Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

Then we went to have ice cream under a green-and-white-striped umbrella. A living sea of pigeons boiled and ate bread at our feet. I looked at them and for a moment the world became strange to me. Then I remembered it had always been strange. I had a dish of pistachio gelato and remembered that the first time I met a model, I didn’t even know she was beautiful.

We went to the movies again the next week and several weeks after that. If we could sit alone in an isolated row, we talked our way through the story. If we had to sit where others could hear us, we didn’t. Either way, we left the theater feeling like we’d been talking in tongues. Sometimes I would see men look at me, and at her, then withdraw their eyes in confusion. Sometimes their confusion would confuse me; sometimes I looked through their eyes and saw that Veronica and I made no sense together. But then I came back into my own eyes, and that kind of sense seemed stupid. It could never see the tenth picture. It couldn’t even see past the first.

I went to more go-sees without being chosen; I was calm. My agent stopped calling me. I looked for another one. Instead of seeing Joy or Cecilia, I went to dinner parties at Veronica’s apartment. She lived up a dingy flight of stairs, behind a door painted with green lead dissolving in rust and rot-speckled yellow. The door opened; a Siamese cat peered from a dark crack; lounge music issued out like an enchanted cloud and in it was Veronica wearing an antique lace dress. The enchanted cloud formed a face with pouting lips and heavy-lidded eyes that beckoned us past a small bed wedged sideways, a giant TV, and a window with cracked moldings propped up by a rain-warped book. Another cat leapt up on a rickety table and tilted its velvet triangle head toward the living room, where a table was draped with linen cloth and set with silver. I was introduced as “the Parisian gamine,” then greeted by a small circle of dignified old men and appealing boys — clerks, proofreaders, and word-processing drones gladly transformed by the enchanted cloud, which traveled among them, touching them here and there with subtle scent and color.

“So anyway, it’s the Korean War and these adorable soldiers are about to charge Pork Chop Hill, and the chaplain says, ‘Let me tell you about another hill,’ and suddenly we’re at Calvary, and there’s James Dean as John the disciple—”

They were talking about James Dean’s debut on Catholic television, and Veronica led the conversation, directing it as if with a scepter made of cardboard and tufts of beaded netting, which, at certain moments, might burst into flame.

“—which was a superb choice. Just look at the old art. John is always slouching and bored.”

Remembering, I hear Charles Trenet’s voice traveling like sunlight over the surfaces of the earth, singing ( “heureux et malheureux” ) and making beautiful shadows on the refrigerator or the prison-yard grass or a girl’s quiet, crying face.

“Magdalen had goodness, whereas Margary was just the meanest old — she was in Anthony’s last movie and she was just dreadful. The way she made that trailer shake from side to side! It took her four hours to do the mascara on one eye, and that was after the false eyelashes!”

“Faye Dunaway played the maid in Tartuffe , a walk-on really, but I picked her out in a second .”

“I don’t want to read this nonsense where every other character is depressed. I want murder and they catch the killer and life is delicious.”

Heureux et malheureux —and life is delicious. Laughing sunlight plays with the shadows of trees, grasses, and birds in the heat-rippling air. The music plays. My father sits in his chair.

“—as we flew along past him, pussies to the wind—”

“—the snow all magical and pure and the lights … the lights … well, anyway. Rosalyn died. And—”

“—then Gielgud spent five glorious minutes putting on his gloves. I could simply have screamed with pleasure.”

I think of my father because their signals were as elaborate and ardent as his, but theirs were received and passed along a living circuit, growing stronger and more affirming with each pass. I tried to feel superior, but I couldn’t. In that apartment, beauty and perfection belonged to Veronica and her guests in the form of a glimmering mirror ball hung high above their heads. They could never reach it, but still they guarded it like fierce elves with lightning-quick rapiers that they drew with a jolly bon mot. Before this guard, I felt wordless, slow and shy, aware that the currency of my sex was worthless here. It made me even more shy to realize that they tolerated my awkwardness, and might even have been kind about any attempts at opinion and wit I might’ve but did not make.

“I’m so glad Veronica finally found a good girlfriend,” said George, a fatherly fellow who walked me home one night. “She really needs some female companionship — especially since the Travesty is finally over. Hopefully for good this time.”

“I never met Duncan.”

“Better for you — a very nasty man. If she gets back together with him, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay friends with her.”

One night, I went with Veronica and two boys named Thomas and Todd to see three legendary actors in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit . According to The New Yorker , it was “like watching three old foxes at play,” but that was not the case; the male lead (“He looks like an old tortoise!”) bumbled and periodically fell asleep, so that his costars had to shout their lines in his ear in order to wake him. The bored boys, punchy and tired of jokes at his expense, began ecstatically to joke about Veronica’s vagina. To my amazement, she joked with them — so loudly that an usher rolled down the aisle with a flashlight in his fist. He leaned over us; the male lead woke with a start and blurted, “Be quiet — you’re behaving like a guttersnipe,” which caused Veronica and the boys to become so hysterical that we were thrown out. We made quite a procession up the aisle (Veronica, Thomas, and Todd waving and throwing kisses), out onto the street, and into a taxi, where Veronica got into a screaming fight with her friends about an imagined insult to the driver, and I slipped out at a stoplight in Times Square.

“Typical fag hag,” said Cecilia. “I wouldn’t be bothered.” I shrugged. We were sitting in a fashionable cheap café with huge graffiti on the walls, yellow and orange and shaped like squared shock waves. Cecilia wore mesh fingerless gloves and a torn black lace blouse. So did a boy across from us.

When I met Veronica at work, we didn’t speak of it. We barely spoke at all. A few nights later, Veronica switched to the graveyard shift. We saw each other fleetingly at shift changes; she looked at me with a pursed expression that said, Of course, this is what our relationship has been all along and that’s fine with me. I returned her look, indifferent as a child who, done with the milk, drops the carton on the ground. We said hi.

The path goes up a steep ridge bordering a sharp drop. The wind rises. A small waterfall explodes with white water. My thoughts fly up and briefly float before sinking and spreading like squid ink on the ocean floor. Dark balances and weights the light. On the dark bottom of the ocean, a wicked girl is covered with black slime and snakes and surrounded by ugly creatures staring at her with hate in their eyes. She thinks they are staring at her because she is so beautiful. She doesn’t know she is as ugly as they are. Sweat runs in gobs down the sides of my body, down my back and belly. My fever is rising.

“You should get a job at Ted’s place when he opens it,” said Cecilia one afternoon over little sandwiches. “The clientele there would be much better, and you’ll be visible to the right people at a restaurant of that caliber.”