Page 11 of Close Reading

“I’ll be home by 5:00.”

“Can we do Thai?”

“From the place on Elm or the place on Foster?”

“Elm. Obviously.”

“Obviously. I’ll order at 5:15.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too, Soph.”

I return to the research space. Priya has her feet on her desk.

Her shoes are off. She is wearing socks, mismatched, one green, one with small cartoon mushrooms. Her feet are crossed at the ankle on the desk where her laptop should be, and the laptop has been moved to her lap. The whole arrangement is that of someone thoroughly at home in a space not, by any reasonable assessment, designed for comfort.

I sit down. I do not comment on the feet. Not commenting is a concession, a crack in something, because the honest response to the feet on the desk is that I find them objectionable, and the honest response underneath the honest response is that I find them endearing, and the endearing is far more dangerous than the objectionable.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“Sophia. A binder emergency, since resolved.”

“The red one?”

I look at her. “How did you know it was the red one?”

“You mentioned it last week. You said Sophia keeps her graphic novel notes in a red binder and that she misplaces it weekly and that the binder is always on the same shelf.”

She remembered this. I said it once, in passing, during a conversation about research organization. A tangent about how Sophia organizes her reading notes. Priya remembered the color of the binder and the frequency of its misplacement because she listens. She does not sort my words into categories of relevant and irrelevant the way I sort hers. She takes it all in, and she holds it, and a week later she can tell me the color of my daughter’s binder because she was paying attention to a story I told about a shelf.

“Yes,” I say. “The red one.”

“Can I ask you something about this passage?” Priya says.

She reads it aloud. She reads my words with a care that tells me she has read them more than once. Her voice is different when she reads aloud, slower, more deliberate. She reads the passage about invisible connections and her voice drops slightly on the word invisible, a weight given to the word that I did not give it when I wrote it but that belongs there, that makes the sentence better.

I am sitting across from her listening to her read my own words back to me in a voice that improves them.

I am in trouble.

The conversation that follows is about the passage, and it is the best conversation I have had about literature in longer than I want to examine. It may be the best since graduate school, when conversations about literature had the quality of being essential. Essential means your body is involved. Your breathing changes, your hands move, you lean forward without noticing. I have not had a conversation that felt essential in a very long time.

My tea goes cold. I do not notice until 4:50, when I reach for it and find it tepid and realize that I have been in this conversation for two hours and have not once thought about the time.

“I have to go,” I say. “Thai food.”

“Same time Thursday?”

“Same time Thursday.”

She is packing the enormous bag. A charging cable snakes across her desk. The golden dog hair is still on her shoulder. She looks up and catches me looking at her, the whole composition of her in the room. The desk, the cracked laptop, the mushroom socks back in the shoes, the Chemex she brought because she noticed my system and decided to add to it rather than replace it. She did not try to dismantle what I built. She put something next to it and left the choice to me.

“This is working,” she says. “The project. It’s actually working.”

“It is.”

“I wasn’t sure it would. I thought you might hate me.”