Page 3 of Close Reading

I have heard her speak at length only once. A colloquium two years ago on silence as rhetorical strategy in women’s literature. She made silence sound like the most dangerous weapon in the English language, and she delivered the entire lecture as though she were proving it. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and measured and had the quality of something refined over years. I sat in the back and listened and found myself leaning forward in my chair in a way I was not conscious of until the lecture ended and I realized my coffee had gone cold because I had forgotten to drink it.

I have never forgotten to drink coffee in my life. I have forgotten many things: car keys, research notes, my own children’s school schedules. But I have never forgotten coffee.

I know she is private. I know she has a daughter. I know Bea speaks of her with a tenderness Bea reserves for people she has decided to protect—not everyone, and not lightly—and this tells me something I don’t yet have the context to interpret. Bea’s protectiveness is a signal. It means there is something to protect, something that happened, something that made the protection necessary.

I know her department is the one under threat.

After the meeting I walk to Lavender House because it is Thursday and Thursday mornings at Lavender House are non-negotiable. The walk takes four minutes from Whitman Hall. Three if I’m not carrying a bag full of misplaced permission slips and a laptop whose battery life is a prayer.

The smell hits before the door does. Coffee, always, and underneath it something with cardamom. Bea baked this morning. Bea is in a good mood.

She looks up from the La Marzocco, the espresso machine she found at a restaurant auction twelve years ago, refurbished herself with the help of a YouTube tutorial, and has treated ever since with the devotion most people reserve for living things. Fat and soft behind the counter, her dark hair flecked with silver and cut short and gently textured around her face, her body moves through the small space with practiced ease; she has been the center of this room for twenty years and has arranged every surface to fit her. She has already started my drink. It’s a Calloway, made from espresso, oat milk, and a half-pump of lavender syrup she makes herself from the hedge outside. The drink is named after a dog. Bea’s first dog, a retriever mix named Calloway, who used to sleep under the counter in the early years. Calloway has been gone for six years. The drink remains. This is how Lavender House works. Things endure past their origins, and no one needs to explain why.

She sets it on the counter as I reach for my wallet. Her rich brown hands, creased with age, wave the wallet away.

“Thank you.” I take the cup. “Kali ate paint.”

“What color?”

“Cerulean.”

“Pretty.” Bea wipes the counter. “She’ll be fine.”

“The vet confirmed.”

“I wasn’t asking the vet. I was telling you.” This is Bea in her fullest form, a woman who has been right about dogs, people, and coffee for decades and has stopped pretending any of these require different skill sets.

Marcus, slim and meticulously groomed as always—he shaves his head every morning—is at his usual table with his laptop open to something he minimizes when I sit down. He is wearing a blazer the color of burnt sienna over a burgundy turtleneck, his dark brown face warm against the fabric. His shoes are cognac, buffed to a shine I associate with a man who considers his appearance a daily argument he intends to win. He teaches Sociology and he dresses like he teaches Style.

We found each other five years ago at a new faculty orientation, bonding over the shared experience of being the only people of color in our respective departments and the fatigue of listening to people calling it “exciting.” He told me about David, who was traveling too much. I told him about a growing distance with Vikram. We have been having Thursday coffee ever since, and the coffee has held through his worst year with David and my divorce and the kind of things you only tell the person who showed up every week and never once made you feel like a project.

“You’re late,” he says.

“Kali ate paint.”

“You’ve been late every Thursday for five years. Kali has only been eating paint for three of them.” He closes the laptop. “How was the meeting?”

“I’ve been volunteered for a joint project with Comp Lit.”

“With Voss?”

“How did you know?”

Marcus gives me a look that suggests the question is beneath both of us. “Who else would it be? She’s the only person in that department who could keep up with you.” He opens the laptop. “How are things since you and Dominique?”

Dominique and I dated for four months earlier this year. It ran its course; the warmth was genuine but the specific heat wasn’t there. We are friends. She sends me photos of her cats.

“Fine,” I say. “It ran its course.”

“Venus in transit, honey.” He taps something on his screen.

From the armchair, without looking up: “Let her drink her coffee, Marcus.”

This is Miriam. Slight build, silver hair cut short, fair face, comfortable shoes, a book in her lap she is not reading because she is listening to everything with the attentiveness of a woman who spent nineteen years as a nun. I have never asked Miriam why she left the order. She has never volunteered. The space between the question and the answer is Miriam’s; I respect it the way I respect everything about Miriam, which is completely and without needing to understand it. She is Ardmore’s spiritual director, though the title does not begin to describe what she actually does, which is sit in rooms and see people. People walk out of Miriam’s presence slightly more themselves than when they walked in.

Gerald is at the counter with a lavender scone, mid-sentence. He is pale and soft around the middle with his corduroy jacket open, unbothered about it, reading glasses on their chain resting against his chest. “And the fascinating thing about the Luttrell Psalter marginalia is that the grotesques appear to be in direct dialogue with the primary text, suggesting a kind of medieval call-and-response that nobody has adequately⁠—”

Bea nods. “That sounds like a real breakthrough, Gerald.”