Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

I took the train to see my family almost every month; I brought them magazines with my picture in them. In Paris, I had sometimes torn pages out and sent them across the rumpled sea, but I’d never seen a reaction to them. My mother looked at my image as if she were looking at a wicked little girl come to scornfully show herself to her poor mother. There was love in her look, but with such jealousy mixed in that the feelings became quickly slurred. It was what my mother gave me, so I took it and I gave it back; I reveled in her jealousy as she reveled in my vanity. Reveling and rageful, we went between sleep and dreams right there in the dining room. Silent and still, we attacked each other like animals. My father coughed nervously, pointed at my most mediocre picture, and said, “Well, this one’s right nice.” Daphne said, “Yeah! This is great.” But as she turned the pages, she vibrated with the words she did not say but which I heard anyway: This is meaningless! And shallow! And false! My mother tossed a magazine down with a snap and said she had to go to the grocery store. Daphne went with her. Sara looked up and said, “But why didn’t they put you on the cover? You’re prettier than she is.” But there was no kiss in her eye now. She was still working at the place for old people, and when she got home, she went down into the basement and stayed there.

Daphne, on the other hand, had gotten a scholarship to Rutgers; she had wrapped herself in a ribbon of A’ s while working as a barmaid at a place where students drank and puked amid roaring jukeboxes and pinball machines with streaming globule lights. When she talked about her classes and her job, she strutted and threw off little scrappy airs that said, How’d you like to try that, Miss New York Model? And my parents looked at her with a pride they could not quite feel for paper copies of their prettiest daughter tingling with an air of Europe and statutory rape.

Still, I tunneled back to my life, happy to be away from them, yet safely attached. One night after a visit home, I lay naked with Patrick on my lopsided mattress, drinking wine and half-hearing my neighbors’ pop songs come through the wall, and I would talk to him about my family.

“What I love about you is that you’re so beautiful and still so real,” he said. “You care about things.”

“How could I not care about my own sister? She’s the only one who’s even half on my side, and she’s been totally cheated by life.”

“Why don’t you have her come visit you?” asked Veronica. “We could take her to the theater, show her a good time. Who knows, she might consider moving here. I’ll tell her, ‘If I can do it, you can do it!’ ”

And so I did. It was summer and the apartment smelled of ripe foliage and rotten drains. When Sara arrived, I pulled the mattress off the box spring and we flipped a coin to decide who would sleep on which. (I got the mattress.) Then we went to meet Veronica in an ornate café lit with white lamps and candles that dripped and pointed with trembling witch fingers. Classical music, rampant and riven with dainty feeling, announced and upheld the display of cakes, which were swollen with sugar and cream. Veronica and Sara talked warmly about the eccentrics they worked with and their weird ways. In Veronica’s baubled words, her bland nest of disaffected temps became a snappy sitcom where people suffered, strove, and lost and yet emerged with rueful grins wrinkling their eyes, ready for the next episode. And Sara told her own stories, about valiant old ladies and tough, salty aides as the candles slowly dropped their fingers into baroque heaps of dust-covered wax. We went to see Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and then ate dinner in Chinatown.

It was late when we left the restaurant through a swinging stream of plastic beads. The potholed street steamed with warm garbage and the chemical discharge of air-conditioning. We walked around moldy cardboard, mashed fruit, fetid porridge, and crumpled vegetables still green and breathing on the pavement. An off-duty cab roared up; we shouted and waved our arms, but it sped away. We stepped past a fish with gelatinous, death-webbed eyes, each stiff red-speckled scale like a stone that for a short magic time had rippled through water as flesh and now was turning back to stone. “Pee-U!” cried Sara, and pinched her nose. But the stench buoyed us and filled the air with energy. Another off-duty cab roared up; Veronica stepped in front of it, tilting her hip, pointing her toe, and lifting an invisible skirt. Dark eyes flashed through the blurred windshield; the driver lustily hit the brake. As we climbed in, he smiled, newly awake and grateful, into his rearview mirror. “It never fails to stop a vehicle of some kind,” purred Veronica.

“Veronica is great,” said Sara as we dragged the mattress off the box spring into the center of the room.

“Yeah,” I said, and meant it.

My sister wanted to meet models, and so the next day we had lunch with Selina, an ex — cover girl attractively worn at twenty-four. I had prepared her for Sara, but still I was afraid that on sitting down, each would look across the table and see the enemy. But that didn’t happen. They got along. They discussed reincarnation, phobias, and nightmares: the psychic who told Sara she was antisocial because she had once been an African noble put to death by the tribe for her refusal to kill a beautiful animal; Selina’s recurring dream, in which she discovered herself as a child, shrunken like a mummy, eyes tightly screwed in permanent sleep in the baggage rack of a high-speed jet.

“Your sister is so spiritual,” she said to me later. “You could say anything to her and she’d talk back to you.”

“I don’t know if she’s spiritual, but she’s certainly lovely,” said Veronica. We were back eating cake amid candles and heaped wax. “She’s got to move here; it would change her life. She—” A soprano voice floated from the sound system and unfurled, shimmering. Veronica put down her forkful of blond cake.

“What is it?”

“This aria,” she said. “It’s from Rigoletto .”

“Oh,” I said. “I think my father has that on record.”

“I saw it with Duncan. Years ago.”

“Oh.” She had not mentioned Duncan for months; I had almost forgotten him. “It’s beautiful,” I said uncertainly.

“It’s a love song. Only I can’t remember what it’s called now.” Her skin shone, like an eye might shine with tears. “We loved each other, you know. I know that must sound sick to you after what happened. But there was love there.”

“I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “But I believe you.”

“Nobody understands. I don’t understand. My aunt was the only person who got it at all — my aunt! That dismal old bitch who once said to me, ‘It’s all about self-hate, isn’t it?’ She said, ‘It must be terrible to lose someone you love.’ And it is.”

I thought of my father lost in his own house, his own family, his own chair. “I’m sorry,” I said.

The singer opened wide her voice, like passionate hands, like arms of light.

“He wasn’t a cunt,” she said. “I’m sorry I ever said that.” Her voice tried to open, to come free of its rococo shape. “He was a Ganymede, a beautiful boy. Royalty in disguise.” Her voice broke free — the terrible freedom of shapelessness and grief. Anguish flooded her eyes. “The ‘Caro nome.’ That’s what it’s called.” Tears ran down her face. I looked away, as if she were naked. I didn’t know what else to do.

When I was a young child, my mother told me that love is what makes the flowers grow. I pictured love inside the flowers, opening their petals and guiding their roots down to suck the earth. When I was a child, I prayed, and when I prayed, I sometimes would picture people not as flowers but as grass — plain and uniform, but also vast and vibrant, each blade with its tiny beloved root. By the time I moved to New York, I had not prayed for many years. But there was a soft dark place where prayer had been and sometimes my mind wandered into it. Sometimes this place was restful and kind. Sometimes it was not. Sometimes when I went into it, I felt like a little piece of flesh chewed by giant teeth. I felt that everyone was being chewed. To ease my terror, I pictured beautiful cows with liquid eyes eating acres of grass with their great loose jaws. I said to myself, Don’t be afraid. Everything is meant to be chewed, and also to keep making more flesh to be chewed. All prayer is prayer to the giant teeth. Maybe sometimes there is pity for the chewed thing, and that is what we pray to. Maybe sometimes there is love.