Page 48 of Close Reading

26

PRIYA

Ilie awake until 2:00 a.m.

What happened was certain, what happened was her hand on my face and her mouth on mine and the word fireworks confessed like a secret and the laughter that followed, the shared laughter, the laughter of two people done pretending. I am not second-guessing. I am replaying. I am lying in the dark with Kali on my feet and the taste of Pinot Noir still on my lips and I am replaying the kiss, over and over.

Her hand on my face. The steadiness of it. She decided. Her certainty was the sexiest thing about it. The absolute, unhedged, system-overriding certainty. She has spent years behind a wall she built herself and chose, on a Thursday in late February, to open the door and let me in.

Kali shifts on my feet. Settles. Her breathing deepens into sleep. The house is dark. The boys are down the hall, asleep in their rooms, unaware that their mother is lying in bed at 2:00 a.m. grinning at the ceiling because a woman kissed her in a basement and thought fireworks.

I arrive at Lavender House at 7:00 the next morning. This is the earliest I have ever arrived anywhere voluntarily. The earliness is a measure of something I cannot contain: the need to be out of the house, the need to be in the world, to sit in a room with coffee and process what has happened in the company of the people who have been watching it happen.

I had called Helen last night when I got home to see if she could help get the boys off to school. She arrived at 6:15 in her walking clothes, already smiling. She did not need the details to understand the situation. “Go,” she said, waving me toward the door. “I’ve got them.”

Marcus is already there. He is at his table with a chai. His laptop is open. He looks up when I walk in and his face does the thing—the scan, the assessment, the rapid processing—and the processing takes approximately one second.

“Finally,” he says. He picks up his chai. “How was it?”

“It was—” I stop. I think about the hand on my face. The steadiness. The certainty. The laughter. The fireworks. “She thought fireworks.”

Marcus sets down his chai. “She told you she thought fireworks.”

“She told me that her mind produced fireworks and she was horrified and delighted and she laughed, Marcus. She laughed the real laugh.”

Marcus thinks for a moment. “Good,” he says. “That’s really good.”

Bea sets a Calloway on the counter. She has not looked at me. She has not said anything. The silence with which she serves it is Bea’s way of saying she knows and she is glad and she is not going to make a thing of it because making a thing of it is not what Margot would want, and Bea’s first loyalty, the oldest loyalty, is to Margot. Bea’s gladness for me is real. Bea’s protectiveness of Margot is older. Both coexist. The Calloway contains both.

I drink my coffee. I know what comes next and I know how to handle it. Margot will need to choose this deliberately, the way she chose the kiss, the way she chose the roar, the way she has chosen every brave thing she has done since September with the full weight of the decision visible in the act. Pushing will close the door.

I go to the research space at 1:25. Five minutes early.

Margot is already there. We look at each other. Three seconds. The three seconds contain everything—the kiss, the fireworks, the laughter, the finally, the night of thinking, the morning of arriving, the decision to be here, the Chemex warm on the shelf, the lamp casting its circle on two desks that are closer together than they have ever been.

She has moved her desk.

I see it now, the desk is closer to mine by at least a foot, maybe more. The six feet that has defined our working distance since September has been reduced, overnight, by a deliberate act of furniture rearrangement. Margot moved her desk closer to mine. She arrived early and she made coffee and she moved her desk. This is Margot’s love language: not words but the rearrangement of the physical environment to accommodate a new variable. She has incorporated me into the system. The incorporation is expressed in the distance between desks, which is now four feet, and the four feet is a declaration as loud as anything she could say with her mouth.

We do not talk about the kiss. We do not need to. The kiss is in the room, in the four feet between our desks, in the coffee she made, in the lamp’s circle that now covers both surfaces with room to spare. The kiss is in the quiet, which is not the quiet of things unsaid but the quieter quiet of things that have been said and that do not need to be repeated.

The work continues. The work is the structure that held us together when we could not hold each other, and the structure does not break now that the holding has begun. The structure simply accommodates.

The distance between our desks is four feet. The distance between the kiss and whatever comes next is unmeasured, unmapped.

The Chemex hisses. The lamp glows. The light through the window lasts one minute longer than yesterday.

We begin.

27

MARGOT

Two days after the kiss I invite Priya to dinner.

I do not mean dinner as in the Thai from the place on Elm, eaten at our desks from takeout containers while we discuss the framework. Dinner as in my house. A meal I will prepare. Saturday evening. Sophia is at a sleepover, arranged two weeks ago, before the kiss, before any of this, a sleepover that I did not engineer and that the universe provided with timing I cannot account for within any rational framework and that I am choosing not to examine because examining it would require acknowledging that I am planning an evening alone with Priya in my house, and that the planning has an intent I have not spoken aloud.

I invite her by email. The email is short. I’d like to make you dinner Saturday. My house. 7:00. I do not add also also. I do not soften the invitation with the language of the research or the project or any of the professional containers we have been using to hold the thing between us. The email is direct. The directness is itself a form of intimacy. I have never aimed this directness at her personally, and the aiming is an act of exposure I feel in my body as I press send.