Mary Gaitskill: Veronica

He agreed that I had to take care of myself, and that she had choices.

I went home and took a hot bath. My mind talked and talked. I got into bed. The darkness of the room grew over me. Just before I curled into it, I started awake and thought, Where am I? Then I sank back to sleep as if slipping into black water.

Under the water, I saw two naked little boys tightly bound and hung upside down. One of them was dead. His rectum had been torn open and gouged so deep that I could see into his belly. Something white moved inside him. The living child sobbed with terror. “He has AIDS and now I have it,” he sobbed. “I’m going to die.” I put my arms around him and tried to hold him upright, but he was too heavy. I said, “I’m sorry you have AIDS,” and the insipid words were loathsome, even to me. In a fury, he bit me; I dropped him and ran, terrified he would give me the disease. Veronica rode past in a cab; I was in the cab telling her about the boys. “And then he bit me,” I said. Her eyes grew wild and she bit me with razor teeth. I jumped out of the car and ran. I woke up and a voice inside me said, You will go to hell. Silent and still, the room roared over me.

The next day, I called Veronica. The phone rang a long time. I was about to hang up when she answered. She sounded as if my voice had called her from a dark place she’d barely been able to pull herself from. As if my voice was a familiar but puzzling and distant sound, significant in a way she couldn’t quite remember.

“Oh, hon, hi. Do you need anything?” she asked. She sounded exhausted and hoarse.

“What do you mean? Are you all right? You sound terrible.”

“I’m not all right, hon. Not at all.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No. I’m too weak to leave the apartment.”

A voice in my head said, This is real.

“Veronica,” I said. “I want to see you. I want to help. I can get a flight tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to do that, hon.”

“Please,” I said. “Let me come. If you really don’t want me to, I won’t. But I want to.”

She didn’t answer for a long moment.

“Hello?” I said.

“You don’t want to stay with me, do you, hon?”

“No! I mean, unless you want.”

“No, I really don’t. I’m a very private person. You know that. But if you stay in your own place, I’d love to see you. If it doesn’t put you out too much.”

“Veronica,” I said, “I love you.”

She didn’t answer.

On the plane, I sat next to a fat old woman who’d come on board in a wheelchair. She wasn’t crippled, but she was too sedated to walk. She was flying to see her son, who had just been shot. He was unconscious and would likely be dead by the time she arrived. Her grief fanned out from her, huge and tender. She did not try to display it or hide it. Her name was Suzanne Lowry. I listened to her talk about her son, and I talked to her about Veronica. She said she was sorry. It didn’t sound like politeness. It sounded like her grief was big enough to take in my lesser grief. We talked about small things. She told me what she was knitting. We snorted over the airline food. She talked about an article in Ebony . She asked, “Do you read Ebony ?” She was black, and when I said no, she said tartly, “Well, you should.”

She was in shock, and because she was heavily medicated, she kept dropping her knitting needles and her silverware. I had to cut her airline food into pieces for her. I poured her half a cup of water and she trembled so that she spilled it on herself anyway. The stewards and stewardesses rolled their eyes behind her back. They didn’t know about her son. They weren’t able to see her grief. They saw a fat old lady who kept screwing up, and they thought it was funny. One of them caught my eye and smirked, like I would think it was funny, too; I gave him such a look that he blanched and turned away. But the others kept giggling. I wanted to march down the aisle and make them stop. But I pictured myself, skinny and prissy, shaking my finger and acting the good girl. I wasn’t the good girl. The old woman couldn’t see them anyway and would have had to put up with my climbing over her so that I could be the good girl.

When I last saw Mrs. Lowry, she was being wheeled through the airport by personnel. I held up my hand in a static wave, but she no longer saw me. She probably forgot me as soon as she got off the plane. But I still remember her. For a long time, the memory confused me. I would recall the soft feeling between us as something precious — and then I would see it as worthless. My feeling had not helped Mrs. Lowry, and her feeling had not helped me. Veronica was dead, and most likely the son was dead, too. The flight attendants had laughed behind their hands. But still I remember the feeling, like a trickle of water in a dry riverbed.

Veronica flung open her apartment door and stepped into the hall with the rakish pose of a cabaret emcee. She had lost weight, but she was not emaciated. Her undyed brown hair was cut close to her head. As I came closer, I saw the glitter of sickness in her eyes. We embraced, her head against my hard shoulder, her heart speaking to my belly with muffled, desperate joy. She was burning up and damp through her clothes. I looked over her head, and saw the last Siamese cat staring at me with a look of flat terror.

I took her to see her doctor. She’d apparently had a bad reaction to AZT, compounded by a respiratory infection. She’d started smoking again, which had probably provoked the infection. She stopped taking the medication and quit smoking. She rested at home. I brought her takeout. In five days, she was well enough to go out. We went for brunch in a restaurant decorated with blue chinaware and animals that crouched on blond wood shelves. We ordered eggs and red flannel hash, and it was placed before us in squat blue pots.

“You always told me I should let my hair go natural,” said Veronica. “It looks good, don’t you think?”

Yes, I did.

“The barber in my building did it. He asked me what I wanted and I said, ‘Whatever you think would look good at a funeral. I am dying, after all.’ Scared him, I think. Goodness, this hash is delicious.”

She said she never felt better. She asked about Venice Beach and the video shoot. We talked about her visiting me out there. She apologized for being “hysterical” on the phone.

“You were sick,” I said.

“I really think it was the AZT,” she said. “It made me psychotic. I literally broke into several people, all arguing with one another. Some of them wanted to live; some wanted to die. I was awake, but I saw it like a dream. It was me, attacking a woman who was also me. A third woman — also me, natch — came to her rescue and stopped me. But the one I had attacked defended me; she understood why I’d done it — she understood completely. But the third — well, that part, I can’t remember. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No,” I said.

“I knew you’d understand.” She sounded genuinely relieved. “You’re probably the only person I could tell.”

It was Sunday afternoon and the restaurant was crowded, its rooms full of pleasant talk. There was a table of gay men sitting across from us, and I was drawn by their ease and companionability. My attention hovered on them for a moment, receiving the affected, elegant lilt of their voices with vicarious enjoyment. Then my reaction swerved sharply. Their voices sounded contorted, tortured into fluted curlicues. They seemed to reflect base souls trying to hide their baseness under the thinnest of pretensions — and then to exaggerate the pretense, as though it were something great. They all talk like that, I thought. You can always tell a fag. And Veronica is just like them. She talks just like them.