Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,10

out of the 1 train, his first peace offering since our breakup, a rhyme he’s always disproportionately enjoyed. Maybe he wants me to call him “Tom Bomb,” or “Don Tom,” but he’s too mild and spiritually castrated for either. “My condolences,” he said.

“Tom,” I said.

He sighed unemotionally. I am too mortified to accept condolences, sympathy, or awareness of any kind. We started walking.

If I am cold to Tom it’s because heat sources molest him. He walks up the street between random admirers as if through a colonnade of lawn sprinklers, each wetting him from the side. He never returns the eye contact but I know he is soothed by the steady, quiet praise. These strangers leave him free to keep on, and in asking nothing of him, they really give him what he needs. I was one rare and temporary returnee of eye contact and I lasted two years, the longest ever detour on Tom’s path toward individual fulfillment.

We met in the library where he used to sit on Tuesdays and Thursdays, rubbing his own scalp while he bent over art books too large to carry home. He was getting a master’s in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a course of study that was expensive and useless for him but deeply felt. I liked to do my cell biology homework at his table because when I got bored I could look at his hair, which seemed to me not to be possible. It was long as Samson’s and never tangled and it covered his shoulders like a prayer shawl. Eventually he also got bored and we started talking—there was no one else at the table. After only a few dry kisses he learned that I lived with Mishti in a rat-friendly studio on Avenue C and he invited me to squat at Veronica’s (the way he referred to his childhood home). I did this because I did this. Every night Tom and I would sleep in a bed that was too large for any child and too small for a pair of grown-ups.

The word I first associate with Tom’s body is utopia. He’s got the ridiculous ringleted black curls and a face cut from marble and flooded by moonlight. His body is long and smooth and consists entirely of untoned muscle. Nothing about him (except maybe the hair, his body is lovely but bland) distracts from the basic completeness and symmetry of his eyes, which have no discernible pigment and are a winter cloud gray. He and Mishti could repopulate the world perfectly; my two best friends have our species’ two best faces. You could hardly call my face a face, more a perfunctory set of features that get the job, as it were, done. I approved of Tom without needing to be approved of in return. He found this relaxing.

All of the love Tom has ever received in his life has come to him unearned, so to ask him to start earning it now would be like charging to use the bathroom. We maintained a totally successful, fraternal, mutual regard. I was surprised by his ability to be so beautiful and he was equally surprised by my ability to define ribosome and there we left it, a kind of handshake of the wills, and we sat contented there, beside each other, for two years, until we more or less simultaneously smelled the pungent decay of our own inner yearnings.

We’re friends now, which is most of what we ever were. Tom refers to the relationship as “A Disappointment in Love.” He’s heavy into tapestries and goblets, for context. We walked across the park toward his mother’s snow globe to pick up my personal effects. I knew we’d be alone there; Veronica spent Mondays in Litchfield. I didn’t want to be alone with Tom anymore but I was capable of it, it was something I would always know how to do. We were both wearing new jackets but the same shoes we had worn during our relationship. Looking down as we walked up the bike path, it could almost have been one of the 716 days we’d spent in our Disappointment.

Tony the doorman welcomed us both as we entered. It occurred to me that he didn’t know about the breakup and neither of us bothered to tell him. We proceeded by habit to the elevator. Frankie the elevator man yanked the grate open for us. Frankie didn’t know either and I told him immediately.

“Won’t be seeing you anymore, Franks.”

He shut the grate