My Year of Rest and Relaxation Read online

  “Prostate isn’t like breast,” my father said, turning away. “They do surgery, and you move on.”

  “The man always dies first,” my mother whispered.

  My dad’s chair screeched on the floor as he pushed himself away from the table.

  “I was only teasing,” my mom said, batting the smoke of her own cigarette away from her face.

  “About the cancer?”

  “No.”

  That was the end of the conversation.

  Later, while I packed up to move into the dorm, my mother came and stood in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cigarette out behind her in the hall as if it would make any difference. The whole house always smelled like stale smoke. “You know I don’t like it when you cry,” she said.

  “I wasn’t crying,” I said.

  “And I hope you’re not packing any shorts. Nobody wears shorts in Manhattan. And they’ll shoot you in the street if you go around in those disgusting tennis shoes. You’ll look ridiculous. Your father isn’t paying this much for you to go look ridiculous in New York City.”

  I wanted her to think that I was crying over my father’s cancer, but that wasn’t quite it. “Well, Goddamnit, if you insist on getting weepy,” my mother said, turning to leave. “You know, when you were a baby, I crushed Valium into your bottle? You had colic and cried for hours and hours, inconsolable and for no good reason. And change your shirt. I can see the sweat under your arms. I’m going to bed.”

  A realty company managed my parents’ property after they were dead. The house got rented out to a history professor and his family. I never had to meet them. The company handled the maintenance and gardening and made any repairs necessary. When something broke or wore out, they sent me a letter with a photo and an estimate. When I got lonely or bored or nostalgic, I’d go through the photos and try to disgust myself with the banality of the place—a cracked step, a leak in the basement, a peeling ceiling, a broken cabinet. And I’d feel sorry for myself, not because I missed my parents, but because there was nothing they could have given me if they’d lived. They weren’t my friends. They didn’t comfort me or give me good advice. They weren’t people I wanted to talk to. They barely even knew me. They were too busy to want to imagine my life in Manhattan. My father was busy dying—within a year of his diagnosis, the cancer had spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer.

  She visited me just once in New York, my sophomore year. She took the train down and was an hour late to meet me at the Guggenheim. I could smell alcohol on her breath as we wandered around. She was skittish and quiet. “Oh, isn’t that pretty?” she said about a Kandinsky, a Chagall. She left me abruptly when we got to the top of the ramp, saying she’d lost track of time. I followed her down and out of the museum, watched her try to hail a cab, seething and flabbergasted when each passing taxi was occupied. I don’t know what her problem was. Maybe she’d seen a piece of art that unnerved her. She never explained it. But she called me later from her hotel and had me meet her for dinner that evening. It was as if nothing strange had happened at the museum. She was accountable for nothing when she was drunk. I was used to it.

  I paid for my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in cash from my inheritance. From the windows in the living room, I could see some of Carl Schurz Park and a sliver of the East River. I could see the nannies with their strollers. Wealthy housewives milled up and down the Esplanade in visors and sunglasses. They reminded me of my mother—pointless and self-obsessed—only she had been less physically active. If I leaned out my bedroom window, I could see the uppermost tip of Roosevelt Island with its weird geometry of low brick buildings. I liked to think those buildings housed the criminally insane, though I knew that wasn’t the case, at least anymore. Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again.

  The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi Goldberg was my main hero. I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta. I owned VHS copies of all her movies, but many of them were too powerful to watch often. The Color Purple was too sad. Ghost filled me with too much longing, and Whoopi only had a small part in it. Sister Act was tricky because the songs got stuck in my head and made me want to laugh, run wild, dance, be impassioned, or whatnot. That would not be good for my sleep. I could only handle it once a week or so. I usually watched Soapdish and The Player back-to-back as though they were two volumes of a single film.

  On my visits to Rite Aid to pick up my pills, I’d buy a pre-owned VHS tape, maybe a box of microwave popcorn, sometimes a two-liter bottle of Diet Sprite if I felt I had the strength to carry it home. Those cheap movies were usually terrible—Showgirls, Enemy of the State, I’ll Be Home for Christmas starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas, whose face unnerved me—but I didn’t mind watching them once or twice. The stupider the movie, the less my mind had to work. But I preferred the familiar—Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg, doing what they always do.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN I WENT TO SEE Dr. Tuttle in early August for my monthly in-person visit, she wore a white sleeveless nightgown with tattered lace across her bosom and huge honey-tinted sunglasses with blinders. She still had the neck brace on. “I had a procedure done on my eyes,” she explained, “and the central air has sprung a leak. Excuse the humidity.” Sweat bubbled across her chest and arms like blisters. Her hair frizzed up and out. The fat cats lay on the fainting sofa. “They’re overheated,” Dr. Tuttle said. “Better not disturb them.” There was no place else to sit, so I stood against the bookshelf, bracing myself and taking shallow breaths. The smell of ammonia in the room was intense. It seemed to be coming from the cats.

  “Did you bring your book of nightmares?” Dr. Tuttle asked, sitting down behind her desk.

  “I forgot my journal today,” I said. “The nightmares have been getting worse and worse, though,” I lied. My dreams had actually mellowed.

  “Tell me about one of them, just so I can update my file,” Dr. Tuttle said, pulling out a folder. She seemed harried and hot, but she was not disorganized.

  “Well . . .” I mined my mind for something disturbing. All I could recall were the plots of the terrible movies I’d recently seen. “I had this one nightmare where I moved to Las Vegas and met a seamstress and gave lap dances. Then I ran into an old friend who gave me a floppy disk full of government secrets and I became a suspect in a murder case and the NSA chased me, and instead of getting a Porsche for Christmas, a football team left me stranded in the desert.”

  Dr. Tuttle scribbled dutifully, then lifted her head, waiting for more.

  “So I started eating sand to try to k
ill myself instead of dying of dehydration. It was awful.”

  “Very troubling,” Dr. Tuttle murmured.

  I wobbled against the bookshelf. It was difficult to stay upright—two months of sleep had made my muscles wither. And I could still feel the trazodone I’d taken that morning.

  “Try to sleep on your side when possible. There was recently a study in Australia that said that when you sleep on your back, you’re more likely to have nightmares about drowning. It’s not conclusive, of course, since they’re on the opposite side of the Earth. So actually, you might want to try sleeping on your stomach instead, and see what that does.”

  “Dr. Tuttle,” I began, “I was wondering if you could prescribe something a little stronger for bedtime. When I’m tossing and turning at night, I get so frustrated. It’s like I’m in hell.”

  “Hell? I can give you something for that,” she said, reaching for her prescription pad. “Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it’s just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Subatomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don’t mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don’t forget that.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Dr. Tuttle handed me the prescriptions.

  “Here, have some samples,” she said, pushing a basket of Promaxatine toward me. “Oh no, wait, these are for impotent obsessive compulsives. They’d keep you up at night.” She pulled the basket back. “See you in a month.”

  I took a cab home, filled the new prescriptions and refilled the old ones at Rite Aid, bought a pack of Skittles, and went home and ate the Skittles and a few leftover primidone and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, Reva came over to whine about her dying mother and prattle on about Ken. Her drinking seemed to be getting worse that summer. She pulled out a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a can of Diet Mountain Dew from her new huge lime green alligator-skin knockoff Gucci tote.

  “Want some tequila?”

  I shook my head no.

  Reva had an interesting method of mixing her drinks. After each sip of Diet Mountain Dew, she’d pour a little Jose Cuervo into the can to take up the space her sip had displaced, so that by the time she finished, she was drinking straight tequila. It was fascinating to me. I caught myself imagining the ratio of Diet Mountain Dew to Jose Cuervo in that can, what the formula would be to measure it sip by sip. I’d studied Zeno’s Paradox in high school algebra but never fully understood it. Infinite divisibility, the theory of halving, whatever it was. That philosophical quandary was exactly the kind of thing Trevor would have loved to explain to me. He’d sit across from me at dinner, slurping his ice water, muttering fluently about fractions of cents and the fluctuating price of oil, for example, all while his eyes scanned the room behind me as though to affirm to me that I was stupid, I was boring. Someone far better might be getting up from a table to go powder her nose. The thought stung. I still couldn’t accept that Trevor was a loser and a moron. I didn’t want to believe that I could have degraded myself for someone who didn’t deserve it. I was still stuck on that bit of vanity. But I was determined to sleep it away.

  “You’re still obsessed with Trevor, aren’t you,” Reva said, slurping from her can.

  “I think I have a tumor,” I replied, “in my brain.”

  “Forget Trevor,” Reva said. “You’ll meet someone better, if you ever leave your apartment.” She sipped and poured and went on about how “it’s all about your attitude,” and that “positive thinking is more powerful than negative thinking, even in equal amounts.” She’d recently read a book called How to Attract the Man of Your Dreams Using Self-hypnosis, and so she went on to explain to me the difference between “wish fulfillment” and “manifesting your own reality.” I tried not to listen. “Your problem is that you’re passive. You wait around for things to change, and they never will. That must be a painful way to live. Very disempowering,” she said, and burped.

  I had taken some Risperdal. I was feeling woozy.

  “Have you ever heard the expression ‘eat shit or die’?” I asked.

  Reva unscrewed the tequila and poured more into her can. “It’s ‘eat shit and die,’” she said.

  We didn’t talk for a while. My mind drifted back to Trevor, the way he unbuttoned his shirts and pulled at his tie, the gray drapes in his bedroom, the flare of his nostrils in the mirror when he clipped his nose hairs, the smell of his aftershave. I was grateful when Reva broke the silence.

  “Well, will you come out for drinks on Saturday at least? It’s my birthday.”

  “I can’t, Reva,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m telling people to meet up at Skinny Kitty at nineish.”

  “I’m sure you’ll have a better time if I’m not there to bum you out.”

  “Don’t be that way,” Reva crooned drunkenly. “Soon we’ll be old and ugly. Life is short, you know? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Who said that?”

  “Someone who liked fucking corpses.”

  * * *

  • • •

  REVA WAS ONLY a week older than me. On August 20, 2000, I turned twenty-five in my apartment in a medicated haze, smoking stale menthols on the toilet and reading an old Architectural Digest. At some point I fumbled in my makeup drawer for eyeliner to circle things on the pages that I found appealing—the blank corners of rooms, the sharp glass crystals hanging from a chandelier. I heard my cell phone ring but I didn’t answer it. “Happy birthday,” Reva said in her message. “I love you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AS SUMMER DWINDLED, my sleep got thin and empty, like a room with white walls and tepid air-conditioning. If I dreamt at all, I dreamt that I was lying in bed. It felt superficial, even boring at times. I’d take a few extra Risperdal and Ambien when I got antsy, thinking about my past. I tried not to think of Trevor. I deleted Reva’s messages without listening to them. I watched Air Force One twelve times on mute. I tried to put everything out of my mind. Valium helped. Ativan helped. Chewable melatonin and Benadryl and NyQuil and Lunesta and temazepam helped.

  My visit to Dr. Tuttle in September was also banal. Besides the sweltering heat I suffered walking from my building into a cab, and from the cab into Dr. Tuttle’s office, I felt almost nothing. I wasn’t anxious or despondent or resentful or terrified.

  “How are you feeling?”

  I stood and pondered the question for five minutes while Dr. Tuttle went around her office turning on an arsenal of fans, all the same make and model, two installed on the radiator under the windows, one on her desk, and two in the corners of the room on the floor. She was impressively nimble. She no longer wore the neck brace.

  “I’m fine, I think,” I yelled blandly over the roaring hum.

  “You look pale,” Dr. Tuttle remarked.

  “I’ve been keeping out of the sun,” I told her.

  “Good thing. Sun exposure promotes cellular collapse, but nobody wants to talk about that.”

  She herself was a piglety shade of pink. She wore a straw-colored sack of a dress that looked like coarse linen. Her hair was at a high frizz. A tight, chunky strand of pearls rolled up and down her throat as she spoke. The fans stirred up a roar of wind and made me dizzy. I gripped the bookshelf, knocking a swollen copy of Apparent Death to the floor.

  “Sorry,” I yelled over the din, and picked it up.

  “An interesting book about possums. Animals have so much wisdom,” Dr. Tuttle paused. “I hope you’re not a vegetarian,” she said, lowering her glasses.

  “I
’m not.”

  “That’s a relief. Now tell me how you feel. Your affect is very flat today,” Dr. Tuttle said. She was right. I could barely arouse the enthusiasm to stand up straight. “Have you been taking your Risperdal?”

  “I skipped yesterday. I was so busy at work, I just forgot. The insomnia is really bad these days,” I lied.

  “You’re exhausted. Plain and simple.” She scribbled on her prescription pad. “According to that book you’re holding, the death gene is passed from mother to child in the birth canal. Something about microdermabrasions and infectious vaginal rash. Does your mother exhibit any signs of hormonal abnormalities?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You might want to ask her. If you are a carrier, I can suggest something for you. An herbal lotion. Only if you want it. I’d have to order it special from Peru.”

  “I was born caesarian, in case that’s a factor.”

  “The noble method,” she said. “Ask her anyway. Her answer might shed some light on your mental and biorhythmic incapacities.”

  “Well, she’s dead,” I reminded her.

  Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and folded her hands into prayer. I thought she was going to sing a song, or do some incantation. I didn’t expect her to offer me any pity or sympathy. But instead, she squinched up her face, sneezed violently, turned to wipe her face with a huge bath towel lying on the floor by her desk chair, and scribbled on her pad some more.

  “And how did she die?” she asked. “Not pineal failure, I suppose.”

  “She mixed alcohol with sedatives,” I said. I was too lethargic to lie. And if Dr. Tuttle had forgotten that I’d told her my mother had slit her wrists, telling her the truth wouldn’t matter in the long run.

  “People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.”

  * * *