The Inkpot

The Inkpot is a basement coffee shop on Chapel Street where the ceilings are low, the espresso machine is older than both of you, and the only light comes through half-windows at ankle height. You chose it because nobody from Hollins Hall would be caught dead there. Professors go to the French place on the green. Oliver Grayle, you'd assumed, goes wherever people bring him things on small silver trays.

He's already there when you arrive. Corner table, back to the wall, a long gray coat over the chair beside him, two cups in front of him.

"I didn't know what you drink," he says, by way of hello. "So I got the most offensive thing on the menu. It has caramel in it."

"I drink black coffee."

"Of course you do." He pushes the other cup across. "That one's black. The caramel's mine. Don't tell anyone."

You sit. You don't take off your coat. The texts from last night are still sitting in your phone like a live wire. You'd stood in your bathroom for a long time deciding what to write back, and whatever you'd finally said, you'd both kept going until almost two.

Neither of you mentions it. That seems to be the rule.

"So," you say. "Terms."

"Terms." He folds his hands on the table. In daylight, even this half-basement daylight, he's ridiculous to look at: the bones of his face, the hair falling into his eyes, a faint shadow along his jaw that suggests he did not sleep either. The barista, a woman with a septum ring and a visible contempt for humanity, has refilled his water twice. "One. The vault stays in the vault. You don't tell anyone, I don't ask why you don't."

"Agreed."

"Two." He hesitates. It's so unlike him that you notice. "We have three months until the lecture. We're both going to spend them in the same library reading the same letters. I'd like to stop pretending I don't read your work."

"You read my work?"

"Every word you've put on the department server since our first year." He says it flatly, like a confession of a minor crime. "I'd like to read drafts. I'd like you to read mine. I'd like you to tell me exactly where I'm wrong, and I'll do the same, and in January one of us wins."

You stare at him. "Why would you help me?"

"I'm not helping you." He picks up his ridiculous caramel thing. "I'm making sure that when I beat you, I've beaten you at your best. Anything else would be embarrassing."

There's the arrogance. Strangely, it's reassuring. It makes the rest of it make sense.

"And three?" you ask.

"Three." He looks at his cup. "You don't do anything like that again."

"Like what?"

"Sit with someone who's being an idiot on a floor. Put your coat around them. Lose sleep." His voice is very even. "It's bad strategy, Mazur. Someone will take advantage."

"Are you warning me about you?"

"I'm warning you about everyone."

For a second neither of you says anything. The radiator under the half-window bangs twice and goes silent, and the woman behind the counter swears at it.

Oliver gets up. He crosses to the radiator, crouches, fishes a coin out of his pocket and does something to the valve at the bottom with the edge of it. A hiss. A gurgle. Heat.

The barista stares at him. So do you.

"Air in the line," he says, sitting back down. "It's an old system."

"How do you know how to bleed a radiator?"

"I read it somewhere."

You don't believe him. You file it.

You file other things, too, over the next hour, while you fight about Swale's 1796 collection and whether Aldine was jealous of her meter. You file that when he pays, he counts the bills out carefully, flattens each one, checks his change. You file that when you mention your father drives a forklift at a warehouse outside Hazleton, he doesn't make the face that people from Oxford usually make. He asks what kind.

"A sit-down counterbalance," you say, thrown. "Why?"

"Those are thirty thousand dollars new," he says. "People think they're simple. They aren't."

"You read that somewhere too?"

He smiles. It's brief and real and devastating, and he puts it away immediately, like a man who's been caught with something he stole.

"Your footnote nine," he says. "In the draft you uploaded Tuesday. You cite the 1911 edition for letter thirty. The 1911 edition misdates it by a year. Use the manuscript."

"The manuscript's in the British Library."

"Then cite it like a scholar and not like a woman with no travel budget."

You open your mouth to destroy him. Then you close it, because he's right, and because he said it without any cruelty at all, the way you'd tell a friend there's spinach in her teeth.

"Fine," you say. "Your chapter two thinks Aldine's review was a joke. It wasn't. Read his letters to his brother before you print that."

He blinks. "I have read them."

"Read them again, Grayle. He wasn't laughing. He was scared of her."

He looks at you for a long moment, and then he writes it down.

The door at the top of the stairs opens with a gust of cold air and a voice you'd know anywhere.

"Ah. I was told this was where the young go to suffer."

Professor Horatio Revell comes down the steps like he's entering a stage, silver hair windblown, a cashmere scarf the color of claret, cheeks pink from the cold. He's sixty-three and moves like fifty. When he smiles, you understand why every dean on the East Coast has tried to hire him.

"My two finalists," he says, beaming. "Together. Over coffee. Should I be worried, or touched?"

"Neither," says Oliver smoothly. He's on his feet; you hadn't seen him stand. "Mazur was explaining my errors to me."

"Was she? Good. Somebody should." Revell lays a hand on Oliver's shoulder, fond, proprietary. "This one's been mine since his first week, Ava. I worry he's too used to winning. Bring him down a peg or two, would you?" He squeezes. "My boy. I need you in my office Monday about the Aldine edition."

"Of course."

"And you." Revell turns that warmth on you, and it's like stepping into sunlight. "I've been meaning to tell you, the revised paper was superb. Truly. I'd love to hear more about what you're digging up for the lecture. Come by any time, Ava. My door's always open."

Then he's gone, buying a scone he doesn't eat and leaving a twenty in the tip jar.

Oliver sits down slowly. He doesn't pick up his cup.

"He's very fond of you," you say.

"Yes," Oliver says. "He's very fond of a lot of things."

He doesn't explain. When you leave, he holds the door, and says, "Drafts by Friday, Mazur," and walks off toward Mercer Lane with his collar up, and you realize you've spent two hours with Oliver Grayle and enjoyed nearly all of it.

Your shift that night is long and quiet. Rain on the stained glass. At eleven-thirty you take down the reading copy.

You'd answered Vellum this morning, finally, before coffee, before you could think better of it. You'd written: Yes. All the time. Lately more than ever. F.

Beneath it now, in that slanted, elegant pencil:

Then let's stop fighting with the margins between us. Saturday. Nine o'clock. The reading room.

And under that, one more line that stops your heart.

I'll be the one holding Swale. V.