The Rest of Us

by Jessica Lott

  “Do you think you’ll see him again?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever we talk, I get all excited and then two days later I’m miserable. He says he feels the same. With separations, sometimes there’s no solution except just getting by.” She smiled at me. “And I feel good lately. Better than I ever have, Terry. I mean, there are times when I get depressed, but I feel different. It’s hard to explain, it feels so internal.”

  “I can see it,” I said. “I can tell.”

  • • •

  That night, as we were getting into bed, I repeated what Hallie had said about Adán to Rhinehart, who’d been out to dinner with his stepdaughters, drinking port wine, most likely—his special occasion drink. They’d recently reunited. Evidently they’d been upset with him after he and Laura split, which I hadn’t known.

  He said, “Tout passe et s’efface dans l’espace sans trace. It loses the assonance in English, but loosely translated it means ‘everything fades eventually without leaving a trace.’ It’s how I felt tonight, being out with the girls. How much of their lives I get a snippet of, meant to represent the whole. In fact, I think it actually subtracts from what I know of them.”

  I was on my side, facing him, the only position that was comfortable anymore. Lying on my back, I felt as if my insides were being crushed. “Can you spend more time with them?”

  “I would like to, but it’s difficult. It’s not just the distance. They satellite around a different star—they have husbands. They have Laura. I met them as independent adults, living away from home, and so the bond between us isn’t as strong as I’d like.”

  “Sometimes I think the only real family unit is the one you have when you’re a child. The one the baby will have,” I told Rhinehart, who added, “The home we will make for little timothy.”

  The unnamed baby, this little soul, probably the same size as my soul, where did it come from? I was throwing these questions upward to circulate around us. Was the soul newly minted for every life? Or was it slightly worn, a crumpled dollar having made a series of mysterious rounds, impossible to know where it had been. Arriving with a history of lives in a dossier. Having loved others before us. Having already lived and lied and done wrong many times over?

  Rhinehart thought this was a good thing. “When the body is born the soul gets another chance to make everything right, to settle any harm caused by its prior actions. Some religions believe that in each life we are given a set of challenges specific to the individual soul’s path to God.”

  “Do you think we knew this child in its past life?”

  “Probably. I always believed you and I knew each other before.”

  I assumed he meant we were married, or perhaps long-lost lovers who had missed the opportunity to marry, but instead, he said he thought I might have been his brother.

  “Your brother!” I said.

  “Don’t laugh, Tatie. I’m an only child. It’s no accident that you’re an only child, too. The roles we take in each life are just helpful guises.”

  “An older or younger brother?”

  “Around the same age. Maybe even a twin.”

  “Really!” I was flattered.

  He laid his palm on my belly. “And who do you think we were?”

  “I’m not sure I believe in reincarnation.”

  “Ah, the good Presbyterian. I’ve always found reincarnation a greatly reassuring philosophy, although I struggle with the idea of karma. It feels strangely unfair.”

  “But what you feel like to me sometimes is my mother. It’s the emotional attachment, I think, the caring. And also probably this feeling of distance. That no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to be close enough. There is an absence embedded in our relationship.”

  “I think that’s true of most people’s relationships. It’s the distance between what we feel and the reality of another person, who is a collection of his or her own separate feelings and desires.”

  “I miss her. How can I miss someone I never knew? Is that stupid?”

  “You did know her. The baby that was you knew her.”

  “I feel cheated.” Tears ran over my nose onto the pillow. “I’m most worried that because I never had a role model, I won’t know how to be a good mother.”

  With his palm he wiped my face. “I’m in the same boat, but I don’t think it matters. It’s something you do instinctively.”

  “Explain reincarnation to me.” I’d had a flash of an idea that the baby could be my mother, and we could have a chance to know each other again.

  “Some Buddhist traditions use the metaphor of a tree to describe the soul. Just because it has no leaves and isn’t blooming at that moment, doesn’t mean it lacks the potential to bloom. Death is just a dormancy period, as a tree experiences in winter. The flowers are still inside, waiting for the right conditions, like spring, rebirth, to manifest themselves.”

  I pictured the cherry trees in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “And how long does it take before someone gets reincarnated?”

  “There are several different theories on this, but I believe it depends on what type of life you’ve had. How much of a rest you need and how enlightened you are. Some people need less time. When they went looking for the next Dalai Lama, they checked for babies that were born on the day he died.”

  I wondered how much time my mother would need. Would she have needed more than thirty years, or would she have lived a life in between, a short life, and then come back into this one.

  “What do you think you’ll be in your next life?” I asked Rhinehart.

  “A girl, probably, and you?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like to try something different. See what it’s like to live inside a man’s body.”

  “Maybe you’ll be my father, then.”

  I laughed. “Maybe. I just hope we know each other.”

  “I’m sure we will,” he said. “I don’t think we’re done with each other yet.”

  • • •

  My opening was on a Thursday. I walked alongside Rhinehart in a long dress and flats. I’d seen old ladies on the Upper East Side in trendier shoes, but my ankles were swollen, and already I was hobbled by nerves. Rhinehart hailed a cab, and then, either to calm me, or just because it occurred to him, began recounting a story about a boyhood blueberrying trip to Maine, during which he spent all day industriously stripping several bushes of unripe berries. He was under the impression that fruit ripened during shipping to the city. The proprietors had asked his chaperone very nicely that he not return. “I love Maine. The way the tidal flats rise up, changing from mud to lake. The water oozes from the ground, like a great underground spring.”

  I’d been thinking about Laura. Clare had mentioned that she’d be there, and I felt as uncomfortable as I would seeing an old lover. She hadn’t spoken to me since that searing phone conversation months ago. But perhaps, if she was coming, it meant she had forgiven me.

  In the quiet of the cab, the city glittering around us, Rhinehart asked how I was feeling.

  “Excited,” I said. “Part of me just can’t believe this is actually happening. It’s exhilarating, but also sort of odd.” For so long I’ve been the one pushing my work along and now it felt as if it had built up its own momentum and was the one pulling me. “I’m not sure I can live up to the thing I’ve created.”

  “But you don’t have to. Your job is done. For this body of work, anyway. Even if you decided not to come tonight, the photographs would still be hanging there. There would still be a crowd. Wine and cheese on the tables.” He smiled. “In some ways, we’re only a vehicle for the work we do. So it gets produced and then seen.”

  I took his hand. It was warm. “Thank you.”

  “Tonight we’re just partygoers. And I’ve been looking forward to this party all summer. You’re going to love it.”

  • • •

  In my imagination, one of my fear-based imaginings, there was a thready, bored group, awkward silences, and my work on the walls,
gaping nakedly at everyone. But the gallery was packed with a noisy, drinking crowd. There were so many people in there, you couldn’t even see the art. I scanned the faces and recognized several women from the MoMA event, my old neighbor, a few artists I did the show in midtown with, even Marty had come along with Shani, who hugged me, saying, “I am so proud of you. And inspired.” Marty, peering at the photographs, complimented me on my “first-rate” technique. I was soon surrounded by a congratulatory group, and the locus of a lot of heady praise.

  Rhinehart had drifted off. I spotted him studying a photograph that had been taken in his apartment, when Laura appeared, smelling of Chanel No. 5, and bent in to kiss me before I’d even had the chance to focus on her face.

  “Everything is perfect. What a success.”

  In the celebrity glow, I was thanking her for her help and advice, telling her I was sorry for our separation, and that I missed her, which, in the state I was in, seemed true, although in retrospect that period stood out as a time when I was dangerously confused and off-balance. But she had done a lot for me, and I told her so. Although she was saying little, I could tell she was affected by my impetuous feeling talk.

  She looked down at me. “You’re definitely pregnant.”

  “Did you think I wasn’t?”

  She laughed. “There was a period of time when I considered he was lying. I just couldn’t picture it.”

  Behind Laura’s head, Hallie was waving frantically, as if we had planned to meet up here, and she wasn’t sure she’d been spotted. Laura turned her head to look, and I saw Hallie’s eyes light up with interest.

  “I should let you mingle and enjoy your night,” Laura said. She looked as if she was going to put her hand on my stomach, and at the last moment shifted it to my arm instead. “You have no idea how this baby is going to change your life. The best thing I ever did was have those girls. It’s a kind of love that’s unsurpassed.”

  The minute she’d moved off, Hallie was on me with questions. “Was that her? I pictured her so different—older and more uptight. She’s a classy-looking woman.”

  “She can be really graceful sometimes.” It occurred to me that I hadn’t been entirely fair about Laura, even in my own head. Our relationship didn’t seem over, as much as transitioning.

  Hallie was looking around, excited. “You’re a genuine celebrity with these hoity-toity types. You!” She took my arm, and we walked around the room together, stopping in front of the series of the birds—she referred to them individually, by their refuge names.

  On display here, my work felt so divorced from the warm intimacy of the idea, it was as if it had been done by someone else. When I’d been creating them, these photographs seemed to be sparks of what felt like God. Now they were mere shadows, castoffs of a creative process, and I had to look hard to try and see that original light. I was proud of them, but they no longer felt related to me.

  I spent the rest of the evening in a babble of my own talk. I was especially keen on playing career matchmaker, resurrecting that desire I’d first felt at the Guerrilla Girls talk when I’d had so little power—would I experience it differently sitting in the audience today? Channeling Laura, but lacking as much finesse, I introduced some of the collectors to other artists I knew, young women who hadn’t already made their own connections.

  Later in the evening, I saw Rhinehart talking with Laura. They were behind me, and I let my attention drift from the conversation I was having to theirs, the astral redistribution the senses are able to perform. She was congratulating him, rather formally, on the coming child, and he thanked her. Information was exchanged about her daughters. A car one of them had decided to buy. The conversational tenor was one of distant relations, and I wondered if they had ever been close in the way that Rhinehart and I were. I never saw him as much as sensed him, an innate, noncerebral communication like that which animals share. It was a mystery to me that people could do it any differently, choose to combine their lives and yet still behave as if they were co-workers at a job neither of them particularly liked. I knew Laura had felt a lot for Rhinehart, but it was questionable whether her feelings bonded her to him or isolated her. As for Rhinehart, I didn’t know what his love for her had felt like. On some level, I didn’t want to.

  As the gallery was clearing out, and we were assembling a group to go have dinner, Rhinehart came up to me, talking heatedly. “I haven’t seen that woman for years—” He pointed across the room at Mrs. Bainbridge, whom I knew by sight only. “She’s the real deal. A collector like Ileana Sonnabend was. I overheard her talking to the gallery owner, asking who represents you internationally.” He kissed me, running his thumb down the top of my spine. “You’re just glowing, as you should be. I’m so proud of you. I know how hard it was for you to get here—but you crossed a river tonight, and once it’s crossed, you never go back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The 26th of August, a brutally ordinary day, and I was almost thirty weeks pregnant. It had been a muggy afternoon, and I was in the grocery store in front of the dairy case, agonizing about whether to buy the commercial cheddar cheese. I had a craving, and they didn’t have the local, humane kind. I wound up leaving it behind. It was already close to evening when I got home, and the heavy orange sun seemed to be setting inside our apartment. The chair rungs cast long shadows on the floor, like fingers. I was suddenly, foolishly, seized with panic. A tragic dangerous feeling, no reason for it, but I was electrified with nerves. Where Rhinehart usually sat, there was only his shirt, ominously draped over the back of the chair. He was in shadow, like in a Beckett play, drinking. I heard the ice cubes rattle when he took a sip.

  “You should watch the drinking. You’re getting a potbelly.” My voice was full of false cheer.

  “Tatie, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s best I do it all at once.” He cleared his throat, my chest went cold, and I thought, But we’ve been so happy.

  “They’ve discovered a tumor on my liver and believe it’s cancerous.”

  My legs started vibrating, and I thought, if I don’t sit down now I may fall. I found a chair. He didn’t get up. He was talking about how he’d been concerned about his health earlier in the summer, on little evidence, really—he hadn’t had much of an appetite, and had been feeling queasy, but that could have been due to anything, anticipating the baby. He’d gone in for blood work, which had picked up an abnormality, and so he went back for an ultrasound and AFP, the test for a protein that appears in the blood of 80 percent of patients with liver cancer. This was around the time of my art show. He didn’t want to burden me. He felt guilty making doctor’s appointments on the sly, but he was hoping he was just being overly cautious. He was testing clean for hepatitis B and C, which meant the baby and I were okay, and in that swamp of talk I was fishing for something to contradict what he had first said about cancer. To solve it. The ultrasound and blood tests indicated he should get an MRI. He’d just gotten the results that afternoon.

  I didn’t want to hear about the phone call. I didn’t want to see the film. “So what’s next?”

  “A biopsy to test if it’s cancerous. But Tatie, I have to warn you, it doesn’t look good. It’s large, and the MRI is showing other abnormalities. The cancer may have invaded the blood vessels already. It may have already spread.” He began to cry, a large sound that filled up the entire room.

  “You don’t know it’s cancer yet!” I said, coming over to him. “The imaging isn’t perfect on those scans—it could be anything.” I held him. I listened to myself tell him how much treatments have changed. Even if it is cancer, I said, chemotherapy has advanced so much. I sounded rational and convincing, sturdy even, but I was like a skin of ice that wouldn’t be able to support anyone who dared to walk across the lake, thinking it was frozen through.

  He went in to Sloan-Kettering to get a section of the tumor removed. Then we waited for the pathology report. During that time, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight. I followed him from room to room,
even into the bathroom, holding his hand, staring big-eyed and quiet with trembling lips, trying not to cry. His mute, distorted shadow. I needed to concentrate on seeing. I was afraid that once he moved out of my field of vision, he would be lost forever.

  He didn’t look sick, didn’t seem sick. I’d done some research on the Internet—a manic rush of typing, freezing me with fear whenever I hit any mention of death. But also it said many people with liver cancer had pain. I asked him twice if he had pain, a dull ache below the right rib cage that perhaps had traveled to the right shoulder? He said no. Unexplained fevers. No. Well, that was a definite sign. Maybe he wasn’t ill at all. The idea of this being one big, malicious mistake was delightful, like stepping into a bright expanse of field after the terrifying tangle of woods. This was what I got down on my knees and prayed for. That it wasn’t true. I sustained this prayer up until the pathology report came back. Hepatocellular carcinoma, stage IV.

  • • •

  We were in the doctor’s office, a gray-haired, wide-faced man with splayed fingertips smelling slightly of camphor, a caricature of a small-town doctor, and yet a Manhattan oncologist and a personal friend of Rhinehart’s for years, typical that Rhinehart would go to him. I now knew things. I knew about this man’s schooling, for example, and about his job. I knew the liver was the largest organ in the body, weighing over three pounds. It acted as a filter and made bile, greenish in color, which emptied into the intestine. Bile was what gave feces their brown color. I was listening to the doctor say that Rhinehart’s tumor was inoperable because of its size and location. It was actually three tumors, one large, two smaller. One of those was pushing up against the portal vein. Why hadn’t Rhinehart known about this earlier? The liver doesn’t sense pain very well. Only the outside has nerve fibers. It also has a high functional reserve—even an advanced tumor may not alter normal operations or show up on blood tests. The oncologist pointed to a chart done in lurid color-pencil detail. Rhinehart didn’t have cirrhosis, which was a good thing, but irrelevant, as he had developed cancer anyway. There was no good reason he had—he didn’t have a metabolic disease that would have destroyed the liver, making it vulnerable, nor was he a heavy drinker. I thought briefly back to the scotch he’d been drinking that afternoon he’d told me about the MRI results. It was probably his last. The thought took my breath away. I struggled to come back, to listen. There may have been a more extensive history of cancer in his family than he knew. What family didn’t have a history of cancer in it?