Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

I thought she was wrong. I thought if they knew she had HIV, they would treat her better. “They’ll be more understanding if they know,” I said. “They’ll go easy.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “They’d circle for the kill.”

She’d left her support group by then because, she said, the women were all stupid cows and the moderator was a condescending queer.

“One day, I made the mistake of being vulnerable around them — if you can’t be vulnerable with cows, then who? I told them what was going on at work, all of it. I said I felt like God hated me, and the snotty faggot said, ‘Oh come on. I know you’re bigger than that.’ I said, ‘My fucking God! How big am I supposed to be?’ And the cows just pursed their detestable lips. No wonder men hate us. No wonder.”

Finally, the moderator told the group that he was writing a book on women with AIDS and that they were going to be part of it. Veronica found this outrageous, and she tried to unite the other women against him. One of them snitched on her and she was asked to leave the group.

During the same week, her sister called and told her to stop sending presents to her niece. “She says whether I’m sick or not, I need to live my own life and stop trying to glom on to the child. She said once I scared Sunny on the phone. Of course she wouldn’t tell me how.” Veronica sat straight, her smoking hand quivering with rage. “She talks like I’m going to contaminate her.” Rage filled her eyes with streaks of yellow bile. “She talks like I’m going to eat her.”

She fought with people at work, until no one would partner with her anymore and she had to work alone. When she and I went to the movies, she accused the people behind her of kicking and screamed at the people in front when they asked her to please stop talking. She fought with people in our aerobics class for getting too close to her on the mat. Once, she fought with the instructor during class. We were on our elbows and knees, pulsing one leg at a time up toward the ceiling. “Hold that pelvis firm!” shouted the instructor into her mouthpiece. “Pretend your favorite person is behind you, holding it very firmly!”

“Excuse me!” Veronica’s voice rang through the room, rising over the music. “Excuse me!” The instructor turned. Veronica was already on her feet, eyes crazy with rage. “One,” she said, “that was a very rude remark. Two, my favorite person is dead.”

I argued with my father about choices. I made fun of him when he talked as if he didn’t have any. But when I talked about Veronica with Daphne, I argued the other way. Daphne lived in Hoboken with her boyfriend, Jeff. She was almost done with graduate school. She had grown steady and a little plump and her eyes had an expression of gathering power. Her kitchen had blue wallpaper and smelled of garbage and lilac. We sat in an oval of sunlight and drank mugs of honeyed tea and talked as if we were walking around the block at Christmas.

“She acts like a demented bitch,” I said, “and I want to tell her that, but I can’t. I don’t know how I’d be if I were her. People say you have a choice about how you act. But it seems like she really doesn’t.”

“What d’you mean? Of course she does. It’s horrible that she’s got AIDS. But she’s got a choice, just like everybody else. You can be her friend, but you can’t help how she chooses to handle what’s happened to her.”

“But sometimes I get this picture of what it’s like inside her. I picture inside her being like a maze that’s really small and dark, full of roadblocks and trick doors. I picture her twisting around and around, wanting to go forward and not being able to find the way. Like a bee that’s banging on the screen door — you open the door and you wait for it to go out, but it just keeps banging on the screen.”

“But she’s not the bee,” said Daphne. “She’s the person who built the maze.”

I wished my father had been there right about then. He’d have said, “ You don’t build anything! You come up out of the ground like a tree and that’s what you are! You’re not the one who made it!”

But I said, “Is she? Even if she built it the way it had to be when she lived with crazy parents?”

“Yes, she still did it. Everybody does. You create these strategies—”

Discussing and describing things we didn’t understand, we walked around a winter block in a sunny kitchen, past little girls dancing on green chairs or sucking up milk shakes in a warm car smelling of mother and vinyl; of Mother’s bare shoulder in her sleeveless blouse with its piercing half circle of sweat. You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off you . We walked and walked against the impassable membrane of our understanding. Good to be true . We pressed against it until we could press no more. Eyes off you . We returned to the kitchen and finished our tea.

On my way back to Manhattan on the train, I remembered that lying in bed with Daphne six years earlier had been like lying in a hole with a dog. The memory was flickering and far away as “heaven” had once been. It flew past me, like the shabby old houses and cars and discarded bathtubs flew past as the train gathered speed, then plunged into a coruscating black tunnel. I dozed in the droning car. I felt like a discarded bathtub sitting out in a yard with sun shining on it. I felt good.

Patrick and I broke up. We had a fight about something I can’t even remember. There was a break in the yelling and I said, “Maybe we should just stop seeing each other.” And he looked up with gratitude and relief. We were quiet for a while. He asked me if I wanted to walk a bit and I said yes. We walked for about an hour, not saying much of anything. At the end of it, we were done and it was okay.

I saw other men after Patrick. They were important to me at the time, but now I can’t remember why. Maybe there was a demon in my pants saying, Do it with this one! No, don’t do it with that one! I did it with one named Chris, a thirty-five-year-old former model with the touching face of an unformed boy. His blond hair fell in his eyes. He wore pastel jackets over white pants. I lay awake at night thinking about him. When we kissed, I felt hope and joy. When we fought, I cried. Now the things I remember most viscerally about him are the way he smartly tapped his packets of artificial sweetener against his saucer, and that he left most of his food on his plate. He was very thin and when you first looked at him, he appeared much younger than he was. His eyes were young. But there was rigidity in his mouth and neck and chest and it was old, very old. One night in a café, I said something and he leaned toward me with tenderness in his eyes. For a moment, his rigidity trembled, trying to move with the feeling; then it was gone.

Years later, when I was lying in my bed crying because my life was broken, Chris came to me as powerfully as in a waking dream. He was leaning toward me, full of tenderness. He did not tremble. His mouth was not rigid; it was alive and firm, and his neck was supple. His chest radiated warmth that was more loving than erotic. My heart was comforted, my mind calmed. In life, we had parted coldly. Afterward, we didn’t speak. We didn’t even look at each other. Still, I believe that somehow he came to me.

There were several others. I lay awake thinking of them, too. I leapt into their arms, laughing, and covered their necks with kisses. I told them secrets and stories from my childhood. I told them I loved them. Now I can’t think why. Perhaps it was simply that, in each case, I was the woman and he was the man. And that was enough.