22. Priya
PRIYA
February, winter’s long middle. The grey that has stopped being dramatic and has become simply the color of the sky, day after day.
But the camellias are blooming outside Lowell Hall, bright pink against the wet dark bark, absurd, defiant.
Color when the grey says there should be none.
I pass them on my way to Lavender House.
Bea is not behind the counter when I arrive.
A young woman I half recognize is working the machine with the careful concentration of someone who has been shown how to do this and is determined not to break anything.
Bea comes through the back door five minutes later, hair damp, cheeks flushed, pulling off a jacket.
“Water aerobics ran long,” she says to no one in particular, and steps behind the counter and the room settles into itself.
The community is smaller this week. Gerald is absent, a cold, according to Kim, which means he is at home with the monograph and a box of tissues and is almost certainly making more progress sick than he has made in the past three months healthy, because Gerald’s productivity is inversely proportional to his access to social interaction.
Kim is in her seat, green jacket, tote bag, oat milk latte, laptop, the violet hair that Rowan did holding its color.
Sam and Lani are at the corner table, the two-person table by the side window that nobody else uses because the window has a draft.
Sam and Lani use it because they have been sitting at this table for four years and the draft is no longer information either of them processes.
They have acclimated to the draft the way they have acclimated to each other—completely, unconsciously, in a way that makes the accommodation invisible.
They are not arguing today. They are quiet, both on their phones, not talking.
Lani’s feet are on the rung of Sam’s chair.
The proximity is unconscious. Her body is angled toward Sam like a plant angled toward light, and it is so habitual that correcting it would require Lani to notice it first, which she has not, in four years, done.
Lani is eating a cardamom bun, her short hair pushed behind her ears.
She reaches across the table and takes a piece of Sam’s scone without asking or looking up from her phone.
Her fingers break off a corner of the scone.
She has been eating off Sam Rivera’s plate for four years and has never considered that it might require permission, because Sam has never once suggested it does.
Sam does not react. Sam takes a sip of her coffee. The taking of the scone and the non-reaction are so practiced, so invisible, that the exchange has the quality of breathing—automatic, essential, unexamined.
I watch this from across the room and think about how some connections are visible only to the people not inside them, the way a mycorrhizal network is visible to the researcher but not to the trees.
Marcus is at his table with his chai and no pretense.
“What are you waiting for?” he asks.
I sit down. I do not pretend to misunderstand. There was a time—September, October—when I might have deflected, might have made the question about the research or the project or some professional dimension Marcus was not asking about. That time has passed.
“For her to be ready.”
“She presented joint research to a Dean’s committee with you last week and the two of you sounded like one person.”
“That’s professional.”
“That’s not professional. Professional is two people who coordinate well.
What I watched was two people who have forgotten where one of them ends and the other begins, and the forgetting was visible from the back row, where I was sitting, making notes.
” He taps the laptop. “What if she’s waiting for you to stop waiting? ”
The question lands. It lands because it is the one question I have not asked myself.
Thinking it would require me to consider the possibility that my patience, which I have been framing as respect for Margot’s timeline, is also a form of protection.
My protection. The patience keeps me safe because as long as I am waiting I am not risking, and as long as I am not risking I cannot be rejected, and as long as I cannot be rejected the wanting stays intact, unblemished, the perfect theoretical version of itself.
Marcus sees this on my face. He does not push. He opens his laptop. He turns it toward me.
The chart.
I have resisted the chart for five months.
I have declined to look at it. I have treated Marcus’s astrological framework with the affectionate skepticism of a scientist who respects her friend’s belief system without sharing it.
But Marcus turns the laptop toward me and the chart is on the screen and the chart is annotated—dates, notes, arrows in different colors—and I look at it.
I do not understand the chart. I am not going to understand the chart.
The symbols and the lines and the houses and the transits are a language I have not learned and am not going to learn at 8:45 on a Thursday morning in February.
But underneath the symbols, underneath the framework, I can see what Marcus has been building.
He has been tracking us. The annotations are not astrological.
They are observational. He has been watching.
He has been building a dataset, and the dataset describes a trajectory, and the trajectory points in one direction.
“You annotated the chart with observational data,” I say.
“I annotated the chart with the truth. The planets provide the framework. The behavior provides the evidence. The evidence is conclusive.” He closes the laptop.
“You are in love with her. She is in love with you. The two of you have been orbiting each other for five months like binary stars and the orbit is decaying and the collapse is coming and I would like to be on record as having identified this in September. Trust me. I do have a PhD in Sociology, after all.”
“Marcus.”
“I am being a good friend. Good friends tell you when you’re being a fool. You are being a fool. A patient, respectful, deeply considerate fool, but a fool nonetheless.”
Good friend. The phrase snags somewhere. He means it with full confidence in his own assessment. But the phrase turns around on me before I can stop it, and what I hear is the question I haven’t been asking.
“Marcus.” I set down my cup. “I have been monopolizing your Thursday mornings for months with my romantic crisis. You have charted it. You have astrologically annotated it. You have been the most patient, most invested, most obnoxiously perceptive person in my life since September and I have not once asked you how you are.”
He is quiet for a moment. The quiet is unusual; Marcus fills silences deliberately, as though dead air were a design flaw. The quiet means I have said something he was not expecting to have to answer.
“David and I almost didn’t make it,” he says.
“Three years ago. He was gone more than he was here and I was building a life he kept flying out of, and I spent six months wondering whether loving someone who is always leaving is the same as being left.” He picks up his chai.
“You sat with me every Thursday for those six months. You brought me coffee. You didn’t consult a chart.
You didn’t analyze the relationship dynamics or offer a prognosis.
You just showed up and sat next to me and let me be a mess in your company.
So it’s my turn. I am going to sit next to you and watch you be a mess and I am going to be insufferably correct about the outcome. ”
“Marcus.”
“This is what we do. You sat with me. I chart you. The methodology differs. The commitment is the same.” He opens the laptop. “Now. The binary star situation.”
Miriam is leaving. She puts on her coat, the long grey one, the sensible buttons. She gathers her book. The title is not written in English.
She passes the counter on her way out. Bea is rinsing something, her back half-turned, and Miriam stops. She puts her hand on Bea’s shoulder and leaves it there. Bea’s hands still in the sink. For three seconds neither of them moves.
Then Bea reaches up and covers Miriam’s hand with her wet one. A squeeze. Quick, firm. The gesture of two women who have been having a conversation without words for a very long time.
Bea goes back to the rinsing. Her face, in the moment between the hand and the rinsing, is the face I saw that evening when I came back for my scarf—the private one, the one that is not for Thursday mornings.
It is there for half a second. Then she is Bea again, wiping the counter, asking Marcus if he wants a warm-up.
I don’t know what I’m seeing. I know it matters.
Miriam pauses at my table.
She looks at me. The look lasts three seconds.
In those three seconds Miriam’s face carries everything she has been holding for five months of listening, the Thursday mornings and the observations and the careful silence she has maintained while Marcus charted and Bea worried and Deenie narrated and the whole community watched me fall in love with a woman who was falling in love with me.
“You know what I think,” she says.
“You haven’t said anything.”
“I know.”
She buttons the last button. The deliberate pace of a woman who has been doing things at her own speed for sixty years and is not going to accelerate for anyone.
“I know,” she says again. And leaves.
The door closes behind her. The room settles. Marcus opens his laptop to the chart again, satisfied. Kim types. The La Marzocco hisses.
I finish my coffee. I leave Lavender House and walk to campus in the February cold.
Not today. But soon. The orbit is decaying. The collapse is coming.
And when it comes, I am going to be there.