Page 6 of Close Reading

“This is good,” she says. “This is actually really good. Did you—” she looks up. “Did you write this knowing I’d say what I just said?”

“I wrote it knowing it was the strongest option.”

“But you ranked it third.”

“I presented it third. Rhetorically, the strongest argument benefits from the preceding two establishing the range of possibility.”

She stares at me. Three seconds, maybe four, and in those seconds something crosses her face that I recognize from students when a lecture lands. The cognitive click. Except she is not a student and the expression is not quite that.

Then she laughs, sudden, warm, a laugh too big for its container, the kind of laugh that fills a room designed for twelve and currently holding two and makes the room feel like it was designed for exactly this.

“You sequenced your own proposals for maximum persuasive impact.”

“I organized them for clarity.”

“You organized them like a three-act structure. You buried your thesis.” She is grinning.

I reach for my pen. The fine-point black, interior pocket. I make a note in the margin of the framework, her phrase, something that doesn’t know it’s serving two audiences, because it is better than anything I wrote and I am rigorous enough to acknowledge this, at least on paper. She watches me write. I am aware of her watching. My handwriting is small and precise and I do not change it because she is watching, but I am aware of the pen in my hand and the page under the pen and her eyes on both in a way that makes the ordinary act of writing feel witnessed. I am not accustomed to being seen while I work. The idea that someone might watch me write a marginal note and find this interesting is not a category of experience I have prepared for.

“So,” she says, settling back in her chair with the Lavender House cup in both hands and an expression I would have to describe, if forced, as delighted, though the word feels insufficient for the quality of warmth it carries, “where do we start?”

We start with the bibliography. We disagree about sources within four minutes.

She wants Rachel Carson alongside Aldo Leopold alongside Robin Wall Kimmerer alongside Adrienne Rich, an associative leap I find both defensible and chaotic, the intellectual equivalent of seating dinner guests based on the conversations they might have rather than on their credentials. I want a tighter frame. She argues that the scaffold is implicit in the texts themselves. I argue that implicit scaffolds are the refuge of writers who have not done the structural work. She argues that not everything needs to be a building. I argue that everything is a building, whether you notice the structure or not.

“That’s a very Comp Lit thing to say,” she says.

“I’m in Comp Lit.”

“I noticed.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “But the natural world doesn’t build structures for persuasion. It builds structures for survival. And the structures that survive longest are the ones that look like they weren’t built at all.”

I consider this. I disagree with it on an intellectual level. I also recognize it as a description of every defense mechanism I have ever constructed.

We do not raise our voices. We do not need to. The argument has the quality of two instruments being tuned to each other; the friction is necessary, the dissonance temporary, and underneath it there is the slow recognition that we are trying to reach the same note from different directions. I find her maddening. I find her thinking better than I expected, and that is maddening too, because I had prepared to be patient with a colleague and instead I am being challenged by one.

At 10:15 we have agreed on a preliminary reading list, a meeting schedule—Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:30 to 4:00, the temporary research space in the basement of Lowell Hall—and a division of labor that I find acceptable and she finds exciting. The gap between acceptable and exciting is, I am beginning to understand, the gap between us. The same territory, differently inhabited.

She gathers her things. She stands, and I notice that she stands the same way she sits, taking up space without apology, without the slight contraction I see in some women when they rise from a chair in a room. She does not make herself smaller. She is herself, and the room accommodates her rather than the other way around.

“Dr. Voss.”

“Dr. Anand.”

“This is going to be good.” She says it with a certainty I have not earned and did not request and cannot, despite my considerable skill at deflection, dismiss. “I can tell.”

She leaves. The door closes behind her. The room is exactly as it was before she arrived except for the Lavender House cup she brought me, still on the table, still warm, and the faint smell of something, warmer than perfume or product, something that might be the cardamom from whatever Bea was baking or might be her.

I drink the rest of the Earl Grey before I leave. This is practical. The cup is still warm and it would be wasteful to leave it. I am sitting alone in a conference room designed for twelve, holding a mug a woman brought me because she asked. I put the cup in my bag. This is practical. Lavender House mugs are Bea’s; they should be returned. I will return it tomorrow.

I take my folder and my three frameworks, and I walk back across the quad in the September light. Lavender House glows across the street. Someone is sitting on the porch. I do not look closely enough to see who.

I do not think about her hands. I do not think about the ink on her left index finger. I do not think about her hair falling when she leaned forward or her lips moving when she read or the laugh that was too big for the room and made the room better for being too big.

I think about the sentence I wrote in the margin of the framework, her sentence, in my handwriting, and the fact that she watched me write it, and I felt the watching like a hand on the back of my neck. Light. Warm. A touch that wasn’t a touch.

The Lavender House cup is still in my bag. I set it on the windowsill beside my kettle, where it sits for the rest of the afternoon, catching the light.

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