The Rest of Us: A Novel (14 page)

“So what did you do earlier?” Hallie asked him. “While we were out?”

“I went for a walk. People they don’t do that here, but I like it still.” He smiled at me. “Even if the cars try and hit me.” He made a little swerving motion with his hands, and I laughed.

Hallie gave me a warning look, as if to say don’t encourage him. “But where did you walk? In which park?”

“That one we went to that other day. By the river.”

“That’s funny. We passed by there. We didn’t see your car.”

His face was turning red, and I became uncomfortable. I didn’t
want to watch him lie. I was also remembering a story he’d told once about an affair he’d had with his roommate’s girlfriend when he was in business school. It had been incredibly difficult, as sometimes the girlfriend would want to stay over with him and so he’d had to put a lock on his door, inventing a “new, very shy” girlfriend for himself to throw his roommate off. All his movements had to be planned in advance, but he and the girl had managed to carry on the relationship for several months without the roommate finding out. At the time, we’d thought the story hysterical, but now it seemed ominous.

“I went to eat something,” he said. “After. I was hungry from all the walking.”

“Where? We have food here.”

“Mi amor, it doesn’t matter. Our friend is here—let us discuss things that she would like to talk about.”

“I’m just asking you where you went. It seems strange that you would go off and eat somewhere by yourself when I’ve heard you say a million times you hate diners and there’s nothing else—”

Adán’s face had grown red down to his neck. “All these questions!”

“Sorry, am I interrupting your Spanish reverie? Should I not talk about our real life here?”

He was shaking his head vigorously, and I was both nervous and fascinated. I’d seen him worked up before, but never this genuinely angry at her.

“I told you I do not like it! And still you persists with these questions, this checking on me, testing, and now—in front of others! What a message to send about us and our home!”

“I’ll go,” I said and already I had stood up. My leaving alarmed Adán, who was saying, “No, no, it was just a storm. It’s passed. Please sit down again. Please continue your visit.” I looked over to Hallie, who was staring frozenly out at the yard.

I asked carefully, “Is everything all right with both of you?”

Hallie turned from the window, her face clouded, still in the middle
of a private argument. She laughed. “Are you afraid we’re going to split up? Adán, tell her we’re not going to split up.”

Adán didn’t deny the possibility. Instead he said, “Terry should be used to all our fire by now.”

I was used to their craziness, but this exchange had been different. Adán offered me another drink, which I refused.

I
’d watched my expectation level rise during the week before dinner at Rhinehart’s and so, partially in self-protection, I asked if I could bring my camera and photograph his bed, if he still had it. He’d once owned an antique mahogany sleigh bed, a formidable piece of furniture, which he’d been very attached to. It was what I’d been envisioning in my new work, the birds circling it, alighting on the footboard.

•  •  •

Meeting me at the door, he said, “I have something for you.” He produced a large black camera bag. “A friend of mine knows a photographer who was looking to let go of this one. It’s in very good shape, he said. Barely used. He has more cameras than one person will ever need, it seems.”

I had unzipped the bag. “But this is a Hasselblad.” And a V-system, a medium-format camera that I’d been wanting for a long time. “This is an expensive camera.”

“Not too expensive.”

“But how did you know I wanted this one?”

“You mentioned it. At Chechna’s. When you talk about equipment, you get a bit technical, but I caught some identifiable phrases.”

“This is too big a gift,” I said. “I can’t accept it.”

“Why don’t you try it out, and if you still feel that way I’ll take it back.”

“It’s such a great camera.” I pointed out the features to Rhinehart,
the top viewfinder, the Zeiss lens, “best lenses ever made. This is a fixed-set lens, eighty millimeter. A very good portrait lens, and versatile.” I handed it to him. “Feel the weight of it.”

He cradled it in his hands. “What’s the crank for?”

“To advance the film,” I said. “You can buy an automatic winder to replace it, but they’ve been making them like this for so many years, it’s tradition.” I took it back from him, smiling. “You even got me film. It’s bigger, six by six square.” I made my fingers into a little box to show him.

“I received a lot of direction.”

“How can I thank you for this? Thank you so much.” I was too stunned, still, to say more.

“I’m happy to do it,” he said.

•  •  •

I wandered off about the apartment, focusing test shots. He was renting a two-bedroom on West 75th near the park, although he said he preferred the East Village. He wanted to buy an apartment in one of those old tenements with the narrow dark hallways and bathtub in the kitchen, but so far he hadn’t been able to find anything he liked. “You’ll have to buy out someone very elderly,” I told him. “Even ten years ago, a lot of those places had already been renovated.”

His current rental, despite its impersonal layout, was stamped with his presence—stacks of books and newspapers in an old firewood box, his Barcelona chairs and braided rugs, the animal sculptures he bought the year he spent in Botswana, fragile bird skeletons, turtle shells, and Long Island beach rocks on shelves, and a heavy Spanish sideboard he’d had as long as I’d known him. Lamps, made out of pottery jugs, cast yellow pools of light on the floor.

He had converted one of the bedrooms into an office with a narrow studio bed for guests. The big college desk from Laura’s house had been replaced with a small oak one with curved legs and little claw feet. It was catty-corner on the room’s windowless side. On the wall above, he’d tacked up a picture of a skier, which looked as if it’d
been ripped from a vintage magazine. The caption read: Downhill Slalom Ukrainian Wins the Gold.

“Why don’t you have any books in here?” An empty bookcase was within arm’s reach, a potted fern on one of the shelves. “Isn’t this your study?”

“They were too seductive so I moved them. I need to focus on genealogy. Otherwise I start reading and can’t stop.” He was unrolling a long off-white scroll of paper like you’d find at an art store. “Foolscap. It’s archival.”

“But I thought the genealogist said he’d just plug everything into the computer.”

“I want to keep a copy for myself—or for one of my younger relatives.”

He had no younger relatives, unless he was referring to this new family of cousins he’d yet to meet. He stood admiring the blank paper with the splay-legged stance of a ship captain charting the route. I stood back and took a couple of quick shots of him.

“Do you need me in the pictures you’re going to take?” he asked.

I smiled. I’d forgotten how much he liked to model. “I don’t think so. I’ll be photographing myself. I have a cable release that should work.”

We went into his bedroom, cleaner than the guest room, with several imposing pieces of furniture, including a large early American dresser with a monogrammed silver tray for his wristwatch. The ceiling fan and dark wood reminded me of Vietnam War movies. In the center of the room was the enormous sleigh bed that I wanted to photograph so badly, probably because it brought back memories of spending hours, entire days, working, lying around, eating Chinese food there. Slovenly. Sloppy with love. The late day sun slanting in through the window, lighting up our naked bodies before slipping to the floor.

He’d left me alone “to work” and gone into the kitchen to prepare dinner. I stripped the bed of its blankets, set up the tripod, and shot two rolls of film as the slatted light was dying through the blinds,
and then afterwards, with a slow shutter speed, once the room had gone partially dark—a disorienting, anxiety-producing time of day when afternoon and evening responsibilities overlapped. Although I was still getting used to it, the camera already felt like mine. I set up lights and shot myself knees up in bed, as the large imaginary birds gathered on the dresser, on the trunk, and flew around the room, spreading their dusty wings. I’d brought a blue cooling filter in an attempt to reproduce the silvery color moonlight sheds.

Afterwards I lay there listening to Rhinehart clattering in the kitchen. On another night he’d made me dinner, he’d picked me up outside my classroom first. I’d been wearing a dress and sneakers. On my wrist was a knotted strip of leather strung with glass beads. We’d cooked steaks in a skillet like my father used to, and sat on the couch after dinner, drinking beer, the dim lamps casting light over his books and pillows. I put my feet up on his lap. I wanted to discuss a reading he’d given, an event I’d looked forward to for weeks. I was trying to convey the odd high of being in the auditorium, the mixture of vulnerability and power at seeing the person you love, who is as familiar as your own body—as a celebrity. I spent most of the time watching the audience as they listened, or scribbled down something he’d said, raising their hands with questions that would impress this man who had, just that morning, rested his head on my trembling thighs. He began rattling off anecdotes about Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke as if he’d just remembered them. Maybe he had. His gaze, moving around, skated over my face, then locked on me in recognition. The exhilaration of being singled out by him.

•  •  •

“All finished?” he asked when I appeared in the kitchen. He was frying Italian sausages with peppers and onions, a dish towel draped over his shoulder.

I sat down. A chipped piece of Brown Brothers pottery held a few daisies, their heads drooping to the table. “Yes.”

“Did it go well?”

“I really love the Hasselblad. Even if I wanted to give it back, I don’t think I could. You’d have to pry it out of my hands.”

I was so touched that he’d given me such a gift, it was making me feel vulnerable around him, even a little sad. Or maybe it was just that after taking pictures, I sometimes felt emptied out, like I no longer belonged to myself. I had to transition back into my own life from the idea I’d been swimming in for the past hour. “It’s strange that I’m shooting myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that. I wonder if these will be any good. I thought so but now I have doubts. Actually, I feel that way about almost everything I’ve been shooting lately.”

“Have you shown your new work to anyone? Gallery owners, curators?”

“No, it’s too early for that. My portfolio isn’t strong enough.”

I thought back to when I first arrived in the city and would visit galleries, my heart skittering around in my throat, pretending to be seriously evaluating the art with my portfolio clutched in my sweaty palms, waiting for the place to clear out so that I could approach the desk. I was dreading, all these years later, of coming up with the same result. The same locked doors and refusals.

“I’m not eager to start showing the work again. Maybe it’s fear. I just find the self-marketing part of things really difficult.”

“That’s the Janus-like nature of making art, I would guess. It doesn’t seem right that something held so closely should be shoved out onto the auction block. It can be a painful process.”

“But there’s no way around it, is there?”

“No. But it helps to focus on what you’re contributing to, as Susan Sontag used to say. You have to love the world enough to fight to be good and then fight to be heard.”

We had finished dinner—a meal he’d prepared for me many times before. Everything in this house was reminding me of the past, causing me to evaluate the gap between then and now, filled with the results of choices I didn’t even know I’d been making, and I said, “What if I don’t have the courage to fight? So many times I think I’ve
done myself and my work a real disservice by being afraid. And yet I can’t help it.”

“You can’t be that afraid. You’re actually working. That’s the only hurdle that matters.”

I shook my head, and he smiled. “You think you have more fears than other people?”

“I’m easily intimidated. You know that.”

He laughed. “No, I don’t.”

•  •  •

We moved into the living room. Rhinehart reached over and turned on the lamp next to the sofa. It was a soft evening, and the air from the open window stirred the loose strands that had fallen from my tied hair, tickling my neck. Almost May already. Rhinehart got up to make me hot chocolate with brandy, which he remembered I liked.

From the kitchen, he called out, “Why don’t you make a list.”

“Of what?”

“Of the things that have intimidated you.” He appeared in the doorway and handed me a notepad that had been sitting on the telescope chair in the corner. “Write down people, too, and their relationship to you. I’ll make my own list of fears so you’re not lonely.”

I made a few lopsided circles on the page, then I wrote my third-grade teacher’s name, a bouncer at a bar who’d caught me smoking pot, a downstairs neighbor who used to complain about the noise when I was just walking around, Hallie’s uncle who’d hired me to do yardwork for him one summer, the guy who owned the laundromat, Laura—I filled two pages with neat columns.

Rhinehart returned, carrying a mug for me and a brandy snifter for himself. I handed him the pad. He put on his reading glasses and peered at it. “Wow.” He pointed to the unnamed man who had mugged me when I was seventeen. “This is understandable.”

Rhinehart was the only person who knew all the details of that story, how I was at a deli getting a sandwich and was so scared when the man came in with a gun, I’d peed on the floor. Right next to the
bread aisle. When I had recounted it for him, breathlessly, in bed, two years after it had happened, I’d felt the incident shrink to the proportions of an anecdote. I had been nineteen, but I’d also been in love—a sweetness that devoured all events, even traumatic ones.

“But nothing happened to me,” I insisted to him now. “I feel like I should be over it.”