§1 — Hook
The dean called me Friday morning at 7:14.
I was in the kitchen with the coffee not yet made. The kettle was on. The light over the sink had the quality of late winter — gray, level, indifferent — and the phone was on the counter where I had left it the night before. I had not, in three days, looked at the phone before the kettle. The phone rang.
I let it ring twice. I did not let it ring three times.
The dean said: "Marcus, the Mellon Joint Research Initiative has come through the second-stage review. We have ten days to confirm the PI pairing."
The dean said: "I want you and Callahan."
I had a habit, since the year I came back to Whitfield, of putting one hand on the counter when a sentence required me not to react. I did not put my hand on the counter. The hand was already there.
I said: "I will need to think about it."
The dean said: "We do not have time for thinking. The pairing was on the application. The pairing was the reason the second-stage review prioritized us. The pairing is the application."
The dean said: "It is four hundred thousand dollars."
The dean said: "She declined the chair appointment Wednesday. I know."
The dean said: "This is grant work. It is a separate appointment. She will not be defending under you. She will be working with you. There is no conflict."
I had the kettle whistling and the gray light and the dean's voice saying no conflict and one specific thing I knew about the way the morning was going to proceed. I knew that I would say yes. I knew that she would say yes. I knew that we would each, separately, sit at our respective desks today and write the email and send it, and we would not call each other, and we would not see each other until the first archival session, which would be set on Monday, which would be at eight in the evening in the rare-book room, because the rare-book room was the only space in the department that would be empty at eight on a Monday, and because the application had named the rare-book room in the methodology section, and because every other consideration was second to the four hundred thousand dollars.
I had — in a different version of this morning, the version in which the dean had not called, the version in which the email about the grant had reached me through the normal department-wide announcement on a Friday afternoon — already drafted the methodology section in such a way that the rare-book room was the only viable space. I had drafted it that way fifteen days ago, when the second-stage review notification had arrived. I had drafted it that way at my kitchen table on a Tuesday in February with the kettle on and the gray light at the same window I was now standing at. I had drafted it that way knowing, with the particular kind of knowing I had developed at twenty-two and refined for fifteen years, that the only space in the department empty at eight on a Monday would be the rare-book room and that the only graduate co-PI who could deliver on the methodology section was the graduate co-PI I had — for fifteen years — not asked the department to assign.
I had drafted the application that way and I had let the application be submitted that way, and on a Tuesday in February I had told myself, at the kitchen table, that I had drafted it for the work and not for the room.
I had told myself that.
I had not, on the Tuesday, believed myself.
I said: "I will send the confirmation by noon."
The dean said: "Thank you, Marcus."
I hung up. The kettle was still whistling. I lifted it off the burner. I did not pour the coffee yet.
I went to the bookshelf in the front room of the apartment. I took down my copy of the book I had published in 2014, the one that had taken me eight years to write because the first chapter had to be rebuilt from the load-bearing assumption up. I opened it to page 47. The marginalia in my handwriting in the right-hand margin — the marginalia I had been writing in this copy for fifteen years — said, in the smallest clearest hand I owned, N. Callahan, 2011, p. 311.
I closed the book. I did not put it back on the shelf.
§2 — Build
She accepted at 11:52.
The dean's reply came to both of us at noon. The first archival session was set for Monday at 8 p.m. in the rare-book room. The grant office had attached the methodology section. I read it. I had written the methodology section. I had written it with her in mind. I had not put her name in it. The shape of the sentences had her name in them.
Monday at 7:50 p.m. I went to the rare-book room. I took the long way around — through the main library, up the stone stairs, past the archivist's desk where Dr. Halloran was packing for the night. He nodded. He did not ask. He had been the rare-book room archivist for thirty-one years and he did not ask about evening hours. I had the key. The grant had given me the key.
The room was the same.
The room had not changed since I had sat in it as a graduate student myself, twenty years ago, in a different decade, in a different version of the question I was about to be asked. The long oak table. The brass lamps with the green glass shades. The wall of leaded windows looking onto the chapel courtyard. The smell — old paper, lemon polish, the slight dust of the book conservator's drawer on the south wall.
I sat down at the head of the table. I did not sit there to claim it. I sat there because it was the seat with the better light. I moved my notebook to the seat at the long side, three down from the head. I sat at the long side.
She came in at 7:58.
She came in with the coat she had been wearing on Wednesday and a leather satchel and a thermos and the same Whitfield Graduate Journal vol. 47 she had brought to the committee meeting. She did not look at me. She set the satchel down at the seat across from mine. She unscrewed the thermos. The smell of the thermos was black tea. She looked at the thermos. She did not look at me.
She said: "Dr. Vane."
I said: "Ms. Callahan."
She said: "I have read the methodology section. I have three concerns. I want to put them on the record before we begin."
I said: "On the record."
She put her notebook on the table. She opened it. The first page had three lines of writing, in pencil, in the smallest clearest hand I had seen in fifteen years.
She read them. She did not look up. The three concerns were precise, narrow, methodologically defensible, and not — not at all — about the methodology. They were, all three, about what the methodology had not yet asked. They were the kind of concern a co-PI raised when they were not interested in the methodology. They were the kind of concern a co-PI raised when they were interested in working.
I listened.
When she was done she sat back. She still did not look at me.
She said: "Those are the concerns."
I said: "They are the right concerns."
She did not move.
I said: "I have one concern of my own."
She turned the page in her notebook. She said: "On the record."
I said: "Off the record."
She did not turn the page back. She did not look up. She said, after three seconds: "Off the record."
§3 — Twist
I had brought the book. I had taken it off the front-room shelf Monday morning at 7:23. I had put it in the inside pocket of my jacket on the way out the door at 7:37. I had carried it across the courtyard at noon when I had walked to the dean's office to sign the second-stage grant confirmation. I had carried it back across the courtyard at one-fifteen. I had set it on the corner of the chair's office desk for the rest of the afternoon. I had picked it up again at 7:34 p.m. when I had left the office for the rare-book room.
I had not put it on the table when I came in. It had been in the inside pocket of my jacket, against the lining, the way she had been carrying her own paper against the inside of her own coat on Wednesday. I had put it there at 7:34 p.m. I had not made a decision to put it there. I had also not made a decision to leave it home.
I took it out. I set it on the table. I did not open it.
She looked at it. She did not move.
She said: "That is the 2014 edition."
I said: "It is."
She said: "I have a copy of the 2014 edition."
I said: "This one is mine."
I had a way of speaking when the sentence I was speaking was the one I had been not-rehearsing for fifteen years. The way was: I let the sentence fall the way it would fall. I let the words come out at the weight they had. I had, in fifteen years, given exactly one lecture in this register. The lecture had been on a Wednesday in March of my Yale year. The lecture had ended with a sixteen-year-old asking me a question.
I had — for fifteen years — been the man whose lecture had ended that way. I had — at twenty-two, three weeks after the lecture, in a corridor at Yale on a Friday in April when the chair of my department had handed me a printed copy of the response paper and asked me to read the footnote on page 311 — read the footnote and recognized, in the small particular way one recognizes the load-bearing assumption in one's own writing only after another reader has named it, that the sixteen-year-old had been correct. I had read the footnote in the corridor. I had read it twice. I had, at twenty-two, in a corridor in New Haven, with the chair of my department waiting for me to say something, said the only thing I had at the time been able to say. I had said: she is correct. The chair had nodded. The chair had taken the journal back. The Yale offer-letter had, in administrative terms, been withdrawn three weeks later. I had, in fifteen years, not corrected anyone who had assumed the withdrawal was the consequence of the response paper. The withdrawal had not been the consequence of the response paper. The withdrawal had been the consequence of my answer in the corridor.
She looked at the book.
She said: "All right."
I opened it to page 47.
I turned the book toward her.
The marginalia in the right-hand margin was in my handwriting. It had been written, in fifteen separate sessions over fifteen years, in the right-hand margin of pages 14, 47, 88, 111, 140, 168, 197, 219, 244, 261, 277, 295, 311, 328, and 347. There were fifteen entries. Each entry was the same form. Each entry was a single line. Each entry began with the same three letters.
The page 47 entry said: N. Callahan, March 14 — the question.
The page 311 entry — I knew without showing her, because she had not turned the page — said: N. Callahan, 2011 — the footnote.
The fifteenth entry was on page 347. The fifteenth entry was dated three weeks ago. The fifteenth entry said: N. Callahan — the dissertation will be assigned. I will recuse.
I had written the fifteenth entry the day Dr. Aldridge had told me, off the record, that Eleanor Hsu was on indefinite leave.
I had written it and then I had not, in fact, recused.
§4 — Cliffhanger
I watched her read.
She read page 47 first. She did not turn the page. She did not need to turn the page. She read it and the silence in the rare-book room had the quality of a silence in which a person does an arithmetic they have done before.
She turned the page.
She did not flip — she turned, one page at a time, the way a conservator turns. She read each marginal entry. She did not skip ahead. She got to page 311. She read page 311. She did not lift her eyes from the page.
She got to page 347.
She read page 347.
She closed the book.
She did not look up.
She said, into the rare-book room, at 8:11 p.m., in a voice I had not heard since a Wednesday in March fifteen years ago in a freshman seminar where she was sixteen and the question she asked was the right question and the answer I gave was the wrong one:
"How long have you been writing back."
— to be continued in Ep3