Veronica (12 page)

Veronica had whole picture books of celebrities in her apartment, thick books by Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, who were almost celebrities themselves. These books did not bewilder her; she understood them as vessels. I remember a picture of two slender, sinewy women in neon underwear, one bending over with perfecdy straight legs and a perfecdy straight back while the other one, perfecdy erect and frontal, pretended to spank her with a paddle. Veronica’s apartment was a condominium that she worked double shifts for a year to buy, and it wanted very much to be perfecdy elegant It was like an aquarium of gray and chrome waiting for something perfect to be placed in it. These pictures were the first perfect things.

When Alain locked me out and stole my money, I went back home. Eventually, I moved to New York; eventually, I returned to modeling. Eventually, I lived in a big apartment, too. I remember returning home to my big apartment alone and drunk. Moving through rooms, turning on the lights. The buzz of my own electricity loud and terrible in my head. Someday to be cut off. That doesn’t happen when I go home to my place on the canal. I am glad to be there. I always turn on the space heater

first thing, a wonderful humming box filled with orange bandpi of dry heat. Take off my wet shoes, sit in the chair, warming my wet feet. Look out the window, look at the wall. Travel slowlyf through the wall. My millions of cells meeting all its millions of cells. We swarm together like ants touching feelers. Now I know ^ you. Good, yes, I know you. I have some coffee. Listen to the radio. This afternoon maybe 1*11 call my father.

But not yet; I won’t go home yet. I’ll take the bus and go someplace beautiful and I’ll walk until I’m so tired that I won’t be able to stay awake tonight. So tired that my sleep will not be pestered by dreams or fairy tales.

At the end of the Naxos shoot, Lisa was not crying. Her face was ravaged and fevered, but she was erect, and her eyes were full of dull flame. She looked like a different person. She looked amazing. Alex moved about her, quick and silent. If he spoke, he did so in a very low voice, so that only she would hear him.

Everyone was so busy watching that I was the only one who saw the old Greek man. He was staring at Alex with a face of astonished disgust. His expression made me blush, and he wasn’t even looking at me. He took a step toward Alex, as if he meant to hit him. He stopped as if confused and wiped his mouth. He turned and walked away. He did not even come back to get paid.

Here’s the main street. Here’s the bus stop. Here’s a retarded girl coming toward me in a yellow slicker and baggy corduroy pants. She is dainty and shambling, with her big body and small feet, her ragged hems crushed and muddy under her heels. She comes close. Her fat, soft face is thick with feelings too blunt for words. Soft like paws, not nimble like fingers. Paws can read the

earth better than fingers. I can feel her reading me, running her senses over the invisible scars left by my appetites, vanities, and passive cruelties. Feeling my secret mouth—still there, even if the fangs have fallen out. Don’t worry about me, I think at her. I am harmless. But she looks wary. She doesn’t answer my hello. She keeps her eyes on me till she’s passed.

When I returned home to New Jersey, everybody met me at the airport. My mother had a fake smile on her face, meant to shield me from her tears. Daphne did not smile. She looked at me calmly, except that her brow was knitted up so high, her eyes were almost popped. My father’s face had the awful tact of a witness to an accident with bloody people sprawled out naked. Sara was the only one who seemed the same. She glanced at me to be sure I was still there, then went back into herself.

I sat in the backseat with my sisters, as if we were children again. For a second, they held apart from me and then we were joined together in the old membrane. My mother had come back to my father just weeks earlier, and the membrane was active and vibrating with recent vigor.

“Do you want anything special to eat?” My father raised his eyes in the rearview mirror but did not look at me.

“I’ve made spaghetti,” said my mother, j “Spaghetti would be good,” I replied.

We drove past low-built gray stores set back in lots half-full of cars and hunks of dirty snow. Their lights were starting to come on. The Dress Barn, Radio Shack, the 99-Cent Store. My mother began to cry; her tears scalded my face.

of nowhere and flags the bus. It stops, popping open its doll with a spastic rasp. The driver is small and bristling, with a lined face and jug ears. Hard and fiery, with a mouthful of spit waiting to be spat, he glares straight ahead as he pulls the door shut.

That night, I shared the big bed with Daphne. They had moved Sara into a small room in the basement, so we were alone. There was a desk where the maturity bed used to be. I piled my clothes on it until we could figure ©lit what to do with them all. We brushed our hair and changed into flowered gowns. I walked around naked more than I had to, She looked away. We had emotions, but we held them back. Silence and stillness connected us. Silence and stillness were where we understood each other. We could still be children together there, and we werel afraid to let adult emotions break it. We got into bed and shut off the light. I turned on my side. Silently, she put her arm around me. I took her hand and kissed it. We laced our fingers together and I kissed her hand again before resting it against my chest.

I sit next to a doughy girl with a stopped-up nose. Who’s the nose of God? The girl sniffs so hard, her head squeaks; she breathes softly through her mouth. Maybe the animals are in charge of smell. Taking everything into their hairy nostrils and translating it with their bodies, patiently putting it through each cell, each organ. Sitting and mulling it over with half-closed eyes. Licking their paws and sending it upward in an invisible skein of knowledge.

I enrolled in the community college. Daphne was already there. Sara had dropped out of school and taken a job at an old people’s home a few blocks over. She didn’t yell anymore. There were no boys to slap her ass. She came home from work and went down into the basement. It was winter and we could hear her hacking cough rise all the way up to the second floor. It was winter and my mother’s skin dried and her face grew thin and shrunken. I might look at her in her rubber boots and her wool cap pulled down over her forehead, the wool darkening with sweat as she worked to scrape ice off the chugging car, and I would think, No sexy pantsuit now. Nobody wants you now! And with that thought, my heart contracted and the world shrank around me so fast that I thought it would crush me. Every morning, my father got up looking like he felt the same way. The expression on his face said that the world shrank around him every day, so close in that it was hard to move. The expression on his face said that he pressed against the hard case of the shrunken world and pushed it back with every step. It was an expression I knew without knowing. I put my forehead down and I helped him push.

Our father dropped Daphne and me off at the college before he went to his job. He let us off at the end of the parking lot and we walked a long concrete path caked with blue-and-gray ice that gleamed on sunny days. The school was small and dingy. The people inside it stared at me like I was a stuck-up bitch. To get away from their stares, I climbed further up my stick. But I didn’t feel stuck-up. I felt scared. I felt like I had to prove I was smart enough to go to college. I worked hard. I wrote poems. The poetry teacher was a little man with sparse hair on his dry head and spotted, trembling hands. But I loved him because he wrote “very good” on my poems. At the end of the day, Daphne and I would sit in the Student Union eating sweetened yogurt and dime doughnuts. Night students came and stood in the cafeteria line. At six o’clock, we walked back down the concrete to meet the car.

If we got home and our mother wasn’t there, our dad danced around the house, pretending he was an ape. He did it to relieve tension. He’d run into the living room swinging his arms and going, “Ooooh! Oooh! Eeee eee eee!” He’d jump up on a chair, scratching his armpit and his head. Daphne and I did it, too; we ran around after him. It was like dancing on the green chairs, only it wasn’t a song everybody knew. It came from the deep flesh place, except it was quick and alive and full of joy. Not that I thought of it that way. I just knew I loved it. If it had gone on longer, it would’ve been better than any song. But it lasted only a minute. Our dad would always call it; he’d suddenly go back to normal and climb down off the chair, his smile disappearing back into his face. “Whew!” he’d say. “I feel a whole lot better now!” Except once between ape and normal, he took my shoulders and hugged me sideways. “I’m proud of you,” he whispered, and kissed my ear.

I was proud, too; I knew I was doing something hard. Sometimes I was even happy. But another world was still with me, glowing and rippling like a dream of heaven deeper than the ocean. I could be studying or watching TV or unloading clothes from the washing machine when a memory would come like a heavy wave of dream rolling into life and threatening to break it open. During the day, life stood stolid, gray and oblivious. But at night, heaven came in the cracks. I would want Alain, and want his cruelty, too. I would long for those cabinets of rich food and plates of drugs, for nights of sitting alone in the dark, eating marzipan until I was sick. For bitches who yanked at me and yelled at me for sweating. For nightclubs like cheap boxed hell, full of smoke and giant faces with endlessly talking lips and eyes and snouts swelling and bulbous with beauty. For my own swollen hugeness, spread across the sky. It didn’t matter that I had been unhappy in the sky, or that I had been cheated and used. I cried for what had hurt me, and felt contempt for those who loved me; if Daphne had put her arm around me then, I would’ve clenched my teeth with contempt.

Then, lying next to her warm body was like lying in a hole with a dog and looking up to see gods rippling in the air of their hot-colored heaven. I wanted her to know that she was a dog, ugly and poor. I wanted all of them to know. I wanted my father to know that he would always be crushed, no matter how hard he pushed.

On the last night I saw Alain, he took a bunch of us to a sado-masochist sex club. It was a dump guarded by a fat tattooed man who smacked his blubbery lips at us. Inside the cave, there was a bar and a handsome young man pouring drinks behind it. Cheerful music played. Two middle-aged women with deep, sour faces sat at the bar wearing corsets and garter belts. Some people were dressed in costume like them; other people were dressed normally. One man was naked. He was skinny as a corpse—you could see his ribs and the bones of his ass. He had long matted gray hair and thick yellow nails like a dog’s. He crawled on the floor, moaning and licking it with his tongue. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Nobody even looked at him. He crawled to the women at the bar and got up on his knees. He moaned and pawed the air like he longed to touch them but didn’t dare. Without looking, one of them took the riding crop from her lap and lighdy struck him across the shoulders. “Va, va!” she scolded gently. He reached down and yanked at his limp penis. He yanked it hard and fast but also daintily. She returned the crop to her lap and he scuttled away, balls swinging between his withered thighs. She saw me staring and made a face, as if I had broken a rule. I looked for Alain and saw him disappearing into a crowded back room with his arm around a dimly familiar girl. “Don’t worry.” Jean-Paul was suddenly beside me. “It is harmless here.” He winked at me. ‘Just a show, mosdy. Unless you want to join.” But I pushed through the crowd.

Sometimes the spell would break: I would look away from the terrible heaven and see my sister lying next to me, her neat graceful form and her even breath beautiful and inviolate. If I put my hand on her warm shoulder, my thoughts might quiet-heaven would vanish and the ceiling would be there again protecting us from the sky. I could lie against her and feel her breath forgive me. The day would come. My night thoughts would pale. My sister and I would go to school.

But sometimes I would barely sleep, then get up with heaven still burning my eyes. I would be full of hate and pain because I could not get back to it. On one of those mornings, I told Daphne the story of the sex club. We were moving around the room quickly, getting out of our warm gowns and into our cold clothes. I told her about the crawling man and the women at the bar. I could tell she didn’t want to hear. But I kept talking, faster and faster. I pushed through the crowd. A hand reached out of it and grabbed my wrist. I took its little finger and bent it back. It let go. I threw my gown on the bed and walked across the room naked. Daphne turned her back, bent, and showed me the gende humps of her spine. With dignity, she put on her pants.

In a reeking back room, I found Alain with Lisa from Naxos. Her sensitive litde lips were tense and strange. They were watching a middle-aged woman climb onto a metal contraption so that a man could whip her. Daphne yanked open a drawer and slammed it shut. I brushed my hair with rapid strokes. Alain smiled at me. I told him I wanted to go home, now. “Then go home,” he said. Lisa was not looking at me on purpose. Daphne pared her nails. She was not looking at me, either. The man with the whip was waiting for the woman to get settled into the proper knee and hand grooves. He seemed nervous; twice he moved his arm, like he was anxious to assist her, then moved it back. “I want to go home!” I nearly screamed. Both the man with the whip and the climbing woman turned to look at me; she brushed a piece of hair from her quizzical eye.

The people watching them looked, too. There was a crash; “Shit!” hissed Daphne. She had knocked a water glass off the bed table, splashing the mattress. Without looking at me, Alain took an ice cube out of his drink and threw it at my face. The woman setded her face into the metal headrest. I kicked Alain’s shin and ran.

“That’s poetry,” I said. “Life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook.” Daphne slammed the glass back on the table so hard, I thought she’d break it. She went out of the room and down the stairs. She knew what I’d said was stupid, but she half-believed it, too.