Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,42

your bedside windowsill, its petals inducing feline kidney failure. I have, since that Christmas, assumed you loved lilies because it was the only plant I saw in your home. I have never interrogated it because you loved it. How is it that neither of us knew about them, about what they can do to cats? As if what we love can’t hurt?

You placed the vase on the windowsill behind the sink. You wiped your hands on a tea towel. The kitchen had been painted the butter color of better homes and the gilt fixtures shone a pee-tinted light. You looked at me with an enraged, apologetic expression that seemed to blame me for the yellowness, for the fact that we were getting yellow.

I met you the year you became Mrs. Estlin and you see in my face a portal back to the moment you made your choice. I met you after you were accomplished and before you were comfortable, which is any spirit’s most vibrant point. I met you at your height. I watched you choose to pour cement over the then ceilingless room of your life and call it a ceiling. I watched you hang a chandelier. Every time the breeze ripples the crystals you’re frightened. Every time you’re frightened I’m in love with you.

You stood by the sink, watching me watch your decline into establishment and you wanted to climb me out of yourself, climb me like a painter’s ladder. You can put your feet on my flat rungs, I want you to, I’m good for that use and no other, I’m firmly planted in the muck, myself. And there you stand in your long gray cosmos. I look at you and I see how absolutely each person is afflicted, regardless of station, by envy. How envy is the best distraction from the completeness of our own lives. How longing is sacred and envy is rotten longing. How hard we are on our own happiness and how generous we are toward just about anyone else, how willing we are to believe that anyone else knows how.

We couldn’t find a thing to say to each other in the golden kitchen and I wanted to write you a benediction on appetite, our enormous animal appetite, and how pure appetite doesn’t differentiate between nourishment and harm. About female patience and the wastefulness of wanting what others wish they didn’t have. About the incredible courage and elegance of children who have not yet named their own fears. About how long we are children. About the person to whom you promise and then take back your life. That we should be capable as organisms to love and then to leave, to pledge and then repledge, is our most hopeful and cruel power.

“I’ll keep the elder away from Amanda,” I said.

“She’s a good girl,” you said.

At this point the evening fractured into distinct, miniature evenings, one after another, as if it weren’t a night we were spending together but an age, an eon.

BEER

Tall, thin, and alabaster, Tom Ottaway opened the wood-covered metal fridge door and took himself a beer. He carried a kind of immaculate energy around him and I wanted to take his picture, but as with the curtain I couldn’t. I don’t wish Tom to fade any more than I wish cliffs to crumble. You reacted electrically to the combination of me and you and him contained in the neutral kitchen, a compound unrepeated since the cheese table, and you jolted to attention with a swish of your atypically loose hair, the waves flew round and gathered on one shoulder. With this imitation of your single braid armor in place you ventured: “Who came before Nell?”

“What?” said Tom, unimaginatively.

It startled me that you’d throw such a bedsheet over our pet elephant and bring its shape into sight, call it Elephant, serve it to us hot, but it didn’t surprise me.

You held an arm out toward me as if I were a piece of evidence. Then you raised your other palm to your own chest, covering that little moonstone. “Joan, preceded by Nell, preceded by whom,” you pronounced clearly, I had never heard you say your own name, and I felt all at once that you had read this notebook, that you imitated my invocations. I also knew you hadn’t, and I wanted you to, I wanted to give you these bodega books full of worship, bound up in mulberry branches. I wanted to hear you read yourself as I’ve composed you and