Page 37 of Close Reading

The conclusion is: I want her. I want her hands on my breasts. I want her mouth on my throat. I want her body against mine in this bed that has held only me for twelve years. I want her weight on me.

The wanting is so complete, so specific, so physically undeniable that my hand moves toward my own body. Toward my breast first, toward the ache, the need that has been building since September and that is, tonight, here, unbearable.

I stop.

My hand is on my sternum, the neutral territory, the place where the hand has stopped because the mind has intervened. The mind that has been overridden by the body for the past four minutes—the mind that was dragged through the fantasy of the sweater and the hair and the hands and the wanting—has reasserted itself. The latch has engaged. The fire suppression system has activated. The protocol is: do not.

Do not touch yourself while thinking about her. Do not give the wanting a physical completion because completion means the wanting was real, which means the wanting exists outside the fantasy, which means you will have to do something about it, and that means risk… and risk means the quad and the earring and the double trouble and the blazer covered in your daughter’s shit while the woman you loved skipped away with your student.

The architecture holds.

I take my hand off my sternum. I get up.

The kitchen is cold. The kitchen is dark. I turn on the light above the stove, and it casts a dim yellow glow across the counter. The clean surfaces and the empty mug rack and the window show me my own reflection: a woman in a sleep shirt standing in her kitchen at 11:30 at night with her hair down and her body on fire and her hands at her sides doing nothing.

I fill the kettle. I boil the water. I make tea I do not want. I hold the mug. I stand in the kitchen. I drink the tea. The arousal does not subside. My breasts ache. The heat between my legs is a fact I am choosing not to act on, and the choosing is costing me something I can feel—a tension in my jaw, a rigidity in my shoulders, the physical cost of refusal distributed across the body that is doing the refusing.

I do not go back to bed. I sit at the kitchen table with the tea and the dark and the silence. I sit there for a long time. The tea grows cold. The arousal cools to a simmer that I know, from weeks of experience, will be there when I wake up, the coal that has survived every night since October and that burns hotter after each failed attempt to extinguish it.

I understand, sitting in my kitchen at midnight in December, that the fire suppression system is failing. A slow failure. A degradation. Each time I activate the protocol it takes longer to engage and holds for a shorter duration, and the wanting that survives the suppression is stronger than the wanting that preceded it. The system is not designed for this level of sustained pressure. The architecture was designed for a life in which the pressure did not exist, a life in which no one stood in a corner at a party, in which no one sat on my floor explaining root networks to my daughter, in which no one wrote emails at 11:00 at night and made me laugh alone in this kitchen in the dark.

The system was designed for a life without Priya.

I wash the mug. I go back to bed. I close my eyes. I do not think about the green sweater. I do not think about her throat. I do not think about the hands in my hair or the mouth on my skin or the weight of her body or the specific, precisely imagined feeling of her fingers inside me.

I think about all of it. Not thinking has stopped working. The thoughts pour through and I lie in the dark and let them pour because there is nothing left to hold them back. The nothing is terrifying and the nothing is also—this is the part I cannot say, cannot admit, cannot write in an email or speak aloud or even think in full sentences—the nothing is also a relief.

I fall asleep. The coal burns. In the morning I will put the wall back up. In the morning I will cross the quad and climb the stairs and make my tea and begin.

18

PRIYA

The boys come home from Chennai on a Sunday in early January, smiling and taller and carrying between them approximately 100 pounds of luggage, 30 pounds of which is the watercolor supplies Ravi’s grandmother bought him and the remainder of which is food.

Ravi has a sketchbook full of Chennai. Every page is a watercolor: the street dogs he befriended, each one named in Tamil and English; the temple his grandmother took them to, rendered in golds and reds that glow off the heavy paper; a portrait of his grandfather sitting in the courtyard reading the newspaper that is so precise and so tender that I stand in the kitchen holding it and I cannot speak for a moment. He is nine. He painted this. My nine-year-old son saw the way his grandfather was sitting in the morning, and he painted it, and the painting is an act of love so fluent I cannot find the word for what I feel.

“Do you like it?” Ravi asks. He is standing beside me with his shoes still on and the travel weariness in his face and the hope in his voice.

“I love it,” I say. “I’m going to frame it.”

“Paati said his hands look wrong.”

“Paati is wrong about the hands.”

“Don’t tell her that.”

“I would never tell her that.”

The house is loud again. Kali is beside herself. She moves between Dev and Ravi in a circuit, confirming their solidity. Moti watched the reunion from the couch, raised his head, assessed, confirmed, returned to sleep. Five weeks of absence processed in approximately four seconds.

I am fully present with my sons. I am washing the travel clothes and unpacking the luggage and heating the sambar Vikram’s mother packed in a thermos that somehow survived twenty hours of international travel.

And in the background, like a radio tuned to a frequency I cannot change, I am thinking about Margot.

The emails started during the winter holiday break. They started legitimately—citations, framing decisions, the professional correspondence that accumulates during a recess. I sent the first one on December 22nd. She responded within the hour. A cycle established itself. The emails stayed professional. The professional framing held, a tent in a strong wind, the poles intact but the fabric straining.

Her emails were precise and funny in a way she did not appear to intend. The humor lived in the exactness, in parenthetical asides that arrived like small packages wrapped in academic prose. (The source I mentioned is available through JSTOR. It is also available in a hardcover from 1987 that I found at Powell’s for $4.50, which tells you everything you need to know about how the market values environmental philosophy.) The humor was Margot—dry, embedded, requiring attention to find.