Page 35 of Close Reading

I delete this. She does not need my apology for the delivery. The delivery was direct, and the directness is what I bring, and she does not need me to apologize for being direct any more than I would need her to apologize for being precise. The argument was the argument. The argument did its work.

I type:

The passage was protecting the argument the same way the argument was protecting you. I should have said that instead of what I said. What I said was true but it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth is that I can see what you’re protecting and I think it’s worth the risk of not protecting it.

I stare at this. I stare at it for a long time. My cursor blinks at the end of the sentence. The sentence is true. The sentence is too true. The sentence says things that belong in a room, not in an email, things that should be said face-to-face where tone and expression and the distance between two bodies can carry the meaning the words alone cannot.

I delete it.

I type:

Thank you. The revision is brave. I’ll read it tonight.

Also: The room was different after you left. I’m glad you came back.

Also also: Bea gave me an affirmation card today. First one. It said: “The door you keep closing is the one you most want open.”

I press send.

Six feet away, Margot’s laptop pings. I do not look up. I look at my screen. I wait.

Two minutes. She is reading. She is reading my email twice, once for content and once for the rest of it. I know this about her. I know she reads everything twice. I know her, and the knowing is dangerous and I do not care.

Her reply arrives.

There are doors I’d like to open.

One sentence. No also also. The absence of the also also is itself a communication, a withholding. But the sentence she did send is the most she has said. I look up from my laptop. Across six feet of research space, Margot is looking at her screen. She is not looking at me. But the corners of her mouth have softened. Smaller than a smile. Something private. She has sent a sentence that was truer than she planned and is sitting with the truth of it and finding that the truth, while uncomfortable, has not destroyed anything.

I go back to my work. She goes back to hers. Neither of us speaks. The silence has changed; the edges have softened, the broken thing between us not repaired, but acknowledged.

The Chemex is on the shelf. The lamp is casting its circle. The grey is at the window. The affirmation card is in my pocket. The email is in my inbox. The sentence—There are doors I’d like to open—is in my head.

We work until 4:30. She packs her bag. She takes the lamp.

At the door she pauses. She turns. She looks at me.

“Thursday,” she says.

“Thursday.”

A beat. The beat contains everything the emails said and everything they didn’t.

“Also also,” she says, very quietly. And leaves.

I sit in the room. I close my laptop. I drive home. Kali meets me at the door. The boys are in Chennai. The also also is in the air.

I make dinner for one. I do not make too much.

This is progress. Small, measurable, real.

17

MARGOT

The December faculty holiday party is in the Prescott Hall lobby, and I have prepared for it the way I prepare for all institutional social obligations: with a departure time established in advance, a maximum of three conversations budgeted, and the understanding that the event will be endured rather than enjoyed. This is not cynicism. This is efficiency. The party is the same every year. The refreshments are hummus and vegetable trays and a cheese board that arrives intact and departs devastated. The sound system plays music at a volume calibrated to be simultaneously present and ignorable, achieving neither. The string lights are tasteful. The conversations are predictable. I arrive, I stay 45 minutes, I speak to three people, I leave. The system works.

The system does not account for Priya looking like that, under the string lights, in a deep green sweater with silver embroidery on the collar.