15. Margot
MARGOT
Like most arguments that matter, it starts about something else.
Priya reads a passage I wrote and says, “This is too dense.”
“It’s rigorous,” I say.
“It’s rigorous and dense. These are not mutually exclusive, and in this case they are both true.”
“The argument requires precision.”
“The argument requires an audience. You’ve buried the insight under three layers of academic scaffolding that the reader has to excavate before they can find the point.
Most readers won’t excavate. Most readers will read the first paragraph, decide it’s impenetrable, and move on.
And they will be wrong to move on, but they will do it, and the argument will die in a journal that seventeen people read. ”
“Seventeen specialists whose assessment of the work determines its scholarly impact.”
“Seventeen specialists who already agree with you. That isn’t persuasion, Margot. That’s an echo chamber with a peer-review process.”
I set my pen down. “The solution is not to simplify the argument,” I say. “The solution is to trust the reader to meet the work where it is.”
“The solution is to trust the argument enough to let it speak in a register that doesn’t require a graduate degree to parse. The strongest ideas don’t need fortification. They need—”
“A door. I remember. You said that in our first meeting. Everything needs a door.”
“Everything needs a door if you want someone to walk through it.”
“And if the room is not intended for casual visitors? If the room is built for people who have done the work to enter it? Not every space needs to be accessible to everyone. Some spaces are built for specific audiences, and the specificity is the point.”
She leans back in her chair. Her arms are crossed.
She has not crossed her arms with me before.
The crossing changes the geometry of her upper body.
The forearms pressed against her chest, the shoulders rounded slightly inward, gathering herself rather than opening, and the change from open to gathered is— I notice it.
I notice the arms and the crossing and the way the crossing compresses the fabric of her blouse against her skin and I am going to focus on the argument.
“You’re not describing rigor,” she says.
Her voice is even, but the evenness is effortful.
“You’re describing a moat. You are building a moat around your ideas and calling it scholarship, and the moat keeps people out, and you are more comfortable with the keeping-out than you are willing to examine. ”
The sentence hits.
“You’re pushing me to write something I don’t write,” I say. “I don’t write accessible summaries of complex ideas for people who haven’t done the reading.”
“I’m not asking you to summarize. I’m asking you to translate.”
“Translation always loses something.”
“Isolation always loses more.”
The air goes out of the room. She meant it about the writing and she meant it about me.
Something detonates in my chest. The anger is the surface, manageable.
Underneath the anger is the thing the anger is protecting: the recognition that she has seen me.
She has identified the place where my work and my self-protection are indistinguishable, and she has pressed on it. The pressing is not cruel. It is exact.
She is agitated. She pushes back from her desk and stands, and the standing brings her closer to me, not intentionally, not strategically, just the physics of a small room and a person who needs to move.
She reaches up and pulls off her sweater.
The gesture is practical. The room is warm, the argument has been going for twenty minutes and the Chemex is on and the lamp is generating heat and the air between us has its own temperature.
She is warm and she is removing a layer, just like anyone removes a layer, a completely ordinary thing that happens in rooms where the temperature has risen.
The sweater comes off over her head and her blouse untucks on one side, a small displacement, the fabric riding up for a moment, exposing a strip of skin at her hip, soft skin over solid bone. One second. She pulls the blouse down. The skin disappears.
My mind produces the next frames: the blouse untucking further, the fabric riding up, the skin extending from the hip to the curve of her waist to the ribs.
The shape of her body inside the blouse becoming the body without the blouse.
The image is specific, not a fantasy but an extrapolation, my mind completing a sequence it was not asked to complete with the same involuntary precision I bring to completing a sentence or a syllogism or any other pattern my mind has been trained to follow to its conclusion.
The conclusion involves Priya’s bare skin from the hip to the shoulder, and the image is vivid and unwelcome, and I am in the middle of an argument.
I shut it down.
It is a physical act. I feel it happen like a door closing, the latch engaging, the mechanism doing its work.
The image retreats. The heat does not retreat.
The heat stays because the heat has two sources, and I can close the door on one of them but the other—the anger, the argument, the woman standing in front of me with her blouse tucked back in and her sweater draped over her chair—the other is still here, still speaking, still looking at me with her precise and unrelenting gaze.
“I think we’re done for today,” I say.
The words come out clipped. Controlled. The voice of a woman who is managing several simultaneous responses and has chosen the one that involves the least exposure, which is ending the conversation.
I gather my things. Papers into the folder.
Pen into the pocket. Laptop closed. The gestures are precise and efficient and if my hands are shaking— they are not shaking.
My hands do not shake. They do what I tell them to do, and right now I am telling them to close the laptop and put the pen in the pocket, and these are simple tasks that do not require the level of concentration I am bringing to them.
“Margot—”
“We’re done.” I stand. The lamp stays. I am not bringing the lamp home tonight because bringing the lamp home would require staying in this room for the additional thirty seconds it takes to unplug it and coil the cord and put it in my bag, and I cannot be in this room for thirty additional seconds.
I leave.
The walk home is December dark, 4:30 dark, the dark that arrives while you are still working and closes around you.
The quad is cold. The old-growth trees are shadows.
I walk fast, faster than my usual pace. I am rushing.
I am rushing because my body wants to move, wants to burn the energy the argument generated and that I did not discharge.
The energy is anger and the energy is something else, and the two are tangled together in my chest and I cannot separate them.
Isolation always loses more. The sentence follows me across the quad. It was a scalpel of a sentence. It found the exact place and it cut cleanly, and the cut is only painful because the cutting was accurate.
I do not go to Lavender House. I do not call anyone. I walk home through the December dark and I let myself into the house. Sophia is doing her homework at the kitchen table. She looks up and reads my face and she says, “Bad day?”
“Difficult meeting.”
I make tea. I sit at the kitchen table across from Sophia, who is doing math with the focused irritation of a child who is good at math and resents that being good at something does not make it enjoyable.
I drink the tea. The tea is hot. The kitchen is warm.
My daughter is across the table, and the house is ordered and quiet and mine.
I am furious.
I am furious at Priya for saying what she said.
I am furious at the precision of it, the exactness, the accuracy, the way she identified the moat and named it and did not apologize for naming it.
I am furious at the strip of skin at her hip, at the image my mind produced, at the coexistence of anger and desire in my body that I cannot sort into separate categories because they are not separate categories.
They are the same response to the same stimulus, the stimulus of being seen, of being known, of having someone else stand in front of me and say the thing you are doing with your work is the thing you are doing with your life, and I can see both and I am not looking away.
The fury is easier to hold than the desire.
The fury has a shape I recognize, a weight I have carried before, a protocol in the system.
The other thing—the wanting, the image, the heat—has no protocol.
The system was not built for this. The system was built for a life that did not include a woman who would stand in a basement research space and remove her sweater and expose one second of skin at her hip and make my mind complete the sequence against my will.
I drink my tea. Sophia finishes her math. She packs her backpack for tomorrow. She says goodnight. She does not ask about the difficult meeting.
“Goodnight, Soph.”
“Goodnight, Mom.”
Her door closes.
I sit at the kitchen table with the empty mug and the fury and the heat that will not cool and the sentence that follows me like a shadow: isolation always loses more.
She is right. She is right about the passage and she is right about the moat and she is right about me, and the rightness is the most infuriating thing about her because I cannot argue with it and I cannot dismiss it and I cannot— I cannot stop thinking about the strip of skin at her hip and the way her voice stayed even when her eyes were not even and the image of her body inside the blouse becoming the body without the blouse.
I go to bed.
I lie in the dark. The fury has cooled enough to let the other thing surface: the wanting, the image, the strip of skin.
I am tired enough to let it be there without fighting it.
The image sits in the dark with me, unwelcome and warm, and I do not shut it down and I do not pursue it.
I let it exist. This is new. This is the first time I have let one of these images simply be in the room without either suppressing it or fleeing to the kitchen.
I fall asleep with the argument in my head and the image in my body and the sentence in my chest.
Isolation always loses more.
On Thursday I will go to the research space and she will be there and the argument will be between us and the argument will need to be resolved. I am not sure I know how to do this. I have a sense that I am going to learn.