Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

I moved into a bigger apartment, too, with high ceilings and casement windows and a bar down below that was full of music, faces, and sweet-colored drinks. As soon as I did, work fell off. I was supposed to be in a swimsuit spread, but I stood next to a girl with big boobs and a butt like a mare, and the photographer said, “You look like her twelve-year-old sister!” During an evening-wear shoot, a client suddenly appeared with a tape measure and held it to my hips and said, “Look at this! We can’t have this!”

“Crazy bitch!” said Morgan over sushi. But then she paused, chopsticks poised over a slice of fish shaped like a lovely tongue. “Were you about to have your period, by any chance?”

It’s Alain, I thought. Finally. It has to be him.

Morgan arranged for me to meet a photographer named Miles. Miles was an eccentric who’d made his reputation working with slightly unusual girls ten years earlier. He’d been recently taken up by a maverick designer whose tiny lace skirts and flowered chenille leggings were everywhere; there was a sense that his face was going to pop noisily out of the background at any minute.

I had drinks with him and a sixteen-year-old starlet named Angelique, a tiny Hispanic girl with a narrow body that made me think of a salamander in a column of fire. By way of greeting, she bit me on the cheek, then on the arm. When she went to the bathroom, I asked Miles if she was crazy. “No,” he said. “She’s just a scared little girl trying to take on the world. But she does bite. She told me once she bit through a box of Kleenex when she couldn’t sleep.”

Miles was a tall, rangy person who wore red plastic sunglasses and carried his bald head the way a certain kind of truculent person carries his butt — high, proud, and glandular. He wanted to know the most embarrassing thing I’d ever done, the sexiest thing, the cruelest thing. I told him and he said, “She’s telling me the truth. That’s lovely!” Angelique frisked like a puppy. “I never tell the truth!” she said. “I know you don’t, darling,” he replied, and took her picture with a small Polaroid camera.

We spent the night going from bar to bar. Wherever we went, Miles took Polaroid pictures of whoever was in front of us; a well-dressed middle-aged woman with wild eyes and a tough shiny nose; a sleek redhead in a T-shirt with a hairy grinning rat on it; a very blond man in a black shirt and thick black glasses, standing ramrod-straight and looking weird on purpose. I noticed Miles didn’t choose anyone too fashionable or too beautiful. He was going for real. The real women tried to look sexy. But there was uncertainty at the bottom of their eyes. Miles threw their pictures on the table with our drinks. I looked at a picture of a woman in a suit. Her clothing was rumpled; her forehead and nose shone with splotches of abnormal light. She was smiling like she believed “fun” was something that could be grabbed and held, and she was still trying very hard to grab it.

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

“I like to see people have some fun.”

“This woman doesn’t look like she’s ever had fun in her life.”

He regarded the picture. “Probably not. But she’s trying, and that’s what’s interesting to me.” He held up the camera and took my picture. I made the ugliest face I could. Angelique put her arms around me. She said, “I want to marry you,” and bit me.

At the end of the night, we had to walk a block to find a cab. Angelique ran ahead of us; when we caught up with her, she was flirting with some Hispanic men on a public bench. They were rough-looking and wore shabby clothes; they had unshaved faces and meaty shoulders just starting to go round. But they were still full of sex, and one of them was handsome. Angelique darted around them like a drunken little bird twittering in Spanish. They were so smitten that they didn’t notice Miles taking pictures. Angelique put her arms around the handsome one and made as if to kiss him. Miles took another picture. One of them did notice, and he glanced at us, frowning. “Pose with them,” Miles said to me.

“No.” I moved away.

“Okay,” he said. “Come on, Angelique, quit kissing the criminals.”

Heat shot through each man on the bench and brought all of them to their feet. Angelique started talking, her voice quick and supplicant. The handsome one snapped at her; she stepped back.

“You call me a criminal?” said one of them. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

“I was only kidding,” said Miles.

“You’re nobody to kid with me, faggot.”

“Look, why don’t you—”

“You’ve got AIDS, don’t you, faggot? Go home and die, faggot.”

We walked down the street and they followed us, yelling at Miles’s aggrieved butt of a head.

When we were in the cab, he said, “So that’s what they’re saying in the street—‘You’ve got AIDS.’ That’s the worst thing you can say.”

“That didn’t mean anything,” said Angelique. “They were just barking.”

“They didn’t want to be used,” I said.

There was a silence and in it I knew Miles would not work with me.

“But that was okay, wasn’t it?” he asked. “That wasn’t too scary, was it?”

“No,” said Angelique. “That was fun!”

That night, I dreamed I was in Paris, posing for a magazine cover. The studio was filled with people — René, Alana, Simone, Cunt Face, every drunk bitch and bastard from rue du Temple. And sliding among them, bending and flattening his body like a snake, Alain showed his white flattened face. There was no movement in his eyes now. They were still and empty as a waiting grave. The photographer was furious, but there was nothing he could do. Alain smiled and disappeared. The crowd milled. The photographer cursed and pinched me.

So I left my body and went to a place more empty than a desert, a place that seemed to stretch into forever. In it shimmered thousands of veils and masks and personalities, each as still as a statue and waiting for someone to step inside them and make them live. Quickly and lightly, I stepped from one to the next. Pleasure zipped across my surface like a water bug.

But under the surface, something heavy pulled and twisted. It pulled and twisted because it did not want to take these shapes. It pulled me back into my body and twisted my face off my head. But it was okay. No one noticed; the camera flashed. I smiled and woke up thrashing, like I was trying to throw off a great blanket of darkness.

Hungover and haunted, I went to the next day’s go-see. Grainy light fell on the bent heads and shining hair of a dozen wan, yawning beauties. The booker opened my book and closed it. He said, “Honey, your look is dead.” Once again, I thought, Alain. He had entered my world through my dream and poisoned it for me. I knew this was absurd. But I thought it anyway.

That night, I showed Patrick the Polaroid Miles had taken of me. My eyes bugged out. My hands were claws. My mouth was open so wide, my cheekbones seemed to pop off my head and my discolored tongue stuck out as far as it could go. My throat was a mass of wet redness.

Patrick looked at it for a long time. “It really is heinous,” he said finally. “It’s the throat that does it. It looks substantial — like there’s something trying to get out.”

Veronica said she hated the people at the office and that they hated her. She said she was forced to work with men who said filthy misogynistic things and that no one would listen to her complaints. She was terrified they would discover her illness, fire her, and cancel her insurance. Yet she worked double shifts, putting in sixty-hour workweeks because she was behind in her taxes.