so well. We were terrible and inebriated and the plastic-wrapped mattress was less grounding than the surface of the moon but it was the deluxe moment when your external life sees your internal life and therefore sees you at your best. The Hindi lyrics I’d heard hundreds of times burst from my lips like a formula. The men stared at us, as if we’d seizured. Our accidentally identical outfits looked like a uniform for our ceremony. There was one move that required the ardent wiggling of our thumbs. We wiggled our thumbs in unbelievable sync. We were doing the most elaborate rib cage contractions and shoulder pumps and a touch of fancy footwork I’d never before dared but could do now because Hrithik had done it, with us, for us, so many nights on the couch. Around two minutes into the song an instrumental interlude hit and we collapsed onto the patient mattress. As with Mendelson’s fall, nobody applauded, or commented, or moved.
We closed our eyes, lying on our backs, heaving on the mattress, our necks sweating onto the plastic. I wanted you to think of me as delightful. I know you aren’t interested in delight. I thought you might be interested in humiliation. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was very, very proud. Mishti created and filled the cavity beside me and I felt newly grateful to Carlo for such an excellent bed, a bed I’d be honored to sleep in, now that it’d been so christened. Someone approached us, it was Tom. He offered his hand to Mishti. She took it and stood up. Nobody helped me up, or everyone assumed I wanted to keep lying there. I kept lying there. Carlo and Barry and Mendelson came over to stand with Tom and I looked at these four male heads above me as if they were the north, south, east, and west winds.
“Mendelson’s got a great idea,” Carlo said, above me, to Mishti. “You take Betty’s dance intensive, I’ll take the colloquium, and we go to Bermuda in February.”
Tom walked away. You followed him. Mishti excused herself to the restroom. Mendelson had to be going. Barry walked him to the elevator. Carlo went somewhere I couldn’t see. My new bed has sixteen buttons, four hundred coils, and a pillow top. Amanda came and lay next to me in the spot Mishti had warmed.
MEAT
Amanda smelled like beef mixed with turkey served over polenta. She panted her breath at me and I welcomed it. I have been panting my polenta breath at everybody for thirty-one years and nobody has ever welcomed it. Her red unwashed fur washed itself in little clumps here and there across her belly. I congratulated her on her mammalhood. Neither of us apologized. Amanda drooled the way I like to drool, down one side of the mouth, it dripped onto her left paw and polished her claws, and I knew right then that I could be acceptable, to her, and to myself, if not to you.
SALT
Everything had become possible now that I could dance and I owned a bed and I’d parted with my last shred of privacy, the words balls to the wall rang through my blood as if chimed from church bells, so when Mishti’s face appeared above mine dripping ink onto my forehead I didn’t register any surprise. Surprise had left our party. I didn’t even feel concern. I felt a kind of strawberry-colored curiosity.
Having finally, slowly, Mendelson-style stood up, I faced Mishti and found her crying. Her explicitly un-waterproof mascara had ruled her face into columns. She didn’t attempt to wipe anything off her cheeks or nose or heart-shaped chin. I’d never seen her cry and now learned that when she did it, she did it with uncurbed exuberance. I couldn’t help but try to wipe something. I ran the back of my hand under her nose and pulled some swirly snot away from her. Now that she could breathe, she opened her mouth and said, “I never believed you.”
I didn’t blame her, I’d never believed me either, but in a specific sense I didn’t know what she was talking about. “That’s okay,” I said, to be overarching about it.
“But it’s actually worse now, believing you is worse.”
“Huh,” I said. She took my hand and walked me toward your library.
Tom had you pushed up against the glass cabinet doors of your rare books collection: your leg wrapped around his knee and your arm wrapped around his ass. Mishti and I watched you two clean