My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,10

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”