Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,11

and the elevator lurched into service.

“You two done boinking?”

“Never to boink again.”

“Shame.”

“Shame.”

“Shame,” Tom chimed in, generously.

The eleventh floor dinged and we stepped from the elevator into the apartment, which was in itself the building’s eleventh floor. Tom’s grandfather had been a British gentleman; Tom’s father had been a gentleman’s renegade son. Grandfather Ottaway had removed the family stain Junior to this owned asset on Madison, a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum. Junior met Veronica on the steps of that museum, married her, missed Tom’s birth at McCloskey’s Bar, and died shortly thereafter of liver disease. Tom doesn’t drink for this reason and lives instead in the self-intoxicated state of medieval unicorn daydreaming, his substitute vice.

Thomas Ottaway the Third now flipped on the light switch in his bedroom and stretched out over a window-side chaise lounge. There lay an infinite waywardness about him, a quality many found unforgivable in one whose way had been so neatly paved by such lavish means, but which was as natural and inherent to him as the means were, and which he could no more separate himself from than from his surname. Finding the chaise lounge hard, he got up again. He walked through the snow globe as if through a school: cowed, quiet, easy. I walked through it in an aggressively neutral state I’d adopted for coping with riches that would never improve my life.

His mother’s framed face reigned over the piano. Veronica had always been intelligent and silent and given Tom very little instruction, reprimand, or fawning. Tom had been her young business partner in the business of being alive rather than dead, and she had treated him rather as a colleague. She’d worked as a Corporate Patron Program officer for the Met’s Development Office since the eighties and when Junior died she remarried the curator of Northern European and British Painting, a very short man named Harvey. Harvey had been on the brink of proposing himself when Junior beat him to it—he’d warned Veronica right then that the man was a drunk—and Harvey hadn’t been waiting for Junior’s death per se but for the inevitable day when he would die. Junior having obliged him entirely, Harvey married Veronica within eight months.

The new family stayed in the city until Tom had finished fifth grade at Dalton and could be sent to a loosely Christian boys’ boarding school, a context in which Tom was at all times two notches too feminine and where he would spend seven years. Tom can still fit into his eighth-grade basketball shorts. Harvey and Veronica progressed from spending weekends to weekdays to the entirety of their recent retirement in Litchfield, Connecticut, leaving the gaping snow globe to Tom in all his slightness. A new distillery in Litchfield ages and bottles coffee-flavored bourbon. Harvey invites Tom to come up and enjoy the guided corn and barley boiler tour about once a month, an act of decorum so ignorant of Tom’s personality that it could be taken as insult but which in practice is ideal because neither party needs to fear any actual contact.

I could feel Tom’s boredom radiating from his elbows and knees. He lacked an active companion. Women shrink from forcing uninvited intimacy on him, partly because he never invites it, and partly because they mistake his beauty for its frequent synonym pride, but pride in Tom is only a mellow bashfulness. He is doing most of the shrinking himself. Shrinking from his guilty and morbid inheritance, from his nice face he can’t undo, and from his inability to understand anything about himself other than his inheritance and his face. I feel for Tom because he’s trying, like anyone, to figure it out.

When he found a more comfortable place to lie down on his mother’s bed, I began gathering my things. I’d left a water-flossing gun in the middle bathroom, a sweater under his bedside table, and six bags of Pirate’s Booty in a kitchen cupboard because the Ottaways don’t believe in snacking. I’d already Ubered my suitcase and bookcase to Red Hook and I was surprised to realize there wasn’t anything else of mine anywhere. Mishti still has my colander. I guess I haven’t really lived anywhere in a long time, maybe since Kansas.

He was still on his mother’s bed when I returned. Seeing him there, spread out over the poppy and marigold duvet, I had a Pavlovian instinct to give him head. It would have been easy, these were the khakis I knew well with the two