The Rest of Us: A Novel

by Lott, Jessica

  • • •

  I was a few minutes late meeting Rhinehart, who was standing outside the café, waiting for me. He handed me a cup of coffee, and we walked up Ninth Avenue against traffic, the late day sun slanting along the buildings. I was watching him out of the corner of my eye—his entire body was infused with mystery. The tailored dark blue shirt he had on that I thought made him look like an intellectual. His rectangular black-rimmed glasses. He’d shaved and been to his stylist, and his white hair was back in its choppy cut. His New York self. Except he had the fascination of a tourist, and we kept stopping so that he could look into the windows of the thrift shop with its dusty clutter of religious icons, or a ground-floor apartment where an overweight man was watching TV, or an English/Spanish insurance company whose rattan chairs and orange-flowered cushions reminded me of the genealogist’s.

  We passed a butcher and Rhinehart read “pig’s knuckles” out loud.

  “You act as if you’ve never been on this street before.”

  “Things seem different when you go away and come back.”

  He took my hand, content, and gestured to the apartment on 52nd where he’d lived in the 1980s, when Hell’s Kitchen was a rough neighborhood. “Across the air shaft, there was an abandoned building with squatters, one of whom was trying to communicate with the teenage girl who lived on the floor below me. I was around in the afternoons, so I was privy to everything. Every day, same time, he’d hold up a sign asking if she wanted to meet by the pay phone. This went on for weeks. The girl—she was probably thirteen or fourteen, a latchkey kid, her dad worked sanitation for the city—she was inviting her friends over to taunt him, and they must have been holding up messages, too. I saw the guy scribble out what he wrote and replace it with ‘Why?’ in big letters.

  “I didn’t want to get involved, but things were escalating and I was worried about the girl, so I finally called the cops to see if they could clear out that building. They laughed. No one would come into the neighborhood for something like that. I called again when I saw the guy remove his pants. I suspect the girls were egging him on. She was a scrawny kid, had this long blond hair that always looked unwashed. I used to see her smoking cigarettes behind the building in that hunched-over self-conscious way. Eventually her old man found out. Someone must have tipped him off—I doubt the girl said anything. But he went over there one afternoon with some of his buddies and beat the shit out of the guy. I never saw him after that.”

  “Wow. That’s really fucked up.”

  “I feel sorry for the girl—this was what she had for fun. Laura grew up like that, in the projects around Coney Island.”

  “Laura?”

  “Until she was fifteen. Then she moved out to the suburbs to live with her grandmother. She had similar stories, guys hanging around. Most people think I’m crazy, but I believe a lot of them were harmless, really. Alcoholics or just down on their luck.”

  I was frozen, wondering if now was the time to reveal I’d seen her. I hesitated and the moment passed.

  With the construction and pedestrian detours, it took us a while to get to the park. We arrived as the street lamps were coming on. Above us, the sky was gathering all the light from between the trees. Rhinehart held my hand, and we took the path to the restaurant that overlooked the pond, a chain of small white lightbulbs glowed in the distance, marking the destination. I pictured us as we must have looked from above, two dark little figures winding our way through a nest of black leaves. We took a table on the water, I pulled on a light sweater, and Rhinehart ordered a bottle of wine.

  I was dying to know what happened in Ukraine, but Rhinehart wanted to hear about me first. We were halfway through dinner when he began talking about it, and then he started by telling me about Fedir, whose mother and wife lived two towns over from Lyuba, and who were constantly feuding, jealous of each other. Fedir had to be peacemaker. “He’s a very mild-mannered person and refused to get involved. Instead he would drink heavily. He gets that hazy unfocused look that some drunks get. Even when he was sober, though, he was a terrible driver. We had a black Lada, a little two-door. From a distance, I’d see him coming, it looked like a tick on the countryside. He crashed it twice.”

  “Jesus. You should have brought someone else.”

  “No, no, I was happy he was there. He’s a very loyal man. He seemed to take Lyuba’s behavior personally and bought me locks for my suitcase. He didn’t trust her after her request for rent money.”

  “It’s terrible that someone you hardly know had to protect you from your own cousin.”

  “Lyuba’s not my cousin.”

  I felt a surge of vindication. “I knew there was something off about this! She’s not even related to you, is she?”

  He took a knowing sip from his glass. “She’s my sister.”

  “Your sister!” I couldn’t envision Rhinehart with a sibling. “Why didn’t your mother ever say anything?”

  “Lyuba wasn’t my mother’s child. She’s my father’s daughter. My half-sister.” He was frowning. “I have a feeling that when my father found out he wasn’t going to be able to join us in the U.S., he started another family with his childhood sweetheart, Marta, who was Lyuba’s mother. It’s unclear. And it’s upsetting. My mother would have been devastated if she’d known. She kept holding out for him to join us and then he died. My poor mother!”

  “So those letters your mother wrote weren’t addressed to Marta, then. They were to your father!”

  “Not all of them. Marta was evidently a friend of hers, so she was writing to both of them separately. My poor mother!” he said again. “To get duped like that.”

  I wasn’t entirely convinced that Rhinehart’s mother hadn’t known her husband had taken up with Marta. Someone, surely, would have tipped her off. “Where is your information coming from? Have you read her letters?”

  “No, Lazar is having trouble getting his hands on them. Lyuba rehid them after she noticed one missing. But Lazar and I have begun piecing it together from fragments Lyuba has told him about her own past, and what my mother had told me. Finally things are beginning to connect! Of course, Lyuba was upset! She was jealous—threatened by my father’s rightful family. I still don’t know how he could have done it, knowing we were waiting for him.”

  There were pieces floating around that I couldn’t connect, and I had a feeling that Rhinehart, with all his emotionalism, was drawing the wrong conclusions. “I thought Lyuba was older than you. Remember that story with the chickens and the tea leaves? How could she have been born after you then, at least six years after—when you were in the U.S.?”

  I sensed resistance from Rhinehart, as if he wanted to attach himself to whatever version of events he and Lazar had already cooked up. The swelling of affection and enthusiasm in his voice reminded me of other impulsive heart-based decisions he’d made in the past. A lot of good Genealogist Gerald did with his mystery books and thick glasses.

  “Perhaps Lyuba fabricated that story or it was something that had been told to her. We’ll know for sure when the letters are translated,” he said. He put his hand around my wrist, lightly exploring the bones with his fingers. We sat listening to the hollow sound of the water lapping against the pay boats, the rustling leaves, the scraping of chairs. Distant music. I was mesmerized by the feel of his fingers, until he took his hand away and signaled to the waiter for the check. “Let’s go back to bed,” he told me.

  • • •

  We stayed in that bed for three days, leaving it only briefly to find food or a shower. Every time it was me that left, Rhinehart would wish me a “speedy return.”

  On the second day, even if he was still supposedly in Ukraine, Rhinehart’s cell phone began to ring. He silenced it. It rang again. He handed it to me, asking me to shut it off. “Here is where I need to be until we decide otherwise.”

  From the angle of the bed I saw part of a red building, one window with an air-conditioning unit, and a very small piece of sky, through which,
sometimes, a cloud would move. This was “my view.” On the other side of the bed, he had his, and we lay back to back and described what we saw. Leaning over the sill, I spoke about the people below, heading in the direction of the park, who they were and where they were going and how they were feeling that day.

  Time became a liquid thing, and sleeping and waking and lovemaking less distinguishable, and I thought of those long couches in Ottoman-era homes, where people lounged and conversed and dozed. I knew afternoon by the pattern of sun on the headboard, the richness of its color. That triangle of light, the sheet grazing my bare back, Rhinehart looking at me, as if his entire self was concentrated into the pinprick of his gaze. Light fell across my toes. His eyes half-shut, he said, “There is lovemaking that feels as if it’s doing tremendous good for everyone.”

  • • •

  We talked. We sat up in bed, eating Malaysian delivery out of cartons. I was reminiscing about my first years in my college town, how I used to walk everywhere, and in every other house someone I knew lived, and I could drop in to have coffee or pancakes or to smoke weed and play Yahtzee on a cold winter afternoon, and then walk home, a sheen on the snow like glass, the pale sun hiding behind the trees. That time now seemed irrecoverable to me, all its pleasures and gratifications bound up with my younger self—also gone. I had loved that town, loved being a student, sitting in an overheated classroom or lying out on the lawn in front, gossiping, watching the guys playing hacky sack. I thought about teaching, once I had done enough shows to get hired at a university, but wondered if I would find standing in front of the classroom as pleasurable as sitting in the back, daydreaming about the night before.

  “Do you ever miss teaching?” I asked Rhinehart. I was cross-legged, naked, facing him, clicking the chopsticks together, and looking out at a sand-colored building, the multiple black-rimmed rectangles of glass that constituted his view.

  His gaze had wandered down between my legs but now he was eyeing me, trying to ascertain where I was going with this. “Sometimes. I enjoyed it, even when I was stomping around like a lunatic to try and engage them. Like Ezra Pound. You know it was capitalism that drove him mad.”

  “I’m sure it had nothing to do with that cage in Italy he was locked up in.”

  “He was a raving fascist before then. Hemingway claimed he was a stand-up fellow, if you trust Papa’s ability to judge character. He mostly liked people who flattered him. At any rate, I was always very conflicted about Pound. I found him difficult to teach, but at his best, he could be a brilliant poet.”

  “That’s all you miss? The difficulty teaching Pound?”

  “Not only. I miss the environment, too. Especially the end of the semester. I enjoyed seeing the library with so many bodies camped out in it. All that thinking and whispering and small movements and the sour smell of unwashed students sneaking bags of chips under their books. How they’d be sleeping across the chairs. Sometimes even under the tables.”

  “I never really used the library.” I couldn’t remember where I studied, actually. It wasn’t in the dorm, with Hallie constantly bugging me and friends stopping in every two minutes.

  “What a serious-looking girl you were. Not studious looking, exactly. Just serious. Serious about the world.”

  “Do you remember the class I took of yours? The spring semester? That I was forced to audit.”

  “Of course I do. You sat in the front row.”

  “I wasn’t always up front. A lot of times I was in the back.”

  “You changed seats midway through the semester to have a better view of anyone I might want to date.” Rhinehart was smiling. “Sometimes when I look at you, I see that young woman with something stuck in her hair from creeping around the yard, bursting into my study to accuse me of cheating.”

  “With Natasha. Were you sleeping with her? I was never entirely convinced you told me the truth back then.”

  “No, no—you invented that. I wasn’t interested in students. They were at a completely different stage of their lives, so sheltered and self-concerned. They didn’t even remind me of myself at that age. The kids I was similar to were the ones working in the dining hall. Especially one girl, who tried to dress up her uniform with hoop earrings and bracelets. It’s so hard to work for people your own age. She was always alone. Used to eat her free sandwich at a table by herself. I tried to slip her a couple of bucks but she wouldn’t take it. She was an honest girl.” He smiled. “Not that I wanted to date her.”

  I didn’t know who Rhinehart was talking about. I didn’t remember anyone who worked at the dining hall. “But you were interested in me.”

  “Who knows where you came from with your old-lady soul—an aberrancy. It’s remarkable that you and I had a relationship. If you remember, I resisted for a long time. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of myself as one of those men.”

  “You were even resistant to get involved recently,” I said.

  “Until I received an ultimatum. I don’t think you’ve ever spoken to me like that before. I sort of liked it.”

  “I’d had enough of the confusion.”

  “I know and I’m sorry. But I would have come back to you anyway. I missed you so much in Ukraine. I was ready to take the risk.”

  “So it wasn’t until Ukraine that you discovered you wanted a relationship with me?”

  He smiled. “No, it was months before.”

  “At Chechna’s, even? Or that night that I came for dinner, and you pushed me off you? You wanted one then?”

  “I didn’t push you off—I was trying to slow things down. You were very quick to take offense. That night could have gone differently.”

  I thought about this. “No. I could sense you were holding back. But why? If you knew you wanted to be with me?”

  “Tatie, you think you’re the only one who has fear?”

  • • •

  Later that night, lying wrapped around each other like cats for warmth, I asked Rhinehart to talk to me about poetry. He was quiet for so long, I said, “Or your other writing. The essay you’re doing about the older workforce in Ukraine.” The topic had shifted slightly after he’d conducted a series of interviews during his trip.

  “That type of writing is different from poetry. There are auxiliary materials to support you, you rev the engine, and you begin. Once you’ve started, you can always return to the material to read it over and get more ideas.”

  “What is poetry like?”

  He rolled away from me, onto his back, considering. “Otherworldly. A poem is a burst, an orgasm—unexpected and closed. It happens, you rework it or you don’t, and that’s it.”

  I thought about photography and that indescribable spiritual feeling that came over me, tracking a vision that had the power to crack the world open like a nut, light streaming from its center. All these experiences, falling in love, making photographs, experiencing God, grouped together for me under the same heading, and were equally elusive, as if I would need an entire lifetime to hunt them down.

  Outside my window the moon had moved to skulk over the top of the building. Rhinehart said, “I stopped writing well after the Pulitzer. I spent two years furiously composing, only to throw most of it away, then more time sitting blankly, looking at the wall, wondering what the point of anything was. That feeling grew into a creeping fear that grew into aversion.”

  “Did Laura know how you felt?” I asked carefully.

  He paused. “Some. We didn’t talk about things like that. She had her gallery and her foundations and I had my work with the NEA, and we were constantly socializing. Poets need solitude and self-governance and downtime to think. At first I didn’t have it, and then I didn’t want it. The network of friends and parties started to feel more rewarding than struggling alone, staring into a gaping cave.”

  I’d never heard him talk this way about poetry, and felt myself resisting the deflated voice he was using. “Did it even bother you that much back then? If it was so gradual, and you were socializi
ng so much? Did you think you’d pick it up again later when you had more time?”

  “No. And it wasn’t gradual. The day I stopped writing was a Wednesday. I was lying on the study couch at the house in Great Neck, waiting for inspiration. At the end of the day, it came down to this, this waiting, except this time there was nothing there. Nothing. No energy even. It was the feeling you have when someone you love has left, and you know they won’t return. I had that feeling, so I stopped. Stopping something is much easier than anyone thinks. It’s the struggle before you give it up that’s difficult.” He rolled over to me again and was tracing the line of my hip where it met the crease of my leg. “The funny thing is that writing always came easy for me, almost too easy. Especially that time when we were together, the words raced forth, so fast and uncontrolled—it felt as if I were constantly saddling steeds.”

  “And now? Are you writing anything?”

  “Scratchings, scribblings, but nothing of substance. No.”

  I wanted to convince him that it would come back, but what did I know? At thirty-five, he had already published three books and was known internationally. Twenty years from now, colleges would still be teaching his poems—there would be dissertations written on him, biographies. Odds were I would never be half as successful. But I still had the illusion of youth and young dreams, strong ambitious visions I’d yet to realize. And I was shooting. The future, for me, seemed limitless.

  He said, “It would take a cataclysmic event to bring it back. Or maybe poetry’s return would be the cataclysmic event. What I write, if I ever do again, will have no resemblance to what I’ve written before.” He smiled valiantly, either for my sake or to punctuate the optimism of his statement. “I hope it’s just rearranging itself in my subconscious somewhere. It feels that way, especially recently. It feels as if now would be the right time for its return.”