Alissa Nutting - Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

Although my life has so many more great things in it now than before I met Garla, I’m still beginning to feel used. And — how can I deny this — I want more of Garla. She is a rare substance, if only because of the role and power she has in our society and not anything she holds innately. Rare substances make people feel selfish and greedy, and Garla is no exception. Neither am I.

I am also getting a little sick of my special Garla-phone, but it’s really expensive and the only thing Garla will call me on. I got rid of my other phone and now have only the phone Garla gave me, perhaps because I know she intended it to only be used when she called me, and this is a small rebellion on my part. Garla doesn’t pick up on rebellions though, big or small. She has no need for them.

I decide to ask if I can be her paid assistant, because she probably will not say yes or no, and I can just interpret it as yes. If anything, by quitting my job and hanging out with her more I will get additional goodies I can eBay, and Garla’s schwag pays several times more than my current employer.

I strike when we are in the back of a town car on the way to a designer’s private shoot. Garla is stretched out on my lap with her muss of blond hair hanging down over my knees. Her hair is softer than my shaved legs.

“Garla,” I say, “I’m going to quit my job and be your assistant. You don’t have to pay me hardly anything. I don’t make very much as it is.” There’s a pause and she hands up a tiny golden comb to me, I presume for me to begin brushing her hair with. I also presume this means “yes,” is a quid pro quo gesture. I call my boss right then on the Garla-phone and quit as loudly as I can without seeming hostile, just to try to burn the event a little deeper into the ether of Garla’s memory.

The shoot goes well. Afterwards I take her glasses of chilled vodka that look like refreshing water and we have a look at the pictures, which are beautiful. We leave with giant bags of expensive clothing that we didn’t pay or ask for.

I am feeling more visible by the second. Perhaps, I think, I should move into Garla’s apartment. That way I’d always be there to do whatever she needed, and there wouldn’t be all the Garla-phone calls in the middle of the night; she could just yell or do a special grunt. Although Garla never needs to yell. Everyone is already paying attention.

Except the next morning, she doesn’t answer my calls, and she doesn’t call me. This goes on for another week and a half. I sulk like a real model. I don’t eat and I drink lots of vodka and I cut my own hair in the bathroom with dull scissors and then regret it, and the next morning I think about going to a really expensive salon and having it fixed except I don’t have the money for that, especially now that I have no job. For that, I need Garla.

This is the root of my pain. I had convinced myself that she needed me, when really, anyone could and would do what I did: follow around a gorgeous person and get gifts and call outrages by name for what they are. How did I lend any type of panache to that role? Looking in the mirror at my botched home haircut, I realize that my new expensive clothes still look nerdy because they don’t fit me right. They never will.

When the Garla-phone finally lights up and makes its synthetic music, it’s like an air-raid siren. I’m paralyzed with fear but angst-ridden from loneliness and desperation. “Where have you been?” I scream. “We agreed I’d be your assistant. I quit my job! I haven’t seen you for like ten days!”

“Vodka head,” Garla explains. I want to pretend like nothing is wrong. “I’m not a bad assistant. I’m a good assistant, which means I need to be where you are, and help you with things.”

“Later, a party,” she says. I can hear happy screams in the background and their shrillness stabs into me. I know those screams belong to completely impractical people, and I hate them for it. “When?” I ask, “How do I get there?”

I stop by a nearby bar to have a few drinks alone before going up to the party. It feels good to sulk over a glass in public. How could I have let my guard down so badly? Before Garla, I had been all-guard. Before Garla, I would’ve seen Garla coming. My pre-Garla life suddenly seems like an amazing thing; I hadn’t even known what I was missing. As I walk out of the bar and look up near the balcony I’m headed to, I can actually see Garla. It makes me feel creepy but I stand there and watch for a while anyway, until the two of us seem like strangers. Under the streetlamp and despite our distance, I notice her bone structure dazzle in the candlelight.

Compared to her, I am like a sandwich. I am completely inhuman and benign. I try to remember a sandwich I’d eaten in the fourth grade and cannot. I can’t even really remember one I’d eaten a month ago. We all must be like fourth grade sandwiches to Garla.

It’s not until I get inside the suite and look around that I realize it’s the same residence where I first met Garla. This makes my hands and feet sweat rapidly; the line is suddenly becoming a circle.

But circles are infinite too. It’s not just lines that go on forever.

As the night moves on, it’s like going back in time. When I enter, Garla gives me a soft embrace and kisses my cheek, but I want restitution. I quit my job and had the week from hell, and she isn’t going to flash a quick smile and reenter my life. Maybe I’m replaceable, but I don’t have to be happy about it.

I take my old seat by the window and start rapidly boozing. The lights change colors in ways that suggest I’m going too fast, and that is the speed I want to go. It’s a rush, like skydiving. I keep giving Garla a scowl that says, “Hey, you. I’m not holding on. See my empty hands.”

She’s rubbing pieces of chocolate over her lips like Chap Stick and men are helplessly pulled to her side of the room. Garla’s face is a centrifuge that separates the confident from the weak and the jealous, and I have been spun away.

Stumbling to the bathroom, I get out my jeweled Garla-phone. Part of me wants to put it into the toilet, or at least try to see if it will fit through the hole in the bottom of the bowl. I want to puke on it but it is so shiny that with its jeweled crystals and my drunken compound fly-eye vision, I couldn’t aim if I wanted to. Instead the puke falls into the water and the phone falls on the ground, and when I’m finished and my cheek hits the floor the phone looks like a store of riches behind the plunger. I grab the phone and open it, kind of bumping it around, hoping it will call a friend who will come pick me up.

But it’s Garla’s phone, so it calls Garla. I hang up but a few minutes later she’s standing over me in an Amazonian manner, one leg on either side of my body. “Put you in tiny coffin,” she says, rolling out some toilet paper and batting it against my wet cheek.

“I wish you would.”

She doesn’t appreciate my display of self-pity. I watch her toss her martini glass out the window onto the patio where it breaks. “You go home and rest doctor-television.”

After she leaves, a bodyguard enters and picks me up with a disgusted look, like he’s emptying a full bedpan. He helps me into the taxi. Motoring away, I watch the colored streaks of Garla on the patio upstairs.

With panic I check my purse to make sure I still have it: the Garla-phone, the jewel. The cursed treasure that brought distress alongside fortune. Glistening in my lap it is too beautiful to be trusted. As the cab nears my apartment, I have the urge to leave the phone behind on the seat for someone else to find and answer. But I won’t. Instead I’ll go home and wait for her to call me and turn me into something special for however long she wants, and this time I won’t forget to be grateful.