Veronica (2 page)

The Mexican woman clicks her suitcase shut and stands with a little smile. My focus snaps back to normal, and the woman slips back into the raining hugeness. She smiles at me again as she turns to go, returning my civility with rain running down her face.

In the dream, it’s like the strangers are delivering messages for more important people, who for some reason can’t talk to me. Or that the people who are important by the normal rules—family, close friends—are accidental attachments, and that the apparent strangers are the true loved ones, hidden by the grotesque disguises of human life.

Of course, Veronica had a lot of smart cracks stored up. She needed them. When she didn’t have them, she was naked and everybody saw. Once when we were in a coffee shop, she tried to speak seriously to me. Her skin was gray with seriousness. Her whole eyeball looked stretched and tight; the white underpart was actually showing. She said, “I’ve just got to get off my fat ass and stop feeling sorry for myself.” Her tough words didn’t go with the look on her face. The waitress, a middle-aged black lady, gave her a sharp, quick glance that softened as she turned away. She could tell something by looking at Veronica, and I wondered what it was.

Veronica died of AIDS. She spent her last days alone. I wasn’t with her. When she died, nobody was with her.

I’m feeling a little feverish already, but I don’t want to take the aspirin on an empty stomach. I also don’t want to deal with holding the umbrella while I get the aspirin out, put it back, get the water, unscrew it, squeeze the umbrella with one arm, the one that’s killing me. . ..

I met Veronica twenty-five years ago, when I was a temporary employee doing word processing for an ad agency in Manhattan. I was twenty-one. She was a plump thirty-seven-year-old with bleached-blond hair. She wore tailored suits in mannish plaids with matching bow ties, bright red lipstick, false red fingernails, and mascara that gathered in intense beads on the ends of her eyelashes. Her loud voice was sensual and rigid at once, like plastic baubles put together in rococo shapes. It was deep but could quickly become shrill. You could hear her from across the room, calling everyone, even people she hated, “hon”: “Excuse me, hon, but I’m very well acquainted with Jimmy Joyce and the use of the semicolon.” She proofread like a cop with a nightstick. She carried an “office kit,” which contained a red plastic ruler, assorted colored pencils, Liquid Paper, Post-its, and a framed sign embroidered with the words still anal after all these years. She was, too. When I told her I had a weird tension that made my forehead feel like it was tightening and letting go over and over again, she said, “No, hon, that’s your sphincter.”

“The supervisor loves her because she’s a total fucking fag hag,” complained another proofreader. “That’s why she’s here all the time.”

“I get a kick out of her myself,” said a temping actress. “She’s like Marlene Dietrich and Emiljannings combined.” “My God, you’re right,” I said, so loudly and suddenly that the others stared. “That’s exactly what she’s like.”

I cross a little footbridge spanning the canal and pass a giant drugstore that takes up the whole block. There’s an employee standing outside, yelling at someone. “Hey you!” he yells. “I saw that! Come back here!” Then more uncertainly: “Hey! I said come back here!”

Hey you. Veronica sat in a doctor’s office, singing, “We’ve got the horse right here; his name’s Retrovir” to the tune of a big Guys and Dolls number. The receptionist smiled. I didn’t.

Come back here. Veronica burst into laughter. “You’re like a Persian cat, hon.” She made primly crossed paws of her hands and ecstatic blanks of her eyes; she let her tongue peep from her mouth. She laughed again.

More employees come out of the store and watch the guy; he just keeps walking. It’s obvious why. The police can’t get there fast enough and these employees are not going to fight him, because he’d win. This animal reality is just dawning on the employees. It makes them laugh, like an animal shaking its head and trotting away, glad to be alive.

I pass the bus depot, where people are hanging out, even in the rain. I pass closed restaurants, Mexican and French. The knot of traffic at this intersection always seems a little festive, although I don’t know why. The bus depot changes: Sometimes it’s sad, sometimes just businesslike, sometimes seems like it’s about to explode. John’s office is in the next block. He shares it with another photographer, who mostly shoots pets. He seems to be better off than John, who sticks to people.

I let myself in and sit down behind John’s desk for a cigarette. I know I should be grateful to John for letting me clean his office, but I’m not. I hate doing it. It depresses me and it tears up my arm, which was injured in a car accident and then ruined by a doctor. John shares a bathroom with the pet photographer, who has filthy habits, and I have to clean up for both of them. I used to know John; we used to be friends. J£ven now, he sometimes talks to me about his insecurities, of-advises me on my problems—smoking, for example, and how terrible it is.

I have some codeine to prep the arm, then walk around the office smoking. I look at the photographs on the walls; John’s got pictures from three decades. The ones from the seventies are the best. The models aren’t professionals; they are just people John knew. They are male and female and they are all naked except for boots or a hat or underpants, something to give thefn style. Most of them don’t have good bodies, but they are looking at the camera like they are happy to be naked, either just standing there or posing in the combination of relaxation and sexual nastiness that people had then. They all look like people whose time had given them a perfect style suit to wear, a set of postures and expressions that gave the right shape

to what they had inside them, so that even naked, they felt clothed.

I drop ash into the potted plant by the desk and rub it into the dirt with my finger. I get up and go into the bathroom for the cleaning supplies, a yellow bucket full of rags and spray botdes of cleaner so potent, I once killed a giant spider with it.

I put the bucket in the sink and run water into it. I spray the mirror with cleaner and fine blue poison twinkles into the filling bucket, bright ammonia and dull smell memories of cafeteria food and public piss, my mother kneeling and cleaning. I wipe the mirror with a store-bought rag and drop it in the bucket.

There is always a style suit, or suits. When I was young,

I used to think these suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically—people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras—I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different. It’s understandable that I thought that; TV and newsmagazines acted like the world had changed, too. I was happy with it, but then five years later it changed again. Again, the TV announced, “Now we’re this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!” Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessandy looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trait at a time; you had to grab on to one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, “we” were loving; then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed. Although we are at war with terror, fashion magazines say we are sunny now. We wear bright colors and choose moral clarity. While I was waiting to get a blood test last week, I read in a newsmagazine that terror must not change our sunny dispositions.

Of course, there is a lot of subtlety in all this, and complexity, too. When John took those naked pictures, the most

popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.

I drop the rag in the bucket and smoke some more, ashing into the sink. A tiny piece of movie from the naked time plays on my eyeball: A psychotic killer is blowing up amusement parks. At the head of the crowd clamoring to ride the roller coaster is a slim, lovely man with long blond hair and floppy clothes and big, beautiful eyes fixed on a tiny strip of light that only he can see.

Lift up the toilet lid—filthy again—and drop the cigarette in. Turn off the water and lift the bucket down. I set my teeth as pain tears a hole in my shoulder and I get sucked inside it. The roller coaster roars and everybody screams with joy; the blond man screams in terror as his car flies off into the sky and smashes on the ground. White froth gently disperses on the stirring bucket water as I set it down.

It’s not an easy thing. If you can’t find the right shape, it’s hard for people to identify you. On the other hand, you need to be able to change shape fast; otherwise, you get stuck in one that used to make sense but that people can’t understand anymore. This has been going on for a long time. My father used to make lists of his favorite popular songs, ranked in order of preference. These lists were very nuanced, and they changed every few years. He’d walk around with the list in his hand, explaining why Jo “G.I. Jo” Stafford was ranked just above Doris Day, why Charles Trenet topped Nat King Cole—but by a hair only. It was his way of showing people things about him that were too private to say directly. For a while, everybody had some idea what Doris Day versus Jo Stafford meant; to give a preference for one over the other signaled a mix of feelings that were secret and tender, and people could sense these feelings when they

imagined the songs side by side.

“Stafford’s voice is darker and sadder,” he said. “But it’s warmer, too. She holds the song in her voice. Day’s voice is sweet, but it’s heartless—she doesn’t hold it; she touches it and lets go—she doesn’t mean it! Stafford is a lover; Day is a flirt—but

what a cute flirt!”

“Um-hm,” said my mother, and she gritted her teeth on

her way out of the room.

But my father didn’t see my mother’s teeth. He was too charmed by Day singing “Bewitched.” He can laugh, but I love it. Although the laugh’s on me...

My father was right. If Jo Stafford sang that song, you would feel the pain of being laughed at by the one you love, and still you would love. When Doris Day sang it, the pain was as bright and sweet and harmless as her smiling voice. I’ll sing to him, each spring to him. And long for the day when I cling to him.... My father smiled and imagined being the one she painlessly longed to cling to; then he went home—to Jo. She sang, “But I miss you most of all, my darling,” and hurt was evoked and tenderly held and healed, again and again, in waves.

But eventually those feelings got attached to other songs, and those singers didn’t work as signals anymore. I remember being there once when he was playing the songs for some men he worked with, talking excitedly about the music. He didn’t realize his signals could not be heard, that the men were looking at him strangely. Or maybe he did realize but didn’t know what else to do but keep signaling. Eventually, he gave up, and there were few visitors. He was just by himself, trying to keep his secret and tender feelings alive through these same old songs.

I thought he was ridiculous. But I was only a kid. I didn’t see that I was making the same mistake. He thought the songs were who he really was, and I thought the new style suit was who I really was. Because I was younger, I was even more naive:

I thought everything had changed forever, that because people wore jeans and sandals everywhere and women went without bras, fashion didn’t matter anymore, that now people could just be who they really were inside. Because I believed this, I was oblivious to fashion. I actually couldn’t see it.

I remember the first time I was made to see it. It was the first time I met a fashion model. Strangely, it was also one of the first times I saw someone for who she really was inside.

I was sixteen when this happened. I had run away from home, pardy because I was unhappy there and partly because running away was what a lot of people did then—it was part of the new style. This style was expressed in articles and books and TV shows about beautiful teenagers who ran away even when their parents were nice; the parents just had to cry and struggle to understand. The first time I left, I was fifteen. My parents had fought and refused to speak to each other for three days; I slipped out through the silence and hitchhiked to a concert in upstate New York. United by my disappearance, my parents called the police, who picked me up in a shopping mall a week after I’d returned of my own accord. Daphne said that while I was gone, our mother acted like somebody on one of the TV specials about runaways—always on the phone talking to her friends about it. “I think she enjoyed it,” said Daphne.

But our mother said she did not enjoy it. “We won’t let you put us through that again,” she said. “If you leave now, you’re on your own. We won’t be calling the police.”

So a year later, I left again. I packed right in front of them. I said I would just be gone for the summer, but they assumed I was lying. “Don’t call here asking for money!” shouted my father. “If you walk out that door, you are cut off!”

“I would never ask you for money!” I shouted back.

“She thinks she won’t need it,” said my mother from the couch. “She thinks being pretty will make her way.” Her voice was angry and jealous, which made me think that leaving must be something great.

“She thinks she’s going to make her way in the world,” she said. But this time her jealousy was touched with wistfulness. She could’ve been talking about a girl in a fairy tale, walking down a path with her bundle on a stick.

I lived from apartment to apartment, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers. I got a ride to San Francisco and stayed in a European-style hostel, where you could stay a limited number of nights for a fixed fee. It was a large dilapidated building with high ceilings and sweet, moldy drains. The kitchen cabinets were full of stale cereal, the kind with frosting or colored sweet bits made to look like animals or stars. You had to chip in for food staples. You weren’t supposed to bring in drugs; people did, but they were moderate and they shared. The man who ran it, a college student with a soft stomach and a big ball of hair on his head, even kept a record player in one of the common rooms, and we gathered there at night to share pot and listen to playful elfin songs about freedom and love. These songs had the light beauty of a summer night full of wonderful smells and fireflies. They also had a feeling of sickness hidden in them, but we didn’t hear that then.