Tom blanched. “What does Joan want from me?” was the odd thing he said.
“From you?”
“I have to monkey myself in front of her husband like a monkey?”
“I think that’s a small price to pay.”
“Who’s paying? What a fucking circus.”
I saw the six of us seated around a ping-pong table under the high center of a tent. You and I would sit at the table ends like monarchs. The email said Sunday at seven o’clock. I mutely postponed walking out of Tom’s life to Monday.
A woman handed us our two coats, they’d been nuzzling each other on adjacent hangers, and I tipped her with the six cash dollars I had from tips crumpled in my jeans pocket, showing Tom that I could afford generosity. He didn’t register the exchange at all, he was rereading your email, scowling at it, as if it were a draft notice. I had no remaining sympathy for him in what I’m sure he dubbed his predicament, and having repaid him a miscellaneous and insufficient but satisfying $150, I readied myself for your party, knowing I’d be the only guest with nothing to lose and everything to eat.
BERRY
I carried a bouquet for the hostess. You opened the door wearing a floor-length charcoal nightgown. You’d let your braid out and your crimped hair wreathed your shoulders. Your twin stone earrings hung like upended monoliths from each lobe. You had painted your fingernails white. You had darkened your eyelashes and eyelids and eyebrows. Your nightgown was strangely formal and acceptable. You had opened the gown’s top button to reveal your collarbone. A tiny moonstone shuddered on its chain in the collarbone’s middle hollow. I thought in all plainness that I would now expressly die. You reached your arms out toward me and pulled one sleeve of my coat off my arm, I gave the bouquet to my other hand, you pulled off the other sleeve, and with the down corpse of my soul in your arms you receded into the darkness of your comfortable home.
The dangling string of the coat closet’s ceiling light kept touching, touching your ear as if whispering formulas for the speed of light into you, you didn’t hush it or flick it away, you hung up my coat, you took a long time of it, I waited for you right there in the underlit foyer. When you finally pulled the string and closed the door and turned around the foyer fell even darker and you seemed surprised by my flowers, as if you hadn’t seen them in the hall, as if you’d also been too busy dying out there. I took this as unbelievable flattery. I held the bouquet out to you proudly, in absolute obedience. You didn’t take it or speak or move. You wanted a prelude.
“Tulip,” I said, pointing to the single pink bulb, “for triumph over yourself.”
“And?” you said. What a remarkable invitation. And the rest of my life, I could wrap in paper and give you, and the largest smell of the smallest leaf of basil, and a cardinal’s breast feathers, and a pack of Junior Mints, and a wall of spontaneous ivy.
“Marsh mallow,” I said, pointing to the fluffy beard beneath the tulip, “because it produces a polysaccharide solution that resembles human mucus and this snot can be used as a gargle or an eyewash.”
Nothing.
“Rosemary, so you don’t forget. Shepherd’s purse, for a blood coagulant. Dandelion, for a blood thinner. Wintergreen, for flatulence. Skullcap, for restlessness. Tansy, for hysteria. Valerian, also for hysteria. Elder for the part-festive part-toxic red berries. All swathed in lily of the valley, for marital happiness.”
Once again you reached your arms out toward me and this time you filled both your hands with my lilies. You went around the perimeter of the bouquet grabbing the white blossoms everywhere they appeared and yanked them out of the bouquet as if from a tiger’s teeth and hurled them onto the ground. You looked at me as if you would kill me and said, “Lilies killed my cat.” Then I started laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. You took the rest of the stalks from my shaking hands and spun to the kitchen to put them somewhere and left me where I shook and left the lilies on the floor and Amanda came lumbering over to sniff them.
It looked like a bird had been eaten by a bigger bird. Red pearls interrupted the white where elderberries fell from your vigorous yanking. Amanda pushed her snout against the pile of it. I had never met Amanda before: she is a handsome, long-legged beast and I was admiring her brick coat in a daze when her tongue emerged, headed for the fattest berry. I tackled the dog. The dog found me incomprehensible. I lay with my head on the mound of tiny lilies, my arms clasped around the dog’s gut. Then, as angels who fall into swamps push slowly, dumbly forward, Amanda resumed her journey, dragging me, me in my soft butt-hushing pants, smooth over the glazed wooden floor a few steps into the kitchen.
I stood up and thanked the dog and looked around your kitchen and thought, Do I deserve this. Do I deserve a dishwasher. Do I deserve a wooden door to hide the metal refrigerator door. Do I deserve a state-of-the-art metal refrigerator. Do I deserve two state-of-the-art metal refrigerators, side by side. Do I deserve a soap dish with no residue in or under it. Do I deserve a pantry.
Wealth is wasted on me, I resolved, because I don’t like sushi. The best way to spend money is on sushi.
With a blue vase squeezed in the crook of your elbow you twisted an ice tray away from itself at the corners until the cubes popped up like wee English muffins from an arctic toaster. You threw them one at a time into the bottom of the vase as Mishti and I had thrown our peach wedges on Halloween. Then you filled the cold belly with water and the ice cracked and the flowers genuflected. You know the best way to do anything. I know the best way to do nothing. Your dog doesn’t do your dog is. She lives her days one evolutionary intelligence ahead of us.
“Sad, Konstantinos,” I said, although Konstantinos had died four years ago and I had joined you in mourning him then. Strange that I hadn’t thought then of the lilies, of course it had been the lilies, the lily on your bedside windowsill, its petals inducing feline kidney failure. I have, since that Christmas, assumed you loved lilies because it was the only plant I saw in your home. I have never interrogated it because you loved it. How is it that neither of us knew about them, about what they can do to cats? As if what we love can’t hurt?
You placed the vase on the windowsill behind the sink. You wiped your hands on a tea towel. The kitchen had been painted the butter color of better homes and the gilt fixtures shone a pee-tinted light. You looked at me with an enraged, apologetic expression that seemed to blame me for the yellowness, for the fact that we were getting yellow.
I met you the year you became Mrs. Estlin and you see in my face a portal back to the moment you made your choice. I met you after you were accomplished and before you were comfortable, which is any spirit’s most vibrant point. I met you at your height. I watched you choose to pour cement over the then ceilingless room of your life and call it a ceiling. I watched you hang a chandelier. Every time the breeze ripples the crystals you’re frightened. Every time you’re frightened I’m in love with you.
You stood by the sink, watching me watch your decline into establishment and you wanted to climb me out of yourself, climb me like a painter’s ladder. You can put your feet on my flat rungs, I want you to, I’m good for that use and no other, I’m firmly planted in the muck, myself. And there you stand in your long gray cosmos. I look at you and I see how absolutely each person is afflicted, regardless of station, by envy. How envy is the best distraction from the completeness of our own lives. How longing is sacred and envy is rotten longing. How hard we are on our own happiness and how generous we are toward just about anyone else, how willing we are to believe that anyone else knows how.
We couldn’t find a thing to say to each other in the golden kitchen and I wanted to write you a benediction on appetite, our enormous animal appetite, and how pure appetite doesn’t differentiate between nourishment and harm. About female patience and the wastefulness of wanting what others wish they didn’t have. About the incredible courage and elegance of children who have not yet named their own fears. About
how long we are children. About the person to whom you promise and then take back your life. That we should be capable as organisms to love and then to leave, to pledge and then repledge, is our most hopeful and cruel power.
“I’ll keep the elder away from Amanda,” I said.
“She’s a good girl,” you said.
At this point the evening fractured into distinct, miniature evenings, one after another, as if it weren’t a night we were spending together but an age, an eon.
BEER
Tall, thin, and alabaster, Tom Ottaway opened the wood-covered metal fridge door and took himself a beer. He carried a kind of immaculate energy around him and I wanted to take his picture, but as with the curtain I couldn’t. I don’t wish Tom to fade any more than I wish cliffs to crumble. You reacted electrically to the combination of me and you and him contained in the neutral kitchen, a compound unrepeated since the cheese table, and you jolted to attention with a swish of your atypically loose hair, the waves flew round and gathered on one shoulder. With this imitation of your single braid armor in place you ventured: “Who came before Nell?”
“What?” said Tom, unimaginatively.
It startled me that you’d throw such a bedsheet over our pet elephant and bring its shape into sight, call it Elephant, serve it to us hot, but it didn’t surprise me.
You held an arm out toward me as if I were a piece of evidence. Then you raised your other palm to your own chest, covering that little moonstone. “Joan, preceded by Nell, preceded by whom,” you pronounced clearly, I had never heard you say your own name, and I felt all at once that you had read this notebook, that you imitated my invocations. I also knew you hadn’t, and I wanted you to, I wanted to give you these bodega books full of worship, bound up in mulberry branches. I wanted to hear you read yourself as I’ve composed you and so fulfill ourselves.
“Nobody,” said Tom.
You said, “You’re joking.”
Tom didn’t mind, he said “What?” again, and then, “I made some gross love in dorm rooms like anyone but Nell was my first relationship, as it were.”
As it were, I knew this, I had never given it much thought. Tom had never belonged to me any more than he’d belonged to himself; his big insufferable beauty had disembodied him and this disembodied, suffering beauty had visited me for a time. That the visit had been protracted over a period of years qualified it, I suppose, as a relationship, but I wouldn’t call it union, communion, or love.
“Which poor chap lost out to Barry?”
Tom had fallen into the Britishisms of our shorthand and his childhood, which meant Tom had fallen down.
“I shudder to think,” he added, at which I watched you lose your patience.
“Ragnar Hjort Erlingsen,” you said, as if translating Go Fuck Yourself into its ancient original language. “Youngest ever Danish parliament member. Blond, ruthless, great dancer, and real efficient.”
I stood there smiling because a nobleman named Ragnar had licked the brackish Baltic Sea off your thighs and I am so perfectly wrong for you that maybe life will let me off this hook: dark, full of ruth, clumsy, comically inept. That you would choose a Barry over a Ragnar confirmed desire’s basic irrelevance, relieved me of taking my irrelevant desire seriously. I could retire now, retire the heart.
Tom only then found the bottle opener in one of your gilt kitchen’s six hundred drawers and cracked open his beer as violently as he could and let the discarded cap lie on the floor. You and I looked at it and thought about strawberry jam. I picked it up because I have no dignity. Tom looked at Mishti, who’d just walked in, we hadn’t even heard the doorbell, evidently Barry had.
“It’s nice to see you,” Tom told Mishti. Mishti sort of literally stopped in her tracks. She looked at Tom for a second as if he were mocking her. Tom’s face didn’t change. Mishti said, “It is?”
Tom said, “Your face is a comfort to me, here in the war zone.”
You said, “What war zone?”
Tom said, “Why the interrogation?”
Mishti said, “My face is a comfort to you?”
You jumped right in and told Mishti to describe her ex. She and Tom snapped out of the eye contact gridlock they’d screeched into, and both of them focused on you. You had turned our discomfort into a parlor game. Bizarrely, Mishti and I were both wearing black turtlenecks and black jeans. It looked as though we’d planned it but I’d never seen Mishti wear black before. Carlo came in right behind her. It seemed insane that Mishti still pretended to date him, until Carlo raised his elbow slightly to shake Tom’s hand and there in the little window of Carlo’s armpit appeared Barry. At once they seemed to require each other, Carlo and Barry, each absurd and together amounting to 180 degrees.
“Sulky,” Mishti said, game. “Hot, sulky, and idiotic.”
Tom burped. “You expel idiots,” he said.
“Insensitive verb choice,” you said, pretending to be my friend.
I tossed the beer cap into the far trash can and made the shot but nobody saw.
“I used to think idiots were hot,” said Mishti.
“They are hot,” Tom said, for a reason I couldn’t imagine.
“They’re vain,” said Mishti.
Tom went back to his open beer. It felt as if Tom and Mishti had been spending time together without me, that their rapport had evolved, and I remembered with a neat punch to the spleen that I really had been expelled.
“And yours?” You welcomed Carlo magnanimously, with a shocking toothy celebrity smile, and I wanted him to bow to you. I couldn’t understand why no one was kissing the hem of your nightgown.
“Socialite lamp designer,” he said. “She was so enamored of her own chores.”
“How so?” said Tom, who had never done chores.
“Oh you know Sometimes I make coffee at five p.m. sometimes I don’t put my socks in the dryer just so I can hang them from doorknobs isn’t that weird sometimes I just need a pineapple—”
“Those are chores?” said Joan, who had always done chores.
“Eccentricities?” Carlo modified. “And to a certain extent, in moderation, of course, everyone loves eccentricities, they lubricate life. But I thought it’d be in better taste if she’d cool it a little.”
“Huh,” said Mishti, who was nothing if not cooled.
“So that’s my dark past,” Carlo told her. “Not so dark. We had a bazillion lamps.”
How willing we were to fill in our blanks, willing and even giddy. The lamp designer, then the chemist. Or the chemist, after the lamp designer. In a more platonic course of life we would be able to love one love at a time, in sequence, without recurrence, relapse, nostalgia, or overlap. But the ones we abandon are always burning holes in the one we choose.
I pictured my utilitarian lamp standing tall and blank in Red Hook. I pictured handing it an elaborate hat. I pictured my lamp throwing the hat out the window and into the East River. I pictured the hat flowing north into the Long Island Sound, covered in spotted moon snails, befriending a sea grape. Carlo had nothing more to say about his ex-girlfriend. One deep awkwardness filled the room. Even your corrupt kitchen couldn’t hold so many of us and when it seemed we’d reached the meaning of capacity the doorbell rang. Barry scampered to it, being the most recent kitchen arrival, the closest still to the door. “Mendelson!” we heard him exclaim.
BUTTER
Mendelson turned out to be one of the spectacularly fit older gentlemen who could model quarter-zip trail tees for the L.L. Bean Signature Collection. A breed of preternatural athletes sixty-five and older who redirect the savings of a corporate lifetime into elderly oomph. The first signal of Mendelson’s health is his haircut: tight on the sides, gray everywhere, and wonderful on top. The second signal is his neck: he likes you to see his neck. Finally, his socks, which are brave and patterned and knit from single-origin wool. This is a man who has tou
ched mastery and who now spends his time restraining himself from tasteless expenditure. This is Carlo’s dream and it stood there right in front of him. Carlo stared at Mendelson as you’d stare at an armadillo.
“Good of you to come,” said Barry, who looked so proud of his life he could die.
“How’s Betty?” Carlo asked. “Still dancing?”
“Don’t get him started on Betty!” Barry said, taking Mendelson’s coat. “She was welcome to join you tonight, you know.” Barry walked off toward the closet and Carlo leaned close to Mendelson and whispered, “Go on, get started.”
The fact is these mature men love the shit out of their second wives. Betty positively rescued them. Before Betty, they were misunderstood. Psychically lonely and imperfectly loved. Before Betty, all they had was cash. Now they have cash and Betty.
We all joined you at the table except Mendelson, who asked to use the restroom. We original six sat in petrified silence, waiting to say some kind of grace. You stood, as if you were she. You rushed to the kitchen and came back with cloth napkins, coiled up into bamboo napkin rings. We passed them around. You sat again, and the impossibility of grace resumed. Then, once more, the doorbell.
“There’s nobody else,” you said vaguely, and Barry again rushed to the door.
Carlo’s generally orderly face filled with mischief, his expression deadpan and his eyes entertained. A man in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit stood in the hallway, propping up a giant plastic-wrapped mattress.
Barry looked back to the table in astonishment. Carlo removed his napkin from its ring. The delivery man slapped the mattress and said, “Where?”
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