My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,52

rostrum and read lines off index cards, shuffling them back and forth as she sniffled and cried. Everything she said sounded like she’d read it in a Hallmark card. Halfway through, she stopped and looked down at me as though for approval. I gave her a thumbs-up. “She was a woman of many talents,” Reva said, “and she inspired me to follow my own path.” She went on for a while, mentioned the watercolors, her mother’s faith in God. Then she seemed to space out. “To be honest . . .” she began. “It’s like, you know . . .” She smiled and apologized and covered her face with her hands and sat back down next to me.

“Did I look like a complete idiot?” she whispered.

I shook my head no and put an arm around her, as awkwardly as such a thing can be done, and sat there until the funeral was over, this strange young woman in the throes of despair, trembling into my armpit.

* * *

• • •

THE RECEPTION AFTERWARD was at Reva’s house. The same middle-aged women were there, the same bald men, only multiplied. Nobody seemed to notice us when we walked in.

“I’m starving,” Reva said and went straight to the kitchen. I trudged back down to the basement and fell into a kind of half sleep.

I thought about whatever subliminal impulse had put me on the train to Farmingdale. Seeing Reva in full-blown Reva mode both delighted and disgusted me. Her repression, her transparent denial, her futile attempts to tap into the pain with me in the car, it all satisfied me somehow. Reva scratched at an itch that, on my own, I couldn’t reach. Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine. Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted—my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.

I woke up briefly to the sound of the faucet running and Reva retching in the bathroom. It was a rhythmic, violent song—throat grunts punctuated with splats and splashes. When she had finished, she flushed three times, turned off the faucet and went back up the stairs. I lay awake until I thought an appropriate amount of time had passed. I didn’t want Reva to think I’d been listening to her vomit. My blind eye was the one real comfort I felt I could give her.

Eventually I got out of bed, got my things together, and went back upstairs to call a taxi to come take me to the train station. Most of the guests had left. The original bald men stood in the sunroom off the kitchen. The snow was coming down hard by then. The women were collecting the plates and mugs from the coffee table in the living room. I found Reva sitting on the sofa, eating from a bag of frozen peas in front of the muted television.

“Can I use the phone?” I asked.

“I’ll drive you back to the city,” Reva said calmly.

“But, Reva, do you think that’s safe?” one of the women asked.

“I’ll drive slow,” Reva said. She got up, left the bag of peas on the coffee table, and took my arm. “Let’s go before my dad tries to stop me,” she said. From the kitchen she grabbed my bouquet of white roses from where they’d gotten stuck between the dirty dishes in the sink. They were still wrapped. “Take a few of those,” she said, pointing the roses at the bottles of wine on the counter. I took three. The women watched. I laid them in the Big Brown Bag on top of my jeans and sweatshirt and dirty sneakers.

“I’ll be right back,” Reva said, and went down the dark hallway.

“You’re Reva’s friend from college?” a woman asked. She spoke to me through the bright doorway to the kitchen as she unloaded the dishwasher. “Good that you have each other. You’ve got friends, you’re all right, no matter what.” Steam filled the air around her. She looked exactly how I’d pictured Reva’s mother. Her hair was brown and short. She wore big fake pearl earrings. Her dress was dark brown