Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,38

the cold hadn’t ruined anything. The river waited to my left like a sleeping fish, silvery and languageless, coughing up the great banks of the Palisades without any effort. A tanker stood still on its surface, crazily heavy, reminding me that I was a twig who could walk. I walked and walked, up the shoulder while cars swerved around me—there’s no clear delineation between where people should walk and where cars should drive on the road to the Cloisters because it’s a singular and pure approach to an old place.

I climbed the fake-ancient and certainly cursed stairs to the front gate. It surprised me to find electric lights installed along the entrance corridor. They’d been tinted yellow to imitate age, but the columns they lit up signified age of a different order. I wanted to loiter in the dark with all the old stone and to turn into stone myself. I knew Tom was waiting inside, hot and human and growing hair. I took my hood down and checked my coat.

There he stood, by the Romanesque fountain of a lion drooling into a tub. The sound it made was utterly peaceful, individual drops on marble, the expression of the lion’s face lunatic and hilarious. Tom, because he likes living, stood smiling at the hilarious lion. When he heard me approach, he offered the same smile to me.

“Pilgrim,” he said.

“Lordship.”

If I acquiesced to Tom’s ego and turf here, he’d let me out quickly; I’d drop the money into his coat pocket (evidently also checked, he stood in a thin henley the gray of his eyes) and I’d walk off in an easy way, in fact walking out of his life: quietly, finally.

We circled the Cuxa Cloister, Catalan, year 1130, an arcade of columns whose capitals showed conjoined lions eating men. The monastery had been sacked in the seventeenth century, fell into ruin by the nineteenth, and had been reconstructed here at a quarter its original size. It was still huge, commanding. Above us the Lamb of God danced on the head of a cherub, and the cherub folded two of his four wings over his chest as a private blanket.

Tom walked, elegantly ogling each object so I’d understand him to be an attentive person. We stopped before twin basins, the Lavabo, from the Latin for “I will wash.” I will wash, I promised myself, having lapsed, having become a little pillar of body oil. I wished I could pull my hood up again and cover my neglected scalp but I wanted to disgust Tom a little, I wanted to get my grease on him. Tom’s hair was clean and sheeny. Sometimes he touched it, as if to get back in touch with himself. Sometimes even I wanted to touch it. I looked forward to the day that touching Tom’s hair would cease to be an option for me—that day became tomorrow. We shared too much, we wanted too little from each other. I wanted a clean break from him, or at least a break of any kind.

“She’s a real adult,” Tom said, as if we’d been talking about you, and I thought I would suffer more XXX annals. “She confirms the fact that I’m a child.”

I thought of Mishti saying, “She’s so . . . old.” I wondered what Tom found arousing—it hadn’t been me, and it hadn’t been any of the countless Miss America contestants who’d solicited him throughout college. I looked at his body grown high, his hair grown long, the fuzz on the backs of his hands, the bone in his jaw, the bulge in his neck, and told him, “You aren’t childish.”

“I think if the moment came, and somebody said, Tom, do something, say something, be something, believe something, if I became, you know, needed—needed in some urgent way to, you know, deliver,” he clawed his right fingernails into his left index finger, turning the knuckle white, “I’d fudge.” He let the finger go. “I worry I’m a serial fudger.”

Against everything I knew of Tom’s inconstancies, his cowardice, and the pulsing envy I felt for his scratched and pinkened finger that had stroked yours, I placed my hand across one of his large flat shoulder blades and said, “You’re the genuine article.”

Tom laughed because he wants so badly to be genuine.

“Everybody’s a fake in some way,” he said. “You know? Well, everybody except Mishti.”

“Mishti wears platform boots for fake height, and eyebrow paint for fake impact, and padded bras.”

“Yeah, but she’s only about what she’s about. She