Page 9 of Close Reading

The house goes quiet by 9:30. I check on both of them because I check on both of them every night, standing in their doorways for a moment the way my mother stood in mine, just long enough to hear the breathing and confirm the fact of them.

I get into bed. Kali arrives approximately eleven seconds after my body hits the mattress—the Kali coefficient, perfectly maintained—and settles across my feet with the density of a sandbag and the warmth of a furnace.

The room is dark. The house ticks.

I think about Margot.

I think about the three frameworks she ranked in persuasive order and the way she reached for her pen when I said something she wanted to record. The pen was black, fine-point. She drew it from the interior pocket of her blazer with a motion so practiced it was almost unconscious, except nothing about Margot is unconscious. The pen, the pocket, the angle of the nib on the page.

She wrote my words down. Something that doesn’t know it’s serving two audiences. I watched her write it and I felt— what did I feel? The specific pleasure of having said something that a very precise person found worth recording. A warmth in my sternum. The feeling you get when someone you respect turns their full attention on you and you realize their attention has weight.

I think about this for slightly longer than the professional dimensions of the problem require.

Then I set two alarms for tomorrow morning. I will sleep through the first and bargain with the second and I know this and I set them anyway because the setting of the alarms is an act of faith, or optimism, or the kind of hopeful self-deception that gets me through most mornings.

Kali shifts on my feet. Outside, the neighbor’s cat has stopped and the house is still.

I close my eyes. I’m not thinking about Margot Voss.

I am asleep before I finish not thinking about her, which is probably for the best.

5

MARGOT

The temporary research space is in the basement of Lowell Hall. Two desks, two chairs, a shared bookshelf, a ground-level window that lets in a strip of natural light between 2:00 and 4:00 on clear days. The overhead lighting is fluorescent. The floor is linoleum. The room smells of old paper and the ghost of whatever cleaning solution facilities uses. A building being maintained without being loved.

I have brought my own lamp. Adequate lighting and good lighting are different things. The lamp creates a circle of gold on my desk that transforms the corner into something habitable.

The desks face each other across approximately six feet. Six feet means I will see her when she works. I will hear her when she speaks on the phone. I will be aware of her presence in the room the way you are aware of weather, not by choosing to observe it but by existing inside it.

I have arranged my desk against the wall beneath the ground-level window. My back to the window, facing the door. My laptop. My folder system. My two ceramic mugs from Pat’s pottery, the one with the chip and the one without. My electric kettle. My Earl Grey, the tin from the shop on Hawthorne. These objects constitute my system. The system is complete.

The Chemex coffee maker appeared in the third week.

I arrived at 1:15, fifteen minutes before our scheduled time, because I wanted to finish organizing the shared bookshelf before she arrived, and because being in a room before the other person enters it is a form of control I have relied on for so long it has become invisible to me, the way breathing is invisible.

The Chemex was on the shared bookshelf. It sat in a pour-over stand, ceramic, handmade, beside a bag of coffee from a roaster I did not recognize, a gooseneck kettle with a temperature gauge built into the handle, and a small handwritten note on a torn piece of notebook paper.

The department coffee maker is an insult to human dignity. This seemed necessary. — P

I picked up the note. Her handwriting is the opposite of mine, round, fast, the letters leaning forward as though they are in a hurry to arrive at the end of the sentence. The P at the end was a full letter, written with casual intimacy. I turned the paper over. The back was blank. I set it down.

I examined the Chemex. Eight-cup, the wooden collar tied at the waist where the glass narrows and opens again. It was the kind of object that did exactly what it was for and was lovely besides. The beans smelled extraordinary. I closed the bag.

I was annoyed.

The annoyance was specific and I understood it completely. I had a system. The system involved my kettle, my Earl Grey, my mugs. The system did not require input. And the Chemex—beautiful, well-chosen, thoughtful in a way that implied she had noticed my system and decided to supplement it without asking—was an incursion. A gift, yes. But also a variable introduced into a controlled environment, and I do not respond well to variables I have not chosen.

This is, I am aware, a disproportionate reaction to a coffee maker. A person does not feel threatened by a Chemex. A person feels threatened by what the Chemex represents: someone paying attention.

I made my Earl Grey. I ignored the Chemex. This was a sustainable strategy I intended to maintain.

Priya arrived at 1:38.

I know the time because I looked at the clock when the door opened, a reflex since the second week of September. She has been late to every session. The range is four minutes to twenty-two. The average is twelve. The fact that I am calculating the arrival times of a colleague is a function of my general commitment to precision.

“Sorry, Kali had a vet follow-up from the paint thing and the appointment ran long because she tried to befriend the clinic cat, who was not interested, and the rejection was dramatic.” She drops her bag beside her desk. She shrugs off her jacket. A single golden dog hair clings to the left shoulder of her blouse, catching the fluorescent light. A thread of gold against dark blue fabric.