The Rest of Us: A Novel (2 page)

“I knew that wasn’t going anywhere,” Hallie said. “You were too much like pals.” Maybe she was right. I hadn’t felt the same type of passion, that soul-bearing intimacy that I’d felt with Rhinehart. Towards the end, I was also beginning to feel some pressure. He had wanted reasonable things, things that most women my age wanted—children, a nice home in the suburbs. I wanted to want those things, too. But I didn’t. Instead I began to feel claustrophobic.

“Terry, you’re coming up on thirty-five. Not a good age to be single.”

I wanted to point out that statistically, in New York, I was likely in the majority, but Hallie had developed a theory. “I think this entire
time, in some subconscious way, you’ve been comparing men to Rhinehart.”

“But I haven’t even been thinking about him. Until recently.”

“I said
subconscious.
You need to have a little ceremony. Write down what you would have said to him if he were alive, a goodbye speech to the relationship, and then bury the piece of paper.”

What would I say? How there existed a time that whenever I saw him, I’d want to touch him affectionately, encouragingly squeeze his arm. That even though he was older than me, I felt that protectiveness. That I still remembered the sweetness of being with him. I hadn’t even been invited to the service. If I did memorialize Rhinehart, I would have to perform some private, self-serving ritual in front of my apartment building. I imagined myself dressed in black, trying to bury a piece of paper with my feelings on it in that strip of dirt between the sidewalk and a tree.

•  •  •

But then, two days later, for the first time in a couple of years, I got out my old Minolta and two rolls of black-and-white film and took the train up to 116th, Columbia University, and stood outside the gates, where I used to linger, hoping to run into him. The camera felt heavy and foreign in my hands. The light fading, I shot the route I had walked, ending up at the bookstore. The bar where I’d once sat and had a beer, looking hopefully out the window, longing to see him, or for a future in which I no longer cared about him as much as I did.

•  •  •

The second part of Hallie’s advice entailed buying new clothes, and then, Internet dating, which I didn’t plan on doing. But I thought she might be right about the shopping, and a couple of weeks later, on impulse, I decided to go into the Bloomingdale’s in SoHo. Once inside, I remembered why I avoided department stores, especially in late November, their atmosphere of repressed panic and desperation,
the overheated crush of people and sale signs and mirrored lights and the heavy, artificial odor that hung over all of it. As a teenager, I would spend several agonizing hours circling the racks clutching the Christmas money my father had pressed into my hand before dropping me off, saying “treat yourself.” I longed for a mother the most then, for her to prevent me from making the mistakes I always made, buying something overpriced and too trendy, so that when it went out of fashion two months later, I’d have to lie to my father when he asked why I wasn’t wearing “the pretty new top.”

After scanning the floor and checking out the price tags, I decided to try my luck elsewhere. I was in the cosmetics department, headed for the doors, when I saw Rhinehart. He was standing in front of the Estée Lauder counter.

My entire body began trembling. I recognized him instinctively, the way I know desire or fear or my own face when passing a mirror. And he looked exactly as I expected him to look, but older than he had been in the obituary photo. His hair had gone completely white and he’d grown a short, academic-looking beard. I was hallucinating. I’d been far more affected by his death than I was able to admit. I willed him to vanish. But he didn’t, and I stood there gaping. When he started to move off, I followed, targeting his wide back, taking in details. His coat was cashmere, expensive. He was carrying three bags, one was awkwardly shaped like it contained electronics. I circled around a counter to get a better angle, but he kept himself half-turned away, as a celebrity would.

I had moved in close enough to smell him, even in this olfactorily confusing place. He wore the same aftershave. Reaching out, I grabbed him as he approached the escalator.

He turned, squinting slightly, and looked at me.

“Tatie!” He dropped the bags and pulled me towards him, kissing me on the face. “How are you!”

I returned the embrace, shyly at first, and then with force. I clung to him for an embarrassing length of time. And then, out of nowhere, I started sobbing. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. As if with other
ears, I heard myself—I sounded like a large drowning mammal. I was wetting the front of his coat, hauling in my breath, conscious of him rubbing the back of my head in a soothing, concerned way. A woman came up and asked if I was all right. “I think I’ve just surprised her,” Rhinehart said. “It’s what she does sometimes. When startled.”

I laughed and began apologizing, trying to disentangle myself. I was fishing around in my pockets for a tissue. Rhinehart was peering into my face, holding it in both his hands so that I couldn’t clean it.

In my defense, I said, “I thought you were dead! I read it . . .”

“I know—it was released by mistake. The paper called it a technical error, by which they mean human. They write these things in advance. But it was pulled the same day. You didn’t see the correction?”

I shook my head, and he said, “Are you all right?”

I nodded, and he let go of me, smiling. “It feels good to know I was mourned.”

Someone bumped me from behind. The bustling shoppers, who had parted to give us space for our scene, had closed back in. He said, “This time of year is awful. My wife makes me participate.”

I sucked in my breath at the mention of her. “I read you and Laura married.” And then, “I didn’t realize you’d kept in contact.”

“We struck up a friendship after I moved here. She was on the board of an arts foundation I was doing work for.”

I bristled in defense of my old self who had been roaming the city looking for him, never imagining he was out dating.

He’d taken my hand in his, turning it palm up, palm down. “And what about you? Not married?”

I shook my head.

“But you’re with someone, I imagine.”

I smiled, but didn’t answer. Rhinehart was squeezing my hand and looking at me intently. “It’s so good to see you. It’s been too many years. Why don’t you come to dinner at our house? We can catch up.”

“That would be nice.” I was starting to get my bearings again. “Are all these gifts for your wife?”

He looked down at the bags forgotten near his leg. “No, no. Some other things. Speakers. Clothes for one of my stepdaughters. She lives in New Hampshire and says she misses wearing city things.” He dug around in his pockets. “Let’s do it on Saturday. Are you free?”

“I believe so.” We exchanged numbers, Rhinehart inputting mine into his BlackBerry, while I scribbled his down on a scrap of paper. He was professing how providential our meeting was.

I had drained my conversational well and suddenly felt shy. “It was definitely unexpected.” We hugged again, and I detached quicker this time. I could feel him watching me as I walked away.

•  •  •

All the way up Broadway, I strode along, my coat open, chest to the wind, as if it were summer. Elated. He was alive! We’d seen each other again after all! It wasn’t until much later, anticipating this dinner, that I began to feel idiotic for making such a scene. I hadn’t even admitted I was single, afraid of how I already looked, sobbing, walking around by myself, as if I’d been mourning not Rhinehart’s death but our breakup all these years. I was also starting to remember things. For example, it hadn’t been fifteen years since we’d spoken. I’d called him when I first arrived in the city to see if he’d like to meet up again, maybe for coffee? He hadn’t returned my call, and I’d been devastated. But I must have gotten over it because I’d written him a letter after I’d heard he’d won the Pulitzer. I was so genuinely pleased to hear the news—I remembered when he was writing those poems! How he struggled!—the letter overflowed with good feeling, run-at-the-mouth honesty, and nostalgia. I parlayed my congratulations into a discussion about our relationship, the force of attraction that I’d found so intense those years ago. I had wanted so badly to be with him, even when we were sitting next to each other it wasn’t enough, having sex wasn’t close enough. I kept that memory-laced letter in my purse for three agonizing days. Instead of throwing it out, as I should have, I’d addressed it in care of his publisher, since I had no idea where he lived, and dropped it in the mail.

I received no response. Instead, a few weeks later, nosing around online, I read about his marriage to Laura. The news was old, but I was so humiliated, it seemed as if the wedding had taken place that morning, right after my letter had arrived. I searched for photos, gasping every time I found one—there they were, standing close, at formal events, fund-raisers. Laura had bright blue eyes, round as marbles and slightly too close together, so that if they were on a dog, you’d think it was a biter. She’d been a condescending and vaguely menacing presence during the time Rhinehart and I were together, and it burned me to know she was with him—this man I had believed was so much like me.

I had met her towards the end of my time with Rhinehart, when a fissure had begun to appear in our relationship. He’d been pressuring me to attend these weekly faculty parties with him, as he thought it would be good for us to “mix,” as he said, not thinking there was anything suspiciously sexual about the term. I didn’t want to. Even though the college turned a blind eye to the relationship, either because he was a visiting professor or because our association dated back to before he’d begun teaching there, it still made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to go to a party and awkwardly try and socialize with my other professors. What I wanted was more time alone with Rhinehart. And for him to come over to 31 Maple Street, Apt. B, the second story of a rickety frame house that I shared with Hallie and three other girls, and have dinner. He said that our apartment—with its half-finished projects from our scrap art class, including a ball of rusty nails and underwear sewn over a chicken-wire frame, our schoolbooks, flip-flops, and full ashtrays everywhere, the
Easy Rider
poster taped over a hole in the plaster, this comfortable, relaxed mess, where I felt most at home—intimidated him. He also said it fascinated him. So I tried to work both angles, describing the environment in alluring detail, while concealing what went on there. Our idea of a good time was taking bong hits and pulling out the batik things or inviting some of the neighborhood guys over to play drug dealer, a largely silent game that involved winking. I swore
my roommates went to other colleges, even though Gertie was in a lecture of his that semester and would return home with detailed accounts of his behavior every Wednesday afternoon at four. Rhinehart was a popular topic of speculation at my house, and they had been harassing me for months to invite him so that they could surround him like the maenads, picking him over with intrusive questions and revealing embarrassing things about me. I wanted Rhinehart to see my life without him, which might add to my mystique, but I didn’t necessarily want him interacting with my roommates. I was waiting for a school break, when the house was empty, to enact my romantic dinner. I had been waiting, it felt like, for a very long time.

We had made a pact, Rhinehart and me, that we would begin trading Thursday night plans. The faculty parties always seemed to happen on Thursday nights, but so did Battle of the Bands at the Chickenbone bar downtown—a date night event I’d been lobbying for for weeks, as it was also something I frequently did without him. He pulled the first Thursday, so I went along to this party, and right in the door, Rhinehart introduced me to a professor in the archaeology department, Dora, a thin-lipped woman with cat eyeglasses in her twenties, too, although late twenties. I was taking an archaeology class that semester and we’d been shown slides of the excavation work she’d done at the Mut Temple Precinct in Egypt. I asked her about the Sakhmet statue she’d reconstructed, how she’d managed to tip it upright without cracking it, and she was walking me through the process—the stone mason packing the statue in sand to protect it from the drill’s vibration, inserting the steel rods, the tense process of lifting it, injecting epoxy into the cracks, and finally coating it with a protective glaze tinted the color of sandstone.

Most of Rhinehart’s friends never knew how to behave with me. They were either embarrassingly girlish, or cold and haughty, probing me with questions without revealing any personal information. Dora was different, and I was incredibly grateful. In fact, the more animated our conversation became, the more I began spinning a fantasy future for us as friends. I liked her eyes. They were a deep and
sympathetic brown, and she held a steady gaze. Mine flickered all over the place when I spoke, out of shyness and this pervasive belief I had that they emitted vulnerability.

She excused herself, and I drifted over to the fireplace, looking for another conversational circle to join. Rhinehart was nowhere in sight. Dora came back into the room, talking to another professor, and I hesitantly approached them. I heard her say, “She’s sweet, you know, but I teach all day—I don’t want to do it at a party.”

Locked in the bathroom, I sat on the edge of the toilet seat, trying not to cry, cursing Rhinehart. And then, as if from my own thoughts, I heard him. He had a deep, sonorous voice that carried well. He had wanted to be a Shakespearean actor once and had even auditioned for a company. He was talking about how I disliked morning radio shows. Out of nearly a year’s worth of material to describe me with, he was highlighting this trivial comment I’d made in the car on the way over.

A woman said, “Well, they are obnoxious.”

Kneeling on the tile, I squinted through a large colonial-reproduction keyhole. I made out the red skirt of his colleague’s wife, Laura, who was supposedly in the middle of a divorce. I’d complimented her on the skirt when I first arrived.