My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh Page 0,89

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.

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• • •

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.