My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

  * * *

  • • •

  ON JUNE 1, 2001, I came to in a cross-legged seated position on the living room floor. Sunlight was needling through the blinds, illuminating crisscrossed planes of yellow dust that blurred and waned as I squinted. I heard a bird chirp.

  I was alive.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS I’D REQUESTED BACK in January, Ping Xi had laid out a set of clothes for me on the dining table: sneakers, track pants, T-shirt, zip-up hoodie. My credit cards and driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, and a thousand dollars cash were in the envelope I’d sealed and given him to hold. There was a bottle of Evian, an apple in a plastic bag from the grocery store, and a sample-size tube of Neutrogena sunscreen—a thoughtful touch. The table had been cleared of all the Post-it notes, which I appreciated, but then I found the cluster in the trash, like a tossed-out bouquet of daisies. I picked one up and read it: “Don’t forget: clothes, shoes, the envelope, keys. Buy me some sunscreen, please.” And then on another one, “Thanks, good luck.” A smiley face.

  My old white fur coat hung on the hook by the front door. A Post-it note stuck to the wall read: “When I bought this for you, it was simply because I wanted you to have it. I’ll really miss working with you. PX.”

  The door was unlocked.

  I got dressed, put the coat on, went out and down the elevator to the lobby and made my way dizzily toward the light exploding through the glass doors onto the street.

  “Miss?” I heard the doorman say. “Can you hear me?” Then the stiff rustle of his uniform pants as he squatted down and cradled my head in his hands. I hadn’t realized that I’d hit the floor.

  Someone brought me a glass of water. A woman held my hand and sat me in a leather armchair in the lobby. The doorman gave me the egg salad sandwich from his brown-bag lunch.

  “Is there anyone we can call?”

  People were so nice.

  “No, there’s nobody. Thank you. I just had a dizzy spell.”

  It took another week until I had the strength to make it outside and walk around the block. The next day I walked to Second Avenue. The next day, all the way to Lexington. I ate prepackaged egg salad sandwiches from a deli on East Eighty-seventh. I sat for hours on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and watched the lapdogs doddling around a tiled, fenced-in area, their owners dodging the sun and clicking at their cell phones. Someone left a collection of books out on the curb one day on East Seventy-seventh Street, and I brought them home and read them all cover to cover. A history of drunk driving in America. An Indian cookbook. War and Peace. Mao II. Italian for Dummies. A book of Mad Libs that I filled in myself using the simplest words I could think of. I passed the days like this for four or five weeks. I did not buy a cell phone. I got rid of the old mattress. Every night at nine I lay down on the smooth hardwood floor with a stretch and a yawn, and I had no trouble sleeping. I had no dreams. I was like a newborn animal. I rose with the sun. I did not walk south of Sixty-eighth Street.

  By mid-June, it was too hot to wear the tracksuit Ping Xi had left me. I bought a pack of white cotton panties and plastic slip-on shoes from the 99 Cent Store on 108th Street. I liked it up there, almost Harlem. I paced slowly up and down Second Avenue in red or blue gym shorts and oversized athletic tees. I got in the habit of buying a box of Corn Flakes from the Egyptians each morning. I fed the Corn Flakes in gentle handfuls to the squirrels in the park. I drank no coffee.

  I discovered the Goodwill store on 126th Street. I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed. This was how I refurnished my apartment. One day, I brought the white fox fur coat with me to the Goodwill and handed it to the teenager taking donations through the door around the corner from the store entrance. He took it calmly, asked if I wanted a receipt. I watched his hands smooth the fur, as though he were assessing its value. Maybe he’d steal it and give it to his girlfriend, or his mother. I hoped he would. But then he just threw it in a huge blue bin.

  In August I bought a battery-operated radio and carried it with me to the park each day. I listened to the jazz stations. I didn’t know any names of the songs. The squirrels flocked to me as soon as I uncrumpled the bag of Corn Flakes. They ate straight from my palm, tiny black hands crunching into the cereal, cheeks ballooning. “You pigs!” I told them. They seemed perturbed by the music coming out of my little radio. I kept the volume low when I fed them.

  * * *

  • • •

  I DIDN’T THINK MUCH of Ping Xi until I saw Reva. I called her on August 19 from the doorman’s cell phone. Despite all the sleep and forgetting, I still knew her number by heart, and recognized the date on the calendar as her birthday.

  She came over the following Sunday, nervous and smelling of a new perfume that reminded me of gummy worms, said nothing about the odd assortment of furniture and decorations in my apartment or my six-month disappearance, my lack of cell phone, the stacks of mildewed books lining the wall of the living room. She just said, “So, it’s been a while, I guess,” sat down where I pointed, at the Goodwill afghan that I’d spread out like a picnic blanket across the floor, and rattled on about her new position at her company. She described her boss as a “CIA tool,” rolling her eyes and emphasizing certain technical terms in her description of her duties. At first I couldn’t tell if they were aphorisms about sex positions. Everything about her seemed troublingly pornographic—her matte foundation, her darkly outlined lips, that perfume, the poised stillness of her hands. “Innovative solutions.” “Anatomy of workplace violence.” “Strong objectives.” She wore her hair in a lose chignon, my tiny pearl earrings budding from her earlobes like drops of milk, simultaneously perverse and innocent, I thought. She also wore my white eyelet blouse and a pair of jeans I’d given her. I felt no longing or nostalgia for the clothes. The jeans had frayed at the cuffs, an inch too long on Reva’s legs. I thought to suggest to her to have them professionally hemmed. There was a place on Eighty-third.

  “I just read this story in the New Yorker,” she said, and pulled the rolled-up issue out of her enormous purse. The story was called “Bad at Math.” It was about an adolescent Chinese American in Cleveland who bombs the PSAT, jumps off his two-story junior high school, and breaks both his legs. After the school guidance counselor pressures the boy’s family into group therapy, his parents tell him they love him in a supermarket parking lot and they all start to cry and wail and fall on their knees, while all the other shoppers wheel their carts past and pretend like nothing amazing is going on. “Listen to this opening,” Reva said. “‘For the first time, they said the words. I think it pained them more than the cracking of my shins and femurs.’”

  “Go on,” I said. The story was terribly written. Reva read aloud.

  Ping Xi appeared in my mind as I listened. I imagined his small, dark eyes staring at me and squinting, one pinching shut as his paint-stained hand, outstretched with a brush, measured me for proportions. But that was all I could remember. He struck me as a reptilian, small-hearted being, someone placed on the planet to strike a chord with similar people, people who distracted themselves with money and conversation rather than sink their hands and teeth into the world around them. Shallow, I guess. But there were worse people on this Earth.

  “I had studied for months for the PSAT.” Reva read the story in its entirety. It took at least half an hour. I knew she was just trying to fill the air, take up the time until she could go and leave me forever. That’s what it felt like at least. I can’t say it didn’t hurt me that she held herself at such a distance. But to confront her about it would have been cruel. I had no rig
ht to make any demands. I sensed she didn’t really want to hear about my experiences in “rehab” or whatever it was she imagined I’d been through. I watched her mouth move, every little wrinkle in the skin of her lips, the vague dimple on her left cheek, the moon-shaped sadness of her eyes.

  “‘A black shred of bok choy had dried and attached itself to the rim of the garbage can,’” she read. I nodded along, hoping to make her feel at ease. When she was done, she sighed, and pulled a piece of gum from her purse.

  “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it, how certain cultures can be so cold?”

  “It’s heartbreaking, yes,” I said.

  “I really identify with the Chinese kid,” Reva said, rolling the magazine back up.

  I reached across her folded legs, tugged at the magazine in her tense clutch, like a tug-of-war. I didn’t want her to leave. The white glare off the overhead light gleamed across her collarbones. She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears. This would be the last time I’d see her in person.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you, too.”

  * * *

  • • •

  PING XI’S VIDEOS and paintings went up at Ducat in late August. The show was called “Large-Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman.” He or Natasha FedExed me tear-outs of the reviews. No note. The images from the show were not what I’d remembered imagining from my days with Ping Xi in my bedroom. I had expected a series of all sloppily painted nudes. Instead, Ping Xi had painted me in the style of Utamaro woodblock prints, wearing neon kimonos printed with tropical flowers and lipstick kisses and Coca-Cola and Pennzoil and Chanel and Absolut Vodka logos. In each piece, my head was huge. In a few portraits, Ping Xi had collaged my actual hair. In Artforum, Ronald Jones called me a “bloated nymph with dead man eyes.” Phyllis Braff condemned the show as “a product of Oedipal lust” in the New York Times. ArtReview called the work “predictably disappointing.” Otherwise, the reviews were positive. The videos described were of me talking into the camera, seeming to narrate some personal stories—I cry in one—but Ping Xi had dubbed everything over. Instead of my voice, you heard long, angry voice mails Ping Xi’s mother had left him in Cantonese. No subtitles.

  * * *

  • • •

  I FOUND MY WAY into the Met one afternoon in early September. I guess I wanted to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit. I wondered if they’d watched the grapes wither and shrivel up, if they’d had to go to the market to replace them, and if, before they threw the shriveled strand of grapes away, they’d eaten a few. I hoped that they’d had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing. Maybe, I thought, once the light had faded for the day, they dropped the rotted fruit out an open window, hoping it would save the life of a starving beggar passing below on the street. Then I imagined the beggar, a monster with worms crawling through his matted hair, the tattered rags on his body fluttering like the wings of a bird, his eyes ablaze with desperation, his heart a caged animal begging for slaughter, hands cupped in perpetual prayer as the townspeople milled around the city square. Picasso was right to start painting the dreary and dejected. The blues. He looked out the window at his own misery. I could respect that. But these painters of fruit thought only of their own mortality, as though the beauty of their work would somehow soothe their fear of death. There they all were, hanging feckless and candid and meaningless, paintings of things, objects, the paintings themselves just things, objects, withering toward their own inevitable demise.

  I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I’d see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they’d crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they’d lived wrongly. Their greatness might have poisoned them. Did they wonder about things like that? Maybe they couldn’t sleep at night. Were they plagued by nightmares? Maybe they understood, in fact, that beauty and meaning had nothing to do with one another. Maybe they lived as real artists knowing all along that there were no pearly gates. Neither creation nor sacrifice could lead a person to heaven. Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lifes without having to swat away any more flies.

  “Step back, please,” I heard a guard say.

  I was too close to the painting.

  “Step away!”

  The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive. I didn’t know what was true. So I did not step back. Instead, I put my hand out. I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no God stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things. “Ma’am!” the guard yelled, and then there were hands gripping my shoulders, pulling me to the side. But that was all that happened.

  “Sorry, I got dizzy,” I explained.

  That was it. I was free.

  The real estate agent upstate sent a handwritten note the next day to say there’d been an offer on my parents’ house. “Ten K below asking, but you might as well. We’ll put it in stocks. Your phone seems to be out of order and has been for quite some time.”

  I took the letter with me on a walk in Central Park. The humidity carried in the warm wind mixed the sweat of the city and its dirt and grime with the heady fragrant lushness of the grass and trees. Things were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows. What was cowardly about the color yellow? Nothing.

  “What kind of bird is that?” I heard a child ask his young mother, pointing to a bird that looked like a psychedelic crow. Its feathers were iridescent black, a rainbow reflected in the gleaming darkness, eyes bright white and alive, vigilant.

  “A grackle,” the woman replied.

  I breathed and walked and sat on a bench and watched a bee circle the heads of a flock of passing teenagers. There was majesty and grace in the pace of the swaying branches of the willows. There was kindness. Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now. I could survive without the house. I understood that it would soon be someone else’s store of memories, and that was beautiful. I could move on.

  I found a pay phone on Second Avenue.

  “OK,” I said into the realtor’s answering machine. “Sell it. And tell them to throw out whatever’s in the attic. I don’t need it. Just mail me whatever I have to sign.”

  Then I called Reva. She answered on the fourth ring, panting and tense.

  “I’m at the gym,” she said. “Can we talk later?”

  We never did.

  Eight

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bou
ght a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

  About the Author

  Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Her first book, McGlue, a novella, won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction.