Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,32

built his case. “She keeps asking for more and more. We finish and she wants more.”

“You must be very satisfying,” I said, ten cold sesame noodles dangling from my lips like a car wash.

He paused. Joan I started to cry.

“What the hell, Nell,” a new rhyme for him, “what?”

I didn’t know what. I hated myself for never having wanted him, I didn’t know what was wrong with me, I didn’t want to fuck you from behind, I didn’t have a pulse.

“Jesus Christ I won’t tell you any more,” he said, quietly, “I thought we were, you know, enlightened exes who could maintain a sexual discourse.”

I wished for a moment that Tom had a sister whom I could fuck from behind and tell him about it. The closest thing was his mother, Mother Veronica, a woman so apparently cold-blooded I wished nothing more for her than that somewhere, sometimes, her husband Harvey succeeded in holding her in whatever way she privately hoped to be held. I stopped my tears by imagining Veronica and Harvey snuggling, a ridiculous word for Tom’s mother, snuggling with all their might, under Harvey’s valuable Hans Holbein the Younger.

Another man, or any woman, would have asked me just then What are you thinking about and I would have said Your mother snuggling and we would have been able to return to our noodles in good faith but Tom in those blank moments asks himself what he is thinking about.

The waiter came by and refilled our waters. Tom abruptly grasped the bowl of orange wonton crackers, threw them down his throat, and then asked the waiter to bring more of them. The waiter laughed because he’s a nice guy. I slid the rest of the sesame noodles onto my plate, as if we were in a race or interested in wastelessness. The waiter brought more crackers, took the empty plate. For a moment there was nothing in the center of the table and we both looked at the brown wood.

“Do you feel any guilt?” I asked the table.

“She started it,” he said. “More to the point have you ever felt any guilt? You’ve been, what, casting spells against this marriage for years. You probably have more to do with it than I do.”

I rehearsed the work Mishti and I had done Halloween night. I wondered if Tom fucking Joan away from Barry counted—lemon balm, clover, ginger, High John the Conqueror, rowan, wahoo, Winter’s bark—as “success.”

The wood turned, as I stared at it, into an oval of string beans, chili oil, no pork, for some reason Tom the Uber Goy doesn’t like pork. The beans steamed great Greek columns of steam. Tom crunched a wonton cracker and I lifted my plate to my mouth and began perversely licking the peanut sauce from it until it was clean. Then the beans were cooler and we could begin.

Tom took one, one bean, with his fingers, and put it on his plate. I did the same.

“Tell me about the Captivity hanging,” I said, my pawn to E5.

“Well Joan was right—they’re not thistles they’re bistort.” Somehow he had already taken my pawn. He took three more beans between two fingers and dropped them onto his plate. Then he arranged the four beans into a hash sign. I grabbed a whole handful of beans, my palm smeared with a million oils, and dropped them onto my plate like pickup sticks. I built a double hash: four on top of four, the beginning of a Jenga tower. I looked up and Tom had built his tower three stories high. I pulled a bean from the bottom of the serving plate and ate it.

He chose to use a fork for the first bean he actually ate. Tom could be so quietly and deeply critical when he disapproved, and he disapproved of such eclectic and unpredictable things, I’d always been nervous about what he judged in me and resentful that he should be able to judge with such force. The tidy mercy of a breakup is how immediately the judgments, and the fear of judgments, evaporate. I could eat with my fingers again, who cared. All I wanted to do now was build a bean tower higher than his, and I knew I could.

“Now that you’ve correctly identified the bordering herbs around the unicorn’s feet, they have no choice but to name you a Master of Medieval and Renaissance Studies,” I said. “You get your diploma when, June?”

Tom nodded and then began simply and mellifluously humming “Beauty