Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

I think of my first job in Rome. Huge open windows looked out onto the city. Long white curtains stirred in the wind. Carmen was playing on an old record player. We drank wine and flipped through an Italian comic book about a demon that lived in a pretty girl’s cunt. He whispered to her clit as if it were an ear and said, “Do it with this one!” or “No, don’t do it with that one!” When she did it with someone, the demon hid in her asshole and said, “Phew, it stinks in here!” I giggled, the photographer smiled, and the other model looked bored. The curtains streamed out the windows and Carmen sang of love.

I wonder if Jerry can see any echo of that moment when he scans me. If he does, he probably understands it better than most. The more withered the reality, the more gigantic and tyrannical the dream. From the dark hole of a bar on a street of sickness and whores comes a teeming cloud of music sparkling with warmth and glamour: Sweet dreams of rhythm and magic— Look in and see dark dead blurs slumped on stools.

“Joanne’s in the kitchen,” says Jerry pointedly. Still not looking at me, he puts down a can of varnish and studies the finish on the chest. “She with Jason’s kids.” He picks up the can again. He wants me to go away.

I say good-bye and cross the wet lawn. I open the door; a little girl stops running in the hall to look at me. Messy hair, small open mouth, aura of shy, senseless joy. “Joanne!” The girl runs again and disappears, waving the ribbon of her voice. “It’s Alison!”

Jason is one of Joanne’s roommates. In the blur of youth, he was married long enough to have five-year-old twin girls, who come to stay with him for a week here and there. Drew and Joanne take care of them while he’s at work; mostly, that means Joanne. I come into the living room fast enough to see the kid dart around the corner into the kitchen. The living room is a bunch of slumping furniture, plants growing up to the ceiling, an electric guitar on the floor, cat dishes, the TV flashing cartoon pictures, and a huge fish tank bubbling against one wall. In the center of the floor is a chair, its orange seat back carved in the shape of flames — Drew’s work. Also Drew’s work is a bench on bird-foot legs, painted with peacock feathers. Beyond the living room, I glimpse the den, which is packed with Drew’s work: a painted forest of legs and backs, the limbs of imaginary animals. Jason’s little girls put their heads around the corner and giggle, then pop back into the kitchen.

“I’m in here, Allie,” says Joanne from the kitchen.

“So he expects me — me with the bad back! — to carry two bags of clubs for this asshole,” says another voice.

“Watch your mouth, Karl,” says Joanne mildly. “Hi, Allie.” She puts her cigarette out on a little plate and smiles. The girls smile, too — not only Jason’s Heather and Joelle but also seven-year-old Trisha from down the block. They’re at the table, drawing pictures. Another roommate, scrawny, pissed-off Karl, stands there bare-chested, raging about his golf course job. He’s hunched over Joanne, sending small, concentrated rage at her, like she’s standing there with a big bag to catch it. He looks at me, his raging head pulled into such a point, it’s like his eyes are on the end of his nose. He says, “Hi,” then continues his rant.

“I’m gonna tell that … that … pig, that fat pig—”

“Look,” says Heather. “Look at my castle and my glass mountain!”

“I’m not gonna tell him anything! I’m gonna go to Loomis and tell him what’s been going on in accounting! And then I’m gonna get Harris and get him together with—”

“Want some tea, Allie?” Joanne is sandy-colored, her skin and her hair. Her eyes are light brown, and they remind me of Alain’s because they are sometimes filled with pouring movement. Except her movement isn’t in pieces. It’s continuous, like the movement of a plant or human cell fluxing with light or water or blood. Joanne is drinking from the world through her eyes, maybe even from beyond it.

“Look at my beach birds!” cries Joelle. “Look at my bird balls!” The children crowd around Joanne as she’s trying to get up, loving what is in her eyes.

“I’ll get the tea,” I say, then realize I forgot to take off my wet shoes. I’ve tracked dirt through the house like a stoner or a senile old lady. Oh well. I bend to pull off my shoes. I feel my aging gingerly. I sit up. The children’s faces are bursting with expressions, each gently crowding out the others. Karl looks at them, and his eyes go back where they’re supposed to be. He turns around and gropes through a cabinet, pulls out a box of cereal with a cartoon tiger on it. The tiger roars as magic sugar flies over his giant bowl of cereal.

“Joanne, look! Look, Alison!” Trisha is dancing and waving her drawing. She is erect and seeking, and her white skin is as vibrant as color. Her brown eyes are radiant, but her small lips have a soft dark color that suggests privacy, hiddenness. Her dancer is red leaping on white, with wiggle arms and pointy yellow shoes on the ends of wiggle legs.

“Wow!” I say. “This is a real dancer. This is like real dancing!”

“Yes,” says Trisha, “now look!”

Even Karl looks as Trisha stands exulting with her arms in the air. “All the way up to here!” She bends and puts her palms on the floor; her cartwheel is a quick, neat arc. “All the way down to there!” Her belly flashes its button. She laughs, cartwheels again, out of the kitchen into the hall. Heather and Joelle somersault after her, screaming, “Me, too! Me!” We applaud. I get a mug from the cabinet, brushing against Karl as I go past. His rage is still there, but it’s inside now. I picture a little metal ball with spikes, rolling in one spot, tearing a hole in his heart while the rest of Karl holds it together, eating his cereal and thinking about other things.

“I’ll get it.” Joanne brushes past me, gets the kettle, runs water into it.

“It’s total disrespect,” says Karl. “He’s shitting on me, and he’s doing it so everybody else knows.”

“Karl,” I say. “I don’t exactly know what you’re talking about. But if you’re talking disrespect at the workplace, I once worked with a photographer who told a girl to put her hand down her pants and masturbate.”

“What?”

“He put it more nicely than that, but he meant, Stick your hand down your pants and masturbate. He wasn’t kidding, either. And she was fifteen.”

This happened in Naxos, Greece. The photographer was an American named Alex Gish. He was considered an artist. Whatever he looked at, he took apart and put back together with his mind, furious because he knew it would just go back to being itself as soon as he looked away. He was looking at me, this fifteen-year-old Brit named Lisa, and three local men his assistant had hired. He called the men “magnificent” and then gazed at them, rearranging. They gazed back, huge, bemused, squinting. One of them affably spat.

“So did she do it?” Karl pauses over his cereal, spiked ball on hold. He is curious. His eyes are a little turned on, but his small chest is soft and open. He has compassion. I get stuck on this for a second. If his compassion comes from the place where he’s clawing himself, is it real? It seems mean to say no. But I wonder. One of the Greek men looked at Lisa with compassion, too. His look was not about something torn. He looked at her before she was disrespected. He looked like a kind dog might look at a nervous cat. Majestic wet tongue out, rhythmically inhaling the scent of feline. Store info in saliva, lick the chops, swallow it down. Blink soft, merciful eyes. Put tongue out again. Sometimes dogs are more dignified than cats. This man was probably sixty years old, and he was so beautiful, they wanted to put him in a fashion magazine.