Page 55 of Close Reading

The house is quiet. I have never been in this house alone. The aloneness changes it. The house without Margot in it is a document I can read without the author present, and the reading tells me things the author might not have chosen to share.

The photographs in the hallway. Sophia at every age. Margot looking at Sophia with the unguarded expression. Alone, without Margot watching me look, I can see the progression—the early photos where her face is still learning the expression, the later ones where it has become the truest thing about her. Thirteen years of Margot learning to love without architecture.

I find the reading glasses on the counter by the stove. I should take them and go.

I do not take them and go.

I make tea. This is not a decision so much as a gravitational event. My body moves on its own toward her kettle and her mugs and her tea. I know where things are. Second shelf, left side, rooibos. First shelf, center, Earl Grey. The mugs from Pat Levin’s pottery. I reach for the rooibos—afternoon, so rooibos—and my hand goes past the tea shelf to the cabinet above.

I open it.

Three lint rollers on the shelf. Lined up in a row. Identical. The same brand I carry in my bag—the one I bought in November to remove the evidence of Kali before entering the research space, the love letter written in the language of dog hair removal.

Margot has purchased three of the same lint roller and arranged them, precisely, on a shelf in her kitchen.

I stand in her kitchen holding the cabinet open and I cannot speak. I cannot speak because the lint rollers are the most Margot thing I have ever seen. They are her way of saying: you are going to be here. Your dogs are going to be here. The dog hair is going to be here. I have prepared. Three lint rollers is not a concession to mess. Three lint rollers is the system expanding to accommodate a variable it has decided to keep.

I close the cabinet. I make the tea. I drink it standing at her counter with the reading glasses in my pocket and the knowledge of the lint rollers in my chest, warm and precise and overwhelming and exactly right.

I do not mention the lint rollers. Some things are better loved than discussed.

29

MARGOT

The next few days pass in a blur of normalcy that is far from normal.

I make my tea. I grade papers. Sophia goes to school and comes home and does her homework at the kitchen table with the focused irritation she reserves for algebra. I cook dinner. I answer emails. The days have the shape of every other week this semester—the tea, the grading, the meetings, the lamp in the hallway that Sophia keeps leaving on—and inside the shape, everything has changed.

My body knows. My body has been keeping a record my mind has not authorized: the weight of her against me, the sound she made when I touched her, the way her hair fell across my pillow in the morning light. The record surfaces without permission. In the middle of a paragraph, the feeling of her mouth on my throat. During a committee email about scheduling, the exact pressure of her hands. I close the email. I open it again. The hands are still there.

On Tuesday, I go to the research space.

She is already there. This is unusual. I am the one who arrives first, who makes the coffee, who arranges the lamp, but she is at her desk with her laptop open and a Calloway from Lavender House and her hair in the knot that means she has been working already and did not stop to fuss with it. She looks up when I open the door.

The look lasts two seconds. In the two seconds: everything. Saturday night and Sunday morning and three days of not seeing each other and the entire recalibration of what it means to walk into a room where she is.

“Good afternoon,” I say.

“Good afternoon.” She is smiling, the one that lives in the corners of her mouth and in her eyes. A smile that says she is exercising restraint and finding the exercise amusing.

We work. We maintain the thinnest veneer of professionalism. We are at our desks. We are looking at our screens. We are, technically, working. The veneer does not account for the way she watches my hands when I turn a page, or the way I have read the same paragraph four times because she tucked her hair behind her ear and the gesture exposed her neck and the neck is, I have recently learned, a location of significant personal interest. Four feet of desk space between us. The four feet has never felt more like a unit of measurement designed specifically to produce suffering.

At 3:15, she sends me an email.

I open it.

The Tsing revisions are stronger. You were right to let the paragraph lead. The reader arrives at the conclusion before you state it.

Also: I was so happy to see you when you came through the door today.

Also also: I have been rereading the passage about proximity and mutualism since Sunday. It reads differently now. I can’t imagine why.

I read the email twice. I hit reply.

Thank you. The fourth draft was finally the one.

Re: the proximity passage—certain arguments do become more compelling upon close rereading. I would recommend continued study.