My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,55
got stuck in her fake eyelashes.
I thought of Trevor and all his drips and splats on my belly and back. When we’d had sex at his place, he’d finish and instantly rush out and back in with a roll of paper towels, hold the little trash can out for me as I wiped myself off. “These sheets . . .” Trevor never once came inside of me, not even when I was on the pill. His favorite thing was to fuck my mouth while I lay on my back pretending to be asleep, as if I wouldn’t notice his penis slamming into the back of my throat.
The credits rolled. Another porn movie started. Reva found the remote and hit unmute.
I opened the sample bottle of Infermiterol and took one, washing it down with the wine.
I remember listening to the stiff dialogue of the opening—the girl played a physical therapist, the guy played a football player with a pain in his groin. Reva cried for a while. When the fucking started, she lowered the volume and told me about her New Year’s the year before. “I just wasn’t in the mood to go to a couples party, you know? Everybody kissing at midnight? Ken was being a dick but I met him at like three in the morning at the Howard Johnson in Times Square.” I was glad to hear she was drunk now. It took some of the tension out of the room. On-screen, there was a knock on the door. The fucking didn’t stop. I was weaving in and out of sleep by then. Reva kept talking.
“And so then Ken was like . . . That was the first time . . . I told my mom . . . She said to pretend it never happened . . . Am I nuts?”
“Whoa,” I said, pointing at the TV screen. A black girl had entered the scene in a cheerleader’s uniform. “Do you think that’s his jealous girlfriend?”
“What’s going on in here?” the cheerleader asked, throwing down her pom-poms.
“You know you’re my only single friend?” Reva asked in response. “I wish I had a big sister,” she said. “Someone who could set me up with somebody. Maybe I’ll ask my dad for money to pay a matchmaker.”
“No man is worth paying for,” I told her.
“I’ll think about it,” Reva said.
I was in the fog by then, eyes open just a crack. Through them, I watched the black girl spread the lips of her vagina with long, sharp, pink fingernails. The inside of her glistened. I thought of Whoopi Goldberg. I remember that. I remember Reva setting the empty wine bottle down on the coffee table. And I remember her saying “Happy New Year” and kissing my cheek. I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.
“I love you, Reva,” I heard myself say from so far away. “I’m really sorry about your mom.”
Then I was gone.
Five
I WOKE UP ALONE on the sofa a few days later. The air smelled like stale smoke and perfume. The TV was on at low volume. My tongue was thick and gritty, like I had dirt in my mouth. I listened to the world weather report: floods in India, an earthquake in Guatemala, another blizzard approaching the northeastern United States, fires burning down million-dollar homes in Southern California, “but sunny skies in our nation’s capital today as Yasser Arafat visits the White House for talks with President Clinton aimed at reviving the stalled peace process in the Middle East. More on that story in a minute.”
I opened my eyes. The room was dim, the shades were down. As I pushed myself upright, lifting my head slowly off the arm of the sofa, the blood drained out of my brain like sand in an hourglass. My vision pixelated, moiréed, then blurred and womped back into focus. I looked down at my feet. I had on Reva’s dead mother’s shoes, seascapes of salt rounding across the leather toes. Nude fishnet stockings. I undid the belt of my white fur coat and found that all I was wearing underneath was a flesh-colored bustier bodysuit. I looked down at my crotch. My pubic hair had been waxed off recently. A good waxing—my skin was neither red nor bumpy nor itchy. My fingernails, I saw, were French-manicured. I could smell my own sweat. It smelled like gin. It smelled like