My Year of Rest and Relaxation (11)

“Please, no petting,” Ping Xi said suddenly in the darkness.

Natasha took his arm, gushing to him that she was ready for outrage from PETA, a protest or two, an Op-Ed in the New York Times that would be publicity gold. Ping Xi nodded blankly.

I called in sick the day of the opening. Natasha didn’t seem to care. She had Angelika fill in at the front desk. She was an anorexic Goth, a senior at NYU. The show was a “brutal success,” one critic called it. “Cruelly funny.” Another said Ping Xi “marked the end of the sacred in art. Here is a spoiled brat taking the piss out of the establishment. Some are hailing him as the next Marcel Duchamp. But is he worth the stink?”

I don’t know why I didn’t just quit. I didn’t need the money. I was relieved when, at last, in June, Natasha called from Switzerland to fire me. I had messed up a shipment of press materials for Art Basel, apparently.

“Out of curiosity, what are you on?” she wanted to know.

“I’ve just been really tired.”

“Is it a medical issue?”

“No,” I said. I could have lied. I could have told her that I had mono, or some sleep disorder. Cancer maybe. Everybody was getting cancer. But defending myself was useless. I had no good reason to fight to keep my job. “Are you letting me go?”

“I’d love it if you’d stay on until I get back and use the time to show Angelika the ropes, the filing system, whatever you’ve been doing on the computer, if anything.” I hung up the phone, took a handful of Benadryl, and went down to the supply closet and fell sleep.



* * *



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OH, SLEEP. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic—I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a somniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. She was not the type to sit and watch me draw or read me books or play games or go for walks in the park or bake brownies. We got along best when we were asleep.

When I was in the third grade, my mother, due to some unspoken conflict with my father, let me sleep with her in their bed because, as she said, it was easier to wake me up in the mornings if she didn’t have to get up and go across the hall. I accumulated thirty-seven tardies and twenty-four absences that year. Thirty-seven times, my mother and I woke up together, bleary and exhausted at seven A.M., tried to get up, but fell back into bed and slept on while cartoons flashed from the small television on her bedside table. We’d wake up a few hours later—shades drawn, extra pillows lying shipwrecked on the rough beige rug—dress in a daze and lurch out into the car. I remember her holding one eye open with one hand, steering with the other. I’ve often wondered what she was on that year, and if she’d been slipping me any of it. Twenty-four times we slept through the alarm, got up sometime past noon, and abandoned the thought of school altogether. I’d eat cereal and read or watch television all day. My mother would smoke cigarettes, talk on the phone, hide from the housekeeper, take a bottle of wine with her into the master bathroom, and draw a bubble bath and read Danielle Steel or Better Homes & Gardens.

My father slept on the sofa in the den that year. I remember his thick glasses perched on the oak end table, their greasy lenses magnifying the dark grain of the wood. Without his glasses on, I barely recognized him. He was fairly nondescript—thinning brown hair, loosening jowls, a single wrinkle of worry etched deep into his brow. That wrinkle made him look perpetually perplexed, yet passive, like a man trapped behind his own eyes. He was kind of a nonentity, I thought, a stranger gently puppeting his way through his life at home with two strange females he could never hope to understand. Each night, he’d plop an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water. I stood by as it dissolved. I remember listening to the fizzing sound as he silently removed the cushions from the sofa and stacked them in the corner, his sad colorless pajamas dragging across the floor. Maybe that’s when his cancer started, a few odd cells forming during a bad night’s sleep in the living room.

My father was neither an ally nor a confidant, but it seemed backward to me that this hardworking man would be relegated to the sofa while my lazy mother got the king-size bed. I resented her for that, but she seemed immune to guilt and shame. I think she got away with so much because she was beautiful. She looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk. I assume she blamed my father for ruining her life—she got pregnant and dropped out of college to marry him. She didn’t have to, of course. I was born in August 1973, seven months after Roe v. Wade. Her family was the country club brand of alcoholic Southern Baptists—Mississippi loggers on one side, Louisiana oilmen on the other—or else, I assumed, she would have aborted me. My father was twelve years older than my mother. She’d been just nineteen years old and already four months pregnant when they got married. I’d figured that out as soon as I could do the math. Stretch marks, loose skin, scars across her belly she said looked like “a raccoon had disemboweled her,” glaring at me as if I’d wrapped my umbilical cord around my neck on purpose. Maybe I did. “You were blue when they cut me open and pulled you out. After all the hell I went through, the consequences, your father, and the baby goes and dies? Like dropping a pie on the floor as soon as you pull it out of the oven.”