12. Priya
PRIYA
The boys leave for Chennai on a Tuesday, for five weeks that will stretch from Thanksgiving through winter break.
This has been the arrangement since the divorce.
They go in winter, not summer, because Chennai in July is a furnace that would melt two boys raised in the Pacific Northwest, and because Vikram’s parents are older now, and the cool season is when they have the energy for grandchildren.
December in Chennai is seventy-five degrees, the city breathing again.
The boys come back every January brown and loud and speaking Tamil phrases they forget by March.
Vikram’s parents collect them at SeaTac.
They flew in from Chennai, his mother’s hometown, three weeks ago.
His parents retired there six years ago, in the reverse migration, as Vikram calls it, reclaimed after forty years in the States.
They have been staying at a vacation rental, resting from the journey and accumulating gifts for the boys.
Vikram is at the gate. He is tall and thin and graying at the temples in a way that suits him, and he is holding two backpacks he packed himself because he does not trust the boys to pack for five weeks, and he is correct not to trust them.
“The watercolors are in the front pocket,” Vikram says to Ravi. “The good ones. Not the school ones.”
“Thanks, Appa.”
Vikram and I stand together at the gate comfortably enough, two people who shared a life and now share two children and who have found the version of proximity that works. He asks about the research. I ask about the new apartment.
Dev hugs me for slightly longer than his twelve-year-old dignity typically permits.
He has been practicing the art of the casual goodbye—the head-nod, the half-wave, the see ya, Amma delivered with studied indifference—but the hug betrays him.
He holds on. I hold on back. I’ve learned not to say anything about it.
The holding is his and I won’t name it into self-consciousness.
Ravi hugs me and then hugs Kali, whom he has smuggled into the departure zone inside his jacket in a maneuver so transparent that the security guard simply looked the other way.
Kali’s tail, protruding from the bottom of the jacket, is wagging at a frequency visible from space.
Moti is in the car, asleep, unbothered by the departure of his family because Moti’s emotional responses operate on a geological timescale, and five weeks in Chennai does not warrant a visible reaction from a dog whose philosophy of existence is rooted in the conservation of energy.
I drive home. The house is quiet.
This is not the bad quiet, the quiet of the first weeks after the divorce when the boys went to Vikram and the house became an argument I was having with nobody, each empty room a rebuttal to a position I hadn’t taken.
This is a different quiet. Seasonal. Expected.
The boys will be in India for five weeks.
I will call them every day. Ravi will show me whatever he has drawn.
The street dogs of Chennai, rendered with the passionate specificity of a naturalist and the color theory of a child who believes more is always more.
Dev will complain about the heat and eat his grandmother’s idli and come back two inches taller and smelling like jasmine from the temple Vikram’s mother takes them to on Fridays.
But the house is quiet, and Kali and Moti are louder in it—their breathing, their nails on the hardwood, Kali’s tail thumping against the couch in a rhythm that has no apparent stimulus and that I have begun to suspect is simply the sound of Kali existing, a baseline vibration, the resting frequency of an animal whose emotional state ranges from delighted to slightly-less-delighted.
I go to the research space because the alternative is the quiet house, and at 5:30 Margot is there too.
Neither of us comments on this. Neither of us says you’re still here or so are we both working late then or anything that would acknowledge that we are two people who have chosen, independently and without coordination, to be in the same basement room at 5:30 on a late November Tuesday when the day’s work ended at 4:00 and the only reason to stay is the staying.
She is at her desk. I am at mine. The lamp is on.
The fluorescents are off. The room has its evening quality, close, warm, ours.
I am editing the Tsing section. She is writing something in her notebook, the black hardbound one she uses for prose that is not yet ready for the screen.
She writes in longhand, with small letters, the pen moving with the deliberate rhythm I have memorized without intending to.
At 6:15 she says, without looking up: “Have you eaten?”
“No,” I say. “Have you?”
“I could order something. Sophia is at a friend’s house working on a project.”
This is Margot initiating dinner. I want to mark this; I want to place a flag on this moment. This is an act of uncalculated generosity from a woman who calculates everything, and the uncalculated quality of it, the spontaneity, is what makes it matter.
“Thai from the place on Elm?” I say.
“Obviously.”
We order. The food arrives in twenty minutes and is carried down to the basement by a delivery driver who looks skeptically at the ground-level entrance to Lowell Hall’s basement, questioning the legitimacy of the address. I meet him at the door. The bag is warm.
We eat at our desks, facing each other across the six feet, the takeout containers between us on her desk because her desk has more clear space than mine.
My desk is a landscape of papers and dog-eared articles and three colored pens and a charging cable—the residue of someone who works the way she lives, expansively.
The pad see ew steams. The room smells like lemongrass and the Chemex and November and the two of us.
She talks about Sophia, and not in the careful, abbreviated way, the three-sentence summary she deploys in professional contexts, the she’s 13, she’s doing well, she reads a lot that functions as a closed door with a polite sign on it.
Tonight the door is open, not wide but cracked, a few inches, enough to see the room behind it.
Sophia’s reading habits: voracious, indiscriminate, currently in a phase of graphic novels about space.
“She reads everything. I have tried to curate and I have failed. She read my Woolf and then she read a manga about a girl who talks to aliens and she treated both with the same seriousness, and I have decided this is a form of literary democracy I should respect rather than correct.”
Sophia’s negotiating style: “She has learned to use my own methods against me, and I find this both deeply satisfying and profoundly alarming.”
Sophia’s kindness, mentioned without the self-conscious deflection I’ve come to associate with Margot discussing anything she loves: “She writes notes. To everyone. Thank you notes, birthday notes, just because notes. I don’t know where she learned it.
It isn’t from me.” A pause. “I don’t write notes. I write arguments.”
“Arguments are a kind of note,” I say. “They’re just notes that expect a response.”
She looks at me. The almost smile.
I talk about Vikram. Lightly, without residue.
The divorce was three years ago, and the grief ran its course—not quickly, not easily, but completely, because the loss was real even though the relationship was over before the paperwork began.
Vikram is a good man and a good father, and the co-parenting is functional: imperfect, practical, requiring ongoing maintenance, better than the alternative.
“Do you miss them?” she asks. “When they’re gone.”
“Every minute.” I set down my fork. “And also, it’s easier. In some ways. To be just me.” I look at the takeout container. “I feel guilty about that.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I know I shouldn’t. Knowing and feeling are different jurisdictions.”
The almost smile deepens. Holds for a full second before she corrects it. I want to tell her to stop correcting it. I want to tell her that the smile is the most beautiful thing in this room. I do not tell her this. I eat my pad see ew and I watch the smile disappear and I say nothing.
We talk until 8:00. About the research. About a film neither of us has seen.
About the November weather. About the mint that has colonized my tomato beds and the window that sticks in her office and the particular way the Pacific Northwest does not have weather so much as a permanent atmospheric condition that varies only in intensity.
None of it is important. All of it has the quality of mattering enormously, the way small talk between two people who do not do small talk is itself a form of intimacy, each trivial exchange a door held open, an offering, a way of saying I will give you the unimportant parts of myself too, not just the arguments and the analysis but the window and the mint and the film I haven’t seen.
At 8:00 she packs her bag. The ritual: papers, pen, lamp. She pauses at the door.
“Thank you,” she says. “For dinner.”
“You suggested it.”
“You stayed.”
She leaves. The door closes. I sit in the research space for a while—ten minutes, maybe more—in the room that smells like lemongrass and coffee and her.
I drive home through Millhaven in the dark. The town settles early on weeknights, the shops on Main closed, the co-op lit but closed, the waterfront invisible except for the container ships’ lights moving south on the Sound.