Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

In the winter, I began to get catalog work rather than fashion assignments. It was dull, and I knew that one day soon I would want to find something else. But I was not bitter or afraid. I was twenty-five years old and I was stronger than I had been in Paris. I waited, alert and listening.

In the spring, Daphne got married in someone’s backyard. There were children running around shouting. There were two-colored tulips and slim trees with heavy bunches of white flowers. While Daphne and Jeff made their vows, a child cried, “There’s a daddy longlegs!” and Daphne laughed under her veil.

In the summer, Sara moved to a Newark bedsit with an aide from the old people’s home. He was a tall, handsome black man with loose, gangling limbs, and he almost wordlessly loaded Sara’s cardboard boxes of things into his car. One raucous night at the bedsit, Sara put her hand through a windowpane; he made a tourniquet and took her to the emergency room. “He thinks quick and he did the right thing,” said my father. “He might not be so bad.” But then he drove off with the car, leaving Sara without any way to get to work. After a few weeks, he brought the car back with a smashed windshield. Sara moved back in with my parents and went to school to learn court reporting.

In the fall, I got a job with a photographer named John. He had a small, tense body and a large head that craned around like something on a turret. He asked me if I was from San Francisco. Because I was wary, I said no. Halfway through the shoot, I recognized him.

A night or two later, we met for coffee in a large café. It was raining; the shadow of a dripping little branch shivered happily on the lit pane. John hunched forward over his thick white cup, warming it with his hands. He said I should go to L.A. There was more joy there, he said, and he had connections to music video work. I said, “I’m not one of those idiots who thinks she can be an actress.” He said, “This isn’t acting.” I said, “I don’t know anybody there.” He smiled and raised a hand off his coffee cup. He had a fleshy, emotional hand. He said, “You know me.”

In a surge of headlights, the grain of the window glass became suddenly visible. Its lines were fine, glowing, and curved in shape. They joined the glistening shadow branches and made a phantom web dripping with wet, senselessly beautiful light.

“Can you help set things up for me?” I asked. “Can you help me find an apartment?”

I love you, said John’s eyes. I love you, said the set of his lips. I love you for a little street girl who’d take off her clothes if you gave her a glass of wine and told her she could be a model. But that’s not what I was. Thrilled and trembling, the phantom web filled with surges of traveling light. Yes, he could help me. Of course he could.

And he did. He found a cheap apartment for me in Venice Beach. I had money to pay for both places for a time. If it didn’t work out in a year or so, I could always come back to New York.

“I’ll see you off to the airport,” said Veronica. “I’ll wave my handkerchief. I’ll run alongside your cab waving my handkerchief.”

“Oh no, that’s all right.”

“Only joking,” said Veronica sharply. “Don’t worry.”

My new apartment was in a small two-story with EL SERENO misspelled on its stucco front in worn-out cork. John took me to flea markets to shop for furniture: a polka-dot shag rug, an orange sectional couch, a red Formica table with matching chairs. He took me to lunch and sometimes to dinner. I told him about Paris and everything that had happened there. He told me about Gregory Carson, who’d folded his agency and gone back to Texas to run his father’s oil business. He told me I would have to learn to drive but that until then he would take me to jobs whenever he could. He said, “I got you into this mess, after all.”

My first video was for the comeback effort of a middle-aged trio of overweight guys with big beards. They played a song about hot girls; I rode in a pink car with two other models in tiny skirts, fighting crime and showing up obnoxious people. My big scene came when, fists on hips, I stopped a barroom bully by planting my gold-heeled foot on the bar, my skirt riding crotch-high. The bully’s eyes popped; he back-flipped out of the frame. Fists on hips, I bounced as if my crotch were the steed I’d ridden in on, humpty-hump! By catwalk standards, it was clumsy and crude, and at first I hated doing it. But then the clumsiness became fun. One of my gal partners stepped on the hand of a fallen villain; the other twirled a toy gun and blew on it with lush lips. The band wandered in, sharing a bag of potato chips.

I went home in a taxi that cost one hundred dollars and walked the peopled gray beach behind El Sereno, feeling my aloneness. It did not feel bad. It felt like something hidden was slowly becoming visible. I thought of Joy, Cecilia, Candy, Jamie, Selina, Chris. They fell away from me like empty potato chip bags thrown from a car. Even Patrick. He was good, I thought, but now he’s finished. And I pictured throwing away an empty milk shake container. These thoughts and images scared me. I could not believe I was really like that. I thought of Veronica. Here there was a change. Veronica did not fall away or seem finished. She seemed to go on forever, all the way down into the ground. I asked myself why and was answered immediately. Her pain was so deep that she had become deep, whether she liked it or not. Maybe deeper than any human being can bear to be.

I went back to New York just before Christmas. The pisselegant city wore salt-stained winter clothes and soiled jewels, its colors stunned and mute in the cold. People who passed me on the street looked like acquaintances whose names I would remember presently. I went to dinner with Selina and to a party with the naked motorcycle girl. I thought, I will not throw them away like empty bags.

Christmas came. My father’s music boasted of fatted abundance, and so did the tree, the scented candles, the stockings, and the stuffed toy sheep my mother had dressed in red Santa suits she’d sewn. Fear was still in the house, as was the sadness and the unsaid things. But happiness had come and dazzled its eyes. Daphne was pregnant. Her breasts and belly were just starting to swell and her skin was plumped and rosy. Sara’s eyes had wakened. My mother bloomed. The decorations, which had looked sad and weak to me, now looked like offerings carried in my family’s arms. I saw my family, exhausted but still hopeful, walking with arms full of offerings down a long road, giving without knowing why to something they couldn’t see. Amid their giving, my video was a trinket, but it was a trinket everyone enjoyed. My father watched it again and again, smiling and expanding inside. For this was no flat picture in a magazine — this came with music! His daughter was punishing bastards to music and bouncing around like a girl nice enough to be a little clumsy. Even when he stopped watching, it stayed on the TV, mutely rewinding and replaying, becoming part of the tree and the stockings and the Christmas sheep.

“How’s Veronica doing?” asked Sara.

We were setting the table with the holiday silver from my mother’s side of the family, and that boasted, too.

“She’s okay.”

“Did you see a lot of her this visit?”

“No. I didn’t see her at all.”

“Oh.”

Of all the people I had spoken to about Veronica, Sara was the only one who didn’t know she had HIV.

I flew back to L.A. just before New Year’s Eve. I had dinner with John. I said I felt bad about not seeing Veronica but that it was painful to be around her. “You can’t talk to her about it because she won’t listen to anything anybody says. But you can’t ignore it, either, because she acts so awful that you always have to remind yourself that she can’t help it, since she’s sick. And her parents were crazy, and they abandoned her. Et cetera.”