Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

“Do you remember the nun who tended Duncan in the hospital?” she asked. “Dymphna Drydell?”

“Sister Drycrotch?”

“Yes, well, Dymphna wasn’t her name. It was Dorothea, but she said we could call her Dymphna if we wanted to. She was a lovely person. She sang to Duncan one night. She sang him a lullaby.”

Outside, someone shouted; gray car noise went down the block. In a minute, I would leave.

“Don’t think I’m angry with you, Allie.” She was still looking at the cat. “I’ve never been angry with you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

I got up and sat beside her. Finally, she looked at me. Her face was stunned and drained. I put my hand on her breastbone. I felt her subtly respond. Shyly, I rubbed her.

The trail runs into a wide road on a high plateau overlooking the entire Bay Area. The rain is now a low drizzle. The fog is still very thick, but it is moving; to my distant right lies the ocean and the bony spangle of the Golden Gate Bridge. I lick my dry lips. I try to imagine myself connected to Veronica even now, but there is no weight to my imagining. I want to know who she was, but I can’t because I didn’t look in time. When I look now, I see a smile hanging in darkness. Then I tip over, pulled down by my own weight. I have the last of the water and tuck the bottle back in my bag.

I rubbed Veronica’s chest and then I left. I said, “Call me if anything happens,” and she walked me to the door. I hugged her and she said, “Wait a minute, hon.” She took a ring off her finger and gave it to me. It was a handsome sienna-colored stone set in ornate silver. “It’s a carnelian,” she said. “Duncan gave it to me the second time we saw each other. He put it on my finger and then he kissed it.” She put it on my finger. She squeezed my hand. She said, “Good-bye, sweetheart.” And she smiled.

Three weeks later, Veronica’s sister called to tell me that Veronica was dead. She had been found by the police, who had gone to her building when the neighbors complained about the smell coming from her apartment. She had died of pneumonia. “She died peacefully,” said her sister. “She was watching television.”

The last cat had still been in the apartment. Veronica had apparently torn open a large bag of cat food and left it in the kitchen so the animal wouldn’t starve before someone found her.

I fold my umbrella and rest it against my thigh. I take off my gloves, put them on my other thigh, and look at the ring Veronica gave me. It is beautiful against my cold-bleached fingers. I try to draw from it some wisp of spirit, some faint echo of Veronica’s smile, her touch, her mad anger, a ghost of fiercely exhaled smoke. Nothing. I put the gloves back on.

Veronica was cremated. I went to New York for the memorial. The rented hall was filled with the coworkers Veronica had hated, including a supervisor. There were also a few temps I’d worked with five years earlier — among them the woman who had once called Veronica a “total fucking fag hag.” When I walked in, they turned to stare at me. I wonder if I looked like Nadia to them.

“I knew she was sick with something,” I heard the supervisor say, “but I had no idea it was AIDS. Somebody’d told me her boyfriend had had it, but she just never looked that bad to me.”

I found George and stood with him. His face was puffy and his eyes sad. A former lover of his had been hospitalized, probably for the last time. He had not seen or spoken to Veronica since I had last visited her. I asked what had happened to the last cat. He said David had adopted it.

“Where is David?” I asked.

“He decided not to come, I guess.”

“And you’re the model!” A woman had my hand and was shaking it. She looked like Veronica in a mask of terrible happiness. “Hi, I’m Veronica’s sister, June. I’ve been following your career, so exciting. How did you meet my sister again?”

George uttered a courtesy that sounded like a curse and fled.

“Oops,” said June. “Did I say something? And there’s my mother. We’d better keep it down — whatever it is!” She winked as she pointed to an elderly woman with a hive of dry bleached hair, who was standing a few feet from us. She did not look like the kind of person who would abuse laxatives in order to lose weight.

When I stood up to talk, I told how I had met Veronica. I said that she knew I had been in Paris before I told her; I said that when I was looking for a job as a secretary, she’d told me I had to be like Judy Garland in A Star Is Born . I said that once when I’d complained about a feeling of tightness in my forehead, she’d said, “No, hon, that’s your sphincter.” I said, “Veronica was very beautiful.”

Then George told a story about a party Veronica had given years ago in L.A., where a faded pop musician had walked into the room naked. Everybody laughed. “Naked?” said Veronica’s mother in a loud, querulous voice. “Naked!” she repeated. Everybody laughed.

The last person I spoke to before I left was Veronica’s mother. I didn’t mean to speak to her, but she grabbed my hand as I walked by. “You were my daughter’s friend?” Her voice was made of dead, still sparking wires. I looked at her face, swollen under her hive of hair, and, for a moment, saw her daughter. Except that this woman did not have Veronica’s armor of pain sculpted to look like sophistry. Her face reflected pain received with the simplicity of a child.

“Yes,” I said. “I was her friend.”

“Thank you so much for coming. I’m so glad to see Veronica had friends.”

I was angry, but I just said, “She was a wonderful person.”

And the old lady embraced me and pulled me close, where I could feel the full force of her pain and fear and need. My anger left me. Gently, I patted her poor back. I felt her quiet slightly. I kept holding her. I felt her subtly open, like Veronica’s chest had opened under my hand. Emotion passed through me; Veronica seemed to move through her mother’s body, swift and graceful as light. I held tighter. Veronica was gone. The embrace broke.

“I’m just glad she didn’t suffer,” said Veronica’s mother.

I moved back a little. My anger returned in a bolt. I said, “She did suffer, ma’am. She had AIDS.”

Veronica’s mother did not change her expression. She just opened her mouth and moaned. She sounded like my mother when she fell on the concrete and the wind was knocked from her.

Veronica’s father had not come to the service.

I sit on the wet ground. My cruelty had been pointless. My kindness had been pointless. I remember rubbing the small bones in the center of Veronica’s chest. I remember her surprise at being touched that way, the slight shift in her facial expression, as if feelings of love and friendship had been wakened by the intimate touch. The subtle muscles between her chest bones seemed to open a little. Then I left.

I never should’ve touched her like that and then turned around and left, leaving her chest opened and defenseless against the feelings that might come into it — feelings of love and friendship left unrequited once more. I put my head on my knees. I fantasize giving Veronica a full-body massage, with oil, with warm blankets wrapped around the resting limbs. Drops of sweat would’ve rolled from my arms to melt on her skin. When I finished, I would’ve held her in my arms. Except she never would have allowed any of that. She only responded to the chest touch because I took her by surprise.

My mind distends from me, groping the air in long fingers, looking for Veronica. The air is cold and bloated with moisture; Veronica is not here. I draw back inside myself. Again, I try to imagine. This time, I can. I imagine Veronica lying on her couch, descending slowly into darkness, the electronic ribbon of television sound breaking into particles of codified appetites, the varied contexts of which must have been impossible to remember. I wonder if, at certain moments, a peal of music or an urgent scream had leapt in tandem with the movement of the darkness, and if so, what it had felt like. I wonder if Veronica’s spirit had tried to cling to the ersatz warmth of the TV noise; I think of a motherless baby animal clinging to a wire “mother” placed in its cage by curious scientists. I imagine Veronica drawing away from everything she had become on earth, withdrawing the spirit blood from what had been her self, allowing its limbs to blacken and fall off. I imagine Veronica’s spirit stripped to its skeleton, then stripped of all but its shocked, staring eyes, yet clinging to life in a fierce, contracted posture that came from intense, habitual pain. I imagine the desiccated spirit as a tiny ash in enormous darkness. I imagine the dark penetrated by something Veronica at first could not see but could sense, something substantive and complete beyond any human definition of those words. In my mind’s eye, it unfurled itself before Veronica. Without words it said, I am Love. And Veronica, hearing, came out of her contraction with brittle, stunted motions. In her eyes was recognition and disbelief, as if she were seeing what she had sought all her life, and was terrified to believe in, lest it prove to be a hoax. No, it said to Veronica. I am real. You have only to come. And Veronica, drawing on the dregs of her strength and her trust, leapt into its embrace and was gone.