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.”
“Who’s Kate?”
“She’s a friend of mine—I have a weird feeling about her and Adán. I don’t like how cozy they are when we go over there. She has so many kids, and he kept picking them up and playing hide-and-seek, and running around and shouting like he was at his own first-grade birthday party. It was a completely different man from the one who agreed I was going to have my tubes tied. And when he talks about her it’s always with this sympathy, how hard it is for her raising the kids alone, and how sad they no longer have their father.”
“How did he die?”
“He didn’t die, he ran off. He’s sailing his yacht somewhere in South America with a twenty-year-old, his former assistant. Sad for the kids, but Kate’s not hurting for money—she seems to have more now than before. So I don’t know why Adán has to take on the weight of it. She looks pretty happy to me.” Hallie leaned closer. “I saw her car in the parking lot, and I pulled over to search it for evidence. Not everything—just the glove compartment, ashtray, those little pockets behind the seats. Not the trunk.”
I disapproved. “Did you find anything?”
“No. But I didn’t have all that much time. She’s an upstater but still, I don’t think she would leave the car unlocked if she was having a crown put in. Last time I cut it too close.”
“How many times have you done this?”
“A couple.”
It was then that I got concerned. When I asked her, half-kidding, if she’d also broken into Kate’s house, she said, “Not yet.”
“But that’s nuts. You shouldn’t be indulging this paranoia.”
She brushed me off, as if my advice was no longer relevant. “I know how to settle it now. I’m going to throw a party. You’re coming. And you can even bring the old man. I’ve invited about thirty people.”
“To dinner?”
“Adán loves big parties. He’s always complaining our house ‘has no life.’ I told him to invite whomever he wanted, people from the company, friends of friends—I drew the line at kids. Anyone above the age of fifteen is fine. The more the better. If I’m going to catch him out doing something, I need a distracting environment where he’ll feel at ease. I even invited Ramón Marles.”
“Ramón from the East Village? You keep in touch with him?”
“No, but he got Adán drunk once. It’s this competitive Latin thing.”
I hesitated. “What exactly do you have planned? Maybe you should just discuss this with him.”
She got angry. “He’s my husband, of course I’ve discussed it. All he does is get pissed and then not speak to me for days. He says I’m trying to remove his balls. Well, fine, if nothing is going on then my plan will turn up nothing and he can have them back and we can all return to normal.”
I let it go, but secretly prayed she’d decide to cancel the idea before then.
• • •
Instead I received an invitation in the mail. We were to show up two Saturdays from now, wearing all white. Appropriate attire required for entry.
I told Rhinehart, who said, “A party! Sounds like fun.”
“No it doesn’t! It sounds dangerous and elaborate. She has some plan to catch her husband having an affair.”
Rhinehart scratched his chin, where he was growing a beard “to amuse the baby.” “Maybe it will turn out to be rather harmless. A big misunderstanding.”
I doubted it. I was seeing this entire situation through the veil of Hallie’s paranoia and general oddness and had a strong feeling the night would end badly. “I just can’t believe Adán would cheat on her.”
“I can. Even Ovid knew you couldn’t find one man in a thousand who believed virtue was its own reward.”
“I hope you’re not referring to yourself. With that new translator who’s been hanging around.”
He had finally found a legitimate translator to work on his books of poetry, an NYU grad student with diluted blue eyes, who always wore the same thing—fitted black pants, white blouse, and black sweater—an archivist’s uniform. She was slim, a little brittle looking, and serious. Her accent was barely discernible, more a slight hiss on the end of some words. They worked for hours together, three times a week, debating language choices—sometimes laughing.
Rhinehart was amused by my jealousy. He liked any emotional evidence he could relate to pregnancy hormones. “Marynia is the furthest thing from being interested in me. She’s engaged to an economics professor at CUNY. They’re getting married this winter. She wants to buy an apartment in Hoboken, but you can’t get much for your money there.”
“You seem to know a lot about her.”
“We can’t talk about poetry the entire time,” he said.
• • •
The closer we got to this dinner party, the more I began to dread it. To distract myself I began shooting at the Botanic Garden, bundles of roses that looked like bouquets. I found if I shot at midday and lit just the flower with a strobe, while underexposing the ambient light with the shutter, I got something that looked like a nineteenth-century Dutch painting. Highly stylized flowers illuminated against a background of midnight. In retouching, Evelyn brought up the whites in the petals, giving the entire image an eerie effect. So I was still thinking about Hallie. Those artfully manipulated arrangements were similar to ones I’d seen at her house.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The night of the party, we were running late. Close to six and Rhinehart was standing in his closet, still in his boxer shorts and socks. He brought out the white pants that I’d pressed, pointing at the crotch accusingly. “I forgot these were pleated! Pleats are too fey for this crowd. I’ll have to wear something else—these white jeans.”
“Those are too casual. It’s supposed to be formal.”
“Or these linen pants, then. I’ll need to iron them.”
“I hope you realize you’re not going there as a single man.” I got up from the couch, where I was sitting in my own white outfit, and followed him into the bedroom.
“I have a young, beautiful, pregnant wife. I need to look deserving.” He insisted on calling me his wife, saying he used it in the “emotional sense.”
I watched him remove the ironing board from the closet where I had just put it back, gently unfold it, and then return for the iron. I was getting increasingly impatient. Hallie had called me three times to tell me not to be late. “Maybe I should go, and you can meet me there,” I said.
This idea was evidently too ridiculous for him to comment on. He continued pressing the pants.
• • •
Rhinehart was behind the wheel and in the mood to reminisce. He was tramping around fondly in what I recalled to be a miserable afternoon, years ago, when he, Hallie, and I wandered around town in an irritable state of indecision, searching for somewhere to have lunch. We couldn’t find the place Rhinehart had suggested, she blamed him for wasting our time with his “memory restaurant,” and the two of them began carp
ing at each other so forcefully that I worried there was sexual tension between them. “If she and I were contemporaries,” Rhinehart was saying now, “she would have scared me out of my wits. Those mischievous eyes! She wouldn’t hesitate to pull a practical joke that would make you look foolish.”
I’d been keeping the two of them apart, not entirely by accident, and the idea of them seeing each other again was making me nervous. I hoped Hallie wouldn’t say anything unkind. Whenever she did, I initially dismissed it, but over time the comment worked on me with its souring strength. I had always depended on her opinion. Rhinehart’s, as well. They both had such a strong and polarizing pull, Hallie and Rhinehart, that I sometimes felt like a moon trying to orbit around two planets.
• • •
Hallie opened the door in a floor-length satin dress in an arresting, liquid red color, like the inside of a pomegranate, that made a V almost to the navel—flapper style—it showed off the delicate bones of her clavicle more than her cleavage, which was minimal. She’d had her hair cut in a glossy black sheet that came to her chin, with a few longer pieces in front. Even though I’d stopped comparing us years ago, next to her tonight, I was a milkmaid, a round-faced girl in a white cotton dress she’d mistakenly thought charming.
“Wow,” Rhinehart said breathlessly, clasping Hallie’s hands. “Look at you. You’ve grown into a beautiful woman.” Which made me cringe—it was something someone’s father would say.
She didn’t seem to notice. “I’ve played it up for the party.” Leaning in to kiss me, she said, “Adán put up a fit because he wanted to wear his black tux. Nearly gave me a heart attack!”
Rhinehart said, “I think a black tux would have been perfect. The two of you set off against all the guests in wh—”
She interrupted in a cooing voice. “Come, I want to show you off. You’re famous in this crowd—they like to think of themselves as intellectuals just because they read The New Yorker. And Adán’s assistant has been dying to meet you. She’s a poet, too, evidently.” She linked his arm. “Terry must still be jealous over us. That’s why she keeps you hidden away.” I started to follow them, and she pointed to the kitchen, as you would to a dog. “Go tell Win to send around another tray of mushroom mousse.” Her look said she was angry I had arrived so late.
The Rest of Us: A Novel Page 24