Veronica

2

I open my eyes.

I can’t sleep. When I try, I wake after two hours and then spend the rest of the night pulled around by feelings and thoughts. I usually sleep again at dawn, then wake at 7:30. When I wake, I’m mad at not sleeping, and that makes me mad at everything. My mind yells insults as my body walks itself around. Dream images rise up and crash down, huge, then gone, huge, gone. A little girl sinks down in the dark. Who is she? Gone.

I drink my coffee out of a heavy blue mug, watching the rain and listening to a fool on a radio show promote her book. I live right on the canal in San Rafael and I can look out on the water. There’re too many boats on it and it’s filthy with gas and garbage and maybe turds from the boats. Still, it’s water, and once I saw a sea lion swimming toward town.

Every day, my neighbor Freddie leaps off his deck and into the canal for a swim. This disgusts my neighbor Bianca. “I asked him, ‘Don’t you know what’s in there? Don’t you know it’s like swimming in a public toilet?’ ” Bianca is a sexy fifty-year-old, sexy even though she’s lost her looks, mainly because of her big fat lips. “He doesn’t care; he says he just takes a hot shower after.” Bianca draws on her cigarette with her big lips. “Probably get typhoid.” She blows out with a neat turn of her head; even her long ropy neck is sort of sexy. “I hate the sight of him flying through the air in that little Speedo, God!”

Sure enough, while I’m looking out the window, Freddie, all red and fleshy, with his stomach hanging down and his silver head tucked between his upstretched arms, vaults through the air and—wap! — hits the water like a bull roaring in the field. I can just see Bianca downstairs muttering “Shit!” and slamming the wall with her fist. He’s a big fifty-something, with a huge jaw and muscles like lumps of raw meat just going to fat. His round eyes show one big emotion at a time: Joy. Anger. Pain. Fear. But his body is full of all those things happening at once, and that’s what you see when he’s swimming. He attacks the water with big pawing strokes, burying his face in it like he’s trying to eat it out. Then he stops and treads water, his snorting head tossing and bobbing for a second before he turns and lies down in the water, like a kid, with total trust — ah! — face to the sky, regardless of the rain or turds.

Even though he’s big, Freddie’s got the face of somebody who’s been beat too many times, like his face is just out there to be beat. He’s also got the face of somebody who, after the beating is done, gets up, says “Okay,” and keeps trying to find something good to eat or drink or roll in. He likes to end stories by saying, “But they’d probably just tell you I’m an a-s-s-h-o-l-e,” like, Oh well, what’s on TV? That’s the thing Bianca hates most, that beat-up but still leaping out into the turds for a swim quality. Especially the leaping: It’s like a personal affront to her. But I like it. It reminds me of the sea lion, swimming into town with its perfect round head sticking up — even though the lion is gliding and Freddie is rough. It’s like something similar put in different containers. Sometimes I want to say this to Bianca, to defend Freddie. But she won’t listen. Besides, I understand why he disgusts her. She’s a refined person, and I like refinement, too. I understand it as a point of view.

The writer on the radio is talking about her characters like they’re real people: “When you look at it from her point of view, his behavior really is strange, because to her, they’re just playing a sexy game, whereas for him it’s—” She blooms out of the radio like a balloon with a face on it, smiling, wanting you to like her, vibrating with things to say. Turn on the radio, there’s always somebody like her on somewhere. People rushing through their lives turn the dial looking for comfort, and the excited smiling words spill over them. I drink my coffee. The novelist’s characters dance and preen. I drink my coffee. People from last night’s dream stumble in dark rooms, screaming at one another, trying hard to do something I can’t see. I finish my coffee. Water is seeping in and soaking the edge of the carpet. I don’t know how this happens, I’m on the second floor.

It’s time for me to go clean John’s office. John is an old friend, and as a favor, he pays me to clean his office every week. Into my patchwork bag I pack the necessaries — aspirin, codeine, bottle of water — then I look for my umbrella. When I find it, I realize it’s broken, and I curse before I remember the other one, the red one from New York that I never use. I got it at the Museum of Modern Art gift shop when I lived in Manhattan. It has four white cartoon sheep, plus one black one, printed on its edge, along with the name of the museum. The decoration is precious and proper, and it reminds me of Veronica Ross. She is someone from my old life. She loved anything precious and proper: small intricate toys, photographs in tiny decorated frames, quotes from Oscar Wilde. She loved MoMA and she loved New York. She wore shoulder pads, prissy loafers, and thin socks. She rolled her trouser cuffs in this crisp way. On her glass-topped coffee table, she had miniature ashtrays, gilt matchboxes, and expensive coasters decorated with smiling cats.

When I go out into the hallway, Rita is there in her housecoat and slippers, holding a little plate of fried chicken livers. She offers me some, says she made too many last night. They smell good, so I take one and eat it while I talk to Rita. She says that last week “that son of a bitch Robert” fired up the barbecue again, on the puny deck right under hers, sending up poisonous charcoal fumes, which, she has explained time and again, are terrible for her hepatitis.

“I knew he still had that grill out there, and sure enough, the sun came out and I heard him mobilize it. I heard the charcoal in the bag. I heard him slide the lid off. I sat down and I meditated. I asked for help. I asked, What is the most powerful force in the world? And the answer came to me: Water.”

Rita has hepatitis C; so do I. We don’t discuss it much; she doesn’t remind me that codeine by the fistful is like dropping a bomb on my liver. I don’t remind her that while charcoal smoke is not a problem, her fried-food diet is.

“I filled every pot, every pan, every jar, glass, and vase, and I set them all out on the edge of the deck. And as soon as he fired it up—”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. I doused the grill, and when he cursed me out, I doused him. He just stood there a second, and then you know what? He laughed! He said, ‘Rita, you are a pisser.’ He liked it!”

We talk a minute more; I laugh and say good-bye, step outside onto the wooden stairs. I snap open the umbrella and remember the last time I visited Veronica. She served me brownies in pink wrapping paper, fancy cheese, and sliced fruit she was too sick to eat. I remember the time I said, “I don’t think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.”

Veronica was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “I think love is overrated. My parents loved me. And it didn’t do any good.”

My street is all functional apartment buildings set back from the sidewalk. White plus a few black people live here. Two blocks down, it’s semifunctional buildings and Mexicans. Turn the corner and it’s warehouses, auto-body repair shops, and a bar with music coming out of it at 8:00 in the morning. Blunt, faceless buildings that are too much trouble to tear down. Grass and weeds and little bushes silently press up between the buildings and through every crack in the concrete. At the end of the street is a four-lane highway that you can walk along. Big businesses live here — car dealerships, computer stores, office retail — and things I can’t identify, even though I walk by them almost every day, because the bigness makes me feel mute. The mute feeling isn’t bad. It’s like being a grain of dirt in the ground, with growth and death all around. A grain or a grass or a stone, a tiny thing that knows everything but can’t say anything. It isn’t just the bigness of the businesses. It’s the highway, too, all the hundreds of cars roaring in the opposite direction I’m walking, the hundreds of heads blurrily showing through hundreds of windshields.

This happens sometimes when I walk along here; my focus slips and goes funny. I think it’s something to do with walking at a slow pace against the speeding traffic, and today the rain blurs everything even more. It’s like I get sucked out of normal life into a place where the order of things is changed; it’s still my life and I recognize it, but the people and places in it are sliding around indiscriminately.

A fat white man pedals gravely past on a green bicycle, one hand guiding the bike, the other holding a small half-broken umbrella over his head. He examines me; there’s a bolt of life from his hazel eyes and then he’s gone.

A dream from last night: Someone is chasing me, and in order to reach safety, I have to run through my past and all the people in it. But the past is jumbled, not sequential, and all the people are mixed up. A nameless old woman who used to live next door is reaching out to me, her large brown eyes brimming with tenderness and tears — but my mother is lost in a crowd scene. My father is barely visible — I see him by himself in the shadows of the living room, dreamily eating a salted nut — while a loud demented stranger pops right up in my face, yelling about what I must do to save myself now.

Meanwhile, a middle-aged Mexican woman is kneeling on the sidewalk, patiently replacing the clothes that apparently spilled out when her big red suitcase broke open. She has no umbrella and her hair and clothes are plastered to her body. I stop and crouch, trying to help her. With an impersonal half glance, she shakes her head no. I straighten and pause and then stand there, holding my umbrella over both of us. She looks up, smiling; I’m invoking civility on this concrete strip between roaring and hugeness, and she appreciates it. Her smile is like an open door, and I enter for a second. She goes back to her nimble packing. She picks freshly wet little blouses, underwear, baby clothes, and socks up off the sidewalk. She retrieves a clear plastic bag of half-burned candles and a T-shirt that says 16 MAGAZINE! on it. She shakes out each thing and refolds it.

Toward the end, Veronica’s shoulder pads used to get loose sometimes and wander down her arm or her back without her knowing it. Once I was sitting with her in a good restaurant when a man next to us said, “Excuse me, there’s something moving on your back.” His tone was light and aggressive, like it was him versus the fashionable nitwits. “Oh,” said Veronica, also light. “Excuse me. It’s just my prosthesis.”

Sometimes I loved how she would make cracks like that. Other times it was just embarrassing. Once we were leaving a movie theater after seeing a pretentious movie. As we walked past a line of people waiting to see the other movie, Veronica said loudly, “They don’t want to see anything challenging. They’d rather see Flashdance. Now me, if it’s bizarre, I’m interested.” There was a little strut to her walk and her voice was like a huge feather in a hat. She’s not like that, I’d wanted to say to the ticket holders. If you knew her, you’d see.

But she was like that. She could be unbelievably obnoxious. In the locker room of the gym we both went to, she was always snapping at somebody for getting too close to her or brushing against her. “If you want me to move, just tell me, but please stop poking me in the bottom,” she’d say to some openmouthed Suzy in a leotard. “Fist fucking went out years ago. Didn’t you know that?”

The Mexican woman clicks her suitcase shut and stands with a little smile. My focus snaps back to normal, and the woman slips back into the raining hugeness. She smiles at me again as she turns to go, returning my civility with rain running down her face.

In the dream, it’s like the strangers are delivering messages for more important people, who for some reason can’t talk to me. Or that the people who are important by the normal rules — family, close friends — are accidental attachments, and that the apparent strangers are the true loved ones, hidden by the grotesque disguises of human life.

Of course, Veronica had a lot of smart cracks stored up. She needed them. When she didn’t have them, she was naked and everybody saw. Once when we were in a coffee shop, she tried to speak seriously to me. Her skin was gray with seriousness. Her whole eyeball looked stretched and tight; the white underpart was actually showing. She said, “I’ve just got to get off my fat ass and stop feeling sorry for myself.” Her tough words didn’t go with the look on her face. The waitress, a middle-aged black lady, gave her a sharp, quick glance that softened as she turned away. She could tell something by looking at Veronica, and I wondered what it was.

Veronica died of AIDS. She spent her last days alone. I wasn’t with her. When she died, nobody was with her.

I’m feeling a little feverish already, but I don’t want to take the aspirin on an empty stomach. I also don’t want to deal with holding the umbrella while I get the aspirin out, put it back, get the water, unscrew it, squeeze the umbrella with one arm, the one that’s killing me.…

I met Veronica twenty-five years ago, when I was a temporary employee doing word processing for an ad agency in Manhattan. I was twenty-one. She was a plump thirty-seven-year-old with bleached-blond hair. She wore tailored suits in mannish plaids with matching bow ties, bright red lipstick, false red fingernails, and mascara that gathered in intense beads on the ends of her eyelashes. Her loud voice was sensual and rigid at once, like plastic baubles put together in rococo shapes. It was deep but could quickly become shrill. You could hear her from across the room, calling everyone, even people she hated, “hon”: “Excuse me, hon, but I’m very well acquainted with Jimmy Joyce and the use of the semicolon.” She proofread like a cop with a nightstick. She carried an “office kit,” which contained a red plastic ruler, assorted colored pencils, Liquid Paper, Post-its, and a framed sign embroidered with the words STILL ANAL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. She was, too. When I told her I had a weird tension that made my forehead feel like it was tightening and letting go over and over again, she said, “No, hon, that’s your sphincter.”

“The supervisor loves her because she’s a total fucking fag hag,” complained another proofreader. “That’s why she’s here all the time.”

“I get a kick out of her myself,” said a temping actress. “She’s like Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings combined.”

“My God, you’re right,” I said, so loudly and suddenly that the others stared. “That’s exactly what she’s like.”

I cross a little footbridge spanning the canal and pass a giant drugstore that takes up the whole block. There’s an employee standing outside, yelling at someone. “Hey you!” he yells. “I saw that! Come back here!” Then more uncertainly: “Hey! I said come back here!”

Hey you. Veronica sat in a doctor’s office, singing, “We’ve got the horse right here; his name’s Retrovir” to the tune of a big Guys and Dolls number. The receptionist smiled. I didn’t.

Come back here. Veronica burst into laughter. “You’re like a Persian cat, hon.” She made primly crossed paws of her hands and ecstatic blanks of her eyes; she let her tongue peep from her mouth. She laughed again.

More employees come out of the store and watch the guy; he just keeps walking. It’s obvious why. The police can’t get there fast enough and these employees are not going to fight him, because he’d win. This animal reality is just dawning on the employees. It makes them laugh, like an animal shaking its head and trotting away, glad to be alive.

I pass the bus depot, where people are hanging out, even in the rain. I pass closed restaurants, Mexican and French. The knot of traffic at this intersection always seems a little festive, although I don’t know why. The bus depot changes: Sometimes it’s sad, sometimes just businesslike, sometimes seems like it’s about to explode. John’s office is in the next block. He shares it with another photographer, who mostly shoots pets. He seems to be better off than John, who sticks to people.

I let myself in and sit down behind John’s desk for a cigarette. I know I should be grateful to John for letting me clean his office, but I’m not. I hate doing it. It depresses me and it tears up my arm, which was injured in a car accident and then ruined by a doctor. John shares a bathroom with the pet photographer, who has filthy habits, and I have to clean up for both of them. I used to know John; we used to be friends. Even now, he sometimes talks to me about his insecurities, or advises me on my problems — smoking, for example, and how terrible it is.

I have some codeine to prep the arm, then walk around the office smoking. I look at the photographs on the walls; John’s got pictures from three decades. The ones from the seventies are the best. The models aren’t professionals; they are just people John knew. They are male and female and they are all naked except for boots or a hat or underpants, something to give them style. Most of them don’t have good bodies, but they are looking at the camera like they are happy to be naked, either just standing there or posing in the combination of relaxation and sexual nastiness that people had then. They all look like people whose time had given them a perfect style suit to wear, a set of postures and expressions that gave the right shape to what they had inside them, so that even naked, they felt clothed.

I drop ash into the potted plant by the desk and rub it into the dirt with my finger. I get up and go into the bathroom for the cleaning supplies, a yellow bucket full of rags and spray bottles of cleaner so potent, I once killed a giant spider with it. I put the bucket in the sink and run water into it. I spray the mirror with cleaner and fine blue poison twinkles into the filling bucket, bright ammonia and dull smell memories of cafeteria food and public piss, my mother kneeling and cleaning. I wipe the mirror with a store-bought rag and drop it in the bucket.

There is always a style suit, or suits. When I was young, I used to think these suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically — people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras — I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different. It’s understandable that I thought that; TV and newsmagazines acted like the world had changed, too. I was happy with it, but then five years later it changed again. Again, the TV announced, “Now we’re this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!” Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trait at a time; you had to grab on to one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, “we” were loving; then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed. Although we are at war with terror, fashion magazines say we are sunny now. We wear bright colors and choose moral clarity. While I was waiting to get a blood test last week, I read in a newsmagazine that terror must not change our sunny dispositions.

Of course, there is a lot of subtlety in all this, and complexity, too. When John took those naked pictures, the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.

I drop the rag in the bucket and smoke some more, ashing into the sink. A tiny piece of movie from the naked time plays on my eyeball: A psychotic killer is blowing up amusement parks. At the head of the crowd clamoring to ride the roller coaster is a slim, lovely man with long blond hair and floppy clothes and big, beautiful eyes fixed on a tiny strip of light that only he can see.

Lift up the toilet lid — filthy again — and drop the cigarette in. Turn off the water and lift the bucket down. I set my teeth as pain tears a hole in my shoulder and I get sucked inside it. The roller coaster roars and everybody screams with joy; the blond man screams in terror as his car flies off into the sky and smashes on the ground. White froth gently disperses on the stirring bucket water as I set it down.

It’s not an easy thing. If you can’t find the right shape, it’s hard for people to identify you. On the other hand, you need to be able to change shape fast; otherwise, you get stuck in one that used to make sense but that people can’t understand anymore. This has been going on for a long time. My father used to make lists of his favorite popular songs, ranked in order of preference. These lists were very nuanced, and they changed every few years. He’d walk around with the list in his hand, explaining why Jo “G.I. Jo” Stafford was ranked just above Doris Day, why Charles Trenet topped Nat King Cole — but by a hair only. It was his way of showing people things about him that were too private to say directly. For a while, everybody had some idea what Doris Day versus Jo Stafford meant; to give a preference for one over the other signaled a mix of feelings that were secret and tender, and people could sense these feelings when they imagined the songs side by side.

“Stafford’s voice is darker and sadder,” he said. “But it’s warmer, too. She holds the song in her voice. Day’s voice is sweet, but it’s heartless — she doesn’t hold it; she touches it and lets go — she doesn’t mean it! Stafford is a lover; Day is a flirt — but what a cute flirt!”

“Um-hm,” said my mother, and she gritted her teeth on her way out of the room.

But my father didn’t see my mother’s teeth. He was too charmed by Day singing “Bewitched.” He can laugh, but I love it. Although the laugh’s on me …

My father was right. If Jo Stafford sang that song, you would feel the pain of being laughed at by the one you love, and still you would love. When Doris Day sang it, the pain was as bright and sweet and harmless as her smiling voice. I’ll sing to him, each spring to him. And long for the day when I cling to him.… My father smiled and imagined being the one she painlessly longed to cling to; then he went home — to Jo. She sang, “But I miss you most of all, my darling,” and hurt was evoked and tenderly held and healed, again and again, in waves.

But eventually those feelings got attached to other songs, and those singers didn’t work as signals anymore. I remember being there once when he was playing the songs for some men he worked with, talking excitedly about the music. He didn’t realize his signals could not be heard, that the men were looking at him strangely. Or maybe he did realize but didn’t know what else to do but keep signaling. Eventually, he gave up, and there were few visitors. He was just by himself, trying to keep his secret and tender feelings alive through these same old songs.

I thought he was ridiculous. But I was only a kid. I didn’t see that I was making the same mistake. He thought the songs were who he really was, and I thought the new style suit was who I really was. Because I was younger, I was even more naive: I thought everything had changed forever, that because people wore jeans and sandals everywhere and women went without bras, fashion didn’t matter anymore, that now people could just be who they really were inside. Because I believed this, I was oblivious to fashion. I actually couldn’t see it.

I remember the first time I was made to see it. It was the first time I met a fashion model. Strangely, it was also one of the first times I saw someone for who she really was inside.

I was sixteen when this happened. I had run away from home, partly because I was unhappy there and partly because running away was what a lot of people did then — it was part of the new style. This style was expressed in articles and books and TV shows about beautiful teenagers who ran away even when their parents were nice; the parents just had to cry and struggle to understand. The first time I left, I was fifteen. My parents had fought and refused to speak to each other for three days; I slipped out through the silence and hitchhiked to a concert in upstate New York. United by my disappearance, my parents called the police, who picked me up in a shopping mall a week after I’d returned of my own accord. Daphne said that while I was gone, our mother acted like somebody on one of the TV specials about runaways — always on the phone talking to her friends about it. “I think she enjoyed it,” said Daphne.

But our mother said she did not enjoy it. “We won’t let you put us through that again,” she said. “If you leave now, you’re on your own. We won’t be calling the police.”

So a year later, I left again. I packed right in front of them. I said I would just be gone for the summer, but they assumed I was lying. “Don’t call here asking for money!” shouted my father. “If you walk out that door, you are cut off!”

“I would never ask you for money!” I shouted back.

“She thinks she won’t need it,” said my mother from the couch. “She thinks being pretty will make her way.” Her voice was angry and jealous, which made me think that leaving must be something great.

“She thinks she’s going to make her way in the world,” she said. But this time her jealousy was touched with wistfulness. She could’ve been talking about a girl in a fairy tale, walking down a path with her bundle on a stick.

I lived from apartment to apartment, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers. I got a ride to San Francisco and stayed in a European-style hostel, where you could stay a limited number of nights for a fixed fee. It was a large dilapidated building with high ceilings and sweet, moldy drains. The kitchen cabinets were full of stale cereal, the kind with frosting or colored sweet bits made to look like animals or stars. You had to chip in for food staples. You weren’t supposed to bring in drugs; people did, but they were moderate and they shared. The man who ran it, a college student with a soft stomach and a big ball of hair on his head, even kept a record player in one of the common rooms, and we gathered there at night to share pot and listen to playful elfin songs about freedom and love. These songs had the light beauty of a summer night full of wonderful smells and fireflies. They also had a feeling of sickness hidden in them, but we didn’t hear that then.

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 secretly 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 exactly 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 exactly what beauty is. It is hard to imagine that a young girl would fail to recognize a former model with full, perfectly 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 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 slightly, 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 slightly 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,” I replied. “It would be mean not to.” But I sat there in the kitchen with my boyfriend, eating cheesecake from a tin and watching his huge black-and-white TV until I sank into a torpor. From there, the German woman’s loud drum was hard to hear. I pictured sitting with her on a nice pillow in front of her stereo. Lots of records would be scattered about — she would have a huge selection. She would go through them with her long manicured hands and then put one on and listen to it dully, like she couldn’t hear. Just picturing it made me feel heavy and tired. The gray figures running around on the TV screen made me feel heavy and tired, too, but in a comforting way. Eight o’clock came and I thought I’d sit in my heavy comfort just ten minutes more and then go. At 8:30, I pictured her sitting alone, going through her records, need and hate surging under her stiff face. She would 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 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.

I 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 exactly 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 little table under the striped awning of an outdoor café, 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.