Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,58

have no business chumming.

“Where is Joan,” I’d go for his information, why not, “have they eloped?”

“Who?”

“What?”

“Tom.”

“Oh Tom bailed,” he said, as if reporting the weather. “Please. Tom didn’t want my forty-one-year-old ex-wife on his hands, when it came down to it. No, no. Come on, Nell. Please.”

Please. I played back Tom’s lips, his forearms curled between Joan’s back and the bookshelf. The way she’d said, “I want him.” The way he’d said not a word. I felt Barry had dropped me out of a jet, through a roof, and onto the floor of my pelvis. Clarity consumed me.

“I want your forty-one-year-old ex-wife in my arms,” I said.

“You’ve had her there.”

“No, only on my mouth.”

I couldn’t believe I’d believed Tom to be capable of desire.

Barry said, “She liked Tom’s mouth best.”

“Tom doesn’t have a mouth.”

“If a mouthless man goes down on a woman—”

“The woman evaporates.”

Joan when you told Barry about my kiss, did you call it torture?

“And she still doesn’t want anything to do with me,” Barry weakly pounded the bar, “that’s the real injury. It’s just me, she just doesn’t want me, Tom or not. And she sure as hell doesn’t want you.”

I looked out the door windows that grew increasingly magenta.

“She’s totally alone,” Barry said, “suffering, and she won’t even accept my kindness,” he said, “she doesn’t want a clean start, she wants total painful destruction.”

I lifted my phone in a spasm of melodrama and sent Tom the text message: What have you done?

Tom had set out to get you, Joan, and was so absolutely pleased that he did. I say this with some meanness in that I’m suggesting he wanted to get you more than he wanted you, but I’m sure he wanted you too. Maybe once he got you, he wanted you more than he could bear. Maybe once the scaffolding of your unavailability came down, he saw you up close and died. You know, the way Aaron is supposed to keep some distance from the altar of the Lord. I’m not saying you’re the Lord Joan don’t worry I’m just saying you merit distance.

I know this notebook isn’t even about you. I’m sorry, Hildegard. Hildegard, this notebook is still yours. I won’t mess it up again.

Barry finally reached for his beer and drank a third of a pint in one sip. He said, “What should I do?”

For the first time I felt attracted to the outright disaster of my castor beans. For the first time I didn’t want to neutralize them, didn’t want to detoxify them, didn’t want to curb their danger, I wanted to deploy them as pure weapon, I wanted their harm, I wanted to harm the man who sat at the bar in front of me. I felt a jolt of disgust run up my neck and squirmed.

“We’re filthy,” I said. “We’re irretrievable.”

“Oh, it’s smaller than that,” Barry said, “I’ve only ruined my own life.”

I paled then because life-ruining is my bag and nobody else’s. Joan, I need a new bag. Nobody’s life is my business, not even my own. Let the Fates spin their threads. I tried to stop thinking about Barry convulsing and took my hands out of my pockets and returned them to the dusty, harmless air and asked him, “How’s business?”

“I don’t know anything about business,” he said. “But I’ll fix the copier as many times as they need.” He laughed. “I bet you didn’t think I know how to fix a Xerox machine. I do. I’m the only person of any value in that office. The women we’ve hired are porpoises but someday we’ll hire a cutie.”

“Remove your love life from my life.”

“Oh, go to hell. I thought you’d understand. Don’t you hunt pussy these days?”

He finished his beer, paid, and tucked his stool under the bar. “Anyway, business is swell,” he said, leaving. He swung an imaginary bat over his shoulder, lowered an imaginary cap over one eye, shrugged, and said, “There’s no loving in business.”

An old man at the back of the bar whose attendance I hadn’t taken hollered mirthfully, “Tom Hanks!”

“Tell Mishti I miss her,” Barry said at the door, one side of his face magenta. “She’s a hell of a fuck, you should try her.”

“I could kill you,” I said.

Barry laughed and said, “Back when you had a lab. If Joan’s grant was going to save your life, what happens to your life now?”

“That really isn’t your business.”

“Sure it is. Who do you think told them you aren’t enrolled?”

I flung his coaster at him