Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,7

could see him better. She began rolling up her sleeves, which had fallen loose and now gave her an excuse to reveal her twig-wide jeweled wrists. I wondered what more she would do with her hands now that they had been prepared. She rested one on each hip, assuming what the life coaches call a “a power position.” And to the extent that his sturdy architecture permitted it, he wilted.

Throughout the courtship month that followed, I’d get intermittent sexual progress updates, biographical data points, fresh letdowns, triumphant reassurances. His second year of business school would soon end and he was preparing for a career in General Affluence.

“You know the path,” Mishti rattled, mouth full of wonderful mushrooms at Sal and Carmine’s. “Texas, Harvard, Blackstone, the obligatory two years of hard labor at SAC, checking all the boxes, but he didn’t get along with Steve.”

“Who’s Steve.”

“Never ask him who Steve is.”

“Shan’t.”

“Now he’s got to figure out somewhere else to go because they’re not going to hire him.”

“And yet he looks with confidence into his future, knowing he will land where he lands, cat-footed.”

“Basically.”

I can eat about four times as much pizza as Mishti can.

She leaned back defeated by her one stupid slice and wiped all the grease off her chin. “But,” and then I got the full story: how it all began in Galicia, how his parents had bravely but reluctantly moved from Spain to Argentina, where his father would direct the Banco Galicia of Buenos Aires.

“Then what?”

“Then they didn’t like it.”

So from South America to the American South, where Texas startled them with its everything. They’d tried Houston, seat of the Argentinian consulate, only to find it oppressively uncivilized, and landed in Austin, which meant a demotion for Carlo’s father but an integrated, respectable high school for Carlo. Mishti thinks this nonprivileged public education tempered Carlo’s international flair but I think it only confirmed his superiority. He was better than the American boys. He could do more: he knew how to waltz, he knew how to surf, he knew how to shake someone’s hand with a frankness uncurbed by American puritanism. The Austin taco culture had chilled him partly out, but it had also accentuated his elegance, the way salt releases the flavor in ice cream.

Carlo, like Tom, like myself, is an only child. The secretly nervous, lonely, son-of-a-workaholic-father and therefore fatherless boy at his core wears on me sometimes. From the way Mishti describes his youth, his after-school hours, he relied on his mother’s affection so entirely—I worry about what Mishti will have to be for him in order to supply his steam. She doesn’t seem to worry. Mishti is impossible to deplete. But I think you know what I have in mind. I have in mind a man whose pumpkin head and uncombed clown tufts lie as far from Carlo’s majesty as the spectrum will allow, but who needs just as much, and who is sucking your life out as if through straws up each of your ear canals.

BARRY

Associate Director Barry Estlin serves the First Year Area of the Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls and it is his job to be on good terms with the students. It is his job! He supervises not only Carman Hall but Furnald Hall, John Jay Hall, and even Hartley and Wallach Halls; he specializes in polishing the gem he calls personal-academic balance; he is a four-time winner of the Students Choose Award. For this, and I can’t say what else, he gets to be married to you.

My favorite thing about Barry is his mother, whom I’ve never met, but whom I hear is Ohio’s uncontested star dog-whisperer. Mrs. Ronald Estlin, Nancy to her friends, receives and boards dogs from across the 220-mile-wide state, the only admission requirement being that the dog has displayed signs of psychic unrest. Did you know that the state of Ohio is 220 miles long and the same 220 miles wide at its most distant points? And yet it isn’t a square? Do you ever feel like the state of Ohio, an inherently even form of equal measures that has been twisted into something new, asymmetrical, and weirdly pointy? I don’t think of you as weirdly pointy I’m just asking how you think of yourself. You know how I think of you.

Oh, Joan, I understand that Barry can be explained as Midwestern. And I so admire the work his mother does. Carrie, who heard it from Anna, who heard it from Jill, told me that Barry has told