The Rest of Us: A Novel

by Lott, Jessica

  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.

  “But that’s not the only reason,” Rhinehart insisted. “It’s because the jockeys are always nasty to the callers. She’s right. Every morning people subject themselves to all sorts of humiliations for our enjoyment. There’s something perverse in it.”

  Laura laughed. “If that’s what she thinks cruelty is, she won’t get very far.” And then, I parsed this sentence in a lower, more flirtatious register. “I suppose you like these little lambs you can corrupt.”

  There was a pause, while my face flamed. “She’s a remarkable young woman,” Rhinehart said. “Hardly a lamb.”

  “You know what I mean. Some people would say you’re afraid of a woman who’s your intellectual equal.”

  “People say all sorts of things. For my own sanity, I ignore them.”

  And that was it! He hadn’t leapt to my defense—told her I was brilliant, talented, an artist. All the things he told me in private! I stood up, the bumpy grouting imprinted on my shins, and stalked out of the bathroom into an empty hallway. Rhinehart was alone in the kitchen, making himself another whiskey and soda. I whispered fiercely in his ear, “I’m going home.” He’d driven. The car keys were in the front pocket of his pants.

  Smiling, he gave me a squeeze. “Oh there you are. I’d wondered where you’d disappeared to.” He looked into my puffy eyes. “Oh, no.”

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “Why?”

  Tight-lipped, I crossed my arms over my chest, my favorite soft light blue sweater. Passing my reflection in the hall mirror earlier, with the two spots of color on my cheeks, I’d felt a part of this chilly spring night—of new, untouched things, like the sticky little buds on the forsythia bush that I’d pinched on my way into the house.

  A beaded gold necklace reached down to my stomach, and Rhinehart extracted it from beneath my folded arms and rolled it between his fingers, saying, “Did I mention how incredibly beautiful you look tonight?”

  “No.” My lip trembled threateningly. “But you said I wasn’t your intellectual equal. Although not to my face.”

  I expected him to be ashamed, to beg my forgiveness. Instead he said, “Here, let me mix you a gin and tonic, even though it’s a little early in the season. And don’t worry, no one will say anything.” He knew I didn’t like to drink in public because I was afraid someone would ask me if I was underage.

  “If you can’t drive me, if your friends prevent you—” My chin was quaking now. “Then give me the keys and I’ll go home by myself.”

  He was touching my wrist, his fingers cool and slightly damp from the glass. “Just tell me what really happened. Not what you imagined happened. I don’t even believe I’m ca
pable of thinking you’re not my equal.”

  “I can’t tell you here,” I whispered, “because you talk too loud, and you’ll make a scene.”

  “You didn’t get groped did you? Then we’ll leave.” One of the Classics professors was a lech. He wouldn’t make eye contact with you on campus, but he’d run his hand down your ass in the café, while pretending to reach for the silverware. He felt free to do this to me, and not to the other students, because I was dating Rhinehart.

  I shook my head.

  “Then what’s got you?” He narrowed his eyes. “Or are you just creating a little smoke because you saw me talking to Dora?”

  “No! I didn’t see that.” I was miserable. “Dora’s meaner than she looks. She’s a smiling hound.”

  “What?” Rhinehart said.

  “ ‘A hound crouched low and smiling,’ ” I quoted. Rhinehart had given me a signed edition of e. e. cummings poetry for my birthday, which I loved, even though he said cummings seemed to have been awarded Poet Laureate of the dormitory.

  He snuck a look at her through the doorway. “You have the most unusual comparisons.”

  “Thanks for setting us up,” I added, nastily. “And I’m serious about leaving. I’ll drive. You’re too drunk. I’ve been insulted.” I reached in his pocket for the keys. “And one of the people insulting me was you.”

  I could tell he was angry, but he put down his glass and gestured towards the bedroom where our coats were. We had to walk single-file down the claustrophobic hallway. Over his shoulder, Rhinehart said, “This was a cocktail party. It was supposed to be fun.”

  I never went to cocktail parties. My friends had parties with a keg outdoors in the dark where it didn’t matter what you did or said, or were wearing, and where you didn’t have to be so fucking careful all the time. You could just relax. My father never had them, with snobbish friends bad-mouthing our country’s foreign aid policies, and throwing around the term “Jesus freaks.” While my mother was still alive, as my father told it, they had quiet dinners at home. They had friends over for coffee and to play cards. He helped her make Christmas ornaments to sell at the church’s harvest fair. My mother’s always sold out first.

  This nearly brought up the tears again. “It isn’t fun, and these people are a lot older than me,” I hissed.

  “Well, so am I.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” I said.

  I went out the front door, with its pretentious beveled glass, not bothering to say goodbye to anyone. On the driveway’s hard, ringing blacktop, I waited for Rhinehart. Above me, the vast sky was as still as a painting, streaked with hopeful tailings of daylight. Where I stood by the locked car, it was already night. My hurt hardened into resentment.

  After what seemed like half an hour, Rhinehart stepped out of the house, a burst of music and laughter behind him. I saw how unappealing I must be, standing alone in the dark, angrily clutching my handbag, shaking with anger and frustration. I was twenty and felt like an embittered woman twice my age.

  Once we were safe in the car, I told him what I’d overheard Laura say. “Is that all?” he said. “You should have emerged from your hiding spot and started a conversation. You missed an opportunity to correct her.” I shook my head. I hadn’t told him the full story, about what Dora had said, as her comment seemed to highlight the real flaw in me—that no matter how I pretended, I was just too young. I didn’t belong there, and Rhinehart should have known I’d be uncomfortable and not pressured me to come.

  • • •

  Over the phone, I related the Bloomingdale’s encounter to Hallie, who’d deliberately misunderstood me, thinking I had experienced an “otherworldly vision.” Even after I corrected her, she leaned heavily on its mystical aspects, and her role in prophetically guiding me to the store.

  “It’s New York,” I said. “People bump into each other.”

  “But right after we had a conversation about it?”

  “Maybe I was more alert to seeing him. We’d probably passed each other before, and I just hadn’t noticed.” Now it seemed strange that I’d never managed to run into him all those months when I’d been trying to.

  She wanted a full account, which she kept interrupting. “Tatie? He still calls you that dog’s name?”

  “It was the name of an old lady on his street, growing up. You were the one who claimed to know a dog with that name.” When I came to the crying part, I hedged, reducing it to a few tears. It still met with disapproving silence.

  “You cry too much,” she took the opportunity to tell me. “Too bad I wasn’t there. He always liked me. He told me I had the facial structure of a 1940s screen star.”

  I remembered that. Afterwards, every time he was in a room, she’d walk in with her head tipped down, eyes wide open in feigned surprise. Then she’d sit on the edge of a chair, light a cigarette, and discuss me as if I were her younger sister.

  As if hitting on a brilliant idea, she said, “You should bring me to this dinner! I’ll protect you from getting too sentimental.”

  Besides the awkwardness of bringing her, instead of a proper date, the entire idea was bad—she would immediately get Rhinehart embroiled in a discussion about the past, and then, being thoroughly entertained by the idea of subterfuge, she’d embroider an outlandish career history for me, have me photographing the Queen or in Afghanistan in the trenches with my camera, when I’d merely asked that she downplay the fact that I was working in a portrait studio, which Rhinehart, who could only see greatness in the people he’d marked for great things, probably wouldn’t care about anyway.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The intervening years had brought Rhinehart to Long Island, to one of a tangle of dark, labyrinthine streets that pooled into cul-de-sacs. His home was now an imposing Federal-style with long narrow windows and black shutters. I parked my Zipcar on the street in front. I hadn’t realized I’d be this nervous. My pulse was racing, my tongue itched with apprehension. It seemed absurd to have come on my own. Along the flagstone walkway, antique carriage lamps sprouted from the ground like mushrooms, lighting my feet as they slowly approached the house.

  Rhinehart opened the door, and internally, I jumped. It was still unreal, seeing him again.

  We stood there, staring at each other. “I’m so pleased you came.” He looked past me to the car. “Are you by yourself?”

  I felt my face getting red. “I, uh, didn’t think—”

  “No, no, it’s wonderful.” He reached out and touched my arm. I could feel, or imagined I could, the warmth of his hand through my coat. “I’ll have less competition for your attention. Come in.”

  I was led down a carpeted hallway flanked with glassed-in bookshelves, Rhinehart in suburban-looking wide-wale corduroys. Two other couples had been invited. “Bill and Jesper are friends of mine. Bill is a poet. Do you remember meeting him years ago?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t get to see him very often. Melinda and Dan are Laura’s friends. She’s hoping they’ll make a contribution to one of her projects. It’s not the most cohesive gathering, but we’ll see how it goes.” He smiled at me with genuine pleasure. “It’s wonderful seeing you again.”

  Inside the vaulted living room, a couple was sitting on an antique white couch. I was still keyed up and making rapid and inaccurate assessments about the crowd: Melinda’s handshake was limp and slightly damp. Dan was someone I wouldn’t be able to recognize on the street tomorrow. He had the polite, blank expression of the men who poured out of the buildings downtown at rush hour. Bill, the poet, gave off the impression of roundness, round black-rimmed glasses, a large stomach covered in a sweater vest with a row of circular buttons. He was short, perhaps five foot five, and beside him, Jesper, who was Swedish, as I learned, appeared even taller than I suspected he was. Laura was absent—my eyes darted towards the ornate velvet curtains, which I assumed hid other rooms.

  When I was introduced to Bill, he remembered me. “How beautiful you’ve become. The la
st time I saw you, you couldn’t have been more than twenty. I gave a reading at your college.” He turned to Jesper. “This was before I met you, love. I had hair then. Shame you never saw it.”

  “Of course!” I said. “Black hair. I do remember.”

  “You were so lovely, like a little wildflower. Very, very shy. I don’t think you said more than five words. And when you asked Rudy a question, you called him by his last name. I remember how charming that was.”

  Jesper began talking about how conservative he’d always found college campuses in the U.S. “So different from what I had imagined when I was watching images on television in the 1970s.” He had an open, likable face and an encouraging way of leaning in towards you when he talked, to bring his height down. He began asking, conversationally, and somewhat circumspectly, how Rhinehart and I were able to get away with our campus romance. “Jes!” Bill said, and I laughed.

  I had the sense that Rhinehart was eavesdropping—he was discreetly standing a few feet away, discussing an eighteenth-century painting with Dan.

  “It was a pretty liberal campus,” I said. “And I wasn’t technically Rhinehart’s student. I audited the one course I took of his.” It had been the spring of my junior year, when our relationship had already begun to fall apart.

  This seemed to satisfy them, and I was relieved. I disliked the chain of questions that Lawrence and other ex-boyfriends had asked: What was it like to be with someone I couldn’t take to college parties? Wasn’t I bored? Did other people stare? Then those “daddy complex” questions I hated. When I dodged those, we’d get back on to the generational difficulties. I couldn’t explain these things. He was just Rhinehart, and inside we had always been the same age.

  But now he did seem older than me, and I wondered how his life could be lived amid all this heavy mahogany and valuable silver. He had always been suspicious of anything too Anglo-Saxon, and during the time I knew him, he never wanted to live with antiques that reminded him of a history of inequity. Great Neck, of all places! A tony suburb of commuters and old ladies. Except for those years upstate with me, he’d spent most of his life in Brooklyn and Queens, amongst the working class, the brick apartment buildings and single-story houses with their wrought iron fences, the men mowing their lawns in their undershirts on Friday evenings, or sitting on their stoops, the Italian delis, the carpet stores, the local butcher, the sidewalks kids drew on with chalk.