Veronica

6

After the memorial, I visited my family. While my mother and Sara were out, I asked my father to play Rigoletto for me. I told him I had a friend who loved a particular aria and that I’d like to hear it. “It’s a love song,” I explained.

My father was happy to play it for me. I rarely spent time alone with him, and I even more rarely showed any interest in the things he loved. I wasn’t really showing interest now. I didn’t want to hear his Rigoletto. I wanted to hear Veronica’s Rigoletto, and it didn’t seem possible to hear both. If my father had met Veronica, he would’ve liked her. But he would not have wanted to meet her. She had loved a bisexual and thus had done wrong. It wouldn’t matter to him that she’d loved the music he loved, that she might’ve understood his sentimental passions in ways that I could not.

With self-righteousness and also a wish that he might know me, I talked to my father about Veronica. I could tell immediately that he didn’t want to hear what I said but that, because he respected death, he would suffer it. This made me all the more determined to make him hear me. I told him of Veronica’s loneliness, her idiosyncrasy, her love of order. I told him how kind she had been to Sara. I told him that Veronica, too, had despised the way people used words like choices. “It’s terrible for anybody to get a disease like AIDS,” I said. “But it seemed even worse for her. Because she tried so hard to be proper and dignified. She didn’t want to be phony; she didn’t want pity. She wound up being and getting what she didn’t want. But at least she fought.”

My father’s face had the retracted look of a threatened animal — tense around the jaw, ready to bite. But he nodded to let me know he was listening.

I told him about sitting in the café with Veronica, listening to the aria from Rigoletto. “The sad thing is, I think she was telling me the truth. I think there probably was love between her and Duncan. But it got put together with a lot of other horrible stuff that both of them couldn’t stop doing to themselves. So the love didn’t help them. That’s sadder to me than if they didn’t love each other.”

He didn’t answer. Loud voices leapt up in declarative oblongs, then divided into fine, vibrant strands of delicacy and strife; father and daughter sang against each other. But my father didn’t answer me. He didn’t look at me. He said, “Now Rigoletto is talking to Gilda, his daughter. He’s warning her not to leave the house. He says, ‘It would be a good joke to dishonor the daughter of a jester.’ ”

He said this last phrase with relish, as if the idea of a daughter’s honor was like a precious jewel to him, a jewel the world no longer valued (not even his own daughter!), and now here it was, celebrated and jealously guarded in Rigoletto. The idea of a daughter’s honor, I thought bitterly, not the reality. In reality, he didn’t honor me enough to answer what I’d said to him. I thought of telling him more, of forcing him to respond. But how could I insist that he face what I had failed to face?

“Now here’s the love duet,” he said. “The Duke has come to woo Gilda, only she doesn’t know who he is.”

I listened to see if this was the music I had heard in the café. I didn’t recognize it. I imagined a vessel of fluted glass falling through the air, landing, and shattering. I had just said that there was love between Veronica and Duncan. But how could I believe Duncan had loved her, when he had been so careless with her life and his? How could I believe she even knew what love was? My thoughts faltered and will-lessly followed the music. No. People who loved each other would never treat each other, or allow themselves to be treated, with such indifference and cruelty. But even as I thought this, I felt, rising from under thought, the stubborn assertion of love living inside their disregard like a ghost, unable to make itself manifest, yet still felt, like emotion from a dream.

“Now Rigoletto’s back,” said my father. “And Gilda’s gone! He cries out, ‘Gilda! Gilda!’ ”

The words cracked his voice as they burst from his lips, more fierce and dramatic than the voice of the singer. The music rose in a great fist. He said it again, more quietly this time. “ ‘Gilda! Gilda!’ ” I stared at him, shocked. His voice was full of emotion, but his face was rigid, his eyes glassy.

When I got back to L.A., I went for a job the next day. John drove me to it, hectoring me about learning to drive. In his voice I heard my father crying out. He laid on the horn and braked as a big white car cut us off, its rear end wagging. A blond child with a blurred face clutched a soft toy and waved at us out the back window. “Son of a bitch!” yelled John. We got slammed from behind and thrown forward. I grabbed the dashboard hard with one hand. John swerved the wrong way and sideswiped a white blur. Crashing and grinding rose in a great fist. Veronica came at me with razor teeth. I screamed. We swerved again and went off the road.

I came to strapped on a gurney in a white corridor of pain and intercom noise. My first thought was, I have AIDS. Then I remembered. A nurse came to check my vitals. “Is my face all right?” I whimpered. “Just bruised,” she replied, and said they’d take me for X-rays soon. People moaned. People ran up and down the hall. I could not move my head enough to see them; there were only upside-down white backs flapping away. Five hours later, I was fighting with a technician who insisted on taking out my earrings before she did the X-ray. She yanked them out so hard, I thought she’d tear my ears.

“If you fuck up my ears, I swear I’ll sue you,” I said. “I’m a model and I can’t have fucked-up ears!”

“Why not?” she asked. “You got a fucked-up head.”

I had a broken wrist, a torn rotator cuff, and whiplash. Because I didn’t have insurance, they let me go that night with a neck brace and a sling for my arm. They told me to wear the sling for three weeks or my rotator cuff wouldn’t heal properly. But I was frantic for money. I persuaded a doctor to take my wrist out of the cast early, then took a hundred-dollar taxi ride to audition without the sling or the brace. Even the tryout hurt like hell. I got the job but broke down with pain in the middle of it. When I told them why, they felt bad for me, but they had to let me go anyway. I got paid for the whole thing. But my neck and arm were never right after that.

John had a concussion, a broken ankle, and two broken ribs. He had insurance, so they kept him longer. When I went to visit him, he said, “See? Didn’t I tell you? You have to learn how to drive!”

Going back down the mountain, I see some bushes I didn’t notice on the way up, even though they grow thick all along the edge of the path. They have twisted little trunks and limbs, dark red and wryly formed. I think of the devil sticking out his tongue of snakes; I think of Robert Mapplethorpe, triumphant, with a whip up his ass; I think of Veronica crying, “They’re taking it all away.” I hadn’t understood her then. But I do now. They did take it away. Veronica’s world is gone, campaigned against by people like my father, who saw his world taken away from him by people like her — I understand that now, too.

A lot was taken. But not everything. Not from Veronica, and not from my father, either. When we listened to Rigoletto together, he had not ignored me. He had sent me a signal through his music. A signal so strong that twenty years later, I finally hear it. I hear him crying out with grief for his daughter, who was taken away from him and violated by people he found alien and terrible. I hear him crying out for Veronica, too, another daughter taken and violated fatally. I hear him signaling a grief so private, I knew nothing about it, even though it hurt so much, it made him cry out.

On both sides now, devil trees escort me. I hear her. The sun has come out. I hear him.

I gave up on music videos and moved back to New York. Incredibly, Morgan was still able to get me work. But I was older and something had gone out of me. I arrived late for bookings and on two occasions slept through them. My arm had lost full range of motion, which put me off balance. I drank too much and took pills and played with heroin. The work stopped coming. John called me from San Francisco to say he was starting an agency there; I went.

The agency was up a narrow flight of stairs on a cold Mission District street, next to a taquería. Just before I went up the stairs, I spied a bag made of hot pink leather lying on the street with its gold clasp open. I thought I’d pick it up on my way out to see if it could be salvaged, but when I emerged, somebody else had gotten it.

The agency lasted a little over a year; then it became a modeling school (“… opening the door for potential models to enter an incredible career — or to make a splash in any field”), and I found myself telling nervous teenagers with bad skin and longing eyes that they might be models. After a month of this, I began drinking every night with a washed-up local musician and a former Playboy bunny who’d had an unhelpful face-lift. After two months, I had a terrible fight with John because I’d told an especially hopeless girl not to waste her money. I ran out, slipped on the stairs, and dislocated my shoulder when I grabbed the banister, hoping to break my fall. John drove me to the hospital. At a particular intersection, I could see unshed tears shining on his sideways eye.

I went back to temping, but my skills were dulled and the injuries to my arm and neck had traveled into my hand, making typing impossible. I saw a doctor, who said the problem stemmed from my neck and that there was an operation that might fix it. Years later, I read in the paper that, in addition to ruining my neck and arm, he had gotten into trouble for trying to perform cosmetic surgery on a horse. By that time, I had discovered I had hepatitis. Who wants to think about their liver or their hand? Now I have to think of mine — all the time.

When I come to the waterfall, I see someone standing on the rocks abutting it, looking into the rushing water — a man wearing a yellow rain slicker. We say hi and I stand near him for a minute, watching the movement of the water. I say, “Those trees there.” I point to a sick ocher tree visible in the canyon. “There must be something really wrong with them to make them look like that. But they’re so beautiful — it seems funny the disease would make them beautiful.”

“They’re not diseased,” he says without looking at me. “They’re madrones. They lose their bark in the winter. It’s normal.” His voice is faintly peevish, as if he wonders what kind of person would see illness in a tree just because it’s naked and ocher-colored. “It’s the tan oaks that are diseased. Not the madrones.”

“Oh!” I smile nervously. “But the color is so extreme; it’s amazing.”

“It’s not that bright usually. The wet brings it out.”

A month or two after Veronica died, I called David to see how her cat was doing. He said that she’d hidden under the bed for the first three days but had recently come up to sleep with him. The first time the cat came onto his bed was right after he’d wakened from a dream about Veronica. The dream had begun with David entering a mansion where a party was being held. The marble walls were veined with threads of purple, blue, and pink, and they were hung with paintings and treasures of all description. There were big windows draped with silk curtains and a skylight high above; the interior was full of light. In the center of the room was a live fountain, and guests were sitting around it. David was amazed at how beautiful they all were, how every detail of their clothes was perfectly done. Their faces were expressive, generous, and exquisitely intelligent. There was one woman he noticed in particular; even though he saw her from behind, there was something familiar about her. She wore a beautiful man’s suit, tailored to fit her. On her head of gold-blond hair sat a fedora, angled rakishly. She was talking to two men, and even from behind, her poise and intellectual grace were visible. As if she could feel David’s eyes on her, she turned to look at him. It was Veronica. She smiled at him, a dazzling smile he had never seen her smile in life. An elevator opened before her; she stepped into it and, still smiling, went up. When David woke, the cat was on his bed with its legs in the air, purring loudly.

When I got off the phone with David, I called Sara to tell her about it. I don’t know why. When I finished describing the dream, I said, “And that’s what Veronica was really like, under all the ugliness and bad taste. It’s so sad, I can’t stand it. She’d gotten so stunted and twisted up, she came out looking like this ridiculous person with bad hair, when she was meant to be sophisticated and brilliant. Like in the dream.”

Sara was silent, and in the silence I felt her furrow her brow. “I thought she was sophisticated and brilliant, Alison. I thought her hair was nice.”

Sara, the only one who saw Veronica the way she looked in her heaven. At forty-two she is now an administrator at the nursing home where she once worked as an aide. She was never married but she has a son, Thomas, who is autistic but also in the gifted program. She’s proud of him, but it’s hard. Daphne worries about her, sends her money. She worries about me, too, but I don’t let her send me money. She has three children of her own now, and her money is not unlimited.

Of the three of us, Daphne was the only one who did well enough to tell a happy story about. A story of love between a man and woman, their work and children. There are other stories. But they are sad. Mostly, they are on the periphery. If we were a story, Veronica and I would be about a bedraggled prostitute taking refuge in the kitchen with the kindly old cook. If the cook dies, you don’t know why. There isn’t that much detail. You just know the prostitute (or servant or street girl) goes on her way. She and the cook are small, dim figures. They are part of the scene and they add to it. But they are not the story.

On the way down the path, I have to crouch, holding the trunks of slim trees and bracing my feet in their roots. My red umbrella is closed and hanging from my wrist. Mother, Mod, modern, mod-el. That last syllable soft and unctuous. I think of my mother dying, her mouth small and sunken, her nostrils large and black. The four of us clasped hands and made a circle around her, standing at her bed or kneeling on it. We held it all between us: the sweet milk shake in the warm car, the blanket in the lamplight, the green chairs, the bright blue waves of the swimming pool, the Christmas tree jeweled with color. One by one, we bent our heads to hear her words. To me, she whispered, “My most beautiful.” Tears came to my eyes. She had never said the word beautiful to me as praise. “Mother,” I said. “I love you.” But she had faded again.

Later, I asked Sara and Daphne what she’d said to them. Each of them looked embarrassed. She’d said the same thing, of course. Each blade of grass is beautiful to the one who made it.

But there is another story, too. There is the story of the girl who stepped on a loaf of bread because she cared more for her shoes than for the flesh of her family. She sank into a world of demons and suffering. Her mother’s tears didn’t help her. The tears of a stranger did. In the fairy tale, a mother tells her daughter the story of the wicked girl who stepped on a loaf, and the innocent girl bursts into tears. Far away under the bog, the wicked girl hears this and for the first time begins to feel. Years later, the innocent girl is an old woman and she is dying. As she dies, she remembers the wicked girl and she enters heaven crying for her. The wicked girl is filled with remorse and gratitude so strong, it breaks her stony prison. She becomes a bird and flies from the swamp. She is tiny and gray and she huddles in a chink in a wall, trembling and shy. She cannot make a sound because she has no voice. But still she is full of gratitude and joy.

I sank down into darkness and lived among the demons for a long, long time. I became one of them. But I was not saved by an innocent girl or an angel crying in heaven. I was saved by another demon, who looked on me with pity and so became human again. And because I pitied her in turn, I was allowed to become human, too.

I come out of the ravine into the neighborhood. The sun is bright and warm even through the wet trees. A child is coming down the walk on his way home from school. He looks maybe eight years old. We are about to meet, when he turns to walk up a long flight of stairs leading to an enormous multilevel house. The air is prickled by wind chimes.

In the story, the gray bird feeds the other birds with crumbs until she has fed them an amount equal to the loaf. Then her wings turn white and she flies up into the sun.

The child mounts the stairs, his gaze fixed on the house. Even with his big eyes and the baby softness of his face, there is maturity and intensity in his gaze, a suggestion of private responsibility taken on willingly and with determination. Not my child, but a child — the future. My eye falls on a torn piece of foil in the gutter. The sun strikes it; an excited ghost leaps up out of it and vanishes in the air. I leave the canyon and walk down a street of shining puddles. I will get something to eat at the Easy Street Café and talk to my friend who works there. I will take the bus home and talk to Rita, standing in the hall. I will call my father and tell him I finally heard him. I will be full of gratitude and joy.