§1 — Hook
I went to the rare-book room at eight on Tuesday night because the schedule, which had been signed by the dean and entered into the institutional record on Monday afternoon at four, said I would.
I did not go to it because I had decided. I had not decided. I had, on Monday night, walked back across the quad in the kind of cold that gives sound a clarity it does not have on warmer nights, and I had heard my own footsteps on the stone steps of my apartment building and I had thought, distinctly, the words I have not decided. I had said the words to myself in the kitchen while I rinsed the thermos. I had said them to myself in the shower. I had said them to myself at the kitchen table while I read, for the third time that month, a chapter of my dissertation I had read so many times the sentences no longer cohered.
The schedule said Tuesday at eight.
The schedule was a document. The document had been signed by the dean. The document was on the record.
I went.
He was already there. He was at the long side of the table, three seats from the head, in the same chair he had taken on Monday. He had brought two stacks of paper. The stack on his left was the methodology section in print. The stack on his right was — I could see the cover sheet — the page proofs of an article I had submitted to the journal Comparative Literature Studies eighteen months ago. The proofs had been stuck in copyediting for nine months because the editor and I disagreed about the pagination of a single citation. I had not seen the proofs since November.
He had the proofs.
I did not ask him how he had the proofs.
I sat down across from him. I unscrewed the thermos. I did not pour. I had had this thermos since my second year. I had bought it the week I had bought the fountain pen I never used and the leather notebook I had not yet started writing in. I had bought all three on the same afternoon in September of 2022, in a stationer's in the North End of Boston, when I had needed an afternoon in which I bought objects that did not refer to him.
I had used the thermos on Mondays for two years.
I had used it last night for the first time on a non-Monday.
I had used it again tonight.
He said: "I asked the journal. They sent the proofs. I have not read them."
I said: "Why did you ask the journal."
He said: "The grant methodology references your forthcoming article. I wanted the page numbers."
He paused.
He said: "I am not lying about why I asked. I am also not telling you the only reason."
§2 — Build
I did not, that Monday night, ask him how long he had been writing back.
I had asked the question in the rare-book room at 8:11 p.m. He had not answered. He had not, in any visible way, refused to answer. He had — and I knew this because I was watching his hands on the table — moved his right hand off the table to his lap, and he had let the hand rest there for the count of one breath, and then he had said: I will give you an answer when you have decided you want one.
He had said: Tonight is not the night you decided.
He had said: Eight tomorrow. Same room. We will work.
I had stood up. I had not closed the book.
I had walked out of the rare-book room with the marginalia copy of his book on the table and the thermos of black tea in my hand and the seven leaded windows of the chapel courtyard reflecting the green-shaded brass lamps in the pane and the seventeen marginal entries — fifteen, I had said, fifteen, but he had written fifteen fifteen-year entries, and he had also written two more in pencil at the bottom of pages 47 and 311, two pencil entries I had read on the way out, one of which said, in his handwriting, I do not know how to do this. M.
The other one had said: I am sorry I gave you the wrong answer.
He had not signed the second one.
I had walked back to my apartment in the cold. I had not, on the walk, made a decision.
§3 — Twist
The work, that Tuesday night, was good.
The work was the work I had wanted to be doing for nine months. He read each of my three concerns and he answered them not with the answers I had braced for — academic-courtesy answers, methodological-deflection answers, the answers a senior PI gives a junior co-PI to manage them — but with the answers a person gives when they are interested in the work. He answered with the actual constraints of the archive. He answered with the literal funding limit on conservation handling. He answered with the dean's preference about the dissertation defense schedule. He answered with the kind of answer that a person gives when they have read your three concerns the way a reader reads — slowly, in order, on the margin where you wrote them.
I had not been read this way in fifteen years.
I had been read.
I had been read at sixteen by Eleanor Hsu, who had been my freshman advisor and who had, in March of my freshman year, taken the printed draft of a 4,000-word response paper from the printer in the seminar suite and read it standing up in the corridor and said, Nora, you should not put this in print. I had said, I am putting it in print. Eleanor had said, Then put it in print. Eleanor had been the only person who had read the paper before I sent it. Eleanor had been the only person, since, who had ever read what I wrote the way it was written.
He read the way Eleanor read.
He read the way Eleanor had read in 2011.
He read with the kind of attention that did not require me to defend in advance.
I had — for the entire hour, between 8:14 and 9:23 p.m., across the long oak table with the brass lamp between us and the page proofs of the Comparative Literature Studies article in a stack on his right and the methodology section in a stack on his left and the marginalia copy of his book sitting closed in the seat to my left where I had left it the night before — not preempted a single objection.
I had not preempted because there were no objections to preempt.
He was not objecting. He was reading.
That was the wound paragraph, I thought, around 9:18 p.m. without meaning to. The wound paragraph would be: a sixteen-year-old got read once, by Eleanor, and then she did not get read again for fifteen years, and the not-getting-read was the shape of the apartment she did not invite people back to, and the dissertation she rewrote three times, and the article that was stuck in copyediting because the editor was wrong and she was right and the editor would not read the citation as it was written.
I did not, at 9:18 p.m., write the wound paragraph in my notebook.
I closed the notebook on the line I was on. I lifted my pen off the page.
He saw me lift the pen.
He did not say anything.
§4 — Cliffhanger
At 9:31 p.m. he reached for the page proofs.
He reached for the page proofs because the methodology section needed the citation page from the Comparative Literature Studies article, and the citation page was not where the editor had originally placed it, and we needed the corrected page reference for the grant submission. The page proofs were on his right. I was on his left. The brass lamp was between us. The pages were stacked at the corner of his side of the table. He extended his right hand across the corner of the table.
I had my left hand on the methodology section.
His hand passed two inches above mine.
He did not move his hand to avoid mine. I did not move my hand to make space. He did not pause. The two inches were the two inches that had been, on Monday night, the eighteen inches of a long oak table between us and were now the two inches of his hand passing over mine for the second and a half it took him to reach the page proofs.
His shirt cuff brushed the back of my wrist.
The cuff was cotton. It was warm because his arm had been resting on the table next to the brass lamp. It was warm enough that I noticed it was warm and I noticed that I had noticed and I noticed, with a precision I had developed for the noticing, that I was noticing.
I did not move my hand.
He did not move his.
He picked up the page proofs. He turned the proofs to page 14, which was the page with the citation. He set them down between us. His hand returned to his side of the table. The whole thing took three seconds.
I read the citation. I read it twice. I made the correction. I marked the correction with the pencil I had been using for the methodology section. The correction was on page 4 of the methodology, line 12. It was a single change of a page-reference from 314 to 312.
He watched me make the correction.
He did not move.
When I was done he said, into the rare-book room, in a voice that was the same voice he had used on Monday night when he had said I am also not telling you the only reason, but quieter, lower, the way a person says a name when they are testing whether the name will hold the weight:
He said: "Nora."
I had not heard my first name in his mouth in fifteen years.
I had not heard my first name in his mouth, in fact, ever.
He had called me, in the freshman seminar, Ms. Callahan. He had called me, in the rare-book room on Monday and tonight, Ms. Callahan. He had, in the marginal entries in the book on the seat to my left, written N. Callahan, fifteen times.
He had never written Nora.
He had said it now.
He had said it the way a person says a sentence they have been carrying in their inside pocket for fifteen years and has, in the moment of saying, not yet decided whether to set it down on the table or take it back to the pocket.
The brass lamp was on. The leaded windows were dark. The page proofs were in the corner of the table. The marginalia copy of his book was on the seat to my left, where I had left it the night before, where it had been waiting, where it had been writing back to me for fifteen years in his handwriting on pages 14, 47, 88, 111, 140, 168, 197, 219, 244, 261, 277, 295, 311, 328, and 347.
He had said it.
He was waiting.
I had a rule, since I was sixteen, about what I did with the things people gave me off the record.
I had developed the rule because I had needed the rule.
I had, on Monday night, broken the rule for the first time in fifteen years.
I had broken the rule by walking out of the rare-book room with the marginalia copy of his book in my left hand instead of leaving it on the table where it belonged.
He had let me take it.
He had not asked for it back.
The brass lamp made a small electric hum I had not noticed in any session before. I noticed it now. I noticed it the way you notice the radiator in your office on the third floor of Whitfield Hall when you are sitting there at three in the afternoon with a letter from the department in the inside pocket of your coat.
I lifted my pen off the page.
I said his name.
I said it once, into the rare-book room, in the voice I had developed at sixteen for the things I did not, on the record, do.
I said: "Marcus."
He did not move. He did not breathe. His right hand on the table did not — for the first time in two days I had been watching his right hand on the table — keep its position. The thumb came off the wood by a quarter of an inch.
We sat across the brass lamp at 9:34 p.m. on a Tuesday in February, with the page proofs and the methodology and his fifteen-year marginalia and the two and a half syllables of his name still in the air between us, and we did not say anything.
We did not say anything for a long time.