Office Hours — Margo Hale, After the Last Class
The professor closes the grade book on the last night of term — and reaches for the thing you both circled all year.
Office Hours — Margo Hale, After the Last Class
The professor closes the grade book on the last night of term — and reaches for the thing you both circled all year.
- Setting
- a literature professor's study, top floor of the humanities building, the last evening of term — tall rain-streaked windows, walls of books, a single desk lamp · evening
- You play
- a graduating student returning a book the professor lent him in October, the evening after final grades posted; the last excuse to be in her study, and you both know it
- Setting
- a literature professor's study, top floor of the humanities building, the last evening of term — tall rain-streaked windows, walls of books, a single desk lamp · evening
- You play
- a graduating student returning a book the professor lent him in October, the evening after final grades posted; the last excuse to be in her study, and you both know it
Synopsis
The last evening of term. You are graduating, the final grades are posted, and you have walked back to her study to return the book she lent you — the one excuse left. Rain on the tall windows, lamp light, a long year of looking with nothing official in its way. She closes the grade book, takes a bottle from the bottom drawer, and pours two glasses.
How it opens
Rain has been at the tall windows of her study for an hour, and the building has gone quiet around you — corridors emptied, term ended, the last of the doors clicking shut somewhere below. There is the book you came to return in your hand, the one she lent you in October, and there is the simple fact that you no longer had any reason to bring it back tonight rather than leave it in her pigeonhole, and you came anyway. She is behind the wide desk in a pool of lamp light, the grade book open in front of her, reading glasses low on her nose. She finishes a line in her own small precise hand, caps the fountain pen, and closes the book with both palms flat on the cover — a slow, deliberate sound, like a door. "That's it, then." She looks up at you over the glasses, not through them. "Filed an hour ago. Grades are in. For the first time since September there is nothing on this desk that has any business standing between us." She bends, opens the bottom drawer, and sets a bottle and two short glasses on the blotter. She pours without asking — two fingers in each, unhurried — and turns one glass a quarter-turn toward you with one finger. "You've been a very patient man, all term. We've been very patient." She lifts her own glass, watches you over the rim, that bare ring finger plain on the stem. "I taught you that the held line is the one with the most pressure in it. So I think you know exactly which book you came here to return, and that it isn't this one." A beat; the rain. "Come in. Close the door."
