Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

“He hit you?”

“No, hon, I’m speaking metaphorically. Anyway, then we would step back and crack a joke and laugh, and everything else would fall away. And we’d just laugh.” She filled her lungs with fiery smoke, then let it go. “It was a narcissistic game maybe. But still, when you go through that with someone, it can feel like something very profound has happened between you. And it has, actually. That person’s your partner, and there’s honor in it.”

I didn’t understand. I glanced at the TV. Nature workers were filming a dominant lion killing a rival’s cubs in order to protect his gene pool. Three terrified cubs watched him knock their sibling on its back.

“Nature,” said Veronica. “How dreadful.” She changed the channel. Human beings smiled over drinks. She changed the channel.

“Anyway, fifteen years ago, there was a precursor to Duncan, this beautiful man I met when I was traveling in the Balkans. He didn’t speak English, so we couldn’t understand each other, but for the week or so we were together, it didn’t matter. Sometimes this look would come into his eyes, and I would feel the same look in mine. All this awkwardness and phony smiling and pidgin English — all of it was just for the times we got to that look. I remember this one time we made love. We were up in the mountains and we did it literally on the edge of a precipice. He turned me around so we were front to back, and if he’d let go of me, I could easily have gone over.”

She changed the channel. Small paws resisted the big snout, then fell as the jaws came down. The lion squatted and ate. She changed the channel. Human beings kissed.

“I remember this tiny figure on the side of a mountain down below, someone in a field of something blue, filling a basket. Then rolling green, and the sun, and the sky going up and up. It was the most erotic experience I ever had.”

One of the Siamese cats walked across the band of TV light and paused, its ears in fine bestial relief against the brilliant screen. There were only three cats by then. Veronica had already started finding homes for them through a service at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

“I’ve done things that looked self-destructive all my life. But I wasn’t really being self-destructive. I always knew where the door was. Until now.”

The nature workers scared the lion away and scooped up the remaining cubs. Veronica turned off the television. She invited me to sleep over. She gave me a flannel nightgown imprinted with violets and green ribbons. The print was faded from many washings and there was a ragged hole in one elbow; it was so unlike Veronica to own such a decrepit item that I thought it must be from her childhood. As I slipped it over my head in the bathroom, I inhaled deeply, imagining ghost scents wafting off the gown. Childhood smells: silken armpit, back of the neck, fragrant perfect foot. Adolescence stronger, more pungent, heavy with spray-can deodorant, then secretly, defiantly rank. An adult snow cloud of soap and bleach, and the ghosts still whispering through it. The gown was tight across my shoulders; its sleeves went just past my elbow and its hem just past my knees. I smoothed it lovingly and left the bathroom, ready to get in bed and put my arms around Veronica; I imagined us together in our flannels, cuddling until we woke.

But as soon as we lay down, she said, “Good night,” and turned on her side. I stared at the ceiling and listened to her snore. My heart said, Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? I remembered myself in bed with Daphne, and how I would’ve ground my teeth if she’d put her arm around me. I thought of the young Veronica, held on the edge of a cliff in the arms of a stranger she never had to know, embraced like a beloved child and penetrated with the force of one adult to another. That person did not want the reassuring arm of a sister. She did not want to cuddle.

I fidgeted until the day came through the blinds. One of the cats approached; I reached to touch it and it recoiled as if it were shocked. I got out of bed and softly walked the apartment in my ragged gown. The cats stared, lemurlike. The furniture slowly groaned awake. I went to a window and slit the blind with a finger. I watched people and cars pass in a trance of fixity and motion. Now the diamonds on my floor would be filled with light and gently moving. Now there would be no prison bars. Now I could go home.

I got back in bed and lay close enough to Veronica to feel the heat come off her. The week before, I had heard a man who had AIDS interviewed on TV. He said that on top of dying he constantly had to comfort his well friends, who were terrified that he was dying, and that it was exhausting to have to do that.

I’m not terrified, I thought.

My father stormed across the living room floor. “Do you know what that son of a bitch is doing to his family by going on a television show?”

I’m not terrified .

We breakfasted at a place that served a full English tea on mismatched tables. Our table slowly became a jumble of flowered plates piled with sandwiches and cakes, flowered cups and pots of tea, and red jam in a porcelain pot. We were waited on by severe middle-aged women who wore their dowdiness as if it were a starched uniform. Veronica leaned back in her chair and joked with them about girdles.

“My mother used to say, ‘If he asks you what kind of underwear you have on, you tell him, “It’s up to my chest and down to my knees and I’ve got panels where you don’t need panels.” ’ And that’s actually what hers was like! Mine, too, until I could physically fight her about it.”

“What was your mom like besides that?” I asked.

“You need to know more ?”

Veronica said her mother spent hours putting makeup on every day, then came down the stairs crying because it was all wrong. She abused laxatives for so many years, she eventually lost bowel control and had to keep emergency towels in various locations around the house — little hand towels she’d neatly fold up and then forget. Veronica’s father would find them and hurl them on the dining table. There were showers of tears and furious Kabuki scowls. Her mother’s condition got so bad, she couldn’t go out for groceries. Because her father was an agoraphobic, he couldn’t do it either unless the perfect opportunity popped up in his drive-to-work plan.

“They would fight about who would go, until we were down to two frankfurters and a can of peas. Then they’d send me and my sister out across this huge intersection with our little red wagon. They’d be watching us from the window, waving.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten and eight. We’d get back and they’d accuse me of stealing—‘skimming off the top,’ my father would say. My sister was no fool — she began telling on me before they would make the accusation. I was no fool — I took the hint and started stealing.”

The waitress brought us an ashtray. Veronica thanked her with a zesty simper.

“Do they know you could get sick?”

“Sort of. I mean, I told them. My mother said, ‘You’ve always been a hypochondriac.’ My father screamed, ‘You’re just trying to get attention,’ and hung up.” She shrugged. “Not enough sandwiches to make a picnic in that family.”

For the first time, it occurred to me that the unsaid things were not so bad after all. For the first time, it occurred to me that my parents had hidden their hate and pain out of love.

“Perhaps,” said Veronica, “perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt it’s my destiny to find respite, at the end of my life, in a safe, beautiful dwelling. It doesn’t have to be an actual house. It could be an apartment, or maybe a cottage.”

“I could see you in a cottage,” I said. “With flowers growing up the side.”