5. Margot
MARGOT
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.
I see the dog hair immediately. Before her face, before her expression, before whatever she is saying about the clinic cat.
Left shoulder. Gold. Fine. Approximately three inches long.
Kali’s, not Moti’s, because I have retained the information.
I catch myself, and redirect my gaze to my laptop screen.
“The Chemex,” I say. My voice is level.
“A necessary addition.”
“The note made that clear.”
“And?”
“It’s well-chosen. Thank you.”
She smiles. It starts in her eyes before it reaches her mouth, and it changes the room.
“You’re welcome. I wasn’t sure if you’d use it.”
“I have my own system.”
“I noticed. Earl Grey, ceramic mug, precise water temperature.” She opens her laptop. The cracked screen flickers to life. “Very you.”
I do not know how to respond to very you.
It is a phrase that implies she has formed a theory of me, that she has observed my habits, identified my patterns, developed a model of who I am.
The phrase is offered casually, as though people routinely observe each other with this level of attention and share their conclusions with the same ease they might share a weather observation.
Very you. As though she knows what me is.
We work.
The first hour is productive in the way that two skilled people can be productive when they have agreed to stop negotiating and start building.
She writes in bursts, fast, associative, her keyboard rattling with the rapid irregular rhythm of someone whose thoughts arrive faster than her fingers can transcribe them.
I write in layers, slow, deliberate, each sentence finished before the next begins, the prose accreting like sediment. Our methods should be incompatible.
They are not incompatible. The bursts find the channels the geology has carved. The geology is reshaped by the bursts. The document grows in a way I did not expect, a third thing, neither her approach nor mine, something that lives in the space between our two rhythms.
At 2:45 she laughs.
The laugh is at something in the text, a passage about the grammar of animacy in Potawatomi, how the language itself insists on the aliveness of things that English treats as objects.
It is not a joke but an insight, and the laugh is the sound of a mind delighted by something.
It is genuine and sudden and escapes before she has decided to let it out.
It fills the room. The basement room with its fluorescent hum and its linoleum floor.
A room designed to be functional and nothing more fills with the sound of her laughing at the aliveness of language.
I realize I have been listening for it.
I listen for some things consciously, like Sophia’s key in the door or the kettle’s click or any of the sounds that constitute the scheduled events of my day.
This is a different listening, one that has been happening underneath my awareness, tuned to her frequency, waiting—without my permission—for this specific sound.
I file this under irrelevant data. The file is growing larger than the label can accommodate.
At 3:15 my phone buzzes. Sophia’s face on the screen, the photo I took last spring when she wasn’t looking, reading in the window seat with the afternoon light behind her, her hair falling across her face. I look at this photo multiple times a day. It is the most beautiful thing I own.
“Excuse me,” I say, and I take the call in the hallway.
“Mom. Where’s the red binder?”
“Which red binder?”
“The one with the—” a pause, the sound of a drawer opening. “Never mind. Found it.”
“On the shelf where I said it would be?”
“On the shelf where you said it would be.”
“I’m going to resist the urge to comment on this.”
“You just commented on it.”
“I commented on resisting the urge. The distinction matters.”
“Mom.” The gentleness again, the tone she has been developing since she turned twelve, a tone that lands somewhere between humor and kindness and the gentle recognition that her mother is who her mother is. “Are you working late?”
“I’ll be home by 5:00.”
“Can we do Thai?”
“From the place on Elm or the place on Foster?”
“Elm. Obviously.”
“Obviously. I’ll order at 5:15.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too, Soph.”
I return to the research space. Priya has her feet on her desk.
Her shoes are off. She is wearing socks, mismatched, one green, one with small cartoon mushrooms. Her feet are crossed at the ankle on the desk where her laptop should be, and the laptop has been moved to her lap.
The whole arrangement is that of someone thoroughly at home in a space not, by any reasonable assessment, designed for comfort.
I sit down. I do not comment on the feet.
Not commenting is a concession, a crack in something, because the honest response to the feet on the desk is that I find them objectionable, and the honest response underneath the honest response is that I find them endearing, and the endearing is far more dangerous than the objectionable.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Sophia. A binder emergency, since resolved.”
“The red one?”
I look at her. “How did you know it was the red one?”
“You mentioned it last week. You said Sophia keeps her graphic novel notes in a red binder and that she misplaces it weekly and that the binder is always on the same shelf.”
She remembered this. I said it once, in passing, during a conversation about research organization.
A tangent about how Sophia organizes her reading notes.
Priya remembered the color of the binder and the frequency of its misplacement because she listens.
She does not sort my words into categories of relevant and irrelevant the way I sort hers.
She takes it all in, and she holds it, and a week later she can tell me the color of my daughter’s binder because she was paying attention to a story I told about a shelf.
“Yes,” I say. “The red one.”
“Can I ask you something about this passage?” Priya says.
She reads it aloud. She reads my words with a care that tells me she has read them more than once.
Her voice is different when she reads aloud, slower, more deliberate.
She reads the passage about invisible connections and her voice drops slightly on the word invisible, a weight given to the word that I did not give it when I wrote it but that belongs there, that makes the sentence better.
I am sitting across from her listening to her read my own words back to me in a voice that improves them.
I am in trouble.
The conversation that follows is about the passage, and it is the best conversation I have had about literature in longer than I want to examine.
It may be the best since graduate school, when conversations about literature had the quality of being essential.
Essential means your body is involved. Your breathing changes, your hands move, you lean forward without noticing.
I have not had a conversation that felt essential in a very long time.
My tea goes cold. I do not notice until 4:50, when I reach for it and find it tepid and realize that I have been in this conversation for two hours and have not once thought about the time.
“I have to go,” I say. “Thai food.”
“Same time Thursday?”
“Same time Thursday.”
She is packing the enormous bag. A charging cable snakes across her desk.
The golden dog hair is still on her shoulder.
She looks up and catches me looking at her, the whole composition of her in the room.
The desk, the cracked laptop, the mushroom socks back in the shoes, the Chemex she brought because she noticed my system and decided to add to it rather than replace it.
She did not try to dismantle what I built.
She put something next to it and left the choice to me.
“This is working,” she says. “The project. It’s actually working.”
“It is.”
“I wasn’t sure it would. I thought you might hate me.”
Hate her. I do not hate her. I am annoyed by her and intrigued by her and I have been listening for her laugh since September and I noticed the dog hair on her shoulder and the ink on her finger and the way her lips move when she reads and I have never once, in the accumulation of all this noticing, felt anything that resembles hate.
Hate would be simpler. Hate would fit in the system.
“I don’t form conclusions prematurely,” I say.
She laughs. The real one. The one that fills the room.
I walk home in the late afternoon light. The air has turned. It is not cold yet, but suggestive, the first drafts of the cold to come. Lavender House glows across the street, dusky purple in the diminishing light. I walk past it.
I think about the Chemex. I will use it Thursday. The coffee smells extraordinary and I am rigorous enough to acknowledge this.