Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

“I knew he still had that grill out there, and sure enough, the sun came out and I heard him mobilize it. I heard the charcoal in the bag. I heard him slide the lid off. I sat down and I meditated. I asked for help. I asked, What is the most powerful force in the world? And the answer came to me: Water.”

Rita has hepatitis C; so do I. We don’t discuss it much; she doesn’t remind me that codeine by the fistful is like dropping a bomb on my liver. I don’t remind her that while charcoal smoke is not a problem, her fried-food diet is.

“I filled every pot, every pan, every jar, glass, and vase, and I set them all out on the edge of the deck. And as soon as he fired it up—”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. I doused the grill, and when he cursed me out, I doused him. He just stood there a second, and then you know what? He laughed! He said, ‘Rita, you are a pisser.’ He liked it!”

We talk a minute more; I laugh and say good-bye, step outside onto the wooden stairs. I snap open the umbrella and remember the last time I visited Veronica. She served me brownies in pink wrapping paper, fancy cheese, and sliced fruit she was too sick to eat. I remember the time I said, “I don’t think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.”

Veronica was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “I think love is overrated. My parents loved me. And it didn’t do any good.”

My street is all functional apartment buildings set back from the sidewalk. White plus a few black people live here. Two blocks down, it’s semifunctional buildings and Mexicans. Turn the corner and it’s warehouses, auto-body repair shops, and a bar with music coming out of it at 8:00 in the morning. Blunt, faceless buildings that are too much trouble to tear down. Grass and weeds and little bushes silently press up between the buildings and through every crack in the concrete. At the end of the street is a four-lane highway that you can walk along. Big businesses live here — car dealerships, computer stores, office retail — and things I can’t identify, even though I walk by them almost every day, because the bigness makes me feel mute. The mute feeling isn’t bad. It’s like being a grain of dirt in the ground, with growth and death all around. A grain or a grass or a stone, a tiny thing that knows everything but can’t say anything. It isn’t just the bigness of the businesses. It’s the highway, too, all the hundreds of cars roaring in the opposite direction I’m walking, the hundreds of heads blurrily showing through hundreds of windshields.

This happens sometimes when I walk along here; my focus slips and goes funny. I think it’s something to do with walking at a slow pace against the speeding traffic, and today the rain blurs everything even more. It’s like I get sucked out of normal life into a place where the order of things is changed; it’s still my life and I recognize it, but the people and places in it are sliding around indiscriminately.

A fat white man pedals gravely past on a green bicycle, one hand guiding the bike, the other holding a small half-broken umbrella over his head. He examines me; there’s a bolt of life from his hazel eyes and then he’s gone.

A dream from last night: Someone is chasing me, and in order to reach safety, I have to run through my past and all the people in it. But the past is jumbled, not sequential, and all the people are mixed up. A nameless old woman who used to live next door is reaching out to me, her large brown eyes brimming with tenderness and tears — but my mother is lost in a crowd scene. My father is barely visible — I see him by himself in the shadows of the living room, dreamily eating a salted nut — while a loud demented stranger pops right up in my face, yelling about what I must do to save myself now.

Meanwhile, a middle-aged Mexican woman is kneeling on the sidewalk, patiently replacing the clothes that apparently spilled out when her big red suitcase broke open. She has no umbrella and her hair and clothes are plastered to her body. I stop and crouch, trying to help her. With an impersonal half glance, she shakes her head no. I straighten and pause and then stand there, holding my umbrella over both of us. She looks up, smiling; I’m invoking civility on this concrete strip between roaring and hugeness, and she appreciates it. Her smile is like an open door, and I enter for a second. She goes back to her nimble packing. She picks freshly wet little blouses, underwear, baby clothes, and socks up off the sidewalk. She retrieves a clear plastic bag of half-burned candles and a T-shirt that says 16 MAGAZINE! on it. She shakes out each thing and refolds it.

Toward the end, Veronica’s shoulder pads used to get loose sometimes and wander down her arm or her back without her knowing it. Once I was sitting with her in a good restaurant when a man next to us said, “Excuse me, there’s something moving on your back.” His tone was light and aggressive, like it was him versus the fashionable nitwits. “Oh,” said Veronica, also light. “Excuse me. It’s just my prosthesis.”

Sometimes I loved how she would make cracks like that. Other times it was just embarrassing. Once we were leaving a movie theater after seeing a pretentious movie. As we walked past a line of people waiting to see the other movie, Veronica said loudly, “They don’t want to see anything challenging. They’d rather see Flashdance . Now me, if it’s bizarre, I’m interested.” There was a little strut to her walk and her voice was like a huge feather in a hat. She’s not like that, I’d wanted to say to the ticket holders. If you knew her, you’d see.

But she was like that. She could be unbelievably obnoxious. In the locker room of the gym we both went to, she was always snapping at somebody for getting too close to her or brushing against her. “If you want me to move, just tell me, but please stop poking me in the bottom,” she’d say to some openmouthed Suzy in a leotard. “Fist fucking went out years ago. Didn’t you know that?”

The Mexican woman clicks her suitcase shut and stands with a little smile. My focus snaps back to normal, and the woman slips back into the raining hugeness. She smiles at me again as she turns to go, returning my civility with rain running down her face.

In the dream, it’s like the strangers are delivering messages for more important people, who for some reason can’t talk to me. Or that the people who are important by the normal rules — family, close friends — are accidental attachments, and that the apparent strangers are the true loved ones, hidden by the grotesque disguises of human life.

Of course, Veronica had a lot of smart cracks stored up. She needed them. When she didn’t have them, she was naked and everybody saw. Once when we were in a coffee shop, she tried to speak seriously to me. Her skin was gray with seriousness. Her whole eyeball looked stretched and tight; the white underpart was actually showing. She said, “I’ve just got to get off my fat ass and stop feeling sorry for myself.” Her tough words didn’t go with the look on her face. The waitress, a middle-aged black lady, gave her a sharp, quick glance that softened as she turned away. She could tell something by looking at Veronica, and I wondered what it was.

Veronica died of AIDS. She spent her last days alone. I wasn’t with her. When she died, nobody was with her.

I’m feeling a little feverish already, but I don’t want to take the aspirin on an empty stomach. I also don’t want to deal with holding the umbrella while I get the aspirin out, put it back, get the water, unscrew it, squeeze the umbrella with one arm, the one that’s killing me.…

I met Veronica twenty-five years ago, when I was a temporary employee doing word processing for an ad agency in Manhattan. I was twenty-one. She was a plump thirty-seven-year-old with bleached-blond hair. She wore tailored suits in mannish plaids with matching bow ties, bright red lipstick, false red fingernails, and mascara that gathered in intense beads on the ends of her eyelashes. Her loud voice was sensual and rigid at once, like plastic baubles put together in rococo shapes. It was deep but could quickly become shrill. You could hear her from across the room, calling everyone, even people she hated, “hon”: “Excuse me, hon, but I’m very well acquainted with Jimmy Joyce and the use of the semicolon.” She proofread like a cop with a nightstick. She carried an “office kit,” which contained a red plastic ruler, assorted colored pencils, Liquid Paper, Post-its, and a framed sign embroidered with the words STILL ANAL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. She was, too. When I told her I had a weird tension that made my forehead feel like it was tightening and letting go over and over again, she said, “No, hon, that’s your sphincter.”