My Year of Rest and Relaxation (12)

The only intellectual exercise my mother got was doing crossword puzzles. She’d come out of the bedroom some nights to ask my father for hints. “Don’t tell me the answer. Just tell me what the word sounds like,” she’d say. As a professor, my father was good at guiding people to their own conclusions. He was dispassionate, sulky, even a little snide at times. I took after him. My mother did say once we were both “stone wolves.” But she herself had a cold aura, too. I don’t think she realized it. None of us had much warmth in our hearts. I was never allowed to have any pets. Sometimes I think a puppy might have changed everything. My parents died one after the other my junior year of college—first my dad from cancer, then my mother from pills and alcohol six weeks later.

All of this, the tragedy of my past, came reeling back with great force that night I woke up in the supply closet at Ducat for the last time.

It was ten at night and everyone had gone home. I trudged up the dark stairway to clean out my desk. There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing. I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life. I found a shopping bag in the break room and packed up my coffee mug, the spare change of clothes I kept in my desk drawer along with a few pairs of high heels, panty hose, a push-up bra, some makeup, a stash of cocaine I hadn’t used in a year. I thought about stealing something from the gallery—the Larry Clark photo hanging in Natasha’s office, or the paper cutter. I settled on a bottle of champagne—a lukewarm, and therefore appropriate, consolation.

I turned off all the lights, set the alarm, and walked out. It was a cool early-summer night. I lit a cigarette and stood facing the gallery. The lasers weren’t on, but through the glass I could see the tall white poodle that looked out onto the sidewalk. It was baring its teeth, with one gold fang glinting in the light of the streetlamp. There was a red velvet bow tied around its little bouffant hairdo. Suddenly, a feeling rose up in me. I tried to squash it down, but it nestled into my bowels. “Pets just make messes. I don’t want to have to go around picking dog hairs out of my teeth,” I remembered my mother saying.

“Not even a goldfish?”

“Why? Just to watch it swim around and die?”

Maybe this memory triggered the hemorrhage of adrenaline that pushed me to go back inside the gallery. I pulled a few Kleenex from the box on my old desk, flipped the power switch to turn on the lasers, and stood between the stuffed black Lab and the sleeping dachshund. Then I pulled down my pants, squatted, and shat on the floor. I wiped myself and shuffled across the gallery with my pants around my ankles and stuffed the shitty Kleenex into the mouth of that bitchy poodle. That felt like vindication. That was my proper good-bye. I left and caught a cab home and drank the whole bottle of champagne that night and fell asleep on my sofa watching Burglar. Whoopi Goldberg was one reason to stay alive, at least.



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THE NEXT DAY, I filed for unemployment, which Natasha must have resented. But she never called. I set up a weekly pickup with the Laundromat and automatic payments on all my utilities, bought a wide selection of used VHS tapes from the Jewish Women’s Council Thrift Shop on Second Avenue, and soon I was hitting the pills hard and sleeping all day and all night with two-or three-hour breaks in between. This was good, I thought. I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.





Two


I’D BEEN SEEING Dr. Tuttle once a week, but after I left Ducat, I didn’t want to have to make the trek down to Union Square that often. So I told her that I was “freelancing in Chicago” and could only see her in person once a month. She said we could talk over the phone every week, or not, as long as I gave her postdated checks for my copayments in advance. “If your insurance asks, say you were here weekly in person. Just in case.” She never caught on that I was having her call in my refills to my local Rite Aid in Manhattan. She never asked how my work in Chicago was going, or what I was doing there. Dr. Tuttle knew nothing about my hibernation project. I wanted her to think I was a nervous wreck, but fully operative, so she’d prescribe whatever she thought might knock me out the hardest.

I plunged into sleep full force once this arrangement had been made. It was an exciting time in my life. I felt hopeful. I felt I was on my way to a great transformation.



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I SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK in a soft twilight zone. I didn’t leave the apartment at all, not even for coffee. I kept a jar of macadamia nuts by the bed, ate a few whenever I rose to the surface, sucked a bottle of Poland Spring, gravitated to the toilet maybe once a day. I didn’t answer the phone—nobody but Reva ever called me anyway. She left me messages so long and breathless that they got cut off midsentence. Usually she called while she was on the StairMaster at her gym.