Veronica by Mary Gaitskill Page A

But all I could think about was him alone, crying.
    I didn’t get the file clerk job, so I sold flowers outside the stripper bars until late, when men would come out drunk and give me bills. At the end of the night, I’d go home to count it out on my bed and then I’d store it in a pair of folded socks in the back of
    the drawer. I’d sit on my bed in a T-shirt and underwear, writing poems while voices went past my window on clomping feet. I’d sleep at dawn to the sound of garbage trucks and wake to music from the weird-ass guy in the basement, the sound coming up through the heat vent like a haint.
    I had enough to buy my ticket when I saw John in the park. I didn’t recognize him until he walked up to me and started telling me he was sorry. He said, “We were in the same position that day, you and I.” That’s when I first noticed his neck, tense and rubbery, already angry and ready to torque around. “Gregory plays that game with girls all the time, and I go along because he gives me work. But I hate it, and after that day with you, I walked out and said, ‘Fuck it. I’m not doing this again.’” I tried to act like I’d known what was going on, that nobody had fooled me. And he let me act that way—his eyes did not say, Come on, girl, you know you got took!—maybe because he was kind, maybe because he didn’t notice I was acting. “But with you, he was also stupid,” he continued. “Because you really could do it. I saw it right away.” He wanted to send my pictures to a magazine modeling contest, and he needed me to fill out a contest form. He needed my address so he could let me know what happened.
    Imagine ten pictures of me at Carson Models. In nine of them, I’m a real stupid girl, but in the tenth, I’m somebody who could be a model. John was looking at the tenth one, and because he was, I did, too. I said okay and gave him my parents’ address in New Jersey. The next day, I got on the plane and flew home.
    It’s weird for me, too, looking at John and seeing a young guy turned into a twitchy middle-aged man being chased around his own office by invisible people; it’s like an emotional funny bone. The terrible, beautiful things zoomed up close, flattened us, and sped off. Well, they flattened me. Him they just sped past. Which was lucky for him. Now he actually has something good, when he can stop twitching long enough to enjoy it. He has a house with a family and he has an office, a nest of past and present, where a remnant of everything he thought he wanted comes and cleans his toilet for him. He can yell at it and be yelled at by it and the invisible people go quiet and fade away. Then there’s doughnuts with colored icing—pink, lavender, white with little hairs of coconut—and talk about the new baby he’s had at fifty-two with a woman fifteen years younger.
    “He just grooves on everything, Alison, and when he looks at me I do, too. To bring home food to them, to be the provider—I can’t tell you how it makes me feel.”
    He doesn’t have to tell me. I can see it in his face: Happiness shines on his dullard sadness and makes it scratch its head and blink with wonder.
    “But sometimes I feel shut out, you know? Lonnie and Eddie are so bonded, so physical, it’s like I’m a total third wheel, like this ... utility unit. And I wonder, What about my dreams? You know?”
    “John, when I was eight, I dreamed about being a ballerina. It was a good dream for an eight-year-old.”
    “What about now? What are your dreams?” A sly, sad look comes out of his eye like a tiny eye on a stalk, and he’s behind the camera again.
    “My dream is being able to sleep and to stop my arm from hurting.” To stop traveling through the endless rooms that don’t have music or people in them anymore. “But John, you’ve got your dream; you’re living it. I can see it in your face!”
    And he can see it, too, now that I say it. It’s something I can give him, something I hold out in warm