I said, “Margot Hennessey. The woman in the cream coat. I want to see what she’s been doing while I’ve been here.”
The shimmer at his cheekbone brightened, just a hair. He inclined his head, once, and in the same motion extended his bare right hand, palm up, the gesture precise.
“Come,” he said.
I did.
He walked us out of the wood-lined room, up a shallow run of stone, through a hall whose walls were honeycomb panels of raw onyx. The further up we went, the less of the world there was. The color fell away from the air. The heat receded. We climbed a spiral stair so narrow I could only take the steps sideways,shoulder grazing the wall at each turn. The touch of it was cold, but not the cold of winter or of cellars; it was a curated, surgical cold, the kind a jeweler uses to set a diamond.
At the top, a door: not silver, not even metal, but a void cut perfectly into the dome.
He opened it with his wrist, a gesture so small I only saw it in the echo.
The observatory.
I had never seen the inside of a planetarium; I had only seen them in photographs, or on the covers of books about fathers and daughters who looked at the moon together. This was nothing like those. There was no blue, no chair, no star map stenciled in dots across the ceiling. There was only a single high vault of black stone, every seam running up to the apex like ribs, and at the center, flush with the floor, a circular pool of mercury that reflected nothing at all.
The lake.
He let go of my hand. He moved to the center of the room and stood at the edge of the pool, looking into it the way a man looks into the grave of a parent he admired and never understood. I joined him, half a pace behind.
Up close, I could see that the rim of the lake was not perfectly smooth. There were cracks. They ran out from the edge in thin radial lines, no two the same, some as fine as a hair and others wide enough that you could have slid a thumbnail into the seam. And in one—just to the left of where he had stopped — a little clutch of opalescent residue, still bright, still present, as if the room refused to clean itself.
He knelt at the rim.
He put both hands to his knees, left hand bare, right gloved, and looked at the surface of the pool as though he could read, in the liquid skin of it, the shape of the world to come.
He said, “Are you sure you want to see, baby?”
It was the “baby” that did it. My knees nearly buckled. But I knelt too, beside him, putting the meat of my palms to the cold stone. The skin of it was softer than it looked, polished to a lustre so deep that it seemed to eat the blue from the rest of the room.
I said, “Margot Hennessy. Now.”
He inclined his head, once.
He pressed the bare pad of his thumb to the edge of the pool.
The water—if it was water—clouded at once, the way milk clouds tea, a swirling opacity that ran from the rim to the center and then cleared, all at once, to a window: a view down onto a table, a woman in a cream coat, a book in her hand.
For a moment, I thought the book was a prop—a copy of The Sea Wife, or some earlier conquest. But the title, when she turned the cover toward the camera, was new: Salt and Stay.
The book I had left in the top drawer of my desk on Suydam.
She was reading from it.
How much time had passed?
She was reading it aloud to a room. The room was not a room, it was a studio, or a library dressed as a studio. There was a camera—two cameras, in fact—one at her right, one dead-on. The interviewer, a man with a voice like sanded glass, was introducing her as “the most luminous mind of a generation,” and she was smiling the smile I had once rehearsed in a mirror at an MFA party. The audience—there was an audience, a full house, every seat a grad student or a junior editor or a paid-up friend of the house—sat with their faces tipped toward her as though the mere act of looking at her would add a decade to their own careers.
She opened the book. She opened it to the first line.
She read it aloud.
And I felt, at the base of my own tongue, the sentence click into place: not as her sentence, but as mine. The one I had written on the L train going the other direction in October of last year, theone I had left in the top right drawer, the one I had not known, until this moment, was the only thing I ever wanted read aloud in the world.
She read it badly.
She put pauses where there were none. She inverted the clause order. She changed the rhythm, changed the music, turned a two-beat line into a five-beat trudge. She read it like it was an apology for having to read at all, and when she finished the paragraph she looked up at the camera and said, “It’s always strange, the first time you hear yourself read new work out loud.”
