by Jessica Lott
“Compared to those things, people are rather tame.”
“What type of mental illness?”
“Different types of mania, like Robert Lowell had, where he stripped his clothes off and went down by the river, ‘a man-aping balloon.’ That was probably the fun part, actually, it was the depression that was awful. The type of despair that drugs you, makes you believe you’ll never be happy again. I had it in my twenties, and then again recently before I stopped writing poetry. Actually, I should update this list—I’m more afraid of Alzheimer’s now.” He took back his list, added “Alzheimer’s” and “the absolute cruelty people have the capacity to show to each other, to wildlife, to their land.” And then, “how invisible that cruelty often is.”
“You were depressed? I’ve never seen you like that.”
“It involves sleeping and a lot of negativity.”
“And it was because you stopped writing poetry?” I said carefully.
“It was related. That feeling of ineffectualness. In poetry I had keys that were in tune with something much greater than myself. It gave me a sense of purpose to play them.”
“But if poetry is spiritual work, and it’s been given to you to benefit the world, couldn’t you ask for it back?”
He was swirling the brandy in the bottom of his glass and smiling at me, maybe at my earnestness. He came over and joined me on the couch, pulling me against him, my head now resting on his chest. I smiled involuntarily, with pleasure.
He said, “How much you care. I wish I could give you an answer. Maybe it was never meant to be my life’s mission. Maybe I’ve been pulled off one job so that I can make progress in another. Maybe I’ll write something tomorrow. ‘Seek out the attitude which makes you feel most vitally alive,’ William James said, and so for now, I do my best to concentrate on the present. That myopia has saved me on more than one occasion.”
There was something forced in his voice. Was this truly how he felt or how he most wanted to feel? Behind us, the shade banged with the breeze. It had become night. I had a weird sensation of time suspended before us, stretching out in all directions, like a flat, dark sea, and this couch a little rowboat that we were snugly on, drifting.
I could feel him smile against the top of my head. “You always gave me more credit than I deserve, thinking I’m wise. Little did you know that around you I always felt so boyish. You make me want to shout and misbehave.”
He was running two fingers, very slowly, from the top of my shoulder, down over the ridge of my elbow, to the sensitive hollow of my wrist, and back up. I had my eyes half-closed in pleasure, like a cat. I knew he was watching his hand, my skin respond.
“Is that why you wanted to be with me?” I asked. “Because I made you feel young?”
“It was your adorableness, your insight. Your talent,” he said, his hand drifting to the side of my neck. “Many other things. But love only writes itself down as a reason.”
I felt us getting close to the cliff edge and was very quiet. I could hear his breath going quicker. I turned around and found his face and kissed him. For a blissful moment I wondered why we hadn’t done this earlier. It was so simple. And then, his hand in my hair, he shifted, hesitated, and very gently moved me to the side. The warmth of him was gone. He was now holding my hand in an encouraging, comforting way, like you would for someone who’d just told you a distressing story. “It’s after two,” he said.
I was confused and looked over at the clock, as if the alarm had gone off. “Should I go?”
“To Brooklyn? At this hour?”
But he wasn’t inviting me to spend the night with him. His expression made that clear.
I stood up, the dreaminess draining out through my feet. I felt the room rapidly cooling as both of us retreated from each other.
“There’s a spare bed in the study,” he said. “I’ll put fresh sheets on it.”
I was conscious, internally, of an indignant pricking pain—rejection. Still I lingered, unsure of what to do.
“You’ll be comfortable here, I promise,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll worry about you.”
He led me down the hall and clicked on the light. On his desk, a mess of papers. The roll of foolscap. His movements were quick and nervous as he stripped the mattress, fetched the sheets from the hall closet, returned, made the bed, shuffled some writings around on the desk, then gathered the dirty laundry in a bundle, grasping it to his chest. “This is where I take naps—the air must be rich with unused ideas.”
I stared at the bunched-up sheets in his arms. Neither of us moved.
“Sleep well, sweet,” he said finally, shutting the door with a click, this old-fashioned door with its many layers of paint and its round brass knob. I lay down on the bed, clutching the pillow.
• • •
I woke up at five, in the same position, my face to the ceiling, as if sleep had never happened. I stayed in bed until slivers of light began streaming in from the sides of the window where the shade had curled. Seven.
Rhinehart was already up, shaven and dressed, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice. The hard morning light was on the linoleum. He used to stay in bed until mid-morning, and I’d been thinking I’d go and find him there, and in that more intimate space, we could discuss what had happened the night before.
“Did you sleep okay?” he asked.
I’d had tangled dreams about him. The bed had been hard and narrow and too close to the wall, and throwing my leg out in sleep, I had accidentally kneed the corner of the windowsill and given myself a bruise. “Yes,” I said.
He was reading an art book. “Vasilkivsky,” he said, showing me the cover. “The Cossacks were quite remarkable how they managed to kick the Tartars around. And they did it by mobilizing the peasants, who didn’t want to fight during harvesting or planting.” He pointed to a watery earth-tone painting of a heavily mustached man, resting against his shotgun, staring into the distance, his horse behind him. “I love this picture. Cossack on the Steppe. The pose, the quiet dignity, everything. It’s the Ukrainian equivalent of The Thinker.”
Whatever had transpired between us last night was gone. I poured myself a cup of coffee. “I thought you told me the Cossacks hated the Jews. That they led pogroms against them.”
“In the seventeenth century, yes. Their history was far from spotless—it’s why I won’t have a reproduction of this done.” He flipped through the book. “Here’s the sculpture of Saint Peter in Kiev Square.”
“Why so much Ukraine this morning?”
Rhinehart had gotten up to cook, eggs fried inside slices of bread, the middles torn out.
Watching him at the stove, I felt the heat cascading from my chest, down through my arms. How I could see all these things—his rumpled sweater and drooping khakis, and white hair mussed in the back, and yet have the pieces assemble into something else—a rush of love and desire. I was trying not to react as I’d had in the past whenever he’d withdraw from me, offended and showing it. Maybe he’d just gotten nervous. If I had pushed it last night, I would have succeeded in sleeping with him—I could feel he wanted to, but he probably wasn’t ready for that yet. Maybe I wasn’t ready, either, although looking at him I realized I would have done it anyway, despite the potential emotional cost. But it would have been a mistake. So, instead, I’d let him go at his own pace and not take it personally. Hallie was wrong, I’d changed.
His back still to me, he said. “I’m going there.”
“Going where?”
“Ukraine.” He turned around. “It’s become too difficult to get the answers I need being so far away. I want to talk to Lyuba in person and see my mother’s letters. I’m also contracted with The Atlantic for an essay about the legacy of perestroika.”
I felt betrayed. With all the talking I’d done last night, yammering on about myself, he hadn’t mentioned this at all. Which made me suspicious it wasn’t a short trip. “How long are you going for?”
He slid the eggs
onto a blue flowered plate and brought it over to me. “I’m not sure yet.”
“You’re not going to move there are you?”
To my horror, he hesitated. “It’s where I used to live. I don’t know how I’ll feel when I’m there again. I want to give myself a few months to see.” His speech had slowed down, and he was talking to me as you would to an animal you were afraid might bite you.
“I feel a pull to the place,” he said. “Either that pull will get stronger or it will dissipate. New York, you know, sometimes you stay here because it seems like everyone else does. But it would be nice to have a little house somewhere.”
“I just . . . I had no idea you were thinking this. Of leaving like this. Why didn’t you tell me last night?”
Again, Rhinehart slid his hands over to the middle of the table. They lay there, supplicating. I didn’t want to look into his face and see the guilty sheepish look. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just didn’t seem to fit with anything else.” He hesitated. “I’m not going into exile. I haven’t even booked the tickets yet. It’s just a research trip. One stage of a quest.”
That’s what I was afraid of—the lure of the quest. My eggs getting cold on the plate, I launched into a story of Pizarro’s search for El Dorado, the city of gold. In that bright kitchen, I went on talking about greedy Pizarro, and how the gold probably didn’t even exist, and how he kept on searching and searching, even as they ran out of food. Rhinehart leaving—I couldn’t imagine it. And how foolish I was, thinking I had unlimited time with him, assuming he’d changed and was no longer restless. He could be so selfish. I recalled the hours I’d once spent planning a vacation at a bed-and-breakfast in Nova Scotia just to hear he’d decided to speak at a poetry conference that same weekend. Why had he invited me over here last night? Given me the camera?
I’d gotten around to the part where the convoy had eaten the saddles and were now hacking off part of the horses’ haunches on the trail, letting the blood, and then plastering the wounds up with river clay, when I caught Rhinehart looking at me with a mixture of sympathy and horror. “I researched it for a photo series I was thinking of doing,” I said defensively. “Before he died, Pizarro had a dream that a dragon tore out his heart. The dragon had his own face. The moral is that sometimes you can chase around blindly for something and you aren’t the only one who suffers.”
I felt I’d finally hit on the brilliant, cold truth of us.
From across the table, Rhinehart had taken my hands. “It’s just a trip. No one will get hurt. I promise.”
• • •
I should have left at that point. Spent the day in the Strand, looking for a bargain on the photography books upstairs, poking through Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, gradually unhitching my perception of myself from Rhinehart. He was interviewing a translator today, yet another thing he hadn’t told me, and I wondered what else was going to come out of this mountain of concealment. When he asked me if I wanted to join him, I should have said no, but already I was aware of our time together growing short, and so I said yes.
We were meeting Fedir at Union Square Park at one. The sun was heating up the afternoon, women were out in their sundresses, there was an undercurrent of excitement and restlessness, a warm spring day in New York. I was dressed in yesterday’s black pants and felt hot and anxious, a live wire of dissatisfaction. No matter how well this day went, I would be unhappy.
We sat on a bench by the dog run, Rhinehart looking leisurely in his aviator sunglasses, reminding me of those half-blind men in front of the rest home in Chelsea, playing chess with the nurse calling out the moves. We were early, and Rhinehart was enjoying sitting there, so I went over to the Strand without him. But I was overly conscious of the time and left empty-handed. When I got back to the park, Rhinehart was talking to someone on a neighboring bench—he talked to everyone. Passing a homeless person, he would ask him where he was from, or what he used to do for a living. Once, many years ago upstate, he had invited two local vagrants into a bar to talk about New York City in the 1960s. They were loudly discussing the Mets and a place called Andy’s Coffee Shop that no longer existed. Rhinehart offered to put one of them, Frank, up for the night, but he’d refused. They sat there drinking for another hour, Rhinehart buying the rounds.
Out on the street, I chastised Rhinehart for enabling Frank’s alcoholism. “If you really care about him, why don’t you get him into a shelter, AA, or something?”
Rhinehart said, “That man’s been living on the street for close to fifty years—it’s his choice. He wouldn’t even take me up on my offer of a bed. No need to worry.” This last part was said for my benefit. He often quoted Auden to me, “In headaches and worry, vaguely life slips away,” as if I were the only one to whom this applied.
• • •
There was something strange about the conversation Rhinehart was having with the man in the green army jacket and cap, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until I got closer and saw that they were talking simultaneously, as if they were reciting lines from a play. Rhinehart was gazing in the direction of 16th Street, while the other man was staring down at his shoe.
Rhinehart waved as he saw me approach. Was this the translator? He was much younger than I’d imagined, seemed to be in his twenties. He had slightly concave shoulders, as if he hadn’t quite grown into his frame yet, and a spotty complexion. Something about his face, the cruel, thin lips maybe, instantly reminded me of my long-dead great-uncle, who had once called me a piglet when I’d reached across the table to get a roll from the bread basket.
Rhinehart slapped the man on the back, as if they’d been friends forever. “This is Fedir. He’s going to be my guide to Ukraine.”
Fedir grinned and enthusiastically shook my hand so maybe the cruel mouth was an accident. Rhinehart, who most likely had already decided where we were going for lunch, said, “Let’s just wander along and see what we find.”
On the street, Fedir lagged behind half a step. I slowed down so that he could walk beside us. Every time I slowed, he slowed.
Rhinehart took my elbow. “Don’t worry about him.”
Behind us, Fedir said something.
I turned around. “Excuse me?”
Fedir looked down at the ground, and repeated it. He was mumbling, but I caught the word “idiot.” I stopped dead under the construction overhang, so that people had to squeeze around us. The traffic roared past on 14th Street.
“What did you just say?”
Rhinehart said, “It’s Ukrainian, Tatie. He’s translating.” Half a beat later, Fedir clamored in gruffly. Rhinehart raised his own voice, so he was practically shouting. “It’s so that I can get accustomed to hearing the language again. I remember some words from when I was younger, but I’ve forgotten most of it.”
“He’s translating everything?”
“Yes.”
I turned back to Fedir, who met my eyes and said, “Tak.”
• • •
Rhinehart had chosen his favorite overpriced deli restaurant on Second Avenue, which he claimed was his favorite.
While Fedir was over at the coat rack, carefully hanging up his jacket, Rhinehart whispered, “I haven’t quite got him figured out. He’s a circumspect man. Ukrainians tend to be rather open but he—”
“That’s going to drive me crazy, you know. That constant talking.”
He frowned. “I keep tuning it out, unconsciously. A bad habit. Comes from living in the city.”
“Everyone within three blocks can hear him. Do you know how loud he is?”
He opened the menu and glanced through it, even though, as he said, he’d been coming here for more than twenty years. Fedir returned from the restroom and slid into Rhinehart’s side of the booth, so I was looking at both of them. He was very tall. His beanstalk legs extended into the aisle.
The waitress appeared, a cute blonde, younger than me, who’d done her hair in a bouffant that made her look both retro and stylish. She greeted Rhineha
rt warmly, calling him Rudy.
He asked what was good today and then ordered the pastrami. I suspected the portions were enormous, and I offered to split it, but he waved me away. I looked for something small and light and settled for a Caesar salad. Fedir pointed to the matzo ball soup, which made me wonder if he’d been able to read the menu.
I excused myself to go to the bathroom, but the women’s room had an “out of order” sign. I didn’t have to go that badly, but still it was annoying. I had wanted to go to one of the cute little French bistros along the way. Walking by, I was envious of the couples sitting in the warm light inside. Rhinehart said he preferred no European to fake European, and since 1992 it had bothered him that Starbucks had the audacity to sully the Italian espresso culture with its use of the word “venti.” He always did that, annexed one grievance to another to build a case. What was I doing here, not even his lover—a resentful sidekick, another stray he’d picked up, like Frank.
When I returned to the table, Rhinehart said, “So quick?”
I took a sip of coffee that had appeared even though I hadn’t asked for it. “The ladies’ room is broken,” I informed him.
“So use the men’s. They’re single-person restrooms.”
“I don’t like the men’s room.” I glanced at Fedir, who grinned—it had sounded like he was translating me in a slightly higher-pitched voice.
“So what are you going to do then?” After another minute, Fedir grumblingly stopped. They both sat looking at me.
“Why do you need to be worried about it? It has nothing to do with you. Worry about yourself.”
I could tell he was miffed. He said stiffly, “You shouldn’t let your fears restrict you.”
It annoyed me how he was echoing my language from last night. “It’s not a fear, it’s a preference! Last I knew, you wouldn’t go into drugstores!”
“That’s an ideological stance. There are too many of them, one on every corner—it’s an indicator of how we’re being railroaded into pharmacology. They used to serve ice cream sodas and headache medicine.”
“You’d feel differently if you actually had a medical condition that needed treatment.” I looked across the street. Inside the Chinese restaurant, one of the cooks was slumped in the window, his uniform creased against the glass. I identified with the silent defeat in his posture.