Page 53 of Close Reading

The grinning started approximately fourteen hours ago and has not stopped and I do not expect it to stop and I am fine with this. I am fine with being a woman grinning at a steering wheel on Foster Avenue because my body is still humming with the residual warmth of a night that rearranged the furniture of my life and I have not yet figured out where everything goes and I do not care.

The car behind me honks. The light is green. I have been sitting at a green light replaying the moment Margot took off her bra.

She reached behind her back. She unclasped it. She let it fall. The gesture was—I am searching for the word and the word does not exist in English or any of the languages I have partial access to—the gesture was Margot. Deliberate. Unhurried. The decision visible in the doing of it, as it always is with her, because she does nothing by accident. I watched her choose, in real time, to be seen. By me. The choosing was the sexiest thing about it. The choosing and her boobs, which were— I am operating a motor vehicle. I should not be thinking about Margot’s boobs while operating a motor vehicle. Her nipples hardened in the cool air and she stood in her bedroom and let me look and what came after the looking was⁠—

Another green light. Another honk.

I pull into the parking lot of a grocery store. I put the car in park. I am going to need a minute.

Flashes. Her laugh when I fumbled with the button on her trousers. The sound she made when I touched her—low, unguarded, from somewhere the composure doesn’t reach. Her hand tightening in my hair. Her mouth. Her precision. I am going to think about her precision for the rest of my natural life.

I am 41 years old. I have been in love before. I have been in bed before. I have never sat in a parking lot unable to operate a vehicle because my body will not stop replaying a single night and my face will not stop grinning and my chest is so full of joy that I have to put my head on the steering wheel and remind myself to breathe.

The boys are at Vikram’s until Tuesday. The house will be quiet, too quiet.

I text Marcus. Two words: Lavender House?

His response arrives in four seconds: Already here. Bring details.

Lavender House is seven minutes from here. The morning is March bright, the sun that appears after months of grey with the aggressive cheerfulness of a guest who has been absent too long. The sun is on my face and the window is down and the air smells like wet earth and new growth and I am driving to Lavender House to sit with people who love me and tell them that I am happy.

Happy is not the right word. Happy fits inside a sentence. What I am is too large for a sentence, requires a paragraph, possibly a chapter, most certainly a footnote longer than even Kim could produce, potentially a geological era. What I am is: a woman whose body remembers the specific pressure of another woman’s mouth and whose heart remembers the specific expression on that woman’s face when the composure finally gave way and what was underneath was not the analytical Margot or the professional Margot or the defended Margot but just Margot, soft and terrified and reaching and allowing herself to be seen.

I park outside Lavender House. The door is propped open. The lavender hedge is pushing new growth. The smell carries. The fragrance has never smelled so divine. So real.

Marcus is at his table. The chai. The laptop. He looks up when I walk in and his face does the rapid scan—two seconds—and whatever the scan reveals produces an expression I have never seen on Marcus Wellington’s face. Not the chart vindication. Not the astrological certainty. Joy. Uncomplicated, unhidden. He has been watching his friend fall in love for six months, and he is looking at the result and finding it good.

“Tell me everything. No. Wait.” He adjusts his collar. “Tell me the important things and save the details for when I have more chai.”

“Marcus.”

“You are glowing. You are literally incandescent. Sit down.”

I sit. I don’t know where to start. The pierogies seem too early and the morning seems too late and the middle is private; the middle belongs to the lamplight and the bedroom and the room where her composure broke open and I was there to catch what came through. But the edges I can share.

“She made pierogies,” I say.

“From scratch?”

“Her grandmother’s recipe.”

Marcus sets down his chai. “She made you her grandmother’s pierogies.”

“With her hair down.”

“A woman who makes you her grandmother’s recipe with her hair down is a woman who has decided. That is not dinner. That is a declaration of intent.”

“The intent was declared.”

“I can see that.” He looks at me, really looks, the look beneath the chart, the look of a friend who has known me through Dominique and Morgan and the divorce and the years of the boys and the Thursday mornings. “You’re happy.”

“I’m— Marcus, I’m so happy it’s structurally unsound. I don’t think this level of happiness has adequate load-bearing capacity. It’s going to collapse into something embarrassing.”

“Let it collapse. You’ve earned it.”

From the corner armchair, Rowan speaks without looking up from their phone.

“Is this the Comp Lit professor? The one with the blazers?”