing me had made him a gentleman and he loved me for it. I liked him, too. “It is Andrea, yes?” “No,” I said. “Alison.”

His car was sleek and white and had doors that opened upward, like wings on a flying horse. We got inside it. He opened the bag (which was silk) and scooped the cocaine out of it with his car key. He placed the key under one winged nostril and briskly inhaled. I thought of the time my father was insulted by a car salesman who said, “All you want is something to get around in!” For a week after, my father walked around saying, “What do you do with it, you son of a bitch? Screw with it?” We passed the key back and forth for some moments. Finally, he licked it and put it in the ignition. He said, “Alison, you are a beautiful girl. And now you are in a country that understands beauty. Enjoy it.” He started the car. The drug hit my heart. Its hard pounding spread through my body in long dark ripples and for a second I was afraid. Then I stepped inside the electrical current and let it knock me out. We pulled out of the lot and into the Parisian traffic.

I had read about Paris in school. It was a place where ladies wore jewels and branches of flowers, even live birds in tiny cages woven into their huge wigs. The whipping boy sometimes played chess with the prince. The Marquis de Sade painted asylum inmates with liquid gold and made them recite poetry until they died. Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat butt-naked in the tub. I looked at the car speeding next to us; a plain girl with glasses on the end of her nose frowned and hunched forward. She cut us off and René muttered a soft curse. American pop music came out of her car in a blur. Ossifier. Love’s desire . Huge office complexes sat silent in fields brimming with bright green desire. The queen knelt before a guillotine. Blood shot from her neck in a hot stream. The next day, her blood stained the street and people walked on it; now her head was gone, and she could be part of life. René asked what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to write poetry. Cancan girls laughed and kicked. In paintings, their eyes are squiggles of pleasure, their mouths loose-shaped holes. On the street, people waiting for the light to change frowned and glanced at their watches.

René waited for me in the car while I went into the agency. It was a medium-sized building with a shiny door on a cobbled street. The doorman had mad blue eyes and beautiful white gloves. The halls were carpeted in aqua. Voices and laughter came from behind a door. It opened and there was a woman with one kind eye and one cruel eye. Behind her was a man looking at me from inside an office. His look held me like a powerful hand. A girl’s small white face peeped around the corner of the same office. The hand let go of me. The girl blinked and withdrew. “Where is your luggage?” asked the double-eyed woman. “With René, outside,” I replied. “René?” She rolled her eyes back in her head. When they came forward again, they were both cruel. “Very well. Here.” She handed me a piece of paper. “This is a list of go-sees for tomorrow and Wednesday. I suggest you use a taxi to get to them. Now tell René that Madame Sokolov says he must take you straight to rue de l’Estrapade.”

“Ah,” said René. “Madame Sokolov is not always aware.” He tapped his head with two fingers and drove us to a dark door squeezed between a tobacco shop and a shoe store. The concierge was an old woman with a brace on her leg. She led me slowly up the dingy stairs, with René following, bags in hand. We moved slowly to respect the brace. Each short flight of steps came to a small landing with ticking light switches that shut off too soon. “Merde,” muttered the old lady. The light had turned off while she was looking for the key to my room. In the dark, I felt René’s hot breath on my ear. “Take a nap this afternoon, eh? I’ll be by at eight.” He bit me on the ear. I started and he disappeared down the stairs. The old lady pushed open the door; there was a weak burst of light and television noise and a high, cunty voice: “But don’t you see, I want you here now . Two days from now will be too late!” My roommate, in bra and underpants, sat cross-legged on the sagging couch, the phone to her sulky face. She acknowledged me with a look, then rose and walked into a back room, trailing the phone cord. She carried her slim butt like a raised tail and her shoulders like pointy ears. When the old lady left, I sat on the couch and picked at a bowl of potato chips on the side table. Out a window, enamel rooftops with slim metal chimneys were bright against the white sky; a shadow weather vane twirled on a shadow roof. I watched it until my roommate got off the phone and I could call my family.

When René came, I told him I wanted to go someplace that had pie. He laughed and said, “You will have French pie!” We went to a patisserie with cakes that looked like jewelry boxes made of cream. I ate them, but I didn’t like them. They had too many tastes, and I wanted the plain chemical taste of grocery store pie. But the tables were made of polished wood and the people sitting at them were drinking coffee from tiny white cups. A woman next to us took a cigarette out of a case and lit it with a silver lighter. And because René asked him to, the waiter sang to me. The song was about little boys peeing on butterflies. Papillon, pee, pee, pee. Papillon, non, non, non . The waiter bent down to the table and sang softly. His pocked face hung in bristly jowls and I saw he was missing teeth. But his voice opened the song like a picture book with feelings and smells in it. Blue flowers bobbed on the wind and butterflies dodged the piss of laughing boys. Mothers called; the boys buttoned their flies and ran home. I had awakened in New Jersey with my parents and I was going to sleep tonight with my French lover.