14. Priya
PRIYA
Thursday at Lavender House and the room is in its December configuration: door closed against the cold, the patio tables stacked inside, the space warmer and closer than it was in September. The windows have fogged at the bottom.
I slept badly.
The boys are still in Chennai, the house too quiet, the evenings too long.
I slept badly because the quiet leaves room for the wanting, and the wanting has changed.
It was over a week ago—the heat that Kali interrupted—and it did not dissipate.
It settled into a low-grade warmth that has been present in my body ever since, coloring everything, making every surface more textured, every sensation more acute.
Marcus wastes no time.
He is at his table with a chai and his laptop open to what he has stopped pretending is anything other than an astrological chart.
He is wearing a charcoal sweater over a white collared shirt, the collar crisp, the sweater cashmere, the whole arrangement communicating the specific message that Marcus Wellington considers Thursday mornings at Lavender House an occasion worthy of effort.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says.
“Good morning to you too, Marcus.”
“You’re doing the thing where you make a friend when you want something else.”
“I am having a Thursday morning and I have not yet received my coffee.”
“You’re doing the thing you did with Dominique.
The oh, she’s my colleague and we work well together thing.
Except with Dominique it took three weeks to get from colleague to kissing and with Margot it’s been three months and you haven’t even gotten to the part where you admit you want to kiss her.
” He picks up his chai. “This is not a criticism. This is a timeline observation.”
“Marcus.”
“Your Venus is in Scorpio, Priya. You know what that means.”
“I know what you think it means.”
“I am asking you directly, because indirect has not been working: are you attracted to Margot Voss?”
The question is a door. I have been standing in front of it since September, since the colloquium two years ago, really.
But now someone else is holding it open and asking me to walk through in a public coffee shop on a Thursday morning with my unwashed hair and my sleep-deprived face and the residual heat of an interrupted orgasm still in my body.
“The situation,” I say, “is more complicated than attraction.”
Marcus closes his laptop. Opens it. Closes it. He has just received confirmation of a hypothesis he has been developing since September and is managing his vindication with the kind of restraint that, for Marcus, constitutes a Herculean exercise in self-control.
“I’m sorry.” His voice is careful now. He knows he is holding something fragile. “Are you telling me you don’t know whether you’re attracted to her?”
“I am telling you that I know exactly what I feel and that what I feel is complicated and that the complication is not the attraction. The attraction is—” I stop.
I hear myself. I hear the sentence I was about to say, which was the attraction is the simplest part, and the sentence is true and the truth of it, spoken aloud in Lavender House on a Thursday morning, would constitute an admission I have not yet made to anyone, including myself in daylight hours, and Marcus is looking at me as though he heard the sentence I didn’t say as clearly as if I had said it.
“The attraction is what?” he says, gently.
“Present.”
The word sits between us. One word. The most honest thing I have said out loud about Margot Voss.
Marcus nods. He does not gloat. He does not consult the chart. He does not say I told you so or your Venus or any of the things I expected him to say. He nods, serious, and does not cheapen the admission by performing his own satisfaction. He understands what it cost.
“Good,” he says. “Now what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“She’s not ready. I don’t know the shape of what she’s carrying but I know it’s heavy and I know that pushing will close the door, and I am not willing to lose what we have because I want more than what we have.”
“What if she wants more too?”
“Then she’ll get there. On her timeline. In her way.”
Marcus looks at me for a long moment. His face does something I have not seen before.
Something softer, more personal than his the chart was right vindication.
The face of a man who has been in love with the same person for eight years and who knows what it costs to wait and who knows what it’s worth.
“That’s very patient of you,” he says.
“I’m not patient. I’m strategic.”
“Those are the same thing when you’re in love.”
I do not confirm or deny the word love. The word is too large for a Thursday morning.
The word requires more coffee than I have consumed and more sleep than I have gotten and more distance from the image of Margot above me in the dark with her hair down and her eyes focused and her hands— I am in a coffee shop. I redirect.
“How’s David?” I ask, because changing the subject is sometimes the kindest thing you can do for both people in a conversation.
“David is in Chicago for work.” He reopens the laptop. “But we’re not talking about David. We’re talking about you and the fact that you just said present in a voice that sounded like you were confessing to a crime.”
“Marcus.”
“I’m noting it for the chart.”
“You’re noting my confession for an astrological chart.”
“I’m noting relevant emotional data in a predictive framework. The methodology is sound.”
“Marcus, astrology is not a social science.”
“Astrology is sociology without the grant funding.”
Bea sets my Calloway on the counter. She has been listening. Bea is always listening. She does not comment. She wipes the counter. The slow wipe, the Bea wipe, the one that means she has opinions she is choosing not to share.
Outside, the December morning is doing what December mornings do here: existing in a state of ambient greyness that is not rain and not not-rain, a condition the Pacific Northwest maintains with the committed persistence of a region that has chosen its aesthetic and refuses to apologize.
Kim makes a sound.
The sound is small and involuntary, a sharp intake of breath, followed by a silence, followed by the sound of Kim placing both hands flat on the table with the deliberate pressure, like she’s anchoring herself to a surface because the alternative is floating away.
She is staring at her laptop. Her face has an expression of disbelief.
“I finished,” she says.
The room changes.
Gerald sets down his scone. Marcus closes his laptop in a full, definitive close that communicates something more important than astrology is happening.
Bea stops wiping. Miriam looks up from her book.
Even the La Marzocco seems to pause, the hissing settling to a murmur, as though the machine itself has recognized the gravity of the moment.
“Finished what?” Marcus asks carefully.
“Chapter Four. I finished Chapter Four,” Kim says. Her voice has the quality of someone testing the words against the air, checking whether they hold, whether saying them aloud makes them more or less real. “The argument works. The sources support it. The footnote on Derrida is comprehensive.”
She turns the laptop around.
The footnote is visible on the screen. It occupies—and I am not exaggerating, I am a scientist, I do not exaggerate—approximately three-quarters of the page.
The body text of the chapter is visible as a thin strip at the top, a narrow band of prose above a vast landscape of citation.
The footnote is a monument. It has its own internal logic, its own paragraph breaks, its own sub-citations.
It is, by any scholarly measure, excessive.
It is also, by the same measure, extraordinary.
“That is a very long footnote,” Gerald says, leaning forward, reverent.
He has written his share of long footnotes; he recognizes a kindred spirit.
Gerald and Kim have this in common—the belief that the margins of a text are where the most interesting conversations happen, that the footnote is not a subsidiary of the argument but an alternate dimension of it, a parallel world where the ideas that don’t fit in the main text are not discarded but housed, sheltered, given room to breathe.
“It needed to be comprehensive,” Kim says.
Gerald tilts his head. He is reading the screen from three feet away, squinting through the reading glasses on their chain. “Does it— does the footnote itself require a footnote? Because the reference in line seven seems to open a sub-argument that could—”
Kim leans forward. Her eyes widen. “You’re right. That’s a footnote within a footnote. Is that possible?”
“Academically?”
“Typographically.”
Kim immediately opens a new browser tab.
The moment of celebration has transformed, in the span of 30 seconds, into a new research question.
The community watches. Marcus shakes his head fond resignation; he has known Kim for five years and understands that this is simply how Kim works, that the completion of Chapter Four was never going to be a resting place but a launching point.
Gerald is delighted. He and Kim are now in a rapid-fire exchange about the scholarly precedent for nested footnotes, and Gerald is citing examples from medieval manuscripts where the marginal commentary spawned its own marginal commentary, and Kim is taking notes, and the energy between them is that of two people who have found each other across the vast landscape of academic specificity and are finally having the conversation they were meant to have.
From the corner—the armchair near the side window, not Miriam’s armchair, the other one, the smaller one that nobody fights over because it has a spring that pokes through the upholstery in one specific spot and that Rowan has been sitting in unbothered for three years—Rowan speaks.
“Milestone hair. I’m doing your milestone hair.”
Rowan Chen, an MFA student in Creative Writing.
They are warm tan, skinny, and short-haired.
They are dressed with the considered specificity of someone who has thought about color and texture and pattern and arrived at conclusions that are entirely their own—a patterned button-down in teal and gold under a fleece vest, good boots.
On their lap: a golden fanny pack that is moving.
Kim looks up from the footnote-within-footnote research. “Milestone hair?”
“New chapter, new color. This is a rule. I’ve been telling you this for two years.”
“You’ve been telling me this every time I finish a section. I’ve never taken you up on it.”
“Because you’ve never finished Chapter Four before.
Chapter Four is different. Chapter Four gets the full treatment.
” They gesture expansively, the gesture encompassing the full range of what the full treatment can achieve.
“I did Chelsea’s last month, the whole spectrum, took three hours. Transformative. What are you thinking?”
Kim, who has not been thinking about her hair because she has been thinking about nested footnotes, is now thinking about her hair. The shift is visible, a new variable entering her system. She has been offered something she didn’t know she wanted. “Something different.”
“I can do different. I have a whole range.”
The fanny pack moves again. A small whiskered face emerges from the opening: Hammertime, Rowan’s hedgehog, approximately the size of a grapefruit, regarding the room with the offended dignity of a creature that has been awakened from a nap and is evaluating whether the interruption was warranted.
Hammertime blinks once, slowly, with the deliberate contemplation of an animal that processes the world at a different speed than its surroundings and sees no reason to accelerate.
Hammertime has been a Lavender House regular for as long as Rowan has.
Bea made her peace with a hedgehog in the shop years ago, under conditions I suspect involved negotiation but that neither party has ever disclosed.
“Next week?” Kim says. “After I figure out the footnote-within-footnote thing.”
“Next week works. I’ll bring swatches.” Rowan settles back into the spring-compromised armchair with Hammertime in their lap and a satisfied expression.
Bea has returned to the machine. The La Marzocco hisses. Miriam has returned to her book.
Miriam.
I watch her for a moment—the silver hair, the comfortable shoes, the small old book.
I strain to see the book’s interior, fairly certain the language is not English.
She has not spoken during any of this. She listened to Marcus confront me about Margot.
She listened to Kim’s announcement. She watched Rowan and Hammertime.
She has been present for all of it and has contributed nothing, and the nothing she has contributed is, as always, the most considered offering in the room.
I think about Miriam’s silence. It’s like the silence in forests—the places where no sound is produced and where, if you listen carefully, the absence of sound contains its own information.
The birds have stopped singing because something is moving through the canopy.
The frogs have gone quiet because the temperature has shifted. Miriam is quiet because she is waiting.
I think about what Marcus said. Are you attracted to Margot Voss?
I think about what I said back. The attraction is… present.
It has been present since September. It has been present in my hands when I watch her write, in my stomach when she almost smiles, in the low hum that has lived in my body since last Tuesday night when I lay in the dark and let myself want her and was sixty pounds of golden retriever away from proving just how present the attraction is.
Bring her here, Miriam said, weeks ago.
I am going to bring her here. Not yet. But soon. When the time is right. When the door she has been holding shut has opened far enough for the light to come through.
I finish my coffee. I leave Lavender House. I walk to campus in the December mist with the word present in my mouth and the warmth of the room behind me and the shape of Margot’s absence beside me, specific as a shadow, warm as a hand I haven’t held.