The Rest of Us: A Novel (21 page)

I tried to focus but all I could feel was the wetness between my legs. I suspected this lesson was meant to tease me. Sometimes he would do that. “But I get turned on when you touch me here.” I moved his hand to my breast, and then slipped it down between my legs. “That gets me wet.”

“Not so fast. You can train your body to have an orgasm when you’re touched anywhere.” He pressed the back of my neck.

I thought of the part in
Sleepers
when they get in the orgasmatron. I started to tell him this—it was Rhinehart who had introduced me to Woody Allen—which made me start laughing, until finally he gave up on me, and we went at it the typical way. For me, that alone was almost too much fun, an overwhelming series of moods and complex positions, directions, rump slapping, and shouted encouragements. The mossy smells of semen and sweat. And sometimes, I would go somewhere else in my mind, be teleported to a modish living room in London, to the back of a galloping stallion with glistening flanks, then I was the stallion. Afterwards I lay on my back, my breasts sloping to the sides, and smoked a Camel Light, dazed with visions of myself as a great artist. Sunlight on the grass, a glass-walled studio by a river. All mine.

M
onday. I was waiting for Rhinehart outside Customs, empty-handed, without even a purse, my fists thrust in my pockets.

In the swarm of people rushing through the doors I saw him before he saw me—he was in the same jeans he’d left in but he was tan, leaner, unshaven, as if he had spent months trekking across difficult country. He was searching the faces around him, cautiously smiling, and I saw the deep creases under his eyes that appeared when he was overtired. I thought, “how handsome he is,” and went up to him, and before he could focus on me, kissed him on the mouth. He took my face in both his hands and said, “Here you are.” He filled the entire frame, and behind him, distantly, I heard the sounds of the airport, rattling baggage carts and the squeal of taxi brakes, announcements.

He was smiling. “I’m so glad you came.”

“I emailed you to say I would.” I put my arm around his waist, and we walked through the sliding glass doors to the car.

“Yes, but it was so short. I wasn’t sure if you’d change your mind. I became less certain the longer the flight was in the air. I tried to call you during the layover, but I couldn’t reach you.”

“You did?” I looked up at him. “I think I like being the mysterious one.”

“It’s agony putting your feelings out there. I checked my email more in the last two weeks than I have all year.”

I laughed and he kissed me again. “We’re in for it now, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. “But we’re ready.”

I thought I remembered what it had been like to have sex with Rhinehart but I’d gotten everything rearranged. There had been other men in the way, and I had been different back then, inexperienced and shy. Before Rhinehart, there’d been college boys, still in their teens, with awkward, overly wet or hard-lipped ways of kissing. One used to get so excited during sex, it was if he were pumping away on a swing, trying to lift off into the air without me, his head buried in the pillow next to my ear.

Perhaps I had changed. With Lawrence I was always dominant, using tricks Rhinehart had most likely taught me, and which I later incorporated into my routine. How to pulsate the tongue when giving a blow job, or to make a C-curve with my spine while I was on top, so I caught the head of his penis on a ring of slipping muscle, and with an ecstatic squeeze, released it.

But Rhinehart was still the one in control here, although it seemed for a while we were competing until I yielded. His focus, his warm grip on my wrists, turning me over, leading me. How quiet he was, only the sound of his concentration, his breathing. And I was cut loose of any responsibility, free to swim around near the ocean floor. Because he was new to me again, I was watching him, my eyes as big as dinner plates, he said. He had caught me looking and was smiling. His body was different, but not in the way I expected—he just seemed larger, a more solid presence against me. But I didn’t come. Even as I felt him searching his memory for the way to angle me, slightly to the right, hands lifting my pelvis to hit the G-spot. Still I didn’t. On some level I was holding back.

He was languid and serene afterwards, looking over at me. I was high off the entire experience, as if everything in me had been knocked loose, and in a disconnected jumble of talk, I was rattling on about all that had occurred during the months he’d been away—the show, the dirty walls, finally going to see it, people peering at my piece, overheard comments, tangling that up with future photography ideas, circling back to Hallie and her Buddhism, my own ideas about God, rambling, rambling, but still aware, skirting around the
subject of Laura and my meetings with her. I felt, during this stream of talk, an enormous freedom, as if I were running around naked with the sprinkler on.

•  •  •

The next day I was up early. As I started to get out of bed he threw his warm body over mine, while pretending to be asleep. Every time he’d relax into real sleep, I’d start to disentangle myself, and he’d tighten his grip. One eye open.

I struggled, giggling. “I have to go downtown and meet the retoucher on some prints I’m getting done.” I would usually do the retouching myself, but I wasn’t as good as a professional, and these were Laura’s images—I wanted them to be perfect. Once I’d made the break from the seductive warmth of the bed, I was eager to be out in the bright fall morning, to complete the task, be done with it.

When I got out of the shower, he was sitting up, his arms folded behind his head, smiling contentedly like some sort of prince. I laughed. Everything struck me as funny this morning.

“Don’t you have any work to do today?” I said.

“No one knows I’m back in town except you. They think I’m returning next week. It’s like a holiday. Let’s walk in the park together.”

We agreed to meet at 6:30 at Amy’s Bread on Ninth and 46th, where he would be having coffee and reading, and I left, as if flung out into the day. The September sun splashing across the sidewalk, my cotton dress and clinking bracelets, the roar of the bus pulling up—all of this made me happy. The world seemed plastered with my happiness.

•  •  •

The retoucher, Evelyn, worked out of a spare Ikea-furnished office that she shared with her girlfriend, a graphic designer. We had made drum scans of the images; she had already dropped them into Photoshop and was finishing cleaning up the dust and scratches when I arrived. We worked on the two black-and-whites first, adjusting
the gradation and adding a little grain; I wanted her to bring up the contrast on the subway shot. The image of the couple outside the restaurant took longer, as she had to balance the color. I was looking for a more heightened, almost surreal look, and was uncertain how tight I wanted to bring in the crop. We spent over an hour playing with it, and in the end I left a lot of visual material around the couple, so that they seemed, even in the private world of their emotions, to be at the mercy of their environment. I was lost in the images most of the day, although occasionally I’d glance up at the clock, sunlight gathering in my chest.

•  •  •

I was a few minutes late meeting Rhinehart, who was standing outside the café, waiting for me. He handed me a cup of coffee, and we walked up Ninth Avenue against traffic, the late day sun slanting along the buildings. I was watching him out of the corner of my eye—his entire body was infused with mystery. The tailored dark blue shirt he had on that I thought made him look like an intellectual. His rectangular black-rimmed glasses. He’d shaved and been to his stylist, and his white hair was back in its choppy cut. His New York self. Except he had the fascination of a tourist, and we kept stopping so that he could look into the windows of the thrift shop with its dusty clutter of religious icons, or a ground-floor apartment where an overweight man was watching TV, or an English/Spanish insurance company whose rattan chairs and orange-flowered cushions reminded me of the genealogist’s.

We passed a butcher and Rhinehart read “pig’s knuckles” out loud.

“You act as if you’ve never been on this street before.”

“Things seem different when you go away and come back.”

He took my hand, content, and gestured to the apartment on 52nd where he’d lived in the 1980s, when Hell’s Kitchen was a rough neighborhood. “Across the air shaft, there was an abandoned building with squatters, one of whom was trying to communicate with the teenage girl who lived on the floor below me. I was around in the afternoons,
so I was privy to everything. Every day, same time, he’d hold up a sign asking if she wanted to meet by the pay phone. This went on for weeks. The girl—she was probably thirteen or fourteen, a latchkey kid, her dad worked sanitation for the city—she was inviting her friends over to taunt him, and they must have been holding up messages, too. I saw the guy scribble out what he wrote and replace it with ‘Why?’ in big letters.

“I didn’t want to get involved, but things were escalating and I was worried about the girl, so I finally called the cops to see if they could clear out that building. They laughed. No one would come into the neighborhood for something like that. I called again when I saw the guy remove his pants. I suspect the girls were egging him on. She was a scrawny kid, had this long blond hair that always looked unwashed. I used to see her smoking cigarettes behind the building in that hunched-over self-conscious way. Eventually her old man found out. Someone must have tipped him off—I doubt the girl said anything. But he went over there one afternoon with some of his buddies and beat the shit out of the guy. I never saw him after that.”

“Wow. That’s really fucked up.”

“I feel sorry for the girl—this was what she had for fun. Laura grew up like that, in the projects around Coney Island.”

“Laura?”

“Until she was fifteen. Then she moved out to the suburbs to live with her grandmother. She had similar stories, guys hanging around. Most people think I’m crazy, but I believe a lot of them were harmless, really. Alcoholics or just down on their luck.”

I was frozen, wondering if now was the time to reveal I’d seen her. I hesitated and the moment passed.

With the construction and pedestrian detours, it took us a while to get to the park. We arrived as the street lamps were coming on. Above us, the sky was gathering all the light from between the trees. Rhinehart held my hand, and we took the path to the restaurant that overlooked the pond, a chain of small white lightbulbs glowed in the distance, marking the destination. I pictured us as we must have looked from above, two dark little figures winding our way through a
nest of black leaves. We took a table on the water, I pulled on a light sweater, and Rhinehart ordered a bottle of wine.

I was dying to know what happened in Ukraine, but Rhinehart wanted to hear about me first. We were halfway through dinner when he began talking about it, and then he started by telling me about Fedir, whose mother and wife lived two towns over from Lyuba, and who were constantly feuding, jealous of each other. Fedir had to be peacemaker. “He’s a very mild-mannered person and refused to get involved. Instead he would drink heavily. He gets that hazy unfocused look that some drunks get. Even when he was sober, though, he was a terrible driver. We had a black Lada, a little two-door. From a distance, I’d see him coming, it looked like a tick on the countryside. He crashed it twice.”

“Jesus. You should have brought someone else.”

“No, no, I was happy he was there. He’s a very loyal man. He seemed to take Lyuba’s behavior personally and bought me locks for my suitcase. He didn’t trust her after her request for rent money.”

“It’s terrible that someone you hardly know had to protect you from your own cousin.”

“Lyuba’s not my cousin.”

I felt a surge of vindication. “I knew there was something off about this! She’s not even related to you, is she?”

He took a knowing sip from his glass. “She’s my sister.”

“Your sister!” I couldn’t envision Rhinehart with a sibling. “Why didn’t your mother ever say anything?”

“Lyuba wasn’t my mother’s child. She’s my father’s daughter. My half-sister.” He was frowning. “I have a feeling that when my father found out he wasn’t going to be able to join us in the U.S., he started another family with his childhood sweetheart, Marta, who was Lyuba’s mother. It’s unclear. And it’s upsetting. My mother would have been devastated if she’d known. She kept holding out for him to join us and then he died. My poor mother!”

“So those letters your mother wrote weren’t addressed to Marta, then. They were to your father!”

“Not all of them. Marta was evidently a friend of hers, so she was writing to both of them separately. My poor mother!” he said again. “To get duped like that.”

I wasn’t entirely convinced that Rhinehart’s mother hadn’t known her husband had taken up with Marta. Someone, surely, would have tipped her off. “Where is your information coming from? Have you read her letters?”

“No, Lazar is having trouble getting his hands on them. Lyuba rehid them after she noticed one missing. But Lazar and I have begun piecing it together from fragments Lyuba has told him about her own past, and what my mother had told me. Finally things are beginning to connect! Of course, Lyuba was upset! She was
jealous
—threatened by my father’s rightful family. I still don’t know how he could have done it, knowing we were waiting for him.”

There were pieces floating around that
I
couldn’t connect, and I had a feeling that Rhinehart, with all his emotionalism, was drawing the wrong conclusions. “I thought Lyuba was older than you. Remember that story with the chickens and the tea leaves? How could she have been born
after
you then, at least six years after—when you were in the U.S.?”

I sensed resistance from Rhinehart, as if he wanted to attach himself to whatever version of events he and Lazar had already cooked up. The swelling of affection and enthusiasm in his voice reminded me of other impulsive heart-based decisions he’d made in the past. A lot of good Genealogist Gerald did with his mystery books and thick glasses.