Page 36 of Close Reading

She is across the room when I arrive, standing near the refreshment table talking to Dr. Harmon, gesturing. I enter the room. I get a glass of sparkling water. I speak to Gerald, who is excited about the monograph and who is wearing the bow tie Robert gave him and that he has worn to every formal event since Robert died. The silk is fraying at one edge. Gerald does not notice or does not mind.

I speak to Dean Marsh, who asks about the initiative with what appears to be genuine interest. This is the thing about Alan Marsh that makes him difficult to dismiss: he is not indifferent to the work. “The cross-disciplinary approach is exactly what the committee was hoping for,” he says. “Truly. Work like this is going to matter when the board starts asking hard questions about the humanities.” He says this the way you might tell someone their roof looks great while mentioning the forecast calls for a storm. I thank him. He moves on. I hold my glass.

I speak to the department secretary, whose name is Diane, and who has kept the department functioning through three deans and two budget crises and whose presence at this party should be recognized with something considerably more substantial than hummus. She is drinking a gin and tonic; she helped organize this event and intends to survive it. I ask about her daughter’s recital. She asks about Sophia.

Three conversations. Twenty-two minutes. I can leave in twenty-three minutes.

Priya appears beside me. She is holding a glass of wine. Red. The glass catches the string lights, and the wine looks warm and the green sweater is close enough that I can see the embroidery in detail—small flowers, silver on green, stitched by hand.

“The refreshments have committed very strongly to hummus,” she says.

“The hummus is the party’s defining feature. I consider it a load-bearing element. If the hummus were removed, the party would collapse.”

She laughs, the one that is close and warm and aimed at the six inches of air between her shoulder and mine rather than at the room. The laugh is new. I have heard her laugh many times, in many registers, from the full room-filling laugh to the almost laugh that accompanies a clever turn of phrase. This laugh is different. This laugh is conspiratorial. This laugh says: we are in this together. We are in this room together and the room is ridiculous and the ridiculousness is something we share.

We stay in the corner.

Something has shifted since the argument. The argument and the emails and the also also spoken aloud in the doorway. We survived a fight, and surviving produced a closeness that not fighting could not have produced. The closeness is in the room now, between us, in the six inches of air.

I am aware, as we talk, that I am smiling.

She is close. We are standing closer than the room requires. There is space around us, other people have moved to the refreshment table and the center of the room, and we have not moved with them. We have stayed in the corner, and the corner has become ours and the distance between us is not the six feet of the research space or the eight inches of the quad. It is less. It is the distance of two people who have chosen, in a room full of other people, to be near each other, and the choosing is visible, and I do not care that it is visible. That is a new feeling.

I stay two hours.

I do not notice this until I am putting on my coat at the door and I check my phone and the time is 8:15. My planned departure was 6:45, and I have stayed an hour and a half past my system, and I did not notice because the noticing would have required me to look at the time, and looking at the time would have required me to look away from Priya.

This is information. I stayed two hours at a party I planned to leave in 45 minutes because a woman in a green sweater was making me laugh in a corner, and I chose the laughing over the leaving, and it was not difficult. It was the easiest thing I have done in twelve years. Easier than the system. Easier than the departure time and the three conversations and the measured stride across the quad. Easier than all of it.

I walk home alone.

The campus is cold and dark, and the mist has settled in the trees, not fog exactly, but the low damp cloud that descends on winter evenings and turns the lampposts into soft yellow suggestions and makes the old-growth forest at the campus edge disappear entirely. The wet pavement reflects the colored lights strung along the main path. My breath makes small clouds in the December air. The world has contracted to the ten feet in front of me and the thoughts inside my head. I walk at my usual pace. I do not rush. I cross the quad in the dark and pass the place by the old-growth trees without stopping. I walk up the hill to my neighborhood. I let myself into the house. Sophia is asleep, and the house is quiet and ordered and mine.

And I wanted company on the walk.

The wanting is simple and complete. I wanted Priya beside me. I wanted the eight inches. I wanted the conversation to continue, not about the hummus or the string lights, not the clever observations, but the thing underneath the observations, the thing that was happening between us in the corner while the party went on around us. I wanted to walk home in the cold with someone whose shoulder was near mine and whose laugh—the private one, the conspiratorial one—I could hear beside me in the dark.

I hang my coat. I check on Sophia. She is asleep, face peaceful, a book splayed open on the pillow beside her. I watch her breathe for a moment.

I shower. I brush my teeth. I get into bed. I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. Tonight sleep is not going to come easily because— the party, the corner, the green sweater, the silver thread, the laugh, the staying.

The green sweater.

The thought arrives before I have agreed to think it. The image: Priya in the green sweater, how the fabric caught the string lights, how it draped over her body, the curve of her hips, the width of her shoulders under the neckline, the way the sweater moved when she gestured. I saw all of this at the party. I catalogued it with the running attention I have been unable to redirect since September. But at the party the cataloguing was contained by the context: public space, colleagues present, sparkling water in my hand, the professional overlay still functioning.

Here, in the dark, in the bed, in the quiet house, the context is gone. The cataloguing has nothing to contain it.

The green sweater. The body inside the sweater. My mind slips free.

I think about the fabric against her skin. The warmth of her beneath it. The way she looked under the lights, talking and laughing and I looked, and I looked away. I am not looking away now.

The thought deepens. My body responds, a warmth low in my abdomen, spreading, unmistakable. The warmth I have been managing for weeks, that I have filed and suppressed and redirected, the warmth that the argument did not cool and the emails did not resolve and the also also did not satisfy.

I think about her mouth. The mouth that laughed in the corner, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek. The mouth that reads my passages aloud with a care that transforms them. I think about that mouth on my throat. On the place below my ear. On the line of my jaw that she has never touched and that I can feel, in the dark, as though she is touching it, the phantom sensation of a kiss that has not happened, precise and warm and unbearable in its specificity.

I think about her hands. The hands that gesture when she talks, that hold pens she never uses, that pushed her hair behind her ear in the corner while the party hummed around us. I think about those hands in my hair, undoing the arrangement I maintain every day, the pins, the precision, the controlled shape of it, her fingers loosening it just like she loosens everything about me, slowly, without force, until the structure gives way and her hands are in my hair and I⁠—

My body is fully aroused. The arousal is located in specific places: my breasts, heavy and sensitive against the sheets, my nipples, hard, aching with a need to be touched that is so precise I can feel the shape of the touch I want, the specific pressure, the specific hands. Between my legs, the heat has gathered into something insistent and unmistakable. My body has declared its position. My body has made its case with the same thoroughness I bring to a scholarly argument: evidence marshaled, claims substantiated, conclusion inescapable.