Veronica (22 page)

“I was thinking of things that don’t seem to go together but do. Only I can’t say how.”

“Can’t connect the dots?” asked the actress in a barely audible voice.

“And I was thinking about Veronica.”

“Your friend with AIDS?” asked Patrick.

There was silence filled with quick-running currents. The actress turned abruptly away. Softness and apology rose from her shoulder and came toward me. Talking resumed.

Later, Patrick and I fought about his friends as we stood on the sidewalk in the spilled watery light of an openmouthed bar. I turned to walk away. He grabbed my elbow; I turned away from him and for a ridiculous second we pivoted around each other. A table of drunks near the bar’s blurry window burst into laughter. I turned toward him and he banged into me. The table applauded.

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t be angry now. Let’s go where there aren’t any friends.”

And he took me up and down two twisty streets to an office building with a blank-faced door and a back stair that led up a hot stairwell to a tar roof illuminated by a tin lamp clipped to a wire strung between two chimneys. On the roof was a rough stone bench made bluish in the angled light, a matching table, wooden planters ragged with roses, and cage upon cage of purling gray pigeons. There was an unlit candle on the table and a rain-warped book with its pages stuck together. The tin lamp wobbled slighdy in a low wind and the pigeons wobbled with it.

“What is this?” I asked.

‘A life raft in the sky. Come look.”

The pigeons moved like dark water at our approach—soft and rolling, with little tossing plaps.

“The janitor of this building keeps the birds—his brother owns the building, so he lets him. I know the janitor and he lets me come here if I sort of pay him.”

The pigeons purled like dark water, evenly stroking a dark shore. The burning roof released its acrid tang Grainy light poured up off the city, reached into the sky, and sank back with a darkish milky glow. Patrick took off his shirt and spread it on the mattress. Smiling, I sat on it. He scooped up my hips and, with hands on either side of my wakened spine, used his thumbs

to open my body. Wave after wave reached the soft dark shore. An hour later, Patrick left ten dollars flapping under a corner of the milk crate.

A month later, he left me for the black-haired actress, whose shoulder had apparently apologized ahead of time. He told me after a torpid dinner, while I was trying to pull him down onto the bed with me. Frowning, he refused to come. I stopped pulling. He came and sat and told me. He had not slept with her yet, he said. He didn’t want to disrespect me. His sense of honor shocked me; I lay in a state of dull shock, letting him kiss and stroke my hair until he left. He stroked me like he didn’t want to leave. He stroked me like the pigeon sounds reached for the shore, again and again. I lay there, hearing those sounds for a long time after he left.

When I finally sat up, it was two o’clock in the morning. The apartment was dark and someone outside it was moaning. The gate on my window made a shadow window of gray diamonds on the floor. I thought of the shadow bars of a prison window striping an upturned face, one eye unstriped. I felt for the phone. I didn’t expect Veronica to be in; I just wanted to hear and speak into her answering machine. The electronic bleat of the phone rippled and rose like a stair into the night sky, each step a bar of light. I saw myself and Sara, two tiny girls, climbing it step by step, each helping the other.

“Hello?” said Veronica. She had been sent home early and had just made herself a nightcap.

I arrived at her apartment moments later. She opened the door in a flowered floor-length gray gown with a yoke of lace on the breast and furry pink slippers on her feet. She gave me a mug of cocoa and white rum. We sat in front of the mumbling TV, and Veronica rapidly changed the channel as we talked.

Patrick and I had nothing in common, but he could hear me thinking. He was smarter than I was, but most of what he said was dumb. His friends were horrible, but I wanted to please them. I loved him, but I kept planning when we would break

up. Heureux et malheureux. I would be with someone else and someone else and then someone else.

“Frankly,” said Veronica, “it’s hard for me to see this as a problem. You should enjoy it while it lasts. I’ll never get laid again, and if I do, I’ll likely infect him.”

On the screen before us, faces cycled past—human, animal, monster, human.

“Veronica,” I said. “What was it like between you and Duncan?”

“Like? Haven’t I told you? Essentially, it was male-female relations. We enjoyed the same things—film, the arts.” Human, monster, animal. The silhouettes of lions walked the African delta with alert ears. Veronica lighted another cigarette. “If you mean deeper, it’s hard to explain. Together, we were able to express something in ourselves that was buried—I don’t quite know what it was, but I’ve been thinking. It sometimes felt like I was something he needed to knock down over and over, and I would always pop back up. He needed that and so did I, the popping back up.”

“He hit you?”

“No, hon, I’m speaking metaphorically. Anyway then we would step back and crack a joke and laugh, and everything else would fall away. And we’d just laugh.” She filled her lungs with fiery smoke, then let it go. “It was a narcissistic game maybe.

But still, when you go through that with someone, it can feel like something very profound has happened between you. And it has, actually. That person’s your partner, and there’s honor in it.”

I didn’t understand. I glanced at the TV Nature workers were filming a dominant lion killing a rival’s cubs in order to protect his gene pool. Three terrified cubs watched him knock their sibling on its back.

“Nature,” said Veronica. “How dreadful.” She changed the channel. Human beings smiled over drinks. She changed the channel.

“Anyway, fifteen years ago, there was a precursor to Duncan, this beautiful man I met when I was traveling in the Balkans. He didn’t speak English, so we couldn’t understand each other, but for the week or so we were together, it didn’t matter. Sometimes this look would come into his eyes, and I would feel the same look in mine. All this awkwardness and phony smiling and pidgin English—all of it was just for the times we got to that look. I remember this one time we made love. We were up in the mountains and we did it literally on the edge of a precipice. He turned me around so we were front to back, and if he’d let go of me, I could easily have gone over.” She changed the channel. Small paws resisted the big snout, then fell as the jaws came down. The lion squatted and ate. She changed the channel. Human beings kissed.

“I remember this tiny figure on the side of a mountain down below, someone in a field of something blue, filling a basket. Then rolling green, and the sun, and the sky going up and up. It was the most erotic experience I ever had.”

One of the Siamese cats walked across the band of TV light and paused, its ears in fine bestial relief against the bril^ liant screen. There were only three cats by then. Veronica had already started finding homes for them through a service at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

“I’ve done things that looked self-destructive all my life. But I wasn’t really being self-destructive. I always knew where the door was. Until now.”

The nature workers scared the lion away and scooped up the remaining cubs. Veronica turned off the television. She invited me to sleep over. She gave me a flannel nightgown imprinted with violets and green ribbons. The print was faded from many washings and there was a ragged hole in one elbow; it was so unlike Veronica to own such a decrepit item that I thought it must be from her childhood. As I slipped it over my head in the bathroom, I inhaled deeply, imagining ghost scents

wafting off the gown. Childhood smells: silken armpit, back of the neck, fragrant perfect foot. Adolescence stronger, more pungent, heavy with spray-can deodorant, then secretly, defiantly rank. An adult snow cloud of soap and bleach, and the ghosts still whispering through it. The gown was tight across my shoulders; its sleeves went just past my elbow and its hem just past my knees. I smoothed it lovingly and left the bathroom, ready to get in bed and put my arms around Veronica; I imagined us together in our flannels, cuddling until we woke.

But as soon as we lay down, she said, “Good night,” and turned on her side. I stared at the ceiling and listened to her snore. My heart said, Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? I remembered myself in bed with Daphne, and how I would’ve ground my teeth if she’d put her arm around me. I thought of the young Veronica, held on the edge of a cliff in the arms of a stranger she never had to know, embraced like a beloved child and penetrated with the force of one adult to another. That person did not want the reassuring arm of a sister. She did not want to cuddle.

I fidgeted until the day came through the blinds. One of the cats approached; I reached to touch it and it recoiled as if it were shocked. I got out of bed and softly walked the apartment in my ragged gown. The cats stared, lemurlike. The furniture slowly groaned awake. I went to a window and slit the blind with a finger. I watched people and cars pass in a trance of fixity and motion. Now the diamonds on my floor would be filled with light and gentiy moving. Now there would be no prison bars. Now I could go home.

I got back in bed and lay close enough to Veronica to feel the heat come off her. The week before, I had heard a man who had AIDS interviewed on TV He said that on top of dying he constandy had to comfort his well friends, who were terrified that he was dying, and that it was exhausting to have to do that.

I’m not terrified, I thought.

My father stormed across the living room floor. “Do you know what that son of a bitch is doing to his family by going on a television show?”

I’m not terrified.

We breakfasted at a place that served a full English tea on mismatched tables. Our table slowly became a jumble of flowered plates piled with sandwiches and cakes, flowered cups and pots of tea, and red jam in a porcelain pot. We were waited on by severe middle-aged women who wore their dowdiness as if it were a starched uniform. Veronica leaned back in her chair and joked with them about girdles.

“My mother used to say, ‘If he asks you what kind of underwear you have on, you tell him, “It’s up to my chest and down to my knees and I’ve got panels where you don’t need panels.” 1 And that’s actually what hers was like! Mine, too, until I could physically fight her about it.”

“What was your mom like besides that?” I asked.

“You need to know more?”

Veronica said her mother spent hours putting makeup on every day, then came down the stairs crying because it was all wrong. She abused laxatives for so many years, she eventually lost bowel control and had to keep emergency towels in various locations around the house—little hand towels she’d neady fold up and then forget. Veronica’s father would find them and hurl them on the dining table. There were showers of tears and furious Kabuki scowls. Her mother’s condition got so bad, she couldn’t go out for groceries. Because her father was an agoraphobic, he couldn’t do it either unless the perfect opportunity popped up in his drive-to-work plan.

“They would fight about who would go, until we were down to two frankfurters and a can of peas. Then they’d send me and my sister out across this huge intersection with our little red wagon. They’d be watching us from the window, waving.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten and eight. We’d get back and they’d accuse me of

stealing—‘skimming off the top,’ my father would say. My sister was no fool—she began telling on me before they would make the accusation. / was no fool—I took the hint and started stealing.”

The waitress brought us an ashtray. Veronica thanked her with a zesty simper.

“Do they know you could get sick?”

“Sort of. I mean, I told them. My mother said, ‘You’ve always been a hypochondriac.’ My father screamed, ‘You’re just trying to get attention,’ and hung up.” She shrugged. “Not enough sandwiches to make a picnic in that family.”

For the first time, it occurred to me that the unsaid things were not so bad after all. For the first time, it occurred to me that my parents had hidden their hate and pain out of love.

“Perhaps,” said Veronica, “perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt it’s my destiny to find respite, at the end of my life, in a safe, beautiful dwelling. It doesn’t have to be an actual house. It could be an apartment, or maybe a cottage.”

“I could see you in a cottage,” I said. “With flowers growing up the side.”

“Flowers on the side! I’d love that!”

“You could wear galoshes and make jam.”

“I could! It’s not too late—I’m in great shape! Who knows, I may not get sick. I could double-shift a few years and make enough to pay for a cottage near the ocean.”

The red jam in its porcelain pot was like a viscous jewel in the sun. I imagined Veronica in her cottage, among flowers and fallen petals.

“But you know, Alison—you shouldn’t listen to the things I say about my parents. You know me, I’ll say anything for a cheap laugh. They weren’t so bad.”

“No?”

“No. My mother had a beautiful voice and she sang to us almost every night. She put on plays with us when we were litde, wrote songs for us to sing. When we went to bed at night,

she would say, ‘Here are all the people who love you.’ And she’d name everybody, every cousin, every great-aunt. She built a fence of protection with those names. And my father would come and stand at the door and watch over us all.” She smoked and exhaled, making a tiny redness on the wet butt. “I can still see him standing there.” She smiled and put out her cigarette.

There were small flowers sprouting on bushes growing alongside the path. They were a flat tough red that paled as their petals extended out, changing into a color that was oddly fleshy, like the underside of a tongue. They grew on clay red branches, slick and shiny in the rain, and they had tough red-tinged leaves. Against the gray sky, they were startling, almost rude. Not the right flower, I thought. Veronica had been startled enough. She needed silkiness and softness.