The Rest of Us: A Novel (19 page)

There was some static, an operator speaking in a foreign language, and then Rhinehart asking in English if the call went through.

I shouted, “Hello, it’s me. It’s Tatie.” With a click the operator was gone. We were both silent and then spoke at once. He sounded tinny and distant, as if he were miniaturized. I couldn’t believe the phone lines were this bad.

“How are you? Where are you? I knew it was you calling, I can always—”

“How are things? How was your show?”

“It’s open. The work’s up. How are you?”

The line went quiet, and I thought for a minute we’d been disconnected. “I don’t seem to remember much, Tatie.”

“You were so young.”

“Maybe.” His voice sounded far away and plaintive, I wondered if I was just a faint little wisp, too. “I expected not to in Kiev. It’s post-Soviet and I’d only been there once according to Mama. But my own birth city? I did live here until I was five.”

“I’m sure it will come back to you eventually. Give it time.”

“You would love to be photographing here. The trees are all shaggy and puffed up, like sick birds. Which I guess isn’t the most appealing image.” He laughed.

“How is your cousin? And the rest of your family? What are they like?”

He hesitated, and at first I wasn’t sure if he heard me, then he said, “If it wasn’t for my birth certificate, I’d believe I was born in Queens. I’ll tell you about it when I get home. I couldn’t even express it well in the letters. My heart can’t withstand it yet. You got the letters?”

“No. You sent me a letter? A real letter or email?”

“A real letter. I only use email for business. I have to go now—I’m sorry, love. That’s Fedir waving to me. He’s bleeding.”

“Bleeding!”

“Get the tire first!” he yelled. He kissed the receiver. “Nothing, just a little fender bender. But I wanted to hear your voice so badly. Take care of yourself. I’ll see you before you know it.”

There was a click, and he hung up.

•  •  •

I got on the subway and went back to my apartment and checked my mailbox, which I hadn’t done in more than a week—there were two letters. I had been assuming he would write to me at his own address, knowing I was picking up his mail.

The first was dated his second day there, although it had been mailed a couple of weeks ago, and it shone with exhilarated metaphors and hyperbole. He compared himself to a fly with a “multi-prismatic view of the world.” Two paragraphs later there was a reference to Dante.

From Boryspil Airport we took a paved eight-lane highway, through a forest of pencil thin birches, a true birchy copse. I was told that during the day it is filled with the melodies of songbirds. Billboards, satellite dishes, the sign “Welcome to Kiev” was even in English. The roads have wide shoulders where people and even horse carts go.

One page was devoted to describing the trains, which “ran with surgical efficiency,” but which he hadn’t taken. Two pages devoted to what he saw from the car window “countryside resembling Michigan” that he imagined me photographing. I was combing the letters for references to myself. There were “elderly women selling various things, like sunflower seeds, along the side of the road, and some old men dragging pickaxes,” and a short meditation on his age, and his luck in having emigrated, if this would have been his fate.

I got a sense of him bounding all over the place, heartily trying to engage. But otherwise, there wasn’t a lot of introspection, mostly surface description. He enclosed a photograph of himself wearing what he said was an “authentic beaver hat.” It was taken at a distance of about fifteen feet. A reference:
Dostoevsky’s wicked man borrowing against his salary to buy one to snub his neighbor.
He continued,
There are wild cherry and walnut trees and so much fresh air. You don’t realize how deadening New York is to the senses—you must come out and see it someday, Tatie. And of course everything is colored by my emotional state—I can’t wait to re-meet my cousin. When you don’t have any family, it’s such an intense experience.

Over the next couple of days, more letters arrived, catching up to the Rhinehart I’d spoken to on the phone.

My dear Tatie,
he began in a letter dated several days after his arrival at Lyuba’s,
I’m writing you from the upstairs bedroom like Richardson’s Pamela, watching the door the entire time to make sure I am not interrupted. I share this room with an old man, older than I. I’m not sure if he is related or if he works for them.

I was foolishly overprepared, as it turned out. In addition to the American gifts, I brought a local bouquet. Even numbers of flowers are bad luck, so I counted them in the car and threw one out! My mother was an incredibly superstitious person. I don’t know whether these things even mean anything to anyone anymore. Never shake hands through a doorway. Don’t look babies in the eye. Sit down before a journey. Don’t whistle indoors. The old man does. I really dislike the sound of whistling.

Lyuba came out to meet me and brought with her a tall thin boy, the elderly man (who shares the room), and a couple of dogs. It seemed an effort for her—she’s very stout and was perspiring. Tears were streaming down her face. I was moved and recited a sentence in Ukrainian that I’d been practicing for days, which means, in short, “I have traveled many miles and waited many years for this moment and now that it’s here, I am speechless, but my heart is singing.” To that I added a phrase of good fortune, “May your wheat grow so thick that even a snake can’t pass through it.” I must have done a decent job with the accent—at any rate she began speaking to me in very rapid Ukrainian of which I understood nothing. Fedir was busy getting the bags out of the car so no translation, but the intent was welcoming.

The house is very modest, but nice, clean, two-story. Very spare inside. Just a wooden table. I was instantly mortified by my ostentatious gifts. But I brought them out anyway, in their garish wrap and ribbons. I felt conflicted, like the rich uncle who suspects everyone secretly resents him, but Lyuba was thrilled with her scarf—Hermès of all things! Although the name meant nothing to her, she kept rubbing it against her cheek and against the old man’s cheek to feel how soft it was.

Everything was going wonderfully and really the comfort of being in a
family again, combined with the excitement of a new place, and thoughts of my mother, was indescribable. I thought of how proud she’d be if she could see me sitting here after all these years, having reunited with her sister’s child. Lyuba inquired about my trip and introduced me to her son, Lazar, who seemed to be about seventeen or so—young to be her son. I inquired about this, delicately of course—although who knows what Fedir does to my politely turned phrasing on the other end—it seems Lazar was a “surprise baby,” when she was in her forties. I don’t know who his father is. He doesn’t seem in the picture. I’m always on the lookout for more family—it’s never enough. I was also told the dogs’ names, which I promptly forgot.

For dinner she served mamaliga, a traditional cornmeal and cottage cheese dish that has fried pork rinds on top. She asked me if I was Jewish, using a word I won’t repeat here. It was as if a gun appeared at the table. I didn’t know what to do with any of this, the question itself—did she think I’d converted?—the way it was expressed, etc.

The letter picked up again several days later.
This may not be the best time to write. Travel morale, spirits—very low. It is hard to constantly not know what’s going on—I feel like someone’s grandfather, half-blind, hard of hearing, who is parked in the corner of the living room and discussed. I’m also starting to be concerned that my kindness and American-sized wealth is getting taken advantage of. I’m spending much of my day fielding business proposals. Import/Export, sunflower seed oil processing, something involving maids that sounds illegal. Fedir does the translating when I can find him. These men come in as if it’s a genuine social call, have a drink, take me aside and show me a business card—then the business card goes right back in the pocket. Many of these people seem to be related to Lyuba or friendly with her. The way she has scheduled these meetings, greeting the men and bringing them to see me in a back room, makes me feel like the main attraction at a whorehouse. I’ve tried to explain that I’m the furthest thing from a businessman, but still they persist. And there is a lot of competitive toasting here so by the middle of the afternoon, I am completely looped and have to say
do pobachennya
and go upstairs to take a nap.

•  •  •

A new letter.

There is something wrong with Lyuba, and the dinner hour is very strained. Sometimes she turns her body sideways from the table, takes her bowl, and eats from her lap, so as not to face us. At dinner, I brought up my mother—how pleased she would be to see us all together. Lyuba turned to me with such a look of revulsion, I immediately accused Fedir of mangling the translation. But he was as alarmed as I was. Finally she said something that Fedir translated as “I did not know your mother,” takes her bowl, and goes off. Didn’t know my mother! I’m very upset.

I started a letter to him, even though I didn’t have a postal address. I felt the need to tell him that nothing meets our expectations, but if he stayed on for a while I was sure the mystery would be cleared up. I filled three pages with these thoughts.

A week passed. Then another letter.

Lyuba is a hard woman to know. She’s carrying a grudge that I’m attributing to my presence in the house. What is she like typically? I’ve seen her kick the dogs, and she berates the old man on a fairly regular basis until he cowers. He seems to be a stable hand for the pony and two goats. Fedir came up to me yesterday carrying the message that Lyuba expected me to be paying a daily rate for my room and board, which I have not been paying. I was instantly ashamed that she should think I’d been taking advantage—but a daily rate? Like at a hostel? It isn’t much, the equivalent of 35 dollars a day, but that is an incredible sum here, especially for the worn mattress I have in the stable man’s room. The fact that she is giving me what she thinks is an extortionist’s rate is really troubling. It feels deliberate.

Perhaps she isn’t my cousin. Maybe I made up the entire thing in my desire to be related to someone in the world. There are definite physical inconsistencies between us—her heavy jaw doesn’t resemble any one of my mother’s sisters in those photos. My mother was also very lithe. I hate to play the Hardy Boy here, but I can’t find one picture of her mother, my supposed aunt, or her father in the house—it’s as if they were all
removed before I came. And at times I’ve caught her looking at me with suspicion, as if I wasn’t a long-lost cousin, but a partner she suspected of double-crossing her. It’s actually this look, and the extreme way she reacts to any mention of my mother, that disturbs me. She looks like she wants to spit fire. Maybe there was some falling out? More to the story than I know.

I have a sinking feeling that the entire purpose of the trip, to see these letters of my mother’s, will end in failure. That’s what torments me—the idea of returning to the U.S. with the mystery still hanging open. Lyuba flat-out refuses to show me the letters. She stood there in the kitchen, her arms folded over that enormous bosom that also doesn’t run in the family, and shook her head emphatically no. I asked several times, reasoning, cajoling, arguing, even pleading, which anyone can decipher from an expression, even without a translator. I’m feeling, irrationally, as if she is denying me my mother, and it makes me dislike her.

I am homesick tonight, heavy-hearted, and wish we were sitting in my living room playing a game of chess and drinking bourbon. To think that I was so careful not to get involved with you before I left, as if it would distract me from this fruitless trip. I am an enormous fool. And I have gotten myself involved regardless because I miss you more than I ever thought possible. More than when we first separated.

I’m aware this is a coward’s confession, shielded by distance and one-way communication, and that I’m doing it on my own time, when you would’ve liked to have discussed it the morning after you stayed at my apartment. You would have been understanding, but I wasn’t ready for your understanding, or to talk about anything. Now that I’m feeling very far away, and torn up with disappointment, it seems time to talk.

Here’s what I haven’t said. It’s devastating to me that my marriage failed. Before it failed I stopped writing poetry, the one thing I’d always been able to rely on, that had given a sense of structure to my life. This isn’t Laura’s fault, nor is it the marriage’s, although I believe the marriage took the poetry in the process of eating itself.

So, although I may seem the same to you, I’m not. I’m older, my battles with Laura have left me weary, and I don’t feel like I used to—my
dry spell with poetry has eroded me. I try not to linger too long on this subject as it’s terrifying to remember that space from where all those words and thoughts and feelings used to emerge. Despair grows in this sort of mental activity, and in the poisonous quiet here, I feel it growing. If I have been trying to cover that hole with the dead leaves of my genealogical research, as you intimated, then I’ve been tragically stupid.

There is another problem and that has to do with us, and the intensity of what we generate. We have, in the past, suffered for it. You’ve always been more fearless, willing to leap into things, but do you remember the unhappiness? I do. I remember you crying all the time. I still feel responsible, but I don’t know how I could have prevented it then or how I would now. I’m still making mistakes, leaving you standing in the airport with your heartfelt declaration in your hands.

I’d love to hear your voice, but there’s no phone here. I have to imagine it, the flat way you say “door” with your old Eastern accent. My artist.

He’d included a post office address I could write in care of, and I immediately started a response, and then another, and then I rewrote it, but my letter always became too long, and too seeped in memory, with convoluted psychological rationales. I kept finding ways to deny my own suffering, to provide a safe space in which to coax him out of his resistance, and this seemed a very bad way to go. I was responding to the intimacy of his confession. But the more times I read the letter over in its entirety, the more it seemed not a love note but an extension of the general confusion I’d been on the receiving end of in New York. Maybe he was right. Maybe our problem wasn’t so easily solved.