Page 39 of Close Reading

“It’s strong,” I say. My voice is level. This is an achievement. I look at my screen. I read the introduction for the fourth time. The introduction is excellent. The introduction has nothing to do with what is happening in my body. I am going to focus on the introduction and I am going to provide thoughtful, specific editorial feedback and I am not going to think about the shower or the tile or the steam or the sound she would make.

I provide thoughtful, specific editorial feedback. It takes eleven minutes. During those eleven minutes I am a professional, I am a collaborator, I am a scientist who is capable of discussing the relationship between ecological and literary frameworks without once mentioning that she has spent the past four months wanting to put her mouth on her colleague’s throat. I am these things. I am also a woman sitting in a chair with her thighs pressed together and a heat between her legs that the lint roller cannot address and the household calendar cannot organize and the also also cannot contain.

When she turns back from the radiator her hair has begun to dry. The waves are forming, the natural shape of her hair freed from the pins, looser than I have ever seen it in the research space, curling slightly at the ends. She looks different with her hair this way. Softer is the wrong word; Margot is not soft. Less armored. The hair down is a vulnerability she did not choose and that she is tolerating with dignified resignation, the same composure she brings to everything.

I want to touch it. I want to reach across the six feet and tuck the wet strand behind her ear the way she does not do herself because she is at her desk and she is working and the strand is falling across her face and she is ignoring it. I want to be the one who moves it. I want the excuse. I want the two seconds of contact. I want the feeling of her hair between my fingers, wet and heavy and real.

I do not reach. I work. She works. The hair dries. The strand falls. She ignores it. I do not ignore it. The strand is the loudest thing in the room and I cannot stop hearing it and this is the state I am in: a forty-one-year-old professor of ecology undone by a strand of wet hair.

We work until 4:30. The rain has stopped. The ground-level window shows the grey-green of a January afternoon that has been washed by a downpour and that looks, now, clean and bright the way that only the Pacific Northwest looks after rain, the colors more saturated, the edges more defined, as though the whole landscape has been rinsed and returned to itself.

She packs her bag. She takes the lamp. The hand towel, now dry, goes into the bag with the precise folding I have come to associate with everything Margot puts away—nothing crumpled, nothing shoved, every object returned to its place with care.

At the door: “Thursday.”

“Thursday.”

I close my laptop. I drive home. Kali meets me at the door.

Helen is on the couch when I get home, her phone in her lap with some game open on the screen. She lives next door and has been collecting the boys from school on the evenings I can’t get back in time—an arrangement she proposed herself and that she refuses to let me compensate her for, no matter how many times I try. Ravi is on the floor with his sketchbook. Dev is at the table with his homework, or something that resembles homework.

“How were they?” I ask.

“Perfect,” Helen says, and means it. She finds her jacket. “There’s leftover pasta if you haven’t eaten.”

I reach for my wallet. Helen is already at the door.

“Put that away.”

“Helen—”

“Goodnight, Priya.”

The door closes. Ravi looks up from his sketchbook. “She let us have ice cream,” he says.

The life I built is here, warm and full and mine.

And I am carrying, alongside all of it—the boys and the dogs and the paintings—the image of a strand of wet hair falling across a face I want to touch and a shower I have never been in and a sound I have never heard and a woman whose absence, as she herself wrote, is notable.

The shape of my life has a new dimension, and it is Margot-shaped. What terrifies me is how naturally she belongs in a space I did not know was empty until she was near enough to fill it.

19

MARGOT

Mid-January. The paper is due to the committee in three weeks. We have been working all afternoon.

At 4:30 I need to see her field data alongside my analysis. The data is on her laptop.

“Can I see the network maps? I need them next to the third section.”

She pulls it up. She turns her laptop toward me, and I pull my chair over to sit beside her. As I am leaning in to see the data, our shoulders touch.

I feel it immediately. The contact registers in my nervous system with a specificity that is disproportionate to the event. I can feel the shape of her shoulder against mine, the warmth of it through two layers of fabric, her blouse and my blazer, the solidity of another body next to my body. The contact is professional. The contact is the most significant physical event of my year and possibly my decade.

I do not move away. She does not move away.

I am aware that she is aware. I can feel the awareness in the slight tension of her shoulder, not pulling away, not pressing closer, simply holding.