The Rest of Us: A Novel (30 page)

He said, “I guess we both knew less about how our lives were going to turn out than we thought.”

•  •  •

We slept in the same bed that night, and Rhinehart made love to me in a sweaty, natural way, as if in deference to my new partnership with mother nature. Afterwards we lay staring out at the milky traces of the moon, listening to the distant slap of the ocean.

Into my hair, he asked, “Why have you stuck with me through all this? I’m not even a young man anymore. You know, throughout my life, I’ve often doubted whether I was suited for a relationship. I worried there was something wrong with me.”

When I was younger, I’d felt Rhinehart hadn’t loved me as much as I loved him. Our relationship and its changing moods had bled all over my life—I thought about him in class, at parties, while studying. For him, the concept of us was so neatly packaged, something he could slide away into a desk with many small drawers. It was a quality that had seemed to empower him.

When I told him this, he said, “Maybe I was just afraid to risk that much of myself on another person after losing my mother.”

I’d never felt that way. After my mother died, my father had doubled his affection and responsibilities. He hadn’t wanted me to feel alone. I’d been afraid in my life, but I’d never been too afraid to love.

But I worried that Rhinehart still was. I asked and he said, “All the work I’ve done on myself over the years has led me here, so I must have finally gotten the internal lesson. Now I will be a father, and I will get to put my fearlessness to use in a new way.”

It was as much a guarantee as I could offer at this point, myself. Quoting Rilke, I said, “for one human being to love another is the work for which all other work is mere preparation.”

Rhinehart was smiling in the dark. I’d pleased him. “His marriage was more short-lived than mine. Do you want to marry?”

The question called up a vision of myself. I was wearing nicer clothes and owned a big house and drove everywhere. I was irritable with all my obligations, and spoke sharply and did no photography. Although I wanted Rhinehart as my partner, I didn’t want to be a wife to anyone. But I also wasn’t going to say so right then. Rhinehart seemed vulnerable, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

He didn’t pursue it. Perhaps he understood. “What a magnificent mother you’ll be. So warm and intelligent.”

“Sometimes I’m a little worried I won’t have the natural instinct.”

“Nonsense. You’re going to be knocked over by the force and the hunger of your love. Like Anna Karenina with little Seriozha, obsessed with the sound of his voice, the smell of his hair, while he was wriggling in her arms so as to touch his whole body on her. That joy.”

O
nce we got back to New York, the first thing we needed to do was call Laura. She had left a message on my cell phone saying she would like an update on the search now that she was “involved against her will.”

Rhinehart would do anything for me lately, looking at me with spaniel eyes as if I were the most wondrous thing he could imagine, carrying around his child. It was a new feeling of power I had—even if everyone else disappeared, my job would still be to bring this baby into the world.

Taking advantage, I said, “You be the one to call Laura.”

He balked. “Do you think it’s necessary? I like to keep those phone calls to a minimum.”

After a little bickering, he did call her, while I made myself scarce. Twenty minutes later, he emerged from his study, frowning.

“How did she take it?”

“She was pissed.”

“About us or because she was worried you were really missing.”

He shook his head. “Not that. She didn’t seem to care where I’d been. She was upset that you were pregnant.”

“You
told
her! You didn’t have to go that far!”

“I wanted to get it over with. I rarely talk to the woman. I wouldn’t even be talking to her now if it weren’t for you. We’d email, maybe.” He smiled. “And I’m proud. A proud father-to-be.”

Part of me was relieved it was out in the open, so that I didn’t have to make any more confessions. “What did she say?”

“That I’m too self-absorbed to raise a child. I didn’t even feel defensive. That’s how sure I am that I’m going to be a great father.”

I smiled.

“She also told me to tell you to call Clare Severeson. They have an opening in the schedule this summer, a cancellation or something, and she suggested you.”

“Clare from George Menten? Really?” I had met her briefly when Laura was introducing me around. She’d been a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and had an intelligent, nonpretentious way of speaking about the artists the gallery represented. I’d actually just seen her picture in a profile spread for
Elle
on young, up-and-coming people in the art world—she was a short-haired African American woman, around my age. In the article, she’d talked a lot about contemporary painting, which seemed to be the gallery’s focus. I’d liked her when I met her, and she’d been polite, but she’d also been a little cool to me, and I’d just assumed she wasn’t interested in my work.

Rhinehart was now telling me she was. “And the two of them seem to be in agreement.”

“It’s hard to believe that Laura set this up. She said she was done with me.”

“She’s an unexpected woman,” he said.

•  •  •

We were getting into summer, and I was growing too fat for my normal pants, although I didn’t want to rush out and start buying maternity clothes. Instead I’d begun dipping into Rhinehart’s closet, and he was often amused to see me walking past in one of his dress shirts, the sleeves rolled up.

Rhinehart’s publisher wanted to put out a collection of selected works, and he had the idea that he’d pair the poems with revised versions, to show how years of not writing, what he called his “wordless gap,” could change the way he understood poetry. He downplayed the project, calling it “revision.” But one evening, as I was passing the
study, I caught him at his desk with the familiar yellow notepad and pencils, and that big-eyed alarmed look he got when he was writing and writing well.

I preserved the silence around the subject for days, waiting for him to mention it. He didn’t. Finally I approached him as he was doing bills and said, “You’re writing poetry again.”

It was a statement, not a question, and he looked up at me and laughed. “Not at this moment.”

“You know what I mean.”

He removed his glasses, considering this. “I guess I am, aren’t I? For all the production of not doing it, the starting again was very quiet—it stole back into the room on soft little feet.”

“How does it feel?”

“It feels—natural. I can’t seem to remember what it was like
not
to do it. How easy it is to forget your struggles once everything’s going well. What mercy there is in that.”

•  •  •

When he wasn’t writing, he was researching how to be a parent as if there were going to be a qualifying exam. I caught him drinking coffee at night, surrounded by books and notepaper, and said he was taking it too far.

“I have no frame of reference and only a few months to learn. I have to cram.” He watched me pick up a plastic-sheeted library book from the stack and check the copyright date.

“Don’t worry, I’m not being stingy. Whichever of these books looks good—if the philosophy’s sound and the writing isn’t too pedestrian, I’m going to buy. That way I can underline.”

“I’m not worried about you buying.” I had to stop him from buying. Near my foot, there was a miniature red plastic dinette set and chairs for six. “I hate kiddie furniture. It looks weird in here.”

“What fun, though! The child can host a dinner party. That’s a very New York thing I was reading in the
Times
.”

“But this is preschooler stuff. Even that high chair won’t be usable
for a year. By the time the baby’s old enough it’s going to be outdated, and maybe even some kind of safety recall.”

I felt a sinking mood coming on. It was like this lately—I oscillated between elation and doubt. For one, the show at George Men-ten wasn’t as assured as I’d assumed. They were considering several artists for the slot, although Laura’s recommendation had gotten me in that group. I’d also begun to have trouble sleeping, which I blamed on the cauldron of hormones. But it was more than that—I was harboring secret fears about my own ability to parent, and sometimes, about Rhinehart’s abilities—also unproven. Would I even like this child? What if our personalities clashed? I couldn’t stand negative people, and what if the child was narcissistic or cruel or a liar? Those types of personality traits were sometimes ingrained; there was only so much you could do.

•  •  •

Hallie told me I was talking about the kid as if I were going on a blind date. “It’s even weirder than your baby phobia. How is that phobia?” When I brushed this off, she brought up an incident from 1991 when our hippie friend Droopy had come over to the apartment with his baby, and I had refused to hold her, and then when pressured into it, said my head felt like it was evaporating and I was losing my balance and I needed to put her down before I dropped her. “You and the baby were all red and grimacing. Both of you about to burst into tears!”

“How relevant is this—it happened so long ago. And it’s not a phobia. I’m surrounded by pictures and plenty of reading material on newborns. Rhinehart keeps bringing home—”

She insisted that wasn’t the same thing as holding one. To prove it, she arranged a lunch at her Manhattan apartment with her friend Veronica, a fashion editor, who had a nine-month-old. Hallie hadn’t informed me of this, for fear I wouldn’t show up, and so I’d arrived in a pair of Rhinehart’s old khakis while the two of them were in heels. Hallie forced me to hold the baby the entire afternoon, even when it
seemed he’d prefer to be sleeping, and asked me a series of questions used to diagnose anxiety attacks, which I deflected. She gave up and began interrogating Veronica about her postpartum depression.

Ricardo. He looked like a studious college boy, hair brushed back from his forehead. Veronica had dressed him in faded jeans and a button-down shirt, and he seemed generally pleased with his surroundings, making some intense eye contact with me, smiling distantly, and then making the same eye contact with the blank television set. His head wobbled. If I had ever disliked babies, I was that way no longer. Even the smell of him was sweet. He lay against my stomach like a hot water bottle, while underneath my shirt, my own baby lay.

•  •  •

After Veronica left, Hallie collapsed on the sofa, as if she’d been entertaining a roomful of children while serving a meal that hadn’t been catered.

I was thanking her. “I got all sorts of tips—that thing about drinking ginger ale for morning sickness instead of eating saltines that can make you gain weight. And heartburn is pretty common and can last throughout the pregnancy.”

“You should have asked her about her labia. Whether they’re still hanging down like a bunch of blackened grapes.”

“Veronica seems tireless.”

“She’s got a live-in nanny—she’s only mothering part-time. It’s a tough job if you’re not suited for it, temperamentally.”

“Constance did it—how bad could it be?”

“My mother didn’t exactly embody the maternal role, if you remember. We never once sat together for dinner. I just ate wherever I wanted—on the damn tire swing. She told me to smoke to keep my weight down. To skip meals unless a man invited me to a restaurant.”

But Constance had also been there for me when I’d first gotten my period. It was a school day, and pleading sickness, I had stayed home. My father was out in the field. Over the course of the morning, I’d been working myself into a frenzy of misinformation. The
blood was brown and I was in a searing amount of pain—I was likely dying of an infection, which, in my shame, I was unable to seek medical treatment for. Finally, after writhing around on my bed for two hours, I packaged up my stained underwear in a paper bag, and ran stumbling to Hallie’s, gripping my stomach the entire way. Without even knocking I burst into the house and then into Constance’s room, where she was sitting on the bed, eating a slice of cheesecake and flipping through a magazine. I was bawling and waving the bag around, and I remembered her putting the plate down to look inside it. Then she patted the bed next to her, and I gratefully collapsed and curled up, moaning, while she stroked my hair, retrieved two ibuprofen from her bedside dresser, and poured me a glass of water from a pitcher. “You rest here,” she said. She’d gotten up and was putting on a red felt coat with black buttons.

I was so shocked, I stopped crying. I’d never seen her in outerwear. “Where are you going?”

“To the store,” she said, as if she did that every day. Then, with clicking heels—she’d also put on shoes—she went downstairs and got in the car that I didn’t know she could drive and backed out, as I, amazed, watched from the upstairs window.

In less than twenty minutes she returned with what seemed like a year’s supply of maxi pads and tampons. Every possible kind. “Your father’s a lovely man, but I imagine he’ll be completely useless in this regard. I stocked up for you.”

Then we went in her bathroom together, and she taught me how to use everything. It was one of the best memories I had of Constance, her sitting on the edge of the tub, ashing into the drain, still wearing that flashy coat. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It seemed to signal everything that was unprecedented and significant about the occasion.

Hallie had never seen her mother drive and at the time had accused me of making it up. I hadn’t tried very hard to defend my story, wanting to keep the intimacy of the moment to myself.

I was on the verge of defending Constance now, when Hallie blurted out, “I don’t think the Buddhism is working anymore.”

“What do you mean ‘working’? It’s a spiritual practice.”

She had a very dark look and was chewing on her thumb. “For a while things were great between Adán and me but now I’m starting to lose it again. Do you know what I did the other day? I looked in Kate’s car while she was in the dentist’s office.”