Page 42 of Close Reading

“We did it,” she says.

“We did.”

“You were brilliant.”

“The work was good.”

“You were brilliant, Margot. Take the compliment.”

She touches my arm.

Briefly. Her hand on my forearm, below the elbow, above the wrist. The touch lasts two seconds. It is congratulatory. It is collegial. It is the kind of gesture that happens between colleagues in hallways after shared professional successes and that does not, in the normal course of human events, cause a person’s entire nervous system to reorganize itself around the point of contact.

Her hand is warm. The touch lands on the bare skin of my forearm where I have pushed my blazer sleeve up during the presentation—a habit, the sleeve-pushing, a concession to the warmth of the room—and the skin-on-skin is a detonation.

The touch radiates. She removes her hand. She is still smiling. She does not know what she has done.

“Thursday,” I say. My voice is level. This may be the greatest achievement of my professional career.

“Thursday.” She turns. She walks down the hallway. She does not look back.

I stand where she left me. The hallway empties. The committee room door closes. My forearm is warm in the place where her hand was, and the warmth is not fading. I have just delivered the best academic presentation of my career and the only thing I can think about is two seconds of skin.

I walk home. The February light is thin and cold and I barely see it. The campus passes in a blur. The quad, the trees, the path. All of it peripheral. All of it secondary to the point of contact on my forearm that I am carrying through the February afternoon like a lit match, careful not to let the wind extinguish it, careful not to close my hand around it, just carrying it, open-palmed, through the cold.

Two seconds.

I feel them for the rest of the evening.

22

PRIYA

February, winter’s long middle. The grey that has stopped being dramatic and has become simply the color of the sky, day after day. But the camellias are blooming outside Lowell Hall, bright pink against the wet dark bark, absurd, defiant. Color when the grey says there should be none. I pass them on my way to Lavender House.

Bea is not behind the counter when I arrive. A young woman I half recognize is working the machine with the careful concentration of someone who has been shown how to do this and is determined not to break anything. Bea comes through the back door five minutes later, hair damp, cheeks flushed, pulling off a jacket.

“Water aerobics ran long,” she says to no one in particular, and steps behind the counter and the room settles into itself.

The community is smaller this week. Gerald is absent, a cold, according to Kim, which means he is at home with the monograph and a box of tissues and is almost certainly making more progress sick than he has made in the past three months healthy, because Gerald’s productivity is inversely proportional to his access to social interaction. Kim is in her seat, green jacket, tote bag, oat milk latte, laptop, the violet hair that Rowan did holding its color.

Sam and Lani are at the corner table, the two-person table by the side window that nobody else uses because the window has a draft. Sam and Lani use it because they have been sitting at this table for four years and the draft is no longer information either of them processes. They have acclimated to the draft the way they have acclimated to each other—completely, unconsciously, in a way that makes the accommodation invisible.

They are not arguing today. They are quiet, both on their phones, not talking. Lani’s feet are on the rung of Sam’s chair. The proximity is unconscious. Her body is angled toward Sam like a plant angled toward light, and it is so habitual that correcting it would require Lani to notice it first, which she has not, in four years, done.

Lani is eating a cardamom bun, her short hair pushed behind her ears. She reaches across the table and takes a piece of Sam’s scone without asking or looking up from her phone. Her fingers break off a corner of the scone. She has been eating off Sam Rivera’s plate for four years and has never considered that it might require permission, because Sam has never once suggested it does.

Sam does not react. Sam takes a sip of her coffee. The taking of the scone and the non-reaction are so practiced, so invisible, that the exchange has the quality of breathing—automatic, essential, unexamined.

I watch this from across the room and think about how some connections are visible only to the people not inside them, the way a mycorrhizal network is visible to the researcher but not to the trees.

Marcus is at his table with his chai and no pretense.

“What are you waiting for?” he asks.

I sit down. I do not pretend to misunderstand. There was a time—September, October—when I might have deflected, might have made the question about the research or the project or some professional dimension Marcus was not asking about. That time has passed.

“For her to be ready.”