The truck was packed outside, but I was reluctant to leave. I checked the narrow bedroom closet again to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind on its high shelf that you could never see to the back of. It was a terrible closet but the only one in the apartment, and when Hallie and I had tried to share it, it became so jammed with our clothes, you couldn’t move the hangers and had to pull out each individual item to figure out what it was. “This sucks,” she said. “It’s like the Loehmann’s sales rack.” Hallie tried to buy closet rights off me for fifty bucks, and then, when I refused out of principle, she spent an entire Saturday creating a “boudoir” out of a clothes rack and a glued-together pyramid of empty shoeboxes with a sheer blue fabric draped tentlike from above “for privacy.” She even hung a full-length mirror. It had a piece of notebook paper taped to it that said, “You’re sexy.”
“For your confidence,” she said. “Imagine a man saying it to you.”
But it was in her handwriting, so all I could hear was her saying it. “And sometimes it sounds sarcastic,” I told her. Within a day, the fabric had snagged on the hangers, pulling out the tacks that connected it to the ceiling, and floating down in a suffocating tangle cloud while I was inside changing. We finally repurposed it as a tablecloth, and I accepted the “porta-closet” as it came to be known, in exchange for unlimited borrowing rights to Hallie’s clothes and a future date with someone from her office. She’d just gotten a paid internship in the publicity department of a men’s lifestyle magazine. I was waiting tables at a crêpe place down by NYU. We both agreed her connections were better than mine.
What I wanted, more than anything, was entry into the invisible New York that I had heard about—restaurants with communal bathrooms and reverse mirror windows and Julian Schnabel art on the walls, places where celebrities had lunch with their pets, and twelve-course meals of all desserts, and saw old-fashioned vaudeville acts and carney shows in restored theaters like where Lincoln was shot, and where you had to know someone to buy a $200 seat. The closest I’d come, would ever really come, were the nights that Hallie and I decided to splurge, and dressing up in our best clothes, went to a fancy restaurant uptown and sat at the bar, our high, elegant chairs turned outward, nursing our pricey drinks and looking around hopefully for someone to come buy us the next round. Those nights, even if they resulted in nothing, as they often did, always seemed seductively full of potential.
At my new apartment my possessions looked small and scattered, but they fit with the high tin ceilings and the old-fashioned glass-front cupboards. I had gotten rid of many things, keeping my two African violets, my mother’s milk glass lamp, a wooden table. I put up a few of my photographs and hung long transparent curtains over the windows, which billowed out from the radiators’ heat. My first night, steam coming off me from a bath, I put on my robe and sat at the kitchen table in my one little wooden chair with a glass of wine, and listened to kids throwing snowballs under the street lamp, shouting into the dark. I was deliriously happy. I felt as I had all those years ago, when I first moved to New York, and all I could see, all around me, were things that were beginning.
CHAPTER FIVE
I was sitting in one of the hair salon chairs, kicking my leg around. How comfortable an environment it was—its confusion of bottles and sprays, the smell of chemicals, light reflecting off the mirrors, the schefflera in the corner named Steve. The salon had no particular focus, it catered to whatever hair type you had, and like a nail place, it always seemed busy, women sitting at the entrance, flipping through magazines.
I was talking to Shani about Brooklyn where the light had a paler, more muted quality, reflecting off the brownstones. Down the block from my building, there were basketball courts behind a high chain link fence, a single-story branch library with construction paper decorations in the window. The parks with their scrub grass and oak trees and old swing sets and stone animals. There were so few people on the streets in the middle of the day. I was roaming with my camera to see what I could capture, sometimes taking the subway above ground to stations farther south, and returning, waiting on a cold, exposed platform, watching plumes of smoke from the buildings below. I was happy to be shooting again, but it seemed a bit aimless. “I feel like I haven’t found my focus still,” I told her. “I need a project—a series.” Watching her, I had an idea. “Maybe I should shoot what I know. Like you, here, working.” I was envisioning it, the grayish early daylight, and Shani sitting in her chair, maybe holding the smock she used when she was doing color, and all the pink bottles and combs and hair pieces dangling behind her. Or sitting in the chair, legs crossed, staring directly at the lens.
“Not at the theater?” she asked.
“But I don’t really know you at the theater. This is the environment that’s familiar. If I get this idea together will you sit for me? That can be our trade for the head shots.”
“I still think you’re crazy not to take a makeup consultation with Nicole. Do you know how booked she gets?” She took up the comb again, using the pointy end to separate strands of hair. The woman in the chair was talking on her cell phone.
I took a piece of paper from behind the register and began sketching, pointing out the placement of things behind her. We’d bring over the cart of bottles, and I could take a couple of shots. I needed a lot of background.
Returning to Marty’s I had an illumination—what if I did a series of people in their daily environments, shooting Marty, too, in his office, hunched over, his chin disappearing into his brown shirt, a cigarette in his mouth, fiddling with his camera, the little barred window and his desk with its piles and piles of yellow papers and receipts and proofs behind him? I was eager to start framing out the idea before it disappeared in the onslaught of customers. I’d gotten out my sketchbook and was making notes, when Rhinehart called my cell phone, shocking me into silence.
He talked, filling up the space. “I’m back from Italy, and I’ve taken an apartment in Manhattan. Near Central Park. It’s so good to be in the city again. I’m sorry I’m late returning your message. It was a bit chaotic when I first returned.”
While I was groping around for a response, he said, “Would you rather I didn’t call you? I can hang up, or we both can.”
“No, I just wasn’t expecting you.”
“It seems to be our way of things, lately. How have you been?”
I stuttered. I wasn’t able to condense the past few months into a response. He seemed to belong to another scenario, one in which it was early winter, and I still lived in my old apartment. Sometime after moving, I realized that I had been attaching way too much importance to Rhinehart’s reappearance in my life. My thoughts had a delusional quality. I had so many expectations, as if we’d just begin building a new, healthy relationship. Enough time away from him, and I’d understood the true purpose of our running into each other—to propel me to a new stage after I’d been stagnant for so long. Now here he was, saying, “Are you up for an outing?”
He was going to Queens to visit an elderly aunt and wanted me to come with my camera equipment to take photographs of her neighbors. He had already mentioned me to her. He was still talking, referencing a series of Diane Arbus’s photos, natural setting, no need to bring a backdrop.
“The nudists? This is what they want?”
“No, no. They haven’t mentioned anything. I was just imagining the style of photography. Not the nudity.”
I asked a series of questions about what type of lights to bring, who was driving, how long we were going to be there, and he interrupted, “Do you no longer trust my judgment because I invited you to that terrible dinner?”
“Not just that.” I was also nervous to spend an afternoon with him, and the fact that I was nervous seemed to signal the danger in it. Even now my entire body was on high alert.
He was still focused on apologizing for that night. “I really do believe in philanthropic organizations and I came off as an academic and a snob, and destructively unhappy. I am n
o longer unhappy. Traveling is a fool’s paradise, Emerson was right, but all that newness can also be incredibly therapeutic. It was very good for me while it lasted.”
I wanted to know then when he’d returned, and presumably heard my message, but an old self-protectiveness prevailed. I was afraid of hurt feelings that could lead to stiltedness in the conversation. Instead we talked plans. We would meet at the train station the following Sunday. Rhinehart would help me carry my equipment.
I hung up, my heart still hammering. Why this day? Why today?
• • •
In the thrash of people at Penn Station, I spotted Rhinehart immediately—he was flipping through a magazine by the ticket window. Fifteen years ago if he was expecting you, he’d size you up from a distance. I’d always been slightly self-conscious approaching him. So much of our relationship I had played out alone on my shifting mental terrain.
He was in a sport coat with jeans and a pair of white loafers that looked Italian, and he seemed expensive—like a patron of the arts. The minute I got within sight range, he stuck his ankle out and twisted it admiringly in the dirty yellow light. “What do you think of these shoes?”
He was trying to dispel the awkwardness between us. It was something he did, took my nervousness from me as if taking a heavy package, and I was grateful and said, “They look like they’ll get marks.”
“You’ve always been so practical, Tatie. A Depression kid who grew up in the Reagan era.” He looked up at the board. “Would you like to get a cup of coffee, or should we catch the 11:15?”
“11:15.” I was anxious to be out again into the cold afternoon, and not in Penn Station’s poorly lit interior. How many times, waiting for a train, had I sat at one of the Starbucks café tables, looking out on the bustling underground passageway as if it were the street.
Maybe because I was so quiet, Rhinehart was filling our wait time with talk. About a man in a cowboy hat, wearing a chain of Metro-Cards around his neck, he said, “The mentally ill have such penetrating eyes. Such a strong desire to convey things to you.” About the young woman standing behind me: “Brightly colored outfits really are cheering.”
And on and on, until our platform was announced, and we shouldered our way down the stairs and onto the train. Rhinehart suggested we take seats facing each other, “stagecoach-style.”
Now that the trip had begun, I felt more at ease. The conductor came by clicking his puncher, and Rhinehart started patting down his pockets. “Did you forget to buy one?” I asked him as I handed mine over. He seemed jittery and I wondered if he was uncomfortable being alone with me.
Still rustling around in his clothes, he said, “I can’t seem to find it. Do you think I dropped it in the station?”
“You can punch my round-trip for his one-way,” I said to the conductor, and Rhinehart gave me an appreciative look.
We were riding in the head car, where you had the best sense you were going somewhere important. I liked the train, the uniforms, the politeness and patience and kindness of the conductors. At seventeen I used to take the two-hour ride into the city, dressed up for some party or a date, bringing a thin paperback along with a wallet full of money I’d saved selling flowers. I kept my purse between my knees so that it couldn’t be whisked off the seat by someone passing, as it was rumored happened. One of the girls at school had chased a man through the cars, but he had hopped off at the next stop. She’d had no choice but to stay on the train all the way into the city, trying not to cry, and then, once in the station, beg for change to use the pay phone. These stories made an impression on me as I tended to worry anyway, and sometimes felt a little sick to my stomach, going in. I took the most pleasure on the return trip, lying back against the seat, mulling over all the funny things that had been said, the teasing, the kissing, if there had been any.
We emerged from the tunnel into the bright morning. Sun glinted off the metal roofs of the warehouses and trash swirled near the tracks. I felt a sudden, exhilarating rush of happiness and looked over at Rhinehart, who was staring out the fingerprint-smeared window, sun on his face. He was smiling distantly.
During the daylight hours, you were given a peep show from the train, a split-second view of people crouched in parking lots and along the backsides of buildings, an overturned shopping cart, garbage stuck in the fence links. Even people’s yards were littered with trash, slack pool covers with newspapers floating in the rainwater, splayed out like dead birds. We passed a schoolyard with a fleet of yellow mini-buses, one lone albino parked in a distant lot.
“Tell me about your aunt again,” I said to Rhinehart, who was eyeing a woman in the next aisle, clipping her fingernails. Elderly people were my favorite to photograph, the trapped histories of what mannerisms, clothes, and expressions used to be in vogue. “I thought you didn’t have any living relatives.”
Rhinehart smoothed the crease in his pants. “I use the term loosely. I’m not even sure why I call her Chechna. Just something I made up as a kid, I guess, and the name stuck. She was from the same oblast as my mother and took care of me after she died. I’m grateful to her—she made sure I was fed and went to school—but I also spent a lot of time sitting outside my old apartment, wishing everything was different.”
There had been a time when I had known about Rhinehart’s past, but it had been so many years that it had broken into fragments and mixed with my own memories of where we were at the time the story was told. I remembered his mother putting a board in between the mattress and box spring to keep her back from giving out. She died when he was ten, two weeks before Easter, and he’d left a colored egg and a glass of vodka at her graveside. His caretaker, or someone, used to make latkes, and nail the Christmas tree to the living room wall to keep it up. Was this Chechna? His mother gave him a brown sweater that he wore for a month, the tags tucked into the sleeve, before she sent it over to the old country. “I never liked that sweater and was happy to see it go.”
“How old is your aunt now?”
“She turned ninety this year. I’m glad we’re talking again. After she got stuck in the tub and I saw her naked, she didn’t want to see me for a while. That was a few summers ago.”
“What? How did she get stuck?”
He sighed. “She has one of those deep tubs with the high sides and that day she just didn’t have the arm strength to hoist herself out—this was before the hand bars. Hours she was in there. I climbed up the fire escape to the window, which was open a crack and tried to force it, but it had these little locks on the sides. The entire time she’s screaming, ‘Don’t come in! I have no clothes on! Call Jean!’—a lady as old as she was, who lived across the hall. I finally got a piece of plywood and was able to leverage the window open. I came in with my eyes shut, groping around for the towel, while she’s screaming at me, ‘Left, left.’ It was over a hundred degrees in there—it’s lucky she didn’t pass out. I slipped on a puddle, and by reflex, I opened my eyes, only for a split second, but I saw her and she saw me. Her arms were black-and-blue. I threw the towel over her, and lifted her out. After that she told me she wanted nothing to do with me. Then, a couple of months ago, she called me again. She didn’t mention it, so I assume it’s forgiven.”
We walked the three blocks from the station, lugging the lights, my camera and tripod, a small screen I had insisted on bringing, and presents. Rhinehart had brought two bottles of liqueur, which seemed excessive for someone in her nineties.
“Here we are!” he said, in front of a stooped four-story brick apartment building. The fire escape from the bathtub story snaked up one side. Rhinehart rang the buzzer, and almost instantly the lace curtains in a window two flights up parted. She buzzed us in.
“She’s a quick one,” he said.
Chechna Olesky was about four feet tall with a small sharp face hidden by enormous plastic-framed glasses and a brown coiffed hairdo that was obviously a wig. Her hand, as we shook, reminded me of a sparrow’s hard little feet. From behind the thick lenses, her ma
gnified eyes looked me over. She didn’t seem all that pleased to see either of us.
“Here. Give—” She reached for the lights I’d borrowed from Marty.
“No, no, Chechna,” Rhinehart said, pulling the case away. “This is very heavy.”
“Put them in the bedroom.” She pointed back into the dim apartment, and Rhinehart took my purse and walked down the low-ceilinged hallway that seemed, through a trick of perspective, to narrow. Chechna and I went into the living room, which was crowded with heavy furniture and had figurines, plastic plants, and little dishes covering every surface, the end tables, the old TV set with the large console, the coffee table. It was like a junk shop upstate. My fingers itched to start shooting.
“This is very pretty.” I gestured to a display shelf that held two porcelain spaniels and a vivid red-and-yellow wooden egg.
Chechna stuck her nose within a half an inch of it. “Which?”
“The egg”—I hesitated—it looked Ukrainian, but I didn’t want to hazard a guess.
“Oh, that. No. That’s junk. It’s there for color.” She pointed to the plastic-covered couch. Needlepoint pillows were trapped underneath as if they were being asphyxiated. I sat down and she said, “No! Over in the middle. That cushion is the firmest.”
Rhinehart appeared in the doorway. He looked enormous in here. “I love your new bedspread, Chechna. It must be hand-done.”
In a voice that was several notches too loud, Chechna said, “My neighbor buys these things for me real cheap. A handmade bedspread! Nobody makes things by hand no more. Now sit.” She pointed to the armchair. It emitted an unpleasant synthetic creak as he sat. Chechna went into the kitchen and returned with a tin of Danish butter cookies. I took one to be polite; it was very soft, the consistency of liverwurst, but with a vague dusty taste. I had trouble swallowing, and afterwards kept trying to sneak looks at the tin’s side to see the expiration date.
The Rest of Us: A Novel Page 7