My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,57
wipe out all that garbage from my mind.
I’d never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos, but I’d seen it from afar: young and beautiful and fascinating people hailing cabs and flicking cigarettes, cocaine, mascara, the diamond grit of a night out on the town, random sex a simple gesture in a bathroom stall, wading once onto the dance floor then back out again, screaming drink orders at the bar, everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow, where they’d have more fun, feel more beautiful, be surrounded by more interesting people. I’d always preferred a septic hotel bar, maybe because that’s where Trevor liked to take me. He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.”
The interns at the gallery had told me about their weekends out at Tunnel and Life and Sound Factory and Spa and Lotus and Centro-Fly and Luke + Leroy. So I had some sense of what went on in the city at night. And as Natasha’s assistant, I’d been responsible for keeping a list of some of the most socially valuable people at an art party—specifically the young impresarios and their attendants. She invited them to openings and told me to study their bios. Maggie Kahpour’s father had owned the largest private collection of Picasso doodles in the world, and when he died, she donated them to an abbey in the south of France. The monks named a cheese after her. Gwen Elbaz-Burke was the grandniece of Ken Burke, the performance artist who was eaten by the shark he kept in his swimming pool, and the daughter of Zara Ali Elbaz, a Syrian princess who was exiled for making a pornographic art film with her German boyfriend, a descendant of Heinrich Himmler. Stacey Bloom had started a magazine called Kun(s)t about “women in the arts,” mostly profiles of rich art-party girls who were starting their own fashion lines or opening galleries or nightclubs or starring in indie movies. Her father was the president of Citibank. Zaza Nakazawa was a nineteen-year-old heiress who had written a book about being in a sexual relationship with her aunt, the painter Elaine Meeks. Eugenie Pratt was the half sister of the documentary filmmaker and architect Emilio Wolford who famously made her eat a raw lamb’s heart on camera when she was twelve. There was Claudia Martini-Richards. Jane Swarovski-Kahn. Pepper Jacobin-Sills. Kylie Jensen. Nell “Nikita” Patrick. Patsy Weinberger. Maybe these were the girls in the photos. I wouldn’t have recognized them outside the gallery. Imogene Behrman. Odette Quincy Adams. Kitty Cavalli. I remembered their names. Dawn’s Early must have been some new after-hours club for the next generation of rich kids and art hags if Ping Xi was hanging out there, presumably among his devotees. I vaguely remembered Natasha saying he’d gone to boarding school with a set of gay royal twins from Prussia. But how had I found him? Or had he found me?
I collected the photos and stuffed them under the sofa cushion, then got up to peek into my bedroom to make sure nobody was there. All my bedding was in a heap on the floor, the mattress bare. I stepped closer to make sure there was no human-sized bloodstain, nobody wrapped up in the sheets, no corpse tucked under the bed. I opened the closet and found nobody bound and gagged. Just the little plastic Baggies of Victoria’s Secret lingerie spilled out. Nothing was amiss. I was alone.
Back in the living room, my phone was dead on the windowsill next to a single sneaker I’d used as an ashtray. I snagged down a slat in the blinds to look out the window. The snow was already beginning to fall. That was good, I thought—I’d stay home through the blizzard and get some hard sleeping done. I’d return to my old rhythm, my daily rituals. I needed the stability of my familiar routine. And I wouldn’t take any more Infermiterol, at least for a while. It was working against my goal of doing nothing. I plugged my phone in to charge and threw the sneaker away in the kitchen. The trash was filled with the brittle peels of clementines and cloudy plastic packaging from single-serving slices of cheese, which I couldn’t remember buying or eating. The fridge contained only the small, light wood crate the clementines came in, and a second gallon jug of distilled water.