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 all three of them that his mother once cured a dog of its diabetes by blowing onto its eyeballs. Have you ever met this Mrs. Ronald? (Have you ever met Carrie, or Anna, or Jill?) I never ask about your participation in Estlin family holidays because I never ask, but if you and she have become close these past ten years a great portion of my woe would be softened. Nobody ever talks about Barry’s father because there’s something boring and a little embarrassing about how rich he is.
You married Barry when you were younger, braver, lonelier, poorer, and more frightened than you are now. You don’t want a public divorce to interrupt your book sales, but now your book sales make Barry unnecessary—in a new way, a new way that completes the many old ways he has always been unnecessary, a new and undeniable way that demands action. You are quick to anger and slow to action.
I imagine Barry as a boy surrounded by drooling retrievers and long-haired wiener-poodles. I imagine a wiener-poodle as a miniature cross between a limousine and a sheep. I know, I know the dogs did Barry good. I know they are responsible for whatever care he exhibits that is untainted by incompetence, vanity, and lust. I wonder what his responsibilities were toward them: whether he was in charge of feeding or walking, poop-bagging or nighttime snuggles, and whether he carries out the same chores for your dog Amanda.
Tom’s mother didn’t allow dogs in the snow globe but here in Red Hook the going assumption is that all tenants are dogs themselves so please send Amanda my way whenever she’s in need of a field trip. She is welcome here. I don’t yet (and won’t ever) have any furniture, rugs, or human food in the house for her to damage or ingest. Meanwhile there are very large windows through which she can see clouds of every shape, some of which might remind her of herself. I think she’ll really like it here and I promise not to test my late-blooming monkshood blossoms on her. I wouldn’t test my late-blooming monkshood blossoms on anybody except myself.
The more I settle into my private exile, the more I realize what it means to be seen. The biggest difference between you and Barry is that while you both need to be seen, you, once seen, are quelled, whereas Barry, once seen, sees back. He acts upon the seer. He wants to be seen again. He never wants the seeing to end. He believes he has an infinite amount to reveal, a body full of secrets to hand out as rewards to the loyal witness. The single most dangerous thing about Barry is he spends his days getting thanked—thanked for his guidance, for his attention, for his good vibes—a tradition that has instilled in him both a knee-jerk humility and a much deeper belief in his own indispensability.
The architect who dispensed with him in the nineties, what was her name, something very nice, Rhonda, Rhonda Davies, she did him real damage and, in flinging him your way, damaged you too (and with you obviously me). Here’s what I’ve gathered about Rhonda, based on Image Search: Rhonda had a head of gray hair at age twenty-five. The day the last black strand left her head she went out and bought a wardrobe’s worth of Eileen Fisher. She draped shawls over her premature age and anointed it with power, signified dignity, became a magnet for dignity-addicts. She was a woman who derived power from the way people treated her, rather than from any inner force. She mesmerized Barry until she bored him. Barry entertained her until he disgusted her. And then there you were: slight Joan, in your tight black clothes, the opposite of Rhonda’s loose beiges, Joan, altogether dark, who took up no space in a room and radiated inner force.
I will never blame Barry for falling in love with you but I will blame him for considering himself eligible. He is listed as the Decapitated Chaperone for The Halloween Hoedown next month and most of my ex-section students from Elements to Organisms are going. Jill and Carrie have cut two face holes into a large Casper mattress delivery box and are going as a Twix bar. My first thought is: the box will block Barry’s view. My second thought is total despair. What if they’d gone as kittens, or themselves, or anything not wrapped in cardboard? Barry might have spontaneously combusted on them. And called it the costume’s fault.
Anybody should punch anybody in the face with beauty, at any time, without getting punched back by a penis. I want Carrie to be as unbearably saturated in herself as she is, and then to fear no retribution from the less saturated. To thank Associate Director Barry Estlin for his advice about the laundry services in Furnald Hall and to leave that conversation knowing the conversation has ended.
You’ll use the word harmless. I’ll get back to my work.
CASTOR
The castor bean plant is getting closer because one seed will kill you but its oil will soften your stool. That’s the kind of harm-unharm pairing I want. Imagine if I could coat a seed in its own oil, such that right before you die you expel the entire contents of your bowels, emptying yourself wholesale, actually emancipating yourself. Imagine how light and speedy you’d feel in the afterlife. And how hungry. You’d spend eternity ready for lunch and your family would develop a mortal dread of diarrhea, a symptom of their grief that would last the rest of their lives, until they too took the oil-coated bean. Finally you’d all be light and speedy, all together.
Ricin, the parent toxin, needs to be expelled quickly or not fully metabolized. If you swallowed the bean without chewing, for instance, you’d probably make it. Or if you chewed and I pumped your stomach within two hours. If you don’t die in three to five days, you live. Even inside the bean itself there’s a good cop bad cop: the ricin protein is a strong cytotoxin but a weak hemagglutinin, and the Ricinus toxin (also in there) is a weak cytotoxin and a strong hemagglutinin. The Ricinus can’t penetrate your intestinal wall, but the ricin can. It seems everything wants to be very near to its opposite. I picture Ricin and Ricinus as twins, as Romulus and Remus, Romulus who will eventually kill Remus but who for now lies beside him, cozy and sucking from the teats of a she-wolf. That’s the way to prosper, spooning someone who represents a total otherness. What a relief. Every morning you skip the mirror and look instead right into the eyes of your perfect antithesis. Then, thank you so much, some breakfast.
> Ricin is six thousand times more poisonous than cyanide and twelve thousand times more than rattlesnake venom. The seeds look like small round zebras and the flowers look like Elmo’s head and they’re the most deadly seed on earth. You wouldn’t believe how attractive the whole plant can be, forty feet tall and its leaves star shaped. Let us pity the Bulgarian communist defector (can you believe his name was as cute as Georgi) who got murdered by a ricin-tipped umbrella. He was just waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge. He didn’t get any of the pleasure of the striped seeds, the fluffy flowers, the poison went via pellet right into the back of his thigh (the guy with the umbrella-gun said “Sorry” before running away) and Georgi thought nothing of it until he lay in the hospital dying.
The plant’s family name is sardonically Euphorbia. The “b” snuck in as a hidden warning. I’ve stroked castor plants in the Brooklyn and New York Botanical Gardens, in the Conservatory Garden on 105th Street, in the Bronx Zoo. The bean can be detoxified by boiling, but that’s like disqualifying the toxin in advance. If you’re in the disqualifying game for, say, farming reasons, squeezing the boiled seed releases the oil, and the remaining hulls can be used in pressed-cake form for animal feed (sheep can withstand 10 percent castor bean meal in their rations without any ill effect). In humans, the detoxified bean can be used against leprosy, syphilis, boils, carbuncles and bunions and corns, warts, inflammation of the middle ear, toenail fungus, cysts. Castor oil in the eyes soothes membranes irritated by dust. Women in countries more imaginative than our own have traditionally lined the inside of the vagina with castor oil for birth control. But what about a woman who eats the whole bean, unboiled, and then needs to be saved? How do we boil the bean inside her?
The lab’s two giant Zanzibar castor seeds look like the fanciest ladybugs, I love them, and I’m planting them tonight.
TOM
May Tom Ottaway never penetrate me again but I rest a lifelong heartfelt appreciation upon his head, his gentle head, a head I genuinely adore.
“Well Nell,” he said as I climbed up out of the 1 train, his first peace offering since our breakup, a rhyme he’s always disproportionately enjoyed. Maybe he wants me to call him “Tom Bomb,” or “Don Tom,” but he’s too mild and spiritually castrated for either. “My condolences,” he said.
“Tom,” I said.
He sighed unemotionally. I am too mortified to accept condolences, sympathy, or awareness of any kind. We started walking.
If I am cold to Tom it’s because heat sources molest him. He walks up the street between random admirers as if through a colonnade of lawn sprinklers, each wetting him from the side. He never returns the eye contact but I know he is soothed by the steady, quiet praise. These strangers leave him free to keep on, and in asking nothing of him, they really give him what he needs. I was one rare and temporary returnee of eye contact and I lasted two years, the longest ever detour on Tom’s path toward individual fulfillment.
We met in the library where he used to sit on Tuesdays and Thursdays, rubbing his own scalp while he bent over art books too large to carry home. He was getting a master’s in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a course of study that was expensive and useless for him but deeply felt. I liked to do my cell biology homework at his table because when I got bored I could look at his hair, which seemed to me not to be possible. It was long as Samson’s and never tangled and it covered his shoulders like a prayer shawl. Eventually he also got bored and we started talking—there was no one else at the table. After only a few dry kisses he learned that I lived with Mishti in a rat-friendly studio on Avenue C and he invited me to squat at Veronica’s (the way he referred to his childhood home). I did this because I did this. Every night Tom and I would sleep in a bed that was too large for any child and too small for a pair of grown-ups.
The word I first associate with Tom’s body is utopia. He’s got the ridiculous ringleted black curls and a face cut from marble and flooded by moonlight. His body is long and smooth and consists entirely of untoned muscle. Nothing about him (except maybe the hair, his body is lovely but bland) distracts from the basic completeness and symmetry of his eyes, which have no discernible pigment and are a winter cloud gray. He and Mishti could repopulate the world perfectly; my two best friends have our species’ two best faces. You could hardly call my face a face, more a perfunctory set of features that get the job, as it were, done. I approved of Tom without needing to be approved of in return. He found this relaxing.
All of the love Tom has ever received in his life has come to him unearned, so to ask him to start earning it now would be like charging to use the bathroom. We maintained a totally successful, fraternal, mutual regard. I was surprised by his ability to be so beautiful and he was equally surprised by my ability to define ribosome and there we left it, a kind of handshake of the wills, and we sat contented there, beside each other, for two years, until we more or less simultaneously smelled the pungent decay of our own inner yearnings.
We’re friends now, which is most of what we ever were. Tom refers to the relationship as “A Disappointment in Love.” He’s heavy into tapestries and goblets, for context. We walked across the park toward his mother’s snow globe to pick up my personal effects. I knew we’d be alone there; Veronica spent Mondays in Litchfield. I didn’t want to be alone with Tom anymore but I was capable of it, it was something I would always know how to do. We were both wearing new jackets but the same shoes we had worn during our relationship. Looking down as we walked up the bike path, it could almost have been one of the 716 days we’d spent in our Disappointment.
Tony the doorman welcomed us both as we entered. It occurred to me that he didn’t know about the breakup and neither of us bothered to tell him. We proceeded by habit to the elevator. Frankie the elevator man yanked the grate open for us. Frankie didn’t know either and I told him immediately.
“Won’t be seeing you anymore, Franks.”
He shut the grate and the elevator lurched into service.
“You two done boinking?”
“Never to boink again.”
“Shame.”
“Shame.”
“Shame,” Tom chimed in, generously.
The eleventh floor dinged and we stepped from the elevator into the apartment, which was in itself the building’s eleventh floor. Tom’s grandfather had been a British gentleman; Tom’s father had been a gentleman’s renegade son. Grandfather Ottaway had removed the family stain Junior to this owned asset on Madison, a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum. Junior met Veronica on the steps of that museum, married her, missed Tom’s birth at McCloskey’s Bar, and died shortly thereafter of liver disease. Tom doesn’t drink for this reason and lives instead in the self-intoxicated state of medieval unicorn daydreaming, his substitute vice.
Thomas Ottaway the Third now flipped on the light switch in his bedroom and stretched out over a window-side chaise lounge. There lay an infinite waywardness about him, a quality many found unforgivable in one whose way had been so neatly paved by such lavish means, but which was as natural and inherent to him as the means were, and which he could no more separate himself from than from his surname. Finding the chaise lounge hard, he got up again. He walked through the snow globe as if through a school: cowed, quiet, easy. I walked through it in an aggressively neutral state I’d adopted for coping with riches that would never improve my life.
His mother’s framed face reigned over the piano. Veronica had always been intelligent and silent and given Tom very little instruction, reprimand, or fawning. Tom had been her young business partner in the business of being alive rather than dead, and she had treated him rather as a colleague. She’d worked as a Corporate Patron Program officer for the Met’s Development Office since the eighties and when Junior died she remarried the curator of Northern European and British Painting, a very short man named Harvey. Harvey had been on the brink of proposing himself when Junior beat him to it—he’d warned Vero
nica right then that the man was a drunk—and Harvey hadn’t been waiting for Junior’s death per se but for the inevitable day when he would die. Junior having obliged him entirely, Harvey married Veronica within eight months.
The new family stayed in the city until Tom had finished fifth grade at Dalton and could be sent to a loosely Christian boys’ boarding school, a context in which Tom was at all times two notches too feminine and where he would spend seven years. Tom can still fit into his eighth-grade basketball shorts. Harvey and Veronica progressed from spending weekends to weekdays to the entirety of their recent retirement in Litchfield, Connecticut, leaving the gaping snow globe to Tom in all his slightness. A new distillery in Litchfield ages and bottles coffee-flavored bourbon. Harvey invites Tom to come up and enjoy the guided corn and barley boiler tour about once a month, an act of decorum so ignorant of Tom’s personality that it could be taken as insult but which in practice is ideal because neither party needs to fear any actual contact.
I could feel Tom’s boredom radiating from his elbows and knees. He lacked an active companion. Women shrink from forcing uninvited intimacy on him, partly because he never invites it, and partly because they mistake his beauty for its frequent synonym pride, but pride in Tom is only a mellow bashfulness. He is doing most of the shrinking himself. Shrinking from his guilty and morbid inheritance, from his nice face he can’t undo, and from his inability to understand anything about himself other than his inheritance and his face. I feel for Tom because he’s trying, like anyone, to figure it out.
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