The Rest of Us: A Novel (38 page)

“Hey,” I said to him. “You saved the note but you refused to come with me to the show.”

I dragged in my box of old photographs. The bedroom was so full of our lives we had to fight a path to the door.

He wanted to cut things out, but in the kitchen all I could find were the poultry shears and a plastic pair of scissors that looked like they were from a third-grade classroom. “Check in the sewing basket,” he called out.

“What sewing basket?”

“Under the leather chair.”

There I found a wicker basket with several spools of thread, needles, and a sharp pair of scissors. There was also a length of raglan yarn. He’d always claimed to know how to darn. It was the reason he gave for refusing to throw away socks with holes in the big toe.

•  •  •

His illness was making him tired much of the time, and although his pain was still manageable he would soon need someone to administer the medication. We hired a private nurse, a young Pakistani woman with short black hair and a soft double chin. She had very smooth skin, and an elusive darkness that gathered around her eyes and lips. She was cheerful and Rhinehart seemed to like her. We had interviewed a dour Russian that I would have thought was more his type, but when I asked if he wanted her in, he shook his head mutely no.

Now that my care hours were reduced—even the term hospice bothered me, I wouldn’t use it—I was encouraged to go out. Weeks in the pressing sadness of the house had left me unprepared for this pointless perambulation outdoors, and there were times I would race back after only fifteen minutes, under a mounting fear that he had died in my absence. Sometimes he would be sleeping. Sometimes I would come back to a house that seemed more cheerful than when I had left it, the hurricane lamps lit and classical music playing, Parveen reading Hafiz to Rhinehart, a favorite of his, in her lilting voice. Coming into this scene, I was a lumbering intruder of darkness with my heavy body and sodden sadness. If her job was to usher him into death, to coax him into quietly releasing his claims on the earthly world, then I was operating at cross-purposes to that. Big-bellied and stubbornly healthy, I was asking him to cling to this life. It was as if I were the source of pain in the house, reminding Rhinehart that he was about to back out on the deals we’d made.

At other times, when I could stand to be out for longer, I’d go chant at the Buddhist center, praying fervently for all of us. It became a routine, and I relied on it, as if it were the only thing propping me up. Afterwards, I’d just walk around, purposelessly. Once I wandered into a department store and around the shiny carousels of clothes until one of the clerks offered to help me. On his face I saw alarm. I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were vacant, as if I were staring out of the back of them, into myself.

•  •  •

Perhaps sensing that with the exception of the Buddhist center, my afternoons out weren’t doing me much good, Rhinehart suggested I take my camera along. For a couple of days, I brought it but took no pictures. Then one afternoon, in a coffee shop, I began talking to another pregnant woman, and she let me photograph her. After that I began looking for and photographing pregnant women when I could find them. It was strange really, how often they were alone, except for the teens, who were often seen in couples. They were still at that stage of their lives where their habits and schedules mirrored each other’s. Sometimes I had them pose, which they willingly did. But I was entering a phase where I was more interested in the potentials of surveillance photography than portraiture; it didn’t escape me that this entire project had a strong psychological imperative. I felt like an outsider, one who was curious as to what drew people together. It was often the interracial couples that seemed best suited, their energy was more dynamic.

I began following couples I marked as mine for the afternoon, observing how they had their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, or one hand tucked slyly in the back pocket of the other’s jeans in a very retro sign of mutual ownership. I noted whether their fingers were entwined or whether one of the partner’s hands enclosed the other’s. I became a cultural anthropologist of these gestures and categorized them according to the headings I remembered: wiping something off the other’s shirt was a maintenance gesture. Hand-holding: proprietary.

I was both conspicuous and inconspicuous because I looked so harmless in my large maternity clothes. I would wander on and off buses, watching my couple as they sat, one leg slung over the other’s, rubbing each other’s hands. I’d follow them right up until the point they would part, kissing goodbye in front of the subway station or building or where two streets intersected. Or if they lived together, I would follow them into the grocery store while they bickered about
the produce and apathetically discussed what to make for dinner, and then back out into the dusk, into Brooklyn neighborhoods of single-family homes with metal awnings and aluminum siding and early Halloween decorations out on the stoops, where the raccoons crept along the power lines at night to travel to adjacent fenced yards, where there were more garbage cans and fewer black trash bags on the curb. I stood across the street, taking pictures and waiting for the lights to come on so that I could see the interior, the shape of the furniture, the type of lighting, harsh or dim, they spent their evenings in.

It was then that I would wake up from the trance of the spy, who without even realizing it, fuses herself with her subject so that her body and self disappear. I would sometimes be lost and have to ask for directions, feeling confused and pathetic and let down. I thought about suicide occasionally, not in any sort of constructive way, but to scare myself, or that was the result, at any rate. It also seemed the only way to avoid all the pain and misery and incomprehensible loss that was heading at me like a levy break on a hill, the debris coming down in slow motion. It bothered me to think these things with Rhinehart laboring for breath at home, and a child struggling inside of me, absorbing my confusion. At times, I rested my hand on my stomach, drawing strength from the person in there who’d yet to know this type of pain.

One evening I was returning from following a young couple in their twenties, who were angry with each other because he’d gone to help a friend in Queens with a graphic design project, and the friend was a girl, and he hadn’t returned home until noon the next day. Most of their time was spent discussing the unanswered phone calls as well as free agency in a relationship and whether if the friend was a guy she’d be as upset. I found their discussion engrossing. Still, I was relieved to leave them.

I wasn’t ready to go home yet and decided to visit the Ukrainian museum downtown, if they were still open. I could finally make up for the trip I hadn’t taken with Rhinehart, and buy him some postcards for the scrapbook.

I was changing trains when a young woman on my side of the platform caught my eye. Or her earrings did, thick rings of amber that hung heavy in her lobes. She had long dark curly hair, pulled back, and they showed up against her slender neck. I was about to compliment her on them but hesitated when I noticed the very subtle affectionate gestures she was making to someone on the other side of the platform, who was headed uptown. With my instinct for couples, I looked across the tracks for him. It was my old boyfriend Lawrence.

I was out of his sight range, and I quickly got behind the freestanding subway map so that he couldn’t see me. From there, I watched her. She had a very easy way of moving, laughing. She had on wide-legged pants and a brightly colored scarf, an outfit I admired but never felt I could pull off. Years ago, I would have assumed she was an artist, based on how she was dressed. I would have envied her.

The train came, she got on it, and I remained hidden behind the stanchion. I had dallied briefly with following her, but what would I say? What could she tell me about the beginning of their relationship, their lives spread out before them like a map? I was feeling irrational, like a spurned lover. The train pulled away. I stepped out from hiding.

Lawrence had taken out
The Economist
and was reading it. His flat black shoes, his jeans hemmed just a touch too short—all the things I had forgotten. It was the interest I was creating, standing alone on the opposite platform, staring intently at him, that caused him to look up. Even his startled expression was familiar, and I instinctively smiled and waved.

He was genuinely pleased to see me and shocked to see I was pregnant. He pointed to my belly and mouthed, “Congratulations!” I turned to the side to give him a better view.

“Thank you,” I mouthed back. “You look good.” He did.

“I’m doing okay. But
you
!” He leaned forward slightly, in that way he had, which meant he wanted to plug me with questions. He was grinning. “When are you due?”

“November 10th.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m good. Okay. It’s a little uncomfortable, but not too bad.” It had been a while since someone had asked me this question in reference to the pregnancy.

“That’s so wonderful! Is it a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know yet.” I threw my hands up to enunciate. “It’s a mystery!”

“Congratulations,” he said again with real feeling. All this genuine pleasure and warmth and excitement for me was confusing. For several minutes, I’d forgotten Rhinehart dying in that room with Rachmaninoff playing on the stereo. I was just me, healthy and seemingly happy. I stood there like an idiot, smiling, as if I were someone to be truly envied.

Then the tone signaling his train’s arrival, and he waved, almost a deferential salute, before it rushed in, he stepped on it, and was gone. I remained there, staring out onto the empty platform.

•  •  •

When Hallie found out I was going to my obstetrician appointments by myself, she insisted on accompanying me. She looked so uncertain and out of place in the waiting room, staring at the pregnant women when she thought they weren’t looking, that I told her not to come. But she kept showing up anyway, sometimes waiting around in front of the office if I was delayed with the subway, or Rhinehart, or just my inability to leave the house. She’d fussily hold the door open, park herself in the seat where she had the best view of the room, and start flipping through parenting magazines. She had become addicted to them, I think, and was culling information, usually scatological—there was a period when she was obsessed with the best toilet training methods—that she could weave into lively, opinionated conversation for the ride home. She had asked to be my birthing partner.

“Do you realize what goes on when a baby is born?” I said. “There’s blood and secretions and it’s a mess.”

“I know. I can handle it. I’ve been preparing.”

“How? With those magazines in the doctor’s office?”

“No,” she said stubbornly. “With videos. It’s not as bad as everyone says. I also learned the breathing.” She panted rhythmically to show me.

“You’ll be the only one in the hospital room doing that. I didn’t study Lamaze.”

She looked hurt. “Well, how am I supposed to know if you don’t share your birth plan with me?”

“Birth plan. I see you’re picking up the vocabulary.” I envisioned all the passion she’d brought to animal rights advocacy diverted to my delivery. It was somewhat frightening. “We’ll see.”

•  •  •

At every appointment, I’d been putting off finding out the baby’s sex, unwilling to let go of our original idea for it to be a “surprise.” Finally, I did. I told Hallie in the car on the drive back. A girl. I had been wanting a boy. Someone who had Rhinehart’s nose, and way of standing with his hands clasped behind him, and his laugh. I missed him already. I would have given anything to be able to go backwards, even to the worst moments, even to after we found out he was sick, that day I walked angrily alongside him in the park.

It took me a minute to realize that a persistent small coughing noise I’d been hearing was Hallie crying. It sounded awkward, as if she didn’t know how to do it properly. The sound was accelerating in speed and intensity. I told her to pull the car over.

“Why are
you
so upset?” I said, and it came out harshly.

She wasn’t responding so I had to wait until she had calmed down enough to whisper, “I’m just overwhelmed.”

“With what? With the birthing videos?”

She shook her head. “No, no. It’s just that it’s a girl—it seems so right that it is. It makes so much sense. And now my whole life’s going to change.”

This was so unexpected, I laughed. “
Your
life! What’s going to change for you?”

She turned around in her seat, sharply offended, and stared at me with her reddened eyes. “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing this for? Why have I been going to the damn La Leche meetings?”

“The breastfeeding organization?”

“I’m going to have to move in with you again, at least for the first month. Maybe longer, until we get a good child care schedule going. I took myself off PETA’s volunteer roster. I’ve told my clients that my hours in November and probably December are limited.”

It was strange, but it hadn’t occurred to me she’d be around. I couldn’t picture it. I’d always been the one to take care of her—that just seemed my role, as fixed as other things about us, the slight difference in our ages, my timidity and her outgoingness. “But I hired someone. You don’t know anything about babies. You don’t even like them.”

“You don’t get it, do you? This isn’t a theoretical infant. She’s a person, a little girl like we once were.” Her tone rebuked me, and I felt guilty for having been initially disappointed. “
We’re
going to be her family. Both of us. My role is huge. It’s all my therapist and I have been working on for the past month, getting myself ready for it. My Buddhist group is chanting for us. I’m fucking terrified, but you can’t care about something this much and then fail.”

“I’m just . . . I had no idea you were taking it this seriously.” I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted her involved. Then I imagined her calling around to her friends for recommendations on schools or conferring with me about a pediatrician or just hashing out one of millions of decisions, and I was suddenly, enormously, relieved. “You mean like a co-parent?”