Page 12 of Close Reading

Hate her. I do not hate her. I am annoyed by her and intrigued by her and I have been listening for her laugh since September and I noticed the dog hair on her shoulder and the ink on her finger and the way her lips move when she reads and I have never once, in the accumulation of all this noticing, felt anything that resembles hate.

Hate would be simpler. Hate would fit in the system.

“I don’t form conclusions prematurely,” I say.

She laughs. The real one. The one that fills the room.

I walk home in the late afternoon light. The air has turned. It is not cold yet, but suggestive, the first drafts of the cold to come. Lavender House glows across the street, dusky purple in the diminishing light. I walk past it.

I think about the Chemex. I will use it Thursday. The coffee smells extraordinary and I am rigorous enough to acknowledge this.

6

PRIYA

It is a Thursday in October and the light has changed.

The Pacific Northwest doesn’t do dramatic with its light, not like the sharp seasonal shift of a New England autumn or the sudden gold-to-grey of the Midwest. Here the change comes on slowly. You look at the sky one morning and realize it has been dimming for weeks and you simply failed to notice because the dimming was incremental and you were busy. On clear days you can see Puget Sound from the hill above campus, the water flat and silver at the edge of town. Today is not a clear day. The quad is still green. The evergreens will hold their color all winter; that’s the bargain they’ve made, trading the drama of deciduous autumn for the steadiness of being the same in every season. I respect the evergreens. I have always respected constancy. I have never managed it.

We are in our fifth week of the project. Tuesday-Thursday, 1:30 to 4:00, the rhythm of it settled into something I don’t have to think about. I think about things that aren’t working. The grant application on my desk at home. The leak in my bathroom that the landlord has classified as “cosmetic,” a word that means I’m not going to fix this expressed in the language of plausible concern. Whether Dev is actually doing his assigned reading or producing increasingly sophisticated summaries of reading he has not done.

Things that are working, I don’t think about. I just do them. The walk to Lowell Hall, the descent to the basement, the opening of the door into the room that smells like old paper and the Chemex and her. I just do.

Margot is at her desk arranging research materials.

I use the word arranging deliberately, because it is the right word and no other word will do. Other people organize. They sort by date or alphabet or some functional logic. Margot arranges. She composes. Each article placed with intention, like a curator positioning works in a gallery, aware that the relationship between objects creates meaning the objects cannot carry alone. A printout of Kimmerer next to a printout of Lorde next to her own handwritten notes, and the triangle they form on the desk is an argument she is making in space.

I have been watching her do this for five weeks. I did not decide to watch.

Her hands. I have to talk about her hands because they are what I see first and what I see last and what I see in between. Her hands are deliberate. Every gesture has been considered, selected. When she picks up a page she picks it up from the corner, index finger and thumb, lifting rather than grabbing, and the page does not crumple because she has calibrated the pressure exactly. When she writes in the margins her pen moves at a consistent speed, and the letters are small and regular and tilted slightly to the left, and the angle never varies.

I don’t have a scientific word for the feeling I get watching Margot Voss hold a pen. I have words for mycorrhizal symbiosis and nutrient exchange and the underground communication networks of forests. I don’t have a word for this.

Something is different about her today.

The difference is in her hands. She is sorting the papers with her usual precision, but there is a quality to the sorting that is—I am reaching for the word—careful. Precise is her default. This is careful in a different register, the care of someone handling objects that carry a weight the objects themselves do not explain.

Her jaw is set. I have learned her jaw over the weeks. The angle changes depending on what she is processing. When she is thinking about the work, the jaw is relaxed, the muscles at the hinge softened. When she is arguing, the jaw tightens, sharpens. Right now the jaw is holding something.

I should ask. But I have learned that direct emotional inquiry is not the path to Margot. Direct questions make her more contained, as though the question requires a reinforcement of the walls. She responds to indirection, to the professional question that carries the personal question inside it.

So I say: “The Kimmerer section is stronger than I expected. The way you connected the root-network metaphor to the narrative structure of collective memory. That’s the center of the paper.”

She looks up. The jaw relaxes by a degree. The eyes refocus on me, and for a moment I see both things: the Margot who is here in the room, and the Margot who was somewhere else, somewhere I cannot follow because she has not opened the door.

“You think so?”

“I think you found something I couldn’t have found from the ecological side. The literary analysis is doing work the science can’t do alone.”

She is quiet for a beat. Then: “That’s what literary analysis is for.” Her voice has a quality I haven’t heard before: underneath the professional register, a tiredness that is not about sleep. A weight that has been carried for a long time and that she is, today, unable to set down as completely as she usually does.

She goes back to the papers. Her hands keep moving. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know the story. I know that Bea said she has her reasons and folded the cloth and walked away, and I know that the reasons are in the room today, pressing on her, and I know that her hands on the papers are holding something they cannot put down.

I go back to my work. I don’t ask. Not asking is the correct response; I know this with the instinct of someone who has spent her career studying living systems and who understands that some organisms need space more than they need intervention. The best thing you can do for a forest that is processing a disturbance is leave it alone and let the underground networks do their work.

But it’s hard not to ask. I want to cross the six feet between our desks and sit beside her and say tell me. I want to say I can see that something is pressing on you and I don’t need to know what it is but I need you to know that I can see it and that the seeing is not a threat.

I don’t say any of these things. I work. She works. The afternoon passes. The light dims. At 4:00 she closes her laptop with her usual precision. She stands, puts on her coat, gathers her papers. I watch her leave. The room changes when she is gone. The air settles differently. The fluorescent hum becomes louder because her presence had been, without my noticing, a counterweight to it.