Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,29

about. A taco dinner is not a secret.”

“How about three taco dinners?”

Mishti had reversed herself so completely it was almost as if nothing had changed. Perhaps dating her nemesis made the most perfect sense. Perhaps anything made more sense than dating Carlo. I’m leaving the fate of your marriage aside.

“I’m not dating Barry,” she said, as if in response to the things I hadn’t said aloud. She knew how it looked. “I’m just figuring him out. If I can figure out what Joan sees in Barry, maybe I’ll finally understand how she thinks. I’ll ace her final,” Mishti said. “At the very least I’ll have taken something from her.”

Mishti, who I think of as authentically powerful, now needed to wield that power over you, needed you to recognize it, needed her enemy’s surrender, to prove her knack for victory. It’s the same thing I went through, but more glamorous—her story confident, mine meek. Anyway, all roads lead to whatever: she’ll soon need your nearness to confirm her basic existence, like I do, like Tom is realizing he will.

“You won’t figure anything out,” I told her. “And you’re not taking anything, Barry’s giving it away. Besides, Joan doesn’t see anything in Barry, there’s something else going on.”

“What else can go on in a marriage?”

“I don’t know but it isn’t vision.”

“You can’t think it’s only the money. Very unlike you.”

“It’s not the money but it’s something about the way the money made her feel once when she was younger.”

Mishti didn’t respond, we were curled up under the library’s grand staircase, deep in a hollow triangle that formed underneath the first flight. It was so dark I couldn’t see Mishti at all but I could feel her clothing on my arm and it was soft in an otherworldly way. She was trying to think about how money made her feel, being young.

While she thought about it I closed my eyes and drew a little evolutionary food chain parade across my eyelids: Mishti, wunderkind, 26; Nell, Homo sapiens, 31; Carlo, half-machine, 35; Joan, sorceress, 41; Barry, troll, 45. Tom wasn’t in the food chain because centaurs don’t eat or get eaten.

Then Mishti said, “He likes the way I look at him.”

“Barry?”

“Which is, you know, to be avoided, because if he likes being looked at he’s either narcissistic or neglected and the former lasts forever and the latter eventually heals and turns into cruelty as a kind of historical payback.”

“Do you like the fact that he thinks about you? Does that make you think about you?”

“At least he thinks about me, at least he isn’t one of the dreamies—”

“Dreamies?”

“Who use eccentricity and neediness as a mask for extreme solipsism and hopes for social ascension—”

“We’re back to Tom now?”

“Or dudes who love their brother. That’s the worst. The brother-best-friend club. Totally toxic.”

I realized that Mishti had been dating since she was thirteen years old and had been born symmetrical and had understood more about her own body and sexuality at age seven than I did today. She could, at a glance, provide a man’s kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. I pictured her standing beside Linnaeus, both of them wearing white curly eighteenth-century wigs. Mishti would say to him, “Hey Carl,” and he’d coo, “Ja Mishti,” and show her his Swedish flowers. Incidentally can you imagine being sent on a journey through Sweden in 1740 to classify the planet’s plants and animals? Can you imagine his boots?

I wanted to end this tolerating and aggrandizing of Barry’s libido. “He sees you as an augmentation of his reality. His reality,” I repeated because Mishti was almost certainly doing something to her own fingernails and not listening in any way. “The focus is his reality and what you do to it. Not love.”

Tom’s face came back to me, the face he’d made when I said romance wasn’t my focus. I’d given him permission, right then, to ruin my life. I can’t believe he commenced his great romance at the cheese table.

“I’d like it,” I said to Mishti, venting some misplaced retroactive anger at Tom, “if you could find a way to measure your own self-worth without praise from other people. Forget Joan, forget Barry, forget me, just go home to yourself.”

“Forget Joan, she says. What a load of hypocrite shit.”

Mishti won every argument in this way. She had for the past five years. Her vanity was untouchable because of my obsession. She knew I loved you, she knew I loved you too much, she knew I didn’t