Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

I am not religious, but when I heard that, I said yes inside. I say it now. I don’t know why. There’s a reason, but it’s outside my vision.

On the sidewalk, leaves dissolve into mud. Another door opens and Veronica comes out, exhaling her smoke with a swift, cool snort. “No, hon,” she says. “That’s your sphincter.” The mud and leaves go into a slow churn, so slow that it’s invisible to me, but I can feel it. I feel something rising from the churning, also invisible. Something we haven’t killed and never will.

I went to community college two more semesters. Instead of poetry, I concentrated on word-processing classes. When I felt I was skilled enough to get a job, I quit. I moved to Manhattan when a friend of a friend told me about a friend (named Candy) who needed a roommate for a six-month sublet. My father said, “Why? You were doing so well.” I told him, “Because I’m too bored to live here,” and he just shook his head. “You always expected so much,” said my mother. “You expect even more after what happened. You have to enjoy what you have.” And I replied, “But I don’t have anything here. I need to go where I can have something.” My father looked down and left the room. I had hurt him, but he couldn’t do anything about it — I still had what was left of the French money and I could do what I wanted.

Ed drove me to the city with some furniture, clothing, and a few plants. My sublet was a loft in the meatpacking district, a labyrinth of sleeping rough-faced buildings with sweet and rotting breath. We took my bags up in a clanking freight elevator with a frayed cable that you could see quivering tensely through the broken ceiling fan. When we reached the top, we emerged to find a stout gray-haired man in leather unlocking his door. “We use that elevator to remove the bodies of our victims,” he said. He spoke in an aggressive, fluting little voice. “Welcome to New York,” he added, and shut himself in. The door across from him opened. “Don’t pay any attention to Percival,” said Candy. “He’s just being silly again.”

Candy was a pretty southern girl with a weak chin, wearing pink paisley shoes. She smiled and led us down a long hall to a big living room lined with huge windows full of daylight. She made us martinis and said, “Don’t you think we’re special people to be in a loft in Manhattan, drinking real martinis?”

Late that night, the sleeping buildings woke and opened for business. I stood in a window as tall as a door and watched heavy trucks feed fresh-killed beef to an openmouthed warehouse across the street. The light from the open mouth shone on one and a half cows at a time, their bodies hanging inverted on the conveyor belt, heads wagging on fresh-cut throats, horned shadows nodding on the warehouse wall. The belt droned and the massed corpses danced with jiggling forefeet. The man operating the belt whistled a song. A snout and gentle brow was flung out, then rolled back into the mass. The man driving the truck joked with the man running the belt. I can accept this, I thought. I can live this life.

The next morning, I began interviewing for secretarial positions, including one at an intellectual magazine run by a tiny woman with a dry face. “I quite like you,” said the woman. “There’s something spooky and incongruous about you. You don’t look like a girl from a community college in New Jersey, but unfortunately, that’s what you are. Everyone else I’ve spoken to is more qualified than you — though likely you’d do the job better.” She gave me an application and told me to call her in a few days.

“She must really like you,” whispered her current secretary as I left the office. “She usually rolls her eyes at me when she’s seeing people out.”

“What the hell would you do in a place like that?” asked Ed. “It doesn’t pay, and she’s obviously a bitch.”

“I could learn about editing. I could become an assistant and then something else.”

He was visiting me for the weekend. We’d just seen a movie and we were walking to a Korean deli for bags of cherries and grapes. There were a lot of hookers standing around, flashing like something at the bottom of a deep well. A tall black girl and a little blonde came into the store behind us to buy cigarettes and two rolls of breath mints. The man behind the counter said, “Hey, slim” to the black girl. When we left, Ed said, “I saw you looking at them.”

“So?”

“You look at those girls, those whores, like they’re something great.”

“It’s just … those two in the store were really pretty. The black girl looked like a model.”

“A model! Are you kidding me? She didn’t look like a model. She looked like shit, because that’s what she is.”

“I know what a model looks like,” I said sharply.

We went to the loft and ate our fruit lying in my bed naked, piling the cherry pits in a white Kleenex on the bedside table.

“You’re not going to try to model?” he asked.

“No. And anyway, if you don’t like whores, you shouldn’t like models, either.”

I reminded him of Lisa at Naxos with her hand down her pants. For the dozenth time, he asked me if I had ever done anything like that. For the dozenth time, I said no, because I was the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe and I didn’t have to. But a lot of girls did. We were quiet and I felt his discomfort. I stared at the ceiling, watching shadows come and go through a stretched square of light. Soon he would want to go, and I would let him.

I called the tiny dry editor. “Goodness,” she said. “I had completely forgotten about you. I’m afraid this week’s not so good after all. I still haven’t looked at your application. Could you call next week?”

“Do you think she’s serious?” I asked Candy.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She sounds like a bitch.”

I registered at a temp agency with stick furniture and a thin carpet, the color of which made me think of cholera. When I walked in, the gimlet girl behind the desk sat up straight and stared. I remembered my fifteen-year-old enemy, one sharp elbow sticking out as she stroked the dresses that lay over her arm. I applied for a word-processing job and checked the box that said “night shift.” She sent me to an advertising firm that evening.

The office was on the forty-second floor of a beautiful half cylinder of steel and glass. The word-processing room was large and curved, with whole walls made of enormous windows that had no glare on them. The supervisor showed me to my desk — a section of long table blocked off by low plastic barriers. Some day workers were finishing up a birthday party at the end of the table. There was laughter and crumbling cake. I turned on my machine, and a black square of infinity appeared, one flashing square star in its upper left corner. There was a burst of laughter. I glanced sideways and saw a strange little figure coming down the hall. From a distance, her whole face looked askew, puckered like flesh around a badly healed wound. She came closer. I saw the wounded pucker was a smile. She sat across from me. “Hi, hon,” she said.

The mouth of the canyon opens to swallow the road. I walk down its slippery muddy throat. Old trees slowly tip into the ravine, gripping the crumbling pavement on one side, seizing fists of wet earth on the other. Their root systems come out of the soaked embankment like facial bones, clenched in unseeable expressions. At the bottom, their children — oak and madrone — stand close together and hold open their shining arms. They are covered to the waist with wet chartreuse moss; it grows away from the trunks in long green hairs that stand in the air like prehensile sense organs. I take off a glove and stroke the cold fur, then sniff my rank, wormy palm. I put my hand on the tree again to see my white skin against the green. When I was a kid, chartreuse was my favorite color. But I didn’t think it was real.