Page 60 of Close Reading

This orgasm is sudden and total, arriving from everywhere at once, from her hand and her thigh and the sound of my name in her mouth and the please that is still in mine. My back arches. My hands tighten on her breasts. The sound I make comes from the place where the roar and the fuck live, the place that has been opening all year, room by room, and that is, in this moment, open.

Her hand slows. Gentles. Stays.

I am breathing hard against her neck. She is breathing hard against mine. We are quiet, two bodies resting against each other, heart rate slowing, skin cooling, the sweat and the chai and the tears all drying together on the linoleum.

She shifts. Settles me against her chest, her back against the cabinet. My ear on her heartbeat.

Kali has relocated to the living room, either out of discretion or disinterest. Moti has not moved.

The evening light comes through the window over the sink, warm and gold, and falls across the floor and across us and across the spilled chai and across the towel she dropped when she swatted my backside twenty minutes or an hour or a lifetime ago.

Her chest rising and falling under my cheek. The kitchen ticking. Kali sighs from the living room. The light moves on the floor.

“I love you,” I say.

The sentence arrives without construction. No framework. No subordinate clause. No optimal moment selected for delivery.

Her hand stills in my hair. One breath.

“I love you too.” Her voice is steady and full and it breaks on the too. “I have loved you since you wrote my sentence in your margin. Your perfect handwriting. I watched your hand move across the page and I thought—” A breath. “I thought, oh. I’m in trouble.”

I laugh. The laugh is wet because I am crying again, apparently, the crying and the laughing simultaneous, and this is the life I am choosing. It is messy and loud and the floor is sticky and I am saying I love you, and the sentence does not require a system to survive.

I close my eyes. She strokes my hair. The floor is ours.

32

PRIYA

Two weeks pass. This is not a problem of wanting. The wanting is constant. The wanting is not the issue. The issue is that we are two women in our forties with children and jobs and dogs and the universe has apparently decided to test whether love can survive scheduling.

Sophia gets a stomach bug. Three days home from school, which means three evenings Margot is on the couch with ginger ale. The boys are on spring break, which means my house is loud and full and wonderful and absolutely not a place I can bring a woman whose sweater I want to remove. Kali eats a sock, partially, and the vet visit takes an entire Wednesday afternoon that I narrate to Margot over email in four increasingly unhinged installments. She responds to each one with the calm precision of a woman who has never had a dog eat a sock and who finds the concept both appalling and, I suspect, hilarious.

The research space continues. Tuesdays and Thursdays. The four feet. The also also. We are together and we are not alone together and I am going slowly out of my mind.

I learn the extent of the threat from June.

Not from Margot—from June, my colleague in conservation biology, who mentions it over coffee in the Whitman Hall break room on a Wednesday in mid-March with the casual assumption that I already know, because of course I know, because I am in a relationship with the woman whose department is being dismantled and the woman would have told me.

“The dissolution vote is next week,” June says. She is stirring her coffee. “Full dissolution. They’re eliminating the department entirely, folding the remaining courses into English, redistributing the tenure lines into joint appointments that won’t report to anyone in the humanities. All the adjunct lines gone across most of the humanities. Nadia got her notice last Friday.”

I set my mug down.

“Full dissolution.”

June looks at me. Her hand stops stirring.

“You didn’t know.”

“I knew the department was under threat. Everyone knows the department is under threat; Alan Marsh has been performing fiscal concern in faculty meetings since October. I helped build the enrollment data. I was in the room when the committee received the presentation.” I hear my own voice. It is careful, and the careful is costing me something. “I knew there were budget cuts coming. Position cuts. That’s partly what the project was for.”

“Priya.” June sets the spoon down. “The budget cuts were the public story. Last week there was a confidential proposal sent to the affected department heads. Seven departments. Full consolidation into a single underfunded entity, all adjunct lines eliminated, the whole thing managed by someone from outside the humanities. They asked the department heads to keep it quiet while they finalized.” She pauses. “Margot was one of the people who received that email.”

The sentence lands and I stand in it.

“The committee hearing on Tuesday isn’t about saving positions anymore. It’s about whether Comparative Literature continues to exist as a department.” June’s face changes. She has just realized she delivered information that was not hers to deliver. “I’m sorry. I assumed you knew. Everyone on the faculty grapevine knows. The email leaked a few days ago.”

Everyone on the faculty grapevine knows. Everyone except me. The person who sits four feet from Margot Voss every Tuesday and Thursday, who built the enrollment data with her, who presented the joint research to the committee, who has been inside her house and her bed and her kitchen and her daughter’s life. Margot found out days ago. She has been sitting across from me in the research space since then, and she said nothing.