The Rest of Us: A Novel (6 page)

Gesturing to Rhinehart’s note, she said, “How come he didn’t just email?”

“I don’t think he has my email address. And he always liked to write by hand, so it makes sense.”

“That so? Since when do you know so much? I hope you’re not getting hung up on him again. I thought we’d seen the last act.”

I’d been behaving oddly enough this afternoon that my boss, Marty, had approached me in that tiny studio crammed with portraits and promotional cardboard displays and an elaborate gold-lettered sign “Photography by Martin” that he had feared would get stolen if he hung it outside, to ask me if I was upset about the raise I’d just received—if I thought it was too low. “You’ve been staring off into space all day,” he said. “You’re reminding me of my Aunt Rosie whenever she was listening to her saints.” I’d been thinking about the deep, open look Rhinehart had given me when he passed me my photograph in the library, how he’d laid his hand on my back instinctively to lead me into the dining room. I had started to think that we could spend time together, just as friends. Maybe, in being around me, he would be reminded of the time he was writing poetry and be inspired. We could go to a reading together. Or to the Lucian Freud show at the Neue Galerie. We both loved the way Freud painted feet, as expressive as a face.

Hallie took my silence as a self-indictment. She had one pointy elbow on the counter and was preparing to lecture me. For someone who claimed to live in the present, she enthusiastically borrowed from more than thirty years of our shared experience to build arguments.

“Even if he is suddenly free that shouldn’t have anything to do with you. Up until recently, you hadn’t seen him in
decades.
”

“It’s been less than that.”

“You haven’t
been
with him since we were in college. I remember. I had box seats to that tragedy.”

There had been many breakups during that spring semester. I’d always gone back with renewed optimism that I’d worked through things by crying. I was prone to unhealthy, near-manic states of jealousy
with him—a pattern that had never been repeated with the same intensity since. Hallie was reminding me of a time, soon after Rhinehart and I had split up, when I suspected him of dating a Russian girl named Natasha. She was in my World Literature and Civilizations class. I sat near her, in whichever seat afforded the best view for spying. She had a much older woman’s way of settling herself into her desk, and her hair always looked unwashed; she used to wear it in a short ponytail, like a gymnast. She wasn’t pretty, but I knew Rhinehart didn’t care about that. In fact, he probably liked the shadowy sideburns and heavy brows—he had once mentioned a preference for hairy girls. Although we’d split up, I still saw him twice a week in the poetry class he taught that I was auditing. I attended, sitting resentfully in back, refusing eye contact. He had pressured me to drop the course, but I was running on a lunatic’s mix of fear and stubbornness, and had refused.

Natasha was also in his poetry class, but not in the same section as me. She was with me in World Lit, though, making it the second most interesting class of the week. I’d show up ten minutes early so I could watch her as she came in. Under her heavy coat, I made out the bulge of her hips. “It’s so warm today,” I said to a girl next to me. “I don’t know how people can still be wearing winter stuff. It’s kind of depressing.” Other days, I’d sit in the desk alongside her and make rapid movements, attempting to catch her attention. She never let her eyes rest on me for more than a split second.

“Paranoid speculation,” Hallie had said. “Give me some proof if you want me to listen to this.”

“All of a sudden he’s really into painting. She’s a painter.” He’d started this before he ended our relationship. Abstract things with triangles. Smeary apparitional figures without any faces.

“So what?” Hallie said. “Maybe he’s with that art professor Hotten. She just got divorced.”

“She’s not his type.” Meaning, Professor Hotten was nothing like me. She had dyed red hair and a flat butt, and wore heavy eyeliner. Her body was shaped like an ant’s, all the bulk in the middle.

“You have to let go,” Hallie said. “I’m starting to think I should be making an appointment for you at the counseling center.”

Two days later I saw Rhinehart and the Russian together. It was pure accident. I’d been shadowing him around campus for weeks, but I wasn’t doing it at that particular moment. I was coming out of Brighton Hall, thinking about whether I should have my hair cut in one of those short, choppy styles that Hallie was pushing me to get. I suspected she just wanted to see how it looked on me before she got it done.

From across the lawn, I saw him. He was listening to something Natasha was saying, his hand on her upper arm. Was he stroking it? He smiled indulgently. Lovingly, almost. I stood there, transfixed, paralyzed by terror, revulsion, and excited vindication, like at a beheading. She was bent over with laughter, her nose grazing his coat. It was this, the graceful movement, the sight of her happy little teeth, like milk teeth, that got me. I’d never seen her smile before. So it was true! My legs, my whole body started vibrating like a struck tuning fork. I ran into the building, down the hallway, and out the double doors behind. Sprinting, I reached the apartment in minutes, sweaty and panting. No one was home. The bright yellow sun poured onto the kitchen floor, where I lay, wailing like a speared animal. Later I locked myself in my room. I stayed in there all night, drinking vodka and crying, looking through old letters Rhinehart had written me—how he’d changed! I fell asleep, the letters underneath me.

It was late afternoon when I went downstairs. Hallie was flipping through a magazine at the kitchen table. She started when she saw me. “Jesus.”

I’d seen myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were swollen like an ornamental goldfish’s. My upper lip was puffy and raw. I hadn’t showered, and my hair was matted in back. I was listless and weak from not eating.

“I didn’t even know you were here.” She sniffed. “You smell like a bar. Have you been drinking in
bed
?” She made me a cheese sandwich, while I sat at the table crying into my folded arms and choking out the
story of Natasha. He was with her! When the entire time I’d just assumed he needed to concentrate on his work. That I was irreplaceable!

“Every woman’s got a story like yours,” she said. “You need to be more proactive. Remember how you said this separation was a good thing?”

“That was before he replaced me. Like I was
nothing.
”

“I’ll invite Rick and Nosh over—those idiots will distract you. Don’t take any bong hits.”

“I wish he knew what this felt like!” I looked up from the table. “Maybe he thinks I don’t care because I haven’t been showing it. Maybe I should ask him to meet me—”

“Oh, no,” Hallie said. “
No.
Believe me—he knows you care. He knows you better than you think. Cry as much as you want but stay away from him.”

She went to the phone. By the time the guys showed up, I was back in my room. They called to me, but I refused to come downstairs.

The next night, after thinking it over, I decided to go to Rhinehart’s house. I waited until Hallie went into the bathroom, and then, my pulse beating wildly, I snuck out. Manic energy carried me all the way to the edge of his lawn. The lights were on, curtain drawn. That’s when I started to have doubts. What if he was in there with her? I ducked over to the garage and peeped in the double-paned window. His car was next to the mower and the gasoline containers. Trampling his ivy, I made my way over to the living room window and peered through the open sliver between the curtains. My breath caught. He was alone, sitting in the armchair in the corner, reading, one pinkie against the wing of his nose, as when he was deep in thought. Relaxed. Peaceful, almost. I was suddenly furious. I tore around to the side door and slammed into the living room.

He jerked, dropping his book. “Tatie! You scared the crap out of me.”

I was unable to move from the doorway. He took off his reading glasses, while I watched his hands.

“You look a little wild. You haven’t come to kill me have you?” He hesitated. “Is that my shirt you have on?”

I hadn’t even thought about my clothes. I was still in the Carhartts
I’d been wearing for several days, and an old shirt of Rhinehart’s. Hoping, in a vague voodoo way, that it would make him long for me.

“I want the things I gave you back,” I blurted out.

“What things?”

“My book of Renaissance paintings.”

“Have you been wandering about in the yard? You have something stuck in your hair, a leaf.”

When he stood up, I instinctively jerked forward to return the hug. He didn’t move, and I stopped mid-motion. I began to sob, taking air in big, gulping breaths.

“Oh, Tatie.”

“I saw you today,” I choked out. “I saw you with someone. On campus.”

“One of my students?”

“It wasn’t just a student! I know who she is.”

I waited for his eyes to shuttle around as he came up with an excuse. His face looked naked without its glasses. But instead he looked at me with something like pity. “You can’t be making yourself ill over this. I get jealous of you, too, but I try and understand that you need to live your life independent of mine.”

My heart surged to hear he was jealous, and to cover it I said, “Fuck that. You have no respect for me.”

“I do, and I’m sensitive to your feelings, trust me.” He sighed. “I sometimes forget how young you are.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s just that these situations feel completely overwhelming before we get better trained in heartache.”

I lost my mother
I wanted to shout at him, what could be a bigger grief than that? But I didn’t want to get us off track. “Natasha’s not even pretty! She smells like cabbage. I can’t believe you!”

My hands over my face, I bent towards him. He didn’t touch me. Instead, he said, almost to himself, “I’d thought you’d held this theory for weeks now.”

“Why? Who’d you hear it from?”

He winced slightly. “Natasha had mentioned that you glare at her. In class. I said that couldn’t be—it’s so unlike you, but I had wondered about it.”

The horror of my situation hit me. They had discussed me! Probably in bed! I started crying again.

Rhinehart patted my tangled hair. I hated myself for letting him. After a while, he said, “Your outfit reminds me of something. Summer, maybe, or backwoods camping. It’s very endearing.”

He led me over to the striped couch and sat me down on the cushion with the squeaky spring. “I’ll get you something to drink. Alcohol probably isn’t a good idea.”

He brought me orange juice in a glass from a set I’d bought him that had been similar to his mother’s long lost ones. “Where did you find these?” he’d said that day, looking as pleased as a little boy.

“Try to calm down,” Rhinehart was saying, and I thought of Hallie back in our snug place, watching a movie on the papasan chair, assuming I was in my room sleeping. Or maybe she’d found me out. She was right. I shouldn’t have come.

I felt a rush of anger. I hated him and was on the verge of saying so, but the thought of it brought on another wave of tears. “You’re such an asshole.”

He let go of me, and I sat down on the couch, still huffing.

He said, “How did we get here, you and me? You never think a relationship will get to this place and then it does. Listen, forget Natasha—”

Even the mention of her name stung. “I can’t forget her. The scene keeps replaying itself in my head over and over.”

“Suspend the movie for minute.”

This gave me a glimmer of hope. “So you’re not seeing her?”

“No. I’m not. You’re the only person I’ve been with since I arrived here. And you are more than enough for one man.”

I squinted at him to see if he was lying.

“But the relationship between us isn’t healthy anymore. Tatie—” He grabbed my knees. “You must see that. You must see how miserable you are with me.”

But I was miserable apart from him, too. That was the problem. I started to say that if we got back together but were more careful, maybe seeing each other only a few times a week, not overdoing it like we usually did.

He was shaking his head. “It’s a trick to think we can change it. Every time it gets worse. It’s excruciating to keep trying. It’s pathological.”

“But I love you,” I said, choking it out. “I never loved anyone as much as I love you. I don’t want to be unhappy with you. Why are we?”

He didn’t say anything, although I knew he had theories. I had theories. He retreated into his work, abandoning me. He made me jealous. I cried all the time and felt inferior. We separated, ostensibly for my good, but he was the one who became more productive, while I skipped class to listen to sad music and write in my journal about him. I didn’t want to discuss these things again. He put his arms around me, and I leaned into his chest and breathed in his cologne, trying to pretend none of what had happened over the past two months had happened at all.

The rest of the evening I remember as a nauseating daze, lying like that for a while, then kissing, then him pulling back, another argument after he said that we’d done the right thing by splitting up and that we needed to move on.

“I just need to feel better,” I said, trying to crawl into his bed. The sheet was too tight, and I had to jerk it back. “I just want to go to sleep and wake up again and feel better.” I wanted him to join me, but he stayed on the other side of the room, arms crossed. Then he left. The light clicked off. I stayed behind, holding myself in his bed.

•  •  •

Hallie remembered this story. She also remembered how, after graduation, suddenly I was interested in moving to New York City with her when originally I’d wanted to go to Seattle. “And then you get here, and he can’t even make time to meet you for a cup of coffee.”

I felt the need to defend our relationship. Its significance. “It’s difficult
when there’s so much emotion and intensity. We were incredibly close.”

“This is what I was afraid of!” she said. “The rewriting of history. You were together for less than a year—and most of the time, you didn’t even seem like you were enjoying yourself! If you’d had a therapist back then, which you should have, she would have told you that you ‘modulated yourself around him.’ ”