I tried to smile. “Enjoy the mlyntsi.”
“Mlyntsi! How did you know that word?” He pulled a strand of hair from my face, letting his fingers drift down to my chin and pause there. “Have you been studying?”
“A little. I was curious.”
“Enjoy your show. Keep your mind open—you don’t know what it will lead to. I’ll come see it as soon as I get back.” He got up and began heading to the security gate. I followed.
“Wait,” I said, and then stood there, breathing shallowly.
He smiled at me but looked confused.
I wanted to tell him I loved him. I didn’t even care if he didn’t feel the same. I wanted him to know. “I just, I just care about you so much.”
I saw the old expression in his face, like the sky changing, clouds passing over the sun. He held my arms. “I’ll be thinking about you, too. I won’t be gone long. Take care of yourself, okay? Promise me.”
He gave my arms a final squeeze before getting on the line for security. When he bent over to untie his shoes, I turned away and walked towards the escalator.
• • •
I missed Rhinehart. I missed hearing him say my name, I missed the night we’d sat in this kitchen together. I missed the way he used to cup the soles of my feet in his palms when I was about to get up off the couch and said, “These pigs don’t want to go to market.”
I’d never been a caretaker for someone’s plants before, and he always claimed I held grievances against indoor vegetation. It was true, in my house growing up, all the plants had been outside, with the exception of a couple African violets. I brought over some clothes so that I could spend a few nights there. But his apartment was strange and vacant without him. I couldn’t decide whether it was better to stay or leave.
Hallie called, and once she heard I was in Manhattan, started pressuring me to go out for cocktails. “Do something normal thirtyish women do. If I were you, I’d take the opportunity to flirt with men my own age.”
On the stereo speaker was a hopeful pot of chrysanthemums. They’d gone spindly, shedding some of their spiky petals. Fall flowers, but fall seemed a long way off. “What if he decides to stay?” I’d been fighting a sinking feeling that once he was there, he’d immediately start putting down roots and not want to return.
“Why would he do that? People want to flee that country.” She paused as if trying to listen through the phone to hear what was happening in the background. “I hope you’re not moping. Crying into his underpants.”
Once, after our breakup, I’d let myself into Rhinehart’s apartment when I knew he’d be at class and spent an hour in his closet, inhaling the sweet scent of his dry-cleaned dress shirts. Later, I’d dumped his hamper out onto the bed and rolled around in the dirty laundry, smelling the cologne he wore when we went out to restaurants, his sour used socks on the mornings he’d get back into bed after a run without showering. I’d made the mistake of telling Hallie this story once when I was drunk.
She was saying to me now, “You should be trying to find someone you can procreate with. What else are we on this earth for?” This from a person who disliked children so much, she refused to baby-sit even back when that’s what everyone our age did.
My other secret fear was that something would happen to Rhinehart. I had been reading a lot about the Colombia-Venezuela hostage negotiations recently. The guerrillas would kidnap someone, usually by hijacking a car that was being driven through a dangerous area, and take him or her to a remote area of the jungle. Once they had the person’s papers, they would create a financial profile—family, job, assets, relative’s assets—and from that they would come up with a ransom figure that was exorbitant, but feasible given the numbers for that particular person. Then they’d contact the kidnapped’s family with a suggested payment plan, as well as instructions for liquidating—sell tío Pedro’s car first, then abuela’s farm to make payment number one. Payments were made on a regular basis and could stretch on for several years, like buying something on layaway.
“What does this have to do with Ukraine?” Hallie said. “It’s not even in the same area of the world. And who do you think they’re going to get this ransom from? You? Even with the exchange rate, it wouldn’t be worth it.”
• • •
Gradually, I began spending nights at his apartment, especially if I had to be at Marty’s early the next morning. I’d been taking more photographs of Rhinehart’s bed, from different angles, for the bird series that I was still obsessed with. In sketching out the idea, it still seemed to be lacking something at the compositional level, so I’d gone back to Renaissance portraiture for help.
I’d grown comfortable at the apartment and left my clothes around. I even finished off his lemon hand cream, which I liked so much I went out to get more, as well as buy a soap dish. He had the bad habit of leaving bars of soap disintegrating on windowsills and counters.
The lotion came from L’Occitane, and I suspected he’d bought it for himself, even though it didn’t seem all that masculine. He could be very particular about scents and complained about Sevilla, the entire city, because of a cheap orange-scented cleanser the majority of restaurants and hotels used. As I was going through the glass doors of the store, a blond woman coming out grabbed my arm. “Terry, right? You’re my husband’s friend. The one that came to dinner at my house.”
Laura. She had lost weight, deepening the lines in her throat and around her eyes, and I hadn’t immediately recognized her.
She quickly maneuvered our initial exchange into a question of whether I’d seen him recently. The way it was phrased made it seem as if she hadn’t. I wanted to be cautious. I sensed an aggressive neediness in her that was reminding me of the addicts that hung around the Catholic ministries building across from my apartment. I told her he’d gone abroad.
She pulled me from the doorway into the store, and I was hit with the scent of lavender, which now seemed ominous.
“Ukraine.” So, he’d told her. “He’s gotten it into his head he’s an immigrant. Ha! He’s only lived in New York his entire life.” She freed my arm, although she kept her eyes on it. Looking at her watch, she said, “It’s only one. Let me take you to lunch.”
This was so intensely something I didn’t want to do that I was overly apologetic in turning her down, professing shopping, then an imaginary evening meeting with a friend. My voice sounded faint and weak. “Thank you, though.”
She was staring at me with those small eyes. “Come on! It’s just lunch.” And before I had processed it, we were out on the street and into a cab, heading uptown. I had the sensation of being shepherded along by the Mafia.
She took me to Le Cirque, which I’d always associated with wealthy out-of-towners and flagrant corporate expense accounts. The place was half-empty, and with the soaring ceilings, and gold fabric draped in a vaguely circus-tent way, and the dizzying red carpet, it seemed desperately vacant.
I was intimidated anyway, and the last thing I felt like doing was eating a hot meal. We took a table by the window, also draped in fabric, and Laura ordered a bottle of prosecco. She was much more at ease here than she’d been in her own home last December. Self-consciously, I touched the small coffee stain on the bottom of my shirt.
She was asking me how he was. I couldn’t figure out the amount of contact she had with him. Far less than me, it seemed, and I hadn’t had much recently. I’d missed the call from him two weeks ago, telling me he’d arrived safely. I checked my email incessantly, and even the mailbox, since I knew he preferred sending letters, but he still hadn’t written. “I believe he’s okay,” I said.
Laura’s gold bracelets clinked against the table as she leaned in to study me. Her skin had a clean, waxy pallor that I attributed to anti-aging cream. She didn’t look friendly, but she didn’t look particularly unfriendly either. More curious than anything, like a bird investigating a crumb on the ground.
“Forgive me for being rude,” she said, “but how old are y
ou?”
“Thirty-five.”
“We met years ago, didn’t we? When I was still married to Charley and you were dating Rudy? I was in my early thirties, and you must have been very young, eighteen or something like that.”
“I was twenty,” I confessed.
She squinted, tapping her index finger on the table. That was Rhinehart’s gesture. “I remember now,” she said. “Jacob Fishburn’s house. He had that colonial that was like a rabbit warren, all the strange little hallways and doors—terrible architecture. I knew we had met then, Rudy always denied it.”
I stiffened. I didn’t want to hear what he had or hadn’t said about me. I doubted she’d filter it to take my feelings into account.
“Maybe it’s seeing you at my own age then that’s brought it back.” She smiled. “But you and I are very different people.”
“Yes. We are.” So different that, sitting here, I wondered at the complex psychology of one man that could find love in both these forms. My instinct was to dismiss her as the aberrancy.
“I think I may have underestimated you, though. The shy, deferential thing. You know Rudy and I aren’t divorced.”
This news settled coldly into my stomach. No, I didn’t know that. “Rhinehart hasn’t discussed your marriage or your separation with me. It’s none of my business.”
Laura made eye contact with the waiter. It was so subtle that until he showed up at my elbow, I’d thought she’d glanced at the door. I ordered the salmon confit, at her suggestion, and she had the lamb. Through my blouse, I fingered the mirrored necklace, directing it at her.
After passing over the menu, she switched moods, or maybe tactics. It was tiring trying to follow her—the game seemed far too complicated for the prize confession she was after. I hadn’t even seen Rhinehart naked in more than a decade.
She said, “I was being a bit misleading. He did put through the papers recently. As if it does me any favors. It’s not like I’ll be getting a big settlement.”
“Oh?” I tried to disguise my relief. So, it wasn’t a lingering attachment to Laura that had been holding him back. Maybe he had wanted to officially be a free man before becoming involved with me. Although that, too, seemed unlikely. In truth, I had no idea what the hell he was thinking, besides that I made a good house-sitter.
She was laughing, I wasn’t sure at what, and the sound seemed to crumble in her mouth. She’d switched to confessional, chummy. “You can’t blame me for being curious. Running into you was just my good fortune. Then again, you ran into him, didn’t you? In a department store. There’s some symmetry to this.” She finished her glass and poured us some more before the waiter could even cross the room. “You haven’t bothered to set me straight about your relationship.”
“That’s because there isn’t one. In the sense you mean.”
She went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “Women make such fools of themselves over men. It’s as if we need to build them up to believe in them, or perhaps in ourselves. Stupid, but inborn.” She put her glass down hard and said, “You know he can be a greedy man, a taker.”
I was mesmerized and wondered if she were mentally ill. Or just drunk? There was a bungled trickiness to this conversation, as if traps were being laid out way in front of me so that I could neatly step around them.
The food had arrived, intricate little portions arranged vertically on a lake of sauce. I was no longer nervous and eating heartily—this was probably the most expensive lunch I’d ever been served.
I did feel the need to contradict her. Rhinehart didn’t care much about money and thought it gave a false sense of security.
“It’s not a priority for him,” she corrected me, “but he’s not afraid of spending it. Anyway, that wasn’t what I was referring to. What he really sucks out of you is something else. Your attention. Your emotions. Your support. He does it while pretending to do nothing at all. To be following his own star. But all the time he asks so much. More than any man I know. He ropes you in, and before you know it, you are only concerned about him, his plans, his life, and your own has slipped away.”
The blood rushed to my face. I pictured my clothes spread out all over Rhinehart’s bedroom. How I’d picked up a photo on his dresser three times this morning, trying to figure out who the two women in it were. I made some vague gesture, indicating my desire to leave the table. She reached out to detain me, and I said, “I don’t want to be having this conversation with you. I’m not enjoying it.”
She was apologetic but didn’t let go of my arm right away. “My daughters tell me I go off the deep end when I start talking about him. Blame the therapy—it makes me share too much. But I didn’t invite you here to bitch. Honestly. Let’s talk about something else.”
My pulse was still racing. It was a bad sign that his ex-wife took this opinion of him, even if she was loose in the head.
“You’re a photographer, aren’t you?” Laura asked.
I nodded.
“Rudy used to have one of your prints in his study. The one of the girl screaming at someone in an apartment building.”
I hadn’t realized Laura had known it was mine. “That’s an older shot.”
“I was always enchanted with it. It’s emotional but it has a sense of mystery. Now that I don’t have it to look at, I miss it.” She cut off a sliver of the blood-red lamb. “Where have you shown?”
I fielded this quickly, figuring she hadn’t seen the current exhibition. I hadn’t even seen it yet. I was too sick on the night of the opening to attend, the flu or maybe some psychologically induced illness brought on by the fear of seeing my work up in public. “I have a couple of pieces in an exhibition at the Hoffman building on 33rd. Race and class in New York.”
“That’s so odd—I saw that show by accident. Which ones were yours?”
I was embarrassed but I described them. A teenager on the subway looking apathetically at her newborn with his heavy head of hair, crying in his stroller. The other, taken in a bar in my neighborhood, was of two big women in fancy dresses and elaborate hairdos, watching the dance floor hopefully.
Laura put her fork down. “Those were good. I couldn’t believe they were even there. A lot of crap in that show, to be honest. I don’t know who the curator was, but to do yet another photography-in-New-York thing, and to include what looked like Pratt freshman work? No wonder no one wants to fund temporary venue shows, indulging whatever garbage someone without any experience thinks is worthy of an audience . . .”
I cringed, but Laura went on eating. “I’d like to see your portfolio,” she said.
I smiled faintly.
She didn’t. “I’m not being coy. I mean to buy something.”
“I’m not adverse to showing it, of course. I just don’t think—”
“Rudy must have told you I collect art. And I love discovering younger artists. I usually go through galleries, but sometimes they’re the ones contacting me to bring them someone new. This isn’t personal. It’s work. Do you have a card?”
I didn’t want to give her one of Marty’s business cards, and the ones I’d ordered for myself over the Internet were thinner stock than I expected and looked cheap, so I didn’t like to give those out either.
“What’s your email?” She reached into her bag and got out her BlackBerry.
I gave it to her, and she said, “I’m sending you my number now. Let’s set it up.” She smiled at me in a way that was almost friendly. “Maybe something productive can come out of this meeting instead of getting into a fight over my husband.”
I noticed that she hadn’t said “ex.”
CHAPTER NINE
Maybe she’s luring you there to kill you,” Hallie said, looking down at the prints that were spread over Rhinehart’s multicolored rugs. I’d lugged a box of them on the subway from Brooklyn several days ago, since I needed Hallie to help me decide.
After Laura called to reiterate her invitation, I had made the colossal mistake of Googling her. Her face showed up
all over the place, being honored at an ArtTable luncheon, in a photo with Gloria Steinem, profile articles in Ms. and Art in America. For years she had owned a gallery in Chelsea, which she’d let go of in favor of private consulting and managing her own collection, much of which had either been loaned or given to MoMA and the Whitney, as well as to Tate Modern and several smaller institutions in Europe. Rhinehart hadn’t mentioned any of this!
When I looked through my prints after, everything seemed art-school-ish, deliberately tendentious in evoking a mood. Why on earth did she want to meet? To complain about Rhinehart some more? Or was this part of an elaborate setup to humiliate me?
Hallie was not helpful. She had spent the first half-hour nosing through Rhinehart’s drawers and closets, calling out whatever she found—“What are these things? They look like mini-condoms”—while I was on my knees, shuffling through the images.
“I always liked this shot,” she said, looking over my shoulder. She was referring to a photograph of herself at seventeen, standing by the road to Montauk in jean cutoffs that were far too short. She had one thin hip thrust out and was pretending to hitchhike, while smoking a cigarette. The sky was big and troubled behind her. It wasn’t something I included in my portfolio.
“You can have that one,” I said. I flipped through contact sheets of photographs I’d taken around the city and some shadowy abstracts at a graveyard upstate. “What if she’s just buying something so she can throw it away?”
“Price it too high. Then she’s the idiot for wasting money.”
I could feel the tension gathering underneath my skin. Except for that initial phone call, I still hadn’t heard from Rhinehart, and it had been almost a month. I’d assumed he’d get in touch while he was away, although he hadn’t said so. I regretted my emotional airport declaration, which had forced him into saying he’d be thinking of me, too. Maybe it had scared him off. Maybe he’d met someone. I’d read an article recently about American businessmen who went there to find wives. The women, beautiful, young, dressed in short spangled skirts, would compete ferociously for these men—men who had trouble even landing a date in the U.S. What would they do for Rhinehart, who was actually famous? I decided to take all my things back to Brooklyn. I shouldn’t have been staying here.
The Rest of Us: A Novel Page 14
