Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

  “What.”

  “I’m eligible for up to twenty-five thousand additional dollars if I hire an assistant from the university system to assist in expanding my study.”

  “Between your student boyfriend and your husband’s student girlfriend, I’d say you have two excellent, expansive candidates.”

  “I’m having good sex, Nell. And I want to hire you. What do you want?”

  You looked at me and I felt I’d been in an accident, that you were asking me to remember my date of birth.

  “I want to bind aconite alkaloids to flecainide acetate, so they cancel each other out.”

  “Great,” you said. “Let’s go.”

  You stood up then and started walking down the steps, I had no idea where you were going and the steps were slippery and I hate falling down and I am starting to think I hate you. I chased after you as if you were my mother.

  “Joan, hey, what are you talking about,” I called forward through the matrix of snowflakes that separated us, I caught up to you, “what does let’s go mean here?”

  “You tell me, what do you need? A monkshood starter?”

  I didn’t want to tell you that I’d forgotten my seeds in the freezer, that I’d over-corrected their dormancy and that they were almost certain to fail. So I said I needed a steady acetate supply, which was also true, and probably a better use of the foundation’s money anyway, as flecainide is way more expensive than seeds. “And taspine resin,” I threw in, for good measure, remembering Mishti’s expensive sample. I got my first flashing sense of the shopping list I could actually assemble. I didn’t trust it, I didn’t trust it to be possible, or mine.

  “Great,” you kept walking, “so the second the assistant allowance comes in I’ll register you and you can go nuts. I’m happy,” you said, “because it’s really about time you went nuts.” I think you were trading me my work for my boyfriend. It was a trade I was willing to make.

  I stopped, I had nothing more to say and nowhere to go, and you just kept walking, walking forward, aimless and totally confident, as if the entire frozen and sparkling world were a private lounge built exclusively for people who have good sex.

  FISH

  When we first met, I didn’t want you. I didn’t want to touch you! I didn’t want to wrap my jiggly arms around you, I didn’t want to leave a hickey on your very long neck. These things moreover wouldn’t have occurred to me; sex hadn’t much existed in Kansas and where it did exist it appeared reserved for boy and girl varsity athletes. I’d never wanted what those kids had, spit and ponytails, and I’d never imagined my own alternatives. Instead I did my homework. I found my privacy, my sensuality, by plunging my feet into pond muck. Scattering schools of invisible fish.

  I met you and I didn’t want you. Why want you? I’d never seen a grown woman wanted. I’d seen my father reach into the sink drain and remove wet slices of onion, because my mother couldn’t suffer their texture. That was enough devotion. I wanted an A, an adviser, a witness to my tiny genius. I wanted a mother more esoteric and contemporary than my own. I wanted a relation more rigorous than friendship. I wanted partnership. I wanted science.

  It surprised me when I loved your shoulders. Your body surprised me. Who could have expected your freckles, your freckles on your shoulders? It surprised me when the flatness of your chest looked to me like a topographical map of Kansas, and when, on certain winter nights, as the city turned unbearably loud and bleary, I thought it might be comfortable to go back and live there, on top of you. It surprised me when your first short-sleeved shirt of spring contracted my abdomen. It surprised me when, on certain summer nights, as the city teemed with humidity and odor, I thought it might be pleasant to be one layer of uncolored nail polish lying in rest over your fingernails.

  I still wanted everything I’d wanted before—your agreement, your affirmation, your success that could illuminate and create my own—but now I also wanted your waist, some way of cupping the sides of your waist with my wrinkly creased palms, and your earlobes, some way of knowing their taste. At first I called these additional desires par for the course. I grouped them into my reverence. I wrote them off as side effects of my ambition. I congratulated myself for going whole hog. There was no danger; I knew you could never want me. My daydreams, my nightdreams were my own. What else could I call my own?

  Then one afternoon, my third year, you were making a joke about Barry. You and he had recently celebrated your paper anniversary and it had been appropriately, this was your word, dry. I asked you what you meant. We were standing in the women’s room of Butler Library, on our way to a research techniques symposium. You’d just finished washing your hands. You reached your left hand, full of rings, to my face and wiped the water off on my cheek. Your hand pulled down smooth and hard until your fingers dropped from my chin.

  “No glide,” you said.

  As if I could speak.

  You were laughing because you found your own sexual dissatisfaction funny and because you felt comfortable around me. Your laughter made me feel comfortable around myself, an insane luxury. You were in a punchy, pre-symposium mood, the mood you always enter when you know you’re about to be bored. You wiped your other hand off on my forearm and it rushed to my elbow as if down a Slip ’n Slide.

  “You’ve got nice skin,” you said, “easy.”

  You were already leaving the room and I watched you push open the swinging door and I thought, I had the unbelievable notion: you wanted me. Which meant, which opened up, which permitted: I wanted you something terrible.

  Maybe cowards can only desire when they feel desired. Maybe runts need encouragement. Maybe my central identity is coward runt. In any case, you introduced a crazy and immense idea to me that day.

  You’ve never touched me since. It has become increasingly shocking that you ever did. You are self-possessed, but not reckless. You behave. My confidence has become more circumscribed, maybe more accurate. I think you were simply tired of yourself, that day, washing your hands in the library bathroom, tired of yourself and your Barry, so you took interest in me, the most available other.

  I know, you didn’t really want me. You wanted the otherness.

  Me, I still want you something terrible.

  LAMB

  Tom says your final was hard. He didn’t study because he didn’t think he needed to. That makes him an idiot. The number one thing to know about you is that you require further study. Tom completely missed the point. Fucking you counts for nothing, I keep telling myself, although it apparently makes your day. I hope he fails your final, as he deserves to, and that his heart breaks. No, it isn’t that vindictive. I hope our hearts break.

  I told Tom I wanted to give him back some money and he found that vulgar and annoying and told me to meet him at the Cloisters, as if its grace could heal and correct me.

  The fortress stood at the top of Fort Tryon Park like a taxidermy grizzly bear, dead and large and hard. But when I entered its arched doorway its grace did heal and correct me. I’d walked up the long and dreary Margaret Corbin Drive with my hood up to the cold, I’d forgotten my headphones and entertained myself by pretending to be a dismal monk, kicking fallen yellow oak leaves that hadn’t yet disintegrated and admiring how long the autumn had lasted, how the cold hadn’t ruined anything. The river waited to my left like a sleeping fish, silvery and languageless, coughing up the great banks of the Palisades without any effort. A tanker stood still on its surface, crazily heavy, reminding me that I was a twig who could walk. I walked and walked, up the shoulder while cars swerved around me—there’s no clear delineation between where people should walk and where cars should drive on the road to the Cloisters because it’s a singular and pure approach to an old place.

  I climbed the fake-ancient and certainly cursed stairs to the front gate. It surprised me to find electric lights installed along the entrance corridor. They’d been tinted yellow to imitate
age, but the columns they lit up signified age of a different order. I wanted to loiter in the dark with all the old stone and to turn into stone myself. I knew Tom was waiting inside, hot and human and growing hair. I took my hood down and checked my coat.

  There he stood, by the Romanesque fountain of a lion drooling into a tub. The sound it made was utterly peaceful, individual drops on marble, the expression of the lion’s face lunatic and hilarious. Tom, because he likes living, stood smiling at the hilarious lion. When he heard me approach, he offered the same smile to me.

  “Pilgrim,” he said.

  “Lordship.”

  If I acquiesced to Tom’s ego and turf here, he’d let me out quickly; I’d drop the money into his coat pocket (evidently also checked, he stood in a thin henley the gray of his eyes) and I’d walk off in an easy way, in fact walking out of his life: quietly, finally.

  We circled the Cuxa Cloister, Catalan, year 1130, an arcade of columns whose capitals showed conjoined lions eating men. The monastery had been sacked in the seventeenth century, fell into ruin by the nineteenth, and had been reconstructed here at a quarter its original size. It was still huge, commanding. Above us the Lamb of God danced on the head of a cherub, and the cherub folded two of his four wings over his chest as a private blanket.

  Tom walked, elegantly ogling each object so I’d understand him to be an attentive person. We stopped before twin basins, the Lavabo, from the Latin for “I will wash.” I will wash, I promised myself, having lapsed, having become a little pillar of body oil. I wished I could pull my hood up again and cover my neglected scalp but I wanted to disgust Tom a little, I wanted to get my grease on him. Tom’s hair was clean and sheeny. Sometimes he touched it, as if to get back in touch with himself. Sometimes even I wanted to touch it. I looked forward to the day that touching Tom’s hair would cease to be an option for me—that day became tomorrow. We shared too much, we wanted too little from each other. I wanted a clean break from him, or at least a break of any kind.

  “She’s a real adult,” Tom said, as if we’d been talking about you, and I thought I would suffer more XXX annals. “She confirms the fact that I’m a child.”

  I thought of Mishti saying, “She’s so . . . old.” I wondered what Tom found arousing—it hadn’t been me, and it hadn’t been any of the countless Miss America contestants who’d solicited him throughout college. I looked at his body grown high, his hair grown long, the fuzz on the backs of his hands, the bone in his jaw, the bulge in his neck, and told him, “You aren’t childish.”

  “I think if the moment came, and somebody said, Tom, do something, say something, be something, believe something, if I became, you know, needed—needed in some urgent way to, you know, deliver,” he clawed his right fingernails into his left index finger, turning the knuckle white, “I’d fudge.” He let the finger go. “I worry I’m a serial fudger.”

  Against everything I knew of Tom’s inconstancies, his cowardice, and the pulsing envy I felt for his scratched and pinkened finger that had stroked yours, I placed my hand across one of his large flat shoulder blades and said, “You’re the genuine article.”

  Tom laughed because he wants so badly to be genuine.

  “Everybody’s a fake in some way,” he said. “You know? Well, everybody except Mishti.”

  “Mishti wears platform boots for fake height, and eyebrow paint for fake impact, and padded bras.”

  “Yeah, but she’s only about what she’s about. She owns it. She isn’t pretending anything, and she does—she has—exactly what she wants. She actually . . . shines.”

  “That’s true, shining is her goal.”

  “I don’t know why she puts up with you, you’re so not shiny.”

  “Why did you put up with me?”

  “I’d be her sidekick, but she finds my presence preposterous.”

  “Your presence is preposterous.”

  A chamber off the cloister’s main courtyard described itself as a place to discuss, consider, and observe the Rule of Saint Benedict, a code of monastic behavior that taught monks how to live right. We walked past it as if we could never ever live right. I wanted to turn back and sit there as much as I wanted you. I looked at Tom and filled up with jealous exhaustion. Preposterous or not, he had landed in the promised land. He kept walking straight past the monks’ educational courtyard. Maybe Tom, being the one who holds your hand, doesn’t need any instruction. His life cannot be improved.

  The copper alloy Refectory Bell on the next wall had been inscribed:

  TINNIO PRANSVRIS CENATVRIS BIBITVRIS

  “I RING FOR BREAKFAST, DRINKS, AND DINNER”

  I looked at the bell thinking No one would answer me, and Tom looked at the bell thinking I should get myself a bell. In the accompanying Glossarium illustration two long-haired and timeless men-women wearing patterned gowns rang bells at each other, grinning as if to say Breakfast. Tom and I wanted to say something to each other about the innumerable and miserable coffee mornings we’d spent together fudging but nothing came and we entered the shadow of an enormous camel.

  The camel hung opposite a dragon in a vaulted hall. The dragon, brave and cartoonish enough to be a Picasso, had been frescoed around 1200 for the “aesthetic delight” of a Benedictine monastery. We turned a corner into a more austere room where one limestone fragment hung high on a wall, far overhead, with a sign at eye level that read only:

  Angel.

  Tom walked from hall to hall as if he’d grown up here in a back bedchamber. He led me directly to a statue of Christ Child with an Apple whose butt had been painted gum pink. Above the child, the warrior-archangel Michael was treading on a fleshy dragon. The description called the dragon “a symbol of the devil” and for a moment I faltered, full of my own solitude and regret, mourning the hideous sacrifice of Rachel Simons, affiliating myself with the devil. Then I tried to affiliate myself with the cartoon, I tried to christen myself Pablo, I tried to walk backwards into the Benedictine schoolroom. Tom walked ahead into his own destination, the tapestry room, which he’d apparently saved for last. He turned over his shoulder to see if I would follow. I followed, Joan, I understand. He is not losing his power, you are not losing your mind. I am not losing you.

  The Unicorn in Captivity towered over Tom, plainly and unmistakably his master. I left him alone and looked at the hanging to his right: The Unicorn Is Found. All about the unicorn’s tail scrambled dogs and rabbits. Men assembled at the top of the tapestry like a jury. I read the men’s faces from left to right, there were twelve of them, and all of them were Tom. They wore ringlets and fine garments, their faces had all been cut from the same moon-colored marble, their features smooth and dignified, their limbs long, their pride immeasurable. The unicorn dips its horn into a pool of water falling from a lion’s mouth, the same kind of fountain that made such a good noise with its water, earlier, in a cloister that now felt imaginary.

  “You could be a real adult if you wanted to be,” I said, because other people’s self-loathing is the only thing that makes me confident. “You are capable.” He lifted his phone and took a couple pictures of the walls. I wanted him to call me your only partner. I wanted him to resign.

  “I suppose,” he said, vague and bored. I’d extended the conversation past his interest and now my speaking was disturbing his unicorn time. I walked away from Tom and down a flight of stairs.

  Saint Fiacre, of alabaster, stood on a pedestal, his eyes closed. “Holding a shovel in one hand, Saint Fiacre is presented as the patron saint of gardeners,” I read first, then, “particularly renowned for curing hemorrhoids.” I pictured the pink butt of the Christ Child. Fiacre, in his comparative solemnity, was a colorless yellow. His head fell against his own shoulder in the most patient melancholy. I stood and genuinely worshipped Saint Fiacre. I wanted some air. I found an exit that led me, as if by his guidance, into an herb garden exhibiting over two hundred medieval plants. Outsid
e it felt less like winter than the lack of every season: a harsh, open, blank day that had never been colored in. All the same it was freezing and for the thousandth time I missed my coat. I missed the way my hood had held my head and taken care of it. I don’t miss my parents per se but I do miss care. Joan if you ever let me care for you I will ask for nothing in return, and you will occasionally shield me in some essentially warm way that induces my deepest gratitude. I made a slow lap of the plant beds, depositing my little dragon puff of breath above each sign:

  Horseheal, Peony, Feverfew, Asparagus.

  Figwort, Sneezewort, and Self-Heal.

  Horned Poppy and Mole Plant.

  Mouse-Ear Hawkweed.

  Squirting Cucumber.

  Common Valerian, Annual Sage, Birthwort, Bearded Iris.

  Madder, Weld.

  Lady’s Bedstraw, Dyer’s Alkanet.

  Flax, Woad, Agrimony.

  Bugle, and a full rush of Aconite Monkshood.

  In one bunch, at the base of a gnarled tree: Quince, Cowslip, and Christmas Rose—Black Hellebore.

  Hound’s-Tongue. Bistort. Adderwort, next to Dragon Arum.

  Tom hadn’t yet found or followed me, none of the museum’s visitors would leave the heated building, I stood alone with my favorite creatures. Tom stood alone with his favorite creatures. There’s a version of the world in which there’s room for all of us. In which we all belong here, also anywhere, even everywhere. Who did you stand with, that cold day, your lover and your servant in their rightful places, your rightful place nowhere?

  Your email popped up on his phone as we were standing in the coat check line. He swiped it open immediately and didn’t stop me from blatantly hunching over to read along. Leaning against him to see the screen was the most physical contact we’d had since the last time we’d slept together. He sleeps with someone better now, I thought. I sleep on the floor with a bag of dirt. Rightful places. The department’s Thanksgiving party had been so weird, you wrote, you wanted to throw a better Christmas party, at your home. The email was addressed to all five of us, and it was ludicrous to see our names together in a row. I pictured you asking Barry for Carlo’s email address and the multiple simultaneous panic attacks that must have provoked through the citywide energy net.