Picture Perfuct: An Account of Irrational Jealousy
There is little explanation for the reason I hate them so much, being that I’ve never met them. But my neighbors’ glib presence lingers on their perfect turn-of-the-century stoop, in the crystal chandelier that glitters from their perfect living room and onto the street, in the perfect holiday decorations cribbed from a J. Crew catalogue with tasteful banners wishing passerby religiously non-committal good tidings like “MERRY BRIGHT!” or offering them a ghoulish image of Edgar Allan Poe hiding behind a stoop-side pumpkin patch. So literary! So tasteful! So sensitive to the cultural times! F**k you guys.
Too often I find myself hating the very people I aspire to be, or, in the case of the young women with nice handbags who have moved into my neighborhood now that it’s cool enough, hating the people I already am. My judgment knows no bounds. It is sick and (mostly) lacking in self-awareness. I stand in front of my proverbial apartment made of glass, a granite softball in hand, suspiciously eyeing my neighbor across the street. I ready, aim, and… decide not to fire since I’m not sure if my renter’s insurance covers retaliation damage. Clause 156: State Farm does not find itself responsible for Acts of God or you being an asshole. Call your mother.
The television is always on in this perfect house, filling the parlor room with an extraterrestrial glow. This affords me some small consolation. When I am of a tax income bracket where I can actually afford to purchase such a house — three stories, brick, a place where this country’s forefathers might have drawn up important documents by candlelight — I will not spend my nights watching back-to-back episodes of The Leftovers. Instead, every evening will be another too-rich dinner or charity event, because, at this point in my imagined successful existence, I will be frequently invited to galas for which I will feign irritation for always needing a new gown but secretly congratulate myself on “making it.” Rich people get asked to sit on boards, donate money, cry during moving three-minute shorts about poverty and missing limbs. No one ever asked my family to sit on a board. They knew better.
There’s a copy of Vanity Fair on my kitchen table open to an advertisement where Johnny Depp and Amber Heard hover over a poor kid and a doctor installing her hearing aid. Depp is wearing a scarf and chambray. Heard, in white, looks like she’s ready for a lady’s luncheon in East Hampton. They are both wearing hats. These are the people you involve in charitable causes. People with hats and expensive skin care products.
I imagine my neighbors in their immaculate marble bathroom — the master, naturally — with a reproduction clawfoot tub and gold knobs denoting “hot” and “cold.” Their medicine cabinet is filled with Kiehl’s and Aesop and products from France you can’t buy in the United States. Somewhere, in another room, a personal assistant organizes two-seasons-old designer clothing into piles to be donated to various thrift stores. “Are you sure you don’t want these Prada slingbacks?” the assistant politely yells.
And so I stand beneath the bricks of Perfect House, my thinly veiled jealousy burning as bright as the high-definition glow on their television, wondering when I’ll be successful enough to earn the unwarranted dislike of some thirty-year-old on my street. Because then and only then — after all the Prada and skin creams and charity boards — I will really know that little phrase I will have picked up while summering in the South of France: je suis arrivé, connards!
