11. Margot
MARGOT
The humanities colloquium meets monthly in Prescott Hall’s seminar room.
It’s a chance for faculty to present works in progress, the school’s version of thinking out loud in public.
It is a Friday at the end of October, and I am presenting the literary framework at the core of the joint initiative.
Priya is in the audience. The ecological half of the argument will come later, at the committee presentation in February.
The room has good acoustics and the projector that works seventy percent of the time.
I have prepared for the projector to fail. I have printed handouts.
The room fills. Twenty-two chairs occupied.
I count as people enter, an involuntary census, the body’s habit of knowing exactly who is in any room I am about to address.
Department colleagues in their usual seats, the geography of an academic audience as predictable as the geography of a church congregation.
Gerald in the third row, notebook open, pen ready.
He will take notes on my presentation and then, at some point, begin taking notes on the monograph, and the transition between the two will be invisible to everyone except me because I have sat beside Gerald in enough rooms to recognize the moment his handwriting changes from responsive to generative, the slight increase in speed, the forward lean.
Dr. Harmon from Ecology, Priya’s department head, in the back row, a gesture of interdisciplinary goodwill or administrative obligation.
Two visiting scholars from Reed College who are here because their own departments are facing similar funding threats and who are, I suspect, taking notes of a different kind.
Tess Okafor is in the fourth row, right side. I recognize her from the faculty meeting; she asked the question no tenured faculty member would ask. She is sitting with focused attention. She has a notebook. The notebook is color-coded. This detail interests me.
I file her. I file everyone. This is what I do before I speak.
I build a map of the room, I locate the allies and the skeptics and the people who are here out of obligation and the people who are here because they care, and I calibrate my delivery accordingly.
Today the room is mostly allies. Today the work is good.
Priya is in the front row.
She arrived early. I know this because I arrived fifteen minutes before the scheduled start, which is my protocol for any public speaking engagement: fifteen minutes to arrange the materials, test the projector (which will fail), and occupy the room before anyone else enters it, so that when the audience arrives I am already part of the room’s geometry rather than an addition to it.
I arrived fifteen minutes early and she was already there.
Seated, laptop open, coffee in her hand.
She is wearing a dark blue sweater and a scarf she has been wearing all fall, and when I walked in she looked up and smiled, the one that starts in her eyes.
I nodded. I arranged my handouts. I did not look at her again for six minutes.
I present our preliminary findings on ecological narrative and literary form.
The argument is strong, the strongest work I have done in years, and the reason it is strong is in the front row, leaning forward, one hand on her chin, the other holding a pen she is not using.
I am aware of her the entire time. This is, I tell myself, normal.
A presenter is naturally attentive to the most engaged listener.
I am presenting the section on the grammar of animacy when I lose my place.
I look up from my notes to check the audience and my eyes find her and she is looking at me with that attention, that full-body attention, the leaning forward and the pen in her hand and the warmth of her gaze like sunlight through a window you forgot was open, and my mind—the mind that knows where the argument goes, that could deliver this presentation in its sleep—goes blank.
No words. No sentences. No direction. Just the awareness of her face in the front row and the feeling in my chest and the three-second eternity of losing my place in a lecture because someone is looking at me.
I find the place. I continue. The recovery is seamless.
Years of lecturing have given me the muscle memory to bridge a three-second gap without the audience noticing.
But she notices. I see her notice—a slight narrowing of her eyes, the head tilting a fraction of a degree, the scientist’s instinct for the anomaly in the pattern.
I am the pattern. The gap was the anomaly. She has noted it.
During the discussion period, Tess asks a question, incisive, specific, about the implications of the ecological metaphor for how we understand institutional knowledge-loss. It is the best question I receive.
After the presentation the hallway fills with the institutional performance of post-colloquium conversation.
Dr. Reeves from my department says the framework is “refreshingly interdisciplinary.” A visiting scholar from Reed asks about the bibliography.
Gerald tells me the Kimmerer section reminded him of something he is working on in the monograph and begins describing it, and I listen because Gerald deserves to be listened to and because the monograph, in its eleventh year, has become a form of devotion that I respect even when I cannot follow its increasingly labyrinthine internal logic.
Then Dr. Chen from the English department, passing on her way to the stairs, pauses. She is carrying her bag and her coat and the handout I prepared, and she says, almost in passing, with the casual warmth of a colleague who has noticed something she finds charming:
“She’s clearly devoted to this project. And to you.”
She walks away. She does not wait for a response. She delivered the observation the way you might deliver a compliment about someone’s coat: lightly, in motion, without expecting it to land as anything more than a pleasantry.
It lands.
And to you.
Dr. Chen did not mean what I heard. Dr. Chen meant: your collaborator is engaged, invested, present. Dr. Chen meant the professional devoted, the devoted that goes in a tenure letter or a recommendation. She did not mean—
She did not mean the other devoted. The one that lives in the body. The one that makes someone arrive early to sit in the front row and lean forward and watch with her whole self. The one that makes someone bring tea from Lavender House because she asked what you drink.
I stand in the hallway and I do not think about this, and I think about it entirely and both of these things are true simultaneously, and I have been living in the space between them for two months, and the space is getting smaller.
I walk home. The campus is settling into the early dark of November.
The light already gone at 4:30, the buildings lit from inside, the quad empty and cold.
October has become November without my noticing, the way these transitions happen here, not a threshold but a dissolve, one month bleeding into the next, the light retreating a minute earlier each day until you realize, walking home in the dark, that you cannot remember the last evening you walked home in daylight.
I cross the quad. I am walking past the old-growth trees and the memory is there. Waiting.
Today the memory does not press. Today the memory opens, like a door I have been holding shut that has decided, in the November dark, on the walk home from a presentation where a woman in the front row watched me with her whole body, to simply swing wide.
I was 32. Sophia was 18 months old. Lyra and I had been together for four years.
Lyra Hart. The slam poet. She read at a campus open mic during my last year of graduate school, a piece about the body as contested text, and I sat in the back row and forgot that I had come to be critical. The poem was extraordinary. I do not use the word lightly.
She found me afterward, not because she noticed me specifically, but because Lyra found everyone afterward; she moved through a room after a performance the way a current moves through water, pulling people in.
I happened to be in the path. She looked at me and said, “Tell me that changed your life,” and the confidence of the demand, the absolute assumption that her poem had the power to change lives and that the only question was whether I would admit it, should have been insufferable.
It was not insufferable. It was the most alive thing I had met in a year of graduate school, and I wanted to be near it.
We were together for four years. I was less careful then, not careless, never careless, but less fortified.
I laughed more easily. I left books open on their spines, a habit I have since corrected.
I let Lyra reorganize my kitchen twice and said nothing when the system she replaced was better than the one she installed, because the installing made her happy, and her happiness was large and warm and I wanted to live inside it.
She was the most vivid person I had ever known.
She made everything—the apartment, the morning, the argument about whether poetry or prose was the superior form—feel like an event.
I did not yet understand that a person who makes everything an event may not know how to make anything ordinary, and that ordinary is where the actual living happens.