Veronica Page 3

  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.

  The new songs had no humility. They pushed past the veil and opened a window into the darkness and climbed through it with a knife in their teeth. The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad and fucking your mom, and then sailing off on a crystal ship to a thousand girls and thrills, or going for a moonlight drive. They were beautiful songs, full of places and textures—flesh, velvet, concrete, city towers, desert sand, snakes, violence, wet glands, childhood, the pure wings of night insects. Anything you could think of was there, and you could move through it as if it were an endless series of rooms and passages full of visions and adventures. And even if it was about killing and dying—that was just another place to go.

  When I still lived at home, I had to share a room with my sisters, Daphne and Sara. Two of us would share a huge bed with a

  giant headboard, and the third had one-half a bunk bed to herself on the other side of the room. We rotated to be fair. The good thing about the single bed was that it felt more mature, and that the wall above it had special cardboard cutouts our mom had made of huge-eyed dancing teens in short skirts and boots. Plus, you could masturbate privately, without having to carefully lift the blankets off your working arm and stiffen up to keep the mattress from shaking—and still wonder if your sister knew what you were doing. But if you shared the big bed, there was the fun of shutting out the third, giggling and whispering secrets under the blankets while the loner hissed, “Shut up!” Sometimes it felt better not to have to touch legs and butts together. Other times it was good to have your back right against your sister’s back, especially if she was asleep and you could feel her presence without her feeling yours.

  We also had to take turns sharing the record player. Daphne and Sara didn’t like the music I liked—they still liked I the old kind recorded on 45s. They’d pretend to be go-go dancers, dancing on the tiny green chairs we’d sat in as little kids to eat peanut butter from teacups. Sometimes when they danced, I’d roll my eyes and hunch up over a book or storm out. But sometimes I’d jump up on a green chair and yell, “I’m Roxanne!” after the most beautiful dancer on Hullabaho. Daphne would yell, “I’m Linda!” and Sara would yell, “I’m Sherry!” even though whenever Sherry came on the TV, my father said, “There’s that big fat girl again.” Then we’d go wild dancing for as long as the record lasted.

  My music was more private, and I didn’t play it loudly. I c
rouched down by it, sucking it into my ears, tunneling into it at the same time. Daphne sprawled on her bed, reading, and Sara maybe played one of her strange games with miniature animals, talking to herself sofdy in different animal voices. Downstairs, my father watched TV or listened to his music while my mother did housework or drew paper clothes for the cardboard paper dolls she still made for us, even though we no longer played with them. I loved them like you love your hand or your liver, without thinking about it or even being able to see it. But my music made that fleshly love feel dull and dumb, deep, slow, and heavy as stone. Come, said the music, to joy and speed and secret endlessness, where everything tumbles together and attachments are not made of sad flesh.

  I didn’t know it, but my father was doing the same thing, sitting in his padded rocking chair, listening to opera or to music from World War II. Except he did not want tumbling or endlessness. He wanted more of the attachment I despised—he just didn’t want it with us. My father had been too young to enlist when World War II started; his brother joined the army right away. When my dad was finally old enough to enlist in the navy, he sent his brother a picture of himself in his uniform with a Hawaiian girl on his lap; he wrote, “Interrogating the natives!” on the back. A week before the war ended, it was returned to my father with a letter saying his brother was dead. Thirty years later, he was a husband, father, and administrator in a national tax-office chain. But sometimes when I walked past him sitting in his chair, he would look at me as if I were the cat or a piece of furniture, while inside he searched for his brother. And through his brother, his mother and father. And through them, a world of people and feelings that had ended too abrupdy and that had nothing to do with where he was now. He wasn’t searching for memories; he already had them. He wanted the physical feel of sitting next to his brother or looking into his eyes, and he was searching for it in the voices of strangers that had sung to them both a long time ago. I was so attached to my father that I felt this. But I felt it without knowing what it was, and I didn’t care enough to think about it. Who wants to think about their liver or their hand? Who wants to know about a world of people who are dead? I was busy following the music, tumbling through my head and out the door.

  My parents were right: When summer ended, I did not go back home. At seventeen, I lived with twelve other kids (sometimes more slept on the floor) in a three-story purple house that listed to one side. I worked for a florist, selling flowers in the bars and outside go-go clubs in North Beach. The bars were little humpbacked caves with bright liquor botdes and sometimes a glowing red jukebox inside. I went in with my basket, and drunk people would dig around for money. Spirits swam in the cloudy mirror behind the bar, rising up and sinking away. The go-go clubs didn’t let me in, but I could hang out in front, talking with the bouncer and warming myself in the heat from the door. Men would say, “Here’s the Little Match Girl!” and drop bills in my basket without taking anything. There were huge neon signs above us, a big red one of an apple and a snake and a naked woman with big tits.

  When we were done, my friend Lilet and I would meet in a coffee shop to count our money and have pie or fries. Then we’d take a late bus to Golden Gate Park and get high. At night, the park was thick with the smell of flowers and pot, wrapped in darkness and smells, hidden, so you could find it only if you knew the right way in. People sat in clumps or flitted in and out of the trees with night joy in their faces, sporting hot-colored hair dye and wearing zebra prints and pointy-toed boots. Sometimes I’d meet a boy and we’d walk so far up in the hills, we could see the ocean. We’d look up and see the fog race across in the sky, then look down and see trees, houses, knots of electric lights. I’d feel like an animal on a pinnacle, ready to leap. We’d kiss and put our hands down each other’s pants.

  Or Lilet and I would join a group and go to a crash pad, usually a cheap apartment, but sometimes a house with a lot of people in it. Everybody would be high and there’d be music filling the rooms with heavy, rolling dreams. Some people found a private spot in a dream, curled into it, and slept on the floor. Some people made it a dream of kissing and touching; peering into a dark corner, you could see a white butt humping up and

  down between open knees. Guys would talk loudly to one another about whatever they were thinking about or things that they did. I remember a guy talking about a girl he’d gotten pregnant. He’d told her to get on the ground and eat dirt first, and she did. “And then I fertilized it!” he said. The guys laughed, and the girls watched with intent, quiet eyes. I went out on the fire escape with Lilet and we sat with our legs dangling down, somebody’s lilac bushes between our feet.

  I wanted something to happen, but I didn’t know what.

  I didn’t have the ambition to be an important person or a star. I My ambition was to live like music. I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s what I wanted; it seemed like that’s what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next—songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

  I saw Lilet surrounded by music. She was seventeen and, like me, she’d left her family. She was blond, with wide cheekbones and pink skin that shone with the radiant grease of hormonal abundance. She fed the engine inside her with zest, gobbling stuff—big sandwiches and ice cream in paper dishes and French fries and bags of hot cashews from vendors—with both hands while we stood on the corner chatting, our baskets on our hips. She wore tight clothes that showed her stomach sticking out under the cheap cloth. She wore thick high heels and she walked proudly, thrusting out not only her breasts, which most girls did, but her stomach and her jaw, too, like they were also good. She walked like a dog—aggressive, interested, and curious, strutting alongside people with her basket, saying, “Buy a flower for the lady?” We’d meet for breaks in front of | club called the Brown Derby, which had a big derby sign outlined in sputtering gold bulbs, and she’d eat with both hands and talk about men. She was always with older men, not rich guys, but truck drivers and bartenders, drifters. They were

  almost never handsome, but she seemed to think they were. She was always excited about stuff they gave her, or did with her sexually. I remember a guy who came by for her one night; he was walking a Doberman on a long leash. His face was heavy and caved in, like somebody’d crushed it, but his eyes were shiny and fierce as his dog’s. They stood together and laughed, Lilet petting the dog’s glossy black head and letting it lick her hand with its dripping pink tongue. When he left, she told me she’d let him butt-fuck her. “Did you get on your elbows and knees?” I asked. “No!” she said. “That’s not the only way to do it—you lie on your back and he pushes your legs up.” Right away, I pictured it—her head raised a little so she could watch him, and her stomach sticking up in a mound. In my picture, her stomach was radiant in the same way as her greasy pink skin, with gold rays coming off it. I understood pornography then, how men could look at actual pictures like this and feel things. Sexual, but also the way you feel when you hear songs on the radio—the joy in knowing everybody’s listening to them and understanding them.

  I saw music, too, in the people I got stoned with in the park or saw dancing at parties or bars. I remember this boy and girl I saw dancing at a crash pad once. They didn’t touch or act sexy, but they looked at each other the whole time, like they were connected through their eyes. They didn’t pay any attention to the rhythm of the music. They danced to its secret personality—clownish and gross, like something big and dumb stuck in a tar pit and trying to walk its way out with brute force. Like being stuck and gross was something great.

  In my mind, models and stars didn’t have any of this. Though I remember once seeing a picture of one who almost did. She was shot so close-up, you could barely see what she was wearing (crumpled lace); her lipstick was smeared and a boy mussed her hair as he pressed a joint to her ope
n dry lips. Her eyes rolled unevenly in her head, so that one stared blankly at the camera and the other shimmered near the top of her eyelid.

  I looked at her for a long moment; then I tore her picture out of the magazine and tacked it up on the wall of my room. I didn’t understand why I liked it. Even if the girl really was stoned, it was just a pose. Mosdy, these poses were like closed doors I couldn’t open, and this one was, too. Except that you could hear muffled sounds coming from behind it, voices, footsteps— music.

  You see a lot more pictures like this in magazines now. Fashion has linked itself to music and so it, too, seems to expand forever into room after room. Maybe it does. But it’s nothing compared to those people dancing, or even to Lilet wolfing her food on the street corner.

  Because we sold flowers outside bars and go-go clubs, prostitutes were some of our best customers; the nice ones bossed their johns into buying from us. Most of them weren’t beautiful girls, but they had a special luster, like something you could barely see shining at the bottom of a deep well. They treated us like little sisters, and we were tempted to join them when men came around looking for “models”—which everybody knew meant stripper or whore. Mostly, we would indig-nandy say no, but sometimes somebody would say yes. I said yes a couple of times. Why I picked those times to say yes, I don’t know. One was an old fat man with a spotted face and pale, aggrieved eyes. He ran some kind of business, maybe postcards or comic books. He leaned on a counter in the back room of his store and blinked his pale eyes while I took off my clothes. When I was naked, he looked awhile and then asked if he could look at me from behind. I said okay; he walked around me in a circle and then went back behind the counter again. “You have beautiful hips and legs,” he said. “Beautiful shoulders, too. But your breasts are small and they’re not that good.” He talked to me about the kind of work I might do while I put my clothes back on.