The Rest of Us: A Novel (25 page)

•  •  •

When I got in, the apartment was dark, and Rhinehart was in bed, even though it was barely ten o’clock. In the bedroom, his lumped form seemed positioned to resist me. He didn’t say anything, but I
launched into a reiteration of the night anyway, while undressing—my timidity, my tangled thoughts about feminism and the distress that accompanied them, the pretentiousness of some of the women, Laura. It seemed as if he were listening out of politeness, responding minimally so as not to encourage me to continue. Even when I relayed Tunis’s request to see my portfolio, he didn’t have much of a reaction, and all the excitement I’d felt coming in the door evaporated.

Pinpointing Laura as the problem, and perhaps his concern that we were getting close, I said, “She’s a strange woman.”

He said nothing.

“Her gallery. What type of work did she have up there?”

I thought he wasn’t going to reply to that question either, but he said, “You should have asked her. She would have talked about it.”

“But I’m closer to you. And you also know the answer.”

“But the difference is I don’t
want
to discuss it. Even for you.”

I was tempted to be rash, to flick on all the lights in a blinding show of force.

He said, “I’ve put those years behind me and don’t want to open them up again for renewed scrutiny. I have that right.”

Whose scrutiny? He had discussed Laura with me before. Did he think I would leak his comments to her? “I just thought since you were familiar with some of the people I may be showing my work to, you might be able to give me some advice. You and Laura used to talk about it.”

“I’m glad you had a nice time tonight,” he said.

If he’d been listening, he would have realized I never actually said that I did.

•  •  •

Laura called the next morning with gossip. Evidently there had been a man in the crowd, a performance artist in a gorilla mask, masquerading as one of the Guerrilla Girls. Security caught him after I’d left—he’d been posing for a photo with the museum director. He claimed it was a protest piece. “How hysterical!” Laura said. “I love it!
To think he was sneaking around like a spy. And there’s no
rule
men can’t attend—they just don’t usually.”

We were talking about galleries, when I asked her, “Do you think my portfolio is strong enough to show Tunis? Honestly.”

“Well, she does prefer experimental work, it’s true. We’ll go through it again—I can help you tailor it. That series with the birds she’ll like, I’m sure.”

“I should probably check out her space and some of the other galleries nearby, to see what they have up now.”

“How about tomorrow night?” Laura said. “I know Thursdays are obnoxious, but there’s an opening for Ryan Tiesley—that British painter who’s so hot right now. We can do some private viewings, maybe a few shows downtown, and then meet up with him and his entourage later for dinner.”

I told Rhinehart about the plan after I got off the phone. He didn’t respond. But then, just as I was leaving the house, after taking an agonizing amount of time deciding what to wear, he said, “So this has become a standing engagement?”

He was sitting in a corner chair, a book open on his lap, although he’d spent the last hour silently observing me rush back and forth to the closet in different combinations of earrings and necklaces.

“I’m just going to check out galleries. It’s research. You should understand that.”

Looking back down at his book, he said, “No one goes to Chelsea on a Thursday night to do research.”

•  •  •

Laura and I did wind up in the 24th Street crowds, breezing through several loud, packed openings, vodka drinks in hand. The Tiesley opening was invite-only, but still a circus—he’d just gotten profiled in
The New York Times Magazine,
and he had several celebrity collectors co-chairing the reception. The gallery was jammed with models, and press photographers, and recognizable faces. We went to Cookshop for dinner—a table of twelve with the gallery
owners, artist, and a few of his friends. From that chaotic light-bulb-flashing crowd, we’d distilled down to a somewhat ordinary looking group.

We were talking about what we’d managed to see tonight. Tunis’s gallery was closed for installation. It would open next week with a show by a Japanese video artist. Not much else had impressed me, even the British sculptor’s pieces seemed noisy and half-finished, like partially completed thoughts, and the way he was using his materials—crunched metal and tire and bright paint—was too reminiscent of 1980s pop art, which had been responding, at the time, to ’80s culture. But as we were at his reception, I didn’t want to be rude, even if he couldn’t hear me, and spoke instead about what Chakaia Booker had managed to do with automobile tires, making wild, intricately detailed, sexualized organlike sculptures. “Beautiful how she just transformed her medium. Lately I’ve been really wanting to push the limits of photography,” I said to Laura. “Maybe by doing a collaboration? With an installation artist.” In a lowered voice, I described for her an idea that had come to me the day after the MoMA event, when I’d been trying to get my mind off Rhinehart. I wanted to reconstruct the interior of a house, complete with furniture. On the walls, I would put up portraits in heavy frames, but instead of conventional family photographs, where the people are woodenly posed, and which tell you nothing about them, these photographs would narrate the history of interactions in the room. In the bathroom, for example, above the toilet, where a man’s gaze typically falls, could hang an image I held in my head of a brown-haired, acned teenager standing with his ear pressed against the bathroom door, listening. I wanted the photographs to appear candid, but also stylized, so that from a distance they could pass for portraits.

“We need to find you the right collaborator,” Laura said. “Someone with the emotional sensitivity to understand the project, but who has the technical set-building skills for it. The more real the rooms seem, the more fascinating it will be to tour through them.
Your audience would be picking up information from tons of details simultaneously. After seeing the family dynamics in the photos, they’d be reconsidering objects that had seemed generic at first.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I want it to be an overall sensory experience.”

“I wonder if Jen Marshall would be right, or maybe, oh—or D’bay. If he’s still in Brooklyn.”

“He moved his studio to Woodstock,” the man sitting beside her said. It annoyed me to think he was listening in. He was another photographer. His first question, after we’d been introduced, was where I’d shown.

“Shame,” Laura said. To me, she lowered her voice. “I’ll dig up his phone number anyway. Maybe just ask him. He’s a sweet person and really exacting technically.”

Just as we were finishing dinner, my phone rang. I looked down, knowing it would be Rhinehart, although he’d never called to check up on me before. I sent the call to voicemail. Five minutes later, he called again, and I excused myself from the table to answer it.

“Where are you?” he said. “I was getting concerned.” He didn’t sound concerned. He sounded vaguely accusatory.

“At a restaurant. Having dinner.”

“It’s after eleven.”

I was jammed in a hallway that the servers used and could barely hear him. He asked me when I would be back.

“I don’t know, maybe in another hour? Should I sleep at my place tonight?”

“No, no, come here. It’s all right. Did you have a nice time tonight?”

I saw Laura looking around for me, and I was impatient to get off the phone. “Yes. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Okay. Make sure you take a cab.” He kissed the receiver but I’d already taken it away from my ear, and heard him just as I hung up.

Back at the table, as I was sitting down, Laura said, “Boyfriend jealous?” I froze, staring at her. She seemed so calm.

Laughing, she said, “Educated guess. Few people would require
you to pick up at this hour. I thought it might be that lawyer you were talking about before.”

Earlier in the evening, we’d passed one of Lawrence’s favorite restaurants, and I’d mentioned we used to go there on Thursday nights. I hadn’t realized Laura was paying attention—she’d been in the middle of emailing. I told her that relationship ended a while ago.

“Was it serious?”

“It was, at the time. We had discussed getting married.”

“It’s so hard for women your age. You have so many requirements in a partner. The late forties woman really is freer, kids are grown, we have money. We’re wiser, or that’s the theory. So you’re coming to the afterparty?”

I was still rattled by the earlier part of the conversation. “I should really get home. I have to get up early.”

“Come on,” said Bruce, who ran the gallery. He leaned across the table. “It’s only two blocks from here. An old Russian bathhouse. I’m not even sure it’s legal, but we’ve brought in the booze and the music and converted the pool into a dance floor. It’s going to be wild.”

•  •  •

We went through an unmarked door and down a flight of stairs to reach an enormous underground space, like an enchanted cave, with thousands of tiny yellow bulbs flickering like fireflies. The DJ was excellent—she had a keen sense of the crowd’s mood and the space. I danced and drank way too much and when I shouted at someone for the time, it was past four. I found Laura at the bar with Ryan, who was completely hammered and had both his hands on her hips, swaying. I waved goodbye. She said, “Leaving already?” Back up at street level, weaving slightly on the deserted sidewalk, I hailed a cab, and then, on an impulse that felt deeper than the drunkenness, directed the driver over the Manhattan Bridge, past the snow-covered broken-down cars, the orangey streetlights, the birds circling through the abandoned bell tower of the Guyanese Episcopal Church. My head buzzing, I stumbled up the uneven stairs to my apartment and fell into bed, relieved to be home.

•  •  •

I had texted Rhinehart before I went down into the party, where I had no cell reception, to tell him I would be very late, but for some reason he hadn’t received the message until I went aboveground again. The next morning I had three voicemails he’d left over the course of the night. I felt bad and so didn’t explain myself gracefully over the phone, and Rhinehart didn’t receive my apology gracefully either. He fixated on the time in between my leaving the restaurant and arriving at the party, scolding me for not calling him. When that didn’t work, he tried to make me feel guilty, recounting, in a voice heavy with self-pity, a night of waiting up and worrying. More translators were coming to the house that afternoon, and he had hoped I would be there to help him decide. I was hungover and still in the mind-set of the evening before and wanted, more than anything, to go back to bed. In the past, I had always longed to feel the authentic desire for time apart from him, believing it would make me appear more independent, and therefore, attractive. Now that I did feel it, it made me uncomfortable. I said I had too much work to do on my portfolio today. He couldn’t argue, but he wasn’t as encouraging as he’d been before, and we arrived at a standstill, both hanging up the phone unhappy.

•  •  •

Although Rhinehart later apologized for “being overbearing,” he turned cold every time I said I was going out, and so eventually I stopped telling him. Laura had so many events, and the more people I knew, the more difficult it became to turn them down. We’d fallen in with a group of young artists, all of them successful—I didn’t realize it was possible to make that much money off of art. “The key is in the commercial contracts,” Laura said. “That cross-branding.” We were joined occasionally by middle-aged artists who had work in the Whitney’s and MoMA’s collections, and who recounted lively anecdotes about the East Village art collectives of the 1980s, Club 57, the Fun
Gallery where Basquiat and Kenny Scharf got their first solo shows, or even about Miles Davis, when he lived down on Broadway and was making heavily shellacked paintings on burlap. The artists never picked up the tab. Instead it was usually a collector or his business associates from out of town, or one of the young crowd of actors and minor celebrities who seemed to have money to burn, or someone in the even wealthier and more indolent group that followed them.

Laura and I tended not to discuss anything outside our shared experiences—my personal life seemed largely irrelevant to our relationship, as was hers. Still, I felt it safest to keep both a psychological and physical buffer between her and Rhinehart, so on the nights I went out with her, I slept at my apartment in Brooklyn. It was also a relief not to have to rehash the evening’s events when I came in, smelling of cigarettes and fruit nectar cocktails as Rhinehart lay in bed animated with resentful questions. How to explain it anyway, or what it felt like, the maniacal laughter and intense, intimate conversations about making art, interspersed with mean gossip or anecdotes about Murakami or Peter Beard, the boozy stumble into the street and general obnoxiousness of our famous and recognizable crowd, shuffling into taxis to dance in dark clubs with thumping music and $800 dollar bottle service. “I thought I’d outgrown this years ago,” Laura said. “But suddenly it’s fun again.” I had lived more than ten years in New York, but I had never lived like this.

•  •  •

“I hardly see you anymore,” Rhinehart complained. “It’s as if you’ve moved back over the bridge.” We still spent plenty of time together, I argued, but in truth, I was only staying at his house a few nights a week. More distressing to me was that on the evenings we did spend together, he didn’t even seem to enjoy my company. We had less and less to say to each other, and instead of going out, he preferred to sit in his study and peruse documents. I grew antsy and then angry, and it took a Herculean effort of patience for me not to check my phone every five minutes to hear what I was missing.

He had latched on to a new idea. He’d convinced Lazar to apply for a visa to the U.S., and was acting as his sponsor, also offering him a job ostensibly to translate some poems and the essay on the Ukrainian workforce. In preparation for Lazar’s visa interview, Rhinehart had been in contact with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and was mailing a dossier on himself over to Ukraine that was complete with letters of invitation (including those he’d solicited from his agent and his publisher), documents showing his income and detailing his familial relationship with Lazar, including color photographs of him and Lazar together in Ukraine to demonstrate his familiarity with his relation’s economic status. To hear Rhinehart tell it, Lazar was anxious to come to New York, probably high off the glitzy lights-on-Broadway stories Rhinehart had been feeding him.