Veronica (26 page)

“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.”

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 in 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 apparendy 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 com-panionability. 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.

Mortified, I divided like Veronica in her sick-vision. Shut up, I told myself, shut up!

“After I got off the phone with you, I decided I wanted to live,-” continued Veronica. “All of me. I got up the next day at five-thirty in the morning and made myself go out to the deli on the corner for poached eggs and toast. No wonder I was so weak—it was the first real food I’d had for days. It was so good,

Alison, I can’t tell you. I felt life coming back into my body. It was still dark outside and I had this wonderful feeling of safety and warmth. I loved watching the countermen setting up, filling the sugar dispensers, putting out all the litde creamers. I flirted with them and they flirted back, even though I looked like hell.”

Her voice was the same bitterly inflected instrument I had just despised. But now there was hope in its center, and that subdy made it sweeter. The sweetness didn’t go with the habitual hard showiness of the voice, and the incongruence gave it a wobbly, unprotected quality that pierced me. I love her, I thought. I love her.

But then she said something with such force that a tiny bit of spit flew from her mouth and landed on my hand. I jerked it away as if I’d been bitten. There had been no thought or even feeling behind it. It was pure reflex. For a second, the conversation stopped. Then Veronica changed the subject. There was no sweetness in her voice.

We left the restaurant and took a walk down Seventh Avenue. The sun gave everything a glow that crackled in the stark cold. Hungrily, I took in the aging patchwork of buildings, the rhythmic pattern of traffic, the people, walking with miraculous order and civility. I had no hateful thoughts. I enjoyed our walk.

The next night, I went to see a play with Veronica, her old friend George, and David, a boy George was dating. When I heard George would be coming, I was surprised—the last I’d heard of him, Veronica had called him a “misogynist.” But when I arrived at the restaurant before the show, my surprise evaporated. The two men were wearing suits and ties; Veronica wore a suit, too. The men were leaning slightly toward her, their faces expressing pleased alertness, as if they were courtiers in the presence of a queen known for her extraordinary wit and didn’t want to miss the slightest nuance of her royal demeanor, let alone her words. They were lavishing this attention on Veronica like praise, ensconcing her in their regard as if it were flowers. They knew she was sick and they were very likely afraid they were about to get sick, too. But their bodies did not speak of this. They sat erect and open, as if the best of life was ahead of them. They gave their courage to the sick woman so that she would be upheld.

When George stood to greet me, I surprised him with a full embrace. He and David complimented me on photos they had seen, not mentioning that they hadn’t seen any for a while. They asked me about Nadia again and again. Veronica drank soda water, but the rest of us shared bottles of wine. We talked about films, books, magazines. Veronica and George quoted lines from All About Eve back and forth intermittendy. (“I heard your story in passing.” “That’s how you met me, in passing.”) We had big desserts and then piled into a cab as if we were wearing capes and carrying walking sticks. (“I told my story in bits and pieces.” “That’s how I met you, in bits and pieces.”)

When we got to the theater, I went to the bathroom, leaving the others in the lobby. When I came back, I saw them before they saw me. George was talking to Veronica, his back to me. David was behind Veronica, looking over her head at George. He was taller than George and I could see his expression clearly. He looked bewildered and scared. I thought, He is even younger than I am. Then he saw me looking at him and smiled brighdy. We all went to the play.

But when I got in bed that night, the hate came on me again. With no conversation or pots of flannel hash to dim it, it came big and loud. Gnawing and terrified, it ran back and forth in erratic diagonals, exuding grotesque visions: a handsome gay man, a hairdresser I’d just had dinner with—hate made his teeth and nose pointy and foregrounded like a dog’s snout. It squeezed him together with the flute-voiced men at the restaurant and with Duncan in Central Park, pulling his ass open, his

body reduced to a dumb totem with a single meaning. And with Veronica, her ugly face, her proofreader’s kit—her rulers, her box of colored pencils—her prissiness, which denied the shit of the world and so drew it down upon herself.

Sweating, I twisted in my bed. I thought: I tried to be so liberal, so free. I lied to myself. Those men were always about death. And Veronica chose them. That’s why she’s dying.

I sat up and turned on the light. I saw myself in the mirror, disheveled and shrunken, my head looking strangely small on my long neck, my eyes remote and ashamed. So this was who I really was. I wanted to blame my father, but I couldn’t. This was who I was. I thought of David’s face in the theater, the way he’d smiled when he saw me looking. I thought of Mrs. Lowry, the way she’d tartly said, “Well, you should.” I thought of the rivulet of hope and sweetness in Veronica’s voice. Sadness brimmed; it bore up my hate like water bears ice and carries it away.

I stayed in New York for ten days. During that time, I saw no one but Veronica. “I told my aunt you’d come to visit me,” she said. “And she asked, ‘How much did you pay her?’ I said, ‘Dolores, would you listen to yourself? She’s my friend. She came because she cares about me.’”

I arrived back in L.A. at night. John picked me up and took me to dinner at an all-hours place with a boiling dark air. He looked angry. He kept telling me I had to learn to drive if I expected L.A. to work out for me. I drank too much and took him back to my place. Maybe I felt I owed him. Maybe I liked him. Maybe the demon whispered, Do it with him! In any case, it didn’t work out. He kissed me too hard and touched me with violent