Page 29 of Close Reading

I stood at the counter. The kitchen was clean. The counters were clear. The system was intact. The house was ordered and quiet and mine.

And underneath the order, underneath the quiet, underneath the years of careful structure, something had shifted. A door had opened. The light was coming through.

14

PRIYA

Thursday at Lavender House and the room is in its December configuration: door closed against the cold, the patio tables stacked inside, the space warmer and closer than it was in September. The windows have fogged at the bottom.

I slept badly.

The boys are still in Chennai, the house too quiet, the evenings too long. I slept badly because the quiet leaves room for the wanting, and the wanting has changed. It was over a week ago—the heat that Kali interrupted—and it did not dissipate. It settled into a low-grade warmth that has been present in my body ever since, coloring everything, making every surface more textured, every sensation more acute.

Marcus wastes no time.

He is at his table with a chai and his laptop open to what he has stopped pretending is anything other than an astrological chart. He is wearing a charcoal sweater over a white collared shirt, the collar crisp, the sweater cashmere, the whole arrangement communicating the specific message that Marcus Wellington considers Thursday mornings at Lavender House an occasion worthy of effort.

“You’re doing the thing,” he says.

“Good morning to you too, Marcus.”

“You’re doing the thing where you make a friend when you want something else.”

“I am having a Thursday morning and I have not yet received my coffee.”

“You’re doing the thing you did with Dominique. The oh, she’s my colleague and we work well together thing. Except with Dominique it took three weeks to get from colleague to kissing and with Margot it’s been three months and you haven’t even gotten to the part where you admit you want to kiss her.” He picks up his chai. “This is not a criticism. This is a timeline observation.”

“Marcus.”

“Your Venus is in Scorpio, Priya. You know what that means.”

“I know what you think it means.”

“I am asking you directly, because indirect has not been working: are you attracted to Margot Voss?”

The question is a door. I have been standing in front of it since September, since the colloquium two years ago, really. But now someone else is holding it open and asking me to walk through in a public coffee shop on a Thursday morning with my unwashed hair and my sleep-deprived face and the residual heat of an interrupted orgasm still in my body.

“The situation,” I say, “is more complicated than attraction.”

Marcus closes his laptop. Opens it. Closes it. He has just received confirmation of a hypothesis he has been developing since September and is managing his vindication with the kind of restraint that, for Marcus, constitutes a Herculean exercise in self-control.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is careful now. He knows he is holding something fragile. “Are you telling me you don’t know whether you’re attracted to her?”

“I am telling you that I know exactly what I feel and that what I feel is complicated and that the complication is not the attraction. The attraction is—” I stop. I hear myself. I hear the sentence I was about to say, which was the attraction is the simplest part, and the sentence is true and the truth of it, spoken aloud in Lavender House on a Thursday morning, would constitute an admission I have not yet made to anyone, including myself in daylight hours, and Marcus is looking at me as though he heard the sentence I didn’t say as clearly as if I had said it.

“The attraction is what?” he says, gently.

“Present.”

The word sits between us. One word. The most honest thing I have said out loud about Margot Voss.

Marcus nods. He does not gloat. He does not consult the chart. He does not say I told you so or your Venus or any of the things I expected him to say. He nods, serious, and does not cheapen the admission by performing his own satisfaction. He understands what it cost.

“Good,” he says. “Now what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”