Veronica

4

It has stopped raining. My sneakers are soaked, so I go ahead and walk through the puddles. Silver and black, full of sky and the solemn upside-down world. The bus shelter glides under my feet like a huge transparent fish. On the side of it is a model in a black sleeveless dress. An ad for perfume: WATCH OUT, MONSIEUR. She has a neat, exquisite face, deep, dim eyes, and a sensitive, swollen mouth. Her slight body is potent and live, like an eel. I like her. I am on her side to destroy monsieur. She makes me remember Alana, another small eel girl.

I walk through black shadows, across the inverted sky. I met Alana at a benefit show put on to support and celebrate the renovation of an ancient Parisian department store, the first of its kind in that country. I walked into the tiny dressing room and saw her standing naked in heels, picking through gorgeous gowns and yelling how her agent had made her get an enema that afternoon so she wouldn’t look bloated. “Now Matmoiselle, ve vill unlock ze bowel!” She was cracking everybody up, talking about the crazy German who’d hosed her out. “Everybody” consisted of the seven models, four makeup artists, and fifteen hairdressers packed into a hot, narrow room that was all mirrors and countertop. Getting their faces made up, talking about enemas and shit: passing out in a nightclub and waking up in ruined panties; diarrhea attack during shoot; farting in boyfriend’s face. The girls giggled hysterically; the hairdressers were getting in on it. They’d probably been up all night and didn’t feel like doing this obscure show. I hesitated at the door; Alana saw me and pounced. “You look like you need an enema,” she snapped. I blushed. The other girls tittered and quieted. Alana flounced into her chair and grabbed a handful of dark red cherries from a plastic bowl next to a mountain of hot hairpieces. Slouching and chewing, she looked absently at her reflection: precise round forehead, nose, and chin. Hot 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 little 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, properly 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 gentleman. “I am René,” he said. “You are for Céleste 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 gentleman 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 René 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. René 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.

René 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 René, outside,” I replied. “René?” 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 René that Madame Sokolov says he must take you straight to rue de l’Estrapade.”

“Ah,” said René. “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 René 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 René’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 bowl of potato chips on the side table. Out a window, enamel rooftops 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 family.

When René 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 too 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 it with a silver lighter. And because René 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 feelings, eating sugar with both hands. The silky sheets were scattered with white powder, mixed with granules and little 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. René held me in his hairy arms and sang the pee-pee song. He said, “You fuck humpty-hump, like a little witch riding her broom!” I smiled and he stroked my hair. “That’s right, is good. I love my little 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 René was right: It didn’t show on my face. I got a job for an Italian magazine and left for Rome the day after. Little 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 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 René’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 miniskirts, and they laughed at how stupid she would look dressed like that. We couldn’t explain what we meant. Everybody knew you were supposed to say “Mom,” and that was it. 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. Well-tended houses sit in neat yards with trees. Yellow-and-white recycling buckets stand brightly curbside. Juice and jam jars for the kids, wine and fancy water bottles for the adults. My friend Joanne 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.

In Paris, things happened fast. Two weeks after my first job, I met the head of Céleste. His name was Alain Black; he was a South African with a French mother. He was the man I had glimpsed on my first day there. He was lean and pale, nearly hairless. His eyes had thick, heavy lids. They were green, gold, and hazel, so mixed that they gave an impression of something bright swarming through his irises. Mostly, the swarming was just emotions and thoughts happening quickly. But there was also something else, moving too fast for you to see what it was. He asked if I had a boyfriend yet. When I said, “René,” he laughed and said, “Oh, René!” Then he said I needed a haircut. Called a hairdresser, told him what to do, and sent me to the salon in a taxi. The salon was full of wrinkled women staring fixedly at models in magazines. When I walked in, they frowned and glared. But the girl at the desk smiled and led me through rows of gleaming dryers, each with a woman under it, dreaming angrily in the heat. The hairdresser didn’t even need to talk to me. He talked to someone else while I stared at myself in the mirror. When it was done, I made the taxi take me back to the agency. It was closed, but the doorman with mad eyes knew to let me in. He knew where I was going and he knew who else would be there. Alain looked up and smiled. “Do you like it?” I asked. He stood and said of course he liked it, it had been his idea. Then he jumped on me.

I say “jumped” because he was quick, but he wasn’t rough. He was strong and excessive, like certain sweet tastes — like grocery pie. But he was also precise. It was so good that when it was over, I felt torn open. Being torn open felt like love to me; I thought it must have felt the same to him. I knew he had a girlfriend and that he lived with her. But I was still shocked when he kissed me and sent me home. At “home,” I wrapped myself in a blanket and looked out the window at the darkening mass of slanted roofs. René came by. I wouldn’t see him. Darkness gradually filled the room. The phone rang; it was my mother — her tiny voice curled up in a tiny wire surrounded by darkness. I talked to her through clenched teeth. I told her she was a housewife who didn’t understand anything about the real world. She told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I could hear she was hurt. After I hung up, I could feel it, too. Her hurt was soft and dark and it had arms to hold me as if I were an infant. I sank into her soft dark arms, into a story of a wicked little girl who stepped on a loaf and fell into a world of demons and deformed creatures. She is covered with snakes and slime and surrounded by the hate of every creature trapped with her. She is starving, but she can’t eat the bread still stuck to her feet. She is so hungry, she feels hollow, like she’s been feeding on herself. In the world above, her mother cries for her. Her tears splash scalding hot on her daughter’s face. Even though they are tears cried for love, they do not bring healing; they burn and make the pain worse. My mother’s tears scalded me and I hated her for it.

My roommate came home and turned on the light, and — bang! — there was no mother and no demons. She clacked across the floor in her high heels, chatting and wiping her lipstick off. It was 4:00 in the morning, but when she saw how unhappy I was, she took out her tarot cards and told my fortune until it came out the way I wanted it. (Luxury. A feast. A kind, loyal woman. Transformation. Home of the true heart.) The sun rose; the enamel rooftops turned hot violet. I had just lain down on the couch to sleep when Alain called and told me I was going to be moving into an apartment on rue du Temple. The rent would be taken care of. Everything would be taken care of.

We met for champagne and omelettes in a sunny bistro with bright-colored cars honking outside. He talked about the Rolling Stones and his six-year-old daughter, after whom he had named the agency Céleste. He asked if I wanted children. I said, “No.” He grabbed my nose between two knuckles and squeezed it. The omelettes came heaped on white plates with blanched asparagus. He hadn’t kissed me yet. He spread his slim legs and tucked a cloth napkin into his shirt with an air of appetite. I wanted badly to touch him. Inside its daintiness, the asparagus was acrid and deep. He said, “The first thing we need to do is get you a Swiss bank account. All the smart girls have one. First, you don’t have to pay taxes that way. Then they invest it for you. Your money will double, triple. You should see!” I loved him and he obviously loved me. Love like in the James Bond movies, where the beautiful sexy girl loves James but tries to kill him anyway. We would love each other for a while and then part. Years later, I would ride down the street in a fancy car. I’d see Alain and he’d see me. I’d smile on my way past. Sexy spy music rubbed my ear like a tongue; it rubbed my crotch, too. We finished quickly and went to my new apartment.

My new apartment had high ceilings and polished wooden floors. I entered it like Freddie leaping naked into turds. There was a sunken marble tub and a chandelier and a glass case of obscene figurines. There was a black velvet couch with a carved ivory back. I sat on it, smiling and trembling. Spy music blared. He knelt and took my hips in both hands. Brightness poured through his eyes in hot little pieces. I followed with my own eyes, thinking if I could stop one little piece and see what it was, I would find a whole world. But he never let one stop. He just showed glimpses. He knew that I saw this — not with my mind, but with my senses. I couldn’t answer him because I was not his equal. But I could see it and he appreciated that. For just a moment, I saw something in his eye stop. It was like a window opening into space. It was dark and cold. Burning meteors fell in a bright, endless shower. He said, “Are you big shit? Or just cute little shit?” His voice was wondering and tender. The window closed. “Big or little?”

When we got to know each other better, we played like dogs, rolling and growling, pretending to bite. We’d make faces and chase each other around naked. If somebody knocked over a lamp or a pricey vase, it was okay. He’d caper and sing dirty French songs. I taught him “The worms go in, the worms go out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.” He liked that a lot. He sang it, panted it while we were doing the “elephant fuck”—him holding my legs up from behind and me walking on my hands.

But when that was over, he’d be on the phone, pacing around naked, talking business and licking coke off his fingers. Someone would call and offer me a job and Alain would say, “No, not available.” I would say, “I am too available!” He would say, “Shut up and wait!” They’d call back and offer twice as much money. He’d be happy and then he’d start calling around to check and see what people were saying about him. If anyone had said anything bad, he’d call around again and start plotting to get them back. “Blood will pour from his anus!” he’d say. I’d sit curled up in my white silk robe with the black dragons on it, smoking.

In the office, we had to pretend we weren’t lovers. That was okay. I was a secret agent. I was an a-s-s-h-o-l-e. I saw his girlfriend with him at nightclubs, because we all went out together — I sat at their table with many other girls. She was stunning in magazines, but in person I thought she looked old. She had a long nose and a long tooth, and when she crossed her legs, her foot stuck out at a funny angle. But she was clever, I could see. She might have known about me. She’d run her eye over the table of girls and sometimes it would linger on me. She’d lean into him, sardonic and whispering. He’d laugh and look away, his eyes always moving and glittering.

I’d see René, too. He was always with another girl. Sometimes he’d come by the table to talk to Alain. He’d look at me and nod, a little bit of feeling for me still. His girl would blink and look around, scratch her arm. Papillon, pee, pee, pee. It was sad, but I was driving past.

Once, I asked René why he’d picked me up at the airport when he didn’t know who I was. He said, “I knew who you were.” And he had. He knew I would get into his car, and he knew I would go home with him. He knew I had a spider mouth, too. He knew that before I did. I couldn’t see it because I was young and my lips were full and beautiful. But it was there.

The sidewalk climbs a hill. At the top, I see more hills, sky and trees. There is wind and the trees move with it, like it and they are part of the same body, breathing in and out; the wind sending, they receiving, passing it down into the ground. Joanne’s house is at the bottom of the hill, a shambling one-story with a walkway lined with rocks painted by children. The garage is open, with work things and radio music pouring out. Joanne’s husband, Drew, builds furniture and does odd repairs. He sometimes hires street people to help him. They are guys he’s met at the men’s shelter next to the church where the support group meets. He meets them standing outside for smokes. They come up to him for cigarettes, but they stand talking because Drew is like a warm stove of manness. He’s huge, with a chest and back like an old brick wall on legs, a grumbling furnace stomach, and small thoughtful eyes in a fleshy red face. The intelligence in his eyes is warm, but it’s not the love warmth of the heart. It’s from the liver and stomach and glands, the busy warmth of function. He’s slow to talk and he says “uhhhh” a lot. It doesn’t make him sound stupid. It makes it seem like his thoughts are physical truths that have to come in noise form before he can get them into words.

Most of the guys he asks to work for him are okay. They’re ex-junkies and fuckups, but they want to do better. Even so, their presence sometimes pisses the neighbors off. They come over to complain, and there’s Drew: a wall with a furnace stomach and benevolent eyes looking out of a fleshy face. They’ll talk to him about these unsafe people, these sad, ragged people appearing to bang around with hammers and wander the sidewalks. Drew will look into space and go, “Uhhh.” There’ll be a silence. Then Drew will explain why these men are okay. He’ll point to a piece of work and say, “This man did that; that man did this. I need help; they can help.” He’ll make more “uhhh” noises. I believe it’s the noises that get people. Takes them out of the world of words into practical thoughts: Things need to get built. Men need to earn. Neighbors have to be decent. The neighbors walk away confused, like they don’t know what has happened.

A guy named Jerry is in the garage now, working. He looks high. He looks beat-up, worse than Freddie, beat-up inside and out. He looks like he still has goodness but that it doesn’t help much. He looks like somebody wandering in a dark maze, clutching his little bit of goodness, knowing it’s all he’s got but not remembering what it is or how to use it. His body is empty, his face dull and numb. His forehead is a big soft knot of puzzlement. His puzzlement gives him just enough to keep him going; his puzzlement is where he’s still alive. He’s refinishing a chest of drawers. It looks like he’s doing a pretty good job. I greet him. “Hey, Alison,” he says. “Drew ain’t home. Joanne is, though.”

He doesn’t look at me when he talks, but he sees me. It’s like he’s got an extrasensory system built into the side of his body. A lot of street people have this. So do a lot of fashion people. I stand there a minute, listening to the rap song coming out of the radio. A soprano voice peels out of the song, a flying red sound that ripples through the beat, then disappears under it. Somebody sampled the “Habanera” from Carmen.

I think of my first job in Rome. Huge open windows looked out onto the city. Long white curtains stirred in the wind. Carmen was playing on an old record player. We drank wine and flipped through an Italian comic book about a demon that lived in a pretty girl’s cunt. He whispered to her clit as if it were an ear and said, “Do it with this one!” or “No, don’t do it with that one!” When she did it with someone, the demon hid in her asshole and said, “Phew, it stinks in here!” I giggled, the photographer smiled, and the other model looked bored. The curtains streamed out the windows and Carmen sang of love.

I wonder if Jerry can see any echo of that moment when he scans me. If he does, he probably understands it better than most. The more withered the reality, the more gigantic and tyrannical the dream. From the dark hole of a bar on a street of sickness and whores comes a teeming cloud of music sparkling with warmth and glamour: Sweet dreams of rhythm and magic—Look in and see dark dead blurs slumped on stools.

“Joanne’s in the kitchen,” says Jerry pointedly. Still not looking at me, he puts down a can of varnish and studies the finish on the chest. “She with Jason’s kids.” He picks up the can again. He wants me to go away.

I say good-bye and cross the wet lawn. I open the door; a little girl stops running in the hall to look at me. Messy hair, small open mouth, aura of shy, senseless joy. “Joanne!” The girl runs again and disappears, waving the ribbon of her voice. “It’s Alison!”

Jason is one of Joanne’s roommates. In the blur of youth, he was married long enough to have five-year-old twin girls, who come to stay with him for a week here and there. Drew and Joanne take care of them while he’s at work; mostly, that means Joanne. I come into the living room fast enough to see the kid dart around the corner into the kitchen. The living room is a bunch of slumping furniture, plants growing up to the ceiling, an electric guitar on the floor, cat dishes, the TV flashing cartoon pictures, and a huge fish tank bubbling against one wall. In the center of the floor is a chair, its orange seat back carved in the shape of flames — Drew’s work. Also Drew’s work is a bench on bird-foot legs, painted with peacock feathers. Beyond the living room, I glimpse the den, which is packed with Drew’s work: a painted forest of legs and backs, the limbs of imaginary animals. Jason’s little girls put their heads around the corner and giggle, then pop back into the kitchen.

“I’m in here, Allie,” says Joanne from the kitchen.

“So he expects me — me with the bad back! — to carry two bags of clubs for this asshole,” says another voice.

“Watch your mouth, Karl,” says Joanne mildly. “Hi, Allie.” She puts her cigarette out on a little plate and smiles. The girls smile, too — not only Jason’s Heather and Joelle but also seven-year-old Trisha from down the block. They’re at the table, drawing pictures. Another roommate, scrawny, pissed-off Karl, stands there bare-chested, raging about his golf course job. He’s hunched over Joanne, sending small, concentrated rage at her, like she’s standing there with a big bag to catch it. He looks at me, his raging head pulled into such a point, it’s like his eyes are on the end of his nose. He says, “Hi,” then continues his rant.

“I’m gonna tell that … that … pig, that fat pig—”

“Look,” says Heather. “Look at my castle and my glass mountain!”

“I’m not gonna tell him anything! I’m gonna go to Loomis and tell him what’s been going on in accounting! And then I’m gonna get Harris and get him together with—”

“Want some tea, Allie?” Joanne is sandy-colored, her skin and her hair. Her eyes are light brown, and they remind me of Alain’s because they are sometimes filled with pouring movement. Except her movement isn’t in pieces. It’s continuous, like the movement of a plant or human cell fluxing with light or water or blood. Joanne is drinking from the world through her eyes, maybe even from beyond it.

“Look at my beach birds!” cries Joelle. “Look at my bird balls!” The children crowd around Joanne as she’s trying to get up, loving what is in her eyes.

“I’ll get the tea,” I say, then realize I forgot to take off my wet shoes. I’ve tracked dirt through the house like a stoner or a senile old lady. Oh well. I bend to pull off my shoes. I feel my aging gingerly. I sit up. The children’s faces are bursting with expressions, each gently crowding out the others. Karl looks at them, and his eyes go back where they’re supposed to be. He turns around and gropes through a cabinet, pulls out a box of cereal with a cartoon tiger on it. The tiger roars as magic sugar flies over his giant bowl of cereal.

“Joanne, look! Look, Alison!” Trisha is dancing and waving her drawing. She is erect and seeking, and her white skin is as vibrant as color. Her brown eyes are radiant, but her small lips have a soft dark color that suggests privacy, hiddenness. Her dancer is red leaping on white, with wiggle arms and pointy yellow shoes on the ends of wiggle legs.

“Wow!” I say. “This is a real dancer. This is like real dancing!”

“Yes,” says Trisha, “now look!”

Even Karl looks as Trisha stands exulting with her arms in the air. “All the way up to here!” She bends and puts her palms on the floor; her cartwheel is a quick, neat arc. “All the way down to there!” Her belly flashes its button. She laughs, cartwheels again, out of the kitchen into the hall. Heather and Joelle somersault after her, screaming, “Me, too! Me!” We applaud. I get a mug from the cabinet, brushing against Karl as I go past. His rage is still there, but it’s inside now. I picture a little metal ball with spikes, rolling in one spot, tearing a hole in his heart while the rest of Karl holds it together, eating his cereal and thinking about other things.

“I’ll get it.” Joanne brushes past me, gets the kettle, runs water into it.

“It’s total disrespect,” says Karl. “He’s shitting on me, and he’s doing it so everybody else knows.”

“Karl,” I say. “I don’t exactly know what you’re talking about. But if you’re talking disrespect at the workplace, I once worked with a photographer who told a girl to put her hand down her pants and masturbate.”

“What?”

“He put it more nicely than that, but he meant, Stick your hand down your pants and masturbate. He wasn’t kidding, either. And she was fifteen.”

This happened in Naxos, Greece. The photographer was an American named Alex Gish. He was considered an artist. Whatever he looked at, he took apart and put back together with his mind, furious because he knew it would just go back to being itself as soon as he looked away. He was looking at me, this fifteen-year-old Brit named Lisa, and three local men his assistant had hired. He called the men “magnificent” and then gazed at them, rearranging. They gazed back, huge, bemused, squinting. One of them affably spat.

“So did she do it?” Karl pauses over his cereal, spiked ball on hold. He is curious. His eyes are a little turned on, but his small chest is soft and open. He has compassion. I get stuck on this for a second. If his compassion comes from the place where he’s clawing himself, is it real? It seems mean to say no. But I wonder. One of the Greek men looked at Lisa with compassion, too. His look was not about something torn. He looked at her before she was disrespected. He looked like a kind dog might look at a nervous cat. Majestic wet tongue out, rhythmically inhaling the scent of feline. Store info in saliva, lick the chops, swallow it down. Blink soft, merciful eyes. Put tongue out again. Sometimes dogs are more dignified than cats. This man was probably sixty years old, and he was so beautiful, they wanted to put him in a fashion magazine.

“Yeah, she did it. He spent the whole day telling her she was bloated and fat. ‘The lips are too thin, André. Can you work with that? And while you’re at it, do something about those bags under the eyes.’ ”

“Pricks like that should just be killed,” says Karl with feeling.

“I’ll bet she was making a lot more than Karl is.” Joanne’s voice is careful and pointed. She pours the boiling water carefully. “And I’ll bet she could’ve said no and not gotten fired.”

“Yeah,” says Karl. “It’s not the same. But I still think the photographer should be killed. Along with—”

“I’m just saying, if you want to talk about disrespect …” I trail off. Joanne doesn’t like it when I tell stories like this. She thinks I’m acting dramatic and victimized. But that’s not how I feel. I feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.

“My God!” cried Alex, throwing another Polaroid on the ground. “Can’t you do better than that? Do you even know what fucking is?” I was drinking orange soda and giggling with a stylist. The shiny little picture flapped across the sand and got caught in some weeds near my feet. Lisa’s mouth quivered. She was thin-lipped for a model. I tipped my head back to drink more soda and to look at the deep and bright blue sky.

“I still think you should try talking to him.” Joanne’s tuned into Karl. “Use the skills we went over. Always talk in terms of ‘I.’ Like, ‘When you had me carry those bags, it made me feel—’ ”

Trisha’s laughter sails into the room with a cloud of TV noise. They’re playing with the channel changer. Zip — voices — zip — music — gray buzz — zip. Their laughter rolls together with the electronic babble in a dissolving ball of sound. Flesh and electricity gather and disperse.

“Okay.” Alex sighed. “Look. We’re going to be shooting from the waist up only. Just put your hand down your pants and make yourself feel good.” One of the Greeks smiled nervously at me and kicked a little sand over my foot. The stylist threw me a hot smirk. Lisa’s mouth was twisted with embarrassment. My heart beat. Tears shone on her face. I frowned and shook sand off my foot. “You haven’t got the lips,” yelled Alex, “so use your eyes! You’ve got the eyes! Use them!”

It was disrespect. But it was something else, too — something I would not be able to explain to Karl or Joanne. Afterward, we all went out for dinner and everybody was nice to Lisa. She sat there, tense and hunched under the niceness. The tension only heightened the beauty of her huge eyes and delicate movements. We ate lamb and sardines, tomatoes dripping with oil. We were sitting on an outdoor patio and the men went to piss in the darkness outside the strung ring of colored lights. It was warm. We could smell one another’s sweat mingled with food and flowers. Alex sat across from Lisa. His face was naked and strange. He said something in a low voice, and for an instant her spirit showed itself — a bright orange pistil in a white flower. “There’s a lady,” he said, and his voice was warm.

Joanne puts her cigarette to her lips. Karl eats his cereal. His rage is quiet. His hurt is quiet. I have aspirin and codeine with my tea. Rain spatters the roof. We sit connected in a triangle. On television, haunted music tiptoes about. Animals bellow. Humans mutter. Comedy music bumps and stumbles. A voice says, “We are here to be the eyes and ears of God.”

I think of Drew’s room of furniture. Some of it he’ll sell, but most of it will build up in that room and spread out through the house. He’s building onto himself and out into the world at the same time. His furniture is for use. But whether anyone uses it or not, each piece adds to the huge place he’s building inside — a place where the physical laws don’t apply, where you can sit in orange flame and be okay. He’s using physical tools to describe this place. He’s leaving physical markers.

One night when I was here, I was alone in the kitchen for a minute and Drew came up behind and pressed against me. I could hear Joanne in the living room, talking to Karl over emergency music on the TV. Fear, pain, excitement, said the music. Sorrow, secret sorrow. We were all high on pot. I was standing at the counter, pouring apple juice. He came in and put one hand on my hip and one arm around my chest, as though to hold me steady. He crouched a little and pressed against me. He put his cheek against the side of my head. Joanne laughed in the next room. For a second, her laugh blended with his touch and I felt held by it. He pressed against my butt. I felt that soft noise feeling all through his body, insistent, warm, ardent, like a snuffling bear at a berry bush. His cheek against me ardent, too. Respecting the bush: May I? Before I knew it, Yes shot down my spine and lifted my tailbone slightly. Ossifier, love’s desire. But silent now, huge and soft with sadness. I put my hand on his. “Stop,” I said. “We can’t.” He held me long enough for me to feel his ardor turn to embarrassment, then sadness, then nothing. He let go, coughed, and opened the refrigerator. I went into the living room. A grim woman flew through gray traffic on a motorcycle. Triumph, said the music. Grim, lonely triumph flying through space. I imagined letting the feeling continue, letting it bend me forward. Open the door to the place where the huge things are. Let him stick it in. He sat far away from me, face blank, cheeks flushed. What would it have been like to open that door again? I might’ve done it, except for Joanne.

Karl puts his dish in the sink and disappears. Joanne takes my wet shoes and socks and puts them in the dryer off the kitchen. Gives me a pair of Drew’s socks to wear. We make lunch — sandwiches and boiled eggs and carrots cut into neat strips. The girls run back in, clamoring for carrots and animal crackers. They sit and draw red animals, whole furious sheets of them. My shoes thud in the dryer. Roommate Nate comes out of his basement room in a pajama top and a cowboy hat. He works the night shift in the emergency room and he’s training to be a fireman. He walks into the kitchen singing, “Move it in, pull it out, stick it back, and waggle it about, Disco Warthog!”

“One,” says Joanne, “quit singing dirty songs. Two—”

The girls crowd around him with their drawings.

“ ‘Disco Warthog,’ ” says Nate, pouring himself a cup of coffee, “is derived from the classic ‘Disco Lady,’ and is therefore not a dirty song.”

“Nate,” says Trisha, looking up, “warthogs are dirty. They’re pigs with teeth!”

“Two. Could you and the girls go into the living room so I can visit with Alison?”

Nate leads the girls from the room, coffee cup aloft. “Let’s go be clean lady warthogs!”

“And no disco whatever!” shouts Joanne. She turns to me and smiles.

Joanne is making a place inside her, too. She doesn’t do it physically like her husband. She does it with thoughts and words. We move around the kitchen, and I can feel the building going on. She’s talking about people we know at the support group. She’s talking about a woman with hepatitis named Karen, who is superpissed about people who help her when she doesn’t want their help. People who lecture her about her smoking and her soothing double vodkas at night, who harangue her about everything from interferon to Bach flower remedies, including yoga, root vegetables, and salmon. “ ‘The worst thing isn’t even being sick.’ ” Joanne imitates Karen’s bitter, husky whine, so heavy, it’s almost sensual. “ ‘The worst thing is having some yoga-class, health food — eating, New Age therapist — going prick jam you about being a junkie. And like’ ”—with fine, hoarse disdain—“ ‘I can afford salmon. Fuck you!’ ” We laugh because Karen is royal, with her long dyed black hair and jewelry, her harsh wild eyes with their ring of green around the gray. We laugh because she’s an asshole. We also laugh because we know what she means about the health pricks, going to gyms, sitting in hot tubs, taking their stinking vitamins and antidepressants. “ ‘Tellin’ me what I need to do, what to eat, what to think about before I go to bed at night — because everybody has to be fucking perfect like they think they are. Because the reality that they can’t control it, that people get sick no matter what they do, scares the shit out of them.’ ”

She’s right about that, too. I think of the guy with hepatitis who was written up in the local paper as a success story last year; he thought he’d beaten the disease with a macrobiotic diet, Chinese herbs, acupuncture, and vigorous exercise. The son of a bitch ran five miles every day, then went home and sat in the hot tub he’d built himself. In the newspaper photo, he looked very pleased with himself; the caption under the photo said “In control.” Then liver cancer squashed him like a mallet. He didn’t know that high temperatures are very bad for the hepatic liver, and he’d apparently cooked the damn organ in his hot tub. Which is exactly what drives Karen crazy — his thinking that if only he did everything right, he might control mortality. His bossy little will with its nose in the air, up on a pedestal to be worshiped. Except she wants to put her sickness on a pedestal and worship it. She wants other people to worship it, too.

“Do you remember,” I say, “all those spiritual healing books from the eighties? There was one that said HIV came to Earth because of shame. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah.” Joanne makes a carrot-strip sunburst on a yellow plate. “I think I read that one. Wasn’t it by this grandmotherly old lady?” She goes to the refrigerator and comes back with handfuls of radishes. “There was an exercise you were supposed to do. I remember …” She stands at the sink, running the radishes under the water, quickly and lightly rubbing them.

“You were supposed to address each body part and tell it you loved it, especially any part you felt shame about. A long time ago, I gave it to this woman named Veronica. She had HIV and I was desperate to give her something, even though she didn’t want it.”

“Like Karen talks about.”

“Yeah, except she didn’t get mad at me. She laughed instead.”

Joanne cuts the radishes like my mother did, like her mother must’ve done — like flowers. I cut the sandwiches into triangles, like Daphne, Sara, and I used to have sandwiches. Like Trisha and Heather and Joelle might one day make sandwiches for children.

“She gave the book back and told me it was sweet. I asked if she did the exercise, and she said, ‘Hon, I may not know much about love, but I know it’s not an act of will.’ She said picturing all those fags chanting ‘I love my ass’ made her laugh.”

In fact, Veronica said she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Trying to put love up their asses like they used to put dick, under the benevolent ur-gaze of this grandmotherly ‘healer,’ like finally Grandma loves and accepts your ass — please. My shame didn’t cause this and my love won’t cure it.”

“I remember she said, ‘How do you think Stalin and Hitler wound up killing so many people? They were trying to fix them. To make them ideal.’ She said, ‘There’s violence in that, hon.’ ”

“Yeah,” says Joanne. “I see what she means. But I liked the exercise. I didn’t expect it to fix me. I just found it comforting.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”

She drops a double handful of cut radishes in the center of the sunburst. Light comes through the window and shines on her hands; they are wet, rough, and slightly red at the knuckles. There’s a torn hangnail on her thumb and chipped silver polish on her broken transparent nails. “Do you want apple juice?” she asks.

Heather and Joelle run through the room, using our legs to play hide-and-seek. Their young faces peep in and out of our aging limbs; their hands and eyes flash. I think of roses climbing a battered trellis.

“We’ve gotta get lunch on,” says Joanne. “My radio program is gonna be on in forty minutes, and today it’s the director of Lost in Translation, and I loved that movie.”

The place Joanne is building inside has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors and old-lady healers and people trying to love their asses and people who think they’re stupid for it. In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put on the wall. Not because it is good but because it is trying to understand something. In these rooms, there will be understanding. In these rooms, each madness and stupidity will be unfolded from its knot and smoothed with loving hands until the true thing inside it lies revealed.

Joanne goes to get Jerry for lunch. The girls help me carry the food into the living room so we can eat it on a blanket while we watch Animal Planet. There’re cheese sandwiches with lettuce, peanut butter and jelly ones, radishes and carrots, plus animal crackers and juice in little cartons. Joanne and I sit on the floor with the girls; Joelle sits between Joanne’s spread legs, her plate balanced on Joanne’s thigh. Jerry’s next to Nate on the couch, laughing about something. The light from the fish tank glows behind them; fish traverse the rippling green.

On Animal Planet, people are putting computer chips under the skins of beautiful lizards in order to help save them from extinction. The camera zooms in on the writhing creatures. Their eyes bulge; their hinged red mouths fiercely gape. One strikes the air with a stiff webbed claw. Joanne presses the mute button to say grace. The bright and scalding past breaks through.

Toward the end, Alain would talk to people about me while I sat right there. I understood French well enough by then that I could understand most of what he said. “She’s gone cold. Morbid, a little weird. She doesn’t have the strength to carry that off. But you should have seen her when she first came.” I just sat there, not saying anything. What shames me most about it is that by then I didn’t even love him. I loved the rich things and the money and people kissing my ass. I loved the song I was living in, and he was the singer.

He still used the apartment for meetings and to hang out. He brought over girls and his beautiful friend Jean-Paul, an ex-model who smiled, dirty and sweet, when Alain called him “cunt face.” He didn’t have official parties there. That was for his real house, which he shared with his real girlfriend. But the apartment was set up so that little parties could happen if they wanted to. There were fresh flowers in freshly polished vases. The pantry was stocked with wine and fancy nuts, big fat olives, figs, sugared almonds, and marzipan animals that I ate myself sick on when I was alone. In the refrigerator were salted fish, pâtés, cheeses. Also boxes of syringes filled with antibiotics for syphilis and clap. There was always cocaine in a big china plate on the mantel. Some nights, people would tumble in like they were being poured from a giant cornucopia, falling out on their royal asses, then getting up to dance and eat and strut. Some of them thought I was just a girl at the party. But lots of them knew this was actually my home. Alain insisted on keeping up the pretense of no sex, even though so many people knew. Once I did it with Cunt Face when people were over, to mock Alain and his policy. That’s when I realized how many people knew. We came out of the bedroom and people looked at Alain to see what he would do. When he didn’t do anything, they looked away. Little laughing people skipping and playing in the place where the huge things are.

But I wasn’t a little person. I was huge. I was hugely drunk. I was a model and secret mistress of a powerful agent who could flaunt another lover in front of him.

I walked down a hallway crowded with gorgeous people. Lush arms, gold skin, fantastic flashing eyes, lips made up so big and full, they seemed mute — made not to talk but only to sense and receive. So much beauty, like bursts of violent color hitting your eye together and mixing until they were mud. I passed a bathroom and heard the sound of puking quickly covered by the music on the stereo. Rich, dreamy mud of sound. A girl met my eye and I was amazed to see her face emerge with such clarity. For a second, I was startled to think I knew her from childhood. Then I realized she was a movie star. I had watched her on TV with my family. She was looking at me curiously. I smiled and walked past. My father had loved her on TV. If he could see this, he would reach up and scratch his ear, not knowing what to say. Jean-Paul had scratched his ear just before he leaned in to kiss me. His kiss had been surprisingly sweet. I ducked into a bedroom to call my father and tell him about the movie star. I closed the door and sat with the phone cord wound against my chest, listening to the phone ringing in the dingy kitchen in New Jersey, my call hurtling through the night, over the cold ocean to land in that dingy phone.

I was going to show myself to my father, living big and bold. Mostly when I called him, I was stilted and hidden. Now I would show him something. I didn’t know what. But I would show him. Jean-Paul had fucked me shallowly a long time before finally sticking it in. I was still drunk with feeling between my legs. The room blurred and swam in my eyes. I heard myself murmur, “I love you, Daddy.” But when he answered the phone, I couldn’t speak. His voice was a mild voice, tired and kind. There was nothing big in it. I didn’t know how to speak to it. I was abashed before it. “Hello?” said the voice. “Hello?” Darkness spread around me, and in it I was tiny. “Hello?” Across the ocean, my father sighed. “Hello?” He hung up. Comforted, I went back to the party.

Sometimes, Alain and I still slept together. He would come into my room in the early morning, when it was still dark. He would bend over me and cover my face with tiny kisses, his rough coat brushing against me. He stroked my face with his cold hands and spoke so gently that I couldn’t hear him. I thought I heard “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was so drunk, his eyes were finally quiet, swollen and rolled back in his head. He would lie beside me, and I would kiss his hands and his temples, shivering with the night air on his clothes. He would kiss me back and touch my body and then fall asleep. I would put my back against him, then pull his arm around me and hold it there. Little gusts of morning air made the shade tap against the window frame. Sunlight crept under the shade and across the floor. Strange to think it was the same sun the cat and I had watched on the dining room floor a long time ago.

But mostly, he didn’t sleep with me. Sometimes he didn’t sleep at all. Sometimes I’d wake up and find him in the living room with Jean-Paul and some girl, watching TV with red eyes and open dry mouths. Once I came out and saw Cunt Face bent over the kitchen table with his pants down so that Alain could give him a clap shot. Alain didn’t look up. Jean-Paul smiled wanly, then winced when Alain jabbed him. He must’ve asked for the shot; Alain didn’t give them away. Even friends had to pay.

Heather and Trisha are almost asleep before the TV. Joelle is standing at the sliding glass door, looking at the sky. The sun has broken through somewhere; the tops of the trees are glowing, almost gold with sunlight. Everything else is gray. A piece of rippling fish tank is reflected in the glass, like a mysterious heart in a gray body. A tiny fish flickers across it. Joelle stretches up a hand. “This is my eyes.” She stretches up the other. “This is my ears.”

Joanne stands beside her. The sun plays across her sideways face. I can see the white down on her skin. I can see the tiny crosshatch marks in the softness of her cheeks, the acne scars pocking one side of her face, the dark pouches under her eyes. Liver, weariness, bile. The weight of her cheeks just starting to pull her mouth into a severe shape. Sensitive lips now sensing death mingled with all the tastes of life. All her pores opened and saturated with waning life. Still sending out the message of Here I Am. The little girl stretches her face up to receive it, drinking in with her own perfect skin what it is to be. Joanne turns to face me. Behind her eyes, she is going from room to room, turning on the lights.

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not. I missed being that kind of person by a hair.

“About the way I used to be. Things I used to do. You know. Stuff I can’t understand anymore why I did it.”

The girl pricks up her ears. “What did you do, Alison?”

I turned into a puppet with a giant hand inside me. Not a particular hand. Just a hand. During a fitting, a client jabbed my crotch with her long nails. She was supposedly smoothing the wrinkles on some pants. She snapped, “You keep sweating!” then twisted my leg so hard, she hurt my knee. I went into hysterics and was fired for the first time. I insulted Alain in public and arrived home two days later, to find myself locked out of the apartment. I ran to the bank, but I was too late — two years too late. I could only get fifty thousand francs. The rest was in a Swiss bank account in the agency’s name.

I look into the child’s eyes. She meets my look, takes it in. She frowns and looks down, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. At that age, they know about doing things you don’t know why you did. When I was five, I slammed Daphne’s leg in the car door. We were having a fight and she said something I didn’t like. I was in the car and she was just getting in and I slammed her leg. She screamed. My mother yelled, “Why did you do that?” I was too shocked to answer. I stroke Joelle’s lowered head. The shine of the sun follows my hand on her gold-brown hair.

We were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed before us. For tearing up the fabric of songs wise enough to acknowledge limits. For making songs of rape and death and then disappearing inside them. For trying to go everywhere and know everything. We were stupid, spoiled, and arrogant. But we were right, too. We were right to do it even so.

Drew walks in. Rough face flushed and sensate. Eye sparkle rooted in the slow, low body. The spry feet of a dandy. Long graying hair fluffy and touched with rain. He stops and his eyes zero in on me. I sit down and take his socks off my feet. I have to go. Heather and Trisha wake for me to kiss their cheeks. Trisha hugs my legs and shouts, “Good-bye!” I bend and kiss her forehead. Ten years from now, I will be a kiss in a great field of faceless kisses, a sweet patch of forgotten territory in her inner country. Joanne hugs me, too, her heart against mine. Nice to think that in her dreams Trisha might run through that field and love it without knowing why. Drew puts out his hand and I clasp it. There is a ball of heat and feeling in his palm. The same feeling as when he pressed up against me that time. If I asked him why he did that, what would he say? I still have this. Do you see? I am sick. One day, I could be very sick. But in the meantime, I still have this and it’s still good. Do you see? I do see. It’s not just sex. It’s why he can help other men without making them feel like bums. Why people will listen to him when he’s not saying words. Yes, I see. I tell him that with my eyes. He thanks me with his eyes. He lets go of my hand.

The rain is out again, hammering the puddles full of holes, pocking the black-and-silver world with shining darkness. Rain soaks each leaf and blade of grass, bloating the lawns until they seem to roll and swell. Houses recede. The wind rises. The eyes and ears of God come down the walk.

I should go home. I’m tired and weak. Should take the bus. Should call my father. He is alone in an apartment with junk mail and old newspapers spread all around. Looking here and there in bafflement while dry heat pours out on him from a vent in the ceiling. His radio with a bent antenna on the dining table is tuned to a sports channel. People on magazine covers smile up from the floor and tabletops — a flat field of smiles blurred with slanted light from the cockeyed lamp. My father doesn’t listen to his old songs anymore. They finally went dead for him. Instead, he has these people in magazines and on TV: actors, singers, celebrities. He knows they are vessels for a nation of secret, tender feeling, and he respects them. I think he tries to cleave to them. But I don’t think he can.

Above me, the treetops wave back and forth, full of shapes, like the ocean. Wild hair, great sopping fists, a rippling field, a huge wet plant with thousands of tiny flowers that open and close with the wind. Form recedes. All the smiling television faces blend to make a shimmering suit that might hold you. I see my father trying to put one of them on. Reaching for it trustfully, noticing the poor quality but letting it pass. Smiling like he doesn’t see when it falls apart in his hands. Still wanting to believe. Afraid not to.

Veronica had whole picture books of celebrities in her apartment, thick books by Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, who were almost celebrities themselves. These books did not bewilder her; she understood them as vessels. I remember a picture of two slender, sinewy women in neon underwear, one bending over with perfectly straight legs and a perfectly straight back while the other one, perfectly erect and frontal, pretended to spank her with a paddle. Veronica’s apartment was a condominium that she worked double shifts for a year to buy, and it wanted very much to be perfectly elegant. It was like an aquarium of gray and chrome waiting for something perfect to be placed in it. These pictures were the first perfect things.

When Alain locked me out and stole my money, I went back home. Eventually, I moved to New York; eventually, I returned to modeling. Eventually, I lived in a big apartment, too. I remember returning home to my big apartment alone and drunk. Moving through rooms, turning on the lights. The buzz of my own electricity loud and terrible in my head. Someday to be cut off. That doesn’t happen when I go home to my place on the canal. I am glad to be there. I always turn on the space heater first thing, a wonderful humming box filled with orange bands of dry heat. Take off my wet shoes, sit in the chair, warming my wet feet. Look out the window, look at the wall. Travel slowly through the wall. My millions of cells meeting all its millions of cells. We swarm together like ants touching feelers. Now I know you. Good, yes, I know you. I have some coffee. Listen to the radio. This afternoon maybe I’ll call my father.

But not yet; I won’t go home yet. I’ll take the bus and go someplace beautiful and I’ll walk until I’m so tired that I won’t be able to stay awake tonight. So tired that my sleep will not be pestered by dreams or fairy tales.

At the end of the Naxos shoot, Lisa was not crying. Her face was ravaged and fevered, but she was erect, and her eyes were full of dull flame. She looked like a different person. She looked amazing. Alex moved about her, quick and silent. If he spoke, he did so in a very low voice, so that only she would hear him.

Everyone was so busy watching that I was the only one who saw the old Greek man. He was staring at Alex with a face of astonished disgust. His expression made me blush, and he wasn’t even looking at me. He took a step toward Alex, as if he meant to hit him. He stopped as if confused and wiped his mouth. He turned and walked away. He did not even come back to get paid.

Here’s the main street. Here’s the bus stop. Here’s a retarded girl coming toward me in a yellow slicker and baggy corduroy pants. She is dainty and shambling, with her big body and small feet, her ragged hems crushed and muddy under her heels. She comes close. Her fat, soft face is thick with feelings too blunt for words. Soft like paws, not nimble like fingers. Paws can read the earth better than fingers. I can feel her reading me, running her senses over the invisible scars left by my appetites, vanities, and passive cruelties. Feeling my secret mouth — still there, even if the fangs have fallen out. Don’t worry about me, I think at her. I am harmless. But she looks wary. She doesn’t answer my hello. She keeps her eyes on me till she’s passed.

When I returned home to New Jersey, everybody met me at the airport. My mother had a fake smile on her face, meant to shield me from her tears. Daphne did not smile. She looked at me calmly, except that her brow was knitted up so high, her eyes were almost popped. My father’s face had the awful tact of a witness to an accident with bloody people sprawled out naked. Sara was the only one who seemed the same. She glanced at me to be sure I was still there, then went back into herself.

I sat in the backseat with my sisters, as if we were children again. For a second, they held apart from me and then we were joined together in the old membrane. My mother had come back to my father just weeks earlier, and the membrane was active and vibrating with recent vigor.

“Do you want anything special to eat?” My father raised his eyes in the rearview mirror but did not look at me.

“I’ve made spaghetti,” said my mother.

“Spaghetti would be good,” I replied.

We drove past low-built gray stores set back in lots half-full of cars and hunks of dirty snow. Their lights were starting to come on. The Dress Barn, Radio Shack, the 99-Cent Store. My mother began to cry; her tears scalded my face.

The bus is coming. I feel my fever subtly mount. A frowning young man, soft and slumped in his worn jacket, appears out of nowhere and flags the bus. It stops, popping open its door with a spastic rasp. The driver is small and bristling, with a lined face and jug ears. Hard and fiery, with a mouthful of spit waiting to be spat, he glares straight ahead as he pulls the door shut.

That night, I shared the big bed with Daphne. They had moved Sara into a small room in the basement, so we were alone. There was a desk where the maturity bed used to be. I piled my clothes on it until we could figure out what to do with them all. We brushed our hair and changed into flowered gowns. I walked around naked more than I had to. She looked away. We had emotions, but we held them back. Silence and stillness connected us. Silence and stillness were where we understood each other. We could still be children together there, and we were afraid to let adult emotions break it. We got into bed and shut off the light. I turned on my side. Silently, she put her arm around me. I took her hand and kissed it. We laced our fingers together and I kissed her hand again before resting it against my chest.

I sit next to a doughy girl with a stopped-up nose. Who’s the nose of God? The girl sniffs so hard, her head squeaks; she breathes softly through her mouth. Maybe the animals are in charge of smell. Taking everything into their hairy nostrils and translating it with their bodies, patiently putting it through each cell, each organ. Sitting and mulling it over with half-closed eyes. Licking their paws and sending it upward in an invisible skein of knowledge.

I enrolled in the community college. Daphne was already there. Sara had dropped out of school and taken a job at an old people’s home a few blocks over. She didn’t yell anymore. There were no boys to slap her ass. She came home from work and went down into the basement. It was winter and we could hear her hacking cough rise all the way up to the second floor. It was winter and my mother’s skin dried and her face grew thin and shrunken. I might look at her in her rubber boots and her wool cap pulled down over her forehead, the wool darkening with sweat as she worked to scrape ice off the chugging car, and I would think, No sexy pantsuit now. Nobody wants you now! And with that thought, my heart contracted and the world shrank around me so fast that I thought it would crush me. Every morning, my father got up looking like he felt the same way. The expression on his face said that the world shrank around him every day, so close in that it was hard to move. The expression on his face said that he pressed against the hard case of the shrunken world and pushed it back with every step. It was an expression I knew without knowing. I put my forehead down and I helped him push.

Our father dropped Daphne and me off at the college before he went to his job. He let us off at the end of the parking lot and we walked a long concrete path caked with blue-and-gray ice that gleamed on sunny days. The school was small and dingy. The people inside it stared at me like I was a stuck-up bitch. To get away from their stares, I climbed further up my stick. But I didn’t feel stuck-up. I felt scared. I felt like I had to prove I was smart enough to go to college. I worked hard. I wrote poems. The poetry teacher was a little man with sparse hair on his dry head and spotted, trembling hands. But I loved him because he wrote “very good” on my poems. At the end of the day, Daphne and I would sit in the Student Union eating sweetened yogurt and dime doughnuts. Night students came and stood in the cafeteria line. At six o’clock, we walked back down the concrete to meet the car.

If we got home and our mother wasn’t there, our dad danced around the house, pretending he was an ape. He did it to relieve tension. He’d run into the living room swinging his arms and going, “Ooooh! Oooh! Eeee eee eee!” He’d jump up on a chair, scratching his armpit and his head. Daphne and I did it, too; we ran around after him. It was like dancing on the green chairs, only it wasn’t a song everybody knew. It came from the deep flesh place, except it was quick and alive and full of joy. Not that I thought of it that way. I just knew I loved it. If it had gone on longer, it would’ve been better than any song. But it lasted only a minute. Our dad would always call it; he’d suddenly go back to normal and climb down off the chair, his smile disappearing back into his face. “Whew!” he’d say. “I feel a whole lot better now!” Except once between ape and normal, he took my shoulders and hugged me sideways. “I’m proud of you,” he whispered, and kissed my ear.

I was proud, too; I knew I was doing something hard. Sometimes I was even happy. But another world was still with me, glowing and rippling like a dream of heaven deeper than the ocean. I could be studying or watching TV or unloading clothes from the washing machine when a memory would come like a heavy wave of dream rolling into life and threatening to break it open. During the day, life stood stolid, gray and oblivious. But at night, heaven came in the cracks. I would want Alain, and want his cruelty, too. I would long for those cabinets of rich food and plates of drugs, for nights of sitting alone in the dark, eating marzipan until I was sick. For bitches who yanked at me and yelled at me for sweating. For nightclubs like cheap boxed hell, full of smoke and giant faces with endlessly talking lips and eyes and snouts swelling and bulbous with beauty. For my own swollen hugeness, spread across the sky. It didn’t matter that I had been unhappy in the sky, or that I had been cheated and used. I cried for what had hurt me, and felt contempt for those who loved me; if Daphne had put her arm around me then, I would’ve clenched my teeth with contempt. Then, lying next to her warm body was like lying in a hole with a dog and looking up to see gods rippling in the air of their hot-colored heaven. I wanted her to know that she was a dog, ugly and poor. I wanted all of them to know. I wanted my father to know that he would always be crushed, no matter how hard he pushed.

On the last night I saw Alain, he took a bunch of us to a sadomasochist sex club. It was a dump guarded by a fat tattooed man who smacked his blubbery lips at us. Inside the cave, there was a bar and a handsome young man pouring drinks behind it. Cheerful music played. Two middle-aged women with deep, sour faces sat at the bar wearing corsets and garter belts. Some people were dressed in costume like them; other people were dressed normally. One man was naked. He was skinny as a corpse — you could see his ribs and the bones of his ass. He had long matted gray hair and thick yellow nails like a dog’s. He crawled on the floor, moaning and licking it with his tongue. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Nobody even looked at him. He crawled to the women at the bar and got up on his knees. He moaned and pawed the air like he longed to touch them but didn’t dare. Without looking, one of them took the riding crop from her lap and lightly struck him across the shoulders. “Va, va!” she scolded gently. He reached down and yanked at his limp penis. He yanked it hard and fast but also daintily. She returned the crop to her lap and he scuttled away, balls swinging between his withered thighs. She saw me staring and made a face, as if I had broken a rule. I looked for Alain and saw him disappearing into a crowded back room with his arm around a dimly familiar girl. “Don’t worry.” Jean-Paul was suddenly beside me. “It is harmless here.” He winked at me. “Just a show, mostly. Unless you want to join.” But I pushed through the crowd.

Sometimes the spell would break: I would look away from the terrible heaven and see my sister lying next to me, her neat, graceful form and her even breath beautiful and inviolate. If I put my hand on her warm shoulder, my thoughts might quiet; heaven would vanish and the ceiling would be there again, protecting us from the sky. I could lie against her and feel her breath forgive me. The day would come. My night thoughts would pale. My sister and I would go to school.

But sometimes I would barely sleep, then get up with heaven still burning my eyes. I would be full of hate and pain because I could not get back to it. On one of those mornings, I told Daphne the story of the sex club. We were moving around the room quickly, getting out of our warm gowns and into our cold clothes. I told her about the crawling man and the women at the bar. I could tell she didn’t want to hear. But I kept talking, faster and faster. I pushed through the crowd. A hand reached out of it and grabbed my wrist. I took its little finger and bent it back. It let go. I threw my gown on the bed and walked across the room naked. Daphne turned her back, bent, and showed me the gentle humps of her spine. With dignity, she put on her pants.

In a reeking back room, I found Alain with Lisa from Naxos. Her sensitive little lips were tense and strange. They were watching a middle-aged woman climb onto a metal contraption so that a man could whip her. Daphne yanked open a drawer and slammed it shut. I brushed my hair with rapid strokes. Alain smiled at me. I told him I wanted to go home, now. “Then go home,” he said. Lisa was not looking at me on purpose. Daphne pared her nails. She was not looking at me, either. The man with the whip was waiting for the woman to get settled into the proper knee and hand grooves. He seemed nervous; twice he moved his arm, like he was anxious to assist her, then moved it back. “I want to go home!” I nearly screamed. Both the man with the whip and the climbing woman turned to look at me; she brushed a piece of hair from her quizzical eye. The people watching them looked, too. There was a crash; “Shit!” hissed Daphne. She had knocked a water glass off the bed table, splashing the mattress. Without looking at me, Alain took an ice cube out of his drink and threw it at my face. The woman settled her face into the metal headrest. I kicked Alain’s shin and ran.

“That’s poetry,” I said. “Life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook.” Daphne slammed the glass back on the table so hard, I thought she’d break it. She went out of the room and down the stairs. She knew what I’d said was stupid, but she half-believed it, too.

I left the sadomasochist dump with a girl from the south of France named Simone. She was wearing a tight blue dress with red wine spilled down the front of it. She was so drunk, she didn’t care. “Fuck it,” she kept saying in English, “you know?” The tattooed doorman called out an endearment to us as we emerged from his cave. “Fuck it!” she yelled. The club was on a tiny alley that smelled of interesting piss, but one block over, glamorous traffic ran biliously. Papillon, pee, pee, pee. We linked arms and walked. Simone was talking about her new boyfriend, but I didn’t listen. I was thinking about Lisa’s shame at Naxos, trying to gloat. But Alex was right: Even a young girl’s shame can be beautiful. The naked man in the club crawled on the floor, looking for his shame, starving for it. Locked out of life and trying to crawl back through a tunnel made of shame. Yanking his dead dick in reverence for a life he couldn’t have. I looked up at the sky. Gnats sparkled in the flickering light of a broken street lamp. Plunged into dark, then dancing for joy, over and over again. Alain hadn’t even looked at me. Just flicked the ice in my face.

Simone raised her arm and stopped a taxi. The driver had a great bony jaw and hairy brows and lightning coming out of his forehead. Simone gave the address of a nightclub and he drove like a charioteer, war arm manning the wheel. I sank back in the dark seat.

By spring, my father and I had succeeded; we had made an open space. I got B’s and even A’s. I spent more of my French money to take a class in the spring semester. I made friends with kids who liked it that I seemed stuck-up. They liked it even better that I was an ex-model who’d gotten kicked in the ass. “Models are stupid cows,” said a girl named Denise, and I said, “Yeah, they are.” She blinked her big heavy eyes and looked at me curiously.

Denise was even taller and thinner than I was. Her round face and huge frantic hair sat atop her fleshless body like a large flower on a drooping stalk. She acted like she was too good for everything. She acted like everything had hurt her and used her, and that this made her superior. But she was nice. She was the kind of person who’d hold your head while you were puking and not mention it later. She almost made me believe in living like music again, just because of the way she’d hunch and rock herself and slowly bring her cigarette hand from knee to lip and back; it was like acoustic guitar on a scratchy record. Her boyfriend, Jeff, was also slim and slouching with a friendly pouchy face and sweet little lips that he pursed and nervously bit. Then there was Sheila, small and royal, with lush bags under her bitter eyes, narrow hips, and tiny breasts. And huge square-shaped Ed, who’d first invited me to share a joint with them behind the Student Union.

Behind the Student Union were a field of blue weeds and a half-built playground made of a swingless swing set, a rotted little merry-go-round, and a plastic red cube with half the red worn off. Water flashed from a rusted pipe in a little ditch. There were fireflies in the deepening sky. The traffic droned in the distance. It was a place of effaced sweetness, and we went to it every day to smoke and talk. After dark, Ed drove me home in his rattling car with its mad turn signal and tape deck full of surly love. His tape sang about a bridge of sighs like a drunk giant pushing a boulder up a mountain. A weird thunder of bells rumbled in the valley. Clouds flew by. I sank back in the dark. In Paris, the taxi dodged cars, ran up over the curb, over the walls of buildings, through apartments, out the windows, up over the sky. A woman’s voice unscrolled and made a road in the sky for us to ride on. It was La Traviata on my father’s record player, flying across the sea to carry me.

A dark blur sails over thought. Veronica emerges. Is she here simply because now I am sick and alone? Yes — no. Candles burn behind her. A small plate of half-eaten cake sits before her. Rigoletto is playing. “He wasn’t a cunt,” she says. “He was a Ganymede. A beautiful boy, a jester.” Duncan bends over, reaching back with both hands to show his butt hole, naked except for little belled slippers and a striped belled hat. He grins over one shoulder. “The ‘Caro nome,’ ” says Veronica. Tears run down her face.

I kissed Ed on the cheek and got out of the car. In the house sat my father, drinking beer and waiting for dinner. La Traviata was on the record player. I said hi and walked through the room. Sara was in the dining room, crouching an inch away from the TV, straining to hear over the music. My mother was in the kitchen, stirring a fragrant pot. How I loved her. How I didn’t know. La Traviata filled the house with woman’s love. My tiny father sat in his tiny chair while the singer’s giant voice took over his house. She sang of suffering and abasement. She sang of strength and love. Her voice made these feelings into great complex waves that opposed, then joined, then opposed one another again with a force that would’ve torn a lesser voice to pieces. My father’s eyes were glazed with concentration and his jaw moved rhythmically from side to side as his mind rose up the crest of one wave, then down the other, then back up, riding their impossible heights until they met in a crescendo of passionate joining. I padded indifferently through the room, on my way to the kitchen for something to eat.

The worms go in, the worms go out. Lisa had no voice, and she was not an artist. But she had done it, too. Alex had pried her open and bullied her, and somehow, she had caught the force of his bullying and joined it to her own force. She caught it at just the right moment, made it into something sexual. And she didn’t even know what she’d done. This is what Alex meant when he called her a “lady.” This is what Alain meant when he called me “cold.” I couldn’t do what Lisa had done. I was too hard. I walked through the room, glanced at my father’s music, glanced away. It wasn’t that I was stupid. I could hear what it meant. But I would not let it in. I would not let myself be broken.

“You’re different now,” said Sara. “You walk through the house like you’re alone on a beach. Like nobody’s there but you.”

Simone yelled, “Arrête!” and we spilled out in front of the club. La Traviata vanished into the dark. A regal woman with a fierce dog face held off the crowd. Simone dug in her purse for the cab fare. Two dirty young boys sauntered past. They slowed down, looking at the crowd. They had craning necks and rubbery faces full of gawking scorn. Something in me lighted up at the sight of them; they were like New Jersey boys. The regal dog at the door glowered at them and one of them laughed and shouted, “Kalaxonez ton con!” Somebody laughed. “What did he say?” I asked Simone. The kid yelled again, “Petez des flammes!” She said, “ ‘Go honk your pussy.’ And ‘Go fart flames.’ ” The fierce dog waved to us and let us in.

At night, I went to strip-mall bars and apartment parties with my new friends. People crowded in, ready for anything. They yelled and drank and sang. Sheila turned into an imp, talking out the side of its mouth, her words a buzzing cloud that hovered above her like smoke. Jeff sat on the floor rolling joints and grinning and generally giving the impression that he was melting into a puddle of goo. Denise became the ringmistress, sitting spread-legged on the edge of the couch, cutting lines of coke with military precision. We drank and snorted until we turned into robots and root vegetables dancing and singing in little pointed boots. Back from suffragette city! A guy with the face of a bloated sweet potato sang, “Hey, don’t lean on me, man,” and leaned into me hard. “Want to dance?” he slurred, and I shrank away so stiffly that he almost fell. You can’t afford the ticket, I thought, but he heard it like I’d yelled and he yelled back—“Oh pardonez bitch-ez!” Hoo ha! “With her lips that she’s always kissing at people, and her hair that she cream rinses!”—until Ed punched him in the face. The guy fell with one foot twisted under his skinny calf. Denise stood up so fast, she knocked down a bowl of goldfish. People roared with pleasure. The punched guy stood and ground a little dancing fish into the floor. He rubbed his face. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I just wanted to dance with her.” “Shut up,” said Ed. He turned to me. His dulled eyes and slack mouth came close. Beyond him was the body of the little fish, mashed except for its poor staring head. A girl walked by with a set mouth and fierce staring eyes with little wet blobs of makeup underneath. Was this where I belonged? “I love you,” whispered Ed.

Go honk your pussy. I looked at the beautiful nightclub crowd, the smart French businesswomen with matching gold jewelry, the models, the slouching playboys, the pretty boys and girls darting like minnows, and that’s what I thought. I thought it all night. I thought it at myself when I went to use the bathroom and saw my reflection in a mirror filled with female faces, eyes made up smartly, but stupid with drunkenness, though sometimes shining nonetheless with intelligence at the very center. Lush fruits jumping down off a branch in human form and sauntering off.

Because it was hot and crowded in the apartment, Ed and I took some couch cushions and a sheet out onto the fire escape. I woke with the sun warming my eyeballs through the lids. The inside of my mouth was sore and sweet with alcohol. Compared to Alain or Jean-Paul, Ed was a very clumsy boy. He said he loved me, and all I could think of was the one who called me “bitch-ez.” But I said, “I love you, too.” Below us, beyond us, all around us, traffic ran.

Alain and Lisa walked in just as Simone and I were walking out. I looked at Lisa and instead of thinking, Go honk your pussy, I shouted it. Alain glared after me as if his face might break. “Petez des flammes!” I screamed. It was two days later that I got home from a job and found he had changed the locks. Fifteen months later, I sat in Ed’s car in the A&P lot with a copy of Vogue on my lap, sobbing and clawing at it. Lisa was on the cover. She was stunning. “I hate her!” I screamed. “I hate all of them!”

Ed sneaked a hot slit-eyed look at Lisa. I screamed, tore the cover off the magazine, and threw it into the lot. A lumpy old man watched it scud across the asphalt. He gave me an irritated look. I hunched down in the seat and sobbed. Lumpy Man got in his car. Ed fiddled with his keys. “Why don’t you go to New York and be a model?” he asked. “You still could.”

“No,” I moaned. “No, never.”

“Then why don’t you go be a poet?”

“I’m not a poet, Ed.” I sat up and stopped crying.

“Then why don’t you just go?”

The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery. As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whinging sound, like we’re streaking through space. Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them. Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around. More distant green, the side of a building. The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point. It sags down with a gassy sigh. Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor. Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus. The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on. The crabbed door suctions open. Teenagers stomp up through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words. “Cuz like — whatcho look — you was just a — ain’t lookin’ at you!” The old lady does not look. But I can feel her taking them in. Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine, and brain. Watering the flowers of her brain. The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap. Private snack suspended for public feast of youth. She would never be so close to them except on the bus. Neither would I. For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars. I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.

Just a week before I got locked out of the apartment on rue du Temple, I saw something I still don’t understand. Without understanding, it has become the reason I can forgive Alain. It happened so early in the morning, it was still dark. I awakened to sounds from the kitchen — Alain’s night voice, plus frying butter. I got up and went down the hall. Alain was at the stove, his back to me. At the table was the man I had seen licking the floor at the sadomasochist club. He was sitting in my place. He was naked except for Alain’s coat, which was draped over him. Under the coat, he was like a skeleton with hair and dirt on it. I could see the bottoms of his filthy feet and the rims of his toenails, thick and yellow as a dog’s. I stood at the door, invisible and dumb. He stared at me like he was staring into pitch-darkness. Alain turned from the stove; he held a plate with an omelette on it. He had made it with jam. He put the sweet plate gently before the skeleton. “There,” he said tenderly. “For you!” He pulled a chair out from the table and sat in it. “Go on!” he said. Alone in the dark, the creature ate, quickly and devouringly. Watching him eat was almost like watching him crawl, even though you didn’t have to see his balls or his ass. Like the German woman, he ate as if he could not taste. Lack of taste had made her indifferent to eating. It made him ravenous. It made him crawl on his hands and knees through the no taste, trying to find taste. Alain put his elbow on the table and leaned toward him, enrapt. He didn’t see or care when I turned and walked away.

Later, I called Jean-Paul to tell him what I had seen. He would know who the skeleton man was, I thought, and he might know why Alain would take him home and put him in my chair. There was so much music and laughter on his end of the line that it took a while for him to understand me.

“Ah,” he said finally. “It is hard to believe, but this man was once a very successful agent.”

“A modeling agent?”

“A long time ago, yes. I’ve heard that he was a friend of Alain’s father. But don’t tell him I said so, okay?”

This incident was so peculiar to me that I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time. Veronica was the first person I told. We were working late in a conference room, wrapped in a membrane of office noise, the clicking and whirring of machines soothing and uniting like the rumbling bus.

“I understand now why you loved him,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yes. He was willing to go places most people won’t go. He was looking at himself, you know. Most people won’t do that.”

She was a fool to talk that way—“you know.” Like she could know anything about Alain or where most people would go. One side of her lips curved up in a repulsive know-it-all style, sensual and tight. But her eyes were gentle and calm. I knew how trite and smug she was being, and I felt superior to it. But I didn’t know the gentleness of her eyes. They were like windows in a prison cell — you look out and the sky comforts you without your knowing why. Unknowing, I took comfort and went back to feeling superior. Maybe I was able to feel the comfort because I half-despised it. I don’t know. But it helped me to forgive Alain.

When I saw Jean-Paul next, I tried to ask him more about Alain’s father. We were at a party, some kind of function. It was dark and crowded. Big plates of food soaked up the smoke in the air. Jean-Paul frowned and blearily leaned into me, trying to hear. The beauty of his eyes was marred by deep stupor. Rum-soaked spongy crumbs fell down his rumpled shirtfront. One hand drunkenly cleaned the shirt; the other loaded the wet mouth with more tumbling crumbs. An ass paraded by in orange silk. Half the crumbs went down the shirt. He did not know who I meant. His tongue came out and licked. “Alain’s father,” I repeated. “How did he know that man who crawls on the floor of that place?” Recognition lit his stupor and made it flash like a sign. “You believed that?” he cried. “Ha ha ha ha ha!” He threw his head back into the darkness of the room, rubbed with the red and purple of muddled sex and appetite, drunken faces smeared into it and grinning out of it. His handsome face was a wreck before my eyes. The smell of wreckage came out of his open jacket as he leaned over to cram more food in his mouth. Ha ha ha! Tiny humans lost in tiny human hell, with all hell’s rich flavors.

We ride past precious stores for rich people. The Rites of Passage bookshop. A Touch of Flair. A French-style pastry shop painted gold and red, the window heaped with cakes. The bus flies over the cakes in a blur of windowpane light.

If I do see René’s rose-colored lamp beside my deathbed, it will be beautiful to me. I will want to touch and linger on every thread of its carefully woven fabric, especially the bits of gold that you half-see when you lean up close to shut off the light and then forget. I will cry to think I ever forgot. I will cry to lose it. It will be the same if Jean-Paul appears before my bed in a dark nimbus of smells and party music. His oafish ridicule will be sweet, like wine. Because I won’t taste it again. I’ll wish I could hold his bloated, blinking face in both my hands and kiss it good-bye. I’ll want to take back the curse I muttered as I turned away. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll miss that, too.

The bus stops at the light. Sun shines lovingly through the cloud cover and warms us through the dirty windowpanes. The bus hums in the light. We are all quiet in the warmth and the sound of the humming motor. I look outside and see a little budding tree, its slim black body shining with rain. Joyous and intelligent, like a fresh girl, the earth all new to its slender, seeking roots. I think of Trisha, erect and seeking with sparkling eyes. A fleshy nimble tree, laughing as it discovers the dirt. Stretching up its limbs to tell the sky what it’s found.

This moment could come to me on my deathbed, too. If it does, I will love it so much that I will take it into death with me. Perhaps if I try, it will dissolve in my arms. But I will try.

The light changes. The bus chugs forward. Veronica’s face floats in the window for an instant before blending with mine. She was right: Alain did go where most people wouldn’t, though not because he willed it. He couldn’t help it. The storm of movement was in him all the time. He lived in pieces, jumping from one falling meteor to the next, and going wherever it went. Of course, everybody has different directions in them. I saw three in my mother when Daphne and I met her in the family diner, and she had more than that. But she was not quick or flexible enough to jump from one to another. Even just to feel three at once made her awkward and confused. She didn’t have the strength to hold that much opposition in one place. That’s why she went back to my father. She still had all her different directions. She just chose to ignore most of them. She came back and became Mod again, mom with a hard d and a nasal o.

But sometimes the other directions took shape and ran against one another, filling the house with invisible war. At night, I sometimes started up with my heart pounding, scared not by a dream but by an image flying loose from thought, big and loud as a freight train: my parents in their room upstairs, their faces distorted with hate, screaming curses and lunging at each other with knives.

I yank the rope, signal the driver that it’s my stop. His head is a human pellet against the wide gray windshield. Directions: Mottled light and shadow go down; droning wipers go side to side; driver’s head goes up.

Alain had the strength and the flexibility; that was his misfortune. I saw him with his daughter once on a windy street. I knelt to meet her; he knelt, too. He pressed her cheek to his and introduced her as “Tiny Duck.” He didn’t introduce me to her. She didn’t mind. She laughed and put her hand on his head and said “Goose” in English. He laughed, and I saw his eyes were the same as they were with me. He could not stop, even for her. He could not stop even to be sad about it. Speaking English back to her, he said “Duck” in a mock-British accent and put his hand on her head. “Duck”; he put his hand on my head. “Goose,” and she put her hand on him. She didn’t look at me. She must’ve met a lot of girls named Duck.

We stop at the curb; the door suctions open. A mist of rain and traffic noise floats in and breaks apart. People stir and cough. I come down the aisle of heads. Duck, duck. The driver acknowledges me with the hard side of his silent head. Goose. His human hand squeezes and pulls; his crabbed wing of a door folds closed. The bus drives off with a loud swoosh, a gray rainbow of sound that twinkles and evaporates. In the distance, Alain and my mother sparkle and evaporate.

I turn off the main street and go down a wide road into a grove of giant redwood trees. It is a canyon at the foot of a mountain. It is a dignity preserve for rich people. Homes are set way back from the street or nested up on high hills with wooden stairways winding up their sides. Invisible children yell and run down an invisible path. The sun flashes in an attic window. The wet pavement is lush as a stone sponge. Giant trees grow up out of it and buckle it with their knotted muscley roots. Their bark is porous, like breathing skin. Through their skin you feel the beat of their huge hearts from deep in the ground. People drive slowly and weave around them, passing one at a time. I picture the lady I saw in the car with the bracelets driving through the trees, her mind fluttering against the glass.

When I first moved here, I lived in this town. I didn’t live in the canyon, but I’d come to walk in it. I’d come especially when I felt afraid, knowing I had hepatitis but not feeling sick yet. I’d look at the big trees and the mountain and I’d think that no matter how big any human sickness might be, they were bigger. Now I’m not so sure. How much sickness can even a huge heart take before it gets sick itself? The canyon is full of dead and dying oaks. Scientists don’t know why. It’s hard to believe we didn’t kill them.

The wind rises. The rain dashes sideways. Slowly, the trees throw their great hair. Their trunks creak and mull. My fever makes a wall in my brain. A door appears in the wall. It opens and another dream comes out. Is it from last night, or the night before, or every night? In it, a man and woman are on a high-speed train that never stops. Music is playing, a mechanical xylophone rippling manically up a high four-note scale again and again. Bing bing bing bing! It is the sound of a giant nervous system. The man and woman are built into this system and they cannot leave it. They are crying. Looking out the window, they see people hunting animals on game preserves. There are almost no animals left, so they have to be recycled — brought back to life after they’ve been killed and hunted again. Mobs of people chase a bear trying to run on artificial legs. It screams with fear and rage. The man and woman cry. They are part of it. They can do nothing. Bing bing bing bing!

My forehead breaks into a sweat. I unfasten a button and loosen my scarf. The air cools my skin; the fever recoils, then sends hot tadpoles wiggling against the cold. Drive the animal before you and never stop. Starve it, cut it, stuff silicone in it. Feed it until it’s too fat to think or feel. Then cut it open and suck the fat out. Sew it up and give it medication for pain. Make it run on the treadmill, faster, faster. Examine it for flaws. Not just the body but the mind, too. Keep going over the symptoms. It’s not a character defect; it’s an illness. Give it medication for pain. Dazzle its eyes with visions of beauty. Dazzle its ears with music that never stops playing. Send it to graze in vast aisles of food so huge and flawless that it seems to be straining to become something more than food. Dazzle its mind with visions of terror. Set it chasing a hot, rippling heaven from which illness and pain have been removed forever. Set it fleeing the silent darkness that is always at its heels. Suck it out. Sew it up. Run. When the dark comes, pray: I love my ass.

I button my coat and let myself sweat. I try to think of something else. I think of an interview I heard with a religious person who had two kinds of cancer. The radio host asked her if she’d prayed for God to heal her. She said that she had and that it hadn’t worked. When she realized she was going to die, she asked God why He hadn’t healed her, and He answered. She actually heard His voice. He said, “But I am.”

I am not religious, but when I heard that, I said yes inside. I say it now. I don’t know why. There’s a reason, but it’s outside my vision.

On the sidewalk, leaves dissolve into mud. Another door opens and Veronica comes out, exhaling her smoke with a swift, cool snort. “No, hon,” she says. “That’s your sphincter.” The mud and leaves go into a slow churn, so slow that it’s invisible to me, but I can feel it. I feel something rising from the churning, also invisible. Something we haven’t killed and never will.