Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

“Did you steal anything from him?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “he stole from me.”

“Then he doesn’t remember you. Everybody knows he’s crazy anyway.”

Eric was only an assistant at the magazine, but he said he could introduce me to a photographer. “You just need pictures. Go to an agency; you’ll be working again. Just lie about your age.” He gave me his number. He smiled at the hunger that suddenly came into my eyes.

The photographer lived with his assistant in a loft in the flower district. It was cold and the flower stands were closed. Their rough doors looked boarded up; their dark windows were haunted by ghostly stalks and stems and cold, faint-gleaming pots. The photographer was three flights up. We sat in his kitchen smoking hash and drinking tea from china cups, talking about Paris. There was a big tub in the kitchen, an unhinged door on the tub, and a dish drain on the door. Old trunks and makeshift wardrobes draped in musty clothes spilled in from the bedroom, and the assistant, a serious boy with the short, sweet legs of a child, deftly picked through them. They dressed me in a red jumpsuit with a white plastic belt and matching white boots. The photographer said, “You’re a Bond girl!” From out of the past, spy music brayed. I grinned and, legs widely akimbo in my little boots, pointed my finger to shoot Alain through the heart.

“Do you think he was a real photographer?” asked Joy.

“Real, yes. Good, I don’t know.”

We were at her house, drinking red wine and half-watching a black-and-white movie on TV. Except for one little lamp draped with a shirt, the lights were off to hide the mess. In the gray glow of the television, Joy applied hot blue nail polish and talked about another audition that had gone badly. As she talked, a girl’s face appeared on the television, ardent and soft, with millions of light cells flowing through it. Her dark liquid eyes were vulnerable, joyful and radiant with hope.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this A Star Is Born ?”

“No, it’s Judy Garland, though. It’s Presenting Lily Mars , which was before she got all pitiful. So anyway—”

Quick, smart, and tremulous, the girl’s voice was full of hot life rising out of her own liquid darkness. In nine pictures, she was a charming actress at the top of her form. In the tenth picture, she was a child crying because she’d dropped her radiant hope into a deep pool, where everyone could see it but she could never feel it. Believe! Believe! Believe! I don’t know what she was saying, but that is what I heard.

When I saw the contact sheets, my heart sank. But Eric said they were great, and so I went to an agency wedged between a discount furrier and a furniture outlet. Sweating men carrying a houndstooth sofa wrapped in flapping plastic gawked at me on their way to a gaping truck.

“Beautiful,” said one.

I opened the shining glass door.

“Cold feesh,” said the other.

The door closed behind me.

A Ms. Stickle stared at the contacts up close and at arm’s length.

Voices rose over the cheap walls of her cubicle; one was crass, one was rapid, and one was a child staring shyly at its lap. So, sweetie, what’s your bra size?… You don’t know? Let’s measure it.… Can you call your mother?… tape measure?

“How old are you?” asked Ms. Stickle.

“Eighteen,” I replied, lying.

“Hum.” She pushed the pictures across the desk. “These photos are too downtown. See a real photographer and come back.”

She says it’s — My God, will you look at this?

“Can you recommend somebody?”

Ms. Stickle grimaced. Then she wrote a name and number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me without looking.

Well, she is a monster .

This photographer was a thin, small man with soft, sexy jowls and gloating eyes that made you feel like he was examining your ass even when he wasn’t. He slathered hair gel on his hands and asked what sign I was. I said, “Scorpio.”

“I thought so.” He worked the gel into my hair so it stood up and away from my head. “I can tell you are strong.” He stepped away and signaled his assistant. “But even so, I could dominate you completely.”

That established, he photographed me in his bathroom, where I leaned into the mirror in an ill-used evening gown, then on the roof in a white shirt and black leather jacket.

I took the pictures back to Ms. Stickle. Once again, she sighed and stared as voices spoke into the air. “Don’t know,” she finally murmured. “I can’t tell if I love you or hate you.”

I went to another agent. He tapped his finger on the shot of me in the white shirt. “This one,” he said. “This one almost makes me feel something.”

“I thought you didn’t want to do it,” said Jamie.

“I need money.”

We were on my bed, eating hot cereal, a box of sugar on the rumpled bedding between us.

“You could work at the Peppermint.”

“I wouldn’t want to be there all the time.”

He carefully poured a layer of sugar on his cereal and ate it with shallow bites. “Where do you want to be?” he asked.

The season got cold and dark. When I arrived at work, people would be putting on their hats and tying their scarves; one girl, with wavy brown hair and a rosy, commonly pretty face, would tuck her chin against her lapel and button her coat with trustful, parted lips — her hands the mother, her body the tenderly buttoned child. Outside, night was already putting on its neon, and traffic was laying the streets with knotted jewelry. Veronica would come down the hall, her walk a waddle and a vamp, a bag of snacks bobbing at her side, her smile and waving hand stiff with routine.

Before she had been a proofreader, Veronica had been a secretary at a screenwriters’ agency. She’d been an assistant script doctor for a television show that I’d never heard of. She’d written flap copy for a publishing house that had gone out of business. In college, she had been a social-work intern with a caseload in the worst neighborhood in Watts. Her first day, a young thug asked if she was the new social worker; she mimicked her own dumb grin and her “Yes.” He asked if he could walk with her, and she said yes again. As they walked, he told her the previous social worker had been shot.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“No, I was too stupid. Anyway, he walked with me long enough for people to see us together. Later I realized he was a member of the neighborhood gang and it was to my advantage to be seen with him.”

“Did he come on to you?”

“No. He was protecting me. He was a gentleman.” She turned sideways to smoke, and when she turned back, her mouth had a little sarcastic twist. But her eyes were wide and suddenly deep. She had been given something by this thug-boy gentleman, and she had kept it. She was showing me that with her eyes.

“What was it like being a social worker there?”

“I was twenty-three years old. I was ignorant. I came from a psychotic family. That’s what it was like. Except for one thing.” She put out her cigarette with a proud, bristling air, and told me the story of a cat named Baldie, a stray that lived under a table at the community center where some of her cases played pool. One day, she brought in a can of cat food for him.

“At first, I thought they were angry at me, the men. They glared and they said, ‘He don’t know what to do with that. He ain’t never had anything that good in his life.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll just try,’ and I opened the can. They stopped playing pool and they all watched when I put it down. And Alison, the way that cat buried his head in that can!” She thrust her head down, fingers splayed, her refined voice rolling and softly gobbling. “He looked up at us, and if cats could cry, tears would’ve been streaming down his face. Nobody said a word. Then one of the men crouched down and held the can so the cat could get to it better.