The Rest of Us: A Novel (4 page)

“Either way, perhaps I’m not the best judge,” said Bill. “I find her poems so claustrophobic.”

“I can’t imagine what it took out of him to edit. Being locked up with those poems, going over them repeatedly. He may have run away from her, but she finally got her audience with him.”

“That’s what bothers me—her glorified obsession with abandonment. The atrocity of being in love with someone who isn’t as
feeling
as you are! Who isn’t as
depressed
as you are.”

“ ‘My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall,’ ” Rhinehart said.

“ ‘Zoo Keeper’s Wife’ is an exception. A brilliant poem. It has this terrifying, multiplying energy. The rhino’s open mouth, ‘big as a hospital sink’—what that one line calls up about the stink of hospitals, of sickness and war, and the inadequacy of medicine. Beautiful.”

Jesper said to me, “In a minute the discussion will turn technical and then into an argument. This is when I begin speaking about basketball. Or suggest we go to a game? Or this past summer, every weekend, I said, Let’s take the boat out and drink Budweisers and not talk at all.”

I laughed. “This is common cocktail hour talk for you?”

“It’s all the time. I’m a translator, so sometimes it’s useful. But not on a Saturday night. Are you a poet?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m enjoying listening.” In fact, the pleasure in being around Rhinehart and hearing him talk was intense enough
that I feared it showed on my face, and I turned towards the window. On the other side of the thick pane, the icy moon cast pale light on the lawn. The room had gotten noisier with two parties going on. I listened to Laura’s conversation about arts-focused education and services for lower-income women in Chicago. Her voice was passionate, pitched towards its success.

Rhinehart noticed me peering out into the yard and asked if I’d like to see the garden. We moved into the darkened hallway, and he opened heavy French doors and stepped out onto a shallow balcony. The night had gotten colder, more biting, the sky a deep, penetrating blue. I was conscious of his body, his arm pressed against mine as we leaned over the iron railing like people watching a parade below.

Rhinehart pointed out a reflecting pool wearing a thin skin of ice. Under stark, motionless clouds, I made out the brittle little sticks of an azalea bush, rhododendrons whose leaves had curled up like piroulines. Below me, close enough to touch, was the shaggy beard of an untrimmed yew. I ran my hand over it. The shrubbery of my childhood. It had been a while since I had felt it.

He pointed to a bird feeder, a single pole in the middle of the yard. “We get a variety of wildlife here. It’s not like Queens where pigeons try and pass for mourning doves.”

“You used to be really interested in birds,” I said in a voice that sounded tentative. I’d remembered a period of time he’d been fascinated with the peregrine falcon. He’d spent several weekends with a group researching and tracking them through the marshes of Connecticut. I came along on these trips and spent the afternoons at the inn, reading or studying. He’d come back around four, smelling of salt hay, dead leaves, and we’d make love on top of the white eyelet cover. Now, hidden in the dark, I felt my face flush.

“My idea of nature is not nearly as Emersonian as it used to be, I’m afraid. I’ve adjusted, or maybe just downsized.” From our vantage point, we could see the back addition, the lights on in the kitchen. The house seemed more bullying from this angle.

From the other room, Laura shouted, “Is there a window open? It’s freezing in here!”

Rhinehart closed the door, and we went back into the living room. “It’s so ridiculous,” she was saying. “He acts as if there are still things growing out there.”

•  •  •

So as not to show favoritism I joined Laura’s conversational circle where Dan, the only person in a suit jacket, was resting his hand on the head of a large brass dog as if it were living. He was discussing real estate, the subprime mortgages that were gouging the economy, and the speculators flipping houses who knew nothing about investing. He was considering buying a house in the area, he said, and wanted to know from Laura what she knew about local home sales. “I hear the market has really come down.”

Laura wasn’t interested in the subject, and I got the sense she didn’t care all that much for Dan either. She shrugged. “The prices still seem high to me.”

“But the properties are just sitting there. They aren’t turning over. You see more and more For Sale signs popping up. In other suburban areas, Jersey especially. New housing, and we’re talking big properties here, one-point-three, one-point-five million, sitting vacant.”

I followed along with my expressions, but I was listening instead to Bill complaining to Rhinehart about how many changes
The New Yorker
forced on his last published poem. “You sound like Elizabeth Bishop,” Rhinehart said.

“I don’t have her clout. Or yours. You know they love you. They’re waiting for you to start sending them work again.”

“So I hear. I still publish with them.”

“Nonfiction. And it’s wonderful. But your poems were something else—from the soul’s seat.”

“Bill, please. That’s hyperbolic even for you.”

“It wasn’t me, it was Susan for the
London Review of Books.
Listen, I’m editing a new anthology—we have an unusually good constellation
of contributors, blessed, even: Glück, Pinsky, Billy Collins, Rita Dove. A league of Poet Laureates.”

“I was never Poet Laureate.”

“You would have been if you had a follow-up. Even a mediocre one.”

I had also wondered why he hadn’t. Was it true, as the obituary said, that he’d stopped writing poetry ten years ago? He’d published two collected volumes of poetry after
Midnight, Spring,
but as far as I could tell, nothing new.

“It still amazes me that the Laureate post pays only thirty-five grand,” Rhinehart was saying. “I think the last person to live high off the hog was Nemerov.”

“No one knows what the hell it means, anyway. I had no idea what I was supposed to do that year except brag. But I happened to mention to Bob that I’d talk over the anthology with you, and maybe you’d be willing, if a few others were also on board—”

“You have no claim. Might as well have offered them Monopoly money.”

“I have hope, belief you may give me something,” Bill said. “Just one poem or thirty poems. Or a draft of something. A shopping list.”

“Please, don’t ask me again,” Rhinehart said, his voice strained. “It’s bad enough coming from my agent.”

•  •  •

Melinda, who had a way of pressing her lips together that made her seem slightly neurotic, was asking me about growing up on the East End. I was less musing than usual, sensing an agenda underneath, and soon she had picked up a thread of zoning laws and farmers who were selling off tracts of land to developers who were building cheap summer homes and ruining the natural tranquillity of the area. I could tell she thought she had a sympathetic audience in me, and I didn’t blame her, but my feelings about the subject were complicated. I had lingering childhood prejudices against summer people who provided the structure and market for all this growth and then wanted to disassociate themselves from the results, which
were inevitably going to be mixed. They were often more concerned about the disfigurement of their view than the water table. My father had been forced to sell some of his land for my college tuition. He’d felt so guilty he cried on the day the papers went through.

But to explain all of this would have taken social energy that was going elsewhere. Once I had started talking, Laura had excused herself to check on dinner. I wasn’t entirely sure, but it seemed as if she had been refusing to make eye contact with me. Maybe I’d been staring at her too much.

Rhinehart’s hand was on my shoulder. “Can I show you something, Tatie?”

I felt uncomfortable saying yes, in case Laura objected, but she hadn’t returned. I wondered if she was still in the kitchen. Maybe she was in another room watching TV or talking on the phone, as Hallie had once done in the middle of her own dinner party, because, as she’d said, she was bored.

I followed Rhinehart through the dining room. I was now on my second glass of wine and inclined to look more generously on my surroundings. The house had great artwork—I recognized a piece by Tracey Emin, a snaky line drawing of a woman. Probably Laura’s, unless Rhinehart had started collecting feminist art. We passed through a room with dark baseboards and gold silk wallpaper, reminding me of the inside of a coffin. He moved us along quickly, as if this house and its studied opulence indicated a failing in him.

His study was bare by comparison. It was as if we’d stepped into the servant’s quarters, or into my past. I recognized so many things—the fat Chinese lamp painted with fish, bought during a time he’d been fascinated with Asian art, scrolls with misted mountains and shoots of bamboo, a small brass Buddha. His nicked-up desk resembled the one he’d had in his faculty office. It reminded me of the afternoon he told me he’d accepted a position at Columbia University and would be moving to New York City. We’d been separated but I hadn’t fully accepted that our relationship was over until then. “It
will be strange not to have you nearby,” he said. I had my back to him, looking out the window, where students like myself were passing on their way to class. So many of them. Indistinguishable from each other.

•  •  •

I became conscious of how quiet the room was, just the two of us alone together, and the possibilities of that shared solitude, all the things we used to do with it. I said, “Is this where you’re writing nowadays?”

“I have worked here,” he replied neutrally. “What I wanted to show you was this, although I suppose I could have brought it out—” And he lifted a silver-framed photograph off the wall, a black-and-white of a young woman yelling into the open window of an apartment, the curtain billowing out towards her face. Mine. My building, my photograph. I had taken it with my 35mm and had lost the negative in my move to the city. The woman was in a half-crouch, shouting in anguish and frustration. I took it in both my hands, fascinated, and said, “I’ve all but stopped doing it, you know. I can’t really call myself a photographer anymore.”

Rhinehart sat down heavily, as if this were a matter to be thought over. “I’m not sure it’s that easy to get rid of. You have to remember that only a portion of any artistic life is actually spent creating. The rest is spent absorbing, experiencing other people, getting to know yourself. I take comfort in Franz Wright, who was so riddled with anxieties he was unable to leave his house for two years, and yet he’s said that period of his life was invaluable to his poetry.”

“Does that theory apply if you’ve never really developed your art?”

“When I knew you, you worked very hard. You were the youngest person the jurors had ever selected for that statewide group show. You walked away with several awards. A lot of people had their eyes on you.”

“I was a college student. I’m not sure that work counts.”

“Everything counts if there’s talent and a sense of mission behind
it. Besides, thirty-five is still quite young. If B. B. King can get on stage and perform, you can pick up your camera.”

He’d remembered my age so effortlessly, as if he’d been keeping up with me, too.

He asked, genuinely curious, “Why did you stop?”

I was prepared to deliver the explanation that I’d repeated to myself so many times it had toughened into a little fact. It was just too hard to make it here, and my life upstate where I had local recognition and was giving shows and had a network of professors to encourage me was vastly different from my life in the city where I was working two waitressing jobs and scrambling to pay rent and also carve out time to work on my projects. I had arrived with such crushingly high expectations that seemed so ridiculous to me now. The galleries I was going to with my little portfolio of college prints, Deitch Projects, Gagosian even! It embarrassed me to think about it.

Rhinehart, watching me struggle silently, said, “Let me rephrase—
when
did you stop?”

“For good, probably a couple of years ago. It was around the time my father died. I’m sure that has something to do with it. But I’d struggled for years before that. I just didn’t feel I could make a career of it. I was afraid of continuing to try, I guess.” Rhinehart was saying he was sorry about my father. They hadn’t known each other—I’d kept them apart, fearing my father would disapprove.

I could sense Rhinehart wanting to comfort me, but I was grateful he didn’t. Horribly, I may have begun to cry if I were hugged by him another time.

“I never realized how difficult it would be to start again.” I’d just gotten the contact sheets back from the rolls I’d shot up at Columbia, as well as a roll I’d shot in Tompkins Square Park, near my apartment, the day after I’d run into him. It was dispiriting. There were only two or three decent images—the rest of the rolls looked stale and amateurish and outdated. There had been so many developments in photography recently. I was still shooting like a Photo I student in the
1990s. “New York has to be one of the most exciting cities to shoot in, and everything I’m producing makes it look boring as hell,” I said. “It’s crap what I’m doing now.”

“So you
have
started again,” he said. Smiling, he took the photograph from my hands and hung it back up on the wall. I started to protest that actually I hadn’t, it was just those two days and a lot of complaining about it, and he waved me away. “It feels uncomfortable because it’s new and you care. But you’re going to be too stubborn to stop just because of that. I know you.” He squeezed my arm encouragingly, and I felt sparks. “Welcome back.”

•  •  •

Out again in the hallway, he asked if I had ever managed to spend time on a working nineteenth-century farm.

I laughed. Half-jokingly, I used to talk about moving to Old Beth-page Village and living there for a while. In my imaginings the 1800s houses were empty—there were no tourists poking through them. “I gave that dream up.”