Page 5 of Close Reading

I wait.

At 9:04 the door opens.

She comes in carrying two cups, both from Lavender House, I can tell by the ceramic, Pat Levin’s, the ones Bea uses for regulars instead of paper, and wearing an expression of cheerful apology so practiced it has become part of her face. Her hair is down and slightly untamed, dark, thick, and wavy, and falling past her shoulders. She is wearing a grey pullover over dark trousers. Her body is utilitarian, with strong thighs and a torso soft and solid at once, built by research that takes her into the field. She moves through the doorway the way she moved through the committee meeting two years ago: as though the room was already hers and she is simply arriving to confirm this. Without hurry. Without apology despite the apology on her face.

“I’m sorry, the line was longer than I expected, and then Bea and I got into a thing about cardamom sources, and I recognize that this is not an acceptable excuse for being late to a meeting but I want you to know that the cardamom conversation was genuinely important and Bea started it.” She sets one of the cups in front of me. “Earl Grey. Bea said it’s your order.”

I look at the mug. “You asked Bea what I drink.”

“I asked Bea what you drink.” She says this the way she might confirm that she checked the weather this morning: a basic act of preparation, not a gesture requiring acknowledgment. She sits down across from me.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Shall we begin?”

“Please.” She pulls a laptop from a bag that should be classified as luggage. It is enormous, canvas, covered in pins: a fern, an atom, a cartoon hedgehog I do not recognize. She rummages through it, and I can see as she rummages two charging cables tangled together, earbuds in a knot that would require surgical intervention, and a dinosaur pen with a cap shaped like a Triceratops. She extracts the laptop. The screen is cracked in the upper left corner.

Her hands are the first thing I look at when she opens the laptop. I do not know why her hands are the first thing I look at. They are ordinary hands, or they should be ordinary, but there is ink on her left index finger, dark against brown skin, from an uncapped pen, a smudge of blue that might be cerulean. She types her password without looking at the keys, her fingers moving with a speed and carelessness that is the opposite of how I type, the opposite of how I do anything. I watch her hands on the keyboard for two seconds longer than I should and then I look down at my folder and I do not look up for four minutes.

“I’ve prepared three possible frameworks for the initiative,” I say. “The first prioritizes rigorous textual analysis with ecological case studies as supporting material. The second⁠—”

“Can I ask a question first?”

I pause. I am not accustomed to being interrupted before the third sentence of a prepared presentation. I am not accustomed to being interrupted at all, because I speak with a deliberateness that most people interpret, correctly, as a signal that I have organized my thoughts and would prefer to deliver them in order. She has either missed this signal or received it and chosen to override it.

“Of course,” I say.

“What do you actually want this to be?”

The question is disarming. I had prepared for a negotiation. Two departments, two methodologies, the careful territorial dance of academics who have been voluntold into collaboration. I had prepared my positions, my concessions, my non-negotiables. What I had not prepared for was someone asking me, directly and without preamble, what I want. Not what the initiative should be. Not what the Dean’s office expects. What I want. As though what I want is relevant. As though she arrived at this meeting intending to find out.

I set down my pen. I have been holding it since I sat down, a reflex, the pen as anchor, the weight of it in my hand a reassurance that I am prepared to write, to note, to record. I set it down because the question requires a response that I cannot give while holding an instrument designed for recording other people’s statements. This is a question that requires me to say something I mean.

“I want it to be rigorous,” I say. “I want it to be work we would both be proud of. I want it to not be a performance piece designed to make the Dean’s office feel progressive while my department loses funding.”

She nods, and it is not the quick nod of someone waiting for their turn to speak. It is a real nod. The kind that takes in what was said and sits with it, lets it settle. Her head tilts slightly to the left as she listens.

“I want it to be accessible,” she says. “I want people outside this building to read it and care. I want it to matter to someone who isn’t already in the room.”

“Accessible and rigorous are not mutually exclusive.”

“No. But they require different structures.” She leans forward. When she leans forward her hair falls in a way that she pushes back with one hand without pausing the sentence, and I track the motion of her hand from her temple to behind her ear. “If we lead with dense literary analysis, we lose the general reader by page three. If we lead with ecological narrative, we lose the scholarly credibility your department needs right now to survive.”

She said your department needs right now to survive without flinching, without hedging, without the careful diplomatic language academics use to discuss the vulnerability of other people’s departments while protecting their own. She named the asymmetry. She looked at me while she named it. She did not look away.

I take a sip of the Earl Grey she brought me because she asked Bea what I drink.

“You’re suggesting we need a structure that serves two audiences simultaneously.”

“I’m suggesting we need a structure that doesn’t know it’s serving two audiences. Something that reads as one thing—coherent, compelling, singular, but does the work of both.”

I regard her. The answer is good. The answer is, in fact, better than anything I wrote in my three frameworks, and I have spent the past week on those frameworks, and she arrived four minutes late and produced, in the space of a single sentence, the structural insight that my three carefully prepared proposals were circling without finding.

I will not be saying this out loud.

“I have some thoughts on how that might work,” I say, and I pull out the third framework, the one I ranked highest, the one that comes closest to what she just described.

She reads it. I watch her read it. She reads with her whole body, leaning in, one hand holding the edge of the paper, her lips moving slightly on the passages she finds interesting. This is a terrible reading habit, and I notice it on the first page, and I notice it again on the second, and by the third page I am noticing the specific words that make her lips move, the theoretical ones, the ones where the argument shifts. Her lips move when her mind is most engaged. This is information I did not need and now have.