The Rest of Us: A Novel (23 page)

He handed me several others. Lazar on the side of the road. Lazar near an ox cart. Lazar in front of a cottage. Shot after shot was of Lazar. The boy was very tall. In each he stood by himself, arms hanging limply from the sockets, waiting to be photographed. There was something very confident and slightly sexual about his gaze, which was at odds with the self-conscious impression his body made. They were magnetic, those eyes with their heavy brows. On the distance shots, you couldn’t see it, but up close—there it was. Rhinehart was staring at the one of Lazar with the cart, taken from at least six feet away. “He has those big, feeling eyes. And he tilts his head exactly like I do.”

There were very few photos of Lyuba. In the clearest one, she stood with one hand on her lower back, squinting into the sun, her face partially averted. An undernourished dog stood nearby. She bore a slight resemblance to Rhinehart in the wide bridge of her nose. I pointed it out, and Rhinehart took the photo and scrutinized it. There were a few pictures of the town, but not many.

I noticed, above the sideboard, that he’d hung a new picture—a circus performer with an elaborate jeweled headpiece and delicate
white slippers in the precarious act of walking across a tightrope. I commented on it, and Rhinehart, who was writing something in his loopy scrawl, said, “That’s what Lazar does now.”

“He joined the circus?”

“He’s in the circus
school,
” he corrected me. “In Kiev. Although he has doubts about it. His mother probably thinks it’s a cash cow.”

“What’s he going to do there?”

“High wire, flying trapeze work.” Rhinehart frowned. “Already he’s being pushed into partnering with the aerial tissues girl. It’s worse than having a wife.”

“From what I’ve heard it can be a pretty prestigious profession in Eastern Europe. Like acting here. Those schools are hard to get into.”

“I suspect because he won a couple of local competitions, he now feels it’s the only thing he’s good at. But he’s a wonderful poet. And he’s still young. He shouldn’t feel pressured to choose yet.”

I was starting to wonder whether Rhinehart was the one exerting pressure. He liked to mentor. At my college, he’d had a student following; he even had a fan club of young intellectuals, mostly male writers, that would get together at a local pub off-hours and discuss his poetry, along with the poetry of Merrill, Walcott, Wright, and Pinsky. He would often drop in for the discussion and to help some of the students find writing residencies or with connections in publishing.

On the table was a list of Ukrainian names bisected by lines. Lazar’s was included. “You’re making charts again?” I asked.

“I’m still interested in genealogy.” He patted my butt. “Now get up. That’s the translator’s stool.” He shook his wrist and looked at his watch. “She’s already five minutes late.”

“I thought we were going to dinner at Dino’s. Who’s this translator?”

“We can go after. I want to interview this woman first. My editor sent over her name. She’ll be translating some of my poetry into Ukrainian.”

“I thought it already had been translated?”

“One of the books hasn’t. And this is a dual-purpose project. I’m
relying on my own obsessiveness with my poetry to help me with my Ukrainian. It’s difficult to learn a language at my age, even to relearn it.”

I didn’t like the turn this project seemed to signal. We’d spoken last week about doing a collaboration based loosely on a New York City photo assignment
Esquire
had sent Diane Arbus on in the 1960s—a series of images that they couldn’t print, photographs of Russian bathhouses and the hot dog stands and peep shows on 42nd Street, a man feeding his flea circus on his forearm while he read the paper, the morgue at Bellevue. I was excited to try an updated version with the elliptical, journalistic feel of some of Nan Goldin’s work. Rhinehart had mentioned that he’d like to write about New York’s long-standing history of bizarreness and hidden vices in the advancing age of its gentrification. We could pair images with short essays, I suggested, and I suspected Rhinehart could get it placed for us fairly easily, maybe even in
The New York Times Magazine.
But he seemed wary of collaborating. “We have a lovely mutual admiration that I don’t want to disrupt,” he’d said. “I’m a different man on deadline. Less congenial.” In the end, he’d said we’d keep it in mind for the future—I still considered the possibility live.

On the table was my heavily bound copy of
The Oxford Companion to Western Art
. I flipped through the glossy pages. I had the urge to tell him about Laura’s phone call, but it felt like the wrong time.

“This being used to test their descriptive skills?” I asked.

Rhinehart, I knew, liked to start this way. I pointed hopefully to Artemisia Gentileschi’s
Judith Beheading Holofernes
. “How about you use this one?”

“Too bloody. I’m having these people come to my house, I don’t want to scare them.”

“But it’s the best example of immediacy. Her expression is so hard and clean. Only a woman could have painted this version. Caravaggio’s is a lot less emotional.”

He came over and kissed my neck. “You’re perfect. Too bad you don’t know Ukrainian.”

•  •  •

The woman who showed up was in her late sixties with thick legs and streaky graying hair pulled into a bun. She had a large round face and big earnest blue eyes. I could tell Rhinehart approved of her appearance—the flowered housedress and support hose. She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever known in publishing. I took her coat, which felt scratchy in my hands, like a pig’s bristles.

There was some introductory chitchat on her background—she’d been working for a long time, translating indiscriminately it seemed to me, whatever she could get her hands on. She’d done a book of poems by another poet represented at the house, so her résumé had been sent over in a stack of four, and I guessed Rhinehart chose her because of her age. The woman spoke with a heavy accent compared to Fedir, whose voice in my memory now seemed light and flickering. He wasn’t called in for this project, although Rhinehart said he would bring him in as a consultant on yet another round of interviews.

I suspected Rhinehart was being so cautious because he’d been burned before when a book of his poetry was translated into German. The book had sold early through the foreign rights agent, and when the original German translator had stepped off the project midway, the house had quickly brought in a less experienced translator without closely scrutinizing his work. It received such shockingly awful reviews in Germany, where he was well known, that it had fueled a debate over the demise of lyricism in American poetry. Rhinehart, after hearing about it, asked a colleague in the German language department to translate the translation back into English so that he could hear what the Germans were reading. The professor wrote it out for him, awful clunky rhythms, mixed-up words, and arbitrary rhymes. Rhinehart was so depressed, he canceled classes for a week and spent the time in his room with German-English dictionaries and phrase books, trying to translate the poems himself. He was on the phone with Germany all day, trying to get the book pulled. Eventually the administration told him they were getting in
an adjunct to cover his course load if he didn’t come back, and he abandoned the project. It was still a sore point, and he believed it greatly hurt sales abroad.

•  •  •

For this interview, Rhinehart had settled on an inoffensive Turner painting of a field at dawn. He asked the translator what she saw. She put on her glasses and was grasping the book with both hands. “Corn. No, maybe this is wheat. Wheat.”

Rhinehart wasn’t satisfied with the response. “But how would you describe it?”

“It’s a field, of course. And there is sky there.” She pointed at the page, as if illustrating the idiocy of the question. Standing next to her, I, too, was starting to wonder how relevant this visual exercise was.

Rhinehart was bending in so they were both shadowing the pages. “But detail. Detail. What does the image feel like, smell like?”

She leaned away from him. “Smell? It’s paper. It smell like book.” She pushed it away, as if it were distasteful. “An old book. Left in closet.”

The woman took off her glasses and looked at me crossly as if I were responsible. Individual hairs stuck out above her puckered lips. “Do you have something for me to translate? Words? A poem?”

“No,” he said, stubbornly.

The woman stood up. “If you have nothing to translate then why did I take two buses to come here?” As if to a maid, she gestured to me to fetch her coat.

She was still going on, gripping her purse by the clasp. “I’m a translator. Of
words.
Show me words, books. What do I know about paintings? That is the test? Stupid.”

Rhinehart had his arms crossed, clearly annoyed. It was rare for him to be impolite with people he didn’t know. There was a tense energy surrounding this project, and I wondered whether it wasn’t the translation that was bothering him but his reinvolvement with his poetry.

“I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” he said sternly. I handed the woman her coat and led her outside, to the elevator. She walked slowly, as if her legs were sore.

After she’d gotten in and pressed the button, she turned to me and tapped her temple. “Your father not using his brains.”

•  •  •

When I came back, Rhinehart was sitting at the table, his forehead cradled in his hands. “Tatie, is this a bad idea?”

“No. I actually think it might get you writing again.”

I was still troubled by the woman’s remark, not because of what it suggested about our age difference, but what it said about me, as if I were hanging around the sidelines of this project because I had nothing better to do. I said, “I bumped into Laura while you were in Ukraine. She bought a couple of my prints and invited me to a networking event at MoMA. She’s a big collector. You didn’t tell me.” This last part was to put him on the defensive.

He was shocked—as if I’d confessed I’d fallen in love with someone else. “Laura? My ex-wife, Laura?”

“According to her the papers still haven’t been signed.”

He brushed this away. “Why haven’t you mentioned it until now?”

I was nervous and tried to explain how I saw the division of things. This was professional, not personal. It suddenly seemed important that I convey to him what a huge networking opportunity she was offering me. I feared he would tell me not to go. He was staring at the wall behind me with an inscrutable expression, and I had the bizarre sensation of again being caught in the middle of them as a feuding couple.

“I have no doubt it will be good for your career,” he said.

Relieved, I plunged ahead, telling him about the prints and how much she paid for them and what this meant. I was full of unasked questions—who she knew, whether she was liable to offer genuine help, why she had closed her gallery. But he was just sitting there, maddeningly deep in thought.

“What did she say about—” He made a gesture that encompassed the two of us, and I cringed. I knew it showed on my face.

“I didn’t tell her.”

“Oh,” he said, getting up.

I followed him into the kitchen, chattering. “I’m assuming she sort of knows. When we first met, she asked me about you, but there was nothing to tell, really. Now I feel it’s something private between us, and not really relevant.”

“Maybe to you it’s not, but I believe she’d see it differently.”

I didn’t like all this intimacy between them—what he knew and didn’t know about her. He was leaning back against the sink, a glass of tap water in his hand, considering me, as if I were a new, unexpected person that had appeared in the kitchen. Someone not to be trusted. Overcome with guilt, I embraced him and said, “I’m sorry. I should have told you I’d seen her.”

“I’m just shocked. At all of this.” His hands on me felt reluctant. He sighed. “I always knew you’d get your break. I just never imagined it would come from this direction.”

•  •  •

That was the last he said about it. When I brought up Laura again he ducked the subject, as if he were actively pretending we’d never met. Still, I was dying to discuss the upcoming MoMA party with someone, so I called Hallie and invited her to lunch. We hadn’t seen as much of each other since Rhinehart and I had gotten together. Although she had pleased me by officially sanctioning my “new” relationship with him. “It seems healthy,” she said. “And that’s taking your past into account. As well as your ‘tendencies.’ ”

About the MoMA night, though, for which I expected an enthusiastic response, she said, “Sounds creepy.”

“What’s creepy? The event?”

“That. Laura’s involvement.”

“I thought you would find it interesting. It’s like an old boys’ club for women, to share resources and contacts we’re often denied.”

“I don’t know that I believe that. And even if I did, I distrust tribes. They expect conformity. Groups of women can be worse—emotional conformity.”

We were at Café Cluny, a small, yellow-walled bistro in the West Village. Hallie had just come from her Buddhist center, where she was clocking a lot of time. I had assumed that once things with Adán had righted themselves, she would give it up, but evidently she attributed the chanting at the center to the continued success at home, and, she said, she was learning a lot about herself, as well. For example, everyone on earth had a mission, I clearly had my photography, some people had their families, but what did she have? She felt she had been repressing it, her purpose, and was on the track to finding out what it was.

I used this as an example. “That’s at the heart of the feminist movement, you know. Women discovering themselves. I thought you’d be behind this idea. You’re a feminist.”

She frowned. “Since when? I don’t go in for labels.”

“But how could you reject the term
feminist!
”

“The whole thing about women’s equality is that we get to choose what type of woman we want to be.”

“That doesn’t justify being irresponsible. We need to band together to get things done.”