18. Priya
PRIYA
Ravi has a sketchbook full of Chennai. Every page is a watercolor: the street dogs he befriended, each one named in Tamil and English; the temple his grandmother took them to, rendered in golds and reds that glow off the heavy paper; a portrait of his grandfather sitting in the courtyard reading the newspaper that is so precise and so tender that I stand in the kitchen holding it and I cannot speak for a moment.
He is nine. He painted this. My nine-year-old son saw the way his grandfather was sitting in the morning, and he painted it, and the painting is an act of love so fluent I cannot find the word for what I feel.
“Do you like it?” Ravi asks. He is standing beside me with his shoes still on and the travel weariness in his face and the hope in his voice.
“I love it,” I say. “I’m going to frame it.”
“Paati said his hands look wrong.”
“Paati is wrong about the hands.”
“Don’t tell her that.”
“I would never tell her that.”
The house is loud again. Kali is beside herself. She moves between Dev and Ravi in a circuit, confirming their solidity. Moti watched the reunion from the couch, raised his head, assessed, confirmed, returned to sleep. Five weeks of absence processed in approximately four seconds.
I am fully present with my sons. I am washing the travel clothes and unpacking the luggage and heating the sambar Vikram’s mother packed in a thermos that somehow survived twenty hours of international travel.
And in the background, like a radio tuned to a frequency I cannot change, I am thinking about Margot.
The emails started during the winter holiday break.
They started legitimately—citations, framing decisions, the professional correspondence that accumulates during a recess.
I sent the first one on December 22nd. She responded within the hour.
A cycle established itself. The emails stayed professional.
The professional framing held, a tent in a strong wind, the poles intact but the fabric straining.
Her emails were precise and funny in a way she did not appear to intend.
The humor lived in the exactness, in parenthetical asides that arrived like small packages wrapped in academic prose.
(The source I mentioned is available through JSTOR.
It is also available in a hardcover from 1987 that I found at Powell’s for $4.
50, which tells you everything you need to know about how the market values environmental philosophy.) The humor was Margot—dry, embedded, requiring attention to find.
My emails were longer. They circled. A research observation becoming a thought about the boys, becoming a note about Ravi’s street dog paintings, becoming a question about the ecological metaphor.
She followed every circle. She responded to the research and the paintings and the metaphor in the same email with the same seriousness, as though my son’s watercolors and our scholarly framework were equally worthy of her attention. Because they are.
Also also also, she wrote at the bottom of an email about the revised conclusion—the triple escalation, the private language expanding by one word—your son’s painting of the street dogs is wonderful. The dogs have opinions. You can see the opinions in their eyes.
And then, in an email about the revised introduction, on the last night of the break: I have become accustomed to your thinking. The absence of it during the break was notable. — M.
The absence of it was notable.
The M was new. She had never signed with her initial before. A single letter. A door opened by one degree.
By the time the semester resumed we had been in daily contact for three weeks. We had both agreed, implicitly, that this was normal. It was not normal. It was the thing that happens before the thing happens.
I noticed changes in myself. The household calendar had appeared on the kitchen wall in October—color-coded, Dev in blue, Ravi in green, mine in red.
I started it after Margot mentioned, once, in passing, that she and Sophia use a shared calendar.
She said it reduced the cognitive load by approximately thirty percent.
I implemented it the next day. I have not told her.
The lint roller is in my bag. I bought it in November after the sixth time Margot noticed a dog hair on my shoulder and looked away.
The lint roller is for the dogs. The lint roller is also a love letter written in the language of dog-hair removal, and I am aware of how this sounds and I do not care.
I have been arriving on time. Not consistently—I am still me—but three times in January I was at the research space before 1:30.
Three times I saw Margot’s face register my early presence with a micro-expression I am learning to read: slight widening of the eyes, softening at the jaw.
The look lasts less than a second. She corrects it.
I see the correction. The correction no longer wounds me.
The third Tuesday of January. The semester has resumed.
It is raining, the real rain, not the Pacific Northwest’s usual ambient moisture but an actual downpour, the kind that overwhelms umbrellas and turns the quad into a series of temporary rivers and that the locals regard with the mild surprise of a region that expects rain the way it expects gravity but is occasionally startled by the volume.
I am at my desk in the research space at 1:28. Two minutes early. The Chemex is warming. My laptop is open. I have used the lint roller. I am prepared.
The door opens at 1:32 and Margot enters and she is wet.
The rain caught her between Lowell Hall and wherever she parked, or her umbrella failed, or she chose not to use one, and the result is that she is standing in the doorway of the research space with water running down her face and her blazer darkened at the shoulders and her hair—
Her hair is down.
I have seen Margot’s hair down twice before: once at her house on the Saturday Sophia answered the door, and once at the holiday party.
Both times the hair was dry and controlled, falling in its deliberate dark waves, maintained even in its looseness.
This is different. This is Margot’s hair wet: heavy, clinging to her neck, to the sides of her face, to the collar of her blazer.
The pins that usually hold it are gone or have been defeated by the rain, and the hair that I have seen restrained and precise and architectural for four months is now loose and dark and dripping and hanging in wet strands against her throat and I—
I am looking at her throat. The wet hair against her throat.
The water running down her neck and disappearing beneath the collar of her blouse where the top button is undone because the rain has— I don’t know why the button is undone.
The button is undone and I can see the hollow of her throat and the water is on her skin.
My mind, which has been exercising restraint for four months with the disciplined understanding that some thoughts are better not had in the presence of the person who produces them, abandons restraint completely.
I think about Margot in a shower.
It’s not a vague thought, the soft-focus suggestion of steam and warmth. It’s a specific, vivid, fully rendered image that arrives in my mind with the force of something that has been waiting behind a door and has kicked the door open.
Margot in a shower, the water running over her shoulders, down the broad plane of her back, along the curve of her spine.
Her hair, this hair, this wet dark hair, slicked against her shoulders, heavy with water.
Steam rising around her. Her body under the water and the water is running between her boobs and down her stomach.
And now I am there, in the imaginary shower, my hands on her wet skin, the heat of the water and the heat of her body and my mouth on her shoulder and my hands sliding down her sides to her hips and her back against the tile and her head tipping back and the sound she would make, the sound, the specific sound of Margot Voss losing control while the water runs over both of us and my hand is between her thighs and my fingers are—
“The introduction,” Margot says. She is toweling her hair with a hand towel she apparently brought from home because of course she brought a hand towel from home, of course she planned for the contingency of rain requiring hair management, of course Margot Voss has a system for being caught in a downpour.
“I revised the opening paragraph over the break. I’d like your assessment of whether the ecological framework is sufficiently foregrounded before the literary argument begins. ”
She is looking at me. She is asking me an academic question.
She is standing six feet away with wet hair and an open collar and a hand towel and she is asking about the introduction and I have to answer.
I have to produce words. I have to assemble a response about ecological frameworks and literary arguments while my mind is in a shower with my hand between her legs and the steam is rising and her back is against the tile and she is making the sound, the sound I have imagined a hundred times and never heard and that I want to hear more than I want to publish, more than I want tenure, more than I want most things I have ever wanted in my life.
Sorry. I was imagining you in the shower.
“Yes,” I say.
A pause. Margot looks at me. The look is the analytical one: the slight narrowing, the head tilt, the assessment of an anomaly in the pattern.
“Yes what?” she says.
Yes, I would like to touch your boobs in the shower.
“Yes, I— sorry. Can you repeat the question?”
“Whether the ecological framework is sufficiently foregrounded.”
Your wet naked body is sufficiently foregrounded.
“Right. Yes. I need to— let me read the revision.” I turn to my laptop.
The laptop screen is a blur. I read the introduction.
I read it three times. The first time I see nothing because the shower is still in my head.
The second time I see words but the words do not form sentences because Margot has sat down at her desk and her hair is drying in waves against her neck and the waves are— I am reading the introduction.
The third time I read it I actually read it and the revision is good, better than good, the ecological framework is foregrounded with the kind of structural elegance that makes me want to call it beautiful and also makes me want to cross the six feet between our desks and put my hands in her wet hair and kiss her until neither of us can remember what an ecological framework is.
“It’s strong,” I say. My voice is level.
This is an achievement. I look at my screen.
I read the introduction for the fourth time.
The introduction is excellent. The introduction has nothing to do with what is happening in my body.
I am going to focus on the introduction and I am going to provide thoughtful, specific editorial feedback and I am not going to think about the shower or the tile or the steam or the sound she would make.
I provide thoughtful, specific editorial feedback.
It takes eleven minutes. During those eleven minutes I am a professional, I am a collaborator, I am a scientist who is capable of discussing the relationship between ecological and literary frameworks without once mentioning that she has spent the past four months wanting to put her mouth on her colleague’s throat.
I am these things. I am also a woman sitting in a chair with her thighs pressed together and a heat between her legs that the lint roller cannot address and the household calendar cannot organize and the also also cannot contain.
When she turns back from the radiator her hair has begun to dry.
The waves are forming, the natural shape of her hair freed from the pins, looser than I have ever seen it in the research space, curling slightly at the ends.
She looks different with her hair this way.
Softer is the wrong word; Margot is not soft.
Less armored. The hair down is a vulnerability she did not choose and that she is tolerating with dignified resignation, the same composure she brings to everything.
I want to touch it. I want to reach across the six feet and tuck the wet strand behind her ear the way she does not do herself because she is at her desk and she is working and the strand is falling across her face and she is ignoring it.
I want to be the one who moves it. I want the excuse.
I want the two seconds of contact. I want the feeling of her hair between my fingers, wet and heavy and real.
I do not reach. I work. She works. The hair dries. The strand falls. She ignores it. I do not ignore it. The strand is the loudest thing in the room and I cannot stop hearing it and this is the state I am in: a forty-one-year-old professor of ecology undone by a strand of wet hair.
We work until 4:30. The rain has stopped.
The ground-level window shows the grey-green of a January afternoon that has been washed by a downpour and that looks, now, clean and bright the way that only the Pacific Northwest looks after rain, the colors more saturated, the edges more defined, as though the whole landscape has been rinsed and returned to itself.
She packs her bag. She takes the lamp. The hand towel, now dry, goes into the bag with the precise folding I have come to associate with everything Margot puts away—nothing crumpled, nothing shoved, every object returned to its place with care.
At the door: “Thursday.”
“Thursday.”
I close my laptop. I drive home. Kali meets me at the door.
Helen is on the couch when I get home, her phone in her lap with some game open on the screen.
She lives next door and has been collecting the boys from school on the evenings I can’t get back in time—an arrangement she proposed herself and that she refuses to let me compensate her for, no matter how many times I try.
Ravi is on the floor with his sketchbook.
Dev is at the table with his homework, or something that resembles homework.
“How were they?” I ask.
“Perfect,” Helen says, and means it. She finds her jacket. “There’s leftover pasta if you haven’t eaten.”
I reach for my wallet. Helen is already at the door.
“Put that away.”
“Helen—”
“Goodnight, Priya.”
The door closes. Ravi looks up from his sketchbook. “She let us have ice cream,” he says.
The life I built is here, warm and full and mine.
And I am carrying, alongside all of it—the boys and the dogs and the paintings—the image of a strand of wet hair falling across a face I want to touch and a shower I have never been in and a sound I have never heard and a woman whose absence, as she herself wrote, is notable.
The shape of my life has a new dimension, and it is Margot-shaped. What terrifies me is how naturally she belongs in a space I did not know was empty until she was near enough to fill it.