The book Tom quoted was one we’d read together. Tom likes that annihilation part. I describe myself as Lampedusa described a vineyard: “ugly, mediocre, but serene and alive.”
I aspire to be an old man with clean toenails.
Hildegard you were better than I could be.
Joan I’ve been so angry at you I forgot to bless the winter.
For those of us inclined toward scripts, here is a totally unscripted junction.
Tom came running to the hospital from his master’s defense. His thesis paper is on Mishti’s bedside table. The cover sheet consists of a long title and a photograph of me looking at the unicorn.
Do you ever pee so much that your bladder flat-out hurts with relief for half an hour after you’re done?
The nurses stood at a corner desk watching Tom devote himself to Mishti. He slid his hands under her neck and lifted her hair up away from her face, took a hair tie off his own wrist, and gathered hers. He pulled the blanket up to nestle her collarbone. He dragged his thumb across her forehead and unfurrowed her brow. He held the backs of his hands to a glass of ice water and then pressed them against her cheeks. He waited for her eyes.
You can find something you have no reason to resist irresistible. You can be tempted by something that won’t harm you. But do you have to make appetite singular? Structurally, there can only be one ground under the temple.
They say tortellini are done when they float at the top of the water. I like to stare down into the pot and watch them when they’re one inch off the bottom and only almost anywhere. That’s where we are today. The hospital is eerie, awestruck, blanched.
WE
The Walgreens on Astor Place filled Mishti’s prescriptions and I wandered with the paper bag up toward Union Square. Barry and Carlo had sent Mishti a joint Speedy Recovery card on the new Juniperus stationery. They had only been told that she’d had her stomach pumped. The contact line at the top of their letterhead listed a post-midtown post-modern Irving Place address that promised a progressive fund, more aesthetically intelligent and demure than its macho predecessors. I wanted to enter their gentle office. I wanted to defile it with my own machismo.
Mishti had wanted to damage her two bodies, together, in one go. She’d wanted her share of the punishment. Carlo, Mishti eventually conceded, had been obsessed with protection. She left the other end of the information open. It wasn’t medically or personally expedient to press her and she’d said enough.
I walked slowly through the daylight. 4th Avenue, sloth of the East Village, made its sloping westward curve toward the park. I turned right onto 14th Street, left onto Irving Place. The population of Estonia exited Trader Joe’s carrying rectangular prisms. A splendid dog reminded me in passing of Amanda, and I realized I’d never see Amanda the dog again as I stopped at the Juniperus address.
A Chinese restaurant called The Cottage occupied the ground floor of 33 Irving Place. I walked up to the window and read the menu. I took a picture of it for Tom. The cold sesame noodles cost only $4.95. A lunch special for $6.50. Bean Curd with Garlic Sauce! I looked up and saw a WeWork decal on the second-floor window. Juniperus rented only a room from an office share.
I didn’t dare to go upstairs anymore, so I walked straight into The Cottage. I ordered the Bean Curd with Garlic Sauce. I sat at the window table. The food came quickly and I ate my brown cubes in gratitude. Mishti would need her refills by mid-afternoon. I waited. I paid. My fortune said, “Don’t go there.” My second fortune said, “A stone sleeping is a great force.” My third fortune said, “You are a man of many abilities.” At about one o’clock, perhaps the lunch bell had rung, Barry hustled out of the WeWork entrance and waited to cross the road. I knocked loudly at the inside of my window. He buttoned his coat. I leapt from my table, disturbing the tranquil waitstaff. Barry crossed.
He’d gotten a good head start on me by the time I cleared the restaurant’s inner and winter doors and I ran after Barry on the sidewalk screaming, “I’M A VERY GOOD WITCH”—at first he didn’t hear me so I used his name—“A GOOD WITCH BARRY”—now he turned, saw me, I yelled, “AND HERE IS MY PROPHECY”—he conspicuously speed-walked—“YOU WILL BUILD A SHIP OF ROTTEN WOOD AND BLOAT IT AND IT WILL GET VERY BIG”—Barry started earnestly sprinting away from me at this point—“AND YOU WILL SOAK IT IN ROTTEN WATERS AND IT WILL FAIL BARRY”—poor Barry—“IT WILL FAIL.” We cannot remove the gross from the world but we can deny it our forgiveness. We can remove ourselves from the gross and let it wither until it’s small.
After Barry crossed 17th Street, the light changed, the traffic resumed between us, he turned a corner, I couldn’t see him anymore, I sat down in the middle of the sidewalk with my knees bunched up to my chest, and the New Yorkers in their solipsism and courtesy marched around me, not wanting anything to do with my distress and leaving me to my peace.
Oh Bartholomew, Oh Bart, Oh Barry the Bad, may we each get what we reach for, and may we reach for only what is ours.
I went back to The Cottage and got my coat. Nobody had stolen it. I thanked the waitstaff so much for that. A man stood outside the window now. He couldn’t see me behind the glare. I put my arms in my sleeves and took a sip of water. The man outside put his hands in his pockets. Carlo exited the building and kissed him. It was a perfect, overcast day for kissing. The man put an arm around Carlo’s shoulder and they walked, presumably, to lunch.
I didn’t chase them; I sat back down at my table and ordered a plate of string beans. I asked Tom to join me. We’d return to the hospital together. I felt so happy for Carlo I could throw myself into a refrigerator. The death of conventional Carlo seemed to be the death of convention itself. It hadn’t been love from others that fed him, it had been love from men, which until now he’d never received. Carlo’s new fullness blasted 16th Street with its incandescent rays. He’d been useless to Mishti because she’d been useless to him—they’d approached each other out of common laziness. I didn’t begrudge him the loan of Mishti, her unattractive perfection had revealed him to himself, and I didn’t begrudge Mishti the permanent loan of Tom. It was permanent, anyone could see that.
Tom came. The waitstaff seemed relieved that I’d ended my loneliness. I smiled and let them hope. He and I sat in silence for a little while, and then there was a great deal to say.
I told him about Carlo.
“He lied to Mishti,” was Tom’s only response.
“He did?”
“He made Mishti think she could rely on him and she couldn’t rely on him.”
I wondered who we were talking about. I wondered if Tom wanted to talk about the fact that nobody except his mother Veronica had ever relied upon him for anything, and that now Veronica relied upon Harvey; that he’d never supported a single thing; that he’d even demurred from carrying heavy books home from the library, and that was why we met. What I heard Tom saying was, I want somebody to rely on me. What he said was, “Carlo sucked.”
Mishti has never been the relying type, she’s been the providing type, and even now in her weakened state, I still couldn’t see what Tom had that she’d need anyway.
“You don’t have much to offer,” I told Tom, which was about all there was to tell him. It was also what he most needed to hear.
“Yeah. Don’t tell anyone,” he said. He smiled because he was about to start trying, to start offering somebody at least his whole self.
“People have become bar stools to me,” I said, “I no longer speak.”
YOU
You asked to meet at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, which struck me as irresponsibly romantic.
We haven’t spoken in about one hundred days. Silence is a greater authority than love: you obey it, protect it, grow it as a matter of pride. You’d rather break your heart than break your rule.
So thank you for breaking. You said you have missed me. Why is somebody missing you the most delicious possible s
atisfaction? We walked into the Osborne Garden, a colonnade of crab apples. You asked after Mishti. I told you that in Scandinavia the verb for “to poison” is the same as the verb for “to marry.” You told me the difference is that “to marry” is a reflexive verb. I had forgotten your life with Ragnar, your Danish history. You marry yourself, you said. You poison another.
It’s like I am rinsing a cup and turning it over to dry.
I want to take care of what we had, now that it is no longer necessary.
You recited, “Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.”
I said, “Ani?”
You said, “Lydia.”
“Lydia.”
“Lydia Davis.”
My complete defeat. “I don’t know her,” I said.
“I’ll read it to you,” you said, “it’s short.” It’s like you were saying Animal harmony.
You said you’d been offered tenure in Santa Cruz. Not at Columbia? Jackasses, you said. I asked if you’re moving. Your whole body shrugged. I told you I don’t live anywhere. I told you I want to become a psychologist.
You looked at me as if you’d just swum across the English Channel and I looked at you as if I were the towel wrapping your shoulders. I took off my backpack and unbuckled it. I loosed the drawstrings and removed the fat thing inside.
I’ve opened my book to transcribe this final conversation and you are watching me do it. I hate your watching but I want the document. You ask what I’m doing. I know you don’t expect an answer. Intimacy is only a floor beneath us, a base mutual recognition of entire to entire. If we choose to make love on it, if we choose to pave it over with asphalt, if we choose to build a temple on it, we can, we will.
Let me remove my laces. I’ll hand you these notebooks, stacked and tied and knotted. Call it a compendium. It is my lab work, my evidence, my chart, and if it repulses you, walk into your repulsion wearing the great badge of one who has been seen. We’re starting into our new days now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novel and screenplay The Sunlit Night, and a collection of poems, Lofoten. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker online, among others. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in New Hampshire.
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