Page 21 of Close Reading

She walks away. She does not wait for a response. She delivered the observation the way you might deliver a compliment about someone’s coat: lightly, in motion, without expecting it to land as anything more than a pleasantry.

It lands.

And to you.

Dr. Chen did not mean what I heard. Dr. Chen meant: your collaborator is engaged, invested, present. Dr. Chen meant the professional devoted, the devoted that goes in a tenure letter or a recommendation. She did not mean⁠—

She did not mean the other devoted. The one that lives in the body. The one that makes someone arrive early to sit in the front row and lean forward and watch with her whole self. The one that makes someone bring tea from Lavender House because she asked what you drink.

I stand in the hallway and I do not think about this, and I think about it entirely and both of these things are true simultaneously, and I have been living in the space between them for two months, and the space is getting smaller.

I walk home. The campus is settling into the early dark of November. The light already gone at 4:30, the buildings lit from inside, the quad empty and cold. October has become November without my noticing, the way these transitions happen here, not a threshold but a dissolve, one month bleeding into the next, the light retreating a minute earlier each day until you realize, walking home in the dark, that you cannot remember the last evening you walked home in daylight.

I cross the quad. I am walking past the old-growth trees and the memory is there. Waiting.

Today the memory does not press. Today the memory opens, like a door I have been holding shut that has decided, in the November dark, on the walk home from a presentation where a woman in the front row watched me with her whole body, to simply swing wide.

I was 32. Sophia was 18 months old. Lyra and I had been together for four years.

Lyra Hart. The slam poet. She read at a campus open mic during my last year of graduate school, a piece about the body as contested text, and I sat in the back row and forgot that I had come to be critical. The poem was extraordinary. I do not use the word lightly.

She found me afterward, not because she noticed me specifically, but because Lyra found everyone afterward; she moved through a room after a performance the way a current moves through water, pulling people in. I happened to be in the path. She looked at me and said, “Tell me that changed your life,” and the confidence of the demand, the absolute assumption that her poem had the power to change lives and that the only question was whether I would admit it, should have been insufferable. It was not insufferable. It was the most alive thing I had met in a year of graduate school, and I wanted to be near it.

We were together for four years. I was less careful then, not careless, never careless, but less fortified. I laughed more easily. I left books open on their spines, a habit I have since corrected. I let Lyra reorganize my kitchen twice and said nothing when the system she replaced was better than the one she installed, because the installing made her happy, and her happiness was large and warm and I wanted to live inside it. She was the most vivid person I had ever known. She made everything—the apartment, the morning, the argument about whether poetry or prose was the superior form—feel like an event. I did not yet understand that a person who makes everything an event may not know how to make anything ordinary, and that ordinary is where the actual living happens.

She loved me. I need to say this because the rest of the story makes it easy to forget, and the forgetting is a lie I have been telling myself for twelve years because the lie is easier than the truth. The truth is: Lyra loved me. She loved me the way she did everything: fully, without the infrastructure to sustain it. She loved me and she could not stay, and the inability to stay was not a performance. It was a limitation she did not know she had until the ordinary arrived in the form of a child and a routine and the Tuesday nights that are the actual substance of a life, and the limitation broke us.

We had private jokes. Couples do, the small language that belongs only to the two people who invented it. We had one called the double trouble. It was silly. It was sexy. One hand on a breast, one hand on the rear end, both at once, a playful simultaneous grab that she would deploy in the kitchen or the hallway or the bedroom, always with a grin, always accompanied by the phrase “double trouble” delivered in a voice that was half seduction and half comedy, and I would laugh every time.

The double trouble was ours. Nobody else knew about it. Nobody else ever saw it.

Until the morning they did.

Sophia had come to us. I wanted her. Lyra wanted her too, genuinely, I believe, in the way Lyra wanted everything: with her whole self, immediately, without asking whether the wanting could survive its own arrival. I adopted her. Our attorney had walked us through it: Washington would recognize us as a couple but other states wouldn’t. Lyra’s second-parent adoption was supposed to come later. I was the legal parent. Lyra was the other parent, the one who held Sophia in the rocking chair and sang to her and called her little poem. And for a while it was good. Lyra with the baby on her chest. Lyra reading poetry aloud to an infant who could not understand the words and who responded to the rhythm, and Lyra delighted by the responding, and the delight was real. I watched her hold Sophia and I thought: this is the life.

The ordinary came. The ordinary always comes. The 3:00 a.m. feedings and the diaper bags and the schedule that a child imposes on a life that had previously been organized around spontaneity and intensity. Lyra tried. I want to be fair about this even though the fairness costs me something: she tried. She was not good at it. She was not built for the repetition, for the smallness of the daily tasks, for the way a child requires you to be present in the same place doing the same things day after day after day. She started leaving the house more. Writing at coffee shops. Performing again, at night, at open mics I could not attend because someone had to be home with the baby. I noticed. I did not say anything. That was the beginning of the system, though I did not know it then.

The morning of my tenure review came. I had finished the PhD at 28, been hired at Ardmore at 29, and gone up for early tenure at 32 because my record left the committee little choice.

I arrived at the review room twenty minutes early. Sophia was with Lyra, napping in the stroller. I crossed the quad. I encountered Bailey Rictor, one of my students, a senior in creative writing, bright and eager. She wished me luck. I felt a small lift of confidence.

I went into the review room. I began laying out my materials. I caught my reflection in the window and noticed my earring was missing. One of the pair Lyra gave me in Greece, gold, delicate. I had time. I went back to the quad to retrace my steps.

I found the earring. A glint in the grass. I bent to pick it up.

I lifted my eyes and I saw Lyra.

She was with Bailey. My student. In the middle of the quad, in the open. They were kissing. The kind of kiss that involves the back of the neck and bodies pressed together.

I stood with the earring in my hand.

Then Lyra did something. One hand on Bailey’s breast. One hand on her backside. Both at once. The double trouble. Our double trouble.

Bailey’s head went back. Her eyes opened. She saw me.

She gasped. Jumped back. Lyra turned.

There was a moment. I have replayed this moment for twelve years and it does not change. Lyra’s face when she saw me was not what I expected. It was not defiance or cruelty. It was relief. The terrible, exhausted relief of someone who has been carrying a secret and who is glad, genuinely glad, to set it down, even here, even like this. The relief was worse than cruelty would have been. The relief meant she had been suffering too, in her way, and the suffering had made her reckless rather than honest. The recklessness had brought us here, to the quad, with our daughter asleep in a stroller and our private gesture on someone else’s body.