Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

If we got home and our mother wasn’t there, our dad danced around the house, pretending he was an ape. He did it to relieve tension. He’d run into the living room swinging his arms and going, “Ooooh! Oooh! Eeee eee eee!” He’d jump up on a chair, scratching his armpit and his head. Daphne and I did it, too; we ran around after him. It was like dancing on the green chairs, only it wasn’t a song everybody knew. It came from the deep flesh place, except it was quick and alive and full of joy. Not that I thought of it that way. I just knew I loved it. If it had gone on longer, it would’ve been better than any song. But it lasted only a minute. Our dad would always call it; he’d suddenly go back to normal and climb down off the chair, his smile disappearing back into his face. “Whew!” he’d say. “I feel a whole lot better now!” Except once between ape and normal, he took my shoulders and hugged me sideways. “I’m proud of you,” he whispered, and kissed my ear.

I was proud, too; I knew I was doing something hard. Sometimes I was even happy. But another world was still with me, glowing and rippling like a dream of heaven deeper than the ocean. I could be studying or watching TV or unloading clothes from the washing machine when a memory would come like a heavy wave of dream rolling into life and threatening to break it open. During the day, life stood stolid, gray and oblivious. But at night, heaven came in the cracks. I would want Alain, and want his cruelty, too. I would long for those cabinets of rich food and plates of drugs, for nights of sitting alone in the dark, eating marzipan until I was sick. For bitches who yanked at me and yelled at me for sweating. For nightclubs like cheap boxed hell, full of smoke and giant faces with endlessly talking lips and eyes and snouts swelling and bulbous with beauty. For my own swollen hugeness, spread across the sky. It didn’t matter that I had been unhappy in the sky, or that I had been cheated and used. I cried for what had hurt me, and felt contempt for those who loved me; if Daphne had put her arm around me then, I would’ve clenched my teeth with contempt. Then, lying next to her warm body was like lying in a hole with a dog and looking up to see gods rippling in the air of their hot-colored heaven. I wanted her to know that she was a dog, ugly and poor. I wanted all of them to know. I wanted my father to know that he would always be crushed, no matter how hard he pushed.

On the last night I saw Alain, he took a bunch of us to a sadomasochist sex club. It was a dump guarded by a fat tattooed man who smacked his blubbery lips at us. Inside the cave, there was a bar and a handsome young man pouring drinks behind it. Cheerful music played. Two middle-aged women with deep, sour faces sat at the bar wearing corsets and garter belts. Some people were dressed in costume like them; other people were dressed normally. One man was naked. He was skinny as a corpse — you could see his ribs and the bones of his ass. He had long matted gray hair and thick yellow nails like a dog’s. He crawled on the floor, moaning and licking it with his tongue. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Nobody even looked at him. He crawled to the women at the bar and got up on his knees. He moaned and pawed the air like he longed to touch them but didn’t dare. Without looking, one of them took the riding crop from her lap and lightly struck him across the shoulders. “Va, va!” she scolded gently. He reached down and yanked at his limp penis. He yanked it hard and fast but also daintily. She returned the crop to her lap and he scuttled away, balls swinging between his withered thighs. She saw me staring and made a face, as if I had broken a rule. I looked for Alain and saw him disappearing into a crowded back room with his arm around a dimly familiar girl. “Don’t worry.” Jean-Paul was suddenly beside me. “It is harmless here.” He winked at me. “Just a show, mostly. Unless you want to join.” But I pushed through the crowd.

Sometimes the spell would break: I would look away from the terrible heaven and see my sister lying next to me, her neat, graceful form and her even breath beautiful and inviolate. If I put my hand on her warm shoulder, my thoughts might quiet; heaven would vanish and the ceiling would be there again, protecting us from the sky. I could lie against her and feel her breath forgive me. The day would come. My night thoughts would pale. My sister and I would go to school.

But sometimes I would barely sleep, then get up with heaven still burning my eyes. I would be full of hate and pain because I could not get back to it. On one of those mornings, I told Daphne the story of the sex club. We were moving around the room quickly, getting out of our warm gowns and into our cold clothes. I told her about the crawling man and the women at the bar. I could tell she didn’t want to hear. But I kept talking, faster and faster. I pushed through the crowd. A hand reached out of it and grabbed my wrist. I took its little finger and bent it back. It let go. I threw my gown on the bed and walked across the room naked. Daphne turned her back, bent, and showed me the gentle humps of her spine. With dignity, she put on her pants.

In a reeking back room, I found Alain with Lisa from Naxos. Her sensitive little lips were tense and strange. They were watching a middle-aged woman climb onto a metal contraption so that a man could whip her. Daphne yanked open a drawer and slammed it shut. I brushed my hair with rapid strokes. Alain smiled at me. I told him I wanted to go home, now. “Then go home,” he said. Lisa was not looking at me on purpose. Daphne pared her nails. She was not looking at me, either. The man with the whip was waiting for the woman to get settled into the proper knee and hand grooves. He seemed nervous; twice he moved his arm, like he was anxious to assist her, then moved it back. “I want to go home!” I nearly screamed. Both the man with the whip and the climbing woman turned to look at me; she brushed a piece of hair from her quizzical eye. The people watching them looked, too. There was a crash; “Shit!” hissed Daphne. She had knocked a water glass off the bed table, splashing the mattress. Without looking at me, Alain took an ice cube out of his drink and threw it at my face. The woman settled her face into the metal headrest. I kicked Alain’s shin and ran.

“That’s poetry,” I said. “Life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook.” Daphne slammed the glass back on the table so hard, I thought she’d break it. She went out of the room and down the stairs. She knew what I’d said was stupid, but she half-believed it, too.

I left the sadomasochist dump with a girl from the south of France named Simone. She was wearing a tight blue dress with red wine spilled down the front of it. She was so drunk, she didn’t care. “Fuck it,” she kept saying in English, “you know?” The tattooed doorman called out an endearment to us as we emerged from his cave. “Fuck it!” she yelled. The club was on a tiny alley that smelled of interesting piss, but one block over, glamorous traffic ran biliously. Papillon, pee, pee, pee . We linked arms and walked. Simone was talking about her new boyfriend, but I didn’t listen. I was thinking about Lisa’s shame at Naxos, trying to gloat. But Alex was right: Even a young girl’s shame can be beautiful. The naked man in the club crawled on the floor, looking for his shame, starving for it. Locked out of life and trying to crawl back through a tunnel made of shame. Yanking his dead dick in reverence for a life he couldn’t have. I looked up at the sky. Gnats sparkled in the flickering light of a broken street lamp. Plunged into dark, then dancing for joy, over and over again. Alain hadn’t even looked at me. Just flicked the ice in my face.