Page 24 of Close Reading

I am walking across the quad in the November dark. The old-growth trees are shadows against the darker sky. Priya was in the front row. She watched me with her whole body. Dr. Chen said devoted and the word is in my chest like a splinter I cannot reach. The memory has opened and I have walked through it and come out the other side and I am still walking, still crossing the quad, still going home.

I do not stop at the place by the trees. I pass it. The memory closes behind me like a door swinging shut, not locked, never locked, just closed, resting against the frame.

I walk home. I open the door. Sophia is in the window seat reading. She looks up.

“How was the thing?”

“Fine. Good. Well received.”

“Did Dr. Anand go?”

I remove my coat. I hang it in the closet. I set my bag by the door. I perform the sequence of arrival I have performed every evening, the ritual of return that says: I am home, I am here, the house is in order, the system holds.

“She was in the front row.”

Sophia looks at me for a moment. The look lasts longer than a question about a colloquium warrants, and in it I see the thing I have been seeing in my daughter’s face for weeks: the assessment of a child who is growing into someone who reads the world the same way I read the world, precisely, thoroughly, missing nothing. She is reading me now. She is reading how I said front row, not the words themselves but the register, the temperature of the sentence.

Then she goes back to her book.

“That’s nice,” she says.

12

PRIYA

The boys leave for Chennai on a Tuesday, for five weeks that will stretch from Thanksgiving through winter break. This has been the arrangement since the divorce. They go in winter, not summer, because Chennai in July is a furnace that would melt two boys raised in the Pacific Northwest, and because Vikram’s parents are older now, and the cool season is when they have the energy for grandchildren. December in Chennai is seventy-five degrees, the city breathing again. The boys come back every January brown and loud and speaking Tamil phrases they forget by March.

They will miss three weeks of school, which I negotiated with their teachers through a combination of advance assignments, a detailed academic plan Dev helped me draft, and what Ravi’s teacher generously described as “an independent study in visual documentation of South Indian urban ecology” but which is, in practice, permission to paint street dogs. The school was accommodating. The school is always accommodating when you arrive with a spreadsheet and a 9-year-old’s watercolor portfolio.

Vikram’s parents collect them at SeaTac. They flew in from Chennai, his mother’s hometown, three weeks ago. His parents retired there six years ago, in the reverse migration, as Vikram calls it, reclaimed after forty years in the States. They have been staying at a vacation rental, resting from the journey and accumulating gifts for the boys.

Vikram is at the gate. He is tall and thin and graying at the temples in a way that suits him, and he is holding two backpacks he packed himself because he does not trust the boys to pack for five weeks, and he is correct not to trust them.

“The watercolors are in the front pocket,” Vikram says to Ravi. “The good ones. Not the school ones.”

“Thanks, Appa.”

Vikram and I stand together at the gate comfortably enough, two people who shared a life and now share two children and who have found the version of proximity that works. He asks about the research. I ask about the new apartment.

Dev hugs me for slightly longer than his twelve-year-old dignity typically permits. He has been practicing the art of the casual goodbye—the head-nod, the half-wave, the see ya, Amma delivered with studied indifference—but the hug betrays him. He holds on. I hold on back. I’ve learned not to say anything about it. The holding is his and I won’t name it into self-consciousness.

Ravi hugs me and then hugs Kali, whom he has smuggled into the departure zone inside his jacket in a maneuver so transparent that the security guard simply looked the other way. Kali’s tail, protruding from the bottom of the jacket, is wagging at a frequency visible from space. Moti is in the car, asleep, unbothered by the departure of his family because Moti’s emotional responses operate on a geological timescale, and five weeks in Chennai does not warrant a visible reaction from a dog whose philosophy of existence is rooted in the conservation of energy.

I drive home. The house is quiet.

This is not the bad quiet, the quiet of the first weeks after the divorce when the boys went to Vikram and the house became an argument I was having with nobody, each empty room a rebuttal to a position I hadn’t taken. This is a different quiet. Seasonal. Expected. The boys will be in India for five weeks. I will call them every day. Ravi will show me whatever he has drawn. The street dogs of Chennai, rendered with the passionate specificity of a naturalist and the color theory of a child who believes more is always more. Dev will complain about the heat and eat his grandmother’s idli and come back two inches taller and smelling like jasmine from the temple Vikram’s mother takes them to on Fridays.

But the house is quiet, and Kali and Moti are louder in it—their breathing, their nails on the hardwood, Kali’s tail thumping against the couch in a rhythm that has no apparent stimulus and that I have begun to suspect is simply the sound of Kali existing, a baseline vibration, the resting frequency of an animal whose emotional state ranges from delighted to slightly-less-delighted.

I go to the research space because the alternative is the quiet house, and at 5:30 Margot is there too.

Neither of us comments on this. Neither of us says you’re still here or so are we both working late then or anything that would acknowledge that we are two people who have chosen, independently and without coordination, to be in the same basement room at 5:30 on a late November Tuesday when the day’s work ended at 4:00 and the only reason to stay is the staying.

She is at her desk. I am at mine. The lamp is on. The fluorescents are off. The room has its evening quality, close, warm, ours. I am editing the Tsing section. She is writing something in her notebook, the black hardbound one she uses for prose that is not yet ready for the screen. She writes in longhand, with small letters, the pen moving with the deliberate rhythm I have memorized without intending to.

At 6:15 she says, without looking up: “Have you eaten?”

“No,” I say. “Have you?”