Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

Because it was hot and crowded in the apartment, Ed and I took some couch cushions and a sheet out onto the fire escape. I woke with the sun warming my eyeballs through the lids. The inside of my mouth was sore and sweet with alcohol. Compared to Alain or Jean-Paul, Ed was a very clumsy boy. He said he loved me, and all I could think of was the one who called me “bitch-ez.” But I said, “I love you, too.” Below us, beyond us, all around us, traffic ran.

Alain and Lisa walked in just as Simone and I were walking out. I looked at Lisa and instead of thinking, Go honk your pussy, I shouted it. Alain glared after me as if his face might break. “Petez des flammes!” I screamed. It was two days later that I got home from a job and found he had changed the locks. Fifteen months later, I sat in Ed’s car in the A&P lot with a copy of Vogue on my lap, sobbing and clawing at it. Lisa was on the cover. She was stunning. “I hate her!” I screamed. “I hate all of them!”

Ed sneaked a hot slit-eyed look at Lisa. I screamed, tore the cover off the magazine, and threw it into the lot. A lumpy old man watched it scud across the asphalt. He gave me an irritated look. I hunched down in the seat and sobbed. Lumpy Man got in his car. Ed fiddled with his keys. “Why don’t you go to New York and be a model?” he asked. “You still could.”

“No,” I moaned. “No, never.”

“Then why don’t you go be a poet?”

“I’m not a poet, Ed.” I sat up and stopped crying.

“Then why don’t you just go?”

The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery. As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whinging sound, like we’re streaking through space. Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them. Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around. More distant green, the side of a building. The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point. It sags down with a gassy sigh. Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor. Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus. The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on. The crabbed door suctions open. Teenagers stomp up through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words. “Cuz like — whatcho look — you was just a — ain’t lookin’ at you!” The old lady does not look. But I can feel her taking them in. Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine, and brain. Watering the flowers of her brain. The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap. Private snack suspended for public feast of youth. She would never be so close to them except on the bus. Neither would I. For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars. I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.

Just a week before I got locked out of the apartment on rue du Temple, I saw something I still don’t understand. Without understanding, it has become the reason I can forgive Alain. It happened so early in the morning, it was still dark. I awakened to sounds from the kitchen — Alain’s night voice, plus frying butter. I got up and went down the hall. Alain was at the stove, his back to me. At the table was the man I had seen licking the floor at the sadomasochist club. He was sitting in my place. He was naked except for Alain’s coat, which was draped over him. Under the coat, he was like a skeleton with hair and dirt on it. I could see the bottoms of his filthy feet and the rims of his toenails, thick and yellow as a dog’s. I stood at the door, invisible and dumb. He stared at me like he was staring into pitch-darkness. Alain turned from the stove; he held a plate with an omelette on it. He had made it with jam. He put the sweet plate gently before the skeleton. “There,” he said tenderly. “For you!” He pulled a chair out from the table and sat in it. “Go on!” he said. Alone in the dark, the creature ate, quickly and devouringly. Watching him eat was almost like watching him crawl, even though you didn’t have to see his balls or his ass. Like the German woman, he ate as if he could not taste. Lack of taste had made her indifferent to eating. It made him ravenous. It made him crawl on his hands and knees through the no taste, trying to find taste. Alain put his elbow on the table and leaned toward him, enrapt. He didn’t see or care when I turned and walked away.

Later, I called Jean-Paul to tell him what I had seen. He would know who the skeleton man was, I thought, and he might know why Alain would take him home and put him in my chair. There was so much music and laughter on his end of the line that it took a while for him to understand me.

“Ah,” he said finally. “It is hard to believe, but this man was once a very successful agent.”

“A modeling agent?”

“A long time ago, yes. I’ve heard that he was a friend of Alain’s father. But don’t tell him I said so, okay?”

This incident was so peculiar to me that I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time. Veronica was the first person I told. We were working late in a conference room, wrapped in a membrane of office noise, the clicking and whirring of machines soothing and uniting like the rumbling bus.

“I understand now why you loved him,” she said.

“You do ?”

“Yes. He was willing to go places most people won’t go. He was looking at himself, you know. Most people won’t do that.”

She was a fool to talk that way—“you know.” Like she could know anything about Alain or where most people would go. One side of her lips curved up in a repulsive know-it-all style, sensual and tight. But her eyes were gentle and calm. I knew how trite and smug she was being, and I felt superior to it. But I didn’t know the gentleness of her eyes. They were like windows in a prison cell — you look out and the sky comforts you without your knowing why. Unknowing, I took comfort and went back to feeling superior. Maybe I was able to feel the comfort because I half-despised it. I don’t know. But it helped me to forgive Alain.

When I saw Jean-Paul next, I tried to ask him more about Alain’s father. We were at a party, some kind of function. It was dark and crowded. Big plates of food soaked up the smoke in the air. Jean-Paul frowned and blearily leaned into me, trying to hear. The beauty of his eyes was marred by deep stupor. Rum-soaked spongy crumbs fell down his rumpled shirtfront. One hand drunkenly cleaned the shirt; the other loaded the wet mouth with more tumbling crumbs. An ass paraded by in orange silk. Half the crumbs went down the shirt. He did not know who I meant. His tongue came out and licked. “Alain’s father,” I repeated. “How did he know that man who crawls on the floor of that place?” Recognition lit his stupor and made it flash like a sign. “You believed that?” he cried. “Ha ha ha ha ha!” He threw his head back into the darkness of the room, rubbed with the red and purple of muddled sex and appetite, drunken faces smeared into it and grinning out of it. His handsome face was a wreck before my eyes. The smell of wreckage came out of his open jacket as he leaned over to cram more food in his mouth. Ha ha ha! Tiny humans lost in tiny human hell, with all hell’s rich flavors.

We ride past precious stores for rich people. The Rites of Passage bookshop. A Touch of Flair. A French-style pastry shop painted gold and red, the window heaped with cakes. The bus flies over the cakes in a blur of windowpane light.