29. Margot
MARGOT
The next few days pass in a blur of normalcy that is far from normal.
I make my tea. I grade papers. Sophia goes to school and comes home and does her homework at the kitchen table with the focused irritation she reserves for algebra.
I cook dinner. I answer emails. The days have the shape of every other week this semester—the tea, the grading, the meetings, the lamp in the hallway that Sophia keeps leaving on—and inside the shape, everything has changed.
My body knows. My body has been keeping a record my mind has not authorized: the weight of her against me, the sound she made when I touched her, the way her hair fell across my pillow in the morning light.
The record surfaces without permission. In the middle of a paragraph, the feeling of her mouth on my throat.
During a committee email about scheduling, the exact pressure of her hands.
I close the email. I open it again. The hands are still there.
On Tuesday, I go to the research space.
She is already there. This is unusual. I am the one who arrives first, who makes the coffee, who arranges the lamp, but she is at her desk with her laptop open and a Calloway from Lavender House and her hair in the knot that means she has been working already and did not stop to fuss with it. She looks up when I open the door.
The look lasts two seconds. In the two seconds: everything. Saturday night and Sunday morning and three days of not seeing each other and the entire recalibration of what it means to walk into a room where she is.
“Good afternoon,” I say.
“Good afternoon.” She is smiling, the one that lives in the corners of her mouth and in her eyes. A smile that says she is exercising restraint and finding the exercise amusing.
We work. We maintain the thinnest veneer of professionalism.
We are at our desks. We are looking at our screens.
We are, technically, working. The veneer does not account for the way she watches my hands when I turn a page, or the way I have read the same paragraph four times because she tucked her hair behind her ear and the gesture exposed her neck and the neck is, I have recently learned, a location of significant personal interest. Four feet of desk space between us.
The four feet has never felt more like a unit of measurement designed specifically to produce suffering.
At 3:15, she sends me an email.
I open it.
The Tsing revisions are stronger. You were right to let the paragraph lead. The reader arrives at the conclusion before you state it.
Also: I was so happy to see you when you came through the door today.
Also also: I have been rereading the passage about proximity and mutualism since Sunday. It reads differently now. I can’t imagine why.
I read the email twice. I hit reply.
Thank you. The fourth draft was finally the one.
Re: the proximity passage—certain arguments do become more compelling upon close rereading. I would recommend continued study.
I press send. Four feet away, her laptop pings. I watch her read it. I watch the flush that starts at her throat and the small, bitten-off smile that she directs at her screen. She does not look at me. She does not need to.
We work until 4:30. We say goodbye at the door with the careful distance of two colleagues, except that she touches my elbow when she passes me and the touch lasts one second longer than a colleague’s touch, and the second is a complete sentence.
On Thursday, we are back. The veneer is thinner. Her hand on my arm when she leans across to show me a citation. The hand lingers. My fingers on the back of her chair when I stand to refill the Chemex. They graze her shoulder on the way past. Small, accumulating.
At 3:40, my email pings.
Come over tomorrow night. I’ll teach you how my mother makes chai. She taught me in our kitchen in Portland when I was twelve. Mine is never quite the same as hers. She never measured anything. She’d done it so many times the precision had become invisible.
Also: I can’t stop thinking about you.
Also also: the chai is a pretense.
I hit reply immediately.
Yes. To the chai and to the rest.
I press send. I do not look at her. I look at my screen.
Four feet away, Priya laughs. The laugh is soft, a private sound, directed at her screen, yet the sound fills the research space completely, changing the temperature.
I do not look up. I am smiling. The smile is the uncontrolled kind, the kind the system cannot manage, from the place that has been opening all year.
Friday. Tomorrow. Her house.
The work is not getting done today.
She opens the door before I knock. Kali at the screen, tail audible from the sidewalk. Priya behind the dog, barefoot, lit from behind. “Hi.” My coat went on the hook by the door. The house was small and warm.
“Come,” she says. “I’m going to teach you something you will be very bad at.”
She is right.
We are in the too-small kitchen making chai from her mother’s recipe.
The recipe requires crushing cardamom pods with the flat of a knife, a technique that sounds simple and is not.
I place the pod. I place the knife. I press.
The pod skitters off the cutting board and lands near Kali, who sniffs it and finds it unworthy.
“You have to actually press,” Priya says, arms crossed, mouth doing the thing it does when she is trying not to laugh.
“I am pressing.”
“You’re negotiating with it.”
I place another pod. Press. The knife slips. The pod remains intact.
She comes to stand behind me, her body against my back, her hand over my hand on the knife. “Like this,” she says, and presses down through my hand and the pod cracks open, sharp and warm.
“The variable I was missing was you,” I say, and the laugh she gives me is close. I feel it in her chest against my back.
We finish the chai together. The pods crushed, the milk added, the straining into mugs that do not match. The chai is sweet and strong.
I reach for the saucepan. My elbow catches her mug—
“Oh—”
“Margot Voss.” She is laughing. She grabs a towel and begins mopping, and she is laughing and I am laughing. The chai has reached the floor and the towel is insufficient and Kali has arrived to investigate because Kali investigates all floor-level events with the thoroughness of a forensic team.
“You’re in so much trouble,” Priya says. She is grinning.
I respond without thinking.
One hand on her breast. One hand on her backside.
Both at once. The playful, simultaneous double grab.
The gesture arrives from my body before my mind has time to intervene, from a place in my muscle memory that I sealed twelve years ago and that has been, apparently, waiting.
My mouth opens and the words come out before I can stop them:
“Double trouble.”
The words are in the room. The gesture is on her body, my hand on her breast, my hand on her backside, the double trouble, the thing that was mine and Lyra’s, the private joke, the intimate gesture, the last thing I associated with being loved before I stopped being loved in public on a Tuesday morning in a quad with an earring in my hand and my daughter in a stroller.
Priya laughs. She laughs because she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know what the gesture is, what the words mean, where they come from.
She laughs because the gesture is funny and sexy and perfectly timed and she returns it, one hand on my breast, one hand on my backside, both at once, and says, delighted: “Double trouble back.”
And my laughter stops.
The image arrives all at once. A detonation.
Lyra’s hand on Bailey’s breast. Lyra’s hand on Bailey’s backside.
The quad. The old-growth trees. The shadows on the grass.
Eleven minutes until the tenure review. Sophia asleep in the stroller.
The earring in my hand. The double trouble on my student in the middle of the quad where anyone could see.
The kitchen tilts. I brace myself on the counter. I am crying. This crying is the kind that starts without permission and does not ask how long it is allowed to stay. The helpless kind. The kind I swore I would never do again.
Priya does not ask what’s wrong. She puts her arms around me, all of me, her whole body wrapping around mine, warm and present and solid.
She holds me against her chest and her hand is on my hair and she does not say what happened and she does not say are you okay and she does not say anything.
She holds me. The holding is complete. The holding says: I am here.
Take as long as you need. I am not leaving this floor.
I cry for a long time. I do not know how long. The crying empties something, a reservoir, a storage facility, a sealed container that has been pressurized for twelve years and that has, on this kitchen floor, in these arms, released.
When I can speak, I tell her everything.
The earring. The quad. Lyra and Bailey. The double trouble, the original, the gesture that was ours, the private language that I thought no one else knew.
The tenure review. The whisper lecture. Sophia sleeping through the applause.
The blowout. Bea in the trees with the tenure tray.
The empty house. The cat litter. Sappho taken and Sophia left.
The crying. The blazers at the dry cleaner. The decision: never again.
Priya listens. She holds me in the kitchen and she listens with her whole body, completely, without interruption.
Some stories require the listener to be still and warm and present and nothing else, and she knows it.
She had heard rumors, the public cheating, some drama, the student involved.
She never knew the details. She never knew about Sophia in the stroller.
She never knew about the whisper lecture.
She never knew about Bea in the trees. She never knew that the gesture she just did—the playful, delighted, double trouble returned with love—was the thing that broke me twelve years ago and has just, on this floor, broken me open again.