Veronica

5

I went to community college two more semesters. Instead of poetry, I concentrated on word-processing classes. When I felt I was skilled enough to get a job, I quit. I moved to Manhattan when a friend of a friend told me about a friend (named Candy) who needed a roommate for a six-month sublet. My father said, “Why? You were doing so well.” I told him, “Because I’m too bored to live here,” and he just shook his head. “You always expected so much,” said my mother. “You expect even more after what happened. You have to enjoy what you have.” And I replied, “But I don’t have anything here. I need to go where I can have something.” My father looked down and left the room. I had hurt him, but he couldn’t do anything about it — I still had what was left of the French money and I could do what I wanted.

Ed drove me to the city with some furniture, clothing, and a few plants. My sublet was a loft in the meatpacking district, a labyrinth of sleeping rough-faced buildings with sweet and rotting breath. We took my bags up in a clanking freight elevator with a frayed cable that you could see quivering tensely through the broken ceiling fan. When we reached the top, we emerged to find a stout gray-haired man in leather unlocking his door. “We use that elevator to remove the bodies of our victims,” he said. He spoke in an aggressive, fluting little voice. “Welcome to New York,” he added, and shut himself in. The door across from him opened. “Don’t pay any attention to Percival,” said Candy. “He’s just being silly again.”

Candy was a pretty southern girl with a weak chin, wearing pink paisley shoes. She smiled and led us down a long hall to a big living room lined with huge windows full of daylight. She made us martinis and said, “Don’t you think we’re special people to be in a loft in Manhattan, drinking real martinis?”

Late that night, the sleeping buildings woke and opened for business. I stood in a window as tall as a door and watched heavy trucks feed fresh-killed beef to an openmouthed warehouse across the street. The light from the open mouth shone on one and a half cows at a time, their bodies hanging inverted on the conveyor belt, heads wagging on fresh-cut throats, horned shadows nodding on the warehouse wall. The belt droned and the massed corpses danced with jiggling forefeet. The man operating the belt whistled a song. A snout and gentle brow was flung out, then rolled back into the mass. The man driving the truck joked with the man running the belt. I can accept this, I thought. I can live this life.

The next morning, I began interviewing for secretarial positions, including one at an intellectual magazine run by a tiny woman with a dry face. “I quite like you,” said the woman. “There’s something spooky and incongruous about you. You don’t look like a girl from a community college in New Jersey, but unfortunately, that’s what you are. Everyone else I’ve spoken to is more qualified than you — though likely you’d do the job better.” She gave me an application and told me to call her in a few days.

“She must really like you,” whispered her current secretary as I left the office. “She usually rolls her eyes at me when she’s seeing people out.”

“What the hell would you do in a place like that?” asked Ed. “It doesn’t pay, and she’s obviously a bitch.”

“I could learn about editing. I could become an assistant and then something else.”

He was visiting me for the weekend. We’d just seen a movie and we were walking to a Korean deli for bags of cherries and grapes. There were a lot of hookers standing around, flashing like something at the bottom of a deep well. A tall black girl and a little blonde came into the store behind us to buy cigarettes and two rolls of breath mints. The man behind the counter said, “Hey, slim” to the black girl. When we left, Ed said, “I saw you looking at them.”

“So?”

“You look at those girls, those whores, like they’re something great.”

“It’s just … those two in the store were really pretty. The black girl looked like a model.”

“A model! Are you kidding me? She didn’t look like a model. She looked like shit, because that’s what she is.”

“I know what a model looks like,” I said sharply.

We went to the loft and ate our fruit lying in my bed naked, piling the cherry pits in a white Kleenex on the bedside table.

“You’re not going to try to model?” he asked.

“No. And anyway, if you don’t like whores, you shouldn’t like models, either.”

I reminded him of Lisa at Naxos with her hand down her pants. For the dozenth time, he asked me if I had ever done anything like that. For the dozenth time, I said no, because I was the mistress of the most powerful agent in Europe and I didn’t have to. But a lot of girls did. We were quiet and I felt his discomfort. I stared at the ceiling, watching shadows come and go through a stretched square of light. Soon he would want to go, and I would let him.

I called the tiny dry editor. “Goodness,” she said. “I had completely forgotten about you. I’m afraid this week’s not so good after all. I still haven’t looked at your application. Could you call next week?”

“Do you think she’s serious?” I asked Candy.

“I don’t know,” she said. “She sounds like a bitch.”

I registered at a temp agency with stick furniture and a thin carpet, the color of which made me think of cholera. When I walked in, the gimlet girl behind the desk sat up straight and stared. I remembered my fifteen-year-old enemy, one sharp elbow sticking out as she stroked the dresses that lay over her arm. I applied for a word-processing job and checked the box that said “night shift.” She sent me to an advertising firm that evening.

The office was on the forty-second floor of a beautiful half cylinder of steel and glass. The word-processing room was large and curved, with whole walls made of enormous windows that had no glare on them. The supervisor showed me to my desk — a section of long table blocked off by low plastic barriers. Some day workers were finishing up a birthday party at the end of the table. There was laughter and crumbling cake. I turned on my machine, and a black square of infinity appeared, one flashing square star in its upper left corner. There was a burst of laughter. I glanced sideways and saw a strange little figure coming down the hall. From a distance, her whole face looked askew, puckered like flesh around a badly healed wound. She came closer. I saw the wounded pucker was a smile. She sat across from me. “Hi, hon,” she said.

The mouth of the canyon opens to swallow the road. I walk down its slippery muddy throat. Old trees slowly tip into the ravine, gripping the crumbling pavement on one side, seizing fists of wet earth on the other. Their root systems come out of the soaked embankment like facial bones, clenched in unseeable expressions. At the bottom, their children — oak and madrone — stand close together and hold open their shining arms. They are covered to the waist with wet chartreuse moss; it grows away from the trunks in long green hairs that stand in the air like prehensile sense organs. I take off a glove and stroke the cold fur, then sniff my rank, wormy palm. I put my hand on the tree again to see my white skin against the green. When I was a kid, chartreuse was my favorite color. But I didn’t think it was real.

Up close, she was not askew in any way. She was monstrously ordered. In her plaid suit, ruffled blouse, and bow tie, she was like a human cuckoo clock. She gave me a pursed smile, lighted a cigarette, and opened a magazine. We sat a long time with no work. I stared out the window. The East River became a dark length of flickering movement with a lit boat on it. In Queens, the neon sign of a sugar factory rose up, its script burning red and radiant in the night.

“Excuse me,” said Veronica. “Have you spent time in Paris, hon?”

I was surprised, but I just said, “Yeah.”

“I thought so. You have a Parisian aura.” She turned her head sideways and worked her throat, head back, cigarette angled rakishly up and out. “I haven’t been there for ages, but I do so well remember the Jardin du Luxembourg in autumn, with the yellow horse chestnuts in bloom.”

We were paired again for the next three nights. I got used to the strange, strident pitch of her voice, even felt oddly caressed by its twists and changes. I talked to her about looking for a job. I told her about the editor calling me “spooky and incongruous.”

“Really? Dorothea Atcheson called you spooky? How delightful.”

“You know her?”

“Not personally. But I’ve read her publication.”

“I filled out an application, but when I called her, she said she’d forgotten about me. Then she said to call back this week. Do you think she’s serious?”

“No. Yes. Who knows if anybody’s serious? But I can imagine Dorothea Atcheson would appreciate you.”

Her voice on appreciate was like the rough tongue of a cat absently licking a kitten on the head. I could not help raising my head to meet it.

The next day, I called Dorothea Atcheson. “You’re going to think I’m awful,” she said, “but I’ve lost your application. Do you suppose you could run by the office and fill out another one?”

“Well,” said Veronica. She drew on her cigarette and tipped her head back; her throat beat like an intelligent heart. She exhaled and asked, “Have you ever seen A Star Is Born with Judy Garland and James Mason?”

I shook my head.

“It’s worth buying a VCR for, but barring that, look for it late on the Movie Channel; they show it constantly.” She smoked; her heart-throat beat. “It’s about a girl whose dreams aren’t big enough, who gets a break and becomes a star.”

“My dreams aren’t the problem. I’m looking for a job as a secretary and I can’t get one because I’m not qualified.”

“Judy Garland isn’t qualified, either! But she meets someone who sees her qualities, who believes in her.”

Another proofreader, a balding little queen named Alan, wheeled round in his frayed throne. “And then he kills himself because she’s left him in the dust.”

“ ‘It’s too late!’ ” cried Veronica. “ ‘I destroy everything I touch. I always have! You’ve come too late!’ ”

“ ‘No!’ ” fluted Alan. “ ‘It’s not too late, not for you, not for me!’ ”

“ ‘Believe it!’ ” exulted Veronica. “ ‘Believe it! Believe it!’ ” In nine of the pictures, it was ridiculous and ugly. But in the tenth one, it was thrilling. I smiled.

Veronica exhaled her smoke and smiled back with fierce, fancy-twisted warmth. “You won’t be here long, hon,” she said. “Trust me.”

I cross into the canyon on a wooden footbridge. The stream below is awake and rushing, light tossing on its cold flux. Silver wrinkles flow in a quick sheet, churn into foam, disperse and sink, flow up and wrinkle the water again. Bright algae, pebbles, and tiny fish stir back and forth. I step off the bridge; huge and calm, the landscape unfolds. Silent and still, it rings with force and hidden motion. The ringing strength is like blood singing in the body of the ground — passionate music you don’t hear with your ear, but feel just outside your senses. Redwoods rise up straight; madrones elegantly wind. Soaked moss and brilliant leaves fill the air with green and tender feeling. Tenderness seeps into and softens my fever. The unfolding deepens.

I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook. The city was so big and bright that for a moment my terrible heaven paled, then went invisible. I thought it was gone, but what I couldn’t see, I felt walking next to me in streets full of vying people. I felt it in their fixed outthrust faces, their busy rigid backs, their jiggling jewelry, their creeping and swagger. I felt it in the office workers who perched in flocks on the concrete flower boxes of giant corporate banks, eating their lunches over crossed legs and rumpled laps, the wind blowing their hair in their chewing mouths and waves of scabby pigeons surging at their feet, eating the bits that fell on the pavement. I felt it in the rough sensate hands of subway musicians playing on drums and guitars while the singer collected money with his cup, still singing like he was talking to himself in a carelessly beautiful voice while riders streamed down concrete stairs like drab birds made fantastic in flight. I felt monstrous wants and gorgeous terrors that found form in radio songs, movie screens, billboards, layers of posters on decayed walls, public dreams bleeding into one another on cheap paper like they might bleed from person to person. I took it in and fed on it, and for a while, that was enough.

Then one day on my way to work, a cab stopped in front of me on a trash-blown street and Alana got out. I looked at her and my breath stopped. She slammed the cab door; her shining hair flashed about her face. I stood still while everybody else crossed the street. She walked lightly in neat white boots, but her eyes gave off the cold glow of an eel whipping through remote water. Down, down through the water floated a magazine picture of a girl in crumpled lace. A picture like a door with music behind it, rolling with the water and soon to be erased by it. “Alana,” I said, but too softly. She walked past me without turning. My face burned. And I wanted heaven again.

But I didn’t know how to get it. Before I had gotten it because a hand had picked me up and put me in the middle of it. Then I lost it because a hand removed me. I knew Alain’s hand could reach across the ocean; I knew he was associated with two powerful New York agencies. Candy said he probably had too much on his mind to bother with me. But she hadn’t seen him naked, with coke coming out his nose, pacing and yelling into the phone, looking for people who might’ve said something bad about him just so that he could fuck them up. Years later and miles away, I still saw him. I saw my hands walking on rich red carpet like paws, me laughing at my legs in the air and his dick inside me. Or panting and openmouthed, a tiny strand of saliva glistening between me and the rug before it dropped.

I looked for another hand to find me. I walked the street, searching for men in beautiful suits, searching their faces for the lips of a spider drinking blood with pure, blank bliss. If I found one, I would look into his eyes, and usually he would look back. If he asked me for my number, I would ask him for his card. The first few times, I looked at the card, put it in my pocket, and mentally threw it away. The last time, I dropped it on the pavement and cursed the gentleman spider to his face.

I stopped looking for a permanent job. I went out whenever I could, under any circumstance. When Sheila’s cousin in Brooklyn had a birthday party, I took the train out, only to stand in a sparsely furnished room with strangers. When a temp at the office gave a reading combined with a dance performance, I showed up to watch determined girls in leotards creep and crouch across a ratty stage drenched in nightmare orange. A friend of Candy’s — a harmless girl I despised for being harmless — invited us to a bachelorette party and I went.

No matter how unfashionable the party, fashionable music was always playing. The fashion then was silly and sepulchral at once, with hopping, skipping beats playing off a funereal overlay. Somebody sang, “This kiss will never fade away,” his voice like an oily black machine operating a merry-go-round of music flying on grossly painted wings. “It’s about the bombing of Dresden,” said a drunk boy. “Excuse me,” I said, and walked away. Heat flared in the flying music, then died like an explosion seen from far away. People walked around smiling and talking while the music likened mass death to a kiss and gave silliness a proud twist to its head. This kiss will never fade away. Alain kissed me forever while I stood on the outskirts of parties, watching people who meant something to one another. A fat person with an outthrust jawbone took someone’s hand and squeezed it; there was a burst of goodwill. A woman with desperately bony calves, made stark by her big high heels, grinned at someone across the room, her grin a signal of deep things inside both of them that nobody else could see. Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the thrusting jaw and the bony calves and turned up my nose. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world described by music — a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too, singing on the surface of its human heart as the machine spread through its tissues and silenced the flow of its blood. In this world, there were no deep things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty, and even songs about mass death could be sung on the light and playful surface of the heart.

I didn’t say any of this. I didn’t even think it. But it was visible in the way I held my body, and in my bitter, despising eyes. Other people could see it in me as surely as I saw it in them. And so I was able to make friends. I went to nightclubs with an “actress” named Joy, who might’ve been a model if not for hips that would’ve been ungainly in a photograph, but which gave her living walk a pleasing, viscous reek. She worked as a hostess in a piano bar, where she got paid to drink and talk to lonely businessmen. She lived in a tiny shotgun apartment piled with dirty dishes, cat boxes, and open jars of clawed-at cold cream. Hurled pairs of pants tried to flee across the couch; wilted dresses snored on the kitchen chairs. The two cats tore the stuffing out of the couch and rolled toilet paper down the hall. During the day, Joy sat in this ragged nest like a princess, bathing in the kitchen with one gleaming pink foot perched on the edge of the tub, or sitting wrapped in a soiled comforter to drink coffee and eat cheesecake out of a tin. At night, she sailed out wearing absurd clothes as if they were Givenchy gowns. Once when I complimented her on one of her mismatched earrings, she pointed at the sky and said, “That earring means, Don’t look at my finger; look at the moon.”

Together, we were assured admittance to exclusive clubs where, lifted up and out of the hoi polloi and deposited at the entrance by the doorman’s fastidious gaze, we handed our coats to a gaunt creature in a coat-lined cave, then walked down the glowing sound-chamber hall, where music, lightly skipping in the main rooms, here bumbled from wall to wall like a ghost groaning in purgatory. We turned a corner and the music showed its laughing public face. We entered the great night flower of fun, open and dark like a giant lily swarming with drunken fairies. Into the swarm we flew, Joy darting, hovering, seeking and finding the inevitable man handing out cocaine to girls.

Our conversation was so much torn paper on the surging current of our united forward intent. But at some point, she would lean with her hip against me, and her body would talk to me, light and charmingly, of earrings and the moon. And at some other point, I would emerge from the bathroom and she would be gone, leaving me to wander with drunken, burning eyes, seeking a way into heaven. Sometimes I would wake with a dry mouth in the dim apartment of a naked man who’d promised he was that way but whose snoring face now denied it.

If I called Joy, she would tell me of her own adventures, of this one’s amazing kiss, or that one’s art-world status. Otherwise, I didn’t hear from her until she wanted to go out again; if I wasn’t able to go out that night, she quickly got off the phone.

Then there was Cecilia, with whom I went to movies and coffee and sometimes dinner. She had meager beauty and magnificent style. Her face was made of such dramatic planes that I remember her with her big bossy nose on sideways, one intense little eye to the side of it and the other peering over its humped middle. She wore jewelry and hats and she sat in a sideways twist. She wrote plays. She had a rich family, who paid for her huge place; when she was depressed and feeling “trapped,” she would check into a suite at the Plaza for the weekend and return feeling refreshed. Most of our conversations were ironic and lively on the first layer, blunt and fixed on the second and only layer down. But she once called me late at night, crying because she felt ashamed of her wealth and her privileged family. “We thought we were so great because magazines came and photographed our fucking unlivable living room. But we were shit! Alison, we were shit! I don’t want to be shit! I want to be a real person!” I didn’t know what to say; dimly I understood, and was moved. But when I called her the next day, she just talked about a party she was giving, one to which she had not invited me. “I need people who can talk about the arts and current events,” she said. “It’s that kind of party.”

“That is so rude,” said Candy.

But to me, it wasn’t. I understood that Cecilia looked at me as an object with specific functions, because that’s how I looked at her. Without knowing it, that is how I looked at everyone who came into my life then. This wasn’t because I had no feelings. I wanted to know people. I wanted to love. But I didn’t realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn’t realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn’t know how to be with another person. I could only fix that person in my imagination and turn him this way and that, trying to feel him, until my mind was tired and raw.

Heart pounding dully, I climb the outer ridge of a small but steep hill. I can smell my fever coming off me like mist. Tired and raw. My whole being is tired and raw. At the top of the hill are rotting trees, dying as they stand. I shouldn’t be walking up this hill. I should be home in bed. With each step, I sway in my basket of tendons and bones, my mind too weak to turn anything any way. My mind can’t protect me from feeling, and I’m glad for that. Sight and sound flow into it; feeling bleeds out of it. I walk up the mountain now because soon I may be too sick to do it. But still, I’m glad.

At the bottom of the ridge, dead oaks have fallen, blanched as old bones, dry even in the rain. Above me, living trees list and groan. I climb over the bones. The gray bark of the freshly dead is loose and cracked open; pale lacy whorls of fern cling to it in clumps, like tangled baby’s hair. Sensitive and perseverant, they cling to and comfort death. Beneath the fern, the bark is mottled with light green mold, feeding lovingly. My thoughts dissolve in the gray and green, traveling from life to death to life.

I did not fix Veronica in my mind, or turn her this way and that, because I didn’t care about her. But I was tolerant enough to take her in at the regular low decibel of work-time conversation. I was not interested in her, but I was curious about her, like I might be curious about an elaborate object. The cuckoo clock sounded the hour; the bird popped out. I listened to her talk about her movies, her six seal-point Siamese cats, and her bisexual boyfriend, Duncan. On either side of the clock face, tiny wooden doors sprang open and figures with blind eyes and puckered lips came whirring out to kiss.

She and Duncan picnicked in Central Park late at night, she in a white lace dress, he in gray flannel pants and a straw boater. They packed their basket with smoked salmon, white bread, pâté, olives, grapes, and deviled eggs. They lounged in the black and shadowed grass, drinking wine from the bottle. La Bohème played on a cheap cassette deck with spools that creaked and strained. “Quando men vo soletta per la via,” sang Duncan, “la gente sosta e mira e la bellezza mia …” A gang of tough black kids drew near, then withdrew in bewilderment, one of them looking wide-eyed over his shoulder as he went. Duncan said, “Just a minute,” then got up and walked away. Veronica was left alone with love creaking and straining in the dark. An enormous cloud streamed across the sky, making the moon a radiant blur. It was beautiful, the voices coming out of the tiny machine to deepen a patch of night, a shimmering skin of eternal love cracked and strained, with mortality coming through. “Così l’effluvio del desìo tutta m’aggira, felice mi fa, felice mi fa!” Her heart beat. She was afraid. Some bushes stirred. Had Duncan gone to the wide-eyed boy? She sat up, heart pounding. But it was him, coming back to her — and with him were two ragged white children, a small boy and a smaller girl.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“They lived in the tunnels under the subways. They’d come up looking for food for their family. Duncan knew the boy somehow — not that way, he said.”

The boy stood whispering to Duncan. The girl squatted next to Veronica, blinking curiously. Her clothes, her face, her hair were coated in oily gray dirt. When Veronica called her “hon,” she bared her teeth, then smiled. Veronica wanted to take them to the police, but they shook their heads vehemently; the cops would take them from their parents, said the boy. Instead, they greedily ate the grapes and then the bread. Veronica wished they had cookies to give them; she wished she could comb the girl’s hair. Duncan asked about somebody named Ray; in a careful voice, the boy said he was sick. They put the rest of the food in the basket and gave it to the children. They watched them carry it into the dark, each holding the handle like a modern Hansel and Gretel, filthy, sick, and innocent.

“Who was Ray?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Another of Duncan’s boys, I assume. Excuse me, hon.” In a curve of light on the convex face of my screen, Veronica’s tiny reflection approached the supervisor’s tiny desk. The fun-house curve stretched her body pencil-thin, then mashed it, then pulled it grossly wide. I had a second of feeling — what was it? She came back, gross, mashed, elongated, then, stepping out of the curve, disappeared.

Another time, they went to the Museum of Modern Art, then returned to the park to ride the carousel, where stumbling security guards chased a shrieking homeless woman around the rising, falling ponies. They dined with an elegant old man, an author and lover of opera—“He once cared for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dogs, exquisite chows”—who called them “Lord and Lady Bracknell.”

“To lose one’s girlfriend is perhaps careless,” said Lord Bracknell. “But to lose one’s boyfriend is incorrigible.”

“To lose one’s boyfriend is also impossible,” replied Lady Bracknell, “when one has so many.”

“Ah, but so many is the same as one, my love, and their one is nothing to your two.”

Lady Bracknell’s words were elegant in fragrant shapely smoke fresh from her throat. The red impress of her striated lower lip was perfect on her Styrofoam cup. The sugar sign beamed its red message across the river. Safety, it said. Stillness. Sweetness.

Lord Bracknell’s young lover arrived and there was a scene. He was a somewhat unclean but fetching boy with pocked skin and sullen, flashing eyes. He looked at Lady Bracknell and said, “Who’s the fish?” “Better fresh fish than rotten meat,” said she. “You don’t look so fresh to me,” he sniffed. “I’m still fresher than you smell, young man.” Lord Bracknell laughed like a hyena in a lace ruff and kissed his lady good-bye, first on her lips and then her hand. He was off into the night with his protégé. Veronica shared a cab home with the elegant and embarrassed old man. The little wooden doors had whirred shut on the little kissing figures.

I stop to wipe the sweat gathered at my eyebrows. My bad arm twinges as I crush it against my side, pinning the umbrella in place while I get the aspirin and water bottle from my bag. I imagine massed atoms of gray and green rising from the ground in a moving cloud, twinkling like motes of dust, except alive, complex, full of joy and perversity. Alain’s eyes — perhaps they were the human form of this. Perhaps Duncan was the human form of this in his entirety. I imagine myself blundering through a night haunt, amid plain people dressed so fantastically, they make my beauty trite — an enormous cloud streams across the room and there is Duncan, singing, “E tu che sai, che memori e ti struggi da me tanto rifuggi.” I go into a bathroom, where the thudding music is dulled, and there a tinny thread of La Bohème flashes and disappears amid voices and rushing water — back to the enchanted park where Veronica and Duncan picnicked with their children. Walking home one morning — cold white sky with a thin aura of liquid gold quivering on buildings and roaring trucks — I saw a prostitute haggling with a john. Mockingly, she shouted, “Hey, blondie!” There was Duncan kissing Veronica in the street, and I did not care about heaven.

I smiled and said, “Good morning!” with such warmth that the prostitute looked abashed.

“Have you ever thought of modeling, hon?”

“I already was a model.” I didn’t take my eyes off the word processor.

“Really? What kind? Catalog or—”

“Print. Runway. Paris.”

“And what are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m here because I got cheated out of all my money and made bad enemies.” I trembled inside to talk about it. My contempt rose up to steady my trembling. “It’s a horrible business,” I snapped. “I’d never do it again.”

There was a wondering silence. Veronica smoked with her lips in a sideways purse so she could stare at me as she inhaled; her eyes flared with each tiny facial twist.

“How did you get into modeling to begin with?”

“By fucking a nobody catalog agent who grabbed my crotch.”

I didn’t have to be embarrassed or make up something nice, because Veronica was nobody. My disdain was so habitual, I didn’t notice it. But she did. She said, “Every pretty girl has a story like that, hon. I had that prettiness. I have those stories. I don’t have to do that anymore, though. It’s my show now.” And she turned into a movie star, strutting past me while I gawked.

It’s raining again. I am deep in the unfolding. All around me living green opens and closes, undulating in ripples and great waves. The creek flashes, eager for the piercing rain, its hard, concentrated pouring. A slim tree naked of bark, ocher, smooth, comes out of the ground in a sinuous twist. A piece of fungus grows in a neat half wheel around a twig, like a hat on a lady with a long neck. I think of Veronica. I speak aloud. “I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s nobody’s show now.”

“Well, hon, if I were you, I’d try again. This is New York, not Paris.” She lighted another cigarette. “But this time, don’t let anybody grab your crotch.” And she smiled.

One evening when I was walking in the East Village with Candy, we came on a party that had spilled out of an apartment building; people stood on the sidewalk, drinking from plastic cups, or lounged on the hoods of cars, like the girl in black laughing at the boy who tried to kiss the bottom of her silver shoe. Music fell out windows, splattered on the ground, got up, and walked away. Candy recognized somebody; he invited us into a tiled hallway (blue, gold, and ruined white) and up a linoleum stair to a large apartment sagging on its moldings and vibrating with many feet. Because I had to work that night, I drank orange juice straight and wandered through the party, bored by but still accepting the expression that rose on every face as I went past. “Beautiful.” “Beautiful!” “Bee-oot-ee-fool.” The expression might be formed with wonder or contempt or warmth or disinterest, but it was still the same coin I mechanically took and tossed on the pile. Half-looking for something else, I walked past a partially open door and saw a well-dressed boy sitting on a bed, gazing at the party with a look of intent, distant amusement. He held a worn toy dog on his lap, which he stroked as if it were a pet. There was something mocking in the gesture, as if it were meant to subtly ridicule anyone who saw it. When he saw me, his expression offered me the coin, but so casually that it fell on the floor before I could take it. He was very handsome himself. “Hello,” he said, holding the toy dog up to his face. “Would you like to meet Skipper?”

His name was Jamie. His soft voice was desiccated and voluptuous at once. He said he was in his room because it was his roommate’s party and he didn’t expect to be interested in anyone there, and besides, he was shy. A fragile system of model airplanes hung from the ceiling over his bed, casting soft, gently stirring shadows. “These are beautiful,” I said. I reached up to touch one; shyly, the system dipped and bobbed.

“Skipper likes you,” he said.

We left the party and went for a walk. On the bottoms of his severely pointed shoes, Jamie wore cleats, which clicked loudly on the pavement. The only people I’d ever known to wear cleats were middle-school boys, who wore them so they could kick hard and make a lot of noise when they walked. I asked Jamie why he wore them, and he said, “I just like them.” His words were modest, but they whirred with secret importance. He said everything that way. The British monarchy was very important; Prince Charles’s recent marriage was particularly so. Ornette Coleman was the only good jazz musician. He approved of men’s shoes on women. He approved of Buckminster Fuller and Malcolm McLaren. He approved of Bow Wow Wow.

His opinions were frivolous, fierce, and exact. He worked in a small graphics plant that made logos and labels for sundry products. But he was as proud and particular as any Parisian playboy. His favorite logo was the brand name of a line of white paper sacks commonly used by small grocers; I had never noticed, but TORNADO was printed in brown letters with a vibrant round T at the top of each bag. “It’s so elegant,” he said, and it was.

When I told him I had to go to work, he asked if he could see me again, and I said yes. He hailed me a cab and I got into it even though I could only afford to take it to the nearest subway.

I think of Jamie and silliness pops out of the ground in the form of a California hazelnut, bearing its tasseled foliage on each slim branch. Amid death and groaning wooden power and the wet complexity of moss and fungus and vines — from the same solemn pit, silliness pops up to dangle its tassels. Jamie. Alain. Joanne. We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass.

I saw Jamie again and we went for another walk. We bought tinned sardines and potato chips and candy, then went back to his apartment to eat. His roommates weren’t home. We finished our dinner and talked until it was so dark, we could see each other only as dim shapes. Jamie didn’t turn on the light. Shadow airplanes appeared and disappeared as headlights swept the wall. “Would you like to take a bath together?” he asked.

In the claw-foot bathtub, I sat between his legs while he held me from behind. Out a low half-moon window was the back of an abandoned building and a piece of illuminated street: the deep gray stone of the building stippled with scars and holes, squares of sidewalk, a lip of curb, a groove of gutter, the melancholy gray of the street. On the street a dog came trotting, chin raised and tail up, all brisk paws, ears, and snout. Jamie laughed; laughing, I turned and he held my face in his wet hands and kissed my forehead, then my closed eyes.

He was gentle in a way that I had not experienced before. He touched me intimately but also somewhat impersonally. He was polite, yet dirty, too. He was covered with soft black hair, which seemed at odds with his sleek habits of dress; with his clothes off, he revealed his nature, without any cleats or clothes to hold it up, and it was wonderful to see, like the coarse little dog prancing down the street.

“You should model,” he said. He was lying on top of me, feeling my eyebrows with his lower lip. “You could make money.”

“I already did,” I said. “I didn’t like it.”

“Class,” he said warmly. “You have class.”

But I was lying.

Candy didn’t like Jamie because he was affected and because he was short and cold with her. “He makes such a big deal out of himself — those stupid cleats and that toy dog — and I don’t think there’s anything there.”

But that wasn’t true. There was something “there.” Something so scornful that it willfully stunted itself just to withhold itself; something so scared that it blindly clung to objects like toys and cleats, pitifully trying to blossom, jealously nursing its own pathos and mocking it, too.

“It’s glamour in its purest form,” said Veronica. “I approve.”

She spoke of fey youths she had known, of their clothes and hair, the petulant swing of their slim hips. Of one who tried to kill himself with pills and wound up curled in a corner of her apartment, alternately sobbing in her lap and barfing in her wicker basket.

“It’s so moving, that artificiality,” she said, “moving and wistful. Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you ever saw. But my advice to you, hon, is not to go looking for it. You’ll see it eventually.” She exhaled a noseful of smoke. “Probably in your nice wicker basket.”

Of course, she was wearing men’s shoes. She was also wearing a cable-knit sweater with raised colored animal shapes knit into it: a cat, a dog, a rooster. Red, green, and orange on peach. Frivolous, exact, and fiercely ugly.

In September, the sublet with Candy ended. I found a new sublet, a tiny apartment in the West Village; I used the last of my French money for the deposit. It was a studio with a stove, a refrigerator, and a sink on one wall and a bed on the other, both walls boxed in by a window on one end and a closet on the other. The window was protected by a metal grid that had gotten stuck shut; to open it, I had to poke a broom handle through one of the grid’s diamond-shaped gaps, manipulate the latch with it, and nudge the window open. Not much sun came in, but when it did, it made a wobbling grid of diamonds on the floor.

When Sheila came to visit from New Jersey, she said, “God! You have to do that every time you open the window?” She told me Lucia was pregnant again. She told me she had been promoted to store manager. We went to Central Park, where we rented a rowboat and rowed on the lake. She let her hand trail in the water and her face grew wistful and luminous. Her face was tense for a twenty-year-old girl. Heavy like her will was pushing down, trying to crush something deep inside her, tense like the crushed thing was pushing back. I thought, She is ugly already. As if she heard me, she frowned and drew her hand from the water. “Did you know Ed is seeing Denise?” she asked.

I didn’t see Sheila or Candy again. I saw Jamie every night I could. We would go for walks and buy our dinner to take back home and eat. Sometimes he would take me to secondhand stores in the East Village and tell me what clothes to buy. Sometimes we would go to clubs and meet his friends, people with changeable hair and light, pointedly civil manners. One of them, a pleasant blond named Eric, with the faintly impossible air of someone who had never been hurt, told me I was stupid not to model. He worked at a magazine made up almost exclusively of pictures of models and actors. “Nobody likes it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter; you only do it a few years and make a lot of money.” When I told him about Alain, he scoffed.

“Did you steal anything from him?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “he stole from me.”

“Then he doesn’t remember you. Everybody knows he’s crazy anyway.”

Eric was only an assistant at the magazine, but he said he could introduce me to a photographer. “You just need pictures. Go to an agency; you’ll be working again. Just lie about your age.” He gave me his number. He smiled at the hunger that suddenly came into my eyes.

The photographer lived with his assistant in a loft in the flower district. It was cold and the flower stands were closed. Their rough doors looked boarded up; their dark windows were haunted by ghostly stalks and stems and cold, faint-gleaming pots. The photographer was three flights up. We sat in his kitchen smoking hash and drinking tea from china cups, talking about Paris. There was a big tub in the kitchen, an unhinged door on the tub, and a dish drain on the door. Old trunks and makeshift wardrobes draped in musty clothes spilled in from the bedroom, and the assistant, a serious boy with the short, sweet legs of a child, deftly picked through them. They dressed me in a red jumpsuit with a white plastic belt and matching white boots. The photographer said, “You’re a Bond girl!” From out of the past, spy music brayed. I grinned and, legs widely akimbo in my little boots, pointed my finger to shoot Alain through the heart.

“Do you think he was a real photographer?” asked Joy.

“Real, yes. Good, I don’t know.”

We were at her house, drinking red wine and half-watching a black-and-white movie on TV. Except for one little lamp draped with a shirt, the lights were off to hide the mess. In the gray glow of the television, Joy applied hot blue nail polish and talked about another audition that had gone badly. As she talked, a girl’s face appeared on the television, ardent and soft, with millions of light cells flowing through it. Her dark liquid eyes were vulnerable, joyful and radiant with hope.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this A Star Is Born?”

“No, it’s Judy Garland, though. It’s Presenting Lily Mars, which was before she got all pitiful. So anyway—”

Quick, smart, and tremulous, the girl’s voice was full of hot life rising out of her own liquid darkness. In nine pictures, she was a charming actress at the top of her form. In the tenth picture, she was a child crying because she’d dropped her radiant hope into a deep pool, where everyone could see it but she could never feel it. Believe! Believe! Believe! I don’t know what she was saying, but that is what I heard.

When I saw the contact sheets, my heart sank. But Eric said they were great, and so I went to an agency wedged between a discount furrier and a furniture outlet. Sweating men carrying a houndstooth sofa wrapped in flapping plastic gawked at me on their way to a gaping truck.

“Beautiful,” said one.

I opened the shining glass door.

“Cold feesh,” said the other.

The door closed behind me.

A Ms. Stickle stared at the contacts up close and at arm’s length.

Voices rose over the cheap walls of her cubicle; one was crass, one was rapid, and one was a child staring shyly at its lap. So, sweetie, what’s your bra size?… You don’t know? Let’s measure it.… Can you call your mother?… tape measure?

“How old are you?” asked Ms. Stickle.

“Eighteen,” I replied, lying.

“Hum.” She pushed the pictures across the desk. “These photos are too downtown. See a real photographer and come back.”

She says it’s — My God, will you look at this?

“Can you recommend somebody?”

Ms. Stickle grimaced. Then she wrote a name and number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me without looking.

Well, she is a monster.

This photographer was a thin, small man with soft, sexy jowls and gloating eyes that made you feel like he was examining your ass even when he wasn’t. He slathered hair gel on his hands and asked what sign I was. I said, “Scorpio.”

“I thought so.” He worked the gel into my hair so it stood up and away from my head. “I can tell you are strong.” He stepped away and signaled his assistant. “But even so, I could dominate you completely.”

That established, he photographed me in his bathroom, where I leaned into the mirror in an ill-used evening gown, then on the roof in a white shirt and black leather jacket.

I took the pictures back to Ms. Stickle. Once again, she sighed and stared as voices spoke into the air. “Don’t know,” she finally murmured. “I can’t tell if I love you or hate you.”

I went to another agent. He tapped his finger on the shot of me in the white shirt. “This one,” he said. “This one almost makes me feel something.”

“I thought you didn’t want to do it,” said Jamie.

“I need money.”

We were on my bed, eating hot cereal, a box of sugar on the rumpled bedding between us.

“You could work at the Peppermint.”

“I wouldn’t want to be there all the time.”

He carefully poured a layer of sugar on his cereal and ate it with shallow bites. “Where do you want to be?” he asked.

The season got cold and dark. When I arrived at work, people would be putting on their hats and tying their scarves; one girl, with wavy brown hair and a rosy, commonly pretty face, would tuck her chin against her lapel and button her coat with trustful, parted lips — her hands the mother, her body the tenderly buttoned child. Outside, night was already putting on its neon, and traffic was laying the streets with knotted jewelry. Veronica would come down the hall, her walk a waddle and a vamp, a bag of snacks bobbing at her side, her smile and waving hand stiff with routine.

Before she had been a proofreader, Veronica had been a secretary at a screenwriters’ agency. She’d been an assistant script doctor for a television show that I’d never heard of. She’d written flap copy for a publishing house that had gone out of business. In college, she had been a social-work intern with a caseload in the worst neighborhood in Watts. Her first day, a young thug asked if she was the new social worker; she mimicked her own dumb grin and her “Yes.” He asked if he could walk with her, and she said yes again. As they walked, he told her the previous social worker had been shot.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“No, I was too stupid. Anyway, he walked with me long enough for people to see us together. Later I realized he was a member of the neighborhood gang and it was to my advantage to be seen with him.”

“Did he come on to you?”

“No. He was protecting me. He was a gentleman.” She turned sideways to smoke, and when she turned back, her mouth had a little sarcastic twist. But her eyes were wide and suddenly deep. She had been given something by this thug-boy gentleman, and she had kept it. She was showing me that with her eyes.

“What was it like being a social worker there?”

“I was twenty-three years old. I was ignorant. I came from a psychotic family. That’s what it was like. Except for one thing.” She put out her cigarette with a proud, bristling air, and told me the story of a cat named Baldie, a stray that lived under a table at the community center where some of her cases played pool. One day, she brought in a can of cat food for him.

“At first, I thought they were angry at me, the men. They glared and they said, ‘He don’t know what to do with that. He ain’t never had anything that good in his life.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll just try,’ and I opened the can. They stopped playing pool and they all watched when I put it down. And Alison, the way that cat buried his head in that can!” She thrust her head down, fingers splayed, her refined voice rolling and softly gobbling. “He looked up at us, and if cats could cry, tears would’ve been streaming down his face. Nobody said a word. Then one of the men crouched down and held the can so the cat could get to it better.

“Every day after that, I brought in a can of food and every day the men would gather to watch Baldie eat. It was probably one of the few times they got to see a righteous need completely satisfied. When I quit, I left a case of food. I like to think they kept it up. They were hard people, but they had real hearts.” She shrugged. “That was the good thing that happened there.”

I come to a clearing filled with little sticks poking out of the ground. Whatever they had been, somebody had chopped them off. Hard people, real hearts. So many of Veronica’s stories were coarse and sentimental. Another time, she told me about being raped by a man who broke into her apartment. He said he was going to kill her, but she talked him out of it. “I told him, ‘If you kill me, you won’t be killing just one person. You’ll be killing my parents. They’re old and it would kill them to know their daughter died like that.’ ” She shrugged and held out her hands like a Borscht Belt comedian. “And he didn’t!” She smoked luxuriously and leaned back in her chair, into the sky with red writ across it. “He was very tender.” Her voice deepened; it became fulsome, indulgent, almost smug. “My rapist was very tender.”

Smart people would say she spoke that way about that story because she was trying to take control over it, because she wanted to deny the pain of it, even make herself superior to it. This is probably true. Smart people would also say that sentimentality always indicates a lack of feeling. Maybe this is true, too. But I’m sure she truly thought the rapist was tender. If he’d had a flash of tenderness anywhere in him, a memory of his mother, of himself as a baby, of a toy, she would’ve felt it because she was desperate for it. Even though it had nothing to do with her, she would’ve sought it, reaching for it as it sank away in a deep pool. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing—

I see myself, home for Christmas. There I am in the warm kitchen, seasonal music coming from the living room in great swollen chords. I see the red mixing bowl on the counter. I see the mixer, mashed potatoes stuck to its dull blades. My mother opens the oven; there is a golden turkey sweating juice. My father sits in his living room chair, his eyes like deep holes full of layered visions invisible to us. Good King Wenceslas looks down at pictures flashing on the mute TV. A local family is turned out of their apartment; alone and defiant, the mother leads her children down the hall, her eyes flaring into the camera. My mother stirs hunks of butter into the peas; she lays the pecan pies out on tattered pot holders. The local family finds shelter with a church group that has pledged to help them. Daphne decorates the tree with nimble, loving gestures. The children accept stuffed toys from strangers; their mother smiles and rapidly blinks. I light the red candles and put them on the dining room table. Rows and rows of wonderful cars are for sale. Santa takes aspirin for a headache. So bring him incense, gold, and myrrh; the music is deep and rich, with sparkling colors flashing in its depths. The TV station’s logo opens and closes like an eye. A mute reporter talks into a microphone; rows of hands pull up rows of pant legs to show rows of lesions. “This is outrageous!” cries my father. “Showing this tonight!” Mute doctors talk and speculate. “Everyone knows they’re diseased,” says my father. “We don’t need it shoved in our faces.”

The rooms roll by. In them, there are plates heaped with apples and oranges, bowls filled with nuts in complex, perfect shells. There are stockings our grandmother made for us before she died, our names spelled in felt letters. There is a crystal dish of cranberry sauce, marked around its shiny middle with the circular impress of its tin. There is a feeling of fear. It connects and holds and flavors everything else like aspic. My father gets up and turns off the TV. It is not really fear of homosexuals. That is just something to say. The real fear is of things that can’t be said. The fear shows through the purposeful expression in my mother’s eyes as she carries the turkey to the table. It gathers in every corner of the house and pools in the basement, where Sara hides in her room, splay-legged before the TV, eating painkillers and hard candy by the handful. My father searches, but his brother has gone too far away to find in any song; when my father looks, he reaches into darkness and grasps nothing.

Against this darkness, our stockings were filled with candy canes and little toys; the table was laden and the tree — a real one my father held upright while my mother and Daphne struggled with the screws in the metal stand — was decorated with ropes of lights and tinsel and dear, strange ornaments — striped balls and snowmen and a silver peacock with its face worn away. How sad and weak these talismans seemed to me, like the music my father played for men who turned away from him. How weak against the fear and the terrible unsaid things.

At night, when the others had gone to sleep, Daphne and I went out and walked in the neighborhood. Street and star light made the shoveled walks gray corridors of soft white mass and softer black shadow, and the crunch-crunch-crunch of our boots played up and down them in the ringing dark. Across the billowing snow, gaunt trees signed in shadow language. Modest houses hung their squares and rectangles with lights the blunt sweet colors of happiness — secret delight hidden in the cold body of winter. Felt but unseen except for now, the deity’s birthday, when people climb wobbling ladders to string symbolic lights on trees and around windows. Crunch-crunch. We used to run across these yards, shouting. There was a birdbath and a strawberry patch behind that house hidden in pine bushes, under a sloping roof swollen twice its size with snow. There was a little girl named Sheila Simmons, who sat on the sidewalk and played with a red rubber ball and a handful of shiny jacks. Crunch-crunch-crunch. In some glossy folded place, they were still there, unseen but felt. And so, unseen but felt, were the unsaid things.

“The thing is,” said Daphne, “his father was a wife-abusing drunk who was killed in a bar. His mother was crazy and his brother was really the one who raised him. And then his brother got killed. But his father was also this delicate, poetic person who sang for a living—”

Giant figures came from their folded places and loomed about us. Walking among them with the hood of her parka over her head, Daphne spoke in a low and rapid voice, hectoring and beseeching them at once.

“—and his brother was also this big, powerful, pragmatic jock type who didn’t really accept Daddy because he was like their father, and probably Uncle Ray could see that even then, the emotionality, the love of music, the fights over nothing.”

There was the Simmonses’ old house. Pale television light flashed on their ceiling, then darted down to flash even paler on the banked blue-shadowed snow outside their window. I wondered if they still lived there. A face emerged out of the dark; an open mouth and eye holes strained against the porous membrane of present time.

“Daddy must’ve looked up to Ray so much, but he couldn’t please him, and if he tried to emulate him, he’d have to fail. The one he could be like was his father, a dead failure, and he didn’t want to be that. So he didn’t have anyone to be.”

Quick and incessant, Daphne went on telling me things I had already heard, trying to say the unsaid things, to say them and say them and say them.

“Except for his mother, who favored him and expected him to be like his dad, wanted him to be, including the abuse, including the drinking, sending double messages, like wanting him to win the statewide spelling bee, and being thrilled when he did, until the next day, when—”

Our father’s father was a heavy drinker who, to supplement his income as a mail clerk, sang for tips at a local bar. One night, he got in the middle of a fight; a knife was pulled, and my father, ten, was orphaned because an ambulance blew a tire on a back road. (Somewhere the driver is still trying to change the tire while his rotating red light rhythmically drenches the dirt and sweeps the sky.) His brother, Ray, fourteen at the time, helped his mother support the family by going to work for a butcher. He enlisted in the army at eighteen and was dead at twenty-two. This we knew. The rest we had invented by looking at pictures of Ray and listening to things our mother had said in certain tones of voice. We’d gotten the story about the spelling bee from Daddy’s great-aunt Claire, who’d been at the bank when Daddy had gone with his mother to deposit the fifty-dollar prize he’d won. He told the teller about the spelling bee and his mother snapped, “Stop bragging on yourself, you swell-headed brat.”

Daphne gave a tense, shuddering sigh; her breath then was always high and strained. “Then Ray died in the war,” she said, “and he could be turned into the perfect brother who loved Daddy as much as Daddy loved him.” She finally fell silent, trying to calm her breath. Colorless smoke billowed out a chimney and rose churning into the sky. The folded place vanished. Our childhood slipped back through its private door. There was nothing but breathing and the light rub and rasp of our clothes. But somewhere, in the sky, in the snow, in a hidden, folded place between them, was a perfect brother who loved as much as he was loved.

When we got back, the house was warm and dark except for the Christmas tree, its burning lights making glowing caves in its branches, jeweled with soft colors and the lit intensity of tiny needles. The blood tingled in our legs as we stamped our feet on the front mat; dangling tinsel stirred with our motion, ghost light alive in each strand. It was beautiful and brimmed with love. Yet the unsaid things remained mute and obdurate. As we went upstairs to bed, they stood like invisible stone tablets, unreadable and indifferent to our words. When we lay down, Daphne slept, but I turned back and forth between sleep and wakefulness. It was there again, clanging between dream and thought — the mental sensation that in the next room our parents were screaming curses and attacking each other like animals. I turned on the light and remembered them as I had seen them earlier that day at the grocery store: an overweight man and a tall pear-shaped woman with their glasses on the ends of their noses, staring about them in mild confusion, their carts full of bargain eggnog and candy canes. I remembered the tree downstairs, the lights outside, and the sky.

Yes, we were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed before us; for trying to go everywhere and know everything. Stupid, spoiled, and arrogant. But we were right, too. I was right. How could I do otherwise when the violence of the unsaid things became so great that it kept me awake at night? When I saw my father sitting in a chair, desperate to express what was inside him, making a code out of outdated symbols even his contemporaries could no longer recognize? When I saw him smile because my mother fell on her face and then put the smile away like it was a piece of paper? When I heard him rail against dying men because otherwise he had no form to give his hates and fears? All the meat of truth was hidden under a dry surface, and so we tore off the surface with a shout. We wanted to have everything revealed and made articulate, everything, even our greatest embarrassments and lusts.

I walk faster and faster, apace of my chattering mind. Here is another slim ocher tree naked of bark. It is utterly smooth and, in the rain, so shiny that it looks almost plastic. It is twisted so elegantly, it is like an art object, made to suggest irony and hauteur. Veronica and Duncan didn’t have to attack each other in the hidden world one glimpses before sleep. They were what they were in public. His lust and scorn, her abjection and bitterness — these were acted out on city streets in graphic, unapologetic form. Not merely unapologetic but ironic, elegant, and haughty. I take off my glove and stroke the tree trunk as I walk past. I wonder if it is diseased. Everyone knows they’re diseased.

But we were not satisfied with revealing and articulating; we came to insist that our embarrassments and lusts were actually beautiful. And sometimes they were — or at least could be made to look it. The first high-end job I had in New York was with two other girls, one of whom was an unstable lesbian with dark, dramatic looks and a known hard-on for the other, a bland blonde from Norway who didn’t speak English. The photographer had us pose at night against the chain-link fence of a deserted ball field. He put me and Ava, the Nordic girl, on one side of the fence and Pia, the dyke, on the other. He photographed Pia alone. He photographed Ava and me together, me slightly behind her to indicate my sidekick status. He photographed Ava and me holding hands while Pia pressed up against the fence. At the end, he had Pia strip down to her underwear and hurl herself onto the fence, like she was “trying to get to Ava,” grabbing it with her hands and bare feet. Most models of Pia’s stature would never have done that. But he knew she would. She was half out of her mind with lovelessness and rage, and she wanted people to see it — she wanted it revealed and articulated. She threw herself at the fence again and again, until her hands and feet were bleeding. That shot ran at the end of a three-page spread and it was a great picture; Pia’s nakedness was blurred by the fence and by her motion, but her face and flying hair came at you like demon beauty bursting out of darkness to devour human beauty. Ava and I huddled together in our pale spring lace, two maids lost in a postmodern wood, she moving forward, me half-turning toward the demon who silently howled at us with her great gold eyes, her genital mouth and long flawless claws with just a hint of anguish in their swollen knuckles. Of course, you didn’t see any blood. You didn’t see human pain on the demon’s face — or rather, you saw it as a shadow, a slight darkness that foregrounded the beauty of the picture and gave it a sort of luscious depth. It was a page-stopper. It restarted my career.

After Christmas, I went to see Jamie and found him making model airplanes with a fourteen-year-old girl. She had full deep-colored lips with no set to them yet, dark, snapping eyes, and gold skin intensely refrained in the fiery gold aura around her pupils. Her laughing eyes lightly touched mine on their way up and down my body; she was not as pretty as I was, but it didn’t matter — she giggled behind her hand as Jamie giddily explained that she was his roommate’s friend’s daughter. I looked at him. The black and gold of her pupils saturated his eyes and shone from them, and in their light I was a mortal in someone else’s heaven. I turned and walked away, while Jamie followed me to the door, protesting that he would call me, until I shut the door on his hand and ran down the stairs.

That night, Veronica wasn’t at work, and for the first time I missed her. When the shift was over, instead of taking a taxi home, I walked blocks of asphalt glossy with yellow lamplight and streaming with yellow cabs, each with a hard nugget of human head inside. When the tears finally came, I sat on a bench in front of the Public Library and let them fall. A man with a face like the bottom of a broken shoe discreetly worked around me, slowly and painfully collecting cigarette butts off the ground and storing them in his pocket. He didn’t look at me, but he sang a nasal, wordless song that touched me like calm hands.

The following morning, I was awakened by the agent who had “almost felt something”; I had a go-see. It was in a cavernous loft full of echoes that sprang from each scraping chair and clacking step, grew ceiling-high in one bound, bounced back, then subsided in sideways waves. Each girl rose from her chair and walked through her own rising echo into someone else’s, until they all overlapped and I couldn’t tell who might be chosen and who would not. The echo of a laughing eye lightly touched mine on its way up and down my body; long white curtains streamed out an enormous window on an ancient city; a demon whispered to a clitoris as if it were an ear; a girl laughed and ate cherries from a plastic bowl; I pounded a door closed to me forever. These and thousands of other bright-painted moments became tiny and featureless as grains of sand that whirled about me while I whirled, too, a tiny grain among grains, condemned to whirl forever. The booker looked at one page of my pictures, then turned to chat with his assistant while absently flipping through the others. “I can’t work with any of these,” he said. “They’re not what I asked for at all.”

“What’s really sickening about it is, I’ll bet she really was his roommate’s friend’s daughter. I don’t think he went out to find her. She just appeared and he was charmed. That seems worse to me.”

“It’s awfully blithe,” agreed Veronica. “Do you think he had sex with her?”

Her tone took me aback. I hadn’t even asked myself that question. “Well, yeah. His eyes — yeah, of course. Don’t you think?”

“Not necessarily. The way you describe him, he’d be enchanted just to kiss and cuddle with her.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Not in my book, hon.”

Veronica had come back to work after being gone for an entire week. She and Duncan had broken up, too. He had promised, because of the new disease, that he wouldn’t sleep with anyone but her. Two weeks later, he confessed to an affair with a minor soap opera actor and Veronica walked out.

“Are you worried?” I asked.

“I’m worried for him, not me. They say it’s not a woman’s disease.”

“They don’t know that for sure.”

“Hon, it’s been ten years. If I have it, I have it. There’s nothing I can do.”

I thought, Most men who call themselves bisexual are really gay. Duncan had probably had sex with Veronica infrequently, and it was true: Everyone acted like women couldn’t get it. But why would Veronica have been involved with a gay man who could not desire her? How had she coded that humiliation so that it looked like something else? Perhaps to her, it had actually been something else. I pictured Veronica and Duncan side by side in a stifling pocket of refinement, dressed up to their necks in stiff Victorian clothing, their lips pursed, their pinkie fingers linked, viewing the world through tiny lorgnettes as they discussed Oscar Wilde and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dogs. Meanwhile, dirty anal sex was happening somewhere else, between someone else and a Duncan she never had to know. Trips to the art museum and weeping at Camille continued unabated. I could see it.

“He took custody of the two big seal-point brothers, which is very sad. Technically, they were his, but I’ve had them since they were kittens. Now I’ve got all girls. A harem of beautiful Siamese.”

She put down her Styrofoam cup. The stirring coffee shone with oils from her lipstick. The side of the cup was marked with the impress of her lower lip. For a strange moment, I wanted to take her cup and kiss it, covering her mark with mine.

“Do you want to go out for a drink afterward?” I blurted it; Veronica blinked with surprise.

“Thanks, hon, but I can’t. I’ve got an appointment.” She took up her cup. “Maybe another time.”

“Maybe we could go see a movie?” I trembled in my extended position, but I held it.

She dropped her eyes. She said, “That would be lovely,” but her voice hesitated, as if her foot had halted midstep while her body veered in another direction. The moment was fragile and uncomfortable, and it united us as if by touch. Veronica raised her eyes. “I could do it this week?”

We met during a windy, trash-blown day — cold, but with a bright, triumphant sky. The movie was about a middle-aged woman, a former teacher, on a binge of young boys and drinking in Mexico. “It’s supposed to be wonderful, hon.” We sat in the back, eating candy and popcorn. A crazily smiling woman with hot, besotted eyes and shoulder blades like amputated wings talked to the camera about being “on vacation from feminism” with a sultry blond acquaintance who’d “never heard of it and never had to.”

“Me and my aunt on vacation in Arizona,” whispered Veronica. “I was sixteen. She got drunk and danced with a truck driver who called her ‘a whore.’ ”

I stared at her. She faced the screen as if she’d addressed it, not me.

“ ‘Are you a whore?’ She just smiled and nodded.”

The ex-teacher and her friend went to the hotel swimming pool; men churned the water as they swam toward the blonde, heaving their dripping, longing selves up onto the tile beneath the reclining chair where she lay, oblivious as a custard. “I don’t have that nonchalance,” said the ex-teacher. “I don’t have that beauty. What I have is desire. And there’s great purity in that.” She turned from the camera to gaze at the sleeping loins of a sloe-eyed boy in wet bathing trunks, then cut back to us with a pop-eyed “Here I go again!” grin.

“Purity,” whispered Veronica, “as in unalloyed.”

I looked at her. She ate a fistful of popcorn.

The ex-teacher walked with a Mexican man on a cobbled street at sunset. She had on a short skirt, and his hand was up so far between her legs that she was nearly walking on tiptoe. “Your name means fish,” he said. She smiled. Feesh.

“Duncan,” whispered Veronica, “both halves.”

She talked in and out of the movie, as if its enlarged characters were fragments escaped from her head and willfully acting out on their own, assuming the perfect narrative forms they were denied in life. It was like somebody in a church repeating and affirming the minister’s sermon in noises and half syllables. The Mexican man fucked the teacher so hard that her head slammed against the wall; I whispered, “Me in Paris. Both halves.” And I could feel Veronica smile before I saw it.

By the end of the movie, Veronica had stopped whispering. Her feelings, grown too broad for words, were strong enough that I could feel them running, sinking, rising, and again running in an ardent fluxing pattern. The ex-teacher stroked the cheek of a beautiful teenager who didn’t bother to look at her. All the feeling in her face had sunk into her jaw and mouth in a heavy expression of appetite and pain — except for a tiny spark in one of her deserted eyes, which held aloof, amazed to find itself on this brink and wanting to stay conscious enough to savor it. Then the spark fell in with the rest and went out. Sick and feverish, the woman ran across a beach like an ostrich with no plumage, pinwheeling her arms ecstatically. Print appeared on the screen, saying she had disappeared in Juárez and was presumed dead. She ran and pinwheeled nonetheless. Ugliness had broken through into beauty and flown into death with it, pinwheeling and joyous in its pain.

When we emerged from the theater, two men stopped us in the lobby to ask what we thought of the movie. They were stout and barrel-chested, with a damp, testicular air that was wounded and bellicose and craved to be loved. I could feel they wanted to look at me, but they didn’t. They didn’t address me, either. They were there to talk to the ex-schoolteacher, not the custard. They were there to preen before her and to acknowledge her; it was her show now. “I loved it,” she said. “I loved her. I love anything that goes to the edge.” She gave her baubled voice to them and they saluted her with their stout, barreled chests.

Then we went to have ice cream under a green-and-white-striped umbrella. A living sea of pigeons boiled and ate bread at our feet. I looked at them and for a moment the world became strange to me. Then I remembered it had always been strange. I had a dish of pistachio gelato and remembered that the first time I met a model, I didn’t even know she was beautiful.

We went to the movies again the next week and several weeks after that. If we could sit alone in an isolated row, we talked our way through the story. If we had to sit where others could hear us, we didn’t. Either way, we left the theater feeling like we’d been talking in tongues. Sometimes I would see men look at me, and at her, then withdraw their eyes in confusion. Sometimes their confusion would confuse me; sometimes I looked through their eyes and saw that Veronica and I made no sense together. But then I came back into my own eyes, and that kind of sense seemed stupid. It could never see the tenth picture. It couldn’t even see past the first.

I went to more go-sees without being chosen; I was calm. My agent stopped calling me. I looked for another one. Instead of seeing Joy or Cecilia, I went to dinner parties at Veronica’s apartment. She lived up a dingy flight of stairs, behind a door painted with green lead dissolving in rust and rot-speckled yellow. The door opened; a Siamese cat peered from a dark crack; lounge music issued out like an enchanted cloud and in it was Veronica wearing an antique lace dress. The enchanted cloud formed a face with pouting lips and heavy-lidded eyes that beckoned us past a small bed wedged sideways, a giant TV, and a window with cracked moldings propped up by a rain-warped book. Another cat leapt up on a rickety table and tilted its velvet triangle head toward the living room, where a table was draped with linen cloth and set with silver. I was introduced as “the Parisian gamine,” then greeted by a small circle of dignified old men and appealing boys — clerks, proofreaders, and word-processing drones gladly transformed by the enchanted cloud, which traveled among them, touching them here and there with subtle scent and color.

“So anyway, it’s the Korean War and these adorable soldiers are about to charge Pork Chop Hill, and the chaplain says, ‘Let me tell you about another hill,’ and suddenly we’re at Calvary, and there’s James Dean as John the disciple—”

They were talking about James Dean’s debut on Catholic television, and Veronica led the conversation, directing it as if with a scepter made of cardboard and tufts of beaded netting, which, at certain moments, might burst into flame.

“—which was a superb choice. Just look at the old art. John is always slouching and bored.”

Remembering, I hear Charles Trenet’s voice traveling like sunlight over the surfaces of the earth, singing (“heureux et malheureux”) and making beautiful shadows on the refrigerator or the prison-yard grass or a girl’s quiet, crying face.

“Magdalen had goodness, whereas Margary was just the meanest old — she was in Anthony’s last movie and she was just dreadful. The way she made that trailer shake from side to side! It took her four hours to do the mascara on one eye, and that was after the false eyelashes!”

“Faye Dunaway played the maid in Tartuffe, a walk-on really, but I picked her out in a second.”

“I don’t want to read this nonsense where every other character is depressed. I want murder and they catch the killer and life is delicious.”

Heureux et malheureux—and life is delicious. Laughing sunlight plays with the shadows of trees, grasses, and birds in the heat-rippling air. The music plays. My father sits in his chair.

“—as we flew along past him, pussies to the wind—”

“—the snow all magical and pure and the lights … the lights … well, anyway. Rosalyn died. And—”

“—then Gielgud spent five glorious minutes putting on his gloves. I could simply have screamed with pleasure.”

I think of my father because their signals were as elaborate and ardent as his, but theirs were received and passed along a living circuit, growing stronger and more affirming with each pass. I tried to feel superior, but I couldn’t. In that apartment, beauty and perfection belonged to Veronica and her guests in the form of a glimmering mirror ball hung high above their heads. They could never reach it, but still they guarded it like fierce elves with lightning-quick rapiers that they drew with a jolly bon mot. Before this guard, I felt wordless, slow and shy, aware that the currency of my sex was worthless here. It made me even more shy to realize that they tolerated my awkwardness, and might even have been kind about any attempts at opinion and wit I might’ve but did not make.

“I’m so glad Veronica finally found a good girlfriend,” said George, a fatherly fellow who walked me home one night. “She really needs some female companionship — especially since the Travesty is finally over. Hopefully for good this time.”

“I never met Duncan.”

“Better for you — a very nasty man. If she gets back together with him, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay friends with her.”

One night, I went with Veronica and two boys named Thomas and Todd to see three legendary actors in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. According to The New Yorker, it was “like watching three old foxes at play,” but that was not the case; the male lead (“He looks like an old tortoise!”) bumbled and periodically fell asleep, so that his costars had to shout their lines in his ear in order to wake him. The bored boys, punchy and tired of jokes at his expense, began ecstatically to joke about Veronica’s vagina. To my amazement, she joked with them — so loudly that an usher rolled down the aisle with a flashlight in his fist. He leaned over us; the male lead woke with a start and blurted, “Be quiet — you’re behaving like a guttersnipe,” which caused Veronica and the boys to become so hysterical that we were thrown out. We made quite a procession up the aisle (Veronica, Thomas, and Todd waving and throwing kisses), out onto the street, and into a taxi, where Veronica got into a screaming fight with her friends about an imagined insult to the driver, and I slipped out at a stoplight in Times Square.

“Typical fag hag,” said Cecilia. “I wouldn’t be bothered.” I shrugged. We were sitting in a fashionable cheap café with huge graffiti on the walls, yellow and orange and shaped like squared shock waves. Cecilia wore mesh fingerless gloves and a torn black lace blouse. So did a boy across from us.

When I met Veronica at work, we didn’t speak of it. We barely spoke at all. A few nights later, Veronica switched to the graveyard shift. We saw each other fleetingly at shift changes; she looked at me with a pursed expression that said, Of course, this is what our relationship has been all along and that’s fine with me. I returned her look, indifferent as a child who, done with the milk, drops the carton on the ground. We said hi.

The path goes up a steep ridge bordering a sharp drop. The wind rises. A small waterfall explodes with white water. My thoughts fly up and briefly float before sinking and spreading like squid ink on the ocean floor. Dark balances and weights the light. On the dark bottom of the ocean, a wicked girl is covered with black slime and snakes and surrounded by ugly creatures staring at her with hate in their eyes. She thinks they are staring at her because she is so beautiful. She doesn’t know she is as ugly as they are. Sweat runs in gobs down the sides of my body, down my back and belly. My fever is rising.

“You should get a job at Ted’s place when he opens it,” said Cecilia one afternoon over little sandwiches. “The clientele there would be much better, and you’ll be visible to the right people at a restaurant of that caliber.”

I remembered a slim white arm and bristling hide and pieces of pie on cream-colored dishes. Unbearable sweetness and sadness funneled into my mouth through a straw; broken feelings tried to be whole. A door of stainless steel swung open on a bright kitchen. “I could work in a restaurant,” I had said. And I could. Even though I had no experience, Ted said I could start the following week.

I left my temp job before I started in the restaurant, and a week of days lay before me in sweet blank chunks. I went to movies by myself. I went to museums by myself. I went for walks. On one walk, I ran into George and stopped to talk with him. When I mentioned Veronica, he said, “We don’t see her anymore, not Max and I. She started up with it again, and suicide is simply not something I want to watch, thank you very much.”

It was late autumn and bright, and there was a delighted feeling in the air. A girl with magenta hair walked by in a tiny black skirt and leopard-print boots, swinging her slim hips with delight. George and I stopped to watch her. She smiled.

“Is Duncan really that bad?” I asked. A bilious look came into George’s pale eyes.

“Yes, he is that bad. He’s the kind of man who pretends to desire a woman because her desire tweaks his vanity — even when he knows he could … and she knows—” The bile receded. “Well, it’s not my business. It’s sad, but there’s nothing you can say to her. She goes right into ‘hon’ mode.”

I said, “She hasn’t got another mode.” We said good-bye.

Still, I called Veronica to tell her about my new job. She congratulated me. She said we must keep in touch. I told her about running into George.

“Oh, don’t believe that old bitch,” she said. “I only saw Duncan a few times for coffee. George is just using that as an excuse. He’s a misogynist, you know.”

“George?”

“I was shocked, too. But we had a fight and he said some things that were totally unforgivable.”

“But a misogynist?” What does that word mean to her? I wondered.

“Absolutely.”

She asked if I’d like to meet for coffee. I didn’t want to, but I said yes. I guess she didn’t want to, either; she canceled at the last minute.

The following months were an oscillating loop of dreams — brilliant and blurred, like a carnival ride at night, lighting up and going dark as its cars toss and churn. From a distance, it is beautiful, even peaceful. From inside, it rattles and roars and roughly yanks you by the neck. I ran from dining room to kitchen with my hands full of plates. The dishwasher creaked and loosed gusts of hot steam, the kitchen boys yakked in Spanish, and the cook spun out plate after plate of flawless food. I ran back through great vases of gaudy flowers, wild ginger and birds-of-paradise with gaping orange beaks. Gorgeous people leaned over succulent plates, gobbling. Earrings flashed and jiggled on jawbones; an eloquent hand drew a lovely emotion out of air; hot eyes fired rounds of arrows at a naked breastbone. Delicacy, roughness, mincing intelligence, and raw, rampant stupidity ran together in the pitched jabber. Back in the kitchen, a radio played sequined songs and the Mexican boys scraped everything off the plates, mashed it up, and washed it down the garbage disposal while the boy at the dishwasher did a butt-bumping dance with the boy mopping the floor. I gossiped with the other wait and bus persons about actresses in the dining room and who was fucking whom as we snatched extra plates of calamari, tuna tartare, bilberries, and lemon cream. At closing, we all piled into a sagging taxi with its seat propped up by oily black springs and got out at a club, where I leaned into a wall of canned music and tongue-kissed a waiter as handsome as Jamie until I passed out, only to wake up alone, slumped on a cold banquette. After three days, I pulled myself out of this slop, put on fresh makeup, and went to a new agency, where I met a woman with powerful shoulders and flat buttocks dressed in a tight leopard print. She looked at my pictures, frowned, looked at me, back to the pictures, looked up, and burst out, “But you’re Alison Owen! What are you doing in these awful pictures?”

Her name was Morgan Crosse. She had unmoored eyes and a voice full of force. I told her what had happened in Paris. It made it more real to describe it to someone who knew what it meant, and I began to cry. She said not to worry. She said I could destroy Alain. She said she’d get me a voodoo doll, which I would stick with pins every day for thirty days, then put in the freezer, and I’d be fine. Soon, I was standing in Central Park, bitterly cold in fluttering underwear. A stolid girl smiled uncertainly as she held the light-blinded eye of the reflector, and the camera saturated me with brilliance. Then I was sitting in an overheated trailer, talking with Pia about David Bowie and Ezra Pound while Ava nibbled cold cream from a jar and mechanical windup stylists tortured our hair. At a magazine party, I sat at a table with the most famous model of the year, a seventeen-year-old whose laughing face was a fleshy description of pleasure, satiety, and engagement that engaged at one decibel again and again. Photographers pitilessly filled her with their radiant needles until she was riddled with invisible holes and joyfully pouring radiance out each one. As an afterthought, a photographer turned and photographed me. My picture would appear later in a magazine society page. In the photo, I was sitting next to the young writer who had briefly occupied the chair next to me when it was vacated by a columnist. He sat down to ask me if I’d ever seen Modigliani’s paintings. “Because you’re like a beautiful Modigliani painting,” he said. “You should go see the exhibit at the Metropolitan.” I waited for him to ask me to go with him, but he didn’t. He just looked at me a long moment. He had intense eyebrows and hazel eyes with bright changeable streaks glowing emberlike through the solid color. His name was Patrick. He gave the impression of a fast current that you might ride on, laughing. We talked about nothing and then he got up and left. I waited a very pleasant moment before getting up, too. Six months later, his friends would ignore me and sting me with weapons made of the finest jealousy and gossamer contempt. A woman writing a book on the history of troll dolls would look at me and talk loudly about the trivial nature of beauty and fashion. A short actress would turn her back on me while I was speaking and put her arms around Patrick. I would break a wineglass in a hostess’s bathroom and walk on it until the splinters were unseeable. I would change my mind and guiltily mop the glass with a wet towel. “Alison?” Patrick would pound on the door. But that night, he proudly introduced me. That night, I said, “I’m a model,” and it came out shy and shining at the same time. People smiled and parted, and allowed me to enter the social grid.

I slip, fall, and muddy my knee. The sky beats on my umbrella; the wind tries to take it from me. “Come on, rat face,” said a photographer, “give me a little hope.” My dream loop flies. I walk and pant like an angry wolf. Faces and scenes rapidly bloom, one out of the other, making a living mosaic that fed me and starved me, freed and captured me at once. And deep within the bright swift-changing pattern is the darkness and emptiness of my apartment, where my phone rings and rang. It was, is, Veronica. “Duncan is dying,” she said. “He has it. He has AIDS.”

We met in a neighborhood bar, a dark rectangle filled with jukebox songs.

“You might not have it,” I said. “Some people still think women can’t—”

“And you believe that?”

“I don’t know. But everybody says they don’t know how infectious it actually is.”

“If I don’t have it, it’ll be another miracle at Fatima.”

“I thought that maybe, him liking boys, you didn’t actually do—”

“We did everything, hon. All the time. It was like Histoire d’O.” Veronica sat very erect as she said this, and I saw a flash of pride in her wide, alert eyes. “He liked boys, but he liked me, too. Well, perhaps liked isn’t the operative word, but …”

A song of betrayal came out of the jukebox like a flare. The faces in the bar suddenly appeared rigid, locked in shapes of willed happiness more terrible than pain. A young waitress danced at her station, anonymous and graceful in the warm light of the clanging kitchen. We hadn’t spoken for nearly a year. I was almost sixteen years younger than she was. We did not belong together. I reached across the table and held her hand. “I like you,” I said.

The wind is strong now. I’m afraid it will pick me up and throw me off the ridge. I picture falling, breaking on tree branches and cracking my head on the rocks below. I picture a tree branch falling on me and pinning me. How long would I lie there before someone found me? Night would come. The softness and greenness and moving stillness would make an immense fist and it would close around me. Bugs would come. I would die. Animals would come. Bugs and animals would eat me. I would rot and disperse. The dispersed flesh would travel down into the ground in tiny pieces, burrowing in the dirt, deeper and deeper. I would cease to be an I and become an it. It would get eaten by bugs, come out their assholes, and keep going. It would come to the center of the earth. The heat and light would be like hell for a human. But it would not be human. It would go on in.

In the bar that night, Veronica talked about Duncan angrily, tenderly. He denied he had AIDS, preferring to think he was losing his life to a tropical fungus he’d picked up years ago in South America. Stripped of his beauty, still he sat upright, bolstered by pillows and glittering desperately. It was a Catholic hospital and fierce comedy manned the battlements as nuns and doctors flapped in and out with prayers, pronouncements, and facial tics as they overacted to Veronica’s wisecracking sound track. She and Duncan giggled at Sister Dymphna Drydell (“I kid you not”), who “warbled like Spring Byington” while glowering “like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” They flirted with a handsome black-haired doctor, and refused to cooperate with the one who used the term fag. They earnestly stammered at the one who stammered, even when he stammeringly told them that Duncan had maybe a week to live. “And Sister Drycrotch, with eyes of the purest psychosis, trills, ‘It’s not the end, but a beautiful beginning.’ ” The enemy rattled at the gate; comedy pulled down its pants and gave it the moon.

Then Duncan remarked, “Well, I’ve always known something was wrong.” He’d known for years.

“His whole family knew,” said Veronica. “His sister told me in the waiting room. She smiled and said, ‘You must feel so betrayed! Oh, oh! You must feel so … so—’ ” Veronica made her voice high, hysterical, and false, then cut it back to her inflected deadpan. “I’ve had Thanksgiving with them almost every year for the last six. I sent Duncan’s niece a birthday present a few weeks ago — a beautiful French wooden pull toy, a red dog with blue eyes, playing the xylophone.” She shrugged.

“What did you say?”

“To whom, hon?”

“Well, Duncan.”

“Say to him?” She took a long drag on her cigarette, put it out, and looked at me, puffing herself up like the Red Queen about to open her inhuman mouth and strike. But halfway up, she lost heart and sank back. “There was nothing to say. He cried. He kissed my hands. He said he was sorry over and over again. When he was finished, I couldn’t speak. I got in bed with him instead.”

I felt my head jerk in disbelief.

“Not to make love, though I felt like it for an instant. We just held each other. His chest felt so thin, it was like his heart was coming through it.”

Sister Drycrotch, who opened the door to announce that visiting hours were over, did not try to hide her dismay.

“You see, hon,” said Veronica, lighting another cigarette, “I knew, too. Of course I did.”

Two entwined trees with roots that break the ground form a lumpy cradle half on the path and half hanging out over the ridge. I squat between them, umbrella over my head. I drink big mouthfuls of water. I look down into the canyon at the treetops, vast and textured, twisting and moving like sea grass under an ocean of air and mist, full of creatures I can’t see. Veronica raises her wand; it bursts into flame.

I imagine being in a hospital bed, holding my dying, unfaithful lover in my arms. I imagine feeling the beat of his heart, thumping with dumb animal purity. Once, when I was working in Spain, I went to a bullfight, where I saw a gored horse run with its intestines spilling out behind it. It was trying to outrun death by doing what it always did, what always gave it joy, safety, and pride. Not understanding that what had always been good was now futile and worthless, and humiliated by its inability to understand. That’s how I imagine Duncan’s heart. Beating like it always had, working as hard as it could. Not understanding why it was no good. This was why Veronica got into the bed — to comfort this debased heart. To say to it, But you are good. I see. I know. You are good. Even if it doesn’t work.

The rain has dissipated into a silent drizzling mist. The air feels like wet silk. Veronica lowers her wand. I get up out of my squat; in the canyon below I see dozens of ocher-colored trees swathed in mist. I think, They are so beautiful. I think, The disease is spreading. The flame of Veronica’s wand arcs across a gray expanse and goes out. My fever abates. I climb the ridge, heading toward the top of the waterfall. I approach the broad path that will take me farther up the mountain.

Duncan died. A year later, Veronica tested positive for HIV. Our friendship continued even though there was no obvious reason why it should. Sometimes I would admit to myself that if she had not called me when Duncan was dying, I would never have seen her again. I would admit that if she’d tested negative, I would have let the friendship lapse. I’d admit that I was embarrassed to be seen with her, that duty and pity were all that joined us. I’d admit, too, that she was the only one I could trust not to reject me.

I’m sure she had these thoughts. “She felt sorry for me,” I’d imagine her bitterly telling an imaginary person. “I was a good listener.” Then I imagined her expression draw inward as she considered that no, that was not all there was to it. But the imaginary Veronica did not admit that to the imaginary person. Instead, she drew on her cigarette, smiled ironically, and said, “Of course, she was a darling girl”—leaving the person to wonder what existed between the first two statements and the third.

I told a makeup artist about Veronica once and he said, “She’s a model hag; it’s obvious. She wants to suck on your life.” Deftly and precisely, he perfected my eyebrows with a tiny brush. “She wants to be invited to the party.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “She’s invited.”

But she wasn’t.

I worked regularly, not constantly. I went to bed at a decent hour. I didn’t drink too much. I showed up on time. I was polite to clients and stylists. As I was no longer the girlfriend of a feared and hated man, my relations with other models were warm and dull as a hair dryer’s drone. I did not let anyone grab my crotch, not even a famous photographer who snickered sideways when I found him banging a fifteen-year-old on a makeup table. (His butt feral, hungrily clenched, and spangled with mauve glitter from a tube the girl had crushed with the heel of her hand; perhaps it was the same glitter she wore on her eyelids as she gloated from the cover of the magazine I was supposed to be on.) I was a shop girl, not a poet. In an inexplicable way, I savored my ordinariness, my affinity with the office girls and waitresses I had briefly moved among. My livid past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart. Sometimes, in certain pictures, I thought I could see this hollow phantom world tingle in the air around me, making you want to look at the picture, sensing something you can’t see. In these pictures, I was what I had once longed for: a closed door you couldn’t open, with music and footsteps behind it. I was holding Ava’s hand, but I was turned toward Pia, and the fire of her eyes was reflected in mine.

I took the train to see my family almost every month; I brought them magazines with my picture in them. In Paris, I had sometimes torn pages out and sent them across the rumpled sea, but I’d never seen a reaction to them. My mother looked at my image as if she were looking at a wicked little girl come to scornfully show herself to her poor mother. There was love in her look, but with such jealousy mixed in that the feelings became quickly slurred. It was what my mother gave me, so I took it and I gave it back; I reveled in her jealousy as she reveled in my vanity. Reveling and rageful, we went between sleep and dreams right there in the dining room. Silent and still, we attacked each other like animals. My father coughed nervously, pointed at my most mediocre picture, and said, “Well, this one’s right nice.” Daphne said, “Yeah! This is great.” But as she turned the pages, she vibrated with the words she did not say but which I heard anyway: This is meaningless! And shallow! And false! My mother tossed a magazine down with a snap and said she had to go to the grocery store. Daphne went with her. Sara looked up and said, “But why didn’t they put you on the cover? You’re prettier than she is.” But there was no kiss in her eye now. She was still working at the place for old people, and when she got home, she went down into the basement and stayed there.

Daphne, on the other hand, had gotten a scholarship to Rutgers; she had wrapped herself in a ribbon of A’s while working as a barmaid at a place where students drank and puked amid roaring jukeboxes and pinball machines with streaming globule lights. When she talked about her classes and her job, she strutted and threw off little scrappy airs that said, How’d you like to try that, Miss New York Model? And my parents looked at her with a pride they could not quite feel for paper copies of their prettiest daughter tingling with an air of Europe and statutory rape.

Still, I tunneled back to my life, happy to be away from them, yet safely attached. One night after a visit home, I lay naked with Patrick on my lopsided mattress, drinking wine and half-hearing my neighbors’ pop songs come through the wall, and I would talk to him about my family.

“What I love about you is that you’re so beautiful and still so real,” he said. “You care about things.”

“How could I not care about my own sister? She’s the only one who’s even half on my side, and she’s been totally cheated by life.”

“Why don’t you have her come visit you?” asked Veronica. “We could take her to the theater, show her a good time. Who knows, she might consider moving here. I’ll tell her, ‘If I can do it, you can do it!’ ”

And so I did. It was summer and the apartment smelled of ripe foliage and rotten drains. When Sara arrived, I pulled the mattress off the box spring and we flipped a coin to decide who would sleep on which. (I got the mattress.) Then we went to meet Veronica in an ornate café lit with white lamps and candles that dripped and pointed with trembling witch fingers. Classical music, rampant and riven with dainty feeling, announced and upheld the display of cakes, which were swollen with sugar and cream. Veronica and Sara talked warmly about the eccentrics they worked with and their weird ways. In Veronica’s baubled words, her bland nest of disaffected temps became a snappy sitcom where people suffered, strove, and lost and yet emerged with rueful grins wrinkling their eyes, ready for the next episode. And Sara told her own stories, about valiant old ladies and tough, salty aides as the candles slowly dropped their fingers into baroque heaps of dust-covered wax. We went to see Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and then ate dinner in Chinatown.

It was late when we left the restaurant through a swinging stream of plastic beads. The potholed street steamed with warm garbage and the chemical discharge of air-conditioning. We walked around moldy cardboard, mashed fruit, fetid porridge, and crumpled vegetables still green and breathing on the pavement. An off-duty cab roared up; we shouted and waved our arms, but it sped away. We stepped past a fish with gelatinous, death-webbed eyes, each stiff red-speckled scale like a stone that for a short magic time had rippled through water as flesh and now was turning back to stone. “Pee-U!” cried Sara, and pinched her nose. But the stench buoyed us and filled the air with energy. Another off-duty cab roared up; Veronica stepped in front of it, tilting her hip, pointing her toe, and lifting an invisible skirt. Dark eyes flashed through the blurred windshield; the driver lustily hit the brake. As we climbed in, he smiled, newly awake and grateful, into his rearview mirror. “It never fails to stop a vehicle of some kind,” purred Veronica.

“Veronica is great,” said Sara as we dragged the mattress off the box spring into the center of the room.

“Yeah,” I said, and meant it.

My sister wanted to meet models, and so the next day we had lunch with Selina, an ex — cover girl attractively worn at twenty-four. I had prepared her for Sara, but still I was afraid that on sitting down, each would look across the table and see the enemy. But that didn’t happen. They got along. They discussed reincarnation, phobias, and nightmares: the psychic who told Sara she was antisocial because she had once been an African noble put to death by the tribe for her refusal to kill a beautiful animal; Selina’s recurring dream, in which she discovered herself as a child, shrunken like a mummy, eyes tightly screwed in permanent sleep in the baggage rack of a high-speed jet.

“Your sister is so spiritual,” she said to me later. “You could say anything to her and she’d talk back to you.”

“I don’t know if she’s spiritual, but she’s certainly lovely,” said Veronica. We were back eating cake amid candles and heaped wax. “She’s got to move here; it would change her life. She—” A soprano voice floated from the sound system and unfurled, shimmering. Veronica put down her forkful of blond cake.

“What is it?”

“This aria,” she said. “It’s from Rigoletto.”

“Oh,” I said. “I think my father has that on record.”

“I saw it with Duncan. Years ago.”

“Oh.” She had not mentioned Duncan for months; I had almost forgotten him. “It’s beautiful,” I said uncertainly.

“It’s a love song. Only I can’t remember what it’s called now.” Her skin shone, like an eye might shine with tears. “We loved each other, you know. I know that must sound sick to you after what happened. But there was love there.”

“I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “But I believe you.”

“Nobody understands. I don’t understand. My aunt was the only person who got it at all — my aunt! That dismal old bitch who once said to me, ‘It’s all about self-hate, isn’t it?’ She said, ‘It must be terrible to lose someone you love.’ And it is.”

I thought of my father lost in his own house, his own family, his own chair. “I’m sorry,” I said.

The singer opened wide her voice, like passionate hands, like arms of light.

“He wasn’t a cunt,” she said. “I’m sorry I ever said that.” Her voice tried to open, to come free of its rococo shape. “He was a Ganymede, a beautiful boy. Royalty in disguise.” Her voice broke free — the terrible freedom of shapelessness and grief. Anguish flooded her eyes. “The ‘Caro nome.’ That’s what it’s called.” Tears ran down her face. I looked away, as if she were naked. I didn’t know what else to do.

When I was a young child, my mother told me that love is what makes the flowers grow. I pictured love inside the flowers, opening their petals and guiding their roots down to suck the earth. When I was a child, I prayed, and when I prayed, I sometimes would picture people not as flowers but as grass — plain and uniform, but also vast and vibrant, each blade with its tiny beloved root. By the time I moved to New York, I had not prayed for many years. But there was a soft dark place where prayer had been and sometimes my mind wandered into it. Sometimes this place was restful and kind. Sometimes it was not. Sometimes when I went into it, I felt like a little piece of flesh chewed by giant teeth. I felt that everyone was being chewed. To ease my terror, I pictured beautiful cows with liquid eyes eating acres of grass with their great loose jaws. I said to myself, Don’t be afraid. Everything is meant to be chewed, and also to keep making more flesh to be chewed. All prayer is prayer to the giant teeth. Maybe sometimes there is pity for the chewed thing, and that is what we pray to. Maybe sometimes there is love.

Veronica said she and Duncan had loved each other. She said her parents loved her, too. My parents would say they loved each other, if you asked them. Patrick and I had loved each other, or at least we had said so.

I met Patrick for drinks after I left Veronica. I told him about how Rigoletto had come on the sound system and how her proud voice had broken.

“That’s so touching and poignant,” he said. “Is she a model?”

“No. I met her when I was temping.”

“That’s even more poignant,” he said. “The poor girl.”

“She isn’t a girl,” I said. “She’s forty.”

“My God!” He gripped the table and flung himself back against his chair. “That’s not poignant; that’s tragic!” His eyes flashed.

I drank up his flashing eyes. The day before, he had knelt naked between my spread legs, streaked eyes fluxing. Light flooded the room. Feelings of tenderness and devouring streamed through and lit his varicolored eyes. With a soft sound, he took my foot in both hands and bent my leg as he brought it to his mouth to kiss my instep, sole, and ankle.

He took a great gulp of strawberry frappe. His eyes flashed more faintly; he looked at his watch. We went to eat at a fancy place with four of his friends. We had precious dinners on big white plates, huge glasses of wine, and sweet-colored cocktails. Thick mirrors on each wall increased us. Bright music played and made pictures of abundant brightness: lips and teeth, soft breasts saronged in silk, warm skin, cut figs, wine and sunlight. The founder of a tiny magazine talked about writers who were supposed to be good and were terrible. The film critic for the tiny magazine talked about a bitchfest between a director and a writer whose story he’d adapted. The troll biographer denounced all that was shallow and vulgar. I listened to them and thought of a photographer who habitually held his arrogant head turned up and away from his body, as if pretending it wasn’t there. His pretense somehow accentuated his hips, his thighs and butt, and made it impossible not to imagine his asshole.

A short actress with sleek black hair looked at me and said, “Thinking hard?”

“No,” I replied. But I was. I was thinking of myself presenting my body without bodily reality, my face exaggerated by makeup and artificial feeling, suspended forever on an imaginary brink, eyes dimmed and looking at nothing. I thought of Duncan dancing in a dark place that glinted with hidden sharpness, his face set in curious determination. I thought of Veronica with her penny loafers and her fussy socks. But my thoughts were naked, and I had no words for them.

“You are too thinking about something,” said Patrick. “I can hear you.”

“I was thinking of things that don’t seem to go together but do. Only I can’t say how.”

“Can’t connect the dots?” asked the actress in a barely audible voice.

“And I was thinking about Veronica.”

“Your friend with AIDS?” asked Patrick.

There was silence filled with quick-running currents. The actress turned abruptly away. Softness and apology rose from her shoulder and came toward me. Talking resumed.

Later, Patrick and I fought about his friends as we stood on the sidewalk in the spilled watery light of an openmouthed bar. I turned to walk away. He grabbed my elbow; I turned away from him and for a ridiculous second we pivoted around each other. A table of drunks near the bar’s blurry window burst into laughter. I turned toward him and he banged into me. The table applauded.

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t be angry now. Let’s go where there aren’t any friends.”

And he took me up and down two twisty streets to an office building with a blank-faced door and a back stair that led up a hot stairwell to a tar roof illuminated by a tin lamp clipped to a wire strung between two chimneys. On the roof was a rough stone bench made bluish in the angled light, a matching table, wooden planters ragged with roses, and cage upon cage of purling gray pigeons. There was an unlit candle on the table and a rain-warped book with its pages stuck together. The tin lamp wobbled slightly in a low wind and the pigeons wobbled with it.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A life raft in the sky. Come look.”

The pigeons moved like dark water at our approach — soft and rolling, with little tossing plaps.

“The janitor of this building keeps the birds — his brother owns the building, so he lets him. I know the janitor and he lets me come here if I sort of pay him.”

The pigeons purled like dark water, evenly stroking a dark shore. The burning roof released its acrid tang. Grainy light poured up off the city, reached into the sky, and sank back with a darkish milky glow. Patrick took off his shirt and spread it on a mattress. Smiling, I sat on it. He scooped up my hips and, with hands on either side of my wakened spine, used his thumbs to open my body. Wave after wave reached the soft dark shore. An hour later, Patrick left ten dollars flapping under a corner of the milk crate.

A month later, he left me for the black-haired actress, whose shoulder had apparently apologized ahead of time. He told me after a torpid dinner, while I was trying to pull him down onto the bed with me. Frowning, he refused to come. I stopped pulling. He came and sat and told me. He had not slept with her yet, he said. He didn’t want to disrespect me. His sense of honor shocked me; I lay in a state of dull shock, letting him kiss and stroke my hair until he left. He stroked me like he didn’t want to leave. He stroked me like the pigeon sounds reached for the shore, again and again. I lay there, hearing those sounds for a long time after he left.

When I finally sat up, it was two o’clock in the morning. The apartment was dark and someone outside it was moaning. The gate on my window made a shadow window of gray diamonds on the floor. I thought of the shadow bars of a prison window striping an upturned face, one eye unstriped. I felt for the phone. I didn’t expect Veronica to be in; I just wanted to hear and speak into her answering machine. The electronic bleat of the phone rippled and rose like a stair into the night sky, each step a bar of light. I saw myself and Sara, two tiny girls, climbing it step by step, each helping the other.

“Hello?” said Veronica. She had been sent home early and had just made herself a nightcap.

I arrived at her apartment moments later. She opened the door in a flowered floor-length gray gown with a yoke of lace on the breast and furry pink slippers on her feet. She gave me a mug of cocoa and white rum. We sat in front of the mumbling TV, and Veronica rapidly changed the channel as we talked.

Patrick and I had nothing in common, but he could hear me thinking. He was smarter than I was, but most of what he said was dumb. His friends were horrible, but I wanted to please them. I loved him, but I kept planning when we would break up. Heureux et malheureux. I would be with someone else and someone else and then someone else.

“Frankly,” said Veronica, “it’s hard for me to see this as a problem. You should enjoy it while it lasts. I’ll never get laid again, and if I do, I’ll likely infect him.”

On the screen before us, faces cycled past — human, animal, monster, human.

“Veronica,” I said. “What was it like between you and Duncan?”

“Like? Haven’t I told you? Essentially, it was male-female relations. We enjoyed the same things — film, the arts.” Human, monster, animal. The silhouettes of lions walked the African delta with alert ears. Veronica lighted another cigarette. “If you mean deeper, it’s hard to explain. Together, we were able to express something in ourselves that was buried — I don’t quite know what it was, but I’ve been thinking. It sometimes felt like I was something he needed to knock down over and over, and I would always pop back up. He needed that and so did I, the popping back up.”

“He hit you?”

“No, hon, I’m speaking metaphorically. Anyway, then we would step back and crack a joke and laugh, and everything else would fall away. And we’d just laugh.” She filled her lungs with fiery smoke, then let it go. “It was a narcissistic game maybe. But still, when you go through that with someone, it can feel like something very profound has happened between you. And it has, actually. That person’s your partner, and there’s honor in it.”

I didn’t understand. I glanced at the TV. Nature workers were filming a dominant lion killing a rival’s cubs in order to protect his gene pool. Three terrified cubs watched him knock their sibling on its back.

“Nature,” said Veronica. “How dreadful.” She changed the channel. Human beings smiled over drinks. She changed the channel.

“Anyway, fifteen years ago, there was a precursor to Duncan, this beautiful man I met when I was traveling in the Balkans. He didn’t speak English, so we couldn’t understand each other, but for the week or so we were together, it didn’t matter. Sometimes this look would come into his eyes, and I would feel the same look in mine. All this awkwardness and phony smiling and pidgin English — all of it was just for the times we got to that look. I remember this one time we made love. We were up in the mountains and we did it literally on the edge of a precipice. He turned me around so we were front to back, and if he’d let go of me, I could easily have gone over.”

She changed the channel. Small paws resisted the big snout, then fell as the jaws came down. The lion squatted and ate. She changed the channel. Human beings kissed.

“I remember this tiny figure on the side of a mountain down below, someone in a field of something blue, filling a basket. Then rolling green, and the sun, and the sky going up and up. It was the most erotic experience I ever had.”

One of the Siamese cats walked across the band of TV light and paused, its ears in fine bestial relief against the brilliant screen. There were only three cats by then. Veronica had already started finding homes for them through a service at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

“I’ve done things that looked self-destructive all my life. But I wasn’t really being self-destructive. I always knew where the door was. Until now.”

The nature workers scared the lion away and scooped up the remaining cubs. Veronica turned off the television. She invited me to sleep over. She gave me a flannel nightgown imprinted with violets and green ribbons. The print was faded from many washings and there was a ragged hole in one elbow; it was so unlike Veronica to own such a decrepit item that I thought it must be from her childhood. As I slipped it over my head in the bathroom, I inhaled deeply, imagining ghost scents wafting off the gown. Childhood smells: silken armpit, back of the neck, fragrant perfect foot. Adolescence stronger, more pungent, heavy with spray-can deodorant, then secretly, defiantly rank. An adult snow cloud of soap and bleach, and the ghosts still whispering through it. The gown was tight across my shoulders; its sleeves went just past my elbow and its hem just past my knees. I smoothed it lovingly and left the bathroom, ready to get in bed and put my arms around Veronica; I imagined us together in our flannels, cuddling until we woke.

But as soon as we lay down, she said, “Good night,” and turned on her side. I stared at the ceiling and listened to her snore. My heart said, Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? I remembered myself in bed with Daphne, and how I would’ve ground my teeth if she’d put her arm around me. I thought of the young Veronica, held on the edge of a cliff in the arms of a stranger she never had to know, embraced like a beloved child and penetrated with the force of one adult to another. That person did not want the reassuring arm of a sister. She did not want to cuddle.

I fidgeted until the day came through the blinds. One of the cats approached; I reached to touch it and it recoiled as if it were shocked. I got out of bed and softly walked the apartment in my ragged gown. The cats stared, lemurlike. The furniture slowly groaned awake. I went to a window and slit the blind with a finger. I watched people and cars pass in a trance of fixity and motion. Now the diamonds on my floor would be filled with light and gently moving. Now there would be no prison bars. Now I could go home.

I got back in bed and lay close enough to Veronica to feel the heat come off her. The week before, I had heard a man who had AIDS interviewed on TV. He said that on top of dying he constantly had to comfort his well friends, who were terrified that he was dying, and that it was exhausting to have to do that.

I’m not terrified, I thought.

My father stormed across the living room floor. “Do you know what that son of a bitch is doing to his family by going on a television show?”

I’m not terrified.

We breakfasted at a place that served a full English tea on mismatched tables. Our table slowly became a jumble of flowered plates piled with sandwiches and cakes, flowered cups and pots of tea, and red jam in a porcelain pot. We were waited on by severe middle-aged women who wore their dowdiness as if it were a starched uniform. Veronica leaned back in her chair and joked with them about girdles.

“My mother used to say, ‘If he asks you what kind of underwear you have on, you tell him, “It’s up to my chest and down to my knees and I’ve got panels where you don’t need panels.” ’ And that’s actually what hers was like! Mine, too, until I could physically fight her about it.”

“What was your mom like besides that?” I asked.

“You need to know more?”

Veronica said her mother spent hours putting makeup on every day, then came down the stairs crying because it was all wrong. She abused laxatives for so many years, she eventually lost bowel control and had to keep emergency towels in various locations around the house — little hand towels she’d neatly fold up and then forget. Veronica’s father would find them and hurl them on the dining table. There were showers of tears and furious Kabuki scowls. Her mother’s condition got so bad, she couldn’t go out for groceries. Because her father was an agoraphobic, he couldn’t do it either unless the perfect opportunity popped up in his drive-to-work plan.

“They would fight about who would go, until we were down to two frankfurters and a can of peas. Then they’d send me and my sister out across this huge intersection with our little red wagon. They’d be watching us from the window, waving.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten and eight. We’d get back and they’d accuse me of stealing—‘skimming off the top,’ my father would say. My sister was no fool — she began telling on me before they would make the accusation. I was no fool — I took the hint and started stealing.”

The waitress brought us an ashtray. Veronica thanked her with a zesty simper.

“Do they know you could get sick?”

“Sort of. I mean, I told them. My mother said, ‘You’ve always been a hypochondriac.’ My father screamed, ‘You’re just trying to get attention,’ and hung up.” She shrugged. “Not enough sandwiches to make a picnic in that family.”

For the first time, it occurred to me that the unsaid things were not so bad after all. For the first time, it occurred to me that my parents had hidden their hate and pain out of love.

“Perhaps,” said Veronica, “perhaps that’s why I’ve always felt it’s my destiny to find respite, at the end of my life, in a safe, beautiful dwelling. It doesn’t have to be an actual house. It could be an apartment, or maybe a cottage.”

“I could see you in a cottage,” I said. “With flowers growing up the side.”

“Flowers on the side! I’d love that!”

“You could wear galoshes and make jam.”

“I could! It’s not too late — I’m in great shape! Who knows, I may not get sick. I could double-shift a few years and make enough to pay for a cottage near the ocean.”

The red jam in its porcelain pot was like a viscous jewel in the sun. I imagined Veronica in her cottage, among flowers and fallen petals.

“But you know, Alison — you shouldn’t listen to the things I say about my parents. You know me, I’ll say anything for a cheap laugh. They weren’t so bad.”

“No?”

“No. My mother had a beautiful voice and she sang to us almost every night. She put on plays with us when we were little, wrote songs for us to sing. When we went to bed at night, she would say, ‘Here are all the people who love you.’ And she’d name everybody, every cousin, every great-aunt. She built a fence of protection with those names. And my father would come and stand at the door and watch over us all.” She smoked and exhaled, making a tiny redness on the wet butt. “I can still see him standing there.” She smiled and put out her cigarette.

There were small flowers sprouting on bushes growing alongside the path. They were a flat tough red that paled as their petals extended out, changing into a color that was oddly fleshy, like the underside of a tongue. They grew on clay red branches, slick and shiny in the rain, and they had tough red-tinged leaves. Against the gray sky, they were startling, almost rude. Not the right flower, I thought. Veronica had been startled enough. She needed silkiness and softness.

Patrick came back to me at a party. It was a benefit given for an AIDS relief organization. Lots of rich fucks milling, and me standing there. Before I saw him, I saw a black supermodel named Nadia, a woman known for her arrogance and meanness. “Oh no,” muttered a magazine editor, “here comes Miss Big Bitch.” But, like everyone else, he watched her move through the room. She moved like a queen inside a twittering entourage that functioned like a parade float of feathers and papier-mâché. She started conversations, then turned her back on them. She threatened relationships with a look. She made everyone either an extension of her or invisible. Her movements expressed a blistering scorn, which perversely electrified her beauty and made it even greater than it might otherwise have been.

I looked at her and saw her avenging the German woman who walked alone on the street with her arms wrapped around her torso, staring with hollowed eyes. I heard her say, Is this what you people really want? Is this what so awes and impresses you? This? All right, then, I’ll give it to you.

“You better be careful,” I said to the editor. “Secretly, I’m a big bitch, too.”

That’s when I saw Patrick. Warm with borrowed anger, sex, and pride, I crossed the room, borrowed raiment flowing. It sometimes takes a while for people to notice that borrowed things don’t quite fit, and so for the moment they do. He smiled, his expression sweet and broad, and flicked his head, casting off nervous feeling as if it were sweat. We bantered and joked, circling, gliding around each other like animals getting ready to play. We kissed against the wall, and in a closet, and finally in the bathroom, like people on soft-core TV, me on the sink with my haunches up.

When we came out, Nadia had moved on and the air of the room had changed, like the sea in the wake of a great wave. All the little creatures and shells still stirred, fitful and chaotic. An oyster sweating in his cream-colored shell was talking into a microphone about something nobody could hear. A laughing blond bit of seaweed rolled against a scudding black-haired pebble and they slid down the wall, laughing. Patrick said, “Honey, let’s go,” and we swam for the door.

On the street, everything was rushing and corporeal, and the sky was soft blue, with small salmon-colored clouds. We went into a deli and wandered giddily among the rows of cans and bottles, wrapped pastel sponges, and a flashing orange cat. Tiny pictures that had smiled at us as children smiled at us as adults: a tuna wearing sunglasses, a laughing green man wearing leaves. We got potato chips and juices and went back out under the soft, glowing sky. A taxi shuddered to a halt and took us into its creaking dimness with a slam. A song came out of the radio, bouncing like balls of colored candy on a conveyor belt. “One more shot!” Bounce bounce! “Cos I love you!” The city rolled along, breaking against our driver’s stalwart hairy neck.

“I have something for you,” said Patrick. Smiling, he held out his bunched fist.

“Hmm?”

He smiled and opened his hand. I saw my wadded underpants. I blinked. The world opened its mouth and laughed like it was a baby being tickled. I’d forgotten to put them on when we were leaving the bathroom; he’d seen them come out my pant leg and fall on the deli floor. The cat flashed past; the green man laughed. We laughed, rolling around in the taxi, kissing. The city rolled along beyond the clouded bulletproof plastic that protected the driver with its hinged pocket for the wadded fare. It was stickered with advertisements for clubs and bands, and the stickers were doodled on with ballpoints and the radio drew its doodles on everything. Oh Miss Big Bitch, even you are overlaid with doodles and radio songs.

“I love you,” I said.

He held me close and kissed me and his body said, Yes, and here we go.

He was still with the black-haired actress and her articulate shoulder. That was all right. If the entire world was going to open its mouth and laugh, there was certainly room for her. She could be in the world and I could be in the laughter that came rolling out and bounced away. There was room.

Once, I arranged for Patrick to come to my apartment right after a visit with Veronica; he arrived a few minutes early and so the two met.

“That’s the woman who has AIDS?” he asked incredulously. “That’s outrageous!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she looks like somebody’s maiden aunt! How on earth did this happen to her?”

“She is somebody’s maiden aunt, you idiot. Not technically a maiden maybe, but … it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“I know it doesn’t matter. I’m not an idiot. But you know what I mean. She doesn’t look like somebody who’d get AIDS from sleeping with a bisexual guy.” He took my hand. “Alison, you’re so sweet and human and you don’t even know. You weren’t friends with this person before she got sick, were you?”

“She’s not sick now. We were friends. We were good work buddies.”

“But you know, most people, when something like that happens, unless it’s a really tight relationship, they run. That’s when you became her friend.”

“So what? I don’t think I should get a medal for acting decent,” I said.

Later that night, Patrick said, “That woman’s face was so bizarre. Veronica, I mean. She was just vibrating with bizarreness.”

I have not spoken to or seen Patrick for over twenty years. Still, on the mountain, I answered him. “Yes,” I said. “She was bizarre. She was in pain and she was all alone. That can make a person bizarre.”

But the thing was, I hadn’t always acted decent.

Veronica was alone because her friends left her. She said they left her because she was sick, but I don’t know what they would’ve said. She said, “They all told me, ‘Don’t sleep with him!’ But I did, and now they’re all angry with me. They want to think they’re right, because if they can think they’re right, they can think they won’t get sick.” She shrugged. “I can understand that. It’s idiotic. But I can understand.”

The first New Year’s Eve after Duncan’s death, she was alone. When the next New Year’s Eve came, I decided I would take her to a party. I examined every invitation I got, looking for a Veronica-safe zone. There were two that I set aside: One was a party on the Upper West Side; hosted by a magazine editor named Joan, it was in honor of a New York filmmaker who’d directed a movie called Show Tunes. Joan was an anomaly in the fashion world. I remembered her, fat, smart, and keen-eyed, peering over tiny square glasses placed on the end of her discerning nose as she scanned a martini menu. I imagined her and Veronica drinking martinis together.

The other possibility was something called the Motorcycle Party, at which, said the hostess, guys would jump over naked girls on their hogs. I knew one of the naked girls; she looked perfect in photographs, but in person she had drunken, filmy eyes and grainy skin and a hard little drum of a belly with a button like a curled toe. I’d told her about Veronica once and she’d said, “It’s so great of you to stand by her. It’s great and it’s brave.”

It was not brave of me to go to the movies with her. But it was brave of me to invite her out that night. I’m embarrassed to say it. But it’s true. I was afraid to go out with her for New Year’s. I had to be brave to do it.

My cab arrived outside Veronica’s apartment at 9:00 p.m. She fluttered and waddled down the walk in a chiffon gown and a black leather jacket. Her head was square and determined above her waddling softness. Her smile gathered power with each step. “I’m so glad we’re doing this,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d have put on my leather chaps and walked the streets.” I thought, I’m doing something good — a thought that was round with wonder and shy conceit.

The party was in a spacious apartment alive with ease and goodwill. People smiled at us, tilting their heads as if they were looking deeply, then deepening their smiles as if to show they were delighted by what they saw. The guests were old, young, and middle-aged people wearing good-quality clothes without fussiness or too much care. There were children, too, and they ran around holding spangled streamers high above them. Someone played show tunes on a piano, loosely, his big bald head erect and radiant.

“My God,” said Veronica. “I don’t deserve this party.”

“Oh stop.” But I wasn’t sure I deserved it, either. I didn’t see any other models. I didn’t see anyone I knew. I looked for Joan and found her in a large room, sitting before a fire burning in an enormous hearth. She radiated warmth, and I wanted Veronica to feel it. But when they were introduced, Veronica seemed to shrink into something small and hard. Joan responded by withholding her warmth. Her fat body became imposing as a fortress and she peered out of it with hard, watchful eyes.

“How long have you known Alison?” she asked.

“Years. We worked together.”

“You’re a stylist?” she asked doubtfully.

“A proofreader,” I said. “From where I temped once.”

“I see.”

The dull conversation went on, becoming subtly hostile without anything hostile being said. Joan’s soft cheeks gradually hardened and I began to hear Veronica’s voice the way she must’ve heard it: stilted, shrill, willed into garish rococo shapes. We were joined by a friend of Joan’s, a busy-eyed little man who said he was a literary agent. In the middle of answering a question from Joan, I heard him ask Veronica what she did.

“I write. I paint. I’ve done some acting.”

Her voice was so unctuous that for a second I thought she was affecting it to mock him. Then I saw her false, pleading smile.

There was a pause. His eyes filled with scorn and the pleasure of feeling it. He raised his chin. “Really,” he said. “How interesting.”

I ran for the hors d’oeuvres table. I thought, If she wants to act weird, it’s not my problem. I won’t baby-sit somebody sixteen years older. But when I looked again, she was standing alone, the same terrible smile fixed on her face.

“Oh, I’m fine, hon,” she said. “Somebody just came up to me and said, ‘Who invited you here?’ ”

“They might’ve really wanted to know,” I said hopefully. “Sometimes people ask you that as a way of placing you.”

Her smile became more terrible. I could smell her sweating.

A man approached. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m about to leave and I just wanted to tell you that it’s been a delight to be in the same room with you. You are just so pretty.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Just so pretty,” he repeated. He turned to leave, and in passing, he put his hand on Veronica’s shoulder. “And you ain’t bad yourself.”

“Thanks for the bone,” she said.

His retreating head flinched.

“Let’s get a drink,” I gasped.

After that, Veronica was more relaxed. Biting someone had probably taken a lot of tension out of her jaws. Now I had it and could calm it only by drinking. I wandered in and out of bland conversations and my heart beat, Where am I? We sang “Auld Lang Syne.” We yelled “Happy New Year.” When I turned to Veronica, she kissed me, and for an instant I knew where I was.

We left the party in a cheerful mood. A cab even stopped when we hailed it. But as soon as we were inside it, I did not want to be with Veronica anymore. I wanted to be at the Motorcycle Party, wandering through the crowded rooms by myself, watching strange haughty faces reveal themselves. I didn’t want to hear Veronica say weird things to people. I didn’t want to worry about her happiness. I didn’t want to be judged because I was with this strange, badly dressed, badly made-up woman. She was talking and talking about how a little girl at the party looked exactly like her niece. Light rose and fell on her face, harsh, then soft. She will soon be very sick, I thought. And she isn’t going to have much pleasure in the meantime. The cab stopped at a traffic light made brilliant and fiery in the cold. Clumped people with gentle, expressive faces leaned against the wind. Frail special dresses stuck out from under the women’s lumpen daily coats.

“Veronica,” I said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I think I’d like to go to this other party by myself. I hope you don’t feel insulted. I just feel like being by myself.”

I dropped her off at her apartment. She kissed me and said, “Happy New Year.” I remember it as though I’d shoved her from the car.

It wasn’t always like that. One night, we went out to dance. She had said, “Just once I’d like to go to one of those chic places to dance. Just once.” So I found one that had only just stopped being chic and we went. She wore a red jacket that had been fashionable five years earlier, a lacquered hide with gold buckles, shoulder pads, and trick pockets. She wore it defiantly. She wore it as if to say yes, it was ugly, yes, it was tasteless, but right now only the forceful character of tastelessness and ugliness could help her shake her booty one last time. She danced the same driven way she moved in aerobics class — leaping and kicking with manic propriety. As if to show a disbelieving someone, once and for all, what she could really do. But with each repetitive movement, she seemed to wind more deeply into a place where she didn’t have to show anybody anything, a place where there was no propriety. I looked up; on crude stages, fat men in wigs haughtily, expertly danced. Hot colored lights crashed down around them in waves. Sirens went off and clown horns honked as they danced in the face of death and in the face of life. The music blared gigantically, as if it were propelling a baby into the outrageous world and bellowing with shock at what it saw. The queens danced and Veronica danced, and their dancing said, World, kiss my fat middle-aged butt.

The narrow path winds against the mountain. It is surrounded by thick, dripping vegetation, and the foliage seems hostile, gluey, weblike, and humming. I remember my mother reading to us, her arms warm and glowing in their fragile nimbus of hair; the jaws of the nature-show lion; the cub’s helpless paws. The camera crew filmed the lion eating the cub’s guts, then scared him away. Or shot him. They let him eat one for the TV show, then scooped up the others.

I don’t know what I said when I danced. Probably nothing. Probably “I’m a pretty girl, I’m a pretty girl, I’m—”

Veronica began to cough. She ran a low fever. She fell during an aerobics class and began to pour cold sweat. I yelled at her about seeing a doctor.

“My main problems are yeast, perpetual herpes, and hemorrhoids,” she said. “The first I can take care of at the drugstore, the second they can’t do anything about, and the third I’m not going to some swinish doctor about.”

“Why not if you can get them removed?”

“Hon, don’t be naïve. I’m not going to some clinic on Broadway with a red neon arrow that reads ‘Hemorrhoid Removal — Strictly Confidential,’ where they’ll core me like an apple and I’ll be expelling bloody rags for a week. I know I’m going to die soon, but I’d rather it not be like that.”

“Then get your lungs looked at,” I said sulkily. “Or get something for the fever.”

Eventually, she did see a doctor, but she pronounced him a bastard and wouldn’t go back.

“I had to wait for hours in a roomful of men with sores on their faces, and there was this one dreadful woman who sat on the edge of the couch like she had a boil on her ass. She went in before me and came flying out like a witch on a broom. Then I went in, and the doctor, who, of course, was a heterosexual with the face of a drunk pig, went on this self-congratulatory rant about how she’d complained about being in a room with AIDS patients. ‘I told her to get the fuck out,’ he said. ‘I don’t need her; nobody needs her.’ Like I’m supposed to think he’s so great.”

“Don’t you agree with him?”

“Not really. Of course she doesn’t want to be in a room with AIDS patients. Who would? I told him — I said, ‘Sir, I have AIDS, and I don’t want to be in a room full of—’ ”

“You don’t have AIDS yet. And I thought you said she was dreadful.”

“They were both dreadful,” she snapped.

I sighed. “Look,” I said. “I know it’s shit. But you’ve got to decide if you want to live or not. Because if you do, you’re going to have to start fighting for your life.”

“Yes, I know, hon. I’m just not sure it’s worth it.”

“Okay. Maybe it’s not. Probably it’s not. You’ve got insane parents and your sister is useless to you. You’re lonely and you have a crummy job. And you’re not going to beat the disease whatever you do.”

Veronica stared like I’d slapped her out of a crying jag. At least I’d refrained from telling her she looked like shit.

“But even if you live only five more years, even if you live only two more years or one year, if you use that time to really … to really …” I fumbled, embarrassed.

She looked at me, sorry for me.

“To really find out who you are and care for yourself and … and forgive yourself — I mean — I don’t mean—”

“I’ll let that pass,” she said softly.

“I don’t mean forgive yourself for getting sick. I mean caring for yourself.” My words were wooden and trite. I had gotten them out of articles in health-food magazines. I did not know what they meant any more than she did. Still I said them: “I mean loving yourself.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Alison.” Veronica spoke gently. “I think it’s lovely. But it’s just that it’s … it’s not my personality.”

“Okay. But then there’s the physical stuff. If you don’t like that doctor, there’s others. There’s herbs, there’s acupuncture, there’s yoga. There’s GMHC, there’s Shanti, there’s support groups — women’s groups, too. Medicine won’t cure you, but it’ll ease the pain. It’ll let your body know you’re caring for it, loving it. I know it’s corny, but—”

“I don’t have insurance.”

I stared. “But I thought you got insurance a while ago.”

“I did, but it lapsed. It was lousy insurance anyway.”

I was speechless.

“I tried an acupuncturist a year ago. I can’t say it did much for me, though he was awfully nice. He talked about the organs and how they relate to different emotions. Lungs are sadness; liver is anger. He said my main weakness was my small intestine. Would you like to guess what emotion that’s related to? Deep unrequited love. The small intestine! Who knew?”

Sometimes I had contempt and disgust for Veronica. It would come on me as I lay alone in bed, drowsy but unable to sleep. I would picture her with one of her false smiles or arranging her cat coasters or adjusting her jaunty bow tie, and I would fill with scorn. I didn’t try to fight it. I let it snort and root. Why had she been involved with someone like Duncan anyway? Someone who let her be called an old fish in public and then went off holding hands with the guy who’d said it. She wanted to be a victim. Probably she even wanted to die — she’d said so herself. Most people, when something like that happens, they run. Of course they did. It was horrible. People like Veronica dragged everyone down; it was paralyzing to be confronted with such pain. Especially since she’d chosen it for herself. How could anyone respect a person like that? She’d made choices. She’d made choices!

“You made choices,” my mother said to my father. “If you’re not happy with your life, you can choose to make it different. That’s what I did. I chose to come back to you, and I can choose differently.”

A Jazz Age band was on loud and jumping. The TV was on, too, and Sara was hunched up in front of it, doing a crossword puzzle with one hand pressed against her ear to shut out the jazz.

“Choices! Choices! What choices do you make when you’re fifty years old? What choice did I have then with a baby to feed and another one coming and another one after that? I had to take what they gave me!”

His voice was pleading, but his rumpusing music mocked us all. Sara made a fist of her ear-blocking hand, muttering curses and gripping her hair as if to tear it out.

“She also means choices inside yourself about how you handle things,” I said. “Like you can let the people at work upset you or you can—”

“Fuck!” shouted Sara, and stormed up the stairs.

“Sara, you do not talk that way!” shouted my mother.

“I do too and so do you!”

“Choices inside you! Do you think a human being’s a fun house with something behind every door?”

“Yes!” I said, laughing.

“Maybe in the New York City fashion world they are! But not here. Not here. Oh, Lordy.”

When I came back the next month, he was reading aloud from a book about queers and the awful things they did. According to this book, all men had the potential to be gay, to fuck anything, all the time, and they got better only with the influence of women. “These guys don’t have to be that way!” he cried. “They have a choice!”

“I thought you didn’t believe in that.”

“I’m not talking about ‘inner choices’! I’m talking about behavior! I’m talking about reality!”

Sara quietly ate her dish of ice cream. My mother rolled her eyes.

Veronica quit temping and took a full-time job with excellent insurance. She joined a support group for women with HIV. She quit smoking. She found a doctor she could tolerate. She double-shifted for a year and bought a large and expensive co-op. She filled it with heavy furniture and blinds, which made her rooms quiet and dim as an aquarium.

I moved into a bigger apartment, too, with high ceilings and casement windows and a bar down below that was full of music, faces, and sweet-colored drinks. As soon as I did, work fell off. I was supposed to be in a swimsuit spread, but I stood next to a girl with big boobs and a butt like a mare, and the photographer said, “You look like her twelve-year-old sister!” During an evening-wear shoot, a client suddenly appeared with a tape measure and held it to my hips and said, “Look at this! We can’t have this!”

“Crazy bitch!” said Morgan over sushi. But then she paused, chopsticks poised over a slice of fish shaped like a lovely tongue. “Were you about to have your period, by any chance?”

It’s Alain, I thought. Finally. It has to be him.

Morgan arranged for me to meet a photographer named Miles. Miles was an eccentric who’d made his reputation working with slightly unusual girls ten years earlier. He’d been recently taken up by a maverick designer whose tiny lace skirts and flowered chenille leggings were everywhere; there was a sense that his face was going to pop noisily out of the background at any minute.

I had drinks with him and a sixteen-year-old starlet named Angelique, a tiny Hispanic girl with a narrow body that made me think of a salamander in a column of fire. By way of greeting, she bit me on the cheek, then on the arm. When she went to the bathroom, I asked Miles if she was crazy. “No,” he said. “She’s just a scared little girl trying to take on the world. But she does bite. She told me once she bit through a box of Kleenex when she couldn’t sleep.”

Miles was a tall, rangy person who wore red plastic sunglasses and carried his bald head the way a certain kind of truculent person carries his butt — high, proud, and glandular. He wanted to know the most embarrassing thing I’d ever done, the sexiest thing, the cruelest thing. I told him and he said, “She’s telling me the truth. That’s lovely!” Angelique frisked like a puppy. “I never tell the truth!” she said. “I know you don’t, darling,” he replied, and took her picture with a small Polaroid camera.

We spent the night going from bar to bar. Wherever we went, Miles took Polaroid pictures of whoever was in front of us; a well-dressed middle-aged woman with wild eyes and a tough shiny nose; a sleek redhead in a T-shirt with a hairy grinning rat on it; a very blond man in a black shirt and thick black glasses, standing ramrod-straight and looking weird on purpose. I noticed Miles didn’t choose anyone too fashionable or too beautiful. He was going for real. The real women tried to look sexy. But there was uncertainty at the bottom of their eyes. Miles threw their pictures on the table with our drinks. I looked at a picture of a woman in a suit. Her clothing was rumpled; her forehead and nose shone with splotches of abnormal light. She was smiling like she believed “fun” was something that could be grabbed and held, and she was still trying very hard to grab it.

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

“I like to see people have some fun.”

“This woman doesn’t look like she’s ever had fun in her life.”

He regarded the picture. “Probably not. But she’s trying, and that’s what’s interesting to me.” He held up the camera and took my picture. I made the ugliest face I could. Angelique put her arms around me. She said, “I want to marry you,” and bit me.

At the end of the night, we had to walk a block to find a cab. Angelique ran ahead of us; when we caught up with her, she was flirting with some Hispanic men on a public bench. They were rough-looking and wore shabby clothes; they had unshaved faces and meaty shoulders just starting to go round. But they were still full of sex, and one of them was handsome. Angelique darted around them like a drunken little bird twittering in Spanish. They were so smitten that they didn’t notice Miles taking pictures. Angelique put her arms around the handsome one and made as if to kiss him. Miles took another picture. One of them did notice, and he glanced at us, frowning. “Pose with them,” Miles said to me.

“No.” I moved away.

“Okay,” he said. “Come on, Angelique, quit kissing the criminals.”

Heat shot through each man on the bench and brought all of them to their feet. Angelique started talking, her voice quick and supplicant. The handsome one snapped at her; she stepped back.

“You call me a criminal?” said one of them. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

“I was only kidding,” said Miles.

“You’re nobody to kid with me, faggot.”

“Look, why don’t you—”

“You’ve got AIDS, don’t you, faggot? Go home and die, faggot.”

We walked down the street and they followed us, yelling at Miles’s aggrieved butt of a head.

When we were in the cab, he said, “So that’s what they’re saying in the street—‘You’ve got AIDS.’ That’s the worst thing you can say.”

“That didn’t mean anything,” said Angelique. “They were just barking.”

“They didn’t want to be used,” I said.

There was a silence and in it I knew Miles would not work with me.

“But that was okay, wasn’t it?” he asked. “That wasn’t too scary, was it?”

“No,” said Angelique. “That was fun!”

That night, I dreamed I was in Paris, posing for a magazine cover. The studio was filled with people — René, Alana, Simone, Cunt Face, every drunk bitch and bastard from rue du Temple. And sliding among them, bending and flattening his body like a snake, Alain showed his white flattened face. There was no movement in his eyes now. They were still and empty as a waiting grave. The photographer was furious, but there was nothing he could do. Alain smiled and disappeared. The crowd milled. The photographer cursed and pinched me.

So I left my body and went to a place more empty than a desert, a place that seemed to stretch into forever. In it shimmered thousands of veils and masks and personalities, each as still as a statue and waiting for someone to step inside them and make them live. Quickly and lightly, I stepped from one to the next. Pleasure zipped across my surface like a water bug.

But under the surface, something heavy pulled and twisted. It pulled and twisted because it did not want to take these shapes. It pulled me back into my body and twisted my face off my head. But it was okay. No one noticed; the camera flashed. I smiled and woke up thrashing, like I was trying to throw off a great blanket of darkness.

Hungover and haunted, I went to the next day’s go-see. Grainy light fell on the bent heads and shining hair of a dozen wan, yawning beauties. The booker opened my book and closed it. He said, “Honey, your look is dead.” Once again, I thought, Alain. He had entered my world through my dream and poisoned it for me. I knew this was absurd. But I thought it anyway.

That night, I showed Patrick the Polaroid Miles had taken of me. My eyes bugged out. My hands were claws. My mouth was open so wide, my cheekbones seemed to pop off my head and my discolored tongue stuck out as far as it could go. My throat was a mass of wet redness.

Patrick looked at it for a long time. “It really is heinous,” he said finally. “It’s the throat that does it. It looks substantial — like there’s something trying to get out.”

Veronica said she hated the people at the office and that they hated her. She said she was forced to work with men who said filthy misogynistic things and that no one would listen to her complaints. She was terrified they would discover her illness, fire her, and cancel her insurance. Yet she worked double shifts, putting in sixty-hour workweeks because she was behind in her taxes.

I thought she was wrong. I thought if they knew she had HIV, they would treat her better. “They’ll be more understanding if they know,” I said. “They’ll go easy.”

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “They’d circle for the kill.”

She’d left her support group by then because, she said, the women were all stupid cows and the moderator was a condescending queer.

“One day, I made the mistake of being vulnerable around them — if you can’t be vulnerable with cows, then who? I told them what was going on at work, all of it. I said I felt like God hated me, and the snotty faggot said, ‘Oh come on. I know you’re bigger than that.’ I said, ‘My fucking God! How big am I supposed to be?’ And the cows just pursed their detestable lips. No wonder men hate us. No wonder.”

Finally, the moderator told the group that he was writing a book on women with AIDS and that they were going to be part of it. Veronica found this outrageous, and she tried to unite the other women against him. One of them snitched on her and she was asked to leave the group.

During the same week, her sister called and told her to stop sending presents to her niece. “She says whether I’m sick or not, I need to live my own life and stop trying to glom on to the child. She said once I scared Sunny on the phone. Of course she wouldn’t tell me how.” Veronica sat straight, her smoking hand quivering with rage. “She talks like I’m going to contaminate her.” Rage filled her eyes with streaks of yellow bile. “She talks like I’m going to eat her.”

She fought with people at work, until no one would partner with her anymore and she had to work alone. When she and I went to the movies, she accused the people behind her of kicking and screamed at the people in front when they asked her to please stop talking. She fought with people in our aerobics class for getting too close to her on the mat. Once, she fought with the instructor during class. We were on our elbows and knees, pulsing one leg at a time up toward the ceiling. “Hold that pelvis firm!” shouted the instructor into her mouthpiece. “Pretend your favorite person is behind you, holding it very firmly!”

“Excuse me!” Veronica’s voice rang through the room, rising over the music. “Excuse me!” The instructor turned. Veronica was already on her feet, eyes crazy with rage. “One,” she said, “that was a very rude remark. Two, my favorite person is dead.”

I argued with my father about choices. I made fun of him when he talked as if he didn’t have any. But when I talked about Veronica with Daphne, I argued the other way. Daphne lived in Hoboken with her boyfriend, Jeff. She was almost done with graduate school. She had grown steady and a little plump and her eyes had an expression of gathering power. Her kitchen had blue wallpaper and smelled of garbage and lilac. We sat in an oval of sunlight and drank mugs of honeyed tea and talked as if we were walking around the block at Christmas.

“She acts like a demented bitch,” I said, “and I want to tell her that, but I can’t. I don’t know how I’d be if I were her. People say you have a choice about how you act. But it seems like she really doesn’t.”

“What d’you mean? Of course she does. It’s horrible that she’s got AIDS. But she’s got a choice, just like everybody else. You can be her friend, but you can’t help how she chooses to handle what’s happened to her.”

“But sometimes I get this picture of what it’s like inside her. I picture inside her being like a maze that’s really small and dark, full of roadblocks and trick doors. I picture her twisting around and around, wanting to go forward and not being able to find the way. Like a bee that’s banging on the screen door — you open the door and you wait for it to go out, but it just keeps banging on the screen.”

“But she’s not the bee,” said Daphne. “She’s the person who built the maze.”

I wished my father had been there right about then. He’d have said, “You don’t build anything! You come up out of the ground like a tree and that’s what you are! You’re not the one who made it!”

But I said, “Is she? Even if she built it the way it had to be when she lived with crazy parents?”

“Yes, she still did it. Everybody does. You create these strategies—”

Discussing and describing things we didn’t understand, we walked around a winter block in a sunny kitchen, past little girls dancing on green chairs or sucking up milk shakes in a warm car smelling of mother and vinyl; of Mother’s bare shoulder in her sleeveless blouse with its piercing half circle of sweat. You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off you. We walked and walked against the impassable membrane of our understanding. Good to be true. We pressed against it until we could press no more. Eyes off you. We returned to the kitchen and finished our tea.

On my way back to Manhattan on the train, I remembered that lying in bed with Daphne six years earlier had been like lying in a hole with a dog. The memory was flickering and far away as “heaven” had once been. It flew past me, like the shabby old houses and cars and discarded bathtubs flew past as the train gathered speed, then plunged into a coruscating black tunnel. I dozed in the droning car. I felt like a discarded bathtub sitting out in a yard with sun shining on it. I felt good.

Patrick and I broke up. We had a fight about something I can’t even remember. There was a break in the yelling and I said, “Maybe we should just stop seeing each other.” And he looked up with gratitude and relief. We were quiet for a while. He asked me if I wanted to walk a bit and I said yes. We walked for about an hour, not saying much of anything. At the end of it, we were done and it was okay.

I saw other men after Patrick. They were important to me at the time, but now I can’t remember why. Maybe there was a demon in my pants saying, Do it with this one! No, don’t do it with that one! I did it with one named Chris, a thirty-five-year-old former model with the touching face of an unformed boy. His blond hair fell in his eyes. He wore pastel jackets over white pants. I lay awake at night thinking about him. When we kissed, I felt hope and joy. When we fought, I cried. Now the things I remember most viscerally about him are the way he smartly tapped his packets of artificial sweetener against his saucer, and that he left most of his food on his plate. He was very thin and when you first looked at him, he appeared much younger than he was. His eyes were young. But there was rigidity in his mouth and neck and chest and it was old, very old. One night in a café, I said something and he leaned toward me with tenderness in his eyes. For a moment, his rigidity trembled, trying to move with the feeling; then it was gone.

Years later, when I was lying in my bed crying because my life was broken, Chris came to me as powerfully as in a waking dream. He was leaning toward me, full of tenderness. He did not tremble. His mouth was not rigid; it was alive and firm, and his neck was supple. His chest radiated warmth that was more loving than erotic. My heart was comforted, my mind calmed. In life, we had parted coldly. Afterward, we didn’t speak. We didn’t even look at each other. Still, I believe that somehow he came to me.

There were several others. I lay awake thinking of them, too. I leapt into their arms, laughing, and covered their necks with kisses. I told them secrets and stories from my childhood. I told them I loved them. Now I can’t think why. Perhaps it was simply that, in each case, I was the woman and he was the man. And that was enough.

In the winter, I began to get catalog work rather than fashion assignments. It was dull, and I knew that one day soon I would want to find something else. But I was not bitter or afraid. I was twenty-five years old and I was stronger than I had been in Paris. I waited, alert and listening.

In the spring, Daphne got married in someone’s backyard. There were children running around shouting. There were two-colored tulips and slim trees with heavy bunches of white flowers. While Daphne and Jeff made their vows, a child cried, “There’s a daddy longlegs!” and Daphne laughed under her veil.

In the summer, Sara moved to a Newark bedsit with an aide from the old people’s home. He was a tall, handsome black man with loose, gangling limbs, and he almost wordlessly loaded Sara’s cardboard boxes of things into his car. One raucous night at the bedsit, Sara put her hand through a windowpane; he made a tourniquet and took her to the emergency room. “He thinks quick and he did the right thing,” said my father. “He might not be so bad.” But then he drove off with the car, leaving Sara without any way to get to work. After a few weeks, he brought the car back with a smashed windshield. Sara moved back in with my parents and went to school to learn court reporting.

In the fall, I got a job with a photographer named John. He had a small, tense body and a large head that craned around like something on a turret. He asked me if I was from San Francisco. Because I was wary, I said no. Halfway through the shoot, I recognized him.

A night or two later, we met for coffee in a large café. It was raining; the shadow of a dripping little branch shivered happily on the lit pane. John hunched forward over his thick white cup, warming it with his hands. He said I should go to L.A. There was more joy there, he said, and he had connections to music video work. I said, “I’m not one of those idiots who thinks she can be an actress.” He said, “This isn’t acting.” I said, “I don’t know anybody there.” He smiled and raised a hand off his coffee cup. He had a fleshy, emotional hand. He said, “You know me.”

In a surge of headlights, the grain of the window glass became suddenly visible. Its lines were fine, glowing, and curved in shape. They joined the glistening shadow branches and made a phantom web dripping with wet, senselessly beautiful light.

“Can you help set things up for me?” I asked. “Can you help me find an apartment?”

I love you, said John’s eyes. I love you, said the set of his lips. I love you for a little street girl who’d take off her clothes if you gave her a glass of wine and told her she could be a model. But that’s not what I was. Thrilled and trembling, the phantom web filled with surges of traveling light. Yes, he could help me. Of course he could.

And he did. He found a cheap apartment for me in Venice Beach. I had money to pay for both places for a time. If it didn’t work out in a year or so, I could always come back to New York.

“I’ll see you off to the airport,” said Veronica. “I’ll wave my handkerchief. I’ll run alongside your cab waving my handkerchief.”

“Oh no, that’s all right.”

“Only joking,” said Veronica sharply. “Don’t worry.”

My new apartment was in a small two-story with EL SERENO misspelled on its stucco front in worn-out cork. John took me to flea markets to shop for furniture: a polka-dot shag rug, an orange sectional couch, a red Formica table with matching chairs. He took me to lunch and sometimes to dinner. I told him about Paris and everything that had happened there. He told me about Gregory Carson, who’d folded his agency and gone back to Texas to run his father’s oil business. He told me I would have to learn to drive but that until then he would take me to jobs whenever he could. He said, “I got you into this mess, after all.”

My first video was for the comeback effort of a middle-aged trio of overweight guys with big beards. They played a song about hot girls; I rode in a pink car with two other models in tiny skirts, fighting crime and showing up obnoxious people. My big scene came when, fists on hips, I stopped a barroom bully by planting my gold-heeled foot on the bar, my skirt riding crotch-high. The bully’s eyes popped; he back-flipped out of the frame. Fists on hips, I bounced as if my crotch were the steed I’d ridden in on, humpty-hump! By catwalk standards, it was clumsy and crude, and at first I hated doing it. But then the clumsiness became fun. One of my gal partners stepped on the hand of a fallen villain; the other twirled a toy gun and blew on it with lush lips. The band wandered in, sharing a bag of potato chips.

I went home in a taxi that cost one hundred dollars and walked the peopled gray beach behind El Sereno, feeling my aloneness. It did not feel bad. It felt like something hidden was slowly becoming visible. I thought of Joy, Cecilia, Candy, Jamie, Selina, Chris. They fell away from me like empty potato chip bags thrown from a car. Even Patrick. He was good, I thought, but now he’s finished. And I pictured throwing away an empty milk shake container. These thoughts and images scared me. I could not believe I was really like that. I thought of Veronica. Here there was a change. Veronica did not fall away or seem finished. She seemed to go on forever, all the way down into the ground. I asked myself why and was answered immediately. Her pain was so deep that she had become deep, whether she liked it or not. Maybe deeper than any human being can bear to be.

I went back to New York just before Christmas. The pisselegant city wore salt-stained winter clothes and soiled jewels, its colors stunned and mute in the cold. People who passed me on the street looked like acquaintances whose names I would remember presently. I went to dinner with Selina and to a party with the naked motorcycle girl. I thought, I will not throw them away like empty bags.

Christmas came. My father’s music boasted of fatted abundance, and so did the tree, the scented candles, the stockings, and the stuffed toy sheep my mother had dressed in red Santa suits she’d sewn. Fear was still in the house, as was the sadness and the unsaid things. But happiness had come and dazzled its eyes. Daphne was pregnant. Her breasts and belly were just starting to swell and her skin was plumped and rosy. Sara’s eyes had wakened. My mother bloomed. The decorations, which had looked sad and weak to me, now looked like offerings carried in my family’s arms. I saw my family, exhausted but still hopeful, walking with arms full of offerings down a long road, giving without knowing why to something they couldn’t see. Amid their giving, my video was a trinket, but it was a trinket everyone enjoyed. My father watched it again and again, smiling and expanding inside. For this was no flat picture in a magazine — this came with music! His daughter was punishing bastards to music and bouncing around like a girl nice enough to be a little clumsy. Even when he stopped watching, it stayed on the TV, mutely rewinding and replaying, becoming part of the tree and the stockings and the Christmas sheep.

“How’s Veronica doing?” asked Sara.

We were setting the table with the holiday silver from my mother’s side of the family, and that boasted, too.

“She’s okay.”

“Did you see a lot of her this visit?”

“No. I didn’t see her at all.”

“Oh.”

Of all the people I had spoken to about Veronica, Sara was the only one who didn’t know she had HIV.

I flew back to L.A. just before New Year’s Eve. I had dinner with John. I said I felt bad about not seeing Veronica but that it was painful to be around her. “You can’t talk to her about it because she won’t listen to anything anybody says. But you can’t ignore it, either, because she acts so awful that you always have to remind yourself that she can’t help it, since she’s sick. And her parents were crazy, and they abandoned her. Et cetera.”

He agreed that I had to take care of myself, and that she had choices.

I went home and took a hot bath. My mind talked and talked. I got into bed. The darkness of the room grew over me. Just before I curled into it, I started awake and thought, Where am I? Then I sank back to sleep as if slipping into black water.

Under the water, I saw two naked little boys tightly bound and hung upside down. One of them was dead. His rectum had been torn open and gouged so deep that I could see into his belly. Something white moved inside him. The living child sobbed with terror. “He has AIDS and now I have it,” he sobbed. “I’m going to die.” I put my arms around him and tried to hold him upright, but he was too heavy. I said, “I’m sorry you have AIDS,” and the insipid words were loathsome, even to me. In a fury, he bit me; I dropped him and ran, terrified he would give me the disease. Veronica rode past in a cab; I was in the cab telling her about the boys. “And then he bit me,” I said. Her eyes grew wild and she bit me with razor teeth. I jumped out of the car and ran. I woke up and a voice inside me said, You will go to hell. Silent and still, the room roared over me.

The next day, I called Veronica. The phone rang a long time. I was about to hang up when she answered. She sounded as if my voice had called her from a dark place she’d barely been able to pull herself from. As if my voice was a familiar but puzzling and distant sound, significant in a way she couldn’t quite remember.

“Oh, hon, hi. Do you need anything?” she asked. She sounded exhausted and hoarse.

“What do you mean? Are you all right? You sound terrible.”

“I’m not all right, hon. Not at all.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No. I’m too weak to leave the apartment.”

A voice in my head said, This is real.

“Veronica,” I said. “I want to see you. I want to help. I can get a flight tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to do that, hon.”

“Please,” I said. “Let me come. If you really don’t want me to, I won’t. But I want to.”

She didn’t answer for a long moment.

“Hello?” I said.

“You don’t want to stay with me, do you, hon?”

“No! I mean, unless you want.”

“No, I really don’t. I’m a very private person. You know that. But if you stay in your own place, I’d love to see you. If it doesn’t put you out too much.”

“Veronica,” I said, “I love you.”

She didn’t answer.

On the plane, I sat next to a fat old woman who’d come on board in a wheelchair. She wasn’t crippled, but she was too sedated to walk. She was flying to see her son, who had just been shot. He was unconscious and would likely be dead by the time she arrived. Her grief fanned out from her, huge and tender. She did not try to display it or hide it. Her name was Suzanne Lowry. I listened to her talk about her son, and I talked to her about Veronica. She said she was sorry. It didn’t sound like politeness. It sounded like her grief was big enough to take in my lesser grief. We talked about small things. She told me what she was knitting. We snorted over the airline food. She talked about an article in Ebony. She asked, “Do you read Ebony?” She was black, and when I said no, she said tartly, “Well, you should.”

She was in shock, and because she was heavily medicated, she kept dropping her knitting needles and her silverware. I had to cut her airline food into pieces for her. I poured her half a cup of water and she trembled so that she spilled it on herself anyway. The stewards and stewardesses rolled their eyes behind her back. They didn’t know about her son. They weren’t able to see her grief. They saw a fat old lady who kept screwing up, and they thought it was funny. One of them caught my eye and smirked, like I would think it was funny, too; I gave him such a look that he blanched and turned away. But the others kept giggling. I wanted to march down the aisle and make them stop. But I pictured myself, skinny and prissy, shaking my finger and acting the good girl. I wasn’t the good girl. The old woman couldn’t see them anyway and would have had to put up with my climbing over her so that I could be the good girl.

When I last saw Mrs. Lowry, she was being wheeled through the airport by personnel. I held up my hand in a static wave, but she no longer saw me. She probably forgot me as soon as she got off the plane. But I still remember her. For a long time, the memory confused me. I would recall the soft feeling between us as something precious — and then I would see it as worthless. My feeling had not helped Mrs. Lowry, and her feeling had not helped me. Veronica was dead, and most likely the son was dead, too. The flight attendants had laughed behind their hands. But still I remember the feeling, like a trickle of water in a dry riverbed.

Veronica flung open her apartment door and stepped into the hall with the rakish pose of a cabaret emcee. She had lost weight, but she was not emaciated. Her undyed brown hair was cut close to her head. As I came closer, I saw the glitter of sickness in her eyes. We embraced, her head against my hard shoulder, her heart speaking to my belly with muffled, desperate joy. She was burning up and damp through her clothes. I looked over her head, and saw the last Siamese cat staring at me with a look of flat terror.

I took her to see her doctor. She’d apparently had a bad reaction to AZT, compounded by a respiratory infection. She’d started smoking again, which had probably provoked the infection. She stopped taking the medication and quit smoking. She rested at home. I brought her takeout. In five days, she was well enough to go out. We went for brunch in a restaurant decorated with blue chinaware and animals that crouched on blond wood shelves. We ordered eggs and red flannel hash, and it was placed before us in squat blue pots.

“You always told me I should let my hair go natural,” said Veronica. “It looks good, don’t you think?”

Yes, I did.

“The barber in my building did it. He asked me what I wanted and I said, ‘Whatever you think would look good at a funeral. I am dying, after all.’ Scared him, I think. Goodness, this hash is delicious.”

She said she never felt better. She asked about Venice Beach and the video shoot. We talked about her visiting me out there. She apologized for being “hysterical” on the phone.

“You were sick,” I said.

“I really think it was the AZT,” she said. “It made me psychotic. I literally broke into several people, all arguing with one another. Some of them wanted to live; some wanted to die. I was awake, but I saw it like a dream. It was me, attacking a woman who was also me. A third woman — also me, natch — came to her rescue and stopped me. But the one I had attacked defended me; she understood why I’d done it — she understood completely. But the third — well, that part, I can’t remember. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No,” I said.

“I knew you’d understand.” She sounded genuinely relieved. “You’re probably the only person I could tell.”

It was Sunday afternoon and the restaurant was crowded, its rooms full of pleasant talk. There was a table of gay men sitting across from us, and I was drawn by their ease and companionability. My attention hovered on them for a moment, receiving the affected, elegant lilt of their voices with vicarious enjoyment. Then my reaction swerved sharply. Their voices sounded contorted, tortured into fluted curlicues. They seemed to reflect base souls trying to hide their baseness under the thinnest of pretensions — and then to exaggerate the pretense, as though it were something great. They all talk like that, I thought. You can always tell a fag. And Veronica is just like them. She talks just like them.

Mortified, I divided like Veronica in her sick-vision. Shut up, I told myself, shut up!

“After I got off the phone with you, I decided I wanted to live,” continued Veronica. “All of me. I got up the next day at five-thirty in the morning and made myself go out to the deli on the corner for poached eggs and toast. No wonder I was so weak — it was the first real food I’d had for days. It was so good, Alison, I can’t tell you. I felt life coming back into my body. It was still dark outside and I had this wonderful feeling of safety and warmth. I loved watching the countermen setting up, filling the sugar dispensers, putting out all the little creamers. I flirted with them and they flirted back, even though I looked like hell.”

Her voice was the same bitterly inflected instrument I had just despised. But now there was hope in its center, and that subtly made it sweeter. The sweetness didn’t go with the habitual hard showiness of the voice, and the incongruence gave it a wobbly, unprotected quality that pierced me. I love her, I thought. I love her.

But then she said something with such force that a tiny bit of spit flew from her mouth and landed on my hand. I jerked it away as if I’d been bitten. There had been no thought or even feeling behind it. It was pure reflex. For a second, the conversation stopped. Then Veronica changed the subject. There was no sweetness in her voice.

We left the restaurant and took a walk down Seventh Avenue. The sun gave everything a glow that crackled in the stark cold. Hungrily, I took in the aging patchwork of buildings, the rhythmic pattern of traffic, the people, walking with miraculous order and civility. I had no hateful thoughts. I enjoyed our walk.

The next night, I went to see a play with Veronica, her old friend George, and David, a boy George was dating. When I heard George would be coming, I was surprised — the last I’d heard of him, Veronica had called him a “misogynist.” But when I arrived at the restaurant before the show, my surprise evaporated. The two men were wearing suits and ties; Veronica wore a suit, too. The men were leaning slightly toward her, their faces expressing pleased alertness, as if they were courtiers in the presence of a queen known for her extraordinary wit and didn’t want to miss the slightest nuance of her royal demeanor, let alone her words. They were lavishing this attention on Veronica like praise, ensconcing her in their regard as if it were flowers. They knew she was sick and they were very likely afraid they were about to get sick, too. But their bodies did not speak of this. They sat erect and open, as if the best of life was ahead of them. They gave their courage to the sick woman so that she would be upheld.

When George stood to greet me, I surprised him with a full embrace. He and David complimented me on photos they had seen, not mentioning that they hadn’t seen any for a while. They asked me about Nadia again and again. Veronica drank soda water, but the rest of us shared bottles of wine. We talked about films, books, magazines. Veronica and George quoted lines from All About Eve back and forth intermittently. (“I heard your story in passing.” “That’s how you met me, in passing.”) We had big desserts and then piled into a cab as if we were wearing capes and carrying walking sticks. (“I told my story in bits and pieces.” “That’s how I met you, in bits and pieces.”)

When we got to the theater, I went to the bathroom, leaving the others in the lobby. When I came back, I saw them before they saw me. George was talking to Veronica, his back to me. David was behind Veronica, looking over her head at George. He was taller than George and I could see his expression clearly. He looked bewildered and scared. I thought, He is even younger than I am. Then he saw me looking at him and smiled brightly. We all went to the play.

But when I got into bed that night, the hate came on me again. With no conversation or pots of flannel hash to dim it, it came big and loud. Gnawing and terrified, it ran back and forth in erratic diagonals, exuding grotesque visions: a handsome gay man, a hairdresser I’d just had dinner with — hate made his teeth and nose pointy and foregrounded like a dog’s snout. It squeezed him together with the flute-voiced men at the restaurant and with Duncan in Central Park, pulling his ass open, his body reduced to a dumb totem with a single meaning. And with Veronica, her ugly face, her proofreader’s kit — her rulers, her box of colored pencils — her prissiness, which denied the shit of the world and so drew it down upon herself.

Sweating, I twisted in my bed. I thought: I tried to be so liberal, so free. I lied to myself. Those men were always about death. And Veronica chose them. That’s why she’s dying.

I sat up and turned on the light. I saw myself in the mirror, disheveled and shrunken, my head looking strangely small on my long neck, my eyes remote and ashamed. So this was who I really was. I wanted to blame my father, but I couldn’t. This was who I was. I thought of David’s face in the theater, the way he’d smiled when he saw me looking. I thought of Mrs. Lowry, the way she’d tartly said, “Well, you should.” I thought of the rivulet of hope and sweetness in Veronica’s voice. Sadness brimmed; it bore up my hate like water bears ice and carries it away.

I stayed in New York for ten days. During that time, I saw no one but Veronica. “I told my aunt you’d come to visit me,” she said. “And she asked, ‘How much did you pay her?’ I said, ‘Dolores, would you listen to yourself? She’s my friend. She came because she cares about me.’ ”

I arrived back in L.A. at night. John picked me up and took me to dinner at an all-hours place with a boiling dark air. He looked angry. He kept telling me I had to learn to drive if I expected L.A. to work out for me. I drank too much and took him back to my place. Maybe I felt I owed him. Maybe I liked him. Maybe the demon whispered, Do it with him! In any case, it didn’t work out. He kissed me too hard and touched me with violent shyness. We rolled awkwardly on my sectional couch; it came apart and almost dumped us on the floor.

“You’re so beautiful,” he blurted.

“I’m not beautiful,” I blurted back. “I’m ugly.”

He reared away, frowning. He was taking it as an insult, and with reason. But it would not be taken back. “You’re beautiful,” he said angrily.

“No I’m not. I’m ugly.”

He slapped me. I fell off the couch. He sat on the edge of it and held my shoulders. I could see in his eyes that his heart was pounding. “Stop saying that!” he said intensely.

“No! I’m ugly, ugly!” My voice was ugly.

He slapped me again. I tried to stop him. He held my wrists. Now we were really in it. The room was buzzing with the energy of it. “Tell me you’re beautiful!” he said, coldly now. I wouldn’t. “You’re beautiful,” he said, and slapped me again.

“John, please stop.”

“Say you’re beautiful.”

But I couldn’t get the words out. He slapped me until my ears sang. Finally, to stop the hitting, I said what he wanted to hear. He let go of me and sat back as if deflated.

“Don’t you see?” My voice broke. I was nearly crying. “Don’t you see how ugly I am?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t.” He crossed his legs and looked away.

I asked if he wanted a drink. He said no, that was okay. He said he was going to go but that he could tuck me in if I wanted. I said no, that was okay. I saw him to the door; we kissed quickly, on the lips.

We didn’t see each other for a few weeks. Then I called him and asked him to drive me to a job, and things went back to normal. Except I didn’t see anger in his eyes for a long time. I saw sadness.

When I told Veronica about John slapping me, she said, “Ooh, that sounds kind of sexy.”

“Maybe if it had been somebody else. With John, it was just weird.”

She didn’t seem surprised that I’d said I was ugly, nor did she act like there was anything strange about it. I appreciated that.

I went to New York every month for the next six. When I wasn’t in New York, I talked to Veronica on the phone. She complained about her doctor, her neighbors, her sister, people at work, people on the street, at the movies, in the store, and at the gym. She insulted David and fell out with George. She had a screaming match with the woman who lived above her, a “bitch” who walked on her hardwood floor in high heels, making a “murderous” noise. Her exterior became to me like a vast prickly thicket broken by patches of ice and tiny, weirdly pursed receptors built only to receive what they’d heard before. It was boring and ugly. You couldn’t talk to it. I’m sure she knew I felt this way. But she didn’t get angry. Probably she didn’t dare. If she’d lost me, she would’ve had no one.

“I’m always the one to call,” I said. “I’ll wait for you to call next time.”

“I understand, hon,” she said. “You’re setting your boundaries.”

“I’m not setting anything,” I said. “We can talk anytime. It’s just that you never call me, and I don’t want to bother you.”

“I don’t have anything to talk about except my new disgusting aches and pains. It’s just depressing.”

“I don’t care if it’s depressing. I want to know what’s going on with you.”

“It may not be too depressing for you, hon. But it’s too depressing for me.”

And so, when we met, I talked brightly about nothing and she let herself be drawn into bright nothingness. But I could see dark shapes moving behind her eyes.

Daphne’s baby was born in June. They sent me a Polaroid of the delivery: a splayed leg, my sister’s extruded red flesh, a bloody cord; life caught in the doctor’s great mitt. My mother’s head between the open leg and the far border of the photograph, grinning from ear to ear. Later, I balked when they handed me the infant, a girl named Star. But when I held her, it was like two opposite electrical poles lit up inside me and discharged twin bolts that met and joined. It was a small place inside me and far away, but I felt it.

That summer was moist and hot. The city exhaled, farted, and sweated through the bars of its concrete cage like a massive animal of flesh and steel, glass and bristled hair. It sent up a mighty stink to carry all the little smells that played in and out of it — flowers, dirt, cars, garbage, piss, and food. I called Selina and we went to see a band. They played in a modest venue, a dark and delicious place with a copious flow of strange faces and a bar of colored bottles lit up like the Emerald City. I drank and bit the rim of my plastic cup and lost myself in the music on the sound system. I had succeeded. I had become like this music. My face had been a note in a piece of continuous music that rolled over people while they talked and drank and married and made babies. No one remembers a particular note. No one remembers a piece of grass. But it does its part. I had done my part.

The sound system cut off. The band came onstage. The front man was rail-thin, with gaunt eyes and pale, pouchy cheeks. He carried himself like a dandy, but rawness hung off him like the smell of meat. He picked up his guitar; dandified feeling came out of it. They weren’t good, but it didn’t matter. The room was full of life that wanted forms to hold it, and it wasn’t picky. Neither were we. We watched as if we were witnessing the preservation of a place in our collective heart — a place that had once been primary and that now had become so layered with auxiliary concerns that we no longer knew what it was or where it was. And now we felt it: secret and tender, and with so many chambers. Some were dark, with bats flying out. Some were speed, light, and joy. Some were tenderness and soft red flesh. Some had babies curled inside them. Some were the places where all the others mingled. I remembered standing on the street with Lilet, eating ice cream off a paper plate and bags of hot cashews. I remembered rooms of strangers and people dancing and a boy who said, “And then I fertilized it!”

Selina put her arm around me and I leaned into her a little. In a chamber of my heart was Daphne, her open leg radiating triumph and pride, and my mother’s grinning face between her legs, a net of love to catch the baby when it came. In another chamber was Nadia, sailing like a ship, her scorn unfurled like silk sails. I saw the German woman from behind, walking alone down a dark corridor, almost disappeared. There was Sara, living in an enchanted shadow world only she could see. There was Veronica alone in her apartment, locked in full engagement with forces the musicians lightly referred to. The song said nothing about any of them, but they were part of it anyway.

I wished I could tell them all about this, tell them what I saw. But I wouldn’t be able to find the right words for conversation. Even if I did, it wouldn’t make sense to them, any more than my father talking of his favorite songs made sense to the men he worked with.

The music turned the corner of a darkly baubled wall. I imagined Veronica alone in the dark, waiting for the brute that stalked her to show itself in full. I imagined her horror at the small eruptions of death on her body — the sores, infections, rashes, yeast, and liquid shit. I imagined her holed up in the part of herself where all was still orderly and clean, insistently maintaining the propriety and congruence that had enabled her to get through the senselessly disordered world, and that was slowly being taken from her.

Even more than the others, I wanted to tell her this. I wanted her to know that even though she was dying, she was still included in the story told by the music. That she wasn’t completely and brutally alone. The music raised its lamp and illuminated its own dark interior. I will tell her, I thought. I will remember and I will tell her.

I went to visit Veronica the next day. She put out a tray of brownies in special pink paper, fruit, and cheeses. Her breathing was labored; it must’ve been hard to go out for the food, and she couldn’t even eat it. In her presence, what had been important and true the previous night seemed trivial. But it was what I had to offer.

“I thought about you,” I said, “because the music was so dramatic and a little dark and — first, it reminded me of the story you told me about being on the mountain with that Balkan guy?”

She nodded, a little dazed, an eyebrow cocked.

“But also the whole event was trying to create this experience, this feeling that these guys were great because they were really dealing with something. Compared to you, they weren’t dealing with shit. I don’t mean just because what you’re dealing with is bad, but because it’s real.”

Veronica’s face went from bewildered to hard. “This isn’t a rock song, hon,” she said.

“I know, I—” I felt my face reddening. “I know it sounds stupid, but I just mean … I thought of you. I thought how strong you are and how much guts you have. You’re the realest person I know. You are! Other people just write songs and strike poses and …”

Veronica turned and looked at the last cat. The gesture was more eloquent than any cutting remark. Silence fell, slow as dust. I realized I was holding my breath; with difficulty, I exhaled.

“Do you have a home lined up for her yet?” I asked.

“No. Not yet. I’m supposed to talk to someone tomorrow.”

“I could take her,” I said.

She didn’t answer me. I thought, In a minute, I will leave.

“Do you remember the nun who tended Duncan in the hospital?” she asked. “Dymphna Drydell?”

“Sister Drycrotch?”

“Yes, well, Dymphna wasn’t her name. It was Dorothea, but she said we could call her Dymphna if we wanted to. She was a lovely person. She sang to Duncan one night. She sang him a lullaby.”

Outside, someone shouted; gray car noise went down the block. In a minute, I would leave.

“Don’t think I’m angry with you, Allie.” She was still looking at the cat. “I’ve never been angry with you.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

I got up and sat beside her. Finally, she looked at me. Her face was stunned and drained. I put my hand on her breastbone. I felt her subtly respond. Shyly, I rubbed her.

The trail runs into a wide road on a high plateau overlooking the entire Bay Area. The rain is now a low drizzle. The fog is still very thick, but it is moving; to my distant right lies the ocean and the bony spangle of the Golden Gate Bridge. I lick my dry lips. I try to imagine myself connected to Veronica even now, but there is no weight to my imagining. I want to know who she was, but I can’t because I didn’t look in time. When I look now, I see a smile hanging in darkness. Then I tip over, pulled down by my own weight. I have the last of the water and tuck the bottle back in my bag.

I rubbed Veronica’s chest and then I left. I said, “Call me if anything happens,” and she walked me to the door. I hugged her and she said, “Wait a minute, hon.” She took a ring off her finger and gave it to me. It was a handsome sienna-colored stone set in ornate silver. “It’s a carnelian,” she said. “Duncan gave it to me the second time we saw each other. He put it on my finger and then he kissed it.” She put it on my finger. She squeezed my hand. She said, “Good-bye, sweetheart.” And she smiled.

Three weeks later, Veronica’s sister called to tell me that Veronica was dead. She had been found by the police, who had gone to her building when the neighbors complained about the smell coming from her apartment. She had died of pneumonia. “She died peacefully,” said her sister. “She was watching television.”

The last cat had still been in the apartment. Veronica had apparently torn open a large bag of cat food and left it in the kitchen so the animal wouldn’t starve before someone found her.

I fold my umbrella and rest it against my thigh. I take off my gloves, put them on my other thigh, and look at the ring Veronica gave me. It is beautiful against my cold-bleached fingers. I try to draw from it some wisp of spirit, some faint echo of Veronica’s smile, her touch, her mad anger, a ghost of fiercely exhaled smoke. Nothing. I put the gloves back on.

Veronica was cremated. I went to New York for the memorial. The rented hall was filled with the coworkers Veronica had hated, including a supervisor. There were also a few temps I’d worked with five years earlier — among them the woman who had once called Veronica a “total fucking fag hag.” When I walked in, they turned to stare at me. I wonder if I looked like Nadia to them.

“I knew she was sick with something,” I heard the supervisor say, “but I had no idea it was AIDS. Somebody’d told me her boyfriend had had it, but she just never looked that bad to me.”

I found George and stood with him. His face was puffy and his eyes sad. A former lover of his had been hospitalized, probably for the last time. He had not seen or spoken to Veronica since I had last visited her. I asked what had happened to the last cat. He said David had adopted it.

“Where is David?” I asked.

“He decided not to come, I guess.”

“And you’re the model!” A woman had my hand and was shaking it. She looked like Veronica in a mask of terrible happiness. “Hi, I’m Veronica’s sister, June. I’ve been following your career, so exciting. How did you meet my sister again?”

George uttered a courtesy that sounded like a curse and fled.

“Oops,” said June. “Did I say something? And there’s my mother. We’d better keep it down — whatever it is!” She winked as she pointed to an elderly woman with a hive of dry bleached hair, who was standing a few feet from us. She did not look like the kind of person who would abuse laxatives in order to lose weight.

When I stood up to talk, I told how I had met Veronica. I said that she knew I had been in Paris before I told her; I said that when I was looking for a job as a secretary, she’d told me I had to be like Judy Garland in A Star Is Born. I said that once when I’d complained about a feeling of tightness in my forehead, she’d said, “No, hon, that’s your sphincter.” I said, “Veronica was very beautiful.”

Then George told a story about a party Veronica had given years ago in L.A., where a faded pop musician had walked into the room naked. Everybody laughed. “Naked?” said Veronica’s mother in a loud, querulous voice. “Naked!” she repeated. Everybody laughed.

The last person I spoke to before I left was Veronica’s mother. I didn’t mean to speak to her, but she grabbed my hand as I walked by. “You were my daughter’s friend?” Her voice was made of dead, still sparking wires. I looked at her face, swollen under her hive of hair, and, for a moment, saw her daughter. Except that this woman did not have Veronica’s armor of pain sculpted to look like sophistry. Her face reflected pain received with the simplicity of a child.

“Yes,” I said. “I was her friend.”

“Thank you so much for coming. I’m so glad to see Veronica had friends.”

I was angry, but I just said, “She was a wonderful person.”

And the old lady embraced me and pulled me close, where I could feel the full force of her pain and fear and need. My anger left me. Gently, I patted her poor back. I felt her quiet slightly. I kept holding her. I felt her subtly open, like Veronica’s chest had opened under my hand. Emotion passed through me; Veronica seemed to move through her mother’s body, swift and graceful as light. I held tighter. Veronica was gone. The embrace broke.

“I’m just glad she didn’t suffer,” said Veronica’s mother.

I moved back a little. My anger returned in a bolt. I said, “She did suffer, ma’am. She had AIDS.”

Veronica’s mother did not change her expression. She just opened her mouth and moaned. She sounded like my mother when she fell on the concrete and the wind was knocked from her.

Veronica’s father had not come to the service.

I sit on the wet ground. My cruelty had been pointless. My kindness had been pointless. I remember rubbing the small bones in the center of Veronica’s chest. I remember her surprise at being touched that way, the slight shift in her facial expression, as if feelings of love and friendship had been wakened by the intimate touch. The subtle muscles between her chest bones seemed to open a little. Then I left.

I never should’ve touched her like that and then turned around and left, leaving her chest opened and defenseless against the feelings that might come into it — feelings of love and friendship left unrequited once more. I put my head on my knees. I fantasize giving Veronica a full-body massage, with oil, with warm blankets wrapped around the resting limbs. Drops of sweat would’ve rolled from my arms to melt on her skin. When I finished, I would’ve held her in my arms. Except she never would have allowed any of that. She only responded to the chest touch because I took her by surprise.

My mind distends from me, groping the air in long fingers, looking for Veronica. The air is cold and bloated with moisture; Veronica is not here. I draw back inside myself. Again, I try to imagine. This time, I can. I imagine Veronica lying on her couch, descending slowly into darkness, the electronic ribbon of television sound breaking into particles of codified appetites, the varied contexts of which must have been impossible to remember. I wonder if, at certain moments, a peal of music or an urgent scream had leapt in tandem with the movement of the darkness, and if so, what it had felt like. I wonder if Veronica’s spirit had tried to cling to the ersatz warmth of the TV noise; I think of a motherless baby animal clinging to a wire “mother” placed in its cage by curious scientists. I imagine Veronica drawing away from everything she had become on earth, withdrawing the spirit blood from what had been her self, allowing its limbs to blacken and fall off. I imagine Veronica’s spirit stripped to its skeleton, then stripped of all but its shocked, staring eyes, yet clinging to life in a fierce, contracted posture that came from intense, habitual pain. I imagine the desiccated spirit as a tiny ash in enormous darkness. I imagine the dark penetrated by something Veronica at first could not see but could sense, something substantive and complete beyond any human definition of those words. In my mind’s eye, it unfurled itself before Veronica. Without words it said, I am Love. And Veronica, hearing, came out of her contraction with brittle, stunted motions. In her eyes was recognition and disbelief, as if she were seeing what she had sought all her life, and was terrified to believe in, lest it prove to be a hoax. No, it said to Veronica. I am real. You have only to come. And Veronica, drawing on the dregs of her strength and her trust, leapt into its embrace and was gone.

I stare at the clay dirt before me. I think of the great teeth; the lion cub torn to pieces in the adult’s embrace. I imagine the methodical grind of digestion and blood. I imagine a moving black coil with white shapes inside it disintegrating in a grind of dirt, roots, and bones. I look up. Before me is a small tree with delicate orangy skin, its limbs, with dull sparse clusters of leaves and buds, arrayed like static flame. It plants its roots in the bones and the dirt and it drinks. I think of my sister’s bit of flesh, red with triumph, and my mother’s joyous head. I think of Veronica leaping into complete embrace, her love requited now forever.