Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

“I don’t know. But everybody says they don’t know how infectious it actually is.”

“If I don’t have it, it’ll be another miracle at Fatima.”

“I thought that maybe, him liking boys, you didn’t actually do—”

“We did everything , hon. All the time. It was like Histoire d’O .” Veronica sat very erect as she said this, and I saw a flash of pride in her wide, alert eyes. “He liked boys, but he liked me, too. Well, perhaps liked isn’t the operative word, but …”

A song of betrayal came out of the jukebox like a flare. The faces in the bar suddenly appeared rigid, locked in shapes of willed happiness more terrible than pain. A young waitress danced at her station, anonymous and graceful in the warm light of the clanging kitchen. We hadn’t spoken for nearly a year. I was almost sixteen years younger than she was. We did not belong together. I reached across the table and held her hand. “I like you,” I said.

The wind is strong now. I’m afraid it will pick me up and throw me off the ridge. I picture falling, breaking on tree branches and cracking my head on the rocks below. I picture a tree branch falling on me and pinning me. How long would I lie there before someone found me? Night would come. The softness and greenness and moving stillness would make an immense fist and it would close around me. Bugs would come. I would die. Animals would come. Bugs and animals would eat me. I would rot and disperse. The dispersed flesh would travel down into the ground in tiny pieces, burrowing in the dirt, deeper and deeper. I would cease to be an I and become an it. It would get eaten by bugs, come out their assholes, and keep going. It would come to the center of the earth. The heat and light would be like hell for a human. But it would not be human. It would go on in.

In the bar that night, Veronica talked about Duncan angrily, tenderly. He denied he had AIDS, preferring to think he was losing his life to a tropical fungus he’d picked up years ago in South America. Stripped of his beauty, still he sat upright, bolstered by pillows and glittering desperately. It was a Catholic hospital and fierce comedy manned the battlements as nuns and doctors flapped in and out with prayers, pronouncements, and facial tics as they overacted to Veronica’s wisecracking sound track. She and Duncan giggled at Sister Dymphna Drydell (“I kid you not”), who “warbled like Spring Byington” while glowering “like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ” They flirted with a handsome black-haired doctor, and refused to cooperate with the one who used the term fag . They earnestly stammered at the one who stammered, even when he stammeringly told them that Duncan had maybe a week to live. “And Sister Drycrotch, with eyes of the purest psychosis, trills, ‘It’s not the end, but a beautiful beginning.’ ” The enemy rattled at the gate; comedy pulled down its pants and gave it the moon.

Then Duncan remarked, “Well, I’ve always known something was wrong.” He’d known for years.

“His whole family knew,” said Veronica. “His sister told me in the waiting room. She smiled and said, ‘You must feel so betrayed! Oh, oh! You must feel so … so—’ ” Veronica made her voice high, hysterical, and false, then cut it back to her inflected deadpan. “I’ve had Thanksgiving with them almost every year for the last six. I sent Duncan’s niece a birthday present a few weeks ago — a beautiful French wooden pull toy, a red dog with blue eyes, playing the xylophone.” She shrugged.

“What did you say?”

“To whom, hon?”

“Well, Duncan.”

“ Say to him?” She took a long drag on her cigarette, put it out, and looked at me, puffing herself up like the Red Queen about to open her inhuman mouth and strike. But halfway up, she lost heart and sank back. “There was nothing to say. He cried. He kissed my hands. He said he was sorry over and over again. When he was finished, I couldn’t speak. I got in bed with him instead.”

I felt my head jerk in disbelief.

“Not to make love, though I felt like it for an instant. We just held each other. His chest felt so thin, it was like his heart was coming through it.”

Sister Drycrotch, who opened the door to announce that visiting hours were over, did not try to hide her dismay.

“You see, hon,” said Veronica, lighting another cigarette, “I knew, too. Of course I did.”

Two entwined trees with roots that break the ground form a lumpy cradle half on the path and half hanging out over the ridge. I squat between them, umbrella over my head. I drink big mouthfuls of water. I look down into the canyon at the treetops, vast and textured, twisting and moving like sea grass under an ocean of air and mist, full of creatures I can’t see. Veronica raises her wand; it bursts into flame.

I imagine being in a hospital bed, holding my dying, unfaithful lover in my arms. I imagine feeling the beat of his heart, thumping with dumb animal purity. Once, when I was working in Spain, I went to a bullfight, where I saw a gored horse run with its intestines spilling out behind it. It was trying to outrun death by doing what it always did, what always gave it joy, safety, and pride. Not understanding that what had always been good was now futile and worthless, and humiliated by its inability to understand. That’s how I imagine Duncan’s heart. Beating like it always had, working as hard as it could. Not understanding why it was no good. This was why Veronica got into the bed — to comfort this debased heart. To say to it, But you are good. I see. I know. You are good. Even if it doesn’t work.

The rain has dissipated into a silent drizzling mist. The air feels like wet silk. Veronica lowers her wand. I get up out of my squat; in the canyon below I see dozens of ocher-colored trees swathed in mist. I think, They are so beautiful. I think, The disease is spreading. The flame of Veronica’s wand arcs across a gray expanse and goes out. My fever abates. I climb the ridge, heading toward the top of the waterfall. I approach the broad path that will take me farther up the mountain.

Duncan died. A year later, Veronica tested positive for HIV. Our friendship continued even though there was no obvious reason why it should. Sometimes I would admit to myself that if she had not called me when Duncan was dying, I would never have seen her again. I would admit that if she’d tested negative, I would have let the friendship lapse. I’d admit that I was embarrassed to be seen with her, that duty and pity were all that joined us. I’d admit, too, that she was the only one I could trust not to reject me.

I’m sure she had these thoughts. “She felt sorry for me,” I’d imagine her bitterly telling an imaginary person. “I was a good listener.” Then I imagined her expression draw inward as she considered that no, that was not all there was to it. But the imaginary Veronica did not admit that to the imaginary person. Instead, she drew on her cigarette, smiled ironically, and said, “Of course, she was a darling girl”—leaving the person to wonder what existed between the first two statements and the third.

I told a makeup artist about Veronica once and he said, “She’s a model hag; it’s obvious. She wants to suck on your life.” Deftly and precisely, he perfected my eyebrows with a tiny brush. “She wants to be invited to the party.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “She’s invited.”

But she wasn’t.

I worked regularly, not constantly. I went to bed at a decent hour. I didn’t drink too much. I showed up on time. I was polite to clients and stylists. As I was no longer the girlfriend of a feared and hated man, my relations with other models were warm and dull as a hair dryer’s drone. I did not let anyone grab my crotch, not even a famous photographer who snickered sideways when I found him banging a fifteen-year-old on a makeup table. (His butt feral, hungrily clenched, and spangled with mauve glitter from a tube the girl had crushed with the heel of her hand; perhaps it was the same glitter she wore on her eyelids as she gloated from the cover of the magazine I was supposed to be on.) I was a shop girl, not a poet. In an inexplicable way, I savored my ordinariness, my affinity with the office girls and waitresses I had briefly moved among. My livid past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart. Sometimes, in certain pictures, I thought I could see this hollow phantom world tingle in the air around me, making you want to look at the picture, sensing something you can’t see. In these pictures, I was what I had once longed for: a closed door you couldn’t open, with music and footsteps behind it. I was holding Ava’s hand, but I was turned toward Pia, and the fire of her eyes was reflected in mine.