3. Margot
MARGOT
Iarrive eight minutes early to the conference room, which by my standards is late. By the standards of the rest of the academy, of people who consider a meeting time approximate, a philosophical position rather than a commitment, eight minutes early constitutes an almost aggressive punctuality.
The room is on the second floor of Prescott Hall, wood-paneled and designed to communicate authority and age.
The table seats twelve. Two chairs have been pulled to the center.
The rest stand empty, pushed back against the walls, which gives the arrangement the feeling of a dinner party most of the guests had the good sense not to attend.
I have brought my materials in a folder I organized last night.
The Dean’s initiative brief, annotated in my handwriting: margin notes in black ink, questions in red, structural observations in green, a color-coding system I have used since graduate school.
A preliminary bibliography. Three possible structural approaches, ranked by viability.
I set the folder at the seat I have chosen, facing the door, back to the window, the light behind me.
I prefer to see who is coming. I prefer to be the one who is already seated, already prepared, already composed when the door opens.
I smooth the folder. I align the pen alongside the edge. I check that the three frameworks are in the correct order: weakest first, strongest last.
I wait.
At 9:04 the door opens.
She comes in carrying two cups, both from Lavender House, I can tell by the ceramic, Pat Levin’s, the ones Bea uses for regulars instead of paper, and wearing an expression of cheerful apology so practiced it has become part of her face.
Her hair is down and slightly untamed, dark, thick, and wavy, and falling past her shoulders.
She is wearing a grey pullover over dark trousers.
Her body is utilitarian, with strong thighs and a torso soft and solid at once, built by research that takes her into the field.
She moves through the doorway the way she moved through the committee meeting two years ago: as though the room was already hers and she is simply arriving to confirm this.
Without hurry. Without apology despite the apology on her face.
“I’m sorry, the line was longer than I expected, and then Bea and I got into a thing about cardamom sources, and I recognize that this is not an acceptable excuse for being late to a meeting but I want you to know that the cardamom conversation was genuinely important and Bea started it.
” She sets one of the cups in front of me. “Earl Grey. Bea said it’s your order.”
I look at the mug. “You asked Bea what I drink.”
“I asked Bea what you drink.” She says this the way she might confirm that she checked the weather this morning: a basic act of preparation, not a gesture requiring acknowledgment. She sits down across from me.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Shall we begin?”
“Please.” She pulls a laptop from a bag that should be classified as luggage.
It is enormous, canvas, covered in pins: a fern, an atom, a cartoon hedgehog I do not recognize.
She rummages through it, and I can see as she rummages two charging cables tangled together, earbuds in a knot that would require surgical intervention, and a dinosaur pen with a cap shaped like a Triceratops.
She extracts the laptop. The screen is cracked in the upper left corner.
Her hands are the first thing I look at when she opens the laptop.
I do not know why her hands are the first thing I look at.
They are ordinary hands, or they should be ordinary, but there is ink on her left index finger, dark against brown skin, from an uncapped pen, a smudge of blue that might be cerulean.
She types her password without looking at the keys, her fingers moving with a speed and carelessness that is the opposite of how I type, the opposite of how I do anything.
I watch her hands on the keyboard for two seconds longer than I should and then I look down at my folder and I do not look up for four minutes.
“I’ve prepared three possible frameworks for the initiative,” I say. “The first prioritizes rigorous textual analysis with ecological case studies as supporting material. The second—”
“Can I ask a question first?”
I pause. I am not accustomed to being interrupted before the third sentence of a prepared presentation.
I am not accustomed to being interrupted at all, because I speak with a deliberateness that most people interpret, correctly, as a signal that I have organized my thoughts and would prefer to deliver them in order.
She has either missed this signal or received it and chosen to override it.
“Of course,” I say.
“What do you actually want this to be?”
The question is disarming. I had prepared for a negotiation.
Two departments, two methodologies, the careful territorial dance of academics who have been voluntold into collaboration.
I had prepared my positions, my concessions, my non-negotiables.
What I had not prepared for was someone asking me, directly and without preamble, what I want.
Not what the initiative should be. Not what the Dean’s office expects.
What I want. As though what I want is relevant.
As though she arrived at this meeting intending to find out.
I set down my pen. I have been holding it since I sat down, a reflex, the pen as anchor, the weight of it in my hand a reassurance that I am prepared to write, to note, to record.
I set it down because the question requires a response that I cannot give while holding an instrument designed for recording other people’s statements.
This is a question that requires me to say something I mean.
“I want it to be rigorous,” I say. “I want it to be work we would both be proud of. I want it to not be a performance piece designed to make the Dean’s office feel progressive while my department loses funding.”
She nods, and it is not the quick nod of someone waiting for their turn to speak. It is a real nod. The kind that takes in what was said and sits with it, lets it settle. Her head tilts slightly to the left as she listens.
“I want it to be accessible,” she says. “I want people outside this building to read it and care. I want it to matter to someone who isn’t already in the room.”
“Accessible and rigorous are not mutually exclusive.”
“No. But they require different structures.” She leans forward.
When she leans forward her hair falls in a way that she pushes back with one hand without pausing the sentence, and I track the motion of her hand from her temple to behind her ear.
“If we lead with dense literary analysis, we lose the general reader by page three. If we lead with ecological narrative, we lose the scholarly credibility your department needs right now to survive.”
She said your department needs right now to survive without flinching, without hedging, without the careful diplomatic language academics use to discuss the vulnerability of other people’s departments while protecting their own.
She named the asymmetry. She looked at me while she named it. She did not look away.
I take a sip of the Earl Grey she brought me because she asked Bea what I drink.
“You’re suggesting we need a structure that serves two audiences simultaneously.”
“I’m suggesting we need a structure that doesn’t know it’s serving two audiences. Something that reads as one thing—coherent, compelling, singular, but does the work of both.”
I regard her. The answer is good. The answer is, in fact, better than anything I wrote in my three frameworks, and I have spent the past week on those frameworks, and she arrived four minutes late and produced, in the space of a single sentence, the structural insight that my three carefully prepared proposals were circling without finding.
I will not be saying this out loud.
“I have some thoughts on how that might work,” I say, and I pull out the third framework, the one I ranked highest, the one that comes closest to what she just described.
She reads it. I watch her read it. She reads with her whole body, leaning in, one hand holding the edge of the paper, her lips moving slightly on the passages she finds interesting.
This is a terrible reading habit, and I notice it on the first page, and I notice it again on the second, and by the third page I am noticing the specific words that make her lips move, the theoretical ones, the ones where the argument shifts.
Her lips move when her mind is most engaged.
This is information I did not need and now have.
“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.