Page 33 of Close Reading

“I think we’re done for today,” I say.

The words come out clipped. Controlled. The voice of a woman who is managing several simultaneous responses and has chosen the one that involves the least exposure, which is ending the conversation. I gather my things. Papers into the folder. Pen into the pocket. Laptop closed. The gestures are precise and efficient and if my hands are shaking— they are not shaking. My hands do not shake. They do what I tell them to do, and right now I am telling them to close the laptop and put the pen in the pocket, and these are simple tasks that do not require the level of concentration I am bringing to them.

“Margot—”

“We’re done.” I stand. The lamp stays. I am not bringing the lamp home tonight because bringing the lamp home would require staying in this room for the additional thirty seconds it takes to unplug it and coil the cord and put it in my bag, and I cannot be in this room for thirty additional seconds.

I leave.

The walk home is December dark, 4:30 dark, the dark that arrives while you are still working and closes around you. The quad is cold. The old-growth trees are shadows. I walk fast, faster than my usual pace. I am rushing. I am rushing because my body wants to move, wants to burn the energy the argument generated and that I did not discharge. The energy is anger and the energy is something else, and the two are tangled together in my chest and I cannot separate them.

Isolation always loses more. The sentence follows me across the quad. It was a scalpel of a sentence. It found the exact place and it cut cleanly, and the cut is only painful because the cutting was accurate.

I do not go to Lavender House. I do not call anyone. I walk home through the December dark and I let myself into the house. Sophia is doing her homework at the kitchen table. She looks up and reads my face and she says, “Bad day?”

“Difficult meeting.”

I make tea. I sit at the kitchen table across from Sophia, who is doing math with the focused irritation of a child who is good at math and resents that being good at something does not make it enjoyable. I drink the tea. The tea is hot. The kitchen is warm. My daughter is across the table, and the house is ordered and quiet and mine.

I am furious.

I am furious at Priya for saying what she said. I am furious at the precision of it, the exactness, the accuracy, the way she identified the moat and named it and did not apologize for naming it. I am furious at the strip of skin at her hip, at the image my mind produced, at the coexistence of anger and desire in my body that I cannot sort into separate categories because they are not separate categories. They are the same response to the same stimulus, the stimulus of being seen, of being known, of having someone else stand in front of me and say the thing you are doing with your work is the thing you are doing with your life, and I can see both and I am not looking away.

The fury is easier to hold than the desire. The fury has a shape I recognize, a weight I have carried before, a protocol in the system. The other thing—the wanting, the image, the heat—has no protocol. The system was not built for this. The system was built for a life that did not include a woman who would stand in a basement research space and remove her sweater and expose one second of skin at her hip and make my mind complete the sequence against my will.

I drink my tea. Sophia finishes her math. She packs her backpack for tomorrow. She says goodnight. She does not ask about the difficult meeting.

“Goodnight, Soph.”

“Goodnight, Mom.”

Her door closes.

I sit at the kitchen table with the empty mug and the fury and the heat that will not cool and the sentence that follows me like a shadow: isolation always loses more.

She is right. She is right about the passage and she is right about the moat and she is right about me, and the rightness is the most infuriating thing about her because I cannot argue with it and I cannot dismiss it and I cannot— I cannot stop thinking about the strip of skin at her hip and the way her voice stayed even when her eyes were not even and the image of her body inside the blouse becoming the body without the blouse.

I go to bed.

I lie in the dark. The fury has cooled enough to let the other thing surface: the wanting, the image, the strip of skin. I am tired enough to let it be there without fighting it. The image sits in the dark with me, unwelcome and warm, and I do not shut it down and I do not pursue it. I let it exist. This is new. This is the first time I have let one of these images simply be in the room without either suppressing it or fleeing to the kitchen.

I fall asleep with the argument in my head and the image in my body and the sentence in my chest.

Isolation always loses more.

On Thursday I will go to the research space and she will be there and the argument will be between us and the argument will need to be resolved. I am not sure I know how to do this. I have a sense that I am going to learn.

16

PRIYA

Itry to work alone the next day. The research space is wrong without her in it.

The room is the same room, the desks are in the same positions, the Chemex is on the shelf and the lamp is here because she left it yesterday. Her desk is arranged in its perfect order. The papers in their stacks, the edges aligned, the pen in its position beside the closed laptop.

I sit at my desk. I open my laptop. I read the same paragraph four times without absorbing it. I close the laptop. I go to Lavender House.

The walk takes four minutes. The December air is cold and damp and I welcome it—the cold on my face, the mist in my hair, the physical sensation of a world that exists outside the basement and outside my head and outside the argument that has been replaying in my mind since yesterday. Isolation always loses more. I said it. I meant it. I meant it about the passage, and I meant it about her, and the meaning was accurate and the accuracy was unkind, and I am not sure, standing on the sidewalk outside Lavender House with the mist on my face, whether accuracy and kindness are always compatible or whether sometimes the truest thing you can say is also the cruelest, and whether saying it anyway is courage or selfishness.