Veronica (17 page)

When I told him I had to go to work, he asked if he could see me again, and I said yes. He hailed me a cab and I got into it even though I could only afford to take it to the nearest subway.

I think of Jamie and silliness pops out of the ground in the form of a California hazelnut, bearing its tasseled foliage on each slim branch. Amid death and groaning wooden power and the wet complexity of moss and fungus and vines—from the same solemn pit, silliness pops up to dangle its tassels. Jamie. Alain. Joanne. We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on

the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass.

I saw Jamie again and we went for another walk. We bought tinned sardines and potato chips and candy, then went back to his apartment to eat. His roommates weren’t home. We finished our dinner and talked until it was so dark, we could see each other only as dim shapes. Jamie didn’t turn on the light. Shadow airplanes appeared and disappeared as headlights swept the wall. “Would you like to take a bath together?” he asked.

In the claw-foot bathtub, I sat between his legs while he held me from behind. Out a low half-moon window was the back of an abandoned building and a piece of illuminated street: the deep gray stone of the building stippled with scars and holes, squares of sidewalk, a lip of curb, a groove of gutter, the melancholy gray of the street. On the street a dog came trotting, chin raised and tail up, all brisk paws, ears, and snout. Jamie laughed; laughing, I turned and he held my face in his wet hands and kissed my forehead, then my closed eyes.

He was gentle in a way that I had not experienced before. He touched me intimately but also somewhat impersonally. He was polite, yet dirty, too. He was . covered with soft black hair, which seemed at odds with his sleek habits of dress; with his clothes off, he revealed his nature, without any cleats or clothes

to hold it up, and it was wonderful to see, like the coarse little dog prancing down the street.

“You should model,” he said. He was lying on top of me, feeling my eyebrows with his lower lip. ‘You could make money.” “I already did,” I said. “I didn’t like it.”

“Class,” he said warmly. “You have class.”

But I was lying.

Candy didn’t like Jamie because he was affected and because he was short and cold with her. “He makes such a big deal out of himself—those stupid cleats and that toy dog—and I don’t think there’s anything there.”

But that wasn’t true. There was something “there.” Something so scornful that it willfidly stunted itself just to withhold itself; something so scared that it blindly clung to objects like toys and cleats, pitifully trying to blossom, jealously nursing its own pathos and mocking it, too,

“It’s glamour in its purest form,” said Veronica. “I approve.’tit,;

She spoke of fey youths she had known, of their clothes and hair, the petulant swing of their slim hips. Of one who tried to kill himself with pills and wound up curled in a corner of her apartment, alternately sobbing in her lap and barfing in her wicker basket.

“It’s so moving, that artificiality,” she said, “moving and wistful. Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you ever saw. But my advice to you, hon, is not to go looking for it. You’ll see it eventually.” She exhaled a noseful of smoke. “Probably in your nice wicker basket.”

Of course, she was wearing men’s shoes. She was also wearing a cable-knit sweater with raised colored animal shapes

knit into it: a cat, a dog, a rooster. Red, green, and orange on peach. Frivolous, exact, and fiercely ugly.

In September, the sublet with Candy ended. I found a new sublet, a tiny apartment in the West Village; I used the last of my French money for the deposit. It was a studio with a stove, a refrigerator, and a sink on one wall and a bed on the other, both walls boxed in by a window on one end and a closet on the other. The window was protected by a metal grid that had gotten stuck shut; to open it, I had to poke a broom handle through one of the grid’s diamond-shaped gaps, manipulate the latch with it, and nudge the window open. Not much sun came irij| but when it did, it made a wobbling grid of diamonds on the floor.

When Sheila came to visit from New Jersey, she said, “God! You have to do that every time you open the window?*’ She told me Lucia was pregnant again. She told me she had been promoted to store manager. We went to Central Park, where we rented a rowboat and rowed on the lake. She let her hand trail in the water and her face grew wistful and luminous. Her face was tense for a twenty-year-old girl. Heavy like her will was pushing down, trying to crush something deep inside her, tense like the crushed thing was pushing back. I thought, She is ugly already. As if she heard me, she frowned and drew her hand from the water. “Did you know Ed is seeing Denise?” she asked.

I didn’t see Sheila or Candy again. I saw Jamie every night I could. We would go for walks and buy our dinner to take back home and eat. Sometimes he would take me to secondhand stores in the East Village and tell me what clothes to buy. Sometimes we would go to clubs and meet his friends, people with changeable hair and light, pointedly civil manners. One of them, a pleasant blond named Eric, with the faintly impossible

air of someone who had never been hurt, told me I was stupid not to model. He worked at a magazine made up almost exclusively of pictures of models and actors. “Nobody likes it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter; you only do it a few years and make a lot of money.” When I told him about Alain, he scoffed.

“Did you steal anything from him?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “he stole from me.”

“Then he doesn’t remember you. Everybody knows he’s crazy anyway.”

Eric was only an assistant at the magazine, but he said he could introduce me to a photographer. “You just need pictures. Go to an agency; you’ll be working again. Just lie about your age.” He gave me his number. He smiled at the hunger that suddenly came into my eyes.

The photographer lived with his assistant in a loft in the flower district. It was cold and the flower stands were closed. Their rough doors looked boarded up; their dark windows were haunted by ghosdy stalks and stems and cold, faint-gleaming pots. The photographer was three flights up. We sat in his kitchen smoking hash and drinking tea from china cups, talking about Paris. There was a big tub in the kitchen, an unhinged door on the tub and a dish drain on the door. Old trunks and makeshift wardrobes draped in musty clothes spilled in from the bedroom, and the assistant, a serious boy with the short, sweet legs of a child, deftiy picked through them. They dressed me in a red jumpsuit with a white plastic belt and matching white boots. The photographer said, “You’re a Bond girl!” From out of the past, spy music brayed. I grinned and, legs widely akimbo in my litde boots, pointed my finger to shoot Alain through the heart.

“Do you think he was a real photographer?” asked Joy.

“Real, yes. Good, I don’t know.”

We were at her house, drinking red wine and halfwatching a black-and-white movie on TV Except for one little lamp draped with a shirt, the lights were off to hide the mess. In the gray glow of the television, Joy applied hot blue nail polish and talked about another audition that had gone badly. As she talked, a girl’s face appeared on the television, ardent and soft, with millions of light cells flowing through it. Her dark liquid eyes were vulnerable, joyful and radiant with hope.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this A Star Is Born?”

“No, it’s Judy Garland, though. It’s Presenting Lily Mars, which was before she got all pitiful. So anyway—”

Quick, smart, and tremulous, the girl’s voice was full of hot life rising out of her own liquid darkness. In nine pictures, she was a charming actress at the top of her form. In the tenth picture, she was a child crying because she’d dropped her radiant hope into a deep pool, where everyone could see it but she could never feel it. Believe! Believe! Believe! I don’t know what she was saying, but that is what I heard.

When I saw the contact sheets, my heart sank. But Eric said they were great, and so I went to an agency wedged between a discount furrier and a furniture outlet. Sweating men carrying a houndstooth sofa wrapped in flapping plastic gawked at me on their way to a gaping truck.

“Beautiful,” said one.

I opened the shining glass door.

“Cold feesh,” said the other.

The door closed behind me.

A Ms. Stickle stared at the contacts up close and at arm’s length.

Voices rose over the cheap walls of her cubicle; one was

crass, one was rapid, and one was a child staring shyly at its lap. So, sweetie, what’s your bra size?.. .You don’t know? Let’s measure it. .. Canyou call your mother?... tape measure?

“How old are you?” asked Ms. Stickle.

“Eighteen,” I replied, lying

“Hum.” She pushed the pictures across the desk. “These photos are too downtown. See a real photographer and come back.”

She says it’s—My God, will you look at this?

“Can you recommend somebody?”

Ms. Stickle grimaced. Then she wrote a name and number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me without looking

Well, she is a monster.

This photographer was a thin, small man with soft, sexy jowls and gloating eyes that made you feel like he was examining your ass even when he wasn’t. He slathered hair gel on his hands and asked what sign I was. I said, “Scorpio.”

“I thought so.” He worked the gel into my hair so it stood up and away from my head. “I can tell you are strong” He stepped away and signaled his assistant. “But even so, I could dominate you completely.”

That established, he photographed me in his bathroom^ where I leaned into the mirror in an ill-used evening gown, then on the roof in a white shirt and black leather jacket.

I took the pictures back to Ms. Stickle. Once again, she sighed and stared as voices spoke into the air. “Don’t know,” she finally murmured. “I can’t tell if I love you or hate you.”

I went to another agent. He tapped his finger on the shot of me in the white shirt. “This one,” he said. “This one almost makes me feel something.”

“I thought you didn’t want to do it,” said Jamie.

“I need money.”

We were on my bed, eating hot cereal, a box of sugar on the rumpled bedding between us.

“You could work at the Peppermint.”

“I wouldn’t want to be there all the time.”

He carefully poured a layer of sugar on his cereal and ate it with shallow bites. “Where do you want to be?” he asked.

The season got cold and dark. When I arrived at work, people would be putting on their hats and tying their scarves; one girl, with wavy brown hair and a rosy, commonly pretty face, would tuck her chin against her lapel and button her coat with trustful, parted lips—her hands the mother, her body the tenderly buttoned child. Outside, night was already putting on its neon, and traffic was laying the streets with knotted jewelry. Veronica would come down the hall, her walk a waddle and a vamp, a bag of snacks bobbing at her side, her smile and waving hand stiff with routine.

Before she had been a proofreader, Veronica had been a secretary at a screenwriters’ agency. She’d been an assistant script doctor for a television show that I’d never heard of. She’d written flap copy for a publishing house that had gone out of business. In college, she had been a social-work intern with a caseload in the worst neighborhood in Watts. Her first day, a young thug asked if she was the new social worker; she mimicked her own dumb grin and her “Yes.” He asked if he could walk with her, and she said yes again. As they walked, he told her the previous social worker had been shot.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“No, I was too stupid. Anyway, he walked with me long enough for people to see us together. Later I realized he was a member of the neighborhood gang and it was to my advantage to be seen with him.”

“Did he come on to you?”

“No. He was protecting me. He was a gentleman.” She turned sideways to smoke, and when she turned back, her mouth had a little sarcastic twist. But her eyes were wide and suddenly deep. She had been given something by this thug-boy gentleman, and she had kept it. She was showing me that with her eyes.

“What was it like being a social worker there?”

“I was twenty-three years old. I was ignorant. I came from a psychotic family. That’s what it was like. Except for one thing.” She put out her cigarette with a proud, bristling air, and told me the story of a cat named Baldie, a stray that lived under a table at the community center where some of her cases played pool. One day, she brought in a can of cat food for him.

‘At first, I thought they were angry at me, the men. They glared and they said, ‘He don’t know what to do with that. He ain’t never had anything that good in his life.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll just try,’ and I opened the can. They stopped playing pool and they all watched when I put it down. And Alison, the way that cat buried his head in that can!” She thrust her head down, fingers splayed, her refined voice rolling and softly gobbling “He looked up at us, and if cats could cry, tears would’ve been streaming down his face. Nobody said a word. Then one of the men crouched down and held the can so the cat could get to it better.

“Every day after that, I brought in a can of food and every day the men would gather to watch Baldie eat. It was probably one of the few times they got to see a righteous need completely satisfied. When I quit, I left a case of food. I like to think they kept it up. They were hard people, but they had real hearts.” She shrugged. “That was the good thing that happened there.”