Veronica (15 page)

“It’s just. . . those two in the store were really pretty. The black girl looked like a model.”

“A model! Are you kidding me? She didn’t look like a model. She looked like shit, because that’s what she is.”

“I know what a model looks like,” I said sharply.

We went to the loft and ate our fruit lying in my bed naked, piling the cherry pits in a white Kleenex on the bedside table.

“You’re not going to try to model?” he asked.

“No. And anyway, if you don’t like whores, you shouldn’t like models, either.”

I reminded him of Lisa at Naxos with her hand down her pants. For the dozenth time, he asked me if I had ever done anything like that. For the dozenth time, I said no, because I was the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe and I didn’t have to. But a lot of girls did. We were quiet and I felt his discomfort. I stared at the ceiling, watching shadows come and go through a stretched square of light. Soon he would want to go, and I would let him.

I called the tiny dry editor. “Goodness,” she said. “I had completely forgotten about you. I’m afraid this week’s not so good after all. I still haven’t looked at your application. Could you call next week?”

“Do you think she’s serious?” I asked Candy.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She sounds like a bitch.”

I registered at a temp agency with stick furniture and a thin carpet, the color of which made me think of cholera. When I walked in, the gimlet girl behind the desk sat up straight and stared. I remembered my fifteen-year-old enemy, one sharp elbow sticking out as she stroked the dresses that lay over her arm. I applied for a word-processing job and checked the box that said “night shift.” She sent me to an advertising firm that evening.

The office was on the forty-second floor of a beautiful half cylinder of steel and glass. The word-processing room was large and curved, with whole walls made of enormous windows that had no glare on them. The supervisor showed me to my desk— a section of long table blocked off by low plastic barriers. Some day workers were finishing up a birthday party at the end of the table. There was laughter and crumbling cake. I turned on my machine, and a black square of infinity appeared, one flashing square star in its upper left corner. There was a burst of laughter. I glanced sideways and saw a strange little figure coming down the hall. From a distance, her whole face looked askew, puckered like flesh around a badly healed wound. She came closer. I saw the wounded pucker was a smile. She sat across from me. “Hi, hon,” she said.

The mouth of the canyon opens to swallow the road. I walk down its slippery muddy throat. Old trees slowly tip into the ravine, gripping the crumbling pavement on one side, seizing fists of wet earth on the other. Their root systems come out of the soaked embankment like facial bones, clenched in unseeable expressions. At the bottom, their children—oak and madrone— stand close together and hold open their shining arms. They are covered to the waist with wet chartreuse moss; it grows away from the trunks in long green hairs that stand in the air like prehensile sense organs. I take off a glove and stroke the cold fur, then sniff my rank, wormy palm. I put my hand on the tree again to see my white skin against the green. When I was a kid, chartreuse was my favorite color. But I didn’t think it was real.

Up close, she was not askew in any way. She was monstrously ordered. In her plaid suit, ruffled blouse, and bow tie, she was like a human cuckoo clock. She gave me a pursed smile, lighted a cigarette, and opened a magazine. We sat a long time with no work. I stared out the window. The East River became a dark length of flickering movement with a lit boat on it. In Queens, the neon sign of a sugar factory rose up, its script burning red and radiant in the night.

“Excuse me,” said Veronica. “Have you spent time in Paris, hon?”

I was surprised, but I just said, “Yeah.”

“I thought so. You have a Parisian aura.” She turned her head sideways and worked her throat, head back, cigarette angled rakishly up and out. “I haven’t been there for ages, but I do so well remember the Jardins du Luxembourg in autumn, with the yellow horse chestnuts in bloom.”

We were paired again for the next three nights. I got used to the strange, strident pitch of her voice, even felt oddly caressed by its twists and changes. I talked to her about looking for a job. I told her about the editor calling me “spooky and incongruous.”

“Really? Dorothea Atcheson called you spooky? ] | delightful.”

“You know her?”

“Not personally. But I’ve read her publication.”^

“I filled out an application, but when I called her, she said she’d forgotten about me. Then she said to call back this week Do you think she’s serious?”

“No. Yes. Who knows if anybody’s serious? But I can imagine Dorothea Atcheson would appreciate you.”

Her voice on appreciate was like the rough tongue of a cat absently licking a kitten on the head. I could not help raising my head to meet it.

The next day, I called Dorothea Atcheson. “You’re going to think I’m awful,” she said, “but I’ve lost your application. Do you suppose you could run by the office and fill out another one?”

“Well, ” said Veronica. She drew on her cigarette and tipped her head back; her throat beat like an intelligent heart. She exhaled and asked, “Have you ever seen A Star Is Born with Judy Garland and James Mason?”

I shook my head.

“It’s worth buying a VCR for, but barring that, look for it late on the Movie Channel; they show it constandy.” She smoked; her heart-throat beat. “It’s about a girl whose dreams aren’t big enough, who gets a break and becomes a star.”

“My dreams aren’t the problem. I’m looking for a job as a secretary and I can’t get one because I’m not qualified.”

“Judy Garland isn’t qualified, either! But she meets someone who sees her qualities, who believes in her.”

Another proofreader, a balding little queen named Alan, wheeled round in his frayed throne. “And then he kills himself because she’s left him in the dust.”

‘“It’s too late!”’ cried Veronica. “‘I destroy everything I touch. I always have! You’ve come too late!’ ”

“‘No!’” fluted Alan. “‘It’s not too late, not for you, not forme!”’

“‘Believe it!”’ exulted Veronica. ‘“Believe it! Believe it!”’

In nine of the pictures, it was ridiculous and ugly. But in the tenth one, it was thrilling. I smiled.

Veronica exhaled her smoke and smiled back with fierce, fancy-twisted warmth. “You won’t be here long, hon,” she said. “Trust me.”

I cross into the canyon on a wooden footbridge. The stream below is awake and rushing, light tossing on its cold flux. Silver wrinkles flow in a quick sheet, churn into foam, disperse and sink, flow up and wrinkle the water again. Bright algae, pebbles, and tiny fish stir back and forth. I step off the bridge; huge and calm, the landscape unfolds. Silent and still, it rings with force and hidden motion. The ringing strength is like blood singing in the body of the ground—passionate music you don’t hear with your ear, but feel just outside your senses. Redwoods rise up straight; madrones elegandy wind. Soaked moss and brilliant leaves fill the air with green and tender feeling Tenderness seeps into and softens my fever. The unfolding deepens.

I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook. The city was so big and bright that for a moment my terrible heaven paled, then went invisible. I thought it was gone, but what I couldn’t see, I felt walking next to me in streets full of vying people. I felt it in their fixed outthrust faces, their busy rigid backs, their jiggling jewelry, their creeping and swagger. I felt it in the office workers who perched in flocks on the concrete flower boxes of giant corporate banks, eating their lunches over crossed legs and rumpled laps, the wind blowing their hair in their chewing mouths and waves of scabby pigeons surging at their feet, eating the bits that fell on the pavement. I felt it in the rough sensate hands of subway musicians playing on drums and guitars while the singer collected money with his cup, still singing like he was talking to himself in a carelessly beautiful voice while riders streamed down concrete stairs like drab birds made fantastic in flight. I felt monstrous wants and gorgeous terrors that found form in radio songs, movie screens, billboards, layers of posters on decayed walls, public dreams bleeding into one another on cheap paper like they might bleed from person to person. I took it in and fed on it, and for a while, that was enough.

Then one day on my way to work, a cab stopped in front of me on a trash-blown street and Alana got out. I looked at her and my breath stopped. She slammed the cab door; her shining hair flashed about her face. I stood still while everybody else crossed the street. She walked lighdy in neat white boots, but her eyes gave off the cold glow of an eel whipping through remote water. Down, down through the water floated a magazine picture of a girl in crumpled lace. A picture like a door with music behind it, rolling with the water and soon to be erased by it. “Alana,” I said, but too sofdy. She walked past me without turning. My face burned. And I wanted heaven again.

But I didn’t know how to get it. Before I had gotten it because a hand had picked me up and put me in the middle of it. Then I lost it because a hand removed me. I knew Alain’s hand could reach across the ocean; I knew he was associated with two powerful New York agencies. Candy said he probably had too much on his mind to bother with me. But she hadn’t seen him naked, with coke coming out his nose, pacing and yelling into the

phone, looking for people who might’ve said something bad about him just so that he could fuck them up. Years later and miles away, I still saw him. I saw my hands walking on rich red carpet like paws, me laughing at my legs in the air and his dick inside me. Or panting and openmouthed, a tiny strand of saliva glistening between me and the rug before it dropped.

I looked for another hand to find me. I walked the street, searching for men in beautiful suits, searching their faces for the lips of a spider drinking blood with pure, blank bliss. If I found one, I would look into his eyes, and usually he would look back. If he asked me for my number, I would ask him for his card. The first few times, I looked at the card, put it in my pocket, and mentally threw it away. The last time, I dropped it on the pavement and cursed the gendeman spider to his face.

I stopped looking for a permanent job. I went out whenever I could, under any circumstance. When Sheila’s cousin in Brooklyn had a birthday party, I took the train out, only to stand in a sparsely furnished room with strangers. When a temp at the office gave a reading combined with a dance performance, I showed up to watch determined girls in leotards creep and crouch across a ratty stage drenched in nightmare orange. A friend of Candy’s—a harmless girl I despised for being harmless—invited us to a bachelorette party and I went.

No matter how unfashionable the party, fashionable music was always playing. The fashion then was silly and sepulchral at once, with hopping, skipping beats playing off a funereal overlay. Somebody sang, “This kiss will never fade away,” his voice like an oily black machine operating a merry-go-round of music flying on grossly painted wings. “It’s about the bombing of Dresden,” said a drunk boy. “Excuse me,” I said, and walked away. Heat flared in the flying music, then died like an explosion seen from far away. People walked around smiling and talking while the music likened mass death to a kiss and gave silliness a proud twist to its head. This kiss will never fade away. Alain kissed me for-

ever while I stood on the outskirts of parties, watching people who meant something to one another. A fat person with an out-thrust jawbone took someone’s hand and squeezed it; there was a burst of goodwill. A woman with desperately bony calves, made stark by her big high heels, grinned at someone across the room, her grin a signal of deep things inside both of them that nobody else could see. Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the thrusting jaw and the bony calves and turned up my nose. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world described by music—a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too, singing on the surface of its human heart as the machine spread through its tissues and silenced the flow of its blood. In this world, there were no deep things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty, and even songs about mass death could be sung on the light and playful surface of the heart.

I didn’t say any of this. I didn’t even think it. But it was visible in the way I held my body, and in my bitter, despising eyes. Other people could see it in me as surely as I saw it in them. And so I was able to make friends. I went to nightclubs with an “actress” named Joy, who might’ve been a model if not for hips that would’ve been ungainly in a photograph, but which gave her living walk a pleasing, viscous reek. She worked as a hostess in a piano bar, where she got paid to drink and talk to lonely businessmen. She lived in a tiny shotgun apartment piled with dirty dishes, cat boxes, and open jars of clawed-at cold cream. Hurled pairs of pants tried to flee across the couch; wilted dresses snored on the kitchen chairs. The two cats tore the stuffing out of the couch and rolled toilet paper down the hall. During the day, Joy sat in this ragged nest like a princess, bathing in the kitchen with one gleaming pink foot perched on the edge of the tub, or sitting wrapped in a soiled comforter to drink coffee and eat cheesecake out of a tin. At night, she sailed out wearing

absurd clothes as if they were Givenchy gowns. Once when I complimented her on one of her mismatched earrings, she pointed at the sky and said, “That earring means, Don’t look at my finger; look at the moon.”

Together, we were assured admittance to exclusive clubs where, lifted up and out of the hoi polloi and deposited at the entrance by the doorman’s fastidious gaze, we handed our coats to a gaunt creature in a coat-lined cave, then walked down the glowing sound-chamber hall, where music, lighdy skipping in the main rooms, here bumbled from wall to wall like a ghost groaning in purgatory. We turned a corner and the music showed its laughing public face. We entered the great night flower of fun, open and dark like a giant lily swarming with drunken fairies. Into the swarm we flew, Joy darting, hovering, seeking and finding the inevitable man handing out cocaine to girls.