I knew who you were, I’d applied to Columbia to study with you. Like a brat I said, “Kansas, Professor Kallas.”
You said, “Assistant Professor.”
I said your breakdown of leaf trait evolution was the single most inspired and inspiring work of contemporary botany I’d ever read. You explained that your boyfriend’s cousins were coming over for dinner and that you wished painful deaths upon them. Your boyfriend’s name was Barry. I’d probably met him as a counselor at freshman orientation. I said I had. You said he always encouraged student interaction and that you’d openly avoided it but that this time he’d approve. I think you actually called me a charitable case. I promised to sit between you and cousin four. You took me, quietly, efficiently, home.
That was your old apartment in Astoria. You were thirty-five and I was twenty-five and I was so impressed by your fortitude, your magnitude, by the apartment you rented alone as if living alone in New York were possible. By the authority of your blank walls and the unheard-of oranges striping the thin, not warm, and very sophisticated quilt on your bed. By the ceiling-high walnut shelf of multicolored encyclopedias, itself a jumbo encyclopedia of encyclopedias, that sternly faced your bed and must have been the first and last thing you saw each day. By the one little St. Bernard’s lily growing on your windowsill and the cat who nibbled at it. I wanted immediately, with my whole self, to be your cat.
You took me, in your equalizing uninflected way, entirely seriously. You let me peel the sweet potatoes. You introduced me to Barry as “a botanist.” I’d only told you as the N train crossed the Queensboro Bridge that I wanted to study the harshest grossest facts about the world’s prettiest organisms. You’d nodded at that as if I’d said I needed to use the bathroom, something basic and inevitable about my body. I think the bottom line is that we’re very similar.
Barry (very different) proposed with a princess-cut gray diamond that New Year’s Eve and by the following Christmas you’d moved into Riverside Drive. I declined your repeat invitation, which I still believe was a relief to you. It’s cute to have a student in the mix in Astoria. It’s weird to dilute Riverside Drive with me.
I’d spent the year reading everything I thought you’d ever read, so that I could speak to you. I didn’t want to sit across from you at a dinner table, I wanted us to coauthor a grafting treatise. You were always working on a paper of your own because the department had laid its tenure hoops out before you and asked you to start jumping. Still you read my abstracts and poked the right holes in them. Sometimes you’d ask my opinion of something we’d both read. I learned my own opinions by giving them to you. I did my own work and you did yours and in that way you and I grew older for a good couple of years.
The person who believes in you is the most dangerous person you know. The person who believes in you can unbuild you in an instant. We haven’t learned how to curb that danger. We don’t know what to do with the person who names our life. The one who says Do this, right now, not that and the this that person casually suggests becomes your entire livelihood. The one who lends you a hat that allows you to enter a room. A coat to survive your own winter. We don’t know how to thank, because gratitude is traded in sexual currency. If you don’t marry the person you’re most grateful to, if you don’t fuck them or pretend you want to, the part of you that person created shrivels a little. The part of me you created has overtaken the rest of me, as a weed, because all I do is thank you, is thank you, is thank you.
It isn’t as if you aren’t beautiful, you are beautiful. It isn’t as if you don’t find me, in whatever way you find me, beautiful. It’s that our interest in each other is a cold lake and neither of us wants to jump in. We want to stand together, at the edge of the cold lake.
Maybe I ought to become a psychologist. Maybe I ought to melt my own head.
The splendid thing is that right now, as I write, all the heat in the world has collected in the bread basket that sits between my best friend and your husband. Between Mishti’s vigor, and Barry’s lust, their combined temperatures could maybe warm us, maybe even at this distance.
TACOS
“No, Carlo doesn’t know about it.”
“Keeping secrets is basically apologizing. You hate apologizing.”
“There’s no it for him to know about. A taco dinner is not a secret.”
“How about three taco dinners?”
Mishti had reversed herself so completely it was almost as if nothing had changed. Perhaps dating her nemesis made the most perfect sense. Perhaps anything made more sense than dating Carlo. I’m leaving the fate of your marriage aside.
“I’m not dating Barry,” she said, as if in response to the things I hadn’t said aloud. She knew how it looked. “I’m just figuring him out. If I can figure out what Joan sees in Barry, maybe I’ll finally understand how she thinks. I’ll ace her final,” Mishti said. “At the very least I’ll have taken something from her.”
Mishti, who I think of as authentically powerful, now needed to wield that power over you, needed you to recognize it, needed her enemy’s surrender, to prove her knack for victory. It’s the same thing I went through, but more glamorous—her story confident, mine meek. Anyway, all roads lead to whatever: she’ll soon need your nearness to confirm her basic existence, like I do, like Tom is realizing he will.
“You won’t figure anything out,” I told her. “And you’re not taking anything, Barry’s giving it away. Besides, Joan doesn’t see anything in Barry, there’s something else going on.”
“What else can go on in a marriage?”
“I don’t know but it isn’t vision.”
“You can’t think it’s only the money. Very unlike you.”
“It’s not the money but it’s something about the way the money made her feel once when she was younger.”
Mishti didn’t respond, we were curled up under the library’s grand staircase, deep in a hollow triangle that formed underneath the first flight. It was so dark I couldn’t see Mishti at all but I could feel her clothing on my arm and it was soft in an otherworldly way. She was trying to think about how money made her feel, being young.
While she thought about it I closed my eyes and drew a little evolutionary food chain parade across my eyelids: Mishti, wunderkind, 26; Nell, Homo sapiens, 31; Carlo, half-machine, 35; Joan, sorceress, 41; Barry, troll, 45. Tom wasn’t in the food chain because centaurs don’t eat or get eaten.
Then Mishti said, “He likes the way I look at him.”
“Barry?”
“Which is, you know, to be avoided, because if he likes being looked at he’s either narcissistic or neglected and the former lasts forever and the latter eventually heals and turns into cruelty as a kind of historical payback.”
“Do you like the fact that he thinks about you? Does that make you think about you?”
“At least he thinks about me, at least he isn’t one of the dreamies—”
“Dreamies?”
“Who use eccentricity and neediness as a mask for extreme solipsism and hopes for social ascension—”
“We’re back to Tom now?”
“Or dudes who love their brother. That’s the worst. The brother-best-friend club. Totally toxic.”
I realized that Mishti had been dating since she was thirteen years old and had been born symmetrical and had understood more about her own body and sexuality at age seven than I did today. She could, at a glance, provide a man’s kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. I pictured her standing beside Linnaeus, both of them wearing white curly eighteenth-century wigs. Mishti would say to him, “Hey Carl,” and he’d coo, “Ja Mishti,” and show her his Swedish flowers. Incidentally can you imagine being sent on a journey through Sweden in 1740 to classify the planet’s plants and animals? Can you imagine his boots?
I wanted to end this tolerating and aggrandizing of Barry’s libido. “He sees you a
s an augmentation of his reality. His reality,” I repeated because Mishti was almost certainly doing something to her own fingernails and not listening in any way. “The focus is his reality and what you do to it. Not love.”
Tom’s face came back to me, the face he’d made when I said romance wasn’t my focus. I’d given him permission, right then, to ruin my life. I can’t believe he commenced his great romance at the cheese table.
“I’d like it,” I said to Mishti, venting some misplaced retroactive anger at Tom, “if you could find a way to measure your own self-worth without praise from other people. Forget Joan, forget Barry, forget me, just go home to yourself.”
“Forget Joan, she says. What a load of hypocrite shit.”
Mishti won every argument in this way. She had for the past five years. Her vanity was untouchable because of my obsession. She knew I loved you, she knew I loved you too much, she knew I didn’t know why or how or what to do about it, she knew it was an exhaust pipe for every private tension I carried, she knew you didn’t love me, and she loved me, and knew me well, and wanted to protect me from the disappointment of something I didn’t understand.
I felt her fabric pull away from me and the minute thuds of her knees crawling forward. Then she was out of our hole and I could see her calves and ankles in silhouette. I gave her a minute to make her exit and then crawled out myself—sometimes sitting under the staircase alone is a good idea but it usually isn’t. Someone had opened one of the library’s grand windows and its long curtain billowed out into the room. It was so smooth and pregnant I wanted to take a picture of it, but should anyone be allowed to take a picture of a window curtain full of wind, stealing and stabilizing its motion? Why celebrate it by robbing it of the very thing you’re celebrating? And what is a photograph of love, is it marriage?
My phone was dead anyway so I stood and celebrated the curtain in my mind. I don’t even know if you know about Mishti and Barry. I don’t even know what I know about you and Tom. I’m going to go home to myself now. I’m going to take my own medicine and go home.
CREAM
You opened your office door and said, “Closed.”
“What was all of that about my being ‘very good’?”
You let me in. I only then realized I’d gone home to your office.
“Well I’ve done the math and calculated that you stopped being very good right when you started dating Tom.”
“So?”
“So I want to see what it feels like,” you said with a sardonic twist to your mouth I’d never seen before, “I want to fuck off and see how it feels. It’s not something I’ve ever done before.” The idea of you fucking off made me imagine first the sun finally exploding, second malnutrition, and third some kind of miniature vibrator that made me sadly horny.
“So what have you been doing?” I asked, hoping very much you wouldn’t tell me. Please don’t tell me what you and Tom are doing. “Ice skating?”
“Yes. Every Thursday night we go ice skating.”
“And what’s with the Thursdays did you and Barry write a Thursday clause into your marriage—”
“You were right about Mishti, give her a command and she executes.”
“She executes your marriage.”
“With a hot pink guillotine.”
“Tom isn’t the right dude to end a marriage for, even yours,” I was stooping so low now my tongue touched the floor, “he’s not really interested in taking care of anybody.”
“I’m not ending anything Nell you alarmist librarian. I’m beginning the part of my life in which I like living.”
Because I am interested in taking care of you, or at least, because I care about you, aggressively, I want you to like living. I know you have low self-esteem but I think you have perfect self-knowledge. You have the grown woman’s gift of preferences—you want Weil over De Beauvoir; your skin wants acid, not serum; you wake up with a single cumulus cloud of inertia filling your entire head and you want fatty cream in your coffee; you want a lot of salt; your shape is this shape and calls for that pant leg; you have chosen your field of work and every day you choose it; your oil is this oil, your fruit this fruit, you tolerate lactose and grain—these aren’t questions anymore, only a laborious set of rules you follow to satisfy your own demands. I guess I’ve assumed that kind of internal fluency would make days easier.
“I never thought of you as unhappy,” I said, as if you’d insulted me.
“Do you think of yourself as unhappy?”
“No.” But I have no demands and I don’t know myself very well.
“Well, we’re the same,” you said, in a warm almost whisper, and with that tranquilizer in my system I climbed back on your flying carpet and hovered out of your office, down the stairs, into some afternoon rain.
Barry rushed up to catch the door from me, shaking out his umbrella. He looked terrified and wet, as if he hadn’t been holding his umbrella over his head but somewhere else.
“Nell, you—” He hesitated. I wanted for the first time to know what he was going to say. “You wouldn’t—” He pulled the little velcro belt around his miniature umbrella so it became a neat baton. He held it up in his right hand and looked, somehow, like the Statue of Liberty. “I don’t know,” he concluded, and went inside.
JAM
Barry never expected Mishti to go to dinner with him. He expected you to marry him, because he is gregarious and rich and you were the opposite and old enough to crave your inverse, but he never expected Mishti, a woman too young to need anything from anyone, to want anything from him.
Mishti says he’s so worried during their dinners he can hardly eat. She says his worry is universal. He looks at her and he can’t say no to the prize he’s baffled to have won, and he can’t say yes to losing you, because even he knows what he has. If Barry Estlin has ever been in a tight spot, this is it. There is something awful about watching a man get what he always wanted.
Barry really loves you. Barry from his bottom thinks you are the celestial alien you are. Barry can’t believe his good fortune so he tests it again and again, as if to prove his life isn’t a fluke. Mishti has now given him more good fortune than he knows how to have. She’s called his Midas bluff and she’s the first golden mammal without a heartbeat, stiff in his hand. He knows you’re next, his prize pet, soon inanimate. I see Barry’s childhood dogs turning now too, golden Labrador, golden Wiener, fat Barry in a gilt room, panting, suffocating, terribly and hopelessly animate. I think Barry has always admired dogs because they are satisfied with a bone and he is never satisfied. He wants to be satisfied, you know. He just confuses satisfaction for boredom, every time it comes near.
Do you remember that Christmas Eve in Astoria, as you spooned strawberry jam onto a cutting board to serve with cheese, you told me a story about strawberry jam: You’d spent the week of Thanksgiving with Barry at his place (the way you pronounced “his place” that night carried no trace of recognition that it would soon and forever be yours) and you’d washed every dish the whole week, by hand, all the Thanksgiving serving platters, everything, even though he had a dishwasher, because you wanted to be good and your father had taught you to love dishwashing and you’d wanted to find some small way to express your respect for the grandeur and polish of his house? And then, Sunday breakfast, finally relaxed, eating toast, a bit of strawberry jam fell from your knife onto the floor. And you knew you’d wipe it up, as you knew you’d wash all the dishes, right after breakfast, but you wanted to eat your toast while it was hot, and there was still more jam on the knife, and you kept spreading, then eating. Barry glared at the floor, at you, and said, “You’re not going to clean that up?”
“After I’d washed all his dishes,” you told me, “after he’d let me just wash and wash, to cast me as some kind of slob?” I hadn’t responded. “This from a man who mass orders his coffee mugs, two dozen white, two dozen black, from a hotel s
upplier because he wants them to be normal.” I hadn’t seen the connection. “He’s so righteously intolerant of anything that breaks his code of order, but he copies his code of order from hotel chains,” you said, “he can’t even come up with his own rules.”
He wants to be satisfied, you know. He wants to be satisfied in a normal way. Normal as anybody, as nobody, Barry Estlin. Maybe after Mishti is through with him he’ll remember that he’s always been satisfied, and he’ll like living, living the way he used to, with you, and you’ll like living the way he used to, too.
BEANS
“From behind.”
“Stop.”
“What? You asked. I fuck her from behind.”
We were sitting in an empty Chinese restaurant, a speaker above the door was playing a wind instrument I could hardly hear but the sound moved through my veins like a sleeping pill, I couldn’t stand up and walk out and break that peace. Tom’s ever longer hair swayed under the ceiling fan.
“Forget I asked. I’m sorry I asked.”
“She really likes it.” It was as if all my ambivalence toward him in bed were coming back in the form of a viper, as if he now had the evidence to prove his desirability, as if I’d been wrong to not want him and he’d built his case. “She keeps asking for more and more. We finish and she wants more.”
“You must be very satisfying,” I said, ten cold sesame noodles dangling from my lips like a car wash.
He paused. Joan I started to cry.
“What the hell, Nell,” a new rhyme for him, “what?”
I didn’t know what. I hated myself for never having wanted him, I didn’t know what was wrong with me, I didn’t want to fuck you from behind, I didn’t have a pulse.
“Jesus Christ I won’t tell you any more,” he said, quietly, “I thought we were, you know, enlightened exes who could maintain a sexual discourse.”
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