Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

  “I bought Nell a bed,” Carlo said.

  You only raised your eyebrows and said, “Drop it on the floor.”

  The man pulled this icon of intercourse into the foyer. He dropped it. The mattress squashed all the nice lilies still strewn over the floor and popped berry juice all over its plastic and the large noise shook your cabinets. Barry signed his receipt, tipped him in cash, and in shock wished him a merry Christmas.

  “Merry Christmas,” said the delivery man as he walked hugely unburdened back down the hall.

  Tom, who had been communing with the wallpaper, blinked into consciousness. He slapped Carlo’s back as hard as the man had slapped my new bed and smiled and said, “She needed one.”

  “I know,” said Carlo. “Overdue.”

  “Why is it here?” was Mishti’s excessively practical question.

  “It shouldn’t be,” Carlo said very mildly, “unless I pasted this address by mistake—Joan’s invite came in as I was ordering.”

  “It’s fine,” you said, as if a guest had merely broken a wine glass. “If you don’t mind, Amanda will lie on it.” I couldn’t believe your cool. For one second you flickered. “Where have you been sleeping?” you asked me.

  I looked at you with weight. It felt like walking on your back. Amanda herself, tall and red, walked into the room, climbed aboard the mattress, sniffed its plastic, spun three times, and collapsed. She let out a great dog sigh. We saw the strip of light under the bathroom door flick off. Mendelson, we thought, in unison. He pulled the door in toward himself, stepped out of the bathroom, caught the tip of his Merrells under the mattress side and fell, face first, onto Amanda.

  The dog yelped a human sound and scrambled out from under him. She ran into the kitchen and slurped frantically from her water bowl. The bowl screeched against the floor tile.

  Carlo and Tom stood up then didn’t move.

  Barry shouted, “Hoo!”

  Mishti looked at me with eyes that said, We were young and now we’re idiots. I was born old and have always been an idiot. Mishti stood.

  You remained seated and raised both hands to your parted lips and held them there in exhausted, abiding nihilism.

  Mendelson lay where he’d landed. Nobody helped him up, he was beyond help, to help would be further insult. He lay there and smelled the mattress’s buttons as Amanda had done. Then, slowly, he pressed his palms down and with his established upper-body strength did a kind of push-up into a child’s pose, then to kneeling, to squat, to standing. The plastic creaked a fart noise under each of his movements. His head, as they instruct you, was the last to come up.

  “Excuse me,” Mendelson said neatly, his pranayama-trained low blood pressure boiling somewhere very deep under his skin. He took his seat at the table with the incredible lightness of a man who finds humiliation boring.

  I said, “What’s the preferred disciplinary action against unsafe mattresses these days? Mr. Estlin, Mr. Mendelson, I appeal to you, couldn’t we have this mattress expelled?”

  You said, “Nell.”

  Barry said, “That’s hardly funny.”

  It seemed clear that I had ruined everyone’s life. I didn’t know what to do or say that could explain the fact that I’d never even asked for anything.

  “Sorry!” I shouted at my bamboo napkin ring.

  Tom said, “Huh?”

  “I mean, thank you!” I shouted at Carlo.

  You said, “Stop shouting.”

  Carlo smiled as if he’d won a thumb wrestle and crooned, “You’re welcome.”

  I poured the wine. Carlo swirled his glass, tasted it, didn’t like it, and said it was good. Mishti drank hers in a gulp and then sat back in her chair so that the rest of the night might happen to her.

  Mendelson recovered entirely and made a toast, thanking Barry for guiding him to the honorary position, thanking Joan for the potatoes. Barry clanked everyone’s glass with sloppy hollow noises. I raised a toast to your pollen-pistil grant. You looked embarrassed to exist. I said I couldn’t wait to assist your study. I said your grant would not only earn you tenure, it would save my life. Heat rose from radiators before the great bay window and made the glass panes look molten and swirling. The apartment itself swallowed my toast, and the power and congratulation you deserved that night crumbled submissively under the outdated thumb of Riverside Drive. Barry said, “Hear hear.” You thanked him, barely moving your lips.

  Anyone who has something you want—a talent, a beauty, an apartment—is paying for it at a price you may find intolerable. Joan what I wish for you even more than I wish myself for you is that you find someone who has only what they need. You’ll find they haven’t paid for it, the world has given it to them in deference to the humility of their request. This is a person who can weather life and who can rejoice in it.

  Your sweet potatoes tasted like apple butter.

  WINE

  After I cleared the table, the bed was still on the floor, we no longer noticed it, it had become something natural to the space. Amanda occasionally revisited it, as if taking herself on vacation. Carlo opened a Sancerre he’d brought for the hosts but hadn’t presumed to pair with the meal; he found new glasses in your sturdy cupboards and poured the bottle out between us. In an adolescence-flavored stupor we receded into assorted corners and drank there, raised the low music, checked in to an evening we knew would turn jolly and damaging. There is no upper age limit for electing damage. It’s not a youth folly but a heart folly.

  Mendelson was twirling a what, a toothpick? An extra-long toothpick? Somewhat acrobatically from finger to finger and rubbing Amanda (they now knew each other well) with the side of his calf. Carlo and Mishti flanked him, nodding.

  “December,” someone said, as if all night we’d been singing one song and this was the song’s name.

  “And the hysterical year-end crunch.”

  I wandered past to find you and Carlo stopped me and said, “No one should sleep on the floor.” It occurred to me now that Carlo had spent, you know, some money, that the bed had cost something, though its price seemed to hover somewhere above Mishti’s head in an abstract nondollar denomination.

  “Thank you, Carlo,” I said. “It’s—”

  “She’s been sleeping on the floor,” Carlo said to Mendelson.

  “I gathered,” Mendelson said with that old bored knife-light in his eyes. He shook my hand and said, “Congratulations,” as if I’d closed a merger, and I stroked the inside of his palm with my middle finger until he jumped. I looked at Mendelson’s exposed neck and said, “Don’t worry, there is rest for the wicked,” and turned and shook Carlo’s hand and said, “Thanks,” and Carlo said, “Please.” He took Mishti’s hand warmly and adoringly. Mishti looked down and stroked Amanda’s spine. Mendelson rubbed his palm against the side of his hip to remove the feeling of me. I didn’t care that he had disciplined me. He occurred to me now as a dustpan.

  “I’m looking forward to Bermuda,” she said. She seemed so tired.

  “Bermuda?” Mendelson asked. “Why Bermuda? Or I suppose, when?”

  “When? Christmas,” said Carlo.

  “Nice,” Mendelson said, the most bored he’d been yet. “I was going to recommend you to the holiday colloquium,” you could see Carlo’s soul curdle in his eyes, “but the beach is more relaxing.”

  “Bermuda—” Carlo started, as if he wanted to say that there were no beaches on Bermuda and he couldn’t.

  “Gorgeous,” Mendelson said. “Anyway the colloquium is for joyless maniacs with a single-track mind. I’m glad you have some joy in your life.” This seemed more or less earnest, if simultaneously devastating. “Betty would love Bermuda, but . . . she understands.”

  And I watched Mishti internalize this understanding, catch the punt, and take a knee, knowing it was now her turn to understand, to permit, to forfeit, to encourage Carlo to go ahead
and have a single-track mind, darling.

  I couldn’t bear it and it wasn’t my business and I walked into the library, you have a library in your home, and you weren’t there. I stood alone in the cavernous, overstuffed den and understood what it is to be a chipmunk.

  When I turned back to see how Mishti looked, I saw Barry refill her glass, this time red, from a new bottle he’d conjured and opened. Something bottomless yawned under us, everyone could feel it, an infinite river of wine had thawed and arrived to cut through our winter. Mishti drank the glass so quickly Barry could refill it before he kept walking. Tom appeared, it seemed out from under the floor. Then, soon, you. I couldn’t resist the group; it was cold in the den. I walked back toward Mishti and she shrank away toward a console on the far wall. A few quiet seconds followed in which I couldn’t see her face or her hands. Then she began to sing.

  WATER

  The song poured from Barry’s sound system at a volume that could carbonate water. Mishti faced the wall, back to us. She extended her right arm out to the side and twirled it just the way it’s twirled in our movie. I knew what was happening even before I could believe it. One very specific part of our life was coming to the front of our life. She had nothing left to give but this central treasure she carried at all times and never gave. Her upright neck, from behind, looked like a soldier’s. On the next line she turned to face us, as the woman in pink does, and sang the rest of the verse with the accompanying dance move: hand ripples under the eyes. In the movie, Hrithik Roshan watches her dance and slowly walks toward her. I knew more forcefully than ever who I was. I slowly walked toward her. She walked toward me. We met on the mattress.

  Mishti knew who I was too. I stood before her in Hrithik’s crossed-arm posture and she rotated her wrists on either side of my face. The mattress wobbled beneath us.

  “Le jaa le jaa!” we simultaneously wailed. “Soniya le jaa le jaa!”

  It meant: Take away, my beloved, take it away!

  Mishti sang the pink woman’s solo Oh with both arms outstretched.

  Tom stared at us as if we’d become planets.

  We knew the dance. We knew every step of the dance. I had no idea bodies could memorize anything so well. We were terrible and inebriated and the plastic-wrapped mattress was less grounding than the surface of the moon but it was the deluxe moment when your external life sees your internal life and therefore sees you at your best. The Hindi lyrics I’d heard hundreds of times burst from my lips like a formula. The men stared at us, as if we’d seizured. Our accidentally identical outfits looked like a uniform for our ceremony. There was one move that required the ardent wiggling of our thumbs. We wiggled our thumbs in unbelievable sync. We were doing the most elaborate rib cage contractions and shoulder pumps and a touch of fancy footwork I’d never before dared but could do now because Hrithik had done it, with us, for us, so many nights on the couch. Around two minutes into the song an instrumental interlude hit and we collapsed onto the patient mattress. As with Mendelson’s fall, nobody applauded, or commented, or moved.

  We closed our eyes, lying on our backs, heaving on the mattress, our necks sweating onto the plastic. I wanted you to think of me as delightful. I know you aren’t interested in delight. I thought you might be interested in humiliation. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was very, very proud. Mishti created and filled the cavity beside me and I felt newly grateful to Carlo for such an excellent bed, a bed I’d be honored to sleep in, now that it’d been so christened. Someone approached us, it was Tom. He offered his hand to Mishti. She took it and stood up. Nobody helped me up, or everyone assumed I wanted to keep lying there. I kept lying there. Carlo and Barry and Mendelson came over to stand with Tom and I looked at these four male heads above me as if they were the north, south, east, and west winds.

  “Mendelson’s got a great idea,” Carlo said, above me, to Mishti. “You take Betty’s dance intensive, I’ll take the colloquium, and we go to Bermuda in February.”

  Tom walked away. You followed him. Mishti excused herself to the restroom. Mendelson had to be going. Barry walked him to the elevator. Carlo went somewhere I couldn’t see. My new bed has sixteen buttons, four hundred coils, and a pillow top. Amanda came and lay next to me in the spot Mishti had warmed.

  MEAT

  Amanda smelled like beef mixed with turkey served over polenta. She panted her breath at me and I welcomed it. I have been panting my polenta breath at everybody for thirty-one years and nobody has ever welcomed it. Her red unwashed fur washed itself in little clumps here and there across her belly. I congratulated her on her mammalhood. Neither of us apologized. Amanda drooled the way I like to drool, down one side of the mouth, it dripped onto her left paw and polished her claws, and I knew right then that I could be acceptable, to her, and to myself, if not to you.

  SALT

  Everything had become possible now that I could dance and I owned a bed and I’d parted with my last shred of privacy, the words balls to the wall rang through my blood as if chimed from church bells, so when Mishti’s face appeared above mine dripping ink onto my forehead I didn’t register any surprise. Surprise had left our party. I didn’t even feel concern. I felt a kind of strawberry-colored curiosity.

  Having finally, slowly, Mendelson-style stood up, I faced Mishti and found her crying. Her explicitly un-waterproof mascara had ruled her face into columns. She didn’t attempt to wipe anything off her cheeks or nose or heart-shaped chin. I’d never seen her cry and now learned that when she did it, she did it with uncurbed exuberance. I couldn’t help but try to wipe something. I ran the back of my hand under her nose and pulled some swirly snot away from her. Now that she could breathe, she opened her mouth and said, “I never believed you.”

  I didn’t blame her, I’d never believed me either, but in a specific sense I didn’t know what she was talking about. “That’s okay,” I said, to be overarching about it.

  “But it’s actually worse now, believing you is worse.”

  “Huh,” I said. She took my hand and walked me toward your library.

  Tom had you pushed up against the glass cabinet doors of your rare books collection: your leg wrapped around his knee and your arm wrapped around his ass. Mishti and I watched you two clean each other’s teeth outside of time and space and then I pulled Mishti into the bathroom. I shut the door behind us and couldn’t find the light switch. A small, wild-rose-shaped nightlight plugged in above the sink gave off a pink light, a glow that filled the sink and bounced off the porcelain onto the ceiling. At the moment it seemed perverse to me that you’d be afraid of the dark. There had been something unidentifiably dark about the library: it wasn’t about Tom, it wasn’t about Barry, it wasn’t even about you—it had to do with desperation.

  Mishti closed the toilet lid, sat down, and proclaimed: “Tom is the most spiritually lazy and emotionally selfish man I’ve ever met and my entire being resents him and I don’t know how to bear the way he simply doesn’t want me.”

  Joan I needed you then in the bathroom, I wasn’t of sound mind and this was a little too much for me. Also I could hardly see. Mishti’s neck was light level and became the room’s one pink pillar. Didn’t want her?

  “Which is to say—” I stammered.

  “I want him,” she finished.

  “I had no idea,” was the whole truth and the only thing I could say.

  “It was okay when he was with you because you come first, for me, and you met him first, and sense made sense, it was fine, but then you didn’t even like him, and I couldn’t stand watching it—how did you stay together so long?”

  “I’m not sure,” I idly grabbed the faucet handle, “I think he felt like protection to me? And I felt like nothing to him, which was all he was looking for.” Tom, now that I thought of it, had to be Mishti’s perfect complement: perfect and complement both in the sense of achieving wholeness. He was abstract, imprecise, dreamy, and unambitious; she was exact a
nd earthbound; they were both beautiful. Tom and I had shared no such symmetries. We had both been underwhelmed, underspoken, dry, and polite. I turned the faucet on and the cold water rushed out. Mishti turned it off.

  I asked her why she wanted him. It seemed worth asking. She had prepared, as she would, a comprehensive and sensible answer: she loved how little direction he needed, how self-generative and flexible he was, loved the prettiness of his impractical degree, and his unapologetic dilettantishness, which in her eyes revealed his fluency in all the assorted flavors of the world she’d never in her rigidity know. She loved him because he was relaxed, sophisticated, and odd. She saw who he was and loved him for it.

  You don’t love Tom like this. What you don’t feel for Tom is what Mishti feels in torrents: clear arrows of appreciation for Tom’s totally bland interior. It sets her mind at ease. It means nothing to you. I wondered if you would give Mishti your seat, as if she were pregnant, or disabled. I knew you wouldn’t, because you ultimately wouldn’t want to insult her, because you consider unearned giving a cheap shot. I used to think Mishti wouldn’t take the seat, either, but I’d never seen her like this. She sat in black on the toilet, pink and in love with Tom.

  I replayed your make-out against the bookshelf. That raging attraction between you and Tom seemed to run on disbelief, as if each had surprised the other with the gift of a new and not necessarily inhabitable continent. Joan I felt so angry. Not because Tom had beaten me to you, not because you had beaten Mishti to Tom, not because you had invited us into your home and then hacked down your ceiling while we were trapped inside, but because you had given up your own elegance and your elegance is all I believed in. You had turned clumsy, and rude. Break my heart as many times as you want, but who are you to break Mishti’s? She stood and washed the mascara from her cheeks. I left her there and went in search of Barry.