My Year of Rest and Relaxation Page 3
Within a few weeks, I’d accumulated an impressive library of psychopharmaceuticals. Each label bore the sign of the sleepy eye, the skull and crossbones. “Do not take this if you become pregnant.” “Take with food or milk.” “Store in a dry place.” “May cause drowsiness.” “May cause dizziness.” “Do not take aspirin.” “Do not crush.” “Do not chew.” Any normal person would have worried about what the drugs would do to her health. I wasn’t completely naive about the potential dangers. My father had been eaten alive by cancer. I’d seen my mother in the hospital full of tubes, brain dead. I’d lost a childhood friend to liver failure after she took acetaminophen on top of DayQuil in high school. Life was fragile and fleeting and one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person. And I figured I was smart enough to know in advance if the pills were going to kill me. I’d start having premonition nightmares before that happened, before my heart failed or my brain exploded or hemorrhaged or pushed me out my seventh-story window. I trusted that everything was going to work out fine as long as I could sleep all day.
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• • •
I’D MOVED INTO MY apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in 1996, a year after I graduated from Columbia. By summer 2000, I still hadn’t had a single conversation with any of my neighbors—almost four years of complete silence in the elevator, each awkward ride a performance of hypnotized spaceout. My neighbors were mostly fortysomething married people without children. Everyone was well-groomed, professional. A lot of camel-hair coats and black leather briefcases. Burberry scarves and pearl earrings. There were a few loudmouthed single women my age I saw from time to time gabbing on their cell phones and walking their teacup poodles. They reminded me of Reva, but they had more money and less self-loathing, I would guess. This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care. The only other slovenly people around were elderly Jews with rent-controlled apartments. But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young. Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good.
My building was eight stories high, concrete with burgundy awnings, an anonymous facade on a block otherwise lined with pristine town houses, each with its own placard warning people not to let their dogs piss on their stoops because it would damage the brownstone. “Let us honor those who came before us, as well as those who will follow,” one sign read. Men took hired cars to work downtown, and women got Botox and boob jobs and vaginal “cinches” to keep their pussies tight for their husbands and personal trainers, or so Reva told me. I had thought the Upper East Side could shield me from the beauty pageants and cockfights of the art scene in which I’d “worked” in Chelsea. But living uptown had infected me with its own virus when I first moved there. I’d tried being one of those blond women speed walking up and down the Esplanade in spandex, Bluetooth in my ear like some self-important asshole, talking to whom—Reva?
On the weekends, I did what young women in New York like me were supposed to do, at first: I got colonics and facials and highlights, worked out at an overpriced gym, lay in the hammam there until I went blind, and went out at night in shoes that cut my feet and gave me sciatica. I met interesting men at the gallery from time to time. I slept around in spurts, going out more, then less. Nothing ever panned out in terms of “love.” Reva often spoke about “settling down.” That sounded like death to me.
“I’d rather be alone than anybody’s live-in prostitute,” I said to Reva.
Still, a romantic urge surfaced now and then with Trevor, a recurring ex-boyfriend, my first and only. I was only eighteen, a freshman, when I met him at a Halloween party in a loft near Battery Park. I went with a dozen girls from the sorority I was rushing. Like most Halloween costumes, mine was an excuse to go around town dressed like a whore. I went as Detective Rizzoli, Whoopi Goldberg’s character in Fatal Beauty. In the first scene of the movie, she’s undercover and disguised as a hooker, so to copy her, I’d teased out my hair, wore a tight dress, high heels, gold lamé jacket, and white cat-eye sunglasses. Trevor had on an Andy Warhol costume: blond bobbed wig, thick black glasses, tight striped shirt. My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate. We left the party together and walked around for hours, lied to each other about our happy lives, ate pizza at midnight, took the Staten Island Ferry back and forth and watched the sun rise. I gave him my phone number at the dorm. By the time he finally called me, two weeks later, I’d become obsessed with him. He kept me on a long, tight leash for months—expensive meals, the occasional opera or ballet. He took my virginity at a ski lodge in Vermont on Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, but I trusted he knew more about sex than I did, so when he rolled off and said, “That was amazing,” I believed him. He was thirty-three, worked for Fuji Bank at the World Trade Center, wore tailored suits, sent cars to pick me up at my dorm, then the sorority house sophomore year, wined and dined me, and asked for head with no shame in the back of cabs he charged to the company account. I took this as proof of his masculine value. My “sisters” all agreed; he was “suave.” And I was impressed by how much he liked talking about his emotions, something I’d never seen a man do. “My mom’s a pothead now, and that’s why I have this deep sadness.” He took frequent trips to Tokyo for work and to San Francisco to visit his twin sister. I suspected she discouraged him from dating me.
He broke up with me the first time freshman year because I was “too young and immature. I can’t be the one to help you grow out of your abandonment issues,” he explained. “It’s too much of a responsibility. You deserve someone who can really support your emotional development.” So I spent that summer at home upstate with my parents and had sex with a boy from high school, who was far more sensual and interested in how the clitoris “works,” but not quite patient enough to really interact with mine successfully. It was helpful, though. I reclaimed a bit of my dignity by feeling nothing for that boy, using him. By Labor Day, when I moved into Delta Gamma, Trevor and I were back together.
Over the next five years, Trevor would periodically deplete his self-esteem in relationships with older women, i.e., women his age, then return to me to reboot. I was always available. I dated guys from time to time, but there was never another real “boyfriend,” if I could even call Trevor that. He wouldn’t have agreed to carry that title. There were plenty of one-night stands in college while we were on the outs, but nothing worth repeating. After I graduated and was flung into the world of adulthood—already orphaned—I was bolder in my desperation, made frequent appeals to Trevor to take me back. I could hear his cock harden on the phone whenever I called to beg him to come over and hold me. “I’ll see if I can squeeze it in,” he’d say. Then he’d be there and I’d shiver in his arms like the child I still was, swoon with gratitude for his recognition, savor the weight of him in the bed next to me. It was as though he were some divine messenger, my soul mate, my savior, whatever. Trevor would be very pleased to spend a night at my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, earning back all the bravado he’d lost in his last affair. I hated seeing that come on in him. One time he said he was afraid of fucking me “too passionately” because he didn’t want to break my heart. So he fucked me efficiently, selfishly, and when he was done, he’d get dressed and check his pager, comb his hair, kiss my forehead, and leave.
I asked Trevor once, “If you could have only blow jobs or only intercourse for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?”
“Blow jobs,” he answered.
“That’s kind of gay, isn’t it?” I said. “To be more interested in mouths than pussies?”
He didn’t speak to me for weeks.
But Trevor was six foot three. He was clean and fit and confident. I’d choose him a million times over the hipste
r nerds I’d see around town and at the gallery. In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches. Nobody up there gave a shit about “irony” or Dogme 95 or Klaus Kinski.
The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked. They would be the ones running museums and magazines, and they’d only hire me if they thought I might fuck them. But when I’d been at parties with them, or out at bars, they’d ignored me. They were so self-serious and distracted by their conversation with their look-alike companions that you’d think they were wrestling with a decision of such high stakes, the world might explode. They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,” they would have me believe. The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.
Trevor probably masturbated to Britney Spears. Or to Janis Joplin. I never understood his duplicity. And Trevor had never wanted to “kneel at the altar.” I could count the number of times he’d gone down on me on one hand. When he’d tried, he had no idea what to do, but seemed overcome with his own generosity and passion, as though delaying getting his dick sucked was so obscene, so reckless, had required so much courage, he’d just blown his own mind. His style of kissing was aggressive, rhythmic, as though he’d studied a manual. His jaw was narrow and angular, his chin a lame afterthought. His skin was evenly toned and well moisturized, smoother than mine even. He barely had to shave. He always smelled like a department store. If I’d met him now, I would have assumed that he was gay.
But at least Trevor had the sincere arrogance to back up his bravado. He didn’t cower in the face of his own ambition, like those hipsters. And he knew how to manipulate me—I had to respect him for that at least, however much I hated him for it.
* * *
• • •
TREVOR AND I WEREN’T SPEAKING when I went into hibernation. I probably called him at some point under the black veil of Ambien early on, but I don’t know if he ever answered. I could easily imagine him diving into a complicated, fortysomething-year-old’s vagina, dismissing any thought of me the way you’d walk past boxes of mac ’n’ cheese or marshmallow cereal on a shelf in the grocery store. I was kids’ stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn’t worth the calories. He said he preferred brunettes. “They give me space to be myself,” he told me. “Blondes are distracting. Think of your beauty as an Achilles’ heel. You’re too much on the surface. I don’t say that offensively. But it’s the truth. It’s hard to look past what you look like.”
Since adolescence, I’d vacillated between wanting to look like the spoiled WASP that I was and the bum that I felt I was and should have been if I’d had any courage. I’d shopped at Bergdorf’s and Barneys and high-end vintage boutiques in the East Village. The result was an amazing wardrobe, my main professional asset as a new college graduate. I easily landed the job as a gallery girl at Ducat, one of a dozen “fine art” galleries on West Twenty-first Street. I had no big plan to become a curator, no great scheme to work my way up a ladder. I was just trying to pass the time. I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime. But I looked like an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere. Trevor was right about my Achilles’ heel. Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.
Natasha, my boss at Ducat, was in her early thirties. She hired me on the spot when I came in for an interview the summer I finished school. I was twenty-two. I barely remember our conversation, but I know I wore a cream silk blouse, tight black jeans, flats—in case I was taller than Natasha, which I was by half an inch—and a huge green glass necklace that thudded against my chest so hard it actually gave me bruises when I ran down the subway stairs. I knew not to wear a dress or look too prim or feminine. That would only elicit patronizing contempt. Natasha wore the same kind of outfit every day—a YSL blazer and tight leather pants, no makeup. She was the kind of mysteriously ethnic woman who would blend in easily in almost any country. She could have been from Istanbul or Paris or Morocco or Moscow or New York or San Juan or even Phnom Penh in a certain light, depending on how she wore her hair. She spoke four languages fluently and had once been married to an Italian aristocrat, a baron or a count, or so I’d heard.
The art at Ducat was supposed to be subversive, irreverent, shocking, but was all just canned counterculture crap, “punk, but with money,” nothing to inspire more than a trip around the corner to buy an unflattering outfit from Comme des Garçons. Natasha had cast me as the jaded underling, and for the most part, the little effort I put into the job was enough. I was fashion candy. Hip decor. I was the bitch who sat behind a desk and ignored you when you walked into the gallery, a pouty knockout wearing indecipherably cool avant-garde outfits. I was told to play dumb if anyone asked a question. Evade, evade. Never hand over a price list. Natasha paid me just $22,000 a year. Without my inheritance, I would have been forced to find a job that paid more money. And I would probably have had to live in Brooklyn, with roommates. I was lucky to have my dead parents’ money, I knew, but that was also depressing.
Natasha’s star artist was Ping Xi, a pubescent-looking twenty-three-year-old from Diamond Bar, California. She thought he was a good investment because he was Asian American and had been kicked out of CalArts for firing a gun in his studio. He would add a certain cachet. “I want the gallery to get more cerebral,” she explained. “The market is moving away from emotion. Now it’s all about process and ideas and branding. Masculinity is hot right now.” Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases. He titled the abstract paintings as though each had some deep, dark political meaning. Blood-Dimmed Tide, and Wintertime in Ho Chi Minh City and Sunset over Sniper Alley. Decapitated Palestinian Child. Bombs Away, Nairobi. It was all nonsense, but people loved it.
Natasha was particularly proud of the “Body of Substance” show because all the artists were under twenty-five, and she’d discovered them herself. She felt this would prove her gift for spotting genius. The only piece I liked in the show was by Aiyla Marw
azi, a nineteen-year-old who went to Pratt. It was a huge white carpet from Crate & Barrel stained with bloody footprints and a wide bloody streak. It was supposed to look as though a bleeding body had been dragged across it. Natasha told me that the blood on the carpet was human, but she didn’t put that in the press release. “You can order anything online from China, apparently. Teeth. Bones. Body parts.” The bloody rug was priced at $75,000.
Annie Pinker’s Cling Film series consisted of clumps of small objects wrapped in Saran Wrap. There was one of tiny marzipan fruits and rabbit-foot key chains, one of dried flowers and condoms. Rolled-up used thong panty liners and rubber bullets. A Big Mac and fries and cheap plastic rosaries. The artist’s baby teeth, or so she claimed, and Christmas-colored M&M’s. Cheap transgressions going for $25,000 a pop. And then there were the large-scale photographs of mannequins draped in flesh-colored fabric, by Max Welch. He was a total moron. I suspected that he and Natasha were fucking. On a low pedestal in the corner, a small sculpture by the Brahams Brothers—a pair of toy monkeys made using human pubic hair. Each monkey had a little erection poking out of its fur. The penises were made of white titanium and had cameras in them positioned to take crotch shots of the viewer. The images were downloaded to a Web site. A specific password to log in to see the crotch shots cost a hundred dollars. The monkeys themselves cost a quarter million for the pair.
* * *
• • •
AT WORK, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. “Napping” is such a childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. A vent in the closet released a steady flow of fresh air that picked up the scent of laundry from the hotel next door. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.