Page 25 of Close Reading

“I could order something. Sophia is at a friend’s house working on a project.”

This is Margot initiating dinner. I want to mark this; I want to place a flag on this moment. This is an act of uncalculated generosity from a woman who calculates everything, and the uncalculated quality of it, the spontaneity, is what makes it matter.

“Thai from the place on Elm?” I say.

“Obviously.”

We order. The food arrives in twenty minutes and is carried down to the basement by a delivery driver who looks skeptically at the ground-level entrance to Lowell Hall’s basement, questioning the legitimacy of the address. I meet him at the door. The bag is warm.

We eat at our desks, facing each other across the six feet, the takeout containers between us on her desk because her desk has more clear space than mine. My desk is a landscape of papers and dog-eared articles and three colored pens and a charging cable—the residue of someone who works the way she lives, expansively. The pad see ew steams. The room smells like lemongrass and the Chemex and November and the two of us.

She talks about Sophia, and not in the careful, abbreviated way, the three-sentence summary she deploys in professional contexts, the she’s 13, she’s doing well, she reads a lot that functions as a closed door with a polite sign on it. Tonight the door is open, not wide but cracked, a few inches, enough to see the room behind it.

Sophia’s reading habits: voracious, indiscriminate, currently in a phase of graphic novels about space. “She reads everything. I have tried to curate and I have failed. She read my Woolf and then she read a manga about a girl who talks to aliens and she treated both with the same seriousness, and I have decided this is a form of literary democracy I should respect rather than correct.”

Sophia’s negotiating style: “She has learned to use my own methods against me, and I find this both deeply satisfying and profoundly alarming.”

Sophia’s kindness, mentioned without the self-conscious deflection I’ve come to associate with Margot discussing anything she loves: “She writes notes. To everyone. Thank you notes, birthday notes, just because notes. I don’t know where she learned it. It isn’t from me.” A pause. “I don’t write notes. I write arguments.”

“Arguments are a kind of note,” I say. “They’re just notes that expect a response.”

She looks at me. The almost smile.

I talk about Vikram. Lightly, without residue. The divorce was three years ago, and the grief ran its course—not quickly, not easily, but completely, because the loss was real even though the relationship was over before the paperwork began. Vikram is a good man and a good father, and the co-parenting is functional: imperfect, practical, requiring ongoing maintenance, better than the alternative.

“Do you miss them?” she asks. “When they’re gone.”

“Every minute.” I set down my fork. “And also, it’s easier. In some ways. To be just me.” I look at the takeout container. “I feel guilty about that.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I know I shouldn’t. Knowing and feeling are different jurisdictions.”

The almost smile deepens. Holds for a full second before she corrects it. I want to tell her to stop correcting it. I want to tell her that the smile is the most beautiful thing in this room. I do not tell her this. I eat my pad see ew and I watch the smile disappear and I say nothing.

We talk until 8:00. About the research. About a film neither of us has seen. About the November weather. About the mint that has colonized my tomato beds and the window that sticks in her office and the particular way the Pacific Northwest does not have weather so much as a permanent atmospheric condition that varies only in intensity.

None of it is important. All of it has the quality of mattering enormously, the way small talk between two people who do not do small talk is itself a form of intimacy, each trivial exchange a door held open, an offering, a way of saying I will give you the unimportant parts of myself too, not just the arguments and the analysis but the window and the mint and the film I haven’t seen.

At 8:00 she packs her bag. The ritual: papers, pen, lamp. She pauses at the door.

“Thank you,” she says. “For dinner.”

“You suggested it.”

“You stayed.”

She leaves. The door closes. I sit in the research space for a while—ten minutes, maybe more—in the room that smells like lemongrass and coffee and her.

I drive home through Millhaven in the dark. The town settles early on weeknights, the shops on Main closed, the co-op lit but closed, the waterfront invisible except for the container ships’ lights moving south on the Sound.

Kali greets me with the full-body devotion of a creature whose concept of time does not include the distinction between two hours and two years. Moti raises his head, confirms my identity, returns to sleep. I feed them both. I stand in the kitchen. The boys’ drawings are on the refrigerator—Ravi’s watercolor of a sunset, Dev’s diagram of a watershed he made for school. The house is theirs even when they are not in it. Their presence is embedded in the surfaces, in the drawings, the height marks on the doorframe, the stain on the counter from the time Ravi mixed paint in a cereal bowl. The house is full of them even when it is empty of them.

I shower. I brush my teeth. I get into bed. Kali arrives approximately eleven seconds after my body hits the mattress—the Kali coefficient, perfectly maintained—and settles across my feet. Moti remains in the living room on his oversized bed.

The dark settles. The house is still. I am alone in a way that is not lonely, a distinction I have learned to make over three years of co-parenting, three years of the boys being here and then not here and then here again, the rhythm of presence and absence that has taught me that solitude and loneliness are different countries and that I am, tonight, in solitude, and the solitude is fine.

Except.