“I think I might just head home.” Although I had planned to spend the day on campus, I could tell that my efforts would be futile. I was too tired and distracted.
“I have another thing,” Safie said. “Pre-tenure orientation.”
“They should have you running the meeting,” I said. Safie was turning in her dossier at the end of the academic year, going up for tenure next fall. “You’re a shoo-in.”
“I don’t know about that.”
But she was, anyone could see it. The students all loved her, she had published a million articles, and her book would be out with Duke in the spring. Safie was doing everything right.
“Well, you guys should come watch the match with me tonight,” Colin said. “It’s important to show your face at things. And soccer is Sawyer’s only decent sport.”
“Soccer?” I asked.
“Yeah, why?”
“Nothing,” I said, suddenly shy about showing interest. “I just didn’t know they were playing tonight.”
Safie laughed. “I mean, extracurriculars aren’t exactly your deal.”
“I’m not that bad. I go to things sometimes.”
“When I drag you.”
“Fine, drag me tonight.”
“For real?” Safie looked genuinely surprised. “Okay, pick me up on your way.”
“Great,” said Colin. “It’s a plan.”
Safie had started at Sawyer a few years ahead of me. Our first real conversation followed my initiation into department meetings. I remember she was wearing this bright green vintage dress, something that on anyone else would look weird, but on her was exactly right. And she had that leather bag plopped on the table in front of her, like a barricade. The bag was so big, I spent half the meeting wondering what was in it. When the meeting closed, as we filed out, Safie stopped me and asked how I was adjusting to Sawyer. I said something noncommittal and polite, and when she gave me a look, I asked, “Are the meetings always like this?”
“That was one of the good ones.” She made a sad, sighing sound. “Let’s go, you’re coming with me.”
She took me to her office, where neat stacks of file folders and books and PDF printouts covered every surface. On one wall, she had hung a gigantic calendar, each square packed with small, precise print, outlining her tasks for the day. I leaned close, squinting: deadlines for grants, page numbers to revise, books to finish reading.
“I usually don’t know what I’m doing in ten minutes, much less ten days.”
Safie shrugged. “I’m a planner. I want to know everything is under control. Anyway—” She scanned a shelf lined with small tins of tea, satchels, neat brown paper bags with handwrittenlabels. “Do you want green, black, or red? Or something herbal—I’ve got a nice mint somewhere.”
“That is a lot of tea.”
She laughed. “I have this thing whenever I travel. I find a shop selling something I can’t get anywhere else.” She stepped back and looked at the shelf. “It is maybe a little obsessive. I don’t know, I find something about the hunt relaxing. I was in Portland for a conference once and took three buses to get to this shop that specializes in rooibos. I had to leave the hotel at five in the morning so I would be back in time for my panel. That tea is the only good thing about Portland.”
She heated water in an electric yellow kettle and I noticed her nails—they were painted with an intricate design, black to purple to pink at the tips. I complimented them—there wasn’t a lot of style on display among faculty. Safie fanned her fingers. “I get them done in Cleveland, when I go up to do my hair. They can’t handle Black hair in Sawyer.”
That morning I discovered one of my favorite things about Safie. Despite her meticulous and ambitious daily plans, she wanted to talk about anything but work. We discussed television, where to eat in Cleveland, where not to eat in Dayton; she told me about her previous summer (in Lisbon) and where she was thinking of going next (maybe Mexico, or back to Lisbon if she could justify it as research and get some funds together). I only got the story of her career by grilling her about past girlfriends. There were a lot. (“I might be a bit picky,” she said. “But I don’t have time to date anyway. First tenure, then maybe a girlfriend.”) She had dropped out after a semester of community college in Virginia and then moved to San Francisco “to become a lesbian and a line cook, but maybe that’s the same thing.” She spent the next years working her way throughthe food world, eventually starting a small catering company. A woman she’d been dating—“an insufferable poet”—took her to a lecture by a famous feminist philosopher. Something in that room, the philosopher’s live brilliance, the play of ideas—Safie realized what her life had been missing. She sold her company. She enrolled at Merritt, transferred to Berkeley, and kept going until she had a PhD. She made it sound easy—like each door just opened to the next. I suspected there was more to it than that, and also that I shouldn’t pry; already I understood that Safie was in charge of our conversations, and maybe everything else. But I expressed surprise she seemed happy in Ohio.
“I am happy,” she said. “I like it here.”
“But you must miss San Francisco?” I had moved to Sawyer just weeks before, and already felt restless.
“After twenty years, California is totally grating. I think I prefer the blatant racism of the rust belt to the backhanded jabs of the precious Bay Area.”
Most of my life, friendship eluded me. I felt more at ease on my own, though I knew something was not quite right about it. My mother brought it up once, my loner ways. It was my last year of high school; all my classmates were celebrating graduation, but I had nothing planned. My mother asked if I wanted to have a dinner before I left for college, with them and some friends. “Isn’t there anyone you’ll miss?” she asked. I’d said no. After a moment, she said, “Well, we will miss you,” and I could feel her hurt and knew that someone else, someone better with people, would have the words to ease it.
College was less solitary, but, still, everything felt so temporary I didn’t invest much in those friendships; I knew we’d finish and move on. When I got to New York for grad school, I mostlyhung out with people from my program, at program events. I dated a bit, guys I met at bars downtown, but that was it, and nothing really lasted; a few weeks, sometimes a few months. Once I left the city for Sawyer, I stayed in touch with only a few people from my grad cohort, mostly through group emails I would halfheartedly skim and then delete.
And so Safie’s welcoming me into the warm ambit of friendship was an unfamiliar and at times unnerving experience. Some part of me understood that her options were limited in a place like this; in a bigger school, a real city, what I—a random white gay guy from Florida—had to offer might be less compelling. Nevertheless, here we were. One night woozy with drink at her apartment, I said I couldn’t believe my good fortune at finding her. Safie said she felt the same way. When I responded with something dismissive, joking that she had no discernment about men, she had simply said, with no judgment, “I know what you’re doing, trying to keep that little distance between us, but it’s not going to work.” And that was it.
