Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

Veronica said she and Duncan had loved each other. She said her parents loved her, too. My parents would say they loved each other, if you asked them. Patrick and I had loved each other, or at least we had said so.

I met Patrick for drinks after I left Veronica. I told him about how Rigoletto had come on the sound system and how her proud voice had broken.

“That’s so touching and poignant,” he said. “Is she a model?”

“No. I met her when I was temping.”

“That’s even more poignant,” he said. “The poor girl.”

“She isn’t a girl,” I said. “She’s forty.”

“My God!” He gripped the table and flung himself back against his chair. “That’s not poignant; that’s tragic!” His eyes flashed.

I drank up his flashing eyes. The day before, he had knelt naked between my spread legs, streaked eyes fluxing. Light flooded the room. Feelings of tenderness and devouring streamed through and lit his varicolored eyes. With a soft sound, he took my foot in both hands and bent my leg as he brought it to his mouth to kiss my instep, sole, and ankle.

He took a great gulp of strawberry frappe. His eyes flashed more faintly; he looked at his watch. We went to eat at a fancy place with four of his friends. We had precious dinners on big white plates, huge glasses of wine, and sweet-colored cocktails. Thick mirrors on each wall increased us. Bright music played and made pictures of abundant brightness: lips and teeth, soft breasts saronged in silk, warm skin, cut figs, wine and sunlight. The founder of a tiny magazine talked about writers who were supposed to be good and were terrible. The film critic for the tiny magazine talked about a bitchfest between a director and a writer whose story he’d adapted. The troll biographer denounced all that was shallow and vulgar. I listened to them and thought of a photographer who habitually held his arrogant head turned up and away from his body, as if pretending it wasn’t there. His pretense somehow accentuated his hips, his thighs and butt, and made it impossible not to imagine his asshole.

A short actress with sleek black hair looked at me and said, “Thinking hard?”

“No,” I replied. But I was. I was thinking of myself presenting my body without bodily reality, my face exaggerated by makeup and artificial feeling, suspended forever on an imaginary brink, eyes dimmed and looking at nothing. I thought of Duncan dancing in a dark place that glinted with hidden sharpness, his face set in curious determination. I thought of Veronica with her penny loafers and her fussy socks. But my thoughts were naked, and I had no words for them.

“You are too thinking about something,” said Patrick. “I can hear you.”

“I was thinking of things that don’t seem to go together but do. Only I can’t say how.”

“Can’t connect the dots?” asked the actress in a barely audible voice.

“And I was thinking about Veronica.”

“Your friend with AIDS?” asked Patrick.

There was silence filled with quick-running currents. The actress turned abruptly away. Softness and apology rose from her shoulder and came toward me. Talking resumed.

Later, Patrick and I fought about his friends as we stood on the sidewalk in the spilled watery light of an openmouthed bar. I turned to walk away. He grabbed my elbow; I turned away from him and for a ridiculous second we pivoted around each other. A table of drunks near the bar’s blurry window burst into laughter. I turned toward him and he banged into me. The table applauded.

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t be angry now. Let’s go where there aren’t any friends.”

And he took me up and down two twisty streets to an office building with a blank-faced door and a back stair that led up a hot stairwell to a tar roof illuminated by a tin lamp clipped to a wire strung between two chimneys. On the roof was a rough stone bench made bluish in the angled light, a matching table, wooden planters ragged with roses, and cage upon cage of purling gray pigeons. There was an unlit candle on the table and a rain-warped book with its pages stuck together. The tin lamp wobbled slightly in a low wind and the pigeons wobbled with it.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A life raft in the sky. Come look.”

The pigeons moved like dark water at our approach — soft and rolling, with little tossing plaps.

“The janitor of this building keeps the birds — his brother owns the building, so he lets him. I know the janitor and he lets me come here if I sort of pay him.”

The pigeons purled like dark water, evenly stroking a dark shore. The burning roof released its acrid tang. Grainy light poured up off the city, reached into the sky, and sank back with a darkish milky glow. Patrick took off his shirt and spread it on a mattress. Smiling, I sat on it. He scooped up my hips and, with hands on either side of my wakened spine, used his thumbs to open my body. Wave after wave reached the soft dark shore. An hour later, Patrick left ten dollars flapping under a corner of the milk crate.

A month later, he left me for the black-haired actress, whose shoulder had apparently apologized ahead of time. He told me after a torpid dinner, while I was trying to pull him down onto the bed with me. Frowning, he refused to come. I stopped pulling. He came and sat and told me. He had not slept with her yet, he said. He didn’t want to disrespect me. His sense of honor shocked me; I lay in a state of dull shock, letting him kiss and stroke my hair until he left. He stroked me like he didn’t want to leave. He stroked me like the pigeon sounds reached for the shore, again and again. I lay there, hearing those sounds for a long time after he left.

When I finally sat up, it was two o’clock in the morning. The apartment was dark and someone outside it was moaning. The gate on my window made a shadow window of gray diamonds on the floor. I thought of the shadow bars of a prison window striping an upturned face, one eye unstriped. I felt for the phone. I didn’t expect Veronica to be in; I just wanted to hear and speak into her answering machine. The electronic bleat of the phone rippled and rose like a stair into the night sky, each step a bar of light. I saw myself and Sara, two tiny girls, climbing it step by step, each helping the other.

“Hello?” said Veronica. She had been sent home early and had just made herself a nightcap.

I arrived at her apartment moments later. She opened the door in a flowered floor-length gray gown with a yoke of lace on the breast and furry pink slippers on her feet. She gave me a mug of cocoa and white rum. We sat in front of the mumbling TV, and Veronica rapidly changed the channel as we talked.

Patrick and I had nothing in common, but he could hear me thinking. He was smarter than I was, but most of what he said was dumb. His friends were horrible, but I wanted to please them. I loved him, but I kept planning when we would break up. Heureux et malheureux . I would be with someone else and someone else and then someone else.

“Frankly,” said Veronica, “it’s hard for me to see this as a problem. You should enjoy it while it lasts. I’ll never get laid again, and if I do, I’ll likely infect him.”

On the screen before us, faces cycled past — human, animal, monster, human.

“Veronica,” I said. “What was it like between you and Duncan?”

“Like? Haven’t I told you? Essentially, it was male-female relations. We enjoyed the same things — film, the arts.” Human, monster, animal. The silhouettes of lions walked the African delta with alert ears. Veronica lighted another cigarette. “If you mean deeper, it’s hard to explain. Together, we were able to express something in ourselves that was buried — I don’t quite know what it was, but I’ve been thinking. It sometimes felt like I was something he needed to knock down over and over, and I would always pop back up. He needed that and so did I, the popping back up.”