Page 49 of Close Reading

She responds in four minutes. Yes.

One word. No also also. No qualification. The brevity mirrors mine. She understood the question. I want it too.

I spend Saturday in a state of preparation that exceeds any preparation I have made for a professional event in my career. I clean the house; the house is already clean, but I clean it again because the cleaning is something my hands can do while my mind processes what is happening. I cook. Pierogies, the recipe my grandmother taught me when I was 16, standing in her kitchen outside Toledo watching her hands fold the dough. A recipe I have not made for anyone in years because the making is an act of sustained attention: the rolling, the filling, the precise folding of each crescent. I am making them for someone. The significance is not lost on me.

I shower. I stand in the steam and wash my body, and I am aware of my body, a body that is about to be seen, if the evening goes where the evening might go.

I dry off. I stand in front of the mirror. The mirror returns what it always returns: a body that has been mine alone for twelve years. Tonight I am ready to share it with Priya.

I get dressed. This is not a blazer evening. I put on a soft grey sweater, dark trousers, the earrings I wear every day. I leave my hair down.

Priya arrives at 7:00. Right on time. She is carrying a bottle of wine and a small paper bag from a bakery I don’t recognize and she is wearing— she is wearing a deep red blouse that I have not seen before and that does something to her skin that I am not going to describe because the describing would require adjectives I do not trust myself to use, and the adjectives are pressing against the inside of my chest like birds against a window.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

We stand in the doorway. The distance between us is the width of the threshold, two feet, maybe less, and the distance is charged in a way that the research space distance was not, because this is my house and she is at my door and the house is empty and the pierogies are on the stove and my hair is down and neither of us is pretending this is about the research.

“Come in,” I say.

She comes in.

We eat. The pierogies are good, the dough tender, the potato filling creamy with dill, the onions caramelized. She eats with enthusiasm, the appreciation visible in her face, in the small sounds she makes, and the sounds are doing something to the bird-against-the-window situation in my chest that I am going to manage by drinking my wine.

We talk. About the food, about Sophia’s sleepover host, about the wine, about a novel Priya is reading that she thinks I would love and that she describes with the associative warmth she brings to everything she cares about, her hands moving. We talk about nothing that matters, and everything we say has the quality of mattering enormously because the talking is not the point. The talking is the surface. The point is underneath, in the glances that last a beat too long, in the proximity at the kitchen counter when she helps me clear the plates, in the moment our hands touch reaching for the same glass and neither of us pulls away.

After dinner. The dishes in the sink. The wine on the counter. The kitchen warm from the cooking and the eating and the talking and the warmth of two people in a small space who have been circling each other for five months and who are not circling anymore.

She is leaning against the counter. I am standing across from her. The distance is three feet—the same three feet from the research space, except this is not the research space and there is no laptop to close and no lamp to pack and no professional protocol to activate. This is my kitchen and the distance is three feet and the distance is a choice.

“Margot,” she says. The same way she said it in the research space in January: full, weighted, carrying months of everything we have not said.

“I need you to know something,” I say.

She waits. She does not rush me. She has never rushed me. This is one of the things, one of the hundred things, one of the thousand things I have catalogued and filed and that have accumulated into the comprehensive, peer-reviewed conclusion that I am in love with her.

“I haven’t— it has been a long time.” The sentence is inadequate. The sentence is the most vulnerable sentence I have spoken in twelve years and it is inadequate. “Twelve years. I haven’t been with anyone in twelve years. And I am—” I stop. I breathe. “I am not sure I remember how to be seen.”

She crosses the three feet.

She does not rush. She closes the distance without hesitation. She stands in front of me. Close. Close enough that I can smell her: the cardamom from whatever she drank at Lavender House today, the wine from dinner, and underneath, the specific warmth that is just her, the scent I have been breathing in the research space for five months and that is, here, in my kitchen, in the proximity of three inches rather than three feet, overwhelming.

She puts her hands on my face, like she has been waiting to hold it and has finally been given permission.

“You don’t have to remember,” she says. “You just have to be here.”

She kisses me. The kiss is different from the research space, slower, deeper, the mouth opening, the warmth of it, her tongue against my lower lip and the sensation radiating down my throat and into my chest and I make a sound—a small sound, involuntary—and her hands tighten on my face.

We move from the kitchen. We are in the hallway. We are at the bottom of the stairs. She stops kissing me long enough to look up the staircase and back at me. The look is a question, and I take her hand and lead her up, her fingers laced through mine, her breath behind me, the creak of the fourth step that I have heard ten thousand times and never like this. I have not brought anyone up these stairs.

The bedroom. My bedroom. The bed made, the nightstand ordered, the glass of water, the reading glasses, the lamp. The room that is mine and only mine and that I am now standing in with a woman whose hands are on my hips and whose mouth is on my throat and whose breath is warm against my skin and whose presence in this room is the most transgressive thing that has happened in my house since the cat litter and the empty hangers.

“Are you—” she says, pulling back, looking at me, the question in her eyes before it reaches her mouth.

“Yes.”

She looks at me. Her eyes are dark. Her breath is uneven. Her hands are still on my hips, the fingers pressing gently through the fabric of my trousers. The answer has been yes for five months and I am tired of the question.