Veronica (3 page)

For the first few days, I was one of two girls, the other being a little fifteen-year-old with suspicious eyes and a sexuality that was sharp and raw as her elbows. But she was with a boyfriend in his thirties, the kind of guy who put on airs about his clothes and manners even though he looked like shit. I tried to be friends with her, but she acted like I was beneath her, maybe because she had an older boyfriend who bought her dresses. The only time she was friendly with me was when she let me see her dresses, pulling them out of a canvas bag and laying them across her arm, smoothing them with her free hand and telling me where and how Don had gotten each of them for her. Otherwise, when we were in the kitchen with the others, she’d roll her eyes when I talked. The boys were nice to me, though; it was a treat for them to have a single girl around. Even the older boyfriend was secredy nice to me. He told me I’d be beautiful in ten years if I “cleaned up.” But in ten years, I thought, I’ll just be old.

Then a German woman came to the hostel. She was already old; she was thirty-one. But the boys were stunned by her. Even before they said so, I could tell. When she came in the room, they looked alert and dazed at the same time, like the beautiful night world of the music had appeared before them and begun swirling around their heads. When she left, they all said, “She is so beautiful!”

I didn’t understand; she just looked like a girl to me, only old. Then someone said, “She used to be a model,” like that explained everything. “She was very famous ten years ago,” he added.

The feeling of dazzlement increased. The next time she appeared, conversation stopped, and people were self-conscious about starting it again. The fifteen-year-old girl didn’t even try. She just sat there smoking and staring, not even suspicious anymore, like finally here was something that was exacdy what it was supposed to be. She didn’t even care that her boyfriend was staring at this woman like he was in love with her. She looked at the model as if she were a glimmering set of dresses, like she’d drape her over her arm and stroke her if she could.

Every day, the German woman would walk into this reaction, eating her cereal, taking her turn at the toilet, sometimes joining in a smoke around the stereo. If she walked into the kitchen, carrying a book: What was she reading? Oh really! And what did she think of it? The German woman answered thoughtfully and pleasantly, but also stiffly, like she was trying to pass a test.

I still didn’t understand. I didn’t think she was beautiful and I didn’t care that she had been a model. This is probably hard to believe. It is hard for me to believe. Now everybody knows models are important; everybody knows exacdy what

beauty is. It is hard to imagine that a young girl would fail to recognize a former model with full, perfecdy shaped features as beautiful. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about beauty; I liked beauty as much as anyone, but I had my own ideas about what it was. This woman didn’t look like anything to me. Now I would be staring at her like everybody else. But back then, I was the only person in the house who did not react to her appearance. The few times we were alone in the kitchen together, we made small talk, and I didn’t think she was paying me any more attention than I paid her.

I left the house after a week. I moved into a rooming house with an older boyfriend who made a living handing out flyers on the street. One day in the fall, I was walking down the street, doing nothing, when suddenly the German woman was there—so suddenly, it felt like she’d leapt out from around a corner.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “It’s so great to see you! How are you doing? I was wondering what happened to you!”

Under her friendliness, her face was wild, like something inside her was crashing together and breaking, then crashing i together again. Her voice was pleasant, but she did not look pleasant, or thoughtful, or like she gave a fuck about passing a test.

I told her about my boyfriend, with whom I now lived. “That sounds wonderful!” she said. “I have my own place just a few blocks away from here. Would you like to come visit?” \ Then, seeing my expression, she added, “Or maybe just go for a coffee now?” I stood there, nervous and speechless. She frowned, peering at me slighdy, maybe noticing finally that I was just a kid. “Or, or... an ice cream! Would you like an ice cream?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t have any money.”

“It’s all right,” she said, already leading me away without checking to see if I was following. “It’s my treat.” From the side, her eye was glassy and hard. Gingerly, I fell in with her.

We must have looked strange together. I was tall, but she was taller, and her high heels made her taller yet. Her burgundy dress was silken and plain, and it flattered the cutting, angular quality of her body. She wore sparkling earrings and eye shadow, lipstick and nail polish. It was hot and she was slighdy wet under the armpits, but still she gave an impression of dryness and gleaming I wore sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt, with no bra underneath. My hair was unkempt and I wore no makeup.

I didn’t wear deodorant or bathe often; I might actually have smelled. She did not seem to notice any of this.

She took me to a very stylish and expensive place with little white tables covered by green-and-white-striped umbrellas. A year later, I would know enough to be uncomfortable sitting in this place looking like I did then. But at that time, I only felt bewildered; we didn’t need to go there to get ice cream.

I stared at the menu, dimly aware of the crudeness of my person for the first time. We ordered our ice cream. She looked at hers dully and began to eat as if she couldn’t taste.

As we ate, a man in a suit came to our table and spoke to her in a foreign language. His voice was soft and he spoke briefly, but what he said enraged her. She did not act enraged, but I could see it, first in the muscles of her jaw and neck, then in her eyes. Rage was leaping from her eyes, but she answered him with a politeness so bitter, it seemed a kind of despair.

“What did he say to you?” I asked, thinking it must have been very obscene.

She literally clenched her teeth and said, ‘“You are very beautiful.’” Hatred illuminated her face like a bright flare and then went out. She returned to her ice cream.

I was even more bewildered; I had known many girls who, when men flirted with them, would pretend to be offended and disgusted, but it was clear that this woman was not pretending I looked at her, really curious now why people thought she was beautiful and why it made her angry that they did.

But I didn’t ask her what I wanted to know. We talked awkwardly for about half an hour and then got up to go. When we returned to the street, she said we should get together again—tomorrow. Did I want to come to her apartment and listen to records? Another flare lighted her face; it was need, not hate, but it was as strong as the hate had been. I was very uncomfortable now, and felt that she was, too. But her need flared unabated, like a pounding drum that pulls you along to its beat and overrules your own emotions. I said yes, I would drop by her apartment at eight o’clock the next evening.

But I didn’t. When I talked to my boyfriend about her,

I said she was weird. “Then don’t go,” he said. “I have to,” if replied. “It would be mean not to.” But I sat there in the kitchen j with my boyfriend, eating cheesecake from a tin and watching 1 his huge black-and-white TV until I sank into a torpor. From I there, the German woman’s loud drum was hard to hear. I pic- | tured sitting with her on a nice pillow in front of her stereo. Lots 1 of records would be scattered about—she would have a huge | selection. She would go through them with her long manicured a hands and then put one on and listen to it dully, like she couldn’t 1 hear. Just picturing it made me feel heavy and tired. The gray | figures running around on the TV screen made me feel heavy I and tired, too, but in a comforting way. Eight o’clock came and I I thought I’d sit in my heavy comfort just ten minutes more and 1 then go. At 8:30,1 pictured her sitting alone, going through her I records, need and hate surging under her stiff face. She would I still be waiting for me to arrive. By nine o’clock, I realized I wouldn’t go. I felt bad—I felt like I was deserting a person who I was sick or starving. But I still didn’t go.

About six months later, I saw her on the street again. I was dressed better then; I’d streaked my blond hair platinum and wore platform shoes. Maybe that’s why the German woman didn’t recognize me, or maybe she pretended not to see me, or maybe she didn’t see me. She didn’t seem to see anything. She was walking alone, her arms wrapped around her torso. Her clothes were ill-kempt and didn’t fit her right because she had

lost a lot of weight. Her eyes were hollow and she stared fixedly before her, as if she were walking down an empty corridor. I wanted to stop her, but I didn’t know what to say.

1 had seen loneliness before that and had felt it, too. But I had never seen or felt it so raw. Thirty years later, I still remember it. Only now I am not bewildered. Now I understand that a person can be wild with loneliness. I understand that she wanted so badly to talk to me exacdy because she sensed I was the only person in the house who was indifferent to her appearance. But it didn’t work because she didn’t know how. She had put on the suit of “model” many years before and now she couldn’t take it off, and it hurt and confined her.

What’s funny about this story is that a year after I met her, I became a model.

“Maybe she recognized that in you. Maybe she wanted to warn you.” That’s what Veronica said about it. We were sitting at a litde table under the striped awning of an outdoor cafe, having gelato and espresso. It was the first time we’d met outside the office and it felt funny. “But I think you were right not to meet her. She sounds crazy, to be that aggressive with a young person.”

A car rolled up and got stopped in traffic in front of us. Music poured from the radio, carrying a voice that was all smooth and elegant, except burps and grunts kept popping out of it, like a baby trying to talk. “She says I am the one,” it sang. The music was a dark bubble in which the singer danced and twitched. An arm came out of the backseat and a hand pointed at me; a voice yelled, “You! You!” and the car roared off.

Now time for the windows. I only do them once a month because it hurts my arm to reach over my head, which means by the time I do clean, I have to press hard, which also hurts my arm. Every now and then, John gets mad at me for not doing the windows every week and we have a fight. He stands there yelling, “What sense does it make to put it off? You’re telling me it hurts when you press hard? Spray it and wipe it every week and you’re fine!” He’s a short guy with a big head on a long rubbery neck that operates like a rotating turret, and words spray from his mouth like bullets. “Do you even think?” he’ll yell, and I’ll go into my thing of how I have to spare my shoulder, how much it hurts, and he’ll yell about why don’t I go to the doctor, why don’t I get physical therapy, and I’ll remind him of how hard it is with my insurance, how I have to get all these forms, and how it never helps anyway. Crying will come into my voice and he’ll get this wet, harried look in his eyes, and the turret will work uselessly, not knowing what to shoot at.

You. You. When I knew Veronica, I was healthy and beautiful, and I thought I was so great for being friends with somebody who was ugly and sick. I told stories about her to anybody who would listen. I can just hear my high, clear voice describing

her antics, her kooky remarks. I can hear the voices of people congratulating me for being good. For being brave.

I drag the bucket across the room. Rain hits the dirty windows in great strokes. The people outside are blurred and runny: a middle-aged woman trying to pull a teenage girl under an umbrella, the girl pulling back and yelling. A car swishes around the corner, filling a fat wet drop with a second of headlight. The girl breaks away and runs into the rain. I think of the Mexican woman with rain running down her face. I spray the window and rub.

Now I’m ugly and sick. I don’t know how long I’ve had hepatitis—probably about fifteen years. It’s only been in the last year that the weakness, the sick stomach, and the fever have kicked up. Sometimes I’m scared, sometimes I feel like I’m being punished for something, sometimes I feel like I’ll be okay. Right now, I’m just glad I don’t have to deal with a beautiful girl telling me I have to learn to love myself.

I stretch up to the top window and breathe into the pain, like it’s a wall I can lean against.

When I say that the songs we listened to at the hostel had a feeling of sickness in them, that doesn’t mean I don’t like them. I did like them, and I still do. The sick feeling wasn’t in all the songs, either. But it was in many songs, and not just the ones for teenagers; you could go to the supermarket and hear it in the Muzak that roamed the aisles, swallowing everything in its soft mouth. It didn’t feel like sickness. It felt like endless opening and expansion, and pleasure that would never end. The songs before that were mosdy about pleasure, too—having it, wanting it, or not getting enough of it and being sad. But they were finite little boxes of pleasure, with the simple surfaces of personality and situation.

Then it was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it, and walk through.

The door didn’t always lead to someplace light and sweet. Sometimes where it led was dark and heavy. That part wasn’t new. A song my father especially loved by Jo Stafford was “I’ll Be Seeing You.” During World War II, it became a lullaby about absence and death for boys who were about to die and kill. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeingyou. In the moonlight of this song, the known things, the tender things, “the carousel, the wishing well,” appear oudined against the gentle twilight of familiarity and comfort. In the song, that twilight is a gauze veil of music, and Stafford’s voice subdy deepens, and gives off a slight shudder as she touches against it. The song does not go any further than this touch because beyond the veil is killing and dying, and the song honors killing and dying. It also honors the little carousel. It knows the wishing well is a passageway to memory and feeling—maybe too much memory and feeling, ghosts and delusion. Jo Stafford’s eyes on the album cover say that she knew that. She knew the dark was huge and she had humility before it.