Veronica (8 page)

She was like Alana that way: elegance and ugliness together. She’d take a sip of tea, properiy dab her lips, and call her boyfriend a “cunt.”

I stop to give change to one of the women huddled on the sidewalk. She looks up at me and it’s like seeing through time. A young girl, a woman, a hag, look at me through a tunnel of layered sight; three pairs of eyes come together as one. We let our hands touch. She’s given me something—what is it? I walk past; it’s gone.

Veronica’s boyfriend was a bisexual named Duncan. She’d go to a party with him and he’d leave with a drunk girl on his arm, looking like he was taking her out to shoot her. He’d come to dinner with a lovely boy who had bad table manners and a giant canker on his mouth. He’d go to a cruising ground in Central Park called the Ramble, where he’d drop his pants, bend over, and wait. “See what I mean?” she said. “A real cunt.” “Why do you stay?” I asked.

She tipped her head back and released a petulant stream of smoke. She righted her head and paused. “Have you ever seen Camille?” she asked. “With Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor?” Camille is about a beautiful prostitute who dies of tuberculosis—a despised woman who is revealed to be better than anyone else, including the aristocrat who loves her but can’t admit it. Veronica and Duncan purchased a VCR as soon as one was invented, so that they could watch a tape of it constantly. They

watched it on the couch, lying in each other’s arms under a blanket. They watched it eating dishes of expensive ice cream or chocolates in a gold box. They could speak the lines with the actors. Sometimes they did it for fun. Sometimes they did it while they cried. At the end, we cry together,” she said. “It’s gotten so I cry as soon as the credits roll.” She shrugged. “Who else could I do that with? Only a cunt would understand.”

My mother was going for elegance and ugliness when she dressed her adultery in earrings, fancy pantsuits, and heels. But she couldn’t do it right. It was at odds with the style of her time. Her generation distrusted the sentimental thrill of putting beauty next to shit. They didn’t want to be split down the center—they figured they’d see what was there sooner or later anyway. They understood the appeal—of course they understood it! They’d made Camille. But you were supposed to know that was a movie.

My parents went with me to the agency in Manhattan. They were not going to put me on a plane to a foreign country just because I’d won some contest. They were going to ask questions and get the truth. They put on their good clothes and the three of us took Amtrak into the city to a building of gold and glass. In the elevator, we stared silently at the numbers above the automatic door as they lighted up and dimmed in a quick sideways motion. For the first time in years, I could feel my parents subtly unite.

The agency person was a woman with a pulled-back, noisy face. Her suit looked like an artistic vase she’d been placed in up to her neck. When she smiled at me, it was like a buzzer going off. I could tell right away that my parents didn’t know what to do.

“Can you assure me that our daughter will be taken care of?” asked my mother.

“Absolutely!” said Mrs. Agency. She spoke of roommates, vigilant concierges who monitored the doors, benevolent chaperones, former models themselves.

“Aren’t there a lot of homosexuals in the fashion industry?” asked my father.

Mrs. Agency emitted a joyless laugh. “Yes, there are. That’s another reason your daughter will be as safe as a kitten.” My father frowned. I felt forces vying in the room. He sighed and sat back. “I just wish you didn’t have to interrupt your school,” he said. And then I was on another plane, humping through a gray tunnel of bumps. I stared into the sky and remembered Daphne at the airport, closing her face to me. She hugged me, but there was no feeling in it, and when she pulled away, I saw her closed face. Sara didn’t hug me, but when she turned to walk away, she looked back at me, the sparkle of love in her eye like a kiss. Droning, we rose above the clouds and into the brilliant blue.

When the plane landed, it was morning. Invisible speakers filled the airport with huge voices I couldn’t understand. I walked with a great mass of people through a cloud of voices, aiming for the baggage claim. I was distracted by a man in a suit coming toward me with a bouquet of roses and a white bag that looked like a miniature pillowcase half-full of sugar. His body was slim and his head was big. Deep furrows in his lower face pulled his small lips into a fleshy beak. His lips made me think of a spider drinking blood with pure blank bliss. Suddenly, he saw me. He stopped, and his beak burst into a beautiful broad smile that transformed him from a spider into a gende-man. “I am Rene,” he said. “You are for Celeste Agency, no?” Yes, I was. He took one of my bags and handed me his roses. He took my other bag, put it on the floor, and kissed my hand. In a flash, I understood: Seeing me had made him a gendeman and he loved me for it. I liked him, too. “It is Andrea, yes?” “No,” I said. “Alison.”

His car was sleek and white and had doors that opened

upward, like wings on a flying horse. We got inside it. He opened the bag (which was silk) and scooped the cocaine out of it with his car key. He placed the key under one winged nostril and briskly inhaled. I thought of the time my father was insulted by a car salesman who said, “All you want is something to get around in!” For a week after, my father walked around saying, “What do you do with it, you son of a bitch? Screw with it?” We passed the key back and forth for some moments. Finally, he licked it and put it in the ignition. He said, “Alison, you are a beautiful girl. And now you are in a country that understands beauty. Enjoy it.” He started the car. The drug hit my heart. Its hard pounding spread through my body in long dark ripples and for a second I was afraid. Then I stepped inside the electrical current and let it knock me out. We pulled out of the lot and into the Parisian traffic.

I had read about Paris in school. It was a place where ladies wore jewels and branches of flowers, even live birds in tiny cages woven into their huge wigs. The whipping boy sometimes played chess with the prince. The Marquis de Sade painted asylum inmates with liquid gold and made them recite poetry until they died. Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat butt-naked in the tub. I looked at the car speeding next to us; a plain girl with glasses on the end of her nose frowned and hunched forward. She cut us off and Rene muttered a soft curse. American pop music came out of her car in a blur. Ossifier. Love’s desire. Huge office complexes sat silent in fields brimming with bright green desire. The queen knelt before a guillotine. Blood shot from her neck in a hot stream. The next day, her blood stained the street and people walked on it; now her head was gone, and she could be part of life. Rene asked what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to write poetry. Cancan girls laughed and kicked. In paintings, their eyes are squiggles of pleasure, their mouths loose-shaped holes. On the street, people waiting for the light to change frowned and glanced at their watches.

Rene waited for me in the car while I went into the agency.

It was a medium-sized building with a shiny door on a cobbled street. The doorman had mad blue eyes and beautiful white gloves. The halls were carpeted in aqua. Voices and laughter came from behind a door. It opened and there was a woman with one kind eye and one cruel eye. Behind her was a man looking at me from inside an office. His look held me like a powerful hand. A girl’s small white face peeped around the corner of the same office. The hand let go of me. The girl blinked and withdrew. “Where is your luggage?” asked the double-eyed woman. “With Rene, outside,” I replied. “Rene?” She rolled her eyes back in her head. When they came forward again, they were both cruel. “Very well. Here.” She handed me a piece of paper. “This is a list of go-sees for tomorrow and Wednesday. I suggest you use a taxi to get to them. Now tell Rene that Madame Sokolov says he must take you straight to rue de l’Estrapade.” “Ah,” said Rene. “Madame Sokolov is not always aware.” He tapped his head with two fingers and drove us to a dark door squeezed between a tobacco shop and a shoe store. The concierge was an old woman with a brace on her leg. She led me slowly up the dingy stairs, with Rene following, bags in hand. We moved slowly to respect the brace. Each short flight of steps came to a small landing with ticking light switches that shut off too soon. “Merde,” muttered the old lady. The light had turned off while she was looking for the key to my room. In the dark, I felt Rene’s hot breath on my ear. “Take a nap this afternoon, eh? I’ll be by at eight.” He bit me on the ear. I started and he disappeared down the stairs. The old lady pushed open the door; there was a weak burst of light and television noise and a high, cunty voice: “But don’t you see, I want you here now. Two days from now will be too late!” My roommate, in bra and underpants, sat cross-legged on the sagging couch, the phone to her sulky face. She acknowledged me with a look, then rose and walked into a back room, trailing the phone cord. She carried her slim butt like a raised tail and her shoulders like pointy ears When the old lady left, I sat on the couch and picked at a bo^fl of potato chips on the side table. Out a window, enamel roof, tops with slim metal chimneys were bright against the white sky; a shadow weather vane twirled on a shadow roof. I watched it until my roommate got off the phone and I could call my famikl

When Rene came, I told him I wanted to go someplace! that had pie. He laughed and said, “You will have French pie!” We went to a patisserie with cakes that looked like jewelry boxes made of cream. I ate them, but I didn’t like them. They had tocfef many tastes, and I wanted the plain chemical taste of grocery : store pie. But the tables were made of polished wood and the people sitting at them were drinking coffee from tiny white cups. A woman next to us took a cigarette out of a case and lit itH with a silver lighter. And because Rene asked him to, the waiter ; sang to me. The song was about little boys peeing on butterflies^ Papillon, pee, pee, pee. Papillon, non, non, non. The waiter bent down to the table and sang softly. His pocked face hung in bristly jowls-’ and I saw he was missing teeth. But his voice opened the song like a picture book with feelings and smells in it. Blue flowers bobbed on the wind and butterflies dodged the piss of laughing boys. Mothers called; the boys buttoned their flies and ran home. I had awakened in New Jersey with my parents and I was going to sleep tonight with my French lover.

And so we lay naked on his rumpled bed. I was dimly aware that my body was exhausted and bewildered, but that didn’t matter. I was in an upper chamber, far above those feel* ings, eating sugar with both hands. The silky sheets were scattered with white powder, mixed with granules and litde hairs that were pleasant to feel. A brown moth flapped around a rose-colored lamp shade. Cold air from an open window stirred the papers on the night table. Ren6 held me in his hairy arms and sang the pee-pee song. He said, “You fuck humpty-hump, like a litde witch riding her broom!” I smiled and he stroked my hair. “That’s right, is good. I love my litde witch! Riding humpty hump in the night!” Then he jumped up and said he wanted to go to a nightclub. But I had go-sees the next day! He laughed and said, “Don’t think like a shop girl! Think like a poet!”

The nightclub was dark and had hot laser lights speeding through it. The music was like something bursting and breaking. People’s faces looked like masks with snouts and beaks. But I knew they were beautiful. If the German ex-model I’d met in San Francisco had walked in, I’d have known she was beautiful, too. But I didn’t remember her. My eyes and ears were so glutted I had no room for memory. I didn’t sleep, but Rene was right: It didn’t show on my face. I got a job for an Italian magazine and left for Rome the day after. Littie witch riding humpty-hump in the night.

Riding still, out of the roaring night into a pallid day of sidewalks and beggars with the past rising through their eyes. Shadows of night sound solemnly glimmer in rain puddles; inverted I worlds of rippling silver glide past with lumps of mud and green weeds poking through. The past coming through the present; it happens. On my deathbed, I might turn toward my night table and see Rene’s rose-colored lamp shade with the brown moth flapping inside it. My sisters could be blubbering at my side, but if Alana walked in and stuck her tongue out at me, she’d be the one I’d see.

When my mother died, she talked to people we couldn’t see while we sat there like ghosts. Once, she screamed in pain and the nurse came to give her morphine. She stretched her slack neck and raised her patchy, spotted face. She looked at the nurse, rapt with pain and straining to see past it. There was pleading in her eyes: Make it better, Mama. Then I said something. I called her “Mod”; that’s what we called her for a while when we were kids. We didn’t mean modern; we just meant

plump and silly, tootling around the house in her short white socks and ponytails—mom, with the soft, stumpy strength of a d All of that was gone on her deathbed, but I said it so she would know I remembered. In response, she dropped her eyes down to look at me and Daphne. Even on her sick face we saw her bewilderment. She looked back at the nurse—at Mama. Who were these big women on her bed? What was “Mod”?

I close my sleek wet umbrella, and the Museum of Mod. We stopped calling her that because other kids ridiculed us for it. They thought we were saying our mother was like girls in I miniskirts, and they laughed at how stupid she would look dressed like that. We couldn’t explain what we meant. Every* i body knew you were supposed to say “Mom,” and that was it. I This was at the very end of the sixties, which people say was a very free time. But really the style suit was very strict then. It applied even to what children could call their mothers.

I turn off the main street and enter a residential zone. Wel^S tended houses sit in neat yards with trees. Yellow-and-white recy- J cling buckets stand brightly curbside. Juice and jam jars for the kids, wine and fancy water botdes for the adults. My friend Joannii lives here. She and her husband, Drew, share a house with four guys in their twenties. Joanne was a teenager in San Francisco at the same time I was, but I only met her when I moved to Marin thirteen years ago. We met in a support group I used to go to for people with hepatitis C. She and Drew have hepatitis and AIDS. It’s shitty, but the drugs are a lot better now and the virus is weaker.