The Rest of Us: A Novel (17 page)

He asked about my group show, which I honestly said I had misgivings about. It would open next month. I’d met with the organizer, bringing along the most professional body of work I could pull together. She’d quickly invited me after flipping through my prints and exclaiming at almost every one, which pleased but also concerned me—she’d seemed a little too impressed. Despite that, I’d still harbored high hopes for the show. I’d had to scale them back when I saw the space, an anonymous office building in the West 30s, next to the cheap wholesale clothing stores, a vacant stretch in the evening. There was gray carpet and the room’s lighting consisted of fluorescents and makeshift spots that illuminated the marked-up walls, dirt shadows of where cubicles had once been, old nails and installation pegs, badly done graffiti. When I had gone to drop off my work, I had looked through some of the other photographs that lay on a folding table, and my heart sank. Concepts I’d seen many times before, and worse, the evidence of poor technical skills being passed off as “artistic,” when I knew it was sloppiness, or laziness, or just ignorance about lighting. I was embarrassed, a prickly sensation in my face, retelling the story to Rhinehart. The implication was that this was the class I was in; people would see the show and know I wasn’t going anywhere.

He said, “Your work is what it is. Where it’s hanging doesn’t change that. The person with the ability to recognize it—will.”

“Are you able to come to the opening? Remind me of that?”

“I wish I could, but I’ll be away. I’d like to see you before I leave, though. Can you come to the airport with me? I hired a car that can take you back after.”

I was hurt. I’d hoped that we could have dinner again before he left. “When is your flight?”

“Next Saturday. In the morning.”

I hadn’t realized he was leaving so soon.

•  •  •

“At this point I think you should just go for it,” Hallie said. “You’re obviously thinking about it all the time. Why not invite him over and try again? Then you’ll know for sure.”

We were back at the refuge where I’d taken more shots of the falcons on their perches, this time with the Hasselblad. If they looked good, I was ready to layer them onto the images of Rhinehart’s bed, so it appeared the birds were actually sitting on his headboard. Removing my camera from the tripod, I remembered the night he’d given it to me.

“This time you should be a little more aggressive,” Hallie said. “Maybe take some clothes off. See how he reacts. To him, you’re still a juicy young piece of flesh.”

“I can’t.”

“Since when are you so shy? You did it once.”

In my inept way, I had been the one to seduce Rhinehart. Once the semester had begun, he said we shouldn’t see each other. This was stupid, I told him. It was clear we enjoyed being together. So I asked him to a lecture. Then to lunch off-campus. Then to an Antonioni revival showing at a nearby theater. Whenever he demurred, usually on the nighttime activities, I’d wait a week, then suggest something else. I had the sexual confidence of the young. And I knew he wanted to have sex with me—I could feel it. It was merely a fussy sense of propriety that was holding him back, which annoyed me. Even in the dorms sex hadn’t been that big a deal—who wasn’t sleeping with somebody? We were in college—it’s what everybody did.

Still, with Rhinehart, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere fast. “Maybe it’s what you’re wearing,” Gertie said. I had on blue corduroys and sneakers, a vintage Mr. Bubble T-shirt, and a silver bracelet made from an old spoon—it was one of my favorite outfits. “Older men like sexier clothes. That’s what my sister says.” I went out and bought a pair of high brown boots and a jean skirt. On my way to campus, I’d passed Hallie, who was hanging out on our neighbor’s porch. She whistled. “Whoa, momma! Going out to make the rent?” I ignored her. I was headed to the class Rhinehart taught, and which I hadn’t had the courage to sign up for. As it was letting out, I went into the room, ostensibly to ask Tim, who I knew had a crush on me, a question about a party that weekend. I saw several heads turn and consider me. Our friend Nosh joined us, saying I should dress like that more often. I watched Rhinehart watch me out of the corner of his eye, dawdling, pretending to gather his notes. I carefully reached down and hooked my thumb into the leather boot and pulled it up. The next day Rhinehart called to ask me to dinner. For weeks, he did no more than hold my hand across the table, gently, as if it were a little dove. But it had begun.

I was battling a bigger fear at this point. What if Rhinehart was no longer attracted to me? Or had realized that he was unable to fall in love with me again? I knew what it was to kiss a man I liked but could never love, not because of anything he’d done, or bad timing, but just because he was unable to call it up in me. If that was how Rhinehart felt, I’d prefer not to know.

Hallie thought that theory was ridiculous. “You’re thinking like a woman. Men aren’t so emotionally choosy. Especially men his age. They
want
companionship and affection and sex. It distracts them from thinking about getting old and sick.”

But Rhinehart was picky and changeable still, and I knew he had a great capacity for solitude. “He’s like one of those animals that would just go off alone into the forest to die.”

“I don’t know,” Hallie said. “That breaks all precedent. Maybe there’s another woman in the picture. Like the ex-wife. Or someone else. This is New York. No shortage of available women.”

We were crossing the field to the parking lot. The sky stretched out in front, bright and clear. Free birds swarmed like bats, settling in clumps high in the tree branches. I thought of the smiling girl in the bookstore. I thought of Laura, who’d won him from me before. Had he been out on Long Island again?

“If so, then there’s nothing I can do about it,” I said. “I’m just going to have to wait until he comes back. I’ll have a better sense of where we stand then.” But this sounded doubtful even to my ears. I worried that we’d spin in this cyclone forever, like Rodin’s Paolo and Francesca in
The Gates of Hell,
always reaching but never embracing, never fulfilled.

I was ten minutes early getting to Rhinehart’s, and he was already waiting by the door with his packed bags. Behind him, splayed out on the living room couch, was a green 1960s hard-backed suitcase with a textured surface that reminded me of a toilet seat cover. This was most likely the suitcase Rhinehart wanted to bring because of sentimentality or superstition, and which common sense had forced him to abandon. Instinctively, I reached out and grasped his arm. “It’s so good to see you.” I handed him a bag with a cup of coffee and crullers.

“You brought me breakfast. That’s so thoughtful.” He did a final check of the rooms, while I waited, looking around.

“Who’s going to take care of your plants?” I asked him.

From the kitchen, he said, “I know, I forgot. I was going to bring them downstairs, maybe the doorman wouldn’t mind. He’s picking up the mail.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “I can get the mail, too.”

Coming back into the room, he said, “Would you? It wouldn’t require much. I can give you my keys. Feel free to stay whenever you like. On the days you don’t want to go all the way back to Brooklyn.”

•  •  •

My stomach felt hollow and unsettled, jouncing around in the hired car’s plush backseat. I watched the clusters of buildings pass by, the washed-out terrain of early morning. The city seemed a shimmery
hallucination, a paler, weaker version of itself. Next to me Rhinehart was also staring out the window, clutching his untouched breakfast. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be nervous, and reaching across the seat, I took his hand and held it.

At JFK, the boyish-looking driver unloaded the bags from the trunk. Rhinehart had tied a red scarf around the handle of his suitcase so that it could be easily identified on the airport carousel. A small leather carry-on hung from his shoulder. That was all.

“You sure you have everything?” I asked. Fedir had gone ahead a week earlier and was meeting him at the airport on the other side. He nodded and rolled his bag through the pneumatic sliding doors. Already I felt him moving out of reach.

Standing in line, I attempted to be brave and unfeeling, to make my heart into a little stone. He had on jeans and a black sweater. After patting down his pockets, he unzipped the bag and extracted his passport, which shook slightly in his hand. I suddenly saw his sleepless, unshaven face, and it looked vulnerable to me. This wasn’t like the other times I’d seen him off at the airport, when he’d been younger, more impatient. What if something happened to him there? My heart, now a wet living thing, lurched towards him. I was uncertain what I would do if I continued to stand there, so instead I went to wait by the monitors. Yards away from me, in the vast, blue-tinted airport, he looked small and helpless. Maybe, from his vantage point, I looked the same.

He joined me eventually and as we walked towards the gate he pointed to a row of chairs bolted down near the security check-in. “Let’s sit.”

From his bag, he pulled out a folded piece of tissue paper and handed it to me. Inside was a silver necklace with a square mirrored pendant. “It’s Ukrainian. To protect you from the evil eye while I’m away.” He clasped it on me and I felt the cool skin of his forearm against my neck.

“Just be careful,” I said.

“It’s more dangerous in New York,” he said. “You know, I’d feel better if I knew you weren’t fretting about me.”

I tried to smile. “Enjoy the
mlyntsi.
”

“Mlyntsi!
How did you know that word?” He pulled a strand of hair from my face, letting his fingers drift down to my chin and pause there. “Have you been studying?”

“A little. I was curious.”

“Enjoy your show. Keep your mind open—you don’t know what it will lead to. I’ll come see it as soon as I get back.” He got up and began heading to the security gate. I followed.

“Wait,” I said, and then stood there, breathing shallowly.

He smiled at me but looked confused.

I wanted to tell him I loved him. I didn’t even care if he didn’t feel the same. I wanted him to know. “I just, I just care about you so much.”

I saw the old expression in his face, like the sky changing, clouds passing over the sun. He held my arms. “I’ll be thinking about you, too. I won’t be gone long. Take care of yourself, okay? Promise me.”

He gave my arms a final squeeze before getting on the line for security. When he bent over to untie his shoes, I turned away and walked towards the escalator.

•  •  •

I missed Rhinehart. I missed hearing him say my name, I missed the night we’d sat in this kitchen together. I missed the way he used to cup the soles of my feet in his palms when I was about to get up off the couch and said, “These pigs don’t want to go to market.”

I’d never been a caretaker for someone’s plants before, and he always claimed I held grievances against indoor vegetation. It was true, in my house growing up, all the plants had been outside, with the exception of a couple African violets. I brought over some clothes so that I could spend a few nights there. But his apartment was strange and vacant without him. I couldn’t decide whether it was better to stay or leave.

Hallie called, and once she heard I was in Manhattan, started pressuring me to go out for cocktails. “Do something normal thirtyish
women do. If I were you, I’d take the opportunity to flirt with men my own age.”

On the stereo speaker was a hopeful pot of chrysanthemums. They’d gone spindly, shedding some of their spiky petals. Fall flowers, but fall seemed a long way off. “What if he decides to stay?” I’d been fighting a sinking feeling that once he was there, he’d immediately start putting down roots and not want to return.

“Why would he do that? People want to flee that country.” She paused as if trying to listen through the phone to hear what was happening in the background. “I hope you’re not moping. Crying into his underpants.”

Once, after our breakup, I’d let myself into Rhinehart’s apartment when I knew he’d be at class and spent an hour in his closet, inhaling the sweet scent of his dry-cleaned dress shirts. Later, I’d dumped his hamper out onto the bed and rolled around in the dirty laundry, smelling the cologne he wore when we went out to restaurants, his sour used socks on the mornings he’d get back into bed after a run without showering. I’d made the mistake of telling Hallie this story once when I was drunk.

She was saying to me now, “You should be trying to find someone you can procreate with. What else are we on this earth for?” This from a person who disliked children so much, she refused to baby-sit even back when that’s what everyone our age did.

My other secret fear was that something would happen to Rhinehart. I had been reading a lot about the Colombia-Venezuela hostage negotiations recently. The guerrillas would kidnap someone, usually by hijacking a car that was being driven through a dangerous area, and take him or her to a remote area of the jungle. Once they had the person’s papers, they would create a financial profile—family, job, assets, relative’s assets—and from that they would come up with a ransom figure that was exorbitant, but feasible given the numbers for that particular person. Then they’d contact the kidnapped’s family with a suggested payment plan, as well as instructions for liquidating—sell tío Pedro’s car first, then abuela’s farm to make payment
number one. Payments were made on a regular basis and could stretch on for several years, like buying something on layaway.

“What does this have to do with Ukraine?” Hallie said. “It’s not even in the same area of the world. And who do you think they’re going to get this ransom from? You? Even with the exchange rate, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

•  •  •

Gradually, I began spending nights at his apartment, especially if I had to be at Marty’s early the next morning. I’d been taking more photographs of Rhinehart’s bed, from different angles, for the bird series that I was still obsessed with. In sketching out the idea, it still seemed to be lacking something at the compositional level, so I’d gone back to Renaissance portraiture for help.