Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,48

each other’s teeth outside of time and space and then I pulled Mishti into the bathroom. I shut the door behind us and couldn’t find the light switch. A small, wild-rose-shaped nightlight plugged in above the sink gave off a pink light, a glow that filled the sink and bounced off the porcelain onto the ceiling. At the moment it seemed perverse to me that you’d be afraid of the dark. There had been something unidentifiably dark about the library: it wasn’t about Tom, it wasn’t about Barry, it wasn’t even about you—it had to do with desperation.

Mishti closed the toilet lid, sat down, and proclaimed: “Tom is the most spiritually lazy and emotionally selfish man I’ve ever met and my entire being resents him and I don’t know how to bear the way he simply doesn’t want me.”

Joan I needed you then in the bathroom, I wasn’t of sound mind and this was a little too much for me. Also I could hardly see. Mishti’s neck was light level and became the room’s one pink pillar. Didn’t want her?

“Which is to say—” I stammered.

“I want him,” she finished.

“I had no idea,” was the whole truth and the only thing I could say.

“It was okay when he was with you because you come first, for me, and you met him first, and sense made sense, it was fine, but then you didn’t even like him, and I couldn’t stand watching it—how did you stay together so long?”

“I’m not sure,” I idly grabbed the faucet handle, “I think he felt like protection to me? And I felt like nothing to him, which was all he was looking for.” Tom, now that I thought of it, had to be Mishti’s perfect complement: perfect and complement both in the sense of achieving wholeness. He was abstract, imprecise, dreamy, and unambitious; she was exact and earthbound; they were both beautiful. Tom and I had shared no such symmetries. We had both been underwhelmed, underspoken, dry, and polite. I turned the faucet on and the cold water rushed out. Mishti turned it off.

I asked her why she wanted him. It seemed worth asking. She had prepared, as she would, a comprehensive and sensible answer: she loved how little direction he needed, how self-generative and flexible he was, loved the prettiness of his impractical degree, and his unapologetic dilettantishness, which in her eyes revealed his fluency in all the assorted flavors of the world she’d never in her rigidity know. She loved him because he was relaxed, sophisticated, and odd. She saw who he was and loved him for it.

You don’t love Tom like this. What you don’t feel for Tom is what Mishti feels in torrents: clear arrows of appreciation for Tom’s totally bland interior. It sets her mind at ease. It means nothing to you. I wondered if you would give Mishti your seat, as if she were pregnant, or disabled. I knew you wouldn’t, because you ultimately wouldn’t want to insult her, because you consider unearned giving a cheap shot. I used to think Mishti wouldn’t take the seat, either, but I’d never seen her like this. She sat in black on the toilet, pink and in love with Tom.

I replayed your make-out against the bookshelf. That raging attraction between you and Tom seemed to run on disbelief, as if each had surprised the other with the gift of a new and not necessarily inhabitable continent. Joan I felt so angry. Not because Tom had beaten me to you, not because you had beaten Mishti to Tom, not because you had invited us into your home and then hacked down your ceiling while we were trapped inside, but because you had given up your own elegance and your elegance is all I believed in. You had turned clumsy, and rude. Break my heart as many times as you want, but who are you to break Mishti’s? She stood and washed the mascara from her cheeks. I left her there and went in search of Barry.

LEATHER

“What’s your move,” I said. I’d come all the way down to the lobby to find him and had lost my mind in the elevator. He stood chatting with the doorman as if his life weren’t changing. The doorman said, “Evening.”

“Your move,” I said. “Who do you fight for? Your wife? Your girlfriend? Yourself?”

“Fight?” said Barry. He wasn’t ready to part with the earnestly pleasant time he’d been having and knew me to be unpleasant. He looked at me