My Year of Rest and Relaxation (7)

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I’D MOVED INTO MY apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in 1996, a year after I graduated from Columbia. By summer 2000, I still hadn’t had a single conversation with any of my neighbors—almost four years of complete silence in the elevator, each awkward ride a performance of hypnotized spaceout. My neighbors were mostly fortysomething married people without children. Everyone was well-groomed, professional. A lot of camel-hair coats and black leather briefcases. Burberry scarves and pearl earrings. There were a few loudmouthed single women my age I saw from time to time gabbing on their cell phones and walking their teacup poodles. They reminded me of Reva, but they had more money and less self-loathing, I would guess. This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care. The only other slovenly people around were elderly Jews with rent-controlled apartments. But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young. Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good.

My building was eight stories high, concrete with burgundy awnings, an anonymous facade on a block otherwise lined with pristine town houses, each with its own placard warning people not to let their dogs piss on their stoops because it would damage the brownstone. “Let us honor those who came before us, as well as those who will follow,” one sign read. Men took hired cars to work downtown, and women got Botox and boob jobs and vaginal “cinches” to keep their pussies tight for their husbands and personal trainers, or so Reva told me. I had thought the Upper East Side could shield me from the beauty pageants and cockfights of the art scene in which I’d “worked” in Chelsea. But living uptown had infected me with its own virus when I first moved there. I’d tried being one of those blond women speed walking up and down the Esplanade in spandex, Bluetooth in my ear like some self-important asshole, talking to whom—Reva?

On the weekends, I did what young women in New York like me were supposed to do, at first: I got colonics and facials and highlights, worked out at an overpriced gym, lay in the hammam there until I went blind, and went out at night in shoes that cut my feet and gave me sciatica. I met interesting men at the gallery from time to time. I slept around in spurts, going out more, then less. Nothing ever panned out in terms of “love.” Reva often spoke about “settling down.” That sounded like death to me.

“I’d rather be alone than anybody’s live-in prostitute,” I said to Reva.

Still, a romantic urge surfaced now and then with Trevor, a recurring ex-boyfriend, my first and only. I was only eighteen, a freshman, when I met him at a Halloween party in a loft near Battery Park. I went with a dozen girls from the sorority I was rushing. Like most Halloween costumes, mine was an excuse to go around town dressed like a whore. I went as Detective Rizzoli, Whoopi Goldberg’s character in Fatal Beauty. In the first scene of the movie, she’s undercover and disguised as a hooker, so to copy her, I’d teased out my hair, wore a tight dress, high heels, gold lamé jacket, and white cat-eye sunglasses. Trevor had on an Andy Warhol costume: blond bobbed wig, thick black glasses, tight striped shirt. My first impression of him was that he was free spirited, clever, funny. That proved to be completely inaccurate. We left the party together and walked around for hours, lied to each other about our happy lives, ate pizza at midnight, took the Staten Island Ferry back and forth and watched the sun rise. I gave him my phone number at the dorm. By the time he finally called me, two weeks later, I’d become obsessed with him. He kept me on a long, tight leash for months—expensive meals, the occasional opera or ballet. He took my virginity at a ski lodge in Vermont on Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t a pleasurable experience, but I trusted he knew more about sex than I did, so when he rolled off and said, “That was amazing,” I believed him. He was thirty-three, worked for Fuji Bank at the World Trade Center, wore tailored suits, sent cars to pick me up at my dorm, then the sorority house sophomore year, wined and dined me, and asked for head with no shame in the back of cabs he charged to the company account. I took this as proof of his masculine value. My “sisters” all agreed; he was “suave.” And I was impressed by how much he liked talking about his emotions, something I’d never seen a man do. “My mom’s a pothead now, and that’s why I have this deep sadness.” He took frequent trips to Tokyo for work and to San Francisco to visit his twin sister. I suspected she discouraged him from dating me.

He broke up with me the first time freshman year because I was “too young and immature. I can’t be the one to help you grow out of your abandonment issues,” he explained. “It’s too much of a responsibility. You deserve someone who can really support your emotional development.” So I spent that summer at home upstate with my parents and had sex with a boy from high school, who was far more sensual and interested in how the clitoris “works,” but not quite patient enough to really interact with mine successfully. It was helpful, though. I reclaimed a bit of my dignity by feeling nothing for that boy, using him. By Labor Day, when I moved into Delta Gamma, Trevor and I were back together.

Over the next five years, Trevor would periodically deplete his self-esteem in relationships with older women, i.e., women his age, then return to me to reboot. I was always available. I dated guys from time to time, but there was never another real “boyfriend,” if I could even call Trevor that. He wouldn’t have agreed to carry that title. There were plenty of one-night stands in college while we were on the outs, but nothing worth repeating. After I graduated and was flung into the world of adulthood—already orphaned—I was bolder in my desperation, made frequent appeals to Trevor to take me back. I could hear his cock harden on the phone whenever I called to beg him to come over and hold me. “I’ll see if I can squeeze it in,” he’d say. Then he’d be there and I’d shiver in his arms like the child I still was, swoon with gratitude for his recognition, savor the weight of him in the bed next to me. It was as though he were some divine messenger, my soul mate, my savior, whatever. Trevor would be very pleased to spend a night at my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, earning back all the bravado he’d lost in his last affair. I hated seeing that come on in him. One time he said he was afraid of fucking me “too passionately” because he didn’t want to break my heart. So he fucked me efficiently, selfishly, and when he was done, he’d get dressed and check his pager, comb his hair, kiss my forehead, and leave.