Page 8 of Close Reading

“Like what?”

“Like they’re interesting.”

I consider this. He is not wrong. I talk about colleagues the way I talk about departmental infrastructure, that is, with respect, with occasional frustration. I do not, as a rule, spend six minutes at the dinner table describing how a colleague organized a bibliography. I do not describe anyone’s approach to organizing a bibliography unless I find the approach either brilliantly efficient or catastrophically wrong, and Margot’s was— I am searching for the right word here and the right word is somewhere between impressive and beautiful and neither of those is appropriate for a bibliography.

“She’s very precise,” I say. This is both an answer and not an answer.

Dev turns it over. “What does that mean?”

“It means she organizes things. Her thoughts, her work, her space. Everything has a place. Everything is considered.” I take a sip of water. “She has a system for arranging the books on her shelves that involves thematic categories and chronological sub-ordering. She described it as if it were perfectly normal.”

“That sounds like you with your field notebooks,” Dev says.

“My field notebooks are organized by ecosystem and date. That’s standard.”

“You color-code the margins.”

“That’s also standard.”

“Amma. Nobody else color-codes their margins.”

Ravi looks up from his pasta. A grain of orzo is stuck to his chin. He has not noticed it. He will not notice it. “Is she nice?”

“She’s— I’m not sure yet. I think she might be, underneath.”

“Underneath what?”

“Underneath... the precision.”

Ravi processes this. For him, underneath is a physical concept. “You should invite her over. We can tell you if she’s nice. We’re good at that.”

“You invited Dominique over and told her that her shoes looked like they were angry,” Dev points out.

“They did look angry. Those were angry shoes.”

“She was nice, though.”

“She was nice with angry shoes. Those things can both be true.” Ravi scrapes the last of his pasta from the bowl. “Is she like Dominique?”

The question lands casually, in the easy way of a child who has grown up watching his mother date women and men and has never once treated this as remarkable. Is she like Quinn? he asked when I started seeing Morgan two years ago. Is she like Morgan? he asked about Dominique four months ago. The taxonomy of Amma’s romantic life, organized by a 9-year-old with excellent observational skills and a belief, apparently, that every person I interact with for more than five minutes is a potential romantic candidate.

“She’s very different from Dominique,” I say.

“How?”

“Dominique was warm.” I stop. I hear what I’ve said. “Margot is warm too. Differently warm. Warm underneath.”

“Underneath the precision,” Dev says.

“Yes.”

“You keep saying underneath.”

“I keep saying underneath because that’s where the interesting things about her are.”

A silence. The boys exchange a look. Years of shared existence have given them a private communication system that operates at a frequency I can detect but not decode. Whatever passes between them constitutes an agreement, because they both return to their food without further questions.

After dinner I wash the dishes. Dev dries. Ravi negotiates screen time with the passionate specificity of a labor organizer at a contract hearing. I grant him 30 minutes. He accepts, magnanimous: his opening position was 45 and 30 was the target all along.