2. Priya #2
We found each other five years ago at a new faculty orientation, bonding over the shared experience of being the only people of color in our respective departments and the fatigue of listening to people calling it “exciting.” He told me about David, who was traveling too much.
I told him about a growing distance with Vikram.
We have been having Thursday coffee ever since, and the coffee has held through his worst year with David and my divorce and the kind of things you only tell the person who showed up every week and never once made you feel like a project.
“You’re late,” he says.
“Kali ate paint.”
“You’ve been late every Thursday for five years. Kali has only been eating paint for three of them.” He closes the laptop. “How was the meeting?”
“I’ve been volunteered for a joint project with Comp Lit.”
“With Voss?”
“How did you know?”
Marcus gives me a look that suggests the question is beneath both of us. “Who else would it be? She’s the only person in that department who could keep up with you.” He opens the laptop. “How are things since you and Dominique?”
Dominique and I dated for four months earlier this year. It ran its course; the warmth was genuine but the specific heat wasn’t there. We are friends. She sends me photos of her cats.
“Fine,” I say. “It ran its course.”
“Venus in transit, honey.” He taps something on his screen.
From the armchair, without looking up: “Let her drink her coffee, Marcus.”
This is Miriam. Slight build, silver hair cut short, fair face, comfortable shoes, a book in her lap she is not reading because she is listening to everything with the attentiveness of a woman who spent nineteen years as a nun.
I have never asked Miriam why she left the order.
She has never volunteered. The space between the question and the answer is Miriam’s; I respect it the way I respect everything about Miriam, which is completely and without needing to understand it.
She is Ardmore’s spiritual director, though the title does not begin to describe what she actually does, which is sit in rooms and see people.
People walk out of Miriam’s presence slightly more themselves than when they walked in.
Gerald is at the counter with a lavender scone, mid-sentence.
He is pale and soft around the middle with his corduroy jacket open, unbothered about it, reading glasses on their chain resting against his chest. “And the fascinating thing about the Luttrell Psalter marginalia is that the grotesques appear to be in direct dialogue with the primary text, suggesting a kind of medieval call-and-response that nobody has adequately—”
Bea nods. “That sounds like a real breakthrough, Gerald.”
“It is. I think this could be the final chapter.”
“You said that in April.”
“April was premature. This is different.”
Kim is in her seat, the bistro chair in front of the section of siding where she carved her name eleven years ago when she started her PhD.
Sturdy in her green jacket, tote bag full of articles, oat milk latte.
Her hair is electric blue this semester against pale, freckled skin.
It was hot pink last spring, silver before that, as though all the change she is capable of has been redirected from her dissertation into her scalp.
I bring my cup back to the counter for a refill, half the usual, just to warm it up. Bea pours without comment. Then, wiping the counter with the slow deliberateness that means she is choosing her words:
“So. Margot Voss.”
“You know about the initiative?”
“I know about most things. This one I know because Alan Marsh told me when he came in for his latte yesterday, and Alan Marsh tells me everything because he thinks making small talk with the coffee shop owner is the same as having friends.” She rinses the cloth. “You’ll be working closely with her.”
“Tuesdays and Thursdays, starting next week. Some kind of shared research space.”
Bea is quiet for a moment. She folds the cloth into a neat square, practiced, something her hands can do while the rest of her is elsewhere.
When she looks at me again her expression is layered: affection for me, worry I can’t place, and underneath both a protectiveness so old it has become structural, part of who Bea is.
“Margot is the most brilliant person I know,” she says. “She is also the most guarded. I’ve known her for fifteen years, and I would like her to be happy in a way I am not certain she would permit.” She sets the folded cloth on the counter. “Be patient with her. She has her reasons.”
I wait for more. More does not come. Bea moves to the next customer with the seamless redirect of a woman who has been ending conversations at exactly the right moment for two decades.
I take my coffee back to my seat. Marcus is watching me.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” He opens his laptop. “Bea doesn’t say things like that about people she’s not worried about.”
“She said to be patient.”
“She said Margot has her reasons. Which means Margot has a story, and the story is the kind you don’t tell a new collaborator on the first day.” He types something. “I’m adding that to the chart.”
“You’re adding Bea’s conversational subtext to an astrological chart.”
“I’m adding contextual data to a predictive model. The methodology is sound even when the results are mixed.”
I drink my Calloway. I think about Dr. Voss. The precision of her. The blazers. The silence. The way Bea folded that cloth, slowly and carefully.
Be patient with her. She has her reasons.
I think about the fact that her department is under threat and mine is not, and what that will mean when we sit across from each other next week and try to build something collaborative out of an asymmetry neither of us chose.
I think about the colloquium, her voice dropping lower as the argument deepened, the whole room leaning in.
And I think about my cold coffee, the coffee I forgot to drink because I was listening too hard.
I finish my Calloway and go to find my research notes.
They are under Kali. I was right about this. I am right about most things, eventually, if you give me enough time and don’t mind that I arrive seventeen minutes after you expected me.