The Rest of Us

by Jessica Lott

  “We need to find you the right collaborator,” Laura said. “Someone with the emotional sensitivity to understand the project, but who has the technical set-building skills for it. The more real the rooms seem, the more fascinating it will be to tour through them. Your audience would be picking up information from tons of details simultaneously. After seeing the family dynamics in the photos, they’d be reconsidering objects that had seemed generic at first.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I want it to be an overall sensory experience.”

  “I wonder if Jen Marshall would be right, or maybe, oh—or D’bay. If he’s still in Brooklyn.”

  “He moved his studio to Woodstock,” the man sitting beside her said. It annoyed me to think he was listening in. He was another photographer. His first question, after we’d been introduced, was where I’d shown.

  “Shame,” Laura said. To me, she lowered her voice. “I’ll dig up his phone number anyway. Maybe just ask him. He’s a sweet person and really exacting technically.”

  Just as we were finishing dinner, my phone rang. I looked down, knowing it would be Rhinehart, although he’d never called to check up on me before. I sent the call to voicemail. Five minutes later, he called again, and I excused myself from the table to answer it.

  “Where are you?” he said. “I was getting concerned.” He didn’t sound concerned. He sounded vaguely accusatory.

  “At a restaurant. Having dinner.”

  “It’s after eleven.”

  I was jammed in a hallway that the servers used and could barely hear him. He asked me when I would be back.

  “I don’t know, maybe in another hour? Should I sleep at my place tonight?”

  “No, no, come here. It’s all right. Did you have a nice time tonight?”

  I saw Laura looking around for me, and I was impatient to get off the phone. “Yes. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  “Okay. Make sure you take a cab.” He kissed the receiver but I’d already taken it away from my ear, and heard him just as I hung up.

  Back at the table, as I was sitting down, Laura said, “Boyfriend jealous?” I froze, staring at her. She seemed so calm.

  Laughing, she said, “Educated guess. Few people would require you to pick up at this hour. I thought it might be that lawyer you were talking about before.”

  Earlier in the evening, we’d passed one of Lawrence’s favorite restaurants, and I’d mentioned we used to go there on Thursday nights. I hadn’t realized Laura was paying attention—she’d been in the middle of emailing. I told her that relationship ended a while ago.

  “Was it serious?”

  “It was, at the time. We had discussed getting married.”

  “It’s so hard for women your age. You have so many requirements in a partner. The late forties woman really is freer, kids are grown, we have money. We’re wiser, or that’s the theory. So you’re coming to the afterparty?”

  I was still rattled by the earlier part of the conversation. “I should really get home. I have to get up early.”

  “Come on,” said Bruce, who ran the gallery. He leaned across the table. “It’s only two blocks from here. An old Russian bathhouse. I’m not even sure it’s legal, but we’ve brought in the booze and the music and converted the pool into a dance floor. It’s going to be wild.”

  • • •

  We went through an unmarked door and down a flight of stairs to reach an enormous underground space, like an enchanted cave, with thousands of tiny yellow bulbs flickering like fireflies. The DJ was excellent—she had a keen sense of the crowd’s mood and the space. I danced and drank way too much and when I shouted at someone for the time, it was past four. I found Laura at the bar with Ryan, who was completely hammered and had both his hands on her hips, swaying. I waved goodbye. She said, “Leaving already?” Back up at street level, weaving slightly on the deserted sidewalk, I hailed a cab, and then, on an impulse that felt deeper than the drunkenness, directed the driver over the Manhattan Bridge, past the snow-covered broken-down cars, the orangey streetlights, the birds circling through the abandoned bell tower of the Guyanese Episcopal Church. My head buzzing, I stumbled up the uneven stairs to my apartment and fell into bed, relieved to be home.

  • • •

  I had texted Rhinehart before I went down into the party, where I had no cell reception, to tell him I would be very late, but for some reason he hadn’t received the message until I went aboveground again. The next morning I had three voicemails he’d left over the course of the night. I felt bad and so didn’t explain myself gracefully over the phone, and Rhinehart didn’t receive my apology gracefully either. He fixated on the time in between my leaving the restaurant and arriving at the party, scolding me for not calling him. When that didn’t work, he tried to make me feel guilty, recounting, in a voice heavy with self-pity, a night of waiting up and worrying. More translators were coming to the house that afternoon, and he had hoped I would be there to help him decide. I was hungover and still in the mind-set of the evening before and wanted, more than anything, to go back to bed. In the past, I had always longed to feel the authentic desire for time apart from him, believing it would make me appear more independent, and therefore, attractive. Now that I did feel it, it made me uncomfortable. I said I had too much work to do on my portfolio today. He couldn’t argue, but he wasn’t as encouraging as he’d been before, and we arrived at a standstill, both hanging up the phone unhappy.

  • • •

  Although Rhinehart later apologized for “being overbearing,” he turned cold every time I said I was going out, and so eventually I stopped telling him. Laura had so many events, and the more people I knew, the more difficult it became to turn them down. We’d fallen in with a group of young artists, all of them successful—I didn’t realize it was possible to make that much money off of art. “The key is in the commercial contracts,” Laura said. “That cross-branding.” We were joined occasionally by middle-aged artists who had work in the Whitney’s and MoMA’s collections, and who recounted lively anecdotes about the East Village art collectives of the 1980s, Club 57, the Fun Gallery where Basquiat and Kenny Scharf got their first solo shows, or even about Miles Davis, when he lived down on Broadway and was making heavily shellacked paintings on burlap. The artists never picked up the tab. Instead it was usually a collector or his business associates from out of town, or one of the young crowd of actors and minor celebrities who seemed to have money to burn, or someone in the even wealthier and more indolent group that followed them.

  Laura and I tended not to discuss anything outside our shared experiences—my personal life seemed largely irrelevant to our relationship, as was hers. Still, I felt it safest to keep both a psychological and physical buffer between her and Rhinehart, so on the nights I went out with her, I slept at my apartment in Brooklyn. It was also a relief not to have to rehash the evening’s events when I came in, smelling of cigarettes and fruit nectar cocktails as Rhinehart lay in bed animated with resentful questions. How to explain it anyway, or what it felt like, the maniacal laughter and intense, intimate conversations about making art, interspersed with mean gossip or anecdotes about Murakami or Peter Beard, the boozy stumble into the street and general obnoxiousness of our famous and recognizable crowd, shuffling into taxis to dance in dark clubs with thumping music and $800 dollar bottle service. “I thought I’d outgrown this years ago,” Laura said. “But suddenly it’s fun again.” I had lived more than ten years in New York, but I had never lived like this.

  • • •

  “I hardly see you anymore,” Rhinehart complained. “It’s as if you’ve moved back over the bridge.” We still spent plenty of time together, I argued, but in truth, I was only staying at his house a few nights a week. More distressing to me was that on the evenings we did spend together, he didn’t even seem to enjoy my company. We had less and less to say to each other, and instead of going out, he preferred to sit in his study and peruse documents. I grew antsy and then angry, and it took a
Herculean effort of patience for me not to check my phone every five minutes to hear what I was missing.

  He had latched on to a new idea. He’d convinced Lazar to apply for a visa to the U.S., and was acting as his sponsor, also offering him a job ostensibly to translate some poems and the essay on the Ukrainian workforce. In preparation for Lazar’s visa interview, Rhinehart had been in contact with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and was mailing a dossier on himself over to Ukraine that was complete with letters of invitation (including those he’d solicited from his agent and his publisher), documents showing his income and detailing his familial relationship with Lazar, including color photographs of him and Lazar together in Ukraine to demonstrate his familiarity with his relation’s economic status. To hear Rhinehart tell it, Lazar was anxious to come to New York, probably high off the glitzy lights-on-Broadway stories Rhinehart had been feeding him.

  The stool and card table were back in the center of the floor with my Meatyard book splayed open to a photograph from the 1950s—a huge sky looking ready to devour the barn and the child standing alongside it. All this meant a translator had yet to be selected. I had missed another round of interviews that Fedir had judged, quite stringently, even getting into a finicky lexical debate with one woman. He’d won. That woman wasn’t called back.

  “Why do you still need a translator if Lazar’s coming?” I said.

  “Different type of work. And I’m not sure Lazar’s going to want to be in all day doing this. He may want to sightsee.”

  “Where’s he going to stay?”

  “Here, of course.” Still beaming with the plan. He was far more excited talking about this potential guest than he ever seemed when I came in the door. “At least initially. If it’s longer, we’ll have to work something out.”

  I was annoyed. “Doesn’t he have school? What about the circus?”

  “He has a break coming up for vacations. They have them in that type of school, too.”

  Something had shifted during the course of their correspondence—Rhinehart was now proud of Lazar’s circus career. There was no more mention of his emerging talent as a poet—the translation idea had been dropped. Instead, Rhinehart began educating me about aerialists, who had the most physically demanding role in the circus, one needing impeccable timing and judgment. You had to have complete control of your body, even as it was coasting through the air. And you had to have acting skills as well, as everything had a story. Even the trapeze, which could articulate a complex narrative of two lovers caught in a betrayal.

  Despite myself, I was curious as to what, specifically, Lazar’s signature moves were. He seemed too tall and gawky to be a gymnast.

  Rhinehart told me, “He’s trained in many forms, which adds to his portfolio. He can do bareback acrobatics, balancing on his head on the trapeze, complicated trampoline maneuvers, which are lead-ups to trapeze work . . .”

  “He can balance on his head on the bar? While it’s swinging?”

  “Well, there’s a cup, but still it’s very difficult. He keeps his arms and legs out for balance. He’s very good. His teacher wrote me, saying he’s one of the best students he’s seen in his career. And he works very hard. Ten hours a day sometimes.” Rhinehart was looking for something, maybe this letter, to show me as proof. I wasn’t interested.

  “How long is he going to stay?”

  “As long as he can get a visa for, Tatie. I’m not going to invite him over here and then send him to an overpriced hotel!”

  “But how long are we talking? Two weeks, a year?” I pictured the three of us cooped up here together and felt suffocated.

  “I can’t answer that! It depends on him, whether he likes it and wants to stay. Whether he can.”

  “But what about school? You’re going to ask him to give up his career for the chance to see a couple of musicals and drink with you down at the pub?”

  Rhinehart turned away from me and said, “We have aerialist programs in the U.S., too.”

  “They can’t be on par with what he’s in now. You said his school was one of the best in the world.”

  “The New York Circus Arts Academy is quite good. And it’s in Queens. I’m going to take him on a campus visit when he comes.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  I picked up a circus book that had been lying on the coffee table, or maybe he’d always had it out and I’d never noticed. On the cover was a top-hatted MC, the mike being lowered into his expectant hands. The dark vertiginous slant of the stadium, the dizzying crisscross of ropes and cables overhead. A dusty circular arena, same format as when a chained lion and bear were pitted against each other. To some of the glossy pages, Rhinehart had attached Post-it notes: “Full-twisting layout salto,” “Clown being used to distract us from equipment getting dismantled.”

  I said, “Are you aware how they treat the animals in the circus? How they abuse them? That’s what I think of first—the smell of piss and misery.”

  “I was going to get us tickets to Ringling Brothers. But now that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” He had his back to me. The conversation was over. “It’s been an exhausting day. Probably be better if you went to Brooklyn tonight.”

  As if I did anything different anymore. As I was unlocking the door, he said, “Maybe I should have done that photo project with you when you asked.”

  It wasn’t so long ago that I believed we’d be able to inspire each other. Rhinehart had always been my model for artistic success, but was that even true anymore? He hadn’t really demonstrated his creativity in years. Once I had that thought I was ashamed of it.

  He turned around in his chair to look at me. “I can’t imagine collaborating now. Can you?”

  • • •

  I was sad when I left his apartment that night. Two days later, I was enraged. How thoroughly unenjoyable all of this was to me—Lazar’s tourist visit, Rhinehart’s inviting me to the circus. The circus! As if this was something I’d be interested in! They wouldn’t even allow me to photograph in there without elaborate permits. Why not invite me for a trip upstate to Dia:Beacon—how many times had I mentioned I wanted to go but didn’t have a car. He didn’t give a shit about what I cared about.

  For Hallie, I spared no details in outlining Rhinehart’s plans for taking me to the circus, the same circus she had wanted to picket three years running because they had elephants and a lion. I was too angry to try and protect him from her judgment, and I ranted for a good twenty minutes. On the other end of the line was dead silence. I thought we’d been disconnected, and said, “Hello?”

  She said, “I don’t blame him. You’ve been running around like a fucking eighteen-year-old away from home for the first time. Are you doing coke?”

  I had actually been tempted to last night. Hallie had an uncanny way of guessing these things. “No,” I said.

  “Well, you sound hopped up. Either high or hungover every time I see you. If I were him, I’d be annoyed, too. I’m annoyed right now, just listening to this.”

  I tried to explain his plan to have Lazar come over here, and how we’d never have any time alone together, and how he was obsessed with Lazar, obsessed with Ukraine, still, and she said, “You act as if all this is new to you. When you’ve been supporting him, giving him lots of feedback and whatever since last summer. And now you’re off around town, and so he’s focusing on this relative. Shit, what man doesn’t withdraw when he’s angry. They all do. I thought you and I had agreed on that.”

  I protested. “I’ve always been there for him! And now when things are actually going well for me, and he’s in a position to support me or at least talk to me about it, he refuses to.”

  “You’re out with his ex-wife! Of course he’s going to avoid that situation. That’s normal. What’s weird is how much time you’re spending with her. There’s a big ball of deceit in that relationship.”

  “Listen to you, as if you’re some kind of prophet, a Buddha now.”

  She handled this ca
lmly, as if speaking to an ignorant person. “And bullshit she doesn’t suspect you have contact with him. She’s just not talking about it because like you, she doesn’t want to end the party. She’s dependent on you—you’re her little buddy, willing to go out every night. And let me ask you something, what kind of woman in her late forties is out partying like this, clubs and whatever, who isn’t a cokehead or going through some midlife crisis.”

  This called up an image of Laura, her sweaty forehead with strands of blond hair stuck to it, hunched over the table, doing a line. Her pupils were so dilated, the blue in her eyes was gone. She was pulling on my arm to tell me something, going too hard to form the words.