Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  Two weeks later, the campus police were called to Benny’s dorm in the middle of the night. He’d walked into the room of a girl who lived down the hall from him and climbed into bed with her in the dark. He wrapped his arms around her, as if she was a teddy bear, then cried and begged her to protect him against some thing that was coming to get him. She woke up screaming. He ran off into the night. When the authorities finally found him, he was naked and raving in the bushes outside the library.

  The psychiatric ward at the hospital diagnosed Benny with schizophrenia. My father flew in on his plane and retrieved him to take him back home to the Bay Area. I cried when they left me behind in New Jersey, but before he boarded the plane my father pulled me in close and hugged me. He breathed in my ear, so that my brother couldn’t hear. “You need to keep it together now, cupcake.”

  I didn’t.

  Did I mention before that I dropped out of Princeton? Not my finest moment. But I was on the verge of failing anyway, and there was an engineering student I’d met who was starting up a dot-com that needed financing. I had that trust fund just sitting there so I thought, I’ll be an investor! An entrepreneur! Who needs college anyway? Daddy would forgive me for dropping out when I proved my business acumen, I figured; he’d be so proud when I made my first million on my own.

  Anyway. It didn’t end well, but that’s a different story.

  That year was the beginning of my brother’s long decade of recovery and relapse: manic wanderings through the streets of San Francisco that would end in back-alley methamphetamine binges; months of seeming normalcy punctuated by suicide attempts. A phalanx of psychologists calibrated and recalibrated his drugs, failing to get the balance right; often, he’d refuse to take them altogether because they made him feel dull and drowsy. Finally, my father committed him to a luxury residential psychiatric care facility in Mendocino County: the Orson Institute.

  By that point I’d given up on the dot-com and moved to New York City, but I would visit Benny at Orson whenever I came back to California. The facility was outside Ukiah, a woodsy area in the Mendocino coastal range full of meditation retreats and clothing-optional resorts where aging hippies lounged in mineral-crusted hot springs. The Orson Institute was a pleasant enough place, a big modern facility with rolling lawns and views over the hills. There were only a few dozen patients, who spent their days doing art therapy, tending to an impressive vegetable garden, and eating gourmet meals cooked by Michelin chefs. This was where families like ours stashed problem relatives—anorexic wives, grandfathers with dementia, children who liked to set things on fire. Benny fit right in.

  The medication they gave Benny made him spacey and soft. His belly protruded over the elastic of his sweatpants now. His primary daily occupation was wandering the property in search of insects that he would capture in plastic baby food jars. His suite was decorated with drawings of spindle-legged spiders and shiny centipedes, but at least the monsters that he doodled were real now, and they didn’t talk back to him. Even though it broke my heart to see him so defanged, I knew that at least here he was safe.

  I sometimes wondered what had misfired in Benny’s brain, and how much of his illness he had inherited from our mother. Was her faulty wiring the same as his? As we took walks around the Orson Institute grounds I would watch my brother aimlessly ambling, purposeless, going nowhere, and experience a pang of guilt: Why him and not me?

  (And then, accompanying this, a dull twinge at the back of my brain, a nagging question: What if it was me, too, and I just didn’t know it yet?)

  Driving away, though, what I usually felt was simple rage. I knew—I know it now—that schizophrenia is a disease, written into the brain from birth. But there had to be some alternate version of Benny’s life where none of this happened; where he was a normal kid, maybe with some mood swings (like me!), but at least able to function in the world. Surely the trajectory of his life was not supposed to be this, just as my mother’s suicide should never have occurred.

  I called Benny’s doctor at the Orson Institute, and posed my question to him. Why Benny? Why now?

  “Schizophrenia is genetic, though there can also be exacerbating external factors, too,” he said.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  I could hear him shuffling papers in the background. “Well, your brother was quite a drug user. And drug usage doesn’t cause schizophrenia, per se, but it can trigger symptoms in people who are susceptible.” Hearing this, the timeline started to snap into place: Benny’s first psychotic episodes coincided with the period at Tahoe when he started doing drugs. The bad news girlfriend—what was her name? Nina. My mom had been right, after all. I’d given him terrible advice that day: I should have warned him away from her instead of encouraging him. (Amour fou, crazy love— Jesus, what had I been thinking?)

  Oh God, maybe it was even my fault he’d ended up so ill. After all, I was also the one who didn’t flag Benny’s behavior to my parents sooner, who didn’t tell my father about the Italian letters or drive Benny to the Princeton therapist myself. My fear of hurting Benny had just let him hurt himself.

  Sometimes, as I flew back across the country from the Orson Institute, I would imagine an alternate life for us. A life in which my parents had stayed in San Francisco, and my brother had found some kind of therapeutic school before it was too late, and my father hadn’t had an affair. A life in which the isolation of Stonehaven hadn’t hurtled both my mother and brother over a cliff that they never managed to climb back up. Maybe it was possible that all this—the schizophrenia, the suicide—could have been avoided (or at least mitigated!). Maybe my mother would still be alive and my brother’s issues would be manageable and my father would be stable and we would all be just fine. Happy, even!

  An optimistic fantasy, of course, but one that grew in power as the years ground on: the lost possibility of an alternate universe, one that spun correctly on its axis, one that hadn’t been knocked off kilter by forces I couldn’t quite comprehend.

  13.

  MODERN CULTURE LOVES TO fetishize risk, as if the norm for everyone should be deviating from the norm. (Saith Oprah, patron saint of inspo quotes: One of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.) Spend enough time with any bestselling biography and you’ll come to the conclusion that greatness is practically guaranteed if you just do something reckless and wild. But what most people don’t like to dwell on is that risk is really only an option if you’ve had some luck first.

  For a while, I had all the luck I needed. One of the greatest luxuries of growing up with money is that you have the freedom to be impulsive: If you fail, there’s always that trust fund there to cushion your fall. So I took a lot of risks in the first few years after I dropped out of Princeton. Unfortunately, none of them took me particularly close to greatness—not my attempt at film financing (two flops, lost $10 million), not the handbag line I designed (out of business within a year), not the tequila brand that I backed (partner went rogue with the money). Only bankruptcy.

  By the time I met Saskia Rubansky at a gala in Tribeca—a benefit for a pediatric leukemia foundation to which my family regularly gave generously—I was, as I put it at parties, in between projects. I kept an office in SoHo and I’d told people I was an “Internet innovations expert” but that mostly meant spending my days surfing the Web and looking for inspiration. My father would occasionally fly in from San Francisco to check on me. He’d sweep into town and make proclamations about how I was “clued in” and “on the bleeding edge,” but I could tell by the way he so loudly proclaimed my genius to anyone who would listen that he was overcompensating. I could smell the disappointment wafting off him, see it in the way he failed to meet my eyes.

  Then again, how could I blame him? Maybe Benny was drifting along in exile at the Orson Institute, listless and lost, but I had no clear agenda for my life, either, and also no good excuse.

  I felt ancho
rless. In a city of eight million, I had few close friends, although I had countless petit amis, the people I rubbed up against out and about on the society circuit. And I went out a lot. Manhattan was a Candyland of cocktails and tasting menus, galas and art openings, parties on the roof decks of midtown penthouses. Dates with trust fund kids and hedge fund managers.

  That, in turn, necessitated shopping. Fashion quickly became a kind of armor for me, a way to gird myself against the ennui that sometimes threatened to leak out and drown me. I lived for the serotonin hit that came with a new outfit: a dress straight off the runway, a perfectly draped scarf, shoes that made people stare on the street. Bill Cunningham clothes. That was my true joy. I drained my trust fund allocation down to the last few pennies every month on Gucci and Prada and Celine.

  All this is to say—I was primed and ready for Saskia Rubansky’s sales pitch.

  * * *

  —

  The leukemia benefit that night was in a loft with views over Lower Manhattan. Waiters with trays of canapés circulated, delicately stepping over the skirts that trailed along the parquet floor. Candles flickered in candelabras and plumes of pale chiffon hung overhead. Broadway stars did a step-and-repeat for photographers in front of a wall of white roses, hands cocked on the hips of their donated dresses.

  In a sea of well-coiffed women in couture, Saskia stood out. It wasn’t that she was prettier than anyone else (in fact, underneath the airbrushed foundation she had a pinched, small-featured face), or that she was that much better dressed (though her red-feathered Dolce & Gabbana was one of the best in the room). It was that she had a dedicated photographer following her, soberly documenting her every move. As she worked the room, she tossed her balayaged hair over her shoulder and laughed with her chin tilted toward the ceiling, cutting her eyes at the photographer at the precise moment when he clicked the shutter. Who was she? I wondered. Clearly, a celebrity of some sort. Maybe a South American pop singer? A reality TV star?

  Eventually I found myself standing next to her in the powder room, where half the women at the party were refreshing their lipstick and patting their underarms with linen towels. Saskia’s photographer had been relegated to the corridor outside the bathroom, and Saskia puffed out a little sigh as she examined herself in the mirror, as if releasing some pent-up pressure in preparation for another onslaught of attention. She caught me watching her in the mirror and smiled sideways.

  I turned to study her profile. “I’m sorry, but should I know who you are?”

  She leaned closer to the mirror and blotted her lips with a tissue. “Saskia Rubansky.”

  I ran the name through my mental registry of society names and came up empty. “I’m sorry. I’m drawing a blank.”

  She tossed the tissue toward the trash can and missed, left it lying there on the floor for someone else to retrieve. I caught the eye of the bathroom attendant and flashed her an apologetic smile on Saskia’s behalf.

  “It’s OK,” Saskia said. “I’m famous on Instagram. You’ve heard of Instagram?”

  I had heard of Instagram. I’d even set up my own account, although I had only a dozen or so followers (Benny was one), and had yet to figure out its true purpose. Pictures of my new puppy, what I was eating for lunch: Who cared? No one, judging by the number of likes I was getting. “Famous for doing what?”

  She smiled, as if the question was a silly one. “For doing this.” She made a delicate circling gesture with her wrist that took in the dress, the hair, the face. “For being me.”

  Her cool self-assurance shattered me. “How many followers do you have?”

  “One-point-six million.” She turned slowly to regard me. The sweep of her gaze took in my dress (Vuitton), my shoes (Valentino), the beaded clutch (Fendi) lying on the vanity. “You’re Vanessa Liebling, right?”

  Later, I would come to learn that Saskia’s real name was Amy. She was from a solidly middle-class Polish family in Omaha, had escaped to New York to get a degree in fashion design. She’d auditioned for Project Runway four times, but never got picked. Instead, she started a “street fashion” blog that slowly morphed into an Instagram feed. A year in, she turned the camera around so that instead of photographing fashionable strangers, she was documenting her own flashy outfits, and her following skyrocketed. She’d practically invented the term Instagram fashion influencer.

  Saskia changed clothes, on average, six times a day, and had not paid for her own clothing in years. She billed herself as a “brand ambassador”—for woven sandals, for sparkling water, for moisturizing lotion, for Florida resorts, for whoever would pay her to breathlessly promote them while posing in designer dresses. She flew around the world on private jets that were chartered by her sponsors. She wasn’t quite rich, but on Instagram you’d never know the difference.

  Another thing about Saskia: She had not landed here by accident. Her appearance at this society gala was the outcome of years of careful study: of fashion, of course, and marketing, but also of the names that appeared in Page Six and Vanity Fair and the New York Social Diary. She knew when it would be useful to thrust herself into a frame, who might serve as another rung on the ladder she was climbing. She had fame; she wanted the respect, the kind that she thought someone might get from proximity to someone like me. She’d pegged me from the moment I walked into the party.

  Honestly, you have to give the girl credit for her balls.

  “You should give it a whirl, too, it’s fun, and you get all kinds of shit for free. Clothes, trips, electronics, I even got sent a fucking sofa last week.” She said this with a kind of bemused blasé. “You’re on Instagram, right?” I nodded. “Yeah, and you already have a brand. You know—old-money name, prestige lifestyle, people go crazy for that, American royalty and all that bullshit.” She threw her lipstick back in her clutch and clicked it shut with a definitive little snap, as if something between us had already been decided. “Look, I’ll tag you in some of my posts. We go out a few times together, you’ll hit fifty thousand followers within the month. You’ll see.”

  Why did I leap at her suggestion? Why did I plug my number into her phone so she could call me the next day and make plans to meet for salads at Le Coucou? Why did I follow her out of that bathroom and then pose with her by that wall of roses, champagne raised and laughing at some joke no one had actually uttered, while her photographer snapped away?

  Oh, I’m sure you’ve already figured it out by now. I wanted to be loved. Don’t we all? Some of us just choose more visible ways to seek it than others. My mother’s love was gone; I needed to find that same gratification elsewhere. (So a therapist once told me, at $250 an hour.)

  But there were other reasons, too. Saskia’s confidence knocked me off my feet. I was a Liebling, I was supposed to be the one sitting in the catbird seat, and yet ever since the day my mother plunged over the edge of the Judybird I’d felt…unmoored. There were nights when I woke up barely able to breathe, battling the familiar, panicky feeling that I’d somehow screwed everything up forever; that I was an abject failure notable only for my name. That without that I might just disappear off the face of the earth without a trace. I’d spent most of my twenties seeking something that would solidify my existence in the world, and what Saskia did—well, it seemed wholly within my capabilities. I could prove that I was good at something.

  Or maybe it was just that Saskia’s cool superiority made me feel the need to beat her at her own game.

  Or maybe it was just as simple as Why the hell not?

  Regardless: When I woke up the next morning, I discovered that she’d tagged me in a series of photos (New bestie! Girls’ night out, helping sick kids, so much fun! #dolceandgabbana #leukemia #bffl). In just eight hours, I had gained 232 new followers.

  And with that, I found my something.

  * * *

  —

  I couldn’t tell you exactly how I went from a few doz
en Instagram followers to a half million. One day, you’re uploading photos of your dog wearing sunglasses; and the next you’re being flown to Coachella on a private jet with four other social media It Girls, twenty suitcases full of wardrobe changes provided by a major fashion website, and a photographer to document the moment when you nonchalantly twirl your Balmain dress just so while pretending to eat an ice cream cone.

  That Balmain moment will be liked by 42,031 strangers. And looking at the comments (Beauty!—YAAS SLAY—Vanessa I adore U—SUCH A BABE) you will feel more substantial than you’ve ever felt in your life: as if you really are that glamorous, jet-setting fashion queen with an army of friends and no self-doubt whatsoever. You are admired—adored, even—beyond your wildest imagination. You’re living the V-Life; everyone wants to be you but only the very lucky few will come even close.

  If you play out a role long enough, can you become that person without even realizing it’s happened? This happier, more evolved person you are pretending to be—can they just inhabit you? Every day, as you put on a show for a worshipful audience of hundreds of thousands (or, heck—even just one other person), when does the performance stop being a performance and just become you?

  I’m still waiting to find the answer to that question.

  * * *

  —

  Several years passed like this, a blur of fashion shows and late-night dinners at caviar restaurants and rides across Lake Como with rich men whose names I had no reason to remember. Once I hit 300,000 followers I finally told my father what I was doing, which didn’t please him one bit. “You’re doing what?” he barked, when I tried to explain the term Instagram influencer. The mottled pink skin at his temple wrinkled with consternation; his nostrils—which had grown veined and corpuscular with age—flared like those of an enraged bull. “I didn’t raise you to just live off your trust fund. Vanessa—that’s really not wise.”