Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

She’s right about that, too. I think of the guy with hepatitis who was written up in the local paper as a success story last year; he thought he’d beaten the disease with a macrobiotic diet, Chinese herbs, acupuncture, and vigorous exercise. The son of a bitch ran five miles every day, then went home and sat in the hot tub he’d built himself. In the newspaper photo, he looked very pleased with himself; the caption under the photo said “In control.” Then liver cancer squashed him like a mallet. He didn’t know that high temperatures are very bad for the hepatic liver, and he’d apparently cooked the damn organ in his hot tub. Which is exactly what drives Karen crazy — his thinking that if only he did everything right, he might control mortality. His bossy little will with its nose in the air, up on a pedestal to be worshiped. Except she wants to put her sickness on a pedestal and worship it. She wants other people to worship it, too.

“Do you remember,” I say, “all those spiritual healing books from the eighties? There was one that said HIV came to Earth because of shame. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah.” Joanne makes a carrot-strip sunburst on a yellow plate. “I think I read that one. Wasn’t it by this grandmotherly old lady?” She goes to the refrigerator and comes back with handfuls of radishes. “There was an exercise you were supposed to do. I remember …” She stands at the sink, running the radishes under the water, quickly and lightly rubbing them.

“You were supposed to address each body part and tell it you loved it, especially any part you felt shame about. A long time ago, I gave it to this woman named Veronica. She had HIV and I was desperate to give her something, even though she didn’t want it.”

“Like Karen talks about.”

“Yeah, except she didn’t get mad at me. She laughed instead.”

Joanne cuts the radishes like my mother did, like her mother must’ve done — like flowers. I cut the sandwiches into triangles, like Daphne, Sara, and I used to have sandwiches. Like Trisha and Heather and Joelle might one day make sandwiches for children.

“She gave the book back and told me it was sweet. I asked if she did the exercise, and she said, ‘Hon, I may not know much about love, but I know it’s not an act of will.’ She said picturing all those fags chanting ‘I love my ass’ made her laugh.”

In fact, Veronica said she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Trying to put love up their asses like they used to put dick, under the benevolent ur-gaze of this grandmotherly ‘healer,’ like finally Grandma loves and accepts your ass — please. My shame didn’t cause this and my love won’t cure it.”

“I remember she said, ‘How do you think Stalin and Hitler wound up killing so many people? They were trying to fix them. To make them ideal.’ She said, ‘There’s violence in that, hon.’ ”

“Yeah,” says Joanne. “I see what she means. But I liked the exercise. I didn’t expect it to fix me. I just found it comforting.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”

She drops a double handful of cut radishes in the center of the sunburst. Light comes through the window and shines on her hands; they are wet, rough, and slightly red at the knuckles. There’s a torn hangnail on her thumb and chipped silver polish on her broken transparent nails. “Do you want apple juice?” she asks.

Heather and Joelle run through the room, using our legs to play hide-and-seek. Their young faces peep in and out of our aging limbs; their hands and eyes flash. I think of roses climbing a battered trellis.

“We’ve gotta get lunch on,” says Joanne. “My radio program is gonna be on in forty minutes, and today it’s the director of Lost in Translation , and I loved that movie.”

The place Joanne is building inside has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors and old-lady healers and people trying to love their asses and people who think they’re stupid for it. In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put on the wall. Not because it is good but because it is trying to understand something. In these rooms, there will be understanding. In these rooms, each madness and stupidity will be unfolded from its knot and smoothed with loving hands until the true thing inside it lies revealed.

Joanne goes to get Jerry for lunch. The girls help me carry the food into the living room so we can eat it on a blanket while we watch Animal Planet . There’re cheese sandwiches with lettuce, peanut butter and jelly ones, radishes and carrots, plus animal crackers and juice in little cartons. Joanne and I sit on the floor with the girls; Joelle sits between Joanne’s spread legs, her plate balanced on Joanne’s thigh. Jerry’s next to Nate on the couch, laughing about something. The light from the fish tank glows behind them; fish traverse the rippling green.

On Animal Planet , people are putting computer chips under the skins of beautiful lizards in order to help save them from extinction. The camera zooms in on the writhing creatures. Their eyes bulge; their hinged red mouths fiercely gape. One strikes the air with a stiff webbed claw. Joanne presses the mute button to say grace. The bright and scalding past breaks through.

Toward the end, Alain would talk to people about me while I sat right there. I understood French well enough by then that I could understand most of what he said. “She’s gone cold. Morbid, a little weird. She doesn’t have the strength to carry that off. But you should have seen her when she first came.” I just sat there, not saying anything. What shames me most about it is that by then I didn’t even love him. I loved the rich things and the money and people kissing my ass. I loved the song I was living in, and he was the singer.

He still used the apartment for meetings and to hang out. He brought over girls and his beautiful friend Jean-Paul, an ex-model who smiled, dirty and sweet, when Alain called him “cunt face.” He didn’t have official parties there. That was for his real house, which he shared with his real girlfriend. But the apartment was set up so that little parties could happen if they wanted to. There were fresh flowers in freshly polished vases. The pantry was stocked with wine and fancy nuts, big fat olives, figs, sugared almonds, and marzipan animals that I ate myself sick on when I was alone. In the refrigerator were salted fish, pâtés, cheeses. Also boxes of syringes filled with antibiotics for syphilis and clap. There was always cocaine in a big china plate on the mantel. Some nights, people would tumble in like they were being poured from a giant cornucopia, falling out on their royal asses, then getting up to dance and eat and strut. Some of them thought I was just a girl at the party. But lots of them knew this was actually my home. Alain insisted on keeping up the pretense of no sex, even though so many people knew. Once I did it with Cunt Face when people were over, to mock Alain and his policy. That’s when I realized how many people knew. We came out of the bedroom and people looked at Alain to see what he would do. When he didn’t do anything, they looked away. Little laughing people skipping and playing in the place where the huge things are.

But I wasn’t a little person. I was huge. I was hugely drunk. I was a model and secret mistress of a powerful agent who could flaunt another lover in front of him.

I walked down a hallway crowded with gorgeous people. Lush arms, gold skin, fantastic flashing eyes, lips made up so big and full, they seemed mute — made not to talk but only to sense and receive. So much beauty, like bursts of violent color hitting your eye together and mixing until they were mud. I passed a bathroom and heard the sound of puking quickly covered by the music on the stereo. Rich, dreamy mud of sound. A girl met my eye and I was amazed to see her face emerge with such clarity. For a second, I was startled to think I knew her from childhood. Then I realized she was a movie star. I had watched her on TV with my family. She was looking at me curiously. I smiled and walked past. My father had loved her on TV. If he could see this, he would reach up and scratch his ear, not knowing what to say. Jean-Paul had scratched his ear just before he leaned in to kiss me. His kiss had been surprisingly sweet. I ducked into a bedroom to call my father and tell him about the movie star. I closed the door and sat with the phone cord wound against my chest, listening to the phone ringing in the dingy kitchen in New Jersey, my call hurtling through the night, over the cold ocean to land in that dingy phone.