Free Veronica by Mary Gaitskill Page A

eyes, dark, violent bloom of a mouth. White pearls in her clean little ears. If they wanted to find something wrong, they’d have to look up her ass. They went up there to serve perfection, and she mocked perfection with the shit that came out.
    But—Watch out, monsieur. On the runway, she was a bolt of lightning in a white Chanel dress. She turned and gave a look. Thumping music took you into the lower body, where the valves and pistons were working. You caught a dark whiff of shit, the sweetness of cherries, and the laughter of girls. Like lightning, the contrast cut down the center of the earth: We all eat and shit, screw and die. But here is Beauty in a white dress. Here is the pumping music, grinding her into meat and dirt. Here are the other girls coming in waves to refill Beauty’s slot. And here is litde Alana, shrugging and turning away. Everyone applauded— and no wonder.
    I walk past old homeless people huddled together under the dripping awning of a record store—three of them, like bags of potatoes with potato faces looking out of the bag to see what’s going on. They look like they know me. Maybe they do. Alana disappeared almost as fast as I did. If I saw her sitting on the street like this, it wouldn’t surprise me.
    “You take the food out of my mouth and I’ll kill you!”
    Veronica had screamed that at a homeless guy once. We were walking down the street together and she was talking to me about how she had to hide her HIV from her coworkers. She was eating a bagel and this beggar made as if to grab it from her hand. The rage came up in her like fire; she turned with a scream and hit him in the face. He bolted and she whipped around to me. “They’re trying to take the food from my mouth. Just let them try. Anyway, hon—” Her eyes were still wild with screaming, but she didn’t miss a beat. For her, it was part of the same conversation.
    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