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I Caught My Rival Smelling My Scarf She Stole — She Looked Up And Neither Of Us Said Anything
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Short filmTranscript
00:00:00The farmhouse fire is the only light.
00:00:03Vesna Calloway turns her chair to face me, not the flames, and I see something in her
00:00:08face I have never seen before.
00:00:10Not composure, not precision, not the armor she has worn in every room I have watched
00:00:16her enter.
00:00:18She says, I'm going to say something, and I need you to let me finish it.
00:00:23Five years of rivalry, two women who measured themselves against each other and called it
00:00:28competition.
00:00:30She has been carrying something she has never said out loud.
00:00:33Tonight, that changes.
00:00:35If you want to hear uncensored, too hot for YouTube stories, check out my Patreon in the
00:00:41description, tell us where you are watching from, and subscribe.
00:00:45You need to understand what the scarf meant before you understand what finding her with
00:00:50it meant.
00:00:51My mother bought the scarf at a market in Edinburgh when I was 19, during the one trip we took
00:00:56abroad together, the one I had almost cancelled because of an exam I was convinced I could
00:01:02not afford to miss.
00:01:04She draped it around my neck on the platform at Waverly Station and said that she could tell
00:01:09from the color of the wool that it was made for serious people, and that she hoped I would
00:01:15be serious, but not too serious, because the world had more than enough serious people, and
00:01:21not nearly enough people who knew when to take the scarf off.
00:01:25She died three years later, four months before my novel came out, which was the specific timing
00:01:32of grief that I had been unable to write around, or write through, or write anything useful
00:01:38about for the six years since.
00:01:41I wore the scarf from September to March every year.
00:01:44I brought it inside from the hook by the door.
00:01:47I had not left it anywhere in six years.
00:01:50I left it in the Harrow reading room on the night of the December resident reading because
00:01:55Vesna Calloway read a passage from her work in progress that was the most precise and devastating
00:02:00thing I had heard in a room in years, and whatever process I normally used to manage myself in
00:02:07public had quietly collapsed while I was listening, and I had walked back to my room in the cold,
00:02:14without the scarf, without noticing, until I was already in bed.
00:02:18I told myself I would get it in the morning.
00:02:21In the morning, she had it.
00:02:24This is the story of how we got to that morning, and what came after.
00:02:28The Harrow Literary Residency operated out of a converted farmhouse in Vermont, 40 minutes
00:02:35from the nearest town large enough to have a bookstore.
00:02:38Eight writers per winter session.
00:02:41Three months, January through March, with an optional orientation period in December for
00:02:47the residents who wanted to arrive early.
00:02:49Two weeks of what the program director called the extraordinary gift of unstructured time,
00:02:55which turned out to mean a room, a writing desk, a view of fields gone white, and the productive
00:03:02silence that some people find in snow and others find terrifying.
00:03:07I arrived on a Tuesday in the second week of December.
00:03:10The farmhouse smelled of cedar and wood smoke, and the very faint institutional undercurrent
00:03:17of a building that had hosted other people's ambitions for thirty years.
00:03:21My room was on the second floor, east-facing, which meant the light was good in the mornings
00:03:26and gone by early afternoon, and the view was of the back meadow and the tree line beyond
00:03:31it.
00:03:32There was a writing desk and a reading chair and a small wood-burning stove that required
00:03:37more attention than it provided warmth, though over the following three months I became competent
00:03:43with it out of necessity.
00:03:44The desk faced the window, the window faced the snow.
00:03:48The program director was a man named Theodore Fenn.
00:03:52Theo, he insisted, always, within the first sentence of any introduction.
00:03:58He was sixty-two years old and had published one small perfect novel in 1994 and had been
00:04:05running residency programs since 1997, which he described as the best trade he had ever made.
00:04:11He had the grounded warmth of someone who had decided long ago that his purpose was to create
00:04:17conditions for other people's work rather than continue arguing for his own.
00:04:22And he performed this purpose with the quiet dedication that makes you want to do good
00:04:27work simply to justify his faith in the general project of it.
00:04:31He met me at the door, showed me my room, told me dinner was at seven and the reading room
00:04:37was always unlocked, and the coffee was always on, and that the only real rule of the harrow
00:04:44was that you did not tell other residents what to write.
00:04:48I said, I've heard the other residents are difficult.
00:04:52He said, I've heard you're difficult, and smiled in a way that made the comment feel like a compliment.
00:04:59I unpacked.
00:05:01I arranged my writing materials with the deliberateness of someone aware that the arrangement of materials
00:05:07is not the same thing as writing.
00:05:10I hung my coat on the hook by the door.
00:05:12I put the scarf on the hook beneath it, because the scarf always went on the hook beneath the
00:05:18coat.
00:05:19Always, without exception, in the way that small rituals calcify into the body after enough winters.
00:05:26Vesna arrived the next morning.
00:05:28I knew she was coming.
00:05:30I had known for three weeks, since the newsletter, a brief announcement that the winter session
00:05:36residents would include, among others, Vesna Calloway, whose second novel had recently received
00:05:42significant international recognition and whose third was understood to be in progress.
00:05:48I had read the newsletter in my apartment in the city, sitting at a writing desk where I had
00:05:54not produced anything useful in eleven months, and felt the specific internal contraction that
00:06:00arrives when you receive information you were hoping to avoid.
00:06:04I had gone anyway, because the alternative was to let the information stop me, and I had made a
00:06:10policy some time ago about not letting Vesna Calloway stop me from anything.
00:06:15The policy had cost more than I expected over the years.
00:06:19It had held.
00:06:20She arrived with a single large bag and a smaller leather satchel, and the unhurriedness of someone
00:06:26either entirely comfortable in new environments or disciplined enough to appear so.
00:06:32She wore dark trousers and a charcoal coat, and her hair pulled back in a way that was always
00:06:38neat, regardless of what the previous eight hours of travel had involved.
00:06:42She was thirty-four years old and looked it in the best possible way, like someone who
00:06:48had spent their thirties acquiring exactly the confidence they had lacked in their twenties
00:06:53and had no particular desire to be younger.
00:06:56I was in the kitchen when she came in.
00:06:59I was pouring coffee, and Theo was behind me explaining the coffee situation, and then I
00:07:05heard the front door, and turned, and she was there.
00:07:08She saw me at the same time I saw her.
00:07:12The silence that followed was the kind that happens between people who have unfinished business
00:07:16and both know it.
00:07:18Theo moved seamlessly into introductions, the way people who manage difficult rooms for a
00:07:23living develop the ability to cross one without dramatizing the crossing.
00:07:27He said,
00:07:29Vesna Calloway, Remy Ashford.
00:07:31I don't think you've met formally.
00:07:34We've met, Vesna said.
00:07:36Her voice was even and clear, and she used it the way she used everything.
00:07:41Precisely.
00:07:42Without excess.
00:07:44Briefly, I said.
00:07:45At the Pemberton Festival.
00:07:48She looked at me.
00:07:49The Pemberton Festival was where the panel had happened.
00:07:53We were both acknowledging that we were pretending the panel had been a meeting rather than what
00:07:57it had actually been, which was a public confrontation that neither of us had started and neither of
00:08:03us had backed down from.
00:08:05Good coffee, she said to Theo.
00:08:08She went to her room.
00:08:10The history between us was not complicated.
00:08:13It was public, which is a different thing from complicated.
00:08:17We had overlapped at the same graduate writing program for a semester.
00:08:21She was finishing her second year when I arrived as a first year.
00:08:25She had read my workshop story and written in the margin that it was raw, undisciplined,
00:08:31and curiously alive.
00:08:32The note had circulated.
00:08:34The way notes circulate in graduate programs.
00:08:38And I had received a second-hand account from a mutual friend who succeeded only in delivering
00:08:43the insult first and the partial compliment second.
00:08:47I had chosen to hear the last two words as the whole message.
00:08:51Four years later, my debut novel, The Weight of Small Things, was published to the kind of
00:08:57reception that disrupts the air in a literary community.
00:09:01The novel was about grief and geography, and the specific problem of loving a person whose
00:09:07death has made them impossible to argue with.
00:09:09I had not intended to write about my mother.
00:09:13I had written about my mother.
00:09:15Vesna's second novel came out the same season, to strong and serious critical reception that
00:09:21was nevertheless quieter than mine, which was not her fault, and not a reflection of the
00:09:27quality of the work, and was still, in the specific economy of literary prizes and cultural
00:09:33attention, a fact.
00:09:35We were both shortlisted for the Ardmore Fiction Prize.
00:09:39The Ardmore was the one that mattered to both of us.
00:09:43Its jury process, its history, the specific weight it carries in the literary world that
00:09:49other prizes imitate without replicating.
00:09:52Vesna won.
00:09:53I sat thirty tables back and smiled for the cameras, and felt the specific hollowness of an outcome you had
00:10:00told yourself you were prepared for, because you had been realistic about the competition, and discovered in the moment of
00:10:07the actual outcome that realistic and prepared are not the same condition.
00:10:40I did not begrudge her the prize.
00:10:47She made a comment, measured, elegant, entirely deniable, about emotional indulgence masquerading as vulnerability in contemporary literary fiction, and the
00:11:00way a certain kind
00:11:01of reader mistakes raw feeling for formal achievement, and the kind of reader mistakes raw feeling for formal achievement. She
00:11:05did not name names. The room knew whose work she was describing. I knew whose work she was describing. I
00:11:13waited until she finished.
00:11:14Then I said, with the equivalent care and deniability, that I had always been interested in the relationship between technical
00:11:22precision and authentic feeling, and whether in some bodies of work the achievement of the former comes at the cost
00:11:29of the latter, and whether the writer is aware of that cost, or whether the cost has been invisible to
00:11:35them.
00:11:36The moderator said something about the next question. The clip was posted by an audience member within an hour. The
00:11:43literary internet spent two weeks on it. We were described as feuding, which was not the right word, but was
00:11:50a word that people understood. We had not been in the same room since, until the harrow. The first week
00:11:58was managed with the professional civility of two adults who had decided to be adults about a situation neither of
00:12:04them had asked for.
00:12:04We were polite at dinner. We were brief, in shared spaces. We navigated the farmhouse with the unconscious territorial awareness
00:12:14of people who have identified each other's ranges and are willing to honor them as long as neither crosses first.
00:12:20The other residents arrived over the following days.
00:12:23Lila Moran came on Thursday, 24 years old, her first residency, her debut short story collection recently acquired by a
00:12:33small press.
00:12:34She had the quality of life. She had the quality of life. She had the quality of total aliveness that
00:12:37very young writers sometimes have before their awareness of the literary world has had time to make them careful.
00:12:42She said what she was thoughtful. She said what she was thinking in the order she was thinking it, which
00:12:46made her either the most guileless person at the dinner table or the most strategic, and I had not yet
00:12:53determined which.
00:12:53An older poet named Cassian Vare arrived Friday, 67 years old, eleven published collections. He had attended enough residencies to
00:13:05know where Theo kept the backup wine, and had helped himself to it before Theo thought to offer it.
00:13:10A novelist named Ingrid Park arrived Saturday, working on her fourth book, dry-humored, the kind of person who made
00:13:19you feel, by the quality of her attention during a conversation, that you were saying something more interesting than you
00:13:27had actually thought you were saying.
00:13:29Eight residents total. The group settled in over the weekend, people finding their rhythms and their distances.
00:13:36Vesna and I stayed on opposite ends of conversations, and managed the rest with the practiced performance of people who
00:13:44understood that a shared space required shared management.
00:13:48On the fifth night, there was a reading in the main room. An informal thing, Theo had suggested each resident
00:13:56share something from current work or old work, just to give the group a sense of voice.
00:14:01It was optional, and everyone attended. The main room was the largest in the farmhouse, with low ceilings and exposed
00:14:09beams and a fireplace that worked, which Cassian had identified within forty-eight hours of his arrival, and had therefore
00:14:17claimed the nearest chair for the duration.
00:14:20The room held us all comfortably. Theo had put out wine and his slightly odd crackers, and everyone settled into
00:14:28the arrangement that groups take on when seating is unassigned.
00:14:32I wore the scarf in from the hook by the door because the room was cold, despite the fire.
00:14:38I read first. I read from the stalled second novel. The first twenty pages. The ones I was relatively confident
00:14:46in. The pages that still felt like the book I had intended to write before the book stopped cooperating.
00:14:52They were good pages. They were good pages. I knew they were good because the room had the specific quality
00:14:58of attention I had learned to identify as genuine engagement rather than courtesy.
00:15:03When I finished, Lila said immediately, that opening sentence, is that yours specifically, because I need to know if it's
00:15:12available to steal.
00:15:13I said, it's the only line in twenty pages I'm not changing. She said, good. Don't change it.
00:15:22Ingrid said the structure of the first scene was doing something she needed to think about.
00:15:27Cassian said nothing, which from him was the best review I had received all year.
00:15:33Vesna was sitting across the room with her wine. She said,
00:15:37The restraint in the second paragraph is new. Whatever you changed about how you're doing that, keep it.
00:15:44I looked at her. It was the first unsolicited comment she had made about my work since the MFA note
00:15:50that I had never forgotten.
00:15:52I said,
00:15:55She looked at the fire. The moment passed.
00:15:59Three other people read.
00:16:00Then Vesna.
00:16:02What she read was from her work in progress.
00:16:04A scene set in a train station in Vienna.
00:16:07A woman waiting on a platform.
00:16:10The woman's interior rendered not through stated feeling but through objects.
00:16:15The way light fell on the platform tiles.
00:16:18The sound the announcement board made turning over destinations.
00:16:22The smell of cold air and diesel and something sweet from a cart she couldn't locate.
00:16:28And underneath those surfaces,
00:16:30through the accumulation of them,
00:16:32the specific texture of waiting for a person who might not come,
00:16:36rendered with such technical precision that the feeling was conveyed entirely without the feeling being named.
00:16:43I did not move for the seven minutes she read.
00:16:46When she finished,
00:16:47the room was quiet in the specific way that follows something true.
00:16:51Theo said softly,
00:16:53That's the book.
00:16:54Vesna said,
00:16:56It may be.
00:16:57I'm not sure yet.
00:16:58I said nothing because the thing I wanted to say,
00:17:02the honest version,
00:17:04the thing her seven minutes had produced in me,
00:17:07was not something I had any professional framework for saying in that room.
00:17:12And I had not yet found the non-professional framework.
00:17:16And until I did,
00:17:18silence was the only correct option.
00:17:21Cassian refilled the glasses.
00:17:23The reading ended.
00:17:25People drifted to the kitchen or their rooms.
00:17:28I stayed talking with Ingrid about structure.
00:17:31The thing Ingrid had said about the first scene required a real conversation,
00:17:36and we had it for an hour,
00:17:38standing at the kitchen island with the remnants of the wine.
00:17:42When I finally went back to the main room to retrieve my scarf from the arm of the chair where
00:17:47I had draped it,
00:17:48the room was empty.
00:17:50The scarf was not there.
00:17:51I checked the floor around the chair.
00:17:54I checked the side table and the mantelpiece,
00:17:57which made no logical sense but I was running out of places.
00:18:01I went to the kitchen where Theo was washing glasses and asked if he had seen it.
00:18:05He said the lost and found basket was by the front door and to check in the morning.
00:18:10The hook by the door held my coat.
00:18:13The hook beneath my coat was empty.
00:18:15I stood looking at the empty hook for a moment.
00:18:18Six years of not forgetting.
00:18:20One night.
00:18:22One reading.
00:18:23One seven-minute passage about waiting on a platform in Vienna,
00:18:26and the scarf was gone.
00:18:29I went to bed without it.
00:18:31I told myself it would turn up.
00:18:33I believed this less and less as the hour got later.
00:18:37At seven in the morning, I went back to the reading room.
00:18:40The door was already open.
00:18:42I stopped in the doorway because Vesna Calloway was standing at the window with her back to me, holding my
00:18:48scarf.
00:18:49You already know what she was doing with it.
00:18:52She heard me.
00:18:54She turned.
00:18:55The scarf came down from her face slowly.
00:18:58She did not attempt an explanation.
00:19:01She did not reach for one of the transitional gestures a person reaches for when they have been caught.
00:19:07The fold.
00:19:08The extending of the item.
00:19:10The look of harmless confusion.
00:19:12She lowered the scarf and held it in both hands and looked at me.
00:19:16And her face in that seven-in-the-morning light was not composed.
00:19:20That was the thing I noticed before anything else.
00:19:24Not the scarf.
00:19:25Not the situation.
00:19:27Not the five years of history arriving all at once in the specific light of a Vermont December.
00:19:33The thing I noticed was that Vesna Calloway's face was not composed.
00:19:37She said,
00:19:38I was going to put it on the hook.
00:19:40I said,
00:19:41The hook by my coat.
00:19:43She said,
00:19:44Yes.
00:19:45I said,
00:19:46You knew whose it was.
00:19:48A pause.
00:19:49The farmhouse machinery hummed around us.
00:19:53Somewhere, a pipe ticked in the cold.
00:19:55She said,
00:19:56It was on the chair you were sitting in.
00:19:58I said,
00:20:00And you took it home.
00:20:01She said nothing.
00:20:03I crossed the room and stood in front of her and held out my hand.
00:20:07She placed the scarf into my palm with both of hers.
00:20:10The transfer was deliberate and careful.
00:20:13Her hands were very steady.
00:20:15The wool was warm from being held.
00:20:18Thank you,
00:20:19I said.
00:20:20She stepped back.
00:20:22She was in what she had worn the night before,
00:20:25minus the coat.
00:20:26Dark trousers,
00:20:28a gray-green merino sweater that was the color of winter trees in their bare state.
00:20:33Her hair still up,
00:20:35but with the slightly loosened quality of hair that had been up for too many hours.
00:20:40She looked like she had slept badly,
00:20:42which I had never seen on her before.
00:20:44Vesna Calloway always looked like she had slept exactly as long as she intended to.
00:20:49I should have left it on the hook last night,
00:20:52she said.
00:20:53Yes,
00:20:54I said.
00:20:56She said.
00:20:57I'm sorry I didn't.
00:20:59She said it precisely.
00:21:00The precision was different from her usual precision.
00:21:04This was not the precision of someone who had selected the correct word from several options.
00:21:08This was the precision of someone saying the only word they had and knowing it was insufficient and saying it
00:21:15anyway.
00:21:15I wrapped the scarf around my neck.
00:21:18It was warm from her hands and smelled of wood smoke from the reading and, underneath that, something else.
00:21:25Something warm and specific that I registered without naming and filed with the other things I was not naming yet.
00:21:33I'll see you at breakfast, I said.
00:21:36She nodded once.
00:21:38I walked out.
00:21:39I did not tell anyone what I had found.
00:21:42Not Ingrid,
00:21:43whose sharp perceptive intelligence would have known exactly what to do with the information.
00:21:48Not Lila,
00:21:49who would have done something inadvertent with it by noon.
00:21:52Not Theo,
00:21:54who saw too much already and needed no additional material.
00:21:58I carried it myself and turned it carefully in the way you turned something,
00:22:02when you don't yet have a name for the shape of it.
00:22:05What I understood.
00:22:07She had not taken it by accident.
00:22:09A gray cashmere scarf draped on a chair in a room with eleven people is a person's scarf.
00:22:16And anyone in a room of people who know each other understands that.
00:22:20She had taken it deliberately or in a moment of not-quite-deliberateness
00:22:25that was its own form of deliberate,
00:22:28which was a more interesting version of the same fact.
00:22:31What I understood further,
00:22:33she had been standing with it lifted to her face at seven in the morning in an empty room
00:22:38before anyone else was awake.
00:22:40Not a person who picks something up carelessly keeps it overnight
00:22:44and holds it pressed against their nose in the gray light of morning.
00:22:47What I did not yet understand.
00:22:50What to do with what I understood.
00:22:53I went back to my room and the blinking cursor.
00:22:56I wrote four pages, which was more than I had written in eleven months.
00:23:01I did not examine this fact too carefully.
00:23:04The residency settled into its rhythm over the following days.
00:23:08Mornings in individual workspaces, a shared lunch that was optional and attended by most people most of the time,
00:23:15afternoons and evenings arranged by each person's preference.
00:23:20The farmhouse was large enough for real solitude when you needed it,
00:23:24and communal enough that the shared spaces had genuine warmth.
00:23:28Dinner conversations that ran long,
00:23:31the fireplace room becoming the natural gathering point after nine,
00:23:35the wine Cassian contributed from his apparent private negotiation with Theo's supply cabinet,
00:23:41becoming an increasingly valued part of the ecosystem.
00:23:45Vesna and I found ourselves,
00:23:47gradually and without apparent coordination,
00:23:50in the same spaces more often.
00:23:53I attributed this initially to the natural compression of eight people in a contained environment,
00:23:59one kitchen,
00:24:00one main room,
00:24:02one reading room,
00:24:03one set of snowshoe trails around the back meadow,
00:24:06and the tree line that Theo had marked on a laminated map in the mudroom.
00:24:11The math of shared space produces proximity,
00:24:14but the math of shared space did not explain the specific instances.
00:24:19It did not explain the afternoon I was in the reading room writing longhand at the large table,
00:24:24and Vesna came in and chose the chair nearest the window, six feet away,
00:24:29and opened her laptop,
00:24:31and we worked in parallel for three hours without speaking.
00:24:35There were other chairs in that room.
00:24:37There was a smaller reading alcove off the main corridor she had used on three previous afternoons.
00:24:43She chose the chair six feet from mine,
00:24:45and neither of us commented on the arrangement.
00:24:48It did not explain the morning she appeared at the kitchen table while I was eating breakfast alone
00:24:53and made her coffee and sat across from me instead of at the island.
00:24:58She had her notebook.
00:24:59I had mine.
00:25:01We did not talk about writing, which was a different conversation from talking about writing.
00:25:06She asked me, without preamble, whether I thought the snow had peaked or was still building.
00:25:13I said I didn't know.
00:25:15I'd been too focused on the page to track the window properly.
00:25:19She said she found snow clarifying for the first two weeks,
00:25:22and then maddening after that,
00:25:24and she was currently at day 11.
00:25:27I said I found it clarifying indefinitely.
00:25:31She received this with the expression she had when someone said something she had not expected.
00:25:36Not surprise.
00:25:38She did not perform surprise.
00:25:40A brief recalibration, visible only at the edges.
00:25:44We talked for 20 minutes.
00:25:46We covered the specific usefulness of Vermont versus upstate New York for winter writing.
00:25:52She had been to both.
00:25:54I had not.
00:25:55We covered the question of whether the reading she had given four nights ago
00:25:59had revealed too much about the book's central problem,
00:26:03and she thought, yes, and I thought, no, and I told her why,
00:26:08and she listened with the full, considered attention she gave to things she was actually thinking about.
00:26:15We covered the coffee situation at the farmhouse, about which we had compatible opinions.
00:26:21It was the most normal 20 minutes we had spent together in the entire history of knowing each other.
00:26:28When her coffee was finished, she went to her workspace without looking back.
00:26:32I sat with my notebook and thought about the word clarifying and what she had meant by it.
00:26:38Then I stopped thinking about it and wrote five more pages.
00:26:41The Ardmore Prize long-listed three books from our resident cohort in the third week of December.
00:26:48My second novel was not among them because my second novel was not finished.
00:26:53Vesna's third novel was not among them because Vesna's third novel was not finished either.
00:26:58The long-listed books were Ingrid's fourth novel, which everyone who had read it agreed deserved every recognition it received,
00:27:07and a debut novel from one of the later arriving residents who had been stunned into a beautiful sort of
00:27:13stillness by the news.
00:27:15What this meant, in the specific economy of the Harrow farmhouse, was that the Ardmore was suddenly in the room,
00:27:21sitting at the dinner table alongside the wine and the slightly odd crackers, taking up the ambient air.
00:27:29I had been shortlisted for the Ardmore once, five years ago.
00:27:34I had sat thirty tables back and smiled for the cameras while Vesna won it.
00:27:39We had not discussed it here, at the residency, or anywhere in the years since,
00:27:45and the specific shape of the not discussing it had its own weight that both of us carried and neither
00:27:51of us sat down.
00:27:52The night the long-list announcement broke, Ingrid had a celebration at dinner that was genuine and warm and deserved.
00:28:00Theo opened the good wine.
00:28:02The atmosphere was easy and generous.
00:28:05I was happy for Ingrid.
00:28:07That was true and uncomplicated.
00:28:11Vesna was across the table.
00:28:13She raised her glass to Ingrid and said something specific and generous about the book that Ingrid received with visible
00:28:19gratitude.
00:28:20Then she looked at me briefly, across the candlelight.
00:28:24I looked back.
00:28:26She looked away first.
00:28:27She always looked away first when my eyes found her,
00:28:31which I had catalogued without meaning to,
00:28:34and which told me something I kept filing in the not-yet-named folder.
00:28:39After dinner, I was doing my dish in the kitchen when Lila appeared at my elbow.
00:28:44She said,
00:28:45Can I ask you something?
00:28:47Sure, I said.
00:28:49She said,
00:28:50Is there something going on with you and Vesna Calloway?
00:28:53The dish I was washing required careful attention suddenly.
00:28:57We have a history, I said.
00:28:59We've been on the same awards circuit.
00:29:02The literary world is small, Lila said.
00:29:05I know about the Pemberton panel.
00:29:07I watched the clip.
00:29:09Everyone had watched the clip.
00:29:11It was the thing people knew us for when they knew us together.
00:29:15I said,
00:29:16Then you know as much as there is to know.
00:29:19She was quiet for a moment.
00:29:21She said,
00:29:22I watched it because someone linked it in a newsletter.
00:29:26But also?
00:29:27When you were reading the other night?
00:29:29She watched you the whole time.
00:29:32Not the way you watch when you're listening.
00:29:34The other way.
00:29:35I continued washing the dish.
00:29:38The other way, I said.
00:29:40You know what I mean?
00:29:41Lila said,
00:29:43and went to bed.
00:29:44I knew what she meant.
00:29:45Knowing something and having the appropriate framework for responding to it are different
00:29:50problems, and the second problem was the one I was working on.
00:29:54The mode of our rivalry had always been public.
00:29:58The Pemberton panel.
00:30:00The awards circuit.
00:30:01The reviews that mentioned us in the same sentence,
00:30:05and let the grammar of the sentence carry the implied comparison.
00:30:08The mode of whatever was happening at the Harrow was not public.
00:30:12It was entirely private.
00:30:15It was happening in the reading room before anyone was awake,
00:30:18and over morning coffee,
00:30:20and in three hours of parallel silence in adjacent chairs.
00:30:25It was happening in a gray cashmere scarf that had been warm from being held.
00:30:30I was not afraid of it.
00:30:32I had spent three years in my twenties being afraid of things I wanted,
00:30:36and had concluded that the fear was the least interesting part of the experience.
00:30:42What I was genuinely uncertain about was the specific structural problem.
00:30:46Two people with a public history that included the word rival discovering something different
00:30:52in private, and whether the private thing could survive contact with the public history
00:30:57once the residency ended.
00:30:59The Ardmore shortlist would come in March.
00:31:02The full literary world would be watching both of us in the ways it always watched both of us.
00:31:08Whatever the Harrow was becoming would have to survive contact with the world
00:31:12that already had a story about what we were to each other.
00:31:16I was not sure it could.
00:31:18On the 19th of December, five days after the longlist announcement,
00:31:23Theo brought in a visiting editor from the city.
00:31:26Her name was Kit Arden.
00:31:27She was forty years old, worked at one of the most prestigious literary presses in the country,
00:31:34and came to the Harrow every December as part of a standing arrangement that Theo described
00:31:39as an annual gift to the residency, and that Kit described, when asked,
00:31:44as three days she spent reading and eating well,
00:31:47and occasionally saying useful things to writers who were ready to hear them.
00:31:52She was sharp in the specific way of people who have spent twenty years being trusted
00:31:56with other people's most important work and have not broken that trust.
00:32:01She made the air in a room feel more legible.
00:32:04She made Theo happy in the way that old friends make each other happy,
00:32:08with the easy shorthand of shared history.
00:32:12She made the other residents nervous in the way visiting editors make writers nervous,
00:32:16which was the correct response.
00:32:18She arrived in time for dinner.
00:32:21She sat between Theo and Ingrid and talked about the Ardmore longlist and Ingrid's book
00:32:26in the way editors talk about books.
00:32:29Not what it was about, but what it was doing.
00:32:32What it had managed that most books attempting the same territory had not.
00:32:37Vesna, sitting across the table, listened with the concentrated attention she brought to things
00:32:43that genuinely interested her, and said, twice, something precise that shifted the direction
00:32:49of the conversation.
00:32:52Kit looked at her both times.
00:32:54The second time, I noticed, was the way you look at something you have not yet decided what
00:32:59to do about.
00:33:01After dinner, in the main room, I ended up standing near Kit by the fire while Theo was
00:33:06refilling glasses.
00:33:08She asked what I was working on.
00:33:10I gave her the short version of the second novel, the one I used in professional contexts,
00:33:15where I was not going to explain eleven months of cursor blinking.
00:33:20She said,
00:33:21I heard the first twenty pages when Theo let me sit in on the reading.
00:33:25It's honest work.
00:33:27The kind that requires you to be inside it.
00:33:29I said,
00:33:31I've been trying to stay inside it.
00:33:32She said,
00:33:34I can tell.
00:33:35It shows differently than the debut.
00:33:38More patient.
00:33:39I don't mean that critically.
00:33:41I said,
00:33:42I know.
00:33:43I'm taking it as the good version of patient.
00:33:46She said,
00:33:47Who else is reading it while you're drafting?
00:33:50I said,
00:33:51No one yet.
00:33:52Too early.
00:33:53She said,
00:33:55I'd be careful with that instinct.
00:33:57Sometimes what you're protecting the work from is exactly what it needs.
00:34:02The right reader at the right stage of a draft changes what's possible in the draft.
00:34:06I thought about Vesna's comment during the first reading.
00:34:10The restraint in the second paragraph is new.
00:34:13Whatever you changed about how you're doing that,
00:34:16Keep it.
00:34:17Specific.
00:34:18Said,
00:34:19Without being asked.
00:34:21Said the way you say something when you have been watching more closely than you were supposed to be watching.
00:34:27I thought about the scarf.
00:34:29I said,
00:34:30I'll think about that.
00:34:31Kit looked at me with the expression of someone who has heard a thing and decided not to say the
00:34:36thought it produced.
00:34:37She turned toward the fire.
00:34:40Vesna was on the other side of the room with Ingrid, their voices too low to hear.
00:34:45I watched her profile for one moment.
00:34:48The clean line of jaw, the dark of her hair against the pale sweater.
00:34:53The way she held her wine with both hands when she was genuinely at ease, rather than performing ease.
00:34:59And then, I looked away.
00:35:02The second reading, the formal one arranged for Kit's visit, was the next evening.
00:35:08Vesna read from the Vienna piece again, but further in,
00:35:12a second scene that followed the first woman onto the train,
00:35:15into a compartment with a stranger described not by appearance, but by the quality of her stillness,
00:35:21the specific geometry of how she occupied a seat in a train,
00:35:26as if the seat had been built with her dimensions in mind.
00:35:30The conversation between the two women was half stated and half inferred.
00:35:35Everything that mattered living in the space between what was said and what was not said.
00:35:40And I had the specific sensation that sometimes happens when you read something that articulates
00:35:46a problem you have been inside without knowing it was a problem.
00:35:49I was sitting four chairs from Vesna during the reading,
00:35:53close enough that when she looked up from the page to let a sentence land,
00:35:58she was looking in my direction.
00:36:00Several times across those seven minutes, she looked up,
00:36:03and her gaze crossed mine, briefly, before moving to the rest of the room.
00:36:08By the third time, I was no longer persuaded the trajectory was coincidental.
00:36:14When she finished, Kit said, simply,
00:36:17That's a book.
00:36:32The room had the quiet that follows when the two things are recognized together.
00:36:39I said,
00:36:41Agreed?
00:36:42Vesna looked at me.
00:36:44Not briefly.
00:36:45A full second.
00:36:46Two seconds.
00:36:48I held her gaze.
00:36:49I was not going to look away first.
00:36:52She looked at Kit.
00:36:54She said,
00:36:57The reading ended.
00:36:58People dispersed toward the kitchen or the fireplace chairs.
00:37:03I stayed near the fire until the room thinned and then stood to go.
00:37:07Checked the arm of the chair for the scarf out of the habit I had developed since the morning in
00:37:11the reading room.
00:37:13Found it there.
00:37:14Took it with me.
00:37:15I was crossing the main room toward the hallway when Vesna appeared at my left shoulder.
00:37:20She said,
00:37:22The scarf is warm enough for the hall temperatures, but not for the meadow path if you're going the outside
00:37:27way.
00:37:28I stopped.
00:37:29I turned and looked at her.
00:37:31I'm going directly to my room.
00:37:34I said.
00:37:35She said,
00:37:37Good.
00:37:38Then she walked to the staircase and went up to her floor.
00:37:41I stood in the hallway and looked at the door she had just gone through.
00:37:45She had stopped to tell me the scarf was warm enough for interior temperatures.
00:37:49At 10.30 at night.
00:37:51In a farmhouse where there was no exterior route between the reading room and my bedroom.
00:37:57She had been watching the scarf.
00:37:59I went to my room and sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the hook by the
00:38:03door
00:38:04and thought with careful attention about what it meant to carry the sustained,
00:38:09specific awareness of someone who had been your rival for five years
00:38:13and to find that awareness existing in places she had not intended to show it to you.
00:38:19I thought about her face in the reading room at 7 in the morning.
00:38:23Eyes closed.
00:38:24The scarf lifted.
00:38:26The gray winter light doing something honest to the line of her shoulders.
00:38:30The way the composure she brought to every room had been entirely absent from that one.
00:38:35I thought.
00:38:37You were not the only one awake that morning.
00:38:40And then.
00:38:41I am not ready to say that out loud.
00:38:44Not yet.
00:38:45Not here.
00:38:46Not to her.
00:38:48Not to Lila.
00:38:49Not to the part of myself that had been cataloging her moments since December and knew exactly what the catalog
00:38:55was adding up to.
00:38:56What I was going to do was take my time.
00:38:58Because we had three months.
00:39:01Because the thing between rivals that turns into something else is the most fragile architecture there is, built entirely from
00:39:09the decision not to destroy it before it is ready to hold weight.
00:39:13Because I had learned, in six winters of wearing a scarf that mattered more than it had any right to,
00:39:20that patience is not the absence of wanting.
00:39:23Patience is the decision to want the right thing in the right order.
00:39:28I hung the scarf on the hook beneath my coat.
00:39:30I went to the window and looked at the snow and the dark meadow and the tree line beyond it.
00:39:36And the last thing I thought before I turned off the light was this.
00:39:41Vesna Calloway stood in a room alone at seven in the morning with her eyes closed and her face unguarded,
00:39:47holding the one thing I had not meant to leave behind.
00:39:50And whatever that meant, it was the most honest thing I had seen her do in five years of watching
00:39:56her.
00:39:56I woke earlier than usual the next morning.
00:40:00Not because anything had changed in the farmhouse or outside the window, where the snow was doing what snow did
00:40:06in Vermont in December, which was accumulate without consulting anyone about whether the timing was convenient.
00:40:12I woke early because the last thought I had before sleep had been about patience and wanting things in the
00:40:19right order, and the first thought I had upon waking was that I was not as patient as I had
00:40:25told myself.
00:40:25I lay in the dark for a while, and examined this honestly.
00:40:30Remy Ashford, I said to the ceiling, you have been cataloging a woman's millimeter since the first of December and
00:40:38telling yourself it was intellectual interest.
00:40:40The ceiling did not respond.
00:40:43The ceiling did not need to.
00:40:45I got up, dressed, went downstairs before anyone else was moving, and made coffee in the farmhouse kitchen in the
00:40:54particular companionable silence of an empty kitchen in winter, which is one of the better kinds of silence available to
00:41:01people who work alone.
00:41:02I was still there, second cup, notebook open to a page that I had been looking at rather than writing
00:41:09in, when Vesna came in at quarter to eight.
00:41:12She stopped when she saw me, not because she was surprised, I thought, but because the specific version of this
00:41:19room that she had been expecting, empty, impersonal, pre-populated only with the coffee situation, had been replaced by a
00:41:28version that included me, and she was recalibrating.
00:41:32She said, good morning.
00:41:34I said, good morning.
00:41:37She went to the coffee.
00:41:39She made it the way she made it every morning, which I knew because I had been here most mornings
00:41:44when she came in and had noted, without particular intention, the way she did things.
00:41:50Two minutes, standing very still while it brewed.
00:41:53The mug she chose from the rack, which was always the same one.
00:41:57A plain white one with a slightly chipped handle that was by objective criteria the least interesting mug in the
00:42:04cabinet, and which she selected every time with the certainty of someone who had already decided.
00:42:11She sat at the table, not at the island, across from me, she said, did you sleep, I said, eventually,
00:42:20she wrapped both hands around the chipped mug and looked at her coffee for a moment.
00:42:24She said, kid is leaving today.
00:42:27I know, I said, after lunch.
00:42:30A pause.
00:42:32A pause.
00:42:32The farmhouse ticked around us in the cold, the way old buildings tick when the temperature is doing something.
00:42:39She said, she told me, last night after the reading, that the Vienna book is the one she wants.
00:42:45When it's ready.
00:42:47When it's ready.
00:42:48I looked at her.
00:42:49In the gray morning light, in civilian clothes, with the composure doing its usual work at the surface and the
00:42:56other thing doing its own work underneath it, she looked like a person who had received news she had wanted
00:43:02and was being careful about how much of wanting she let show.
00:43:06I said, she was right about it.
00:43:09Vesna said, you don't have to say that.
00:43:12I said, I know I don't have to.
00:43:15She looked at me, something in the way she absorbed the words, not redirecting, not qualifying, just taking them in
00:43:24with a directness that was different from her usual responses.
00:43:27She said, thank you.
00:43:30We drank our coffee in the particular silence that exists between people who are not strangers anymore, but have not
00:43:37yet agreed on what they are instead.
00:43:39Kit Arden left after lunch as expected.
00:43:42She said goodbye to each resident in the way she had clearly been saying goodbye to writers at residencies for
00:43:48years.
00:43:49Specific, warm, with a comment about the work that was precise enough to be useful and brief enough not to
00:43:57be precious.
00:43:58She hugged Theo.
00:44:00She shook hands with everyone else.
00:44:02When she came to me, she said, the patience in that opening is right, keep trusting it.
00:44:09I said, I will.
00:44:11She moved on to Vesna.
00:44:12I did not hear what she said to Vesna, but I watched Vesna's face while she received it, and what
00:44:19I saw was the expression of someone absorbing something they had needed to hear, said plainly.
00:44:24At the door, with her coat on, and her bag over one shoulder, Kit stopped and looked back at the
00:44:30room in the unhurried way of someone saying goodbye to a place they like and will return to.
00:44:35Her gaze moved across the group and landed briefly on me, then on Vesna, then on me again.
00:44:42She said, you know, most of the work that matters gets done between the people who are paying the most
00:44:49attention to each other.
00:44:51Whatever you two are in the middle of, don't waste it.
00:44:55Then she left.
00:44:57The room was quiet for a moment.
00:45:00Lila, who was standing next to me, did not look at me.
00:45:04She was being very deliberate about not looking at me, which was itself a form of looking.
00:45:11Vesna, across the room, had turned toward the window.
00:45:15Theo cleared his throat and mentioned that dinner would be at seven, and that the trail crew had cleared the
00:45:20back meadow loop if anyone wanted snowshoes this afternoon.
00:45:24The group dispersed.
00:45:26I stood at the window in the farmhouse's main room for a moment after everyone had gone, looking at the
00:45:32place in the doorframe where Kit had stood, and thought about the phrase whatever you two are in the middle
00:45:37of.
00:45:37She had been here for three days.
00:45:40She had spent approximately four hours in rooms where Vesna and I were both present, and she had walked out
00:45:46of the building and said that plainly, without apology, as the last thing she chose to leave in the air.
00:45:52I thought about what you have to be able to see in a room to say something like that on
00:45:57your way out of it.
00:45:58I thought about what Vesna and I had apparently been doing that was visible enough for a woman with forty
00:46:04years of watching writers work to identify in three days.
00:46:08I went snowshoeing alone, which is what I did when I needed to think without the particular noise of other
00:46:15people's proximity.
00:46:16The back meadow loop took forty-five minutes at a reasonable pace.
00:46:20The snow was deep and recent, and the sky was the specific white gray of a Vermont afternoon in December,
00:46:27low and even, the kind of sky that felt less like weather and more like a lid on the world.
00:46:34I was coming back around the far end of the meadow near the tree line when I heard the specific
00:46:40sound of snowshoes on packed snow behind me and turned.
00:46:45Vesna was about thirty meters back, following the same trail.
00:46:49She had clearly come out a while after I had, which meant she had either been watching the meadow from
00:46:55the farmhouse windows or had gone out for her own reasons and happened to be on the same loop.
00:47:01Both possibilities told me something.
00:47:03I did not examine which.
00:47:05She caught up to me at a walking pace.
00:47:07We walked the last quarter of the loop in parallel, close enough to speak without raising voices, the cold air
00:47:14making everything visible in small clouds when we exhaled.
00:47:18She said,
00:47:19I've been thinking about what Kit said.
00:47:22I said,
00:47:23The part about not wasting it?
00:47:25She glanced at me.
00:47:27Yes.
00:47:28I said,
00:47:29What conclusion did you come to?
00:47:31She was quiet for a moment, her eyes on the trail.
00:47:35She said,
00:47:36That she was accurate.
00:47:37And that I haven't decided what to do with accurate.
00:47:41I said,
00:47:42You could try saying the accurate thing out loud.
00:47:46She said,
00:47:47I've been trying to determine whether saying it out loud makes it harder to manage or easier.
00:47:52I said,
00:47:54Has management been going well?
00:47:56A pause.
00:47:57The tree line was very still around us.
00:48:00The snow absorbed sound the way only large amounts of snow can, and the world had a particular contained intimacy
00:48:07in the quiet it produced.
00:48:09She said,
00:48:10No.
00:48:11I said,
00:48:13Then I'll ask you again in a few days.
00:48:15She looked at me sidelong.
00:48:17The corner of her mouth moved.
00:48:20Half a millimeter.
00:48:21We walked the rest of the loop without speaking.
00:48:25At the mudroom door we took off the snowshoes and hung them on the rack, and went inside without ceremony,
00:48:31and the space between us in the narrow mudroom hallway was the kind of space that is exactly as wide
00:48:37as it needs to be, and not one inch wider.
00:48:40I thought, briefly and very clearly, about closing that inch.
00:48:45I did not.
00:48:47The January residents arrived in the first week of the new year, filling in the four remaining spots with the
00:48:53particular energy of people who had not yet had three weeks to settle into the farmhouse's rhythms.
00:48:59The group expanded and reshuffled in the way groups do when new members arrive, and the existing equilibrium adjusts.
00:49:07The December residents maintained a quiet coherence amid the expansion.
00:49:12We had three weeks of shared rhythm on the new people, and it showed in the ease of our interactions,
00:49:18the shorthand we had built, the way Cassian continued his private negotiation with the wine cabinet without anyone feeling the
00:49:26need to comment on it.
00:49:27Among the January arrivals was a woman named Sable Fitch.
00:49:32She was thirty-seven, a literary journalist who had taken a leave from her publication to finish a book of
00:49:38essays.
00:49:39She was warm and observant, and within forty-eight hours of her arrival had clearly cataloged the existing interpersonal dynamics
00:49:47of the cohort with the professional attention of someone who had spent fifteen years in rooms where dynamics mattered.
00:49:55She was not a villain.
00:49:56She was simply a very perceptive journalist who had a habit she could not entirely leave at home.
00:50:03On her third day, at dinner, she said, to the table in general, with the innocence of someone who genuinely
00:50:09might not have known the territory, that she had been re-reading both.
00:50:13The weight of small things and Vesna's novel Clearwater that week, in preparation for a piece she had deferred from
00:50:21the previous year, a joint profile of two voices in contemporary literary fiction who represented, in her editor's framing, a
00:50:30generational conversation about form and feeling.
00:50:33She set it to the table.
00:50:35The table absorbed it with the slightly charged care of people who knew enough to understand what had just arrived
00:50:42in the room.
00:50:43Vesna, across from me, did not look at me.
00:50:46Her posture did not change.
00:50:48She set her fork down with the precision of someone managing the small actions of a meal very carefully.
00:50:54I said, that sounds like your editor found the Pemberton clip.
00:50:59Sable said, honestly, he definitely found the Pemberton clip.
00:51:04But I told him I thought the clip was the least interesting version of the conversation, and I'd rather do
00:51:10the piece about the work.
00:51:11She looked between us.
00:51:14She said, I realize this is possibly uncomfortable, given you're both here.
00:51:19I should have said something sooner.
00:51:21Theo said, mildly.
00:51:24Sable, the rule of the harrow is that you don't tell other residents what to write.
00:51:29It says nothing about what you write about the residents.
00:51:33I said, I'd want to read the piece before it publishes.
00:51:37Vesna said, same.
00:51:39Sable said, of course.
00:51:41We finished dinner.
00:51:43The conversation moved elsewhere.
00:51:45Cassian made a point about the new wine he had located that redirected everyone's attention, which I suspected was deliberate
00:51:52and was grateful for.
00:51:55Afterward, in the kitchen, Vesna appeared at my shoulder.
00:51:58She said, it doesn't change anything.
00:52:01I said, I know.
00:52:04She said, the piece will frame us as a rivalry.
00:52:07Whatever the journalist's intentions, that's the piece her editor will publish.
00:52:12I said, it's been the frame for five years.
00:52:16One more piece won't move it.
00:52:18She looked at me.
00:52:19In the kitchen light, her eyes had the quality I had been cataloging since December.
00:52:24The careful, complete attention of someone who is letting you see more than they usually let anyone see.
00:52:31She said, I'd like to change the frame.
00:52:34I said, then, change it.
00:52:37A pause.
00:52:39The kitchen sounds moved around us.
00:52:41Plates being cleared.
00:52:43The dishwasher cycling.
00:52:45Leila and Ingrid talking about something in the main room.
00:52:48She said, that requires saying the accurate thing out loud.
00:52:53I looked at her.
00:52:55I thought, you could let her take the time she needs.
00:52:58You could be patient.
00:53:00You could continue to catalog and wait.
00:53:03And then I thought, Kit Arden stood in that door frame and said, don't waste it.
00:53:07And she has been in this industry long enough to mean it as a specific instruction.
00:53:12I said, I'm going to be in the reading room tonight.
00:53:15After eleven.
00:53:17When the others have gone to bed.
00:53:19Not because I expect anything.
00:53:21But because I would like to have a real conversation.
00:53:24And real conversations are easier when the building has gone quiet.
00:53:28She held my gaze.
00:53:30I said, you don't have to come.
00:53:33I left the kitchen.
00:53:34She came at eleven fifteen.
00:53:36The reading room was lit by the single lamp at the far table.
00:53:40The one I used when I was writing late and did not want the overhead.
00:53:44She came in without knocking.
00:53:46The way people enter rooms they have been given permission to enter.
00:53:50And sat in the chair that had become, over the preceding weeks, functionally hers.
00:53:56The one nearest the window.
00:53:58The one she had chosen on the afternoon we had worked three hours in parallel silence.
00:54:04She sat with her hands in her lap and the grey-green sweater and her hair still up.
00:54:09And the expression she had in private.
00:54:12The one that was not the public composure and not the reading room at seven in the morning but something
00:54:17in between.
00:54:18I said, tell me something true.
00:54:21She said, that is an unfair place to start.
00:54:24I said, I know.
00:54:27Tell me anyway.
00:54:28She looked at the window.
00:54:30The snow was moving again.
00:54:32Slow and indifferent past the glass.
00:54:34She said, I have been thinking about your work since the MFA.
00:54:39Not the note I wrote.
00:54:41Since before the note.
00:54:43Since the first workshop story which was raw and undisciplined and curiously alive and which
00:54:49I have thought about more than is reasonable for a story I read once in a room full of other
00:54:55people's work.
00:54:56I said, what did you write in the margin?
00:54:59She said, what I said.
00:55:02I said, you wrote raw, undisciplined and curiously alive.
00:55:07She said, yes.
00:55:09I said, which of those three were you trying to say?
00:55:13She looked at me.
00:55:15The lamp was doing something useful to her face.
00:55:18Taking the precision of it and making the precision feel like honesty rather than control.
00:55:24She said, the last one.
00:55:26I absorbed that.
00:55:28She said, the novel was the same.
00:55:31Your debut novel.
00:55:33I read it in two nights and then I read it again because the second read is the one where
00:55:39you understand what the first read did to you and the second read was worse.
00:55:44I mean that as the highest possible thing.
00:55:47It was the most alive book I read that year.
00:55:50The Ardmore was correctly awarded.
00:55:53You understand why I'm saying that.
00:55:55I said, because you're telling me the prize wasn't about the work.
00:55:59She said, the prize was entirely about the work.
00:56:03Both works.
00:56:04That's what made it difficult.
00:56:06I was not more deserving.
00:56:08I was fortunate that the jury's particular sensibility aligned with mine that year.
00:56:13That is the honest accounting of it.
00:56:16Five years, I said.
00:56:18She said, yes.
00:56:20Five years of the Pemberton frame, I said.
00:56:23Of being the other name in the same sentence.
00:56:26Of the clip that people use to describe what we are.
00:56:30She said, I know.
00:56:32I said, was the panel comment deliberate?
00:56:36A pause.
00:56:37The snow moved past the window.
00:56:40She said, the comment was directed.
00:56:43I want to be honest about that.
00:56:45I was, I was doing the thing I do when something is too close to me and I don't know
00:56:51how to manage the proximity.
00:56:52I use precision as distance.
00:56:55It's a poor way to operate and it cost you something public, and I have not found the right moment
00:57:01to account for it until now.
00:57:03I looked at her for a long time.
00:57:05I said, say what you mean by too close.
00:57:08She said, I mean that your work is the thing in contemporary fiction that challenges me most specifically, which is
00:57:16its own kind of intimacy, and I didn't know how to be in a room with you and that proximity
00:57:21simultaneously, and so I reached for what I reach for, which is control dressed as criticism.
00:57:28I said, and the scarf?
00:57:31She looked at her hands, then back at me.
00:57:34She said, the scarf was not a decision.
00:57:37I want you to understand that.
00:57:39I was tidying the chair, or I told myself I was tidying the chair, and I picked it up, and
00:57:46I was going to put it on the hook.
00:57:48And then I was standing at the window and the room was empty and you weren't there yet, and I
00:57:53was holding the thing that smells like you specifically, and I…
00:57:57She stopped.
00:57:59I said, and?
00:58:01She said, and I stopped making decisions for a moment, which is not something I do often or well.
00:58:08The room was very quiet.
00:58:10The lamp hummed.
00:58:12Outside, the snow.
00:58:13I said, what does it smell like?
00:58:17She looked at me.
00:58:18I said, you were standing at the window with your eyes closed.
00:58:22Holding it.
00:58:23She said, wood smoke.
00:58:26And something underneath the wood smoke that is specific to you, and that I don't have a word for.
00:58:31The way a library smells when someone is working in it and living in it at the same time.
00:58:36I let that sit in the room between us for a moment.
00:58:39The specific thing she had said was the most personal thing she had said to me in five years of
00:58:44being in each other's professional orbit, and she had said it without flinching.
00:58:49I said, the Pemberton comment.
00:58:52She said, yes.
00:58:54I said, I'm going to need that to be the last time you use precision as a weapon when the
00:58:59real problem is proximity.
00:59:01She said, that's a fair condition.
00:59:03I said, good.
00:59:06Then we're clear.
00:59:07She looked at me.
00:59:09Something in her face moved from careful to open in the specific increment that happens when a person has been
00:59:15holding something heavy for a long time and has finally put it down.
00:59:19She said, is there more that you need?
00:59:22I said, not tonight.
00:59:24She nodded.
00:59:26She stood, smoothed the sweater, tucked a loose strand of hair without looking away from me.
00:59:32She said, I'll see you at breakfast.
00:59:35I said, I'll be there.
00:59:38She crossed to the door.
00:59:40At the threshold she stopped, and without turning around she said, I'm glad you were in the doorway.
00:59:47Then she went to her room.
00:59:49I sat in the reading room for a long time after she left, with the lamp and the snow and
00:59:55the particular silence of a conversation that had shifted the weight of several years at once.
01:00:00I was not sure what we were now.
01:00:03I was sure, for the first time in five years of being in the same literary world as Vesna Calloway,
01:00:10that the not knowing was something I wanted rather than something I was managing.
01:00:14That felt like the correct order of things.
01:00:18January settled around us.
01:00:20The Harrow cohort found its expanded shape.
01:00:23The work deepened the way it does when people have been present in the same space long enough to stop
01:00:28performing productivity and start having it.
01:00:31Mornings were serious.
01:00:33Afternoons were variable.
01:00:35Evenings had the ease of a group that had decided to enjoy being contained together.
01:00:41Vesna and I were not the same as we had been in December.
01:00:43We were not dramatically different.
01:00:46We were different in the way of things that have had one important thing moved out of the space between
01:00:51them.
01:00:52The air is the same.
01:00:54The dimensions are the same.
01:00:56But the particular obstruction that was always making it necessary to navigate around something is gone.
01:01:02And the navigation becomes movement instead.
01:01:06We still worked in parallel in the reading room, but the silence had changed quality.
01:01:11It was not managed silence anymore.
01:01:13It was comfortable silence, which is the harder kind to produce, and the better kind to be inside.
01:01:20We talked more freely.
01:01:22About the work?
01:01:24Yes.
01:01:25Always the work.
01:01:27Vesna was the most useful reader of my second novel that I had found.
01:01:32Not because she was soft with it, but because she was precise.
01:01:36And her precision knew the difference between a structural problem and a problem of nerve.
01:01:41And she was always honest about which one I was dealing with.
01:01:45I was useful to her in return.
01:01:48The Vienna book needed a reader who understood what it was attempting.
01:01:52And I did.
01:01:53I had understood it since the first seven minutes in the reading room in December.
01:01:58We talked about other things, too.
01:02:00Her childhood in a city she had left at seventeen, and returned to once at thirty and not since.
01:02:07My mother, which I did not often talk about with anyone, but which I found I could talk about with
01:02:13Vesna because she did not perform sympathy.
01:02:16She listened and asked the specific follow-up questions of someone who wanted to understand the actual shape of a
01:02:22thing rather than the emotional outline of it.
01:02:25The scarf was not mentioned directly after that night.
01:02:29It existed in the space between us as a fact we had both now acknowledged, and acknowledgement turned out to
01:02:35be enough.
01:02:37I wore the scarf in from the hook every morning.
01:02:40She noticed it in the way she noticed everything about me, which I had by now stopped pretending not to
01:02:46know, and that noticing existed comfortably between us without requiring action.
01:02:51Something had shifted, and something else had not shifted yet.
01:02:56And we both knew the difference, and were not, for now, rushing the second thing.
01:03:03Lila, who was the most accurate barometer of social dynamics in any room she occupied, said to me at breakfast
01:03:10one Thursday morning, without preamble,
01:03:12that whatever had happened between me and Vesna was clearly a significant improvement on what had been happening before,
01:03:19and that she was reserving the right to say she had known from the second week that it was going
01:03:24to end up somewhere interesting.
01:03:26I said,
01:03:27It's not ended up anywhere yet.
01:03:29She said,
01:03:30Remy?
01:03:31Come on.
01:03:32I said,
01:03:33I mean it.
01:03:34We're in the middle of something.
01:03:36She said,
01:03:37I know you're in the middle of something.
01:03:39The middle is very visible from the outside.
01:03:42I'm just noting that the outside is rooting for you.
01:03:45I said,
01:03:46All of the outside?
01:03:48She said,
01:03:49All of it,
01:03:50that has eyes.
01:03:52She ate her toast and went to work,
01:03:54and left me with the information that we were apparently more visible than I had thought,
01:03:59which was not surprising,
01:04:00and was still slightly alarming in the specific way of things that you are used to keeping private discovering that
01:04:07they were never quite as private as you imagined.
01:04:10The Ardmore shortlist arrived on a Tuesday in February.
01:04:14I found out the way I found out most things now.
01:04:18My phone on the desk beside the open notebook.
01:04:21A notification from a literary newsletter.
01:04:23The kind of announcement that arrives in the middle of a sentence you are writing and reorganizes everything else around
01:04:29it.
01:04:30My second novel was not on the shortlist.
01:04:33My second novel was not finished.
01:04:36What was on the shortlist was a debut novel by a writer I respected and a work of linked stories
01:04:42and three other novels.
01:04:44Two pieces mentioned my name without anything to say about me except that I had been shortlisted five years ago,
01:04:51which was true, and not particularly useful as a sentence.
01:04:55I put the phone down.
01:04:57I went back to the sentence I had been writing, which was,
01:05:01Now that I read it again.
01:05:03A better sentence than I had thought it was when I started it.
01:05:06I worked for three hours in the focused way that becomes available when external noise has been acknowledged and set
01:05:13aside.
01:05:13When I came down for lunch, Vesna was already at the table.
01:05:17She had seen the announcement.
01:05:19I could tell from the particular stillness she carried when she had processed something that required processing.
01:05:25Not distress.
01:05:27Just the quiet wait of someone who has sat with a fact and come to the correct conclusion about what
01:05:32it means.
01:05:33She looked at me when I sat down.
01:05:35She said,
01:05:37How are you?
01:05:38I said,
01:05:39Fine.
01:05:40It's the right shortlist.
01:05:41Not our year.
01:05:43She said,
01:05:45No.
01:05:45I said,
01:05:47The Vienna book will be its year.
01:05:49When it's ready.
01:05:50She looked at me with the expression I had by now learned to read as her version of gratitude,
01:05:56which was quieter and more contained than most people's gratitude and more genuine for being contained.
01:06:02She said,
01:06:03You don't know that?
01:06:04I said, I know the book.
01:06:06I've read enough of it.
01:06:07A pause.
01:06:09She said,
01:06:10So have I.
01:06:12Yours.
01:06:13I said,
01:06:14Then we're in agreement.
01:06:16We ate lunch.
01:06:17The conversation moved across the table to other things, as conversations at the Harrow did.
01:06:23Because the table had ten people at it now, and ten people in a farmhouse in February in Vermont will
01:06:30generate conversational momentum whether or not two of them have just silently set aside an award outcome.
01:06:36But across the table briefly, she looked at me, and whatever was in that look was not the rival look,
01:06:44not the panel look, not the composure as management look.
01:06:48It was the look I had first seen in the reading room at seven in the morning, when she had
01:06:53turned with the scarf in her hands and her face completely unguarded.
01:06:57I held her gaze until she looked away.
01:07:00She looked away first.
01:07:02Always.
01:07:03The conversation with Sable Fitch happened on a Saturday afternoon in the third week of February.
01:07:09Sable had been working on the joint piece with a care and a specificity that made me believe she had
01:07:15meant what she said about the clip being the least interesting version.
01:07:19She had spoken to me twice individually, long conversations about the work rather than the rivalry, and I had found
01:07:27the conversations genuinely useful in the way that talking about your work to someone who has read it carefully and
01:07:34is asking the right questions can unexpectedly clarify things.
01:07:38She had spoken to Vesna individually as well.
01:07:41I did not know what those conversations had contained.
01:07:44On Saturday, she asked, over coffee in the main room, whether we would both be willing to sit with her
01:07:51together, briefly, not formally, just a conversation, the three of us, that she might draw from.
01:07:59We agreed.
01:08:00The three of us sat near the fire.
01:08:02Sable had a small notebook that she did not make conspicuous.
01:08:06The conversation started with the work, the question of what form and feeling actually mean as categories, whether they are
01:08:14genuinely in opposition, or whether the opposition is a framing that obscures something more interesting.
01:08:20Vesna and I disagreed productively about this, the way we had always been capable of disagreeing when neither of us
01:08:27was using the disagreement as a defensive weapon.
01:08:31Sable listened with the quality of attention that is the best thing a journalist can bring to an interview.
01:08:37She asked good questions.
01:08:39She let pauses be pauses rather than filling them.
01:08:42Then she said, I want to ask you something that I will not print unless you both tell me it's
01:08:47okay.
01:08:48We looked at her.
01:08:50She said, when did the conversation between you change?
01:08:53Because what I am watching right now is not what I saw in the Pemberton clip.
01:08:57And I don't think it's performance.
01:09:00I think something actually changed.
01:09:02Vesna said, you're right that something changed.
01:09:05Sable said, when?
01:09:07A pause.
01:09:08Vesna looked at the fire.
01:09:10She said, December.
01:09:12Sable said, here?
01:09:14Vesna said, here.
01:09:17Sable looked at me.
01:09:18I looked at the fire.
01:09:20I said, the work changed it.
01:09:22When you are in a space where you are both working seriously, and you have to stop performing the public
01:09:28version of what you are to each other, because there's no audience for it, you find out whether the private
01:09:34version is different.
01:09:36Sable said, is it different?
01:09:39I looked at Vesna.
01:09:40Vesna.
01:09:41Vesna was looking at me already.
01:09:43The composure was present.
01:09:45The thing underneath it was also present.
01:09:48Both of them visible.
01:09:50Both of them real.
01:09:51Neither of them apologizing for the other.
01:09:54I said, yes.
01:09:55Sable made a note.
01:09:57Sable made a note.
01:09:58She said, I'll handle it carefully.
01:10:00She closed the notebook.
01:10:02She said, for what it's worth, this is the piece, not the clip.
01:10:07This is the thing that's actually interesting.
01:10:10She took her coffee and left us by the fire.
01:10:14Vesna and I sat in the silence that Sable had left in her wake.
01:10:18The fire was doing its slow work.
01:10:21The farmhouse was quiet with the Saturday afternoon quiet that meant most of the residents were in their workspaces or
01:10:27on the trails.
01:10:28She said, I'm going to say something and I need you to let me finish it.
01:10:33I said, okay.
01:10:35She turned in her chair so she was facing me rather than the fire.
01:10:40She said, I spent five years using the literary world's framing of us as a container for something I did
01:10:48not know how to manage any other way.
01:10:50The rivalry was real.
01:10:52The intellectual disagreement is real.
01:10:54The divergence of our aesthetic commitments is real.
01:10:57And I want to be honest that I do not think you have been wrong about the things you've argued
01:11:02for.
01:11:03But the rivalry was also the only language I had for the other thing, which is that you are the
01:11:09writer whose work I find most difficult to be in the same room with.
01:11:13And I mean, difficult the way you mean, a sentence is difficult.
01:11:18Not impossible, not unpleasant, but requiring something of you that easier sentences don't.
01:11:25I said, keep going.
01:11:28She said, I have been in love with your work for seven years.
01:11:32I have been in love with you.
01:11:34This is less straightforward.
01:11:36And I want to say it with the precision it requires.
01:11:40I have been in love with you in the way you love a person you have been measuring yourself against
01:11:45and realize, at some point along the way, that measuring is not what you were doing.
01:11:52That you were watching.
01:11:54That watching is different.
01:11:57The fire.
01:11:58The snow at the window.
01:12:00The specific weight of something that has been true for a long time being said out loud for the first
01:12:05time.
01:12:06I said, how long?
01:12:08She said, since you came into the workshop in the first year.
01:12:12Since the first story.
01:12:14Since the note I wrote in the margin and could not make honest because honest would have required saying the
01:12:20last two words and nothing else.
01:12:22I said, curiously alive.
01:12:25She said, yes.
01:12:27I said, you put two insults before it to protect yourself.
01:12:31She said, yes.
01:12:33I did.
01:12:34And I am sorry for that.
01:12:36Not only for the Pemberton version of it.
01:12:39For the original version.
01:12:41For every version of it over seven years.
01:12:43I looked at her.
01:12:45This woman who had won the prize I had wanted and given me the sharpest feedback I had received on
01:12:52my current work in eleven months of trying to get it right.
01:12:55Who had come to the reading room at eleven fifteen on a cold January night because I had left the
01:13:02door open and she had decided to walk through it.
01:13:04Who had stood at the window of an empty room at seven in the morning with her eyes closed and
01:13:10her face unguarded and my mother's scarf pressed to her face.
01:13:15I said, you are going to have to stop being precise when you mean to be honest.
01:13:20Those are related skills and they are not the same one.
01:13:24She said, I know that now.
01:13:26I said, you have to keep knowing it.
01:13:29She said, I will.
01:13:31I looked at her for a long time.
01:13:33I said, come back to the reading room tonight.
01:13:36She said, what time?
01:13:38I said, whatever time you're ready.
01:13:41She came at nine thirty.
01:13:43The reading room was dark except for the far lamp and the snow making the windows gray white.
01:13:49She came in without ceremony and sat in her chair.
01:13:52The window chair.
01:13:54The one that was hers by now in the way that things become yours without being assigned.
01:13:59And I sat across from her in a way that was close enough that the space between us was a
01:14:05decision and not an accident.
01:14:08I said, say the rest of it.
01:14:10She said, I've been saying it in the wrong language for seven years.
01:14:14I said, what's the right language?
01:14:18She said, this, sitting in a room with the lamp on and the snow outside and telling you directly that
01:14:25you are the most important writer I know and that I have been in love with you for most of
01:14:30the time.
01:14:31I have known you and that I would very much like to stop having those two things be separate sentences.
01:14:38I said, they don't have to be separate sentences.
01:14:41She looked at me.
01:14:43I said, but I need one more thing from you.
01:14:46She said, what?
01:14:48I said, the Pemberton comment.
01:14:51I need you to understand what it cost me.
01:14:54Not professionally.
01:14:56I processed the professional cost a long time ago.
01:14:59What it cost me personally.
01:15:02To be in that room and hear someone whose work I had loved for years use precision as a weapon
01:15:07and have everyone in that room know exactly where the weapon was aimed.
01:15:11And she was very still.
01:15:13She said, I know what it cost.
01:15:16I knew at the moment it was out of my mouth and I watched your face.
01:15:21I said, tell me.
01:15:23She said, it cost you the permission to say anything honest about my work in public for the next five
01:15:30years.
01:15:30Because anything you said after that would be read as retaliation or rivalry rather than genuine critical engagement.
01:15:38I took the clean version of the conversation away from both of us before it could happen.
01:15:44I said, yes.
01:15:46She said, I am sorry.
01:15:48Specifically.
01:15:49For that, specifically.
01:15:51I said, I know you are.
01:15:54She said, is it enough?
01:15:56I looked at her.
01:15:58The lamp.
01:15:59The snow.
01:16:00The chair that was hers now in the way that some things become yours.
01:16:04I said, it's a start.
01:16:06She looked at me for a long time.
01:16:08Then she said, can I ask you something?
01:16:11I said, yes.
01:16:14She said, the first workshop story.
01:16:17The one I wrote the note about.
01:16:19What was it about?
01:16:20I said, a woman driving to a coast she had never been to because her mother had always wanted to
01:16:26and never gotten there.
01:16:27No ending.
01:16:29The woman just drives.
01:16:31Keeps driving.
01:16:32Vesna said, did she get there?
01:16:35I said, that was the question the workshop spent 45 minutes on.
01:16:39She said, what was your answer?
01:16:42I said, she was already there.
01:16:46She had been there since she started driving.
01:16:48The coast was the decision to go, not the arrival.
01:16:53Vesna looked at me with the expression I was going to spend a long time learning the full vocabulary of.
01:16:59She said, that's the answer the story was waiting for.
01:17:03I said, I know.
01:17:05She said, Remy.
01:17:07It was the first time she had used my first name without the quality of a warning or a professional
01:17:13limit in it.
01:17:14It was just my name.
01:17:16In her voice.
01:17:17Which turned out to be an entirely different thing from every other version of it I had heard.
01:17:23I said, yes.
01:17:25She said, I'm here.
01:17:28I said, I know.
01:17:30I reached across and touched her jaw first.
01:17:33Her skin was warm.
01:17:34She drew one quiet breath and then she was still.
01:17:38In the way of someone absorbing a thing they have been waiting for long enough that its arrival requires a
01:17:44moment to hold.
01:17:45I kissed her.
01:17:46It was not urgent.
01:17:48It was patient and earned.
01:17:50The kind of thing that happens when restraint finally becomes something honest instead of something careful.
01:17:56She kissed me back and her eyes were closed and everything in that room was very still.
01:18:01When we stopped, the lamp was the same lamp.
01:18:06The snow moved past the window with its complete indifference to human decisions.
01:18:11She said, against my hair, that the panel comment was the worst version of love I have ever expressed.
01:18:18I said, we are going to work on the better versions.
01:18:23She laughed.
01:18:24Not the careful version.
01:18:26Not the one with the edge still in it.
01:18:28But the unguarded one.
01:18:30The one kept for rooms where the armor has finally come down.
01:18:34I filed it next to the Edinburgh coat hook and the first workshop story and the window at seven in
01:18:41the morning.
01:18:41The residency ended in March.
01:18:44The cohort dispersed over three days.
01:18:46Cars arriving in the farmhouse drive.
01:18:49Bags carried out into the bright cold.
01:18:52The particular ceremony of departures from places where real work has happened.
01:18:56Theo stood at the door for every departure, unhurried, with the warm gravity of someone who had watched three decades
01:19:04of writers leave this building and understood that what they were carrying out of it was not always visible in
01:19:11the luggage.
01:19:11He said, when it was my turn, keep the patience in the second paragraph.
01:19:17Kit was right about it.
01:19:19I said, I know.
01:19:21Thank you, Theo.
01:19:22He looked at me.
01:19:24Then passed me, briefly, at Vesna, who is at her car with her single large bag and the leather satchel.
01:19:31He said, I've been running this program for thirty years.
01:19:35I've watched a lot of things begin here, and not all of them are about the writing.
01:19:39I said, this one is about the writing, too.
01:19:44He said, I know.
01:19:46That's what makes it the good kind.
01:19:48He hugged me.
01:19:50I went to my car.
01:19:52Vesna and I drove separately because we were going to different cities.
01:19:56The honest geography of two people whose lives had been built independently before this.
01:20:01She was going back to her apartment in the city.
01:20:04I was going back to mine.
01:20:07Three subway stops between us, which was not, by any reasonable measure, very far.
01:20:14I left the Harrow on a Thursday morning in late March.
01:20:17I drove the forty minutes to the nearest town with a proper road, and then the longer stretch south into
01:20:23the city, with the scarf on the passenger seat because the car was warm enough, and I was driving and
01:20:30I didn't need it around my neck.
01:20:32When I reached my apartment, I put the scarf on the hook by the door.
01:20:36I sat at my desk.
01:20:38I opened the second novel to the page where the cursor had been waiting since April of the previous year.
01:20:44I wrote.
01:20:46I wrote for four hours without stopping, which was more than I had written in a single session in eighteen
01:20:52months.
01:20:53The second paragraph, the one with the patience that Kit had said was new, the one that Vesna had told
01:21:00me to keep, opened into the chapter I had been trying to write since the fall, and the chapter opened
01:21:06into the next one, and by the time I stopped, I had twelve pages that were real and were mine
01:21:12and were the book.
01:21:13I texted Vesna, twelve pages, the second chapter finally opened.
01:21:20She texted back, forty minutes later.
01:21:23The Vienna platform scene found its ending.
01:21:25I'll show you Thursday.
01:21:27I said, Thursday.
01:21:29She said, bring the scarf.
01:21:32I said, it lives on the hook.
01:21:35She said, I know.
01:21:37Bring it anyway.
01:21:39I thought about my mother at Waverly Station, draping grey cashmere around the neck of a nineteen-year-old who
01:21:46was going to spend the next three years being serious about the wrong things, and the decade after that learning
01:21:52which things were worth being serious about.
01:21:54I thought about what she had said.
01:21:57Serious, but not too serious.
01:22:00Knowing when to take it off.
01:22:01I thought about what she would have made of Vesna Calloway, who was precise and exacting, and, who had written,
01:22:09in the margin of a workshop story a decade ago, the truest thing about my work that anyone had written
01:22:15since.
01:22:15I thought she would have approved.
01:22:18Not because Vesna was easy or simple or uncomplicated.
01:22:22Because my mother had a preference for things that were difficult and alive.
01:22:27I reached over and took the scarf off the hook.
01:22:30I put it on.
01:22:31I went back to the desk.
01:22:33The cursor was still blinking, but it was blinking at the beginning of a new sentence now instead of the
01:22:39middle of a stalled one, and that is, in the end,
01:22:43the whole difference between a problem and a story.
01:22:46The Ardmore shortlist came in March of the following year.
01:22:50Vesna's Vienna book was on it.
01:22:53I was at a table near the back of the room, and I watched her walk to the stage in
01:22:57a dark dress and the measured unhurriedness she brought to every room she entered,
01:23:02and she said a thank you that was specific and honest and included, in one sentence that the literary world
01:23:09spent a week parsing for its implications,
01:23:12a reference to the writer whose work she found most difficult to be in the same room with.
01:23:17The literary world took that to mean the rivalry was still intact.
01:23:21I was at a table near the back of the room, and I knew exactly what she meant.
01:23:26She looked at me once, from the stage, briefly.
01:23:30The corner of her mouth moved.
01:23:33Half a millimeter.
01:23:34The millimeter I had been cataloging since December.
01:23:38I raised my glass.
01:23:40She looked away and continued her remarks.
01:23:43And the room had no idea that the most interesting thing in it was the silence between two people who
01:23:49had stopped using the wrong language and were still, carefully, learning the right one.
01:23:55That is still the project.
01:23:57It is, as it turns out, the best one either of us has ever worked on.
01:24:02The line is placed
01:24:02The end is heading to the floor.
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