The Rest of Us: A Novel

by Lott, Jessica

  The food arrived, Rhinehart’s piled high on his plate. The sight of this excess made me lose my appetite.

  “I don’t know if I would take pills if I were sick,” Rhinehart was saying. “No point in gilding the lily.”

  “That’s such an antiquated expression. I’m not even sure what it means.”

  He turned to Fedir. “I talk too much in aphorisms—I’m going to have to stop that.”

  Fedir put down his spoon to translate. “It’s okay,” I said. “You can take a break to eat.”

  “My own mouth dates me,” Rhinehart said. “It’s funny how we get stuck in one time and place like that. I knew a man on the block, an old guy, who had stopped buying clothes thirty years back. Why not? He took care of them, and his body wasn’t going to change drastically. I’ll be like that. People will talk about how wide ties used to be in style when they see me coming down the street . . .”

  All this talk about old men—I wondered if he was feeling sensitive about his age. Maybe afraid to sleep with me because of it? But I’d pulled this mental trick before, ascribing phantom emotional motives to him. Most likely he didn’t want to get too close because he was leaving. He was leaving me, yet again—his feelings should be ranked at a lower priority than mine. I cut him off. “You’re digressing.”

  “Yeah, so? We’re just sitting here. What else do we have to do?”

  “I have things to do.”

  “What things? Tell me about them.” I searched his face, but it was all innocence.

  Instead I redirected us to the one topic I was beginning to resent. “How’s the family research coming?”

  “Not bad. I’m doing it mostly on my side for now.”

  “Did Lyuba ever meet your maternal grandparents? That could be helpful.”

  “I asked her that. She said no. I don’t think my aunt had contact with them.”

  “There seems to have been a lot of fallouts in your family. Your aunt must have been a difficult person.”

  “Actually Lyuba speaks about her as if she were a pushover. My mama, on the other hand, was very sensitive and tended to cling to old hurts, even if it hurt her double.” He gave me a meaningful look.

  “What about Lyuba’s father? What was he like?”

  “She said he was a very gentle man, affectionate. He was the one she’d go to with her problems. But sometimes he could be withdrawn. He suffered from depression was my guess. But again, I’m reading into that. She in no way suggested it. At any rate he outlived my aunt, who died before my mother did. He only passed away about ten years ago, I hear.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see those letters back and forth with your mother. To see the connection.” And verify it.

  Rhinehart nodded, motioning to Fedir to let him out of the booth. “I’m going to the restroom now.” He turned to me. “Do you want to go first?”

  “No, thanks.” I wanted to get Fedir alone to see how competent his English was. I’d been watching that churlish upper lip, which had started bothering me again. There was something lazy and yet cunning about his face that I couldn’t quite pin down. This was the person Rhinehart would be traveling with, depending on, and I needed to know he’d be with someone reliable.

  Alone with me Fedir was shy. He tapped one knuckle nervously against the table rim.

  “So how long have you lived here in the U.S.?” I asked.

  He seemed confused about whether to answer or translate.

  “English,” I said.

  “Six years.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You must miss the Ukraine.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you have family there?”

  He looked past my shoulder to the door. “Yes, a wife and three children. A house and farm with two horses. The whole thing mine.” He smiled, revealing surprisingly small teeth. The front incisor was gray, the root dead.

  “You must want to be with them,” I said, and he shrugged.

  “I need to send the money. I make better here, a little this, a little this, I send. My wife likes that I am not always under her footsteps.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take this—I would assume, with three children, she’d want him present. In my purse next to me, my phone buzzed. I unzipped the bag and looked down to see who it was. Manhattan number. I didn’t recognize it.

  Rhinehart came back to the table. As I got out of the booth, he said, “It was really very clean in there, Tatie.”

  As Fedir was getting up, he bumped me by accident, and said, “Excuse me, Teresa.” He gave my name, my grandmother’s name, a heavy Eastern European inflection that I preferred to my own pronounciation.

  Back out on Second Avenue, we passed a bookstore and Rhinehart lifted his hand in greeting to a dark-haired girl waving passionately from behind the register. I felt another skip of jealousy. Rhinehart was talking about Ukrainian art. One of the few types of art I knew nothing about. To Fedir he said the Met’s Ukrainian collection was embarrassingly poor. There was a pause, then the translating began. I was dying to be free of them.

  Rhinehart, still talking, asked a blind man if he’d like assistance crossing. The man accepted, and we crossed together. Rhinehart walked with him to the bus stop on the corner while I checked my voicemail. It was a friend of the painter who lived in my building. She was organizing a group show of New York photographs at a temporary exhibition space in midtown, heard my work was good, and wanted to know if I’d like to put in a couple of prints. She bartended at the Otheroom, and I could come by any time tonight or tomorrow to discuss.

  Rhinehart had stopped in front of the Ukrainian museum.

  “I have to go back to Brooklyn,” I told him.

  “Why now? There’s a great Archipenko exhibit here that I want you to see.”

  I was curious, but resisted. “Another time. I just got invited to be in a group show. I need to get my portfolio together to meet the curator.” Rhinehart started to respond too enthusiastically, so I had to explain that she hadn’t even seen my work yet.

  He was hailing me a cab. “This is great, great news. I told you, didn’t I? Just a matter of time.”

  He was so genuinely pleased for me, I felt guilty for tainting the afternoon. “I’m sorry if I seemed upset today. This morning, I was—”

  “You were fine. Go home. Get your work together. We’ll talk later this week.”

  In the cab, I had the feeling that we wouldn’t be discussing that night again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rhinehart didn’t call me later that week, and I was hurt and had too much pride to call him. What was there to say? If he hadn’t wanted to be with me then, when I was sitting right in front of him, why would he want me now, a week later? It was as if all the warmth and desire I’d been sending in his direction had been blocked by something, a sheet of metal he was holding up, and so it boomeranged back with doubled force to burn up inside of me, pointlessly.

  Since I couldn’t prevent myself from thinking about him, and knew little about his trip, I researched it on my own. I read about the country’s political structure, “constitutional democracy that regained independence in 1991. Twenty-four oblasts each with a capital”; the country’s size “slightly larger than France but smaller than Texas”; I corrected my previous mistake (“Ukraine,” not “the Ukraine”), heard about the famine from 1932 to ’33 when the inconceivable number of six million people starved. I flipped through photos of the lovely old chestnuts along the Dnieper River. In the Times I read about Viktor Yushchenko, who had been poisoned with dioxin by the rival Yanukovych’s party during the election. It was really the photograph of Yushchenko’s face, a grayish color and broken out in pustules, that had stuck in my memory, the fact that an ingested poison could do this. From guidebooks, I learned about the major sightseeing spots that I assumed Rhinehart would be hitting: Shevchenko’s grave, as well as Rabbi Nachman’s—the founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement—before a final destination of Lyuba’s house. I imagined his excitement at the prospect of me
eting her and reading the correspondence that would cause his mother, fifty years dead, to chimerically appear, revealing the secrets of his past.

  • • •

  Eventually I did call him, and he answered as if he’d been expecting me. We talked about his trip preparations, the research he was doing, far more advanced than mine, for the essay he was writing about Ukraine. I largely concealed my new knowledge of the country. It was hard talking to him without being able to see his face.

  He asked about my group show, which I honestly said I had misgivings about. It would open next month. I’d met with the organizer, bringing along the most professional body of work I could pull together. She’d quickly invited me after flipping through my prints and exclaiming at almost every one, which pleased but also concerned me—she’d seemed a little too impressed. Despite that, I’d still harbored high hopes for the show. I’d had to scale them back when I saw the space, an anonymous office building in the West 30s, next to the cheap wholesale clothing stores, a vacant stretch in the evening. There was gray carpet and the room’s lighting consisted of fluorescents and makeshift spots that illuminated the marked-up walls, dirt shadows of where cubicles had once been, old nails and installation pegs, badly done graffiti. When I had gone to drop off my work, I had looked through some of the other photographs that lay on a folding table, and my heart sank. Concepts I’d seen many times before, and worse, the evidence of poor technical skills being passed off as “artistic,” when I knew it was sloppiness, or laziness, or just ignorance about lighting. I was embarrassed, a prickly sensation in my face, retelling the story to Rhinehart. The implication was that this was the class I was in; people would see the show and know I wasn’t going anywhere.

  He said, “Your work is what it is. Where it’s hanging doesn’t change that. The person with the ability to recognize it—will.”

  “Are you able to come to the opening? Remind me of that?”

  “I wish I could, but I’ll be away. I’d like to see you before I leave, though. Can you come to the airport with me? I hired a car that can take you back after.”

  I was hurt. I’d hoped that we could have dinner again before he left. “When is your flight?”

  “Next Saturday. In the morning.”

  I hadn’t realized he was leaving so soon.

  • • •

  “At this point I think you should just go for it,” Hallie said. “You’re obviously thinking about it all the time. Why not invite him over and try again? Then you’ll know for sure.”

  We were back at the refuge where I’d taken more shots of the falcons on their perches, this time with the Hasselblad. If they looked good, I was ready to layer them onto the images of Rhinehart’s bed, so it appeared the birds were actually sitting on his headboard. Removing my camera from the tripod, I remembered the night he’d given it to me.

  “This time you should be a little more aggressive,” Hallie said. “Maybe take some clothes off. See how he reacts. To him, you’re still a juicy young piece of flesh.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Since when are you so shy? You did it once.”

  In my inept way, I had been the one to seduce Rhinehart. Once the semester had begun, he said we shouldn’t see each other. This was stupid, I told him. It was clear we enjoyed being together. So I asked him to a lecture. Then to lunch off-campus. Then to an Antonioni revival showing at a nearby theater. Whenever he demurred, usually on the nighttime activities, I’d wait a week, then suggest something else. I had the sexual confidence of the young. And I knew he wanted to have sex with me—I could feel it. It was merely a fussy sense of propriety that was holding him back, which annoyed me. Even in the dorms sex hadn’t been that big a deal—who wasn’t sleeping with somebody? We were in college—it’s what everybody did.

  Still, with Rhinehart, I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere fast. “Maybe it’s what you’re wearing,” Gertie said. I had on blue corduroys and sneakers, a vintage Mr. Bubble T-shirt, and a silver bracelet made from an old spoon—it was one of my favorite outfits. “Older men like sexier clothes. That’s what my sister says.” I went out and bought a pair of high brown boots and a jean skirt. On my way to campus, I’d passed Hallie, who was hanging out on our neighbor’s porch. She whistled. “Whoa, momma! Going out to make the rent?” I ignored her. I was headed to the class Rhinehart taught, and which I hadn’t had the courage to sign up for. As it was letting out, I went into the room, ostensibly to ask Tim, who I knew had a crush on me, a question about a party that weekend. I saw several heads turn and consider me. Our friend Nosh joined us, saying I should dress like that more often. I watched Rhinehart watch me out of the corner of his eye, dawdling, pretending to gather his notes. I carefully reached down and hooked my thumb into the leather boot and pulled it up. The next day Rhinehart called to ask me to dinner. For weeks, he did no more than hold my hand across the table, gently, as if it were a little dove. But it had begun.

  I was battling a bigger fear at this point. What if Rhinehart was no longer attracted to me? Or had realized that he was unable to fall in love with me again? I knew what it was to kiss a man I liked but could never love, not because of anything he’d done, or bad timing, but just because he was unable to call it up in me. If that was how Rhinehart felt, I’d prefer not to know.

  Hallie thought that theory was ridiculous. “You’re thinking like a woman. Men aren’t so emotionally choosy. Especially men his age. They want companionship and affection and sex. It distracts them from thinking about getting old and sick.”

  But Rhinehart was picky and changeable still, and I knew he had a great capacity for solitude. “He’s like one of those animals that would just go off alone into the forest to die.”

  “I don’t know,” Hallie said. “That breaks all precedent. Maybe there’s another woman in the picture. Like the ex-wife. Or someone else. This is New York. No shortage of available women.”

  We were crossing the field to the parking lot. The sky stretched out in front, bright and clear. Free birds swarmed like bats, settling in clumps high in the tree branches. I thought of the smiling girl in the bookstore. I thought of Laura, who’d won him from me before. Had he been out on Long Island again?

  “If so, then there’s nothing I can do about it,” I said. “I’m just going to have to wait until he comes back. I’ll have a better sense of where we stand then.” But this sounded doubtful even to my ears. I worried that we’d spin in this cyclone forever, like Rodin’s Paolo and Francesca in The Gates of Hell, always reaching but never embracing, never fulfilled.

  I was ten minutes early getting to Rhinehart’s, and he was already waiting by the door with his packed bags. Behind him, splayed out on the living room couch, was a green 1960s hard-backed suitcase with a textured surface that reminded me of a toilet seat cover. This was most likely the suitcase Rhinehart wanted to bring because of sentimentality or superstition, and which common sense had forced him to abandon. Instinctively, I reached out and grasped his arm. “It’s so good to see you.” I handed him a bag with a cup of coffee and crullers.

  “You brought me breakfast. That’s so thoughtful.” He did a final check of the rooms, while I waited, looking around.

  “Who’s going to take care of your plants?” I asked him.

  From the kitchen, he said, “I know, I forgot. I was going to bring them downstairs, maybe the doorman wouldn’t mind. He’s picking up the mail.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “I can get the mail, too.”

  Coming back into the room, he said, “Would you? It wouldn’t require much. I can give you my keys. Feel free to stay whenever you like. On the days you don’t want to go all the way back to Brooklyn.”

  • • •

  My stomach felt hollow and unsettled, jouncing around in the hired car’s plush backseat. I watched the clusters of buildings pass by, the washed-out terrain of early morning. The city seemed a shimmery hallucination, a paler, weaker version of itself. Next to me Rhinehart was also staring out th
e window, clutching his untouched breakfast. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be nervous, and reaching across the seat, I took his hand and held it.

  At JFK, the boyish-looking driver unloaded the bags from the trunk. Rhinehart had tied a red scarf around the handle of his suitcase so that it could be easily identified on the airport carousel. A small leather carry-on hung from his shoulder. That was all.

  “You sure you have everything?” I asked. Fedir had gone ahead a week earlier and was meeting him at the airport on the other side. He nodded and rolled his bag through the pneumatic sliding doors. Already I felt him moving out of reach.

  Standing in line, I attempted to be brave and unfeeling, to make my heart into a little stone. He had on jeans and a black sweater. After patting down his pockets, he unzipped the bag and extracted his passport, which shook slightly in his hand. I suddenly saw his sleepless, unshaven face, and it looked vulnerable to me. This wasn’t like the other times I’d seen him off at the airport, when he’d been younger, more impatient. What if something happened to him there? My heart, now a wet living thing, lurched towards him. I was uncertain what I would do if I continued to stand there, so instead I went to wait by the monitors. Yards away from me, in the vast, blue-tinted airport, he looked small and helpless. Maybe, from his vantage point, I looked the same.

  He joined me eventually and as we walked towards the gate he pointed to a row of chairs bolted down near the security check-in. “Let’s sit.”

  From his bag, he pulled out a folded piece of tissue paper and handed it to me. Inside was a silver necklace with a square mirrored pendant. “It’s Ukrainian. To protect you from the evil eye while I’m away.” He clasped it on me and I felt the cool skin of his forearm against my neck.

  “Just be careful,” I said.

  “It’s more dangerous in New York,” he said. “You know, I’d feel better if I knew you weren’t fretting about me.”