A year has passed since his father’s death. He still lives in New York, rents the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. He works for the same firm. The only significant difference in his life, apart from the permanent absence of his father, is the additional absence of Maxine. At first she’d been patient with him, and for a while he’d allowed himself to fall back into her life, going home after work to her parents’ house, to their world in which nothing had changed. Initially she’d tolerated his silences at the dinner table, his indifference in bed, his need to speak to his mother and Sonia every evening, and to visit them, on weekends, without her. But she had not understood being excluded from the family’s plans to travel to Calcutta that summer to see their relatives and scatter Ashoke’s ashes in the Ganges. Quickly they began to argue about this, and about other things, Maxine going so far one day as to admit that she felt jealous of his mother and sister, an accusation that struck Gogol as so absurd that he had no energy to argue anymore. And so, a few months after his father’s death, he stepped out of Maxine’s life for good.

Recently, bumping into Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter’s engagement to another man.

On weekends he takes the train to Massachusetts, to the house in which his father’s photograph, the one used during the funeral, hangs in a frame on a wall in the upstairs hallway. On the anniversary of his father’s death, and on his father’s birthday, a day they never celebrated when his father was alive, they stand together in front of the photograph and drape a garland of rose petals around the frame and anoint his father’s forehead with sandalwood paste through the glass. It is the photograph more than anything that draws Gogol back to the house again and again, and one day, stepping out of the bathroom on his way to bed and glancing at his father’s smiling face, he realizes that this is the closest thing his father has to a grave.

His visits home are different now; often it’s Sonia who does the cooking. Sonia is still living there with his mother, settled back into the room she had occupied as a girl. Four days a week she leaves the house at five-thirty in the morning, takes a bus to a train that takes her to downtown Boston. She works as a paralegal, is applying to law schools nearby. It is she who drives his mother to weekend parties, and to Haymarket on Saturday mornings. Their mother has become thinner, her hair gray. The white column of her part, the sight of her bare wrists, pains Gogol when he first catches sight of her. From Sonia he learns of how their mother spends her evenings, alone in her bed, unable to sleep, watching television without sound. One weekend he suggests

going to one of the beaches where his father had liked to walk. At first his mother agrees, cheered by the prospect, but as soon as they step out into the windy parking lot she gets back into the car, saying she will wait.

He is preparing to take his registration exam, the two-day ordeal that will enable him to become a licensed architect, to stamp drawings and design things under his own name. He studies in his apartment, and occasionally up at one of the libraries at Columbia, learning about the matter-of-fact aspects of his profession: electricity, materials, lateral forces. He enrolls in a review class to help him prepare for the exam. The class meets twice a week in the evenings, after work. He enjoys the passivity of sitting in a classroom again, listening to an in structor, being told what to do. He is reminded of being a student, of a time when his father was still alive. It’s a small class, and afterward several of them soon begin going out for drinks. Though he is invited to join them, he always says no. Then one day, as they are all filing out of the classroom, one of the women approaches him, and says, “So what’s your excuse?” and because he has none, that night he tags along. The woman’s name is Bridget, and at the bar she sits beside him. She is starkly attractive, with brown hair cut extremely short, the sort of style that would have looked disastrous on most women. She speaks slowly, deliberately, her speech unhurried. She was raised in the south, in New Orleans. She tells him that she works for a small firm, a husband-and-wife team who operate out of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. For a while they talk about the projects they are working on, the architects they both admire: Gropius, van der Rohe, Saarinen. She is his age, married. She sees her husband on weekends; he is a professor at a college in Boston. He thinks of his parents then, living apart for the final months of his father’s life. “That must be difficult,” he tells her. “It can be,” she says. “But it was either that or adjuncting in New York.” She tells him about the house her husband rents in Brookline, a sprawling Victorian that costs less than half of their one-bedroom apartment in Murray Hill. She says that her husband had insisted on putting her name on the mailbox, her voice on the answering machine. He had even insisted on hanging a few items of her clothing in the closet, putting a tube of her lipstick in the medicine cabinet. She tells Gogol that her husband delights in illusions like these, is consoled by them, whereas she finds them simply to be reminders of what is missing.

That night they share a cab back to his apartment. Bridget excuses herself to use the bathroom and when she emerges her wedding ring is absent from her finger. When they are together, he is ravenous; it has been a long time since he’s made love. And yet he never thinks about seeing her at any other time. The day he sets out with his AIA Guide to New York City to explore

Roosevelt Island, it doesn’t occur to him to ask her to come along. Only twice a week, the nights the review class meets, does he look forward to her company. They do not have each other’s phone numbers. He does not know exactly where she lives. She always goes with him to his apartment. She never spends the night. He likes the limitations. He has never been in a situation with a woman in which so little of him is involved, so little expected. He does not know, nor does he want to know, her husband’s name. Then one weekend, when he is on the train to Massachusetts to see his mother and Sonia, a southbound train slices by, and he wonders if perhaps the husband is on the other train, on his way to see Bridget. Suddenly he imagines the house where Bridget’s husband lives alone, longing for her, with his unfaithful wife’s name on the mailbox, her lipstick beside his shaving things. Only then does he feel guilty.

From time to time his mother asks him if he has a new girlfriend. In the past she broached the topic defensively, but now she is hopeful, quietly concerned. She even asks once whether it is possible to patch things up with Maxine.

When he points out to her that she had disliked Maxine, his mother says that that isn’t the point, the point is for him to move on with his life. He works to remain calm during these conversations, not to accuse her of meddling, as he once would have done. When he tells her that he isn’t even thirty, she tells him that by that age she had already celebrated her tenth wedding anniversary. He is aware, without having to be told, that his father’s death has accelerated certain expectations, that by now his mother wants him settled. The fact that he is single doesn’t worry him, and yet he is conscious of the degree to which it troubles his mother. She makes a point of mentioning the engagements and weddings of the Bengali children he’s grown up with in Massachusetts, and his cousins in India. She mentions grandchildren being born.

One day when he is speaking to her on the phone, she asks him if he might be willing to call someone. He had known her as a girl, his mother explains. Her name is Moushumi Ma-zoomdar. He remembers her vaguely. She was the daughter of friends of his parents who had lived for a while in Massachusetts, then moved to New Jersey when he was in high school. She had a British accent. Always with a book in her hand at parties. This is all he remembers about her—details neither appealing nor unappealing. His mother tells him that she is a year younger than he is, that she has a much younger brother, that her father is a renowned chemist with a patent to his name. That he called her mother Rina Mashi, her father Shubir Mesho. Her parents had

driven up for his father’s funeral, his mother says, from New Jersey, but Gogol has no memory of them there. Moushumi lives in New York City these days, is a graduate student at NYU. She was supposed to have been married a year ago, a wedding that he and his mother and Sonia had been invited to, but her fiancé, an American, had backed out of the engagement, well after the hotel had been booked, the invitations sent, the gift registry selected. Her parents are a bit worried about her. She could use a friend, his mother says.

Why doesn’t he give her a call?

When his mother asks if he has a pen to take down the number he lies, telling her yes, not listening as she recites it to him. He has no intention of calling Moushumi; his exam is coming up, besides which, as much as he wants to make his mother happy, he refuses to let her set him up with someone. He refuses to go that far. The next time he is home for the weekend, his mother brings it up again. This time, because he is in the same room with her, he writes down the number, still with no intention of calling. But his mother persists, reminding him, the next time they speak, that her parents had come to his father’s funeral, that it was the least he could do. A cup of tea, a conversation—did he have no time for that?

***

They meet at a bar in the East Village, a place Moushumi had suggested when they’d spoken on the phone. It’s a small, dark, silent space, a single square room with just three booths against one wall. She’s there, sitting at the bar reading a paperback book, when he arrives, and when she looks up from its pages, though it is she who is waiting for him, he has the feeling that he is interrupting her. She has a slender face, pleasingly feline features, spare, straight brows. Her eyes are heavy-lidded and boldly lined on the top lids, in the manner of 1960s movie stars. Her hair is middle-parted, gathered into a chignon, and she wears stylishly narrow tortoiseshell glasses. A gray wool skirt and a thin blue sweater cling suggestively to her sides. Opaque black tights cover her calves. A collection of white shopping bags lie at the base of her stool. On the phone, he hadn’t bothered to ask what she looked like, assuming he’d recognize her, but now he is no longer sure.

“Moushumi?” he says, approaching her.

“Hey there,” she says, closing the cover of the book and kissing him casually on both sides of his face. The book has a plain ivory cover, a title written in French. Her British accent, one of the few things he clearly remembers about her, is gone; she sounds as American as he does, with the

low, gravelly voice that had surprised him on the phone. She has ordered herself a martini with olives. Beside it is a blue packet of Dunhills.

“Nikhil,” she says as he sits down on the stool beside her, and orders a single malt.

“Yes.”

“As opposed to Gogol.”

“Yes.” It had annoyed him, when he’d called her, that she hadn’t recognized him as Nikhil. This is the first time he’s been out with a woman who’d once known him by that other name. On the phone, she’d sounded guarded, faintly suspicious, as he had. The conversation had been brief and thoroughly awkward. “I hope you don’t mind my calling,” he’d begun, after explaining to her that he’d changed his name. “Let me check my book,” she’d told him when he’d asked if she was free Sunday evening for a drink, and then he’d listened to her footsteps clicking across a bare wooden floor.

She studies him for a moment, playfully twisting her lips. “As I recall, given that you’re a year older than me, I was taught by my parents to call you Gogol Dada.”

He is aware of the bartender glancing at them briefly, assessing their potential. He can smell Moushumi’s perfume, something slightly overpowering that makes him think of wet moss and prunes. The silence and the intimacy of the room disconcerts him. “Let’s not dwell on that.”

She laughs. “I’ll drink to that,” she says, lifting her glass. “I never did, of course,” she adds.

“Did what?”

“Call you Gogol Dada. I don’t remember our ever talking, really.” He sips his drink. “Neither do I.”

“So, I’ve never done this before,” she says after a pause. She speaks matter-of-factly, but nevertheless she averts her gaze.

He knows what she is referring to. In spite of this he asks, “Done what?” “Gone out on a blind date that’s been engineered by my mom.”

“Well, it’s not a blind date, exactly,” he says. “No?”

“We already know each other, in a way.”

She shrugs and gives a quick smile, as if she has yet to be convinced. Her teeth are crowded together, not entirely straight. “I guess. I guess we do.”

Together they watch as the bartender puts a CD into the player mounted to the wall. Some jazz. He is thankful for the distraction.

“I was sorry to hear about your father,” she says.

Though she sounds genuinely sympathetic, he wonders whether she even remembers his father. He is tempted to ask her, but instead he nods. “Thanks,” he says, all he can ever think to say.

“How is your mother getting along?” “All right, I guess.”

“Is she okay on her own?” “Sonia’s living with her now.”

“Oh. That’s good. That must be a relief to you.” She reaches for the Dunhills, opening the box and peeling back the gold foil. After offering one to him, she reaches for the book of matches that lies in an ashtray on the bar and lights a cigarette for herself. “Do you guys still live in that same house I used to visit?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“I remember it.” “Do you?”

“I remember that the driveway was to the right of the house as you faced it. There was a flagstone path cut into the lawn.”

The fact that she can recall these details so precisely is at once startling and endearing to him. “Wow. I’m impressed.”

“I also remember watching lots of television in a room covered with really thick brownish gold carpeting.”

He groans. “It still is.”

She apologizes for not being at the funeral, she’d been in Paris at the time. It was where she’d lived after graduating from Brown, she explains. Now she is a candidate for a Ph.D. in French literature at NYU. She’s been living in the city for almost two years. She’s spent the past summer temping, working for two months in the business office of an expensive midtown hotel. Her job was to review and file all the exit surveys left by the guests, make copies, distribute them to the appropriate people. This simple task had taken up her day. She’d been amazed by the energy people put into the surveys. They complained about the pillows being too hard or too soft, or that there wasn’t enough space around the sinks for their toilet ries, or that the bedskirt had a loose thread. Most of the people didn’t even pay for the rooms themselves.

They were at conventions, everything expensed. One person had complained that an architectural print above the desk had a visible speck of dust under the glass.

The anecdote amuses him. “That might have been me,” he speculates. She laughs.

“Why did you leave Paris for New York?” he asks. “I’d think you’d rather study French literature in France.”

“I moved here for love,” she says. Her frankness surprises him. “Surely you know about my prenuptial disaster.”

“Not really,” he lies.

“Well, you ought to.” She shakes her head. “Every other Bengali living on the East Coast does.” She speaks of it lightly, but he detects a bitterness in her voice. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you and your family were invited to the wedding.”

“When was the last time we saw each other?” he says, in an effort to change the subject.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was your high school graduation party.”

His mind goes back to a brightly lit space in the basement of a church his parents and their friends sometimes rented for especially large parties. It was where Sunday school classes were normally held. In the hallways were felt hangings, mottoes about Jesus. He remembers the big, long folding tables that he’d helped his father to set up, chalkboards on the walls, Sonia standing up on a chair, writing “Congratulations.”

“You were there?”

She nods. “It was right before we moved to New Jersey. You sat with your American friends from high school. A few of your teachers were there. You seemed a little embarrassed by it all.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t remember you there. Did I speak to you?” “You ignored me thoroughly. But it doesn’t matter.” She smiles. “I’m sure

I brought a book with me.”

They have a second round of drinks. The bar is beginning to fill up, small groups occupying each of the booths, people sitting on either side of them. A large party enters, and now there are patrons standing behind them to order drinks. When he’d arrived, he’d been bothered by the lack of people, of sounds, feeling on display, but now the crowd bothers him even more.

“It’s getting pretty crazy in here,” he says.

“It’s not usually like this on a Sunday. Should we leave?” He considers. “Maybe.”

They ask for the bill, step out together into the cool October evening.

Glancing at his watch, he sees that not even an hour has passed.

“Where are you headed?” she asks in a way that makes him realize that she assumes the date is over.

He hadn’t planned to take her to dinner. He had intended to go back to his apartment after the drink, and study, and order in some Chinese food. But now he finds himself saying that he is thinking of getting something to eat, did she want to join him?

“I’d like that,” she says.

Neither can think of a place to go and so they decide to walk a bit. He offers to carry her shopping bags, and though they weigh nothing at all she allows him to, telling him she’d been to a sample sale in SoHo just before they’d met. They stop in front of a small place that looks as if it has just opened. They study the handwritten menu taped to the window, the review that was printed a few days ago in the Times. He is distracted by her reflection in the glass, a more severe version of herself, for some reason more stunning.

“Shall we try it?” he asks, stepping away and reaching for the door.

Inside, the walls are painted red. They are surrounded by old posters advertising wine, and street signs and photographs of Paris arranged above the picture rails.

“This place must seem silly to you,” he acknowledges, watching her gaze up at the walls.

She shakes her head. “It’s pretty authentic, actually.”

She asks for a glass of champagne and looks carefully at the wine list. He asks for another single malt, but is told that there is only beer and wine.

“Shall we have a bottle?” she says, handing him the list. “You choose.”

She orders a salad and the bouillabaisse and a bottle of Sancerre. He orders the cassoulet. She doesn’t speak French to the waiter, who is French himself, but the way she pronounces the items on the menu makes it clear that she is fluent. It impresses him. Apart from Bengali, he has never bothered to master another language. The meal passes quickly. He speaks of his work, the projects he is involved in, his upcoming exam. They comment on each other’s dishes, trading tastes on their bread plates. They order espresso and share a crème brûlée, their two teaspoons cracking the hard amber surface from either side.

She offers to pay her share when the bill comes, as she’d done in the bar, but this time he insists on treating. He walks her to her apartment, which is on a run-down but pretty residential block, close to the bar where they’d met. Her building has a crumbling stoop, a terra cotta-colored facade with a gaudy green cornice. She thanks him for the dinner, says she’s had a great time.

Again she kisses him on both cheeks, then begins to search for the keys in her purse.

“Don’t forget these.” He gives her the shopping bags, watches as she loops them over her wrist. Now that he is no longer carrying them he feels awkward, unsure of what to do with his hands. He is parched from the alcohol he has consumed. “So, should we make our parents happy and see each other again?”

She looks at him, studying his face intently. “Maybe.” Her eyes stray to a passing car on the street, the headlights briefly shining on their bodies, but then her gaze returns to his face. She smiles at him, nodding. “Give me a call.”

He watches as she ascends quickly up the stoop with her shopping bags, her heels suspended over the treads in a way that looks precarious. She turns briefly to wave at him and then she goes through a second glass door, not waiting to see him waving back. For a minute longer he stands there, watching as the door opens again and a tenant emerges to deposit something into one of the trash cans below the stoop. Gogol looks up at the building, wondering which of the apartments is hers, waiting to see if a light will turn on in one of the windows.

He had not expected to enjoy himself, to be attracted to her in the least. It strikes him that there is no term for what they once were to each other. Their parents were friends, not they. She is a family acquaintance but she is not family. Their contact until tonight has been artificial, imposed, something like his relationship to his cousins in India but lacking even the justification of blood ties. Until they’d met tonight, he had never seen her outside the context of her family, or she his. He decides that it is her very familiarity that makes him curious about her, and as he begins to walk west, to the subway, he wonders when he might see her again. When he reaches Broadway he changes his mind and hails a cab. The decision feels indulgent, as it is not particularly late, or cold, or raining, and he is in no great rush to be home. But he has the urge to be alone all of a sudden, to be thoroughly passive, to revisit the evening in solitude. The driver of the cab is a Bangladeshi; the name on the registration card pasted to the plexiglass behind the front seat says Mustafa Sayeed. He is talking in Bengali on his cell phone, complaining of traffic on the FDR, of difficult passengers, as they sail uptown, past the shuttered shops and restaurants on Eighth Avenue. If his parents were in the cab they would have struck up a conversation with the driver, asking what part of Bangladesh he was from, how long he’d been in this country, whether his wife and children lived here or there. Gogol sits silently, as if he were any other passenger, lost in his own thoughts, thinking of Moushumi. But as they near his apartment, he leans toward the plexiglass and says to the driver, in

Bengali, “It’s that one, up on the right.”

The driver turns around, surprised, smiling. “I didn’t realize,” he says. “That’s okay,” Gogol says, reaching for his wallet. He tips the driver

excessively and steps out of the car.

In the days that follow, he begins to remember things about Moushumi, images that come to him without warning while he is sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They are scenes he has carried within him, buried but intact, scenes he has never thought about or had reason to conjure up until now. He is grateful that his mind has retained these images of her, pleased with himself, as if he has just discovered an innate talent for a sport or a game he’s never played. He remembers her mainly at the pujos he had attended every year, twice a year, with his family, where she would be dressed in a sari carefully pinned to the top of her shoulder. Sonia would have to do the same, but she would always take off her sari after an hour or two and put on her jeans, stuffing the sari into a plastic bag and telling Gogol or their father to put it away for her in the car. He does not remember Moushumi ever accompanying the other teenagers to the McDonald’s that was across the street from the building in Watertown where the pujos often were, or eventually sitting in someone’s car in the parking lot, listening to the radio and drinking beer from a can. He struggles but fails to recall her presence at Pemberton Road; still, he is secretly pleased that she has seen those rooms, tasted his mother’s cooking, washed her hands in the bathroom, however long ago.

He remembers once going to a Christmas party at her parents’ home. He and Sonia had not wanted to go; Christmas was supposed to be spent with just family. But their parents had replied that in America, Bengali friends were the closest thing they had to family, and so they had gone to Bedford, where the Mazoomdars lived. Her mother, Rina Mashi, had served cold pound cake and warmed-up frozen doughnuts that deflated at the touch. Her brother, Samrat, now a senior in high school, had been a boy of four, obsessed with Spider- Man. Rina Mashi had gone to a great deal of trouble to organize an anonymous gift exchange. Each family was asked to bring as many gifts as there were members, so that there would be something for everyone to open. Gogol had been asked to write numbers on squares of paper, one set to tape

onto the gifts and another to pass around, folded up in a drawstring pouch, to the guests. Everyone gathered in a single room, cramming through the two doorways. He remembers sitting in their living room, listening with all the other guests to Moushumi play something on the piano. On the wall above her was a framed reproduction of Renoir’s girl with a green watering can. After great deliberation, just as people were beginning to fidget, she had played a short piece by Mozart, adapted for children, but the guests wanted her to play “Jingle Bells.” She shook her head no, but her mother said, “Oh, Moushumi’s just being shy, she knows very well how to play ‘Jingle Bells.'” For an instant she had glared at her mother, but then she’d played the song, again and again, as the numbers were called out and people claimed their gifts, sitting with her back to the room.

A week later they meet for lunch. It is the middle of the week and she has offered to meet him someplace near his office, so he’s told her to come to the building where he works. When the receptionist tells him she is waiting in the lobby he feels the anticipation rise in his chest; all morning he’d been unable to concentrate on the elevation he was working on. He spends a few minutes showing her around, pointing out photographs of projects he’s worked on, introducing her to one of the principal designers, showing her the room where the partners meet. His coworkers in the drafting room look up from their desks as she passes by. It is early November, a day on which the temperature has suddenly dropped, bringing the first true cold of the year. Outside, unprepared pedestrians scurry past unhappily, arms folded across their chests. Fallen leaves, battered and bleached, scuttle in swirls on the pavement. Gogol has no hat or gloves, and as they walk he puts his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Moushumi, in contrast, seems enviably protected, at ease in the cold. She wears a navy wool coat, a black wool scarf at her throat, long black leather boots that zip up the sides.

He takes her to an Italian restaurant where he goes from time to time with people at work, to celebrate birthdays and promotions and projects well done. The entrance is a few steps below street level, the windows shielded with panels of lace. The waiter recognizes him, smiles. They are led to a small table at the back as opposed to the long one in the center that he normally sits at. Underneath the coat he sees that she is wearing a nubbly gray suit, with large buttons on the jacket and a bell-shaped skirt that stops short of her knees.

“I taught today,” she explains, aware that he is looking at her—she preferred to wear a suit when she taught, she says, given that her students were only a decade younger than she was. Otherwise she feels no sense of authority. He envies her students suddenly, seeing her without fail, three times a week, pictures them gathered together around a table, staring at her continuously as she writes on the board.

“The pastas are usually pretty good here,” he says as the waiter hands them menus.

“Join me for a glass of wine,” she says. “I’m done for the day.” “Lucky you. I have a stressful meeting to go to after this.”

She looks at him, closing the menu. “All the more reason for a drink,” she points out cheerfully.

“True,” he concedes.

“Two glasses of the merlot,” he says when the waiter re turns. She orders what he does, porcini ravioli and a salad of arugula and pears. He’s nervous that she’ll be disappointed by the choice, but when the food arrives she eyes it approvingly, and she eats heartily, quickly, sopping up the leftover sauce on her plate with bread. As they drink their wine and eat their meal, he admires the light on her face, the faint pale hairs that shine against the contours of her cheek. She speaks of her students, the topic for the dissertation she plans to write, about twentieth-century francophone poets from Algeria. He tells her about his memory of the Christmas party, of her being forced to play “Jingle Bells.”

“Do you remember that night?” he asks, hopeful that she will. “No. My mother was always forcing me to do things like that.” “Do you still play?”

She shakes her head. “I never wanted to learn in the first place. My mother had this fantasy. One of many. I think my mother’s taking lessons now.”

The room is quiet again, the lunch crowd has come and gone. He looks around for the waiter, signals for the check, dismayed that their plates are empty, that the hour has passed.

“She is your sister, signore?” the waiter asks as he sets the check between them, glancing at Moushumi and then back at Gogol.

“Oh, no,” Gogol says, shaking his head, laughing, at once insulted and oddly aroused. In a way, he realizes, it’s true—they share the same coloring, the straight eyebrows, the long, slender bodies, the high cheekbones and dark hair.

“You are sure?” the waiter persists. “Quite sure,” Gogol says.

“But you could be,” the waiter says. “Sì, sì, there is quite a resemblance.”

“You think so?” Moushumi says. She appears to be at ease with the comparison, looking comically askance at Gogol. And yet he notices that some color has risen to her cheeks, whether from the wine or from self- consciousness he doesn’t know.

“It’s funny he should say that,” she says, once they have stepped out into the cold.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just funny to think that all our lives our parents raised us according to the illusion that we were cousins, that we were all part of some makeshift extended Bengali family, and now here we are, years later, and someone actually thinks we’re related.”

He does not know what to say. The waiter’s comment has discomfited him, making his attraction to Moushumi feel mildly illicit.

“You’re not dressed warmly enough,” she observes, twisting the woolen scarf securely around her neck.

“It’s so damn hot in my apartment all the time,” he says. “The heat just got turned on. For some reason I can never get my mind around the fact that it won’t be the same temperature outside.”

“Don’t you check the paper?” “I get it on my way to work.”

“I always check the weather by phone when I leave the house,”

Moushumi says.

“You’re joking.” He stares at her, surprised that she should actually be the type to go to such lengths. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

She laughs. “I don’t admit that to just anyone, you know.” She finishes arranging her scarf, and then, without removing her hands from it, she says, “Why don’t you borrow this?” and begins to untie it again.

“Please, I’m fine.” He puts a hand to his throat, against the knot of his tie. “Sure?”

He nods, half tempted to say yes, to feel her scarf against his skin.

“Well, at the very least you need a hat,” she tells him. “I know a place nearby. Do you need to be back at work right away?”

She leads him to a little boutique on Madison. The window is crowded with women’s hats perched on gray, featureless heads, with sloping necks nearly a foot long.

“They have men’s stuff in the back,” she says. The shop is crowded with women. The back is relatively tranquil, stacks of fedoras and berets arrayed on curved wooden shelves. He picks up a fur hat, a top hat, trying them on as a joke. The glass of wine has made him tipsy. Moushumi begins rummaging through a basket.

“This will be warm,” she says, placing her fingers inside a thick navy cap with yellow stripes on the brim. She stretches the hat with her fingers. “What do you think?” She puts it on his head, touching his hair, his scalp. She smiles, pointing to the mirror. She watches as he studies himself.

He is aware that she is looking at him rather than at his reflection. He wonders what her face looks like without her glasses, when her hair is loose. He wonders what it might be like to kiss her on the mouth. “I like it,” he says. “I’ll take it.”

She pulls it off his head quickly, spoiling his hair. “What are you doing?”

“I want to buy it for you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to,” she says, already heading toward the register. “It was my idea, anyway. You were perfectly happy freezing to death.”

At the register the cashier notices Moushumi eyeing a brown wool and velvet hat decorated with feathers. “It’s an exquisite piece,” the cashier says, carefully lifting it off the bust. “Handmade by a woman in Spain. No two are alike. Would you like to try it?”

Moushumi places it on her head. A customer compliments her. So does the cashier. “Not many women can pull off a hat like that,” the cashier says.

Moushumi blushes, glances at the price tag dangling from a thread on one side of her face. “I’m afraid it’s out of my budget for today,” she says.

The cashier replaces the hat on the shelf. “Well, now you know what to get her for her birthday,” she says, looking at Gogol.

He puts on the new cap and they step out of the store. He is late for his meeting. If it weren’t for that, he would be tempted to stay with her, to walk through the streets beside her, or disappear with her into the dark of a movie theater. The day has turned even colder, the wind more forceful, the sun a faint white patch. She walks him back to his office. For the rest of the day, throughout his meeting and as he struggles, afterward, to get back to work, he thinks of her. When he leaves the office, instead of walking to the subway, he retraces the steps they’d taken together earlier, past the restaurant where people are now having their dinners, and finds his way to the hat store, the sight of it lifting his spirits. It is nearly eight o’clock, dark outside. He assumes the store will be closed, is surprised to see the lights still on inside, the grate only partly lowered. He studies the items in the window, and his reflection in the glass, wearing the cap she’d bought for him. Eventually he walks in. He is the only customer; he can hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner running at the rear of the store.

“I knew you’d be back,” the saleswoman says as he walks through the door. She takes the brown velvet hat off the Styro-foam head without his having to ask. “He was here earlier today with his girlfriend,” she explains to her assistant. “Shall I wrap it for you?”

“That would be great.” It excites him to hear himself referred to that way. He watches as the hat is placed in a round chocolate-colored box, tied with a thick, creamy ribbon. He realizes that he has not asked the price, but without a

thought he signs the receipt for two hundred dollars. He takes the hat back to his apartment, hiding it at the back of his closet even though Moushumi has never been there. He would give it to her on her birthday, in spite of the fact that he has no idea when her birthday is.

And yet he has the feeling that he has been to a few of her birthdays, and she to his. That weekend, at his parents’ house, he confirms this; at night, after his mother and Sonia have gone up to bed, he hunts for her in the photo albums that his mother has assembled over the years. Moushumi is there, lined up behind a blazing cake in his parents’ dining room. She is looking away, a pointed paper hat on her head. He stares straight at the lens, the knife in his hand, poised, for the camera’s benefit, over the cake, his face shining with impending adolescence. He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.

The following weekend she invites him over for dinner at her place. She has to come downstairs in order to let him into the building; the buzzer is broken, she’d warned him when they’d made their plans.

“Nice cap,” she says. She wears a sleeveless black dress tied loosely at the back. Her legs are bare, her feet slim, her toe-nails, exposed at the tops of her sandals, painted maroon. Strands of hair have come loose from her chignon.

She holds half a cigarette between her fingers, but just before she leans forward to kiss him on the cheeks she lets it drop and crushes it with the toe of her sandal. She leads him up the steps to an apartment on the third floor. She’s left the door open. The apartment smells strongly of cooking; on the stove, a few large pieces of chicken are browning in a pan full of oil. Music is playing, a man singing songs in French. Gogol gives her a bunch of sunflowers whose massive stems are heavier in his arms than the bottle of wine he’s also brought. She does not know where to put the flowers; the countertops, limited to begin with, are crammed with evidence of the meal she is preparing, onions and mushrooms, flour, a stick of butter rap idly softening in the heat, a glass of wine she is in the process of drinking, plastic grocery bags she has not had time to put away.

“I should have brought something more manageable,” he says as she looks around the kitchen, the flowers resting against her shoulder, as if expecting a surface to miraculously clear.

“I’ve been meaning for weeks to buy myself some sunflowers,” she says. She glances quickly at the pan on the stove and takes him through the kitchen and into the living room. She unwraps the flowers. “There’s a vase up there,” she says, pointing to the top of a bookcase. “Would you mind getting it down?”

She carries the vase into the bathroom, and he can hear water running in the tub. He takes the opportunity to remove his coat and cap, drape them over the back of the sofa. He has dressed with care, a blue-and-white-striped Italian shirt that Sonia had bought for him at Filene’s Basement, a pair of black jeans. She returns and fills the vase with the flowers, putting it on the coffee table. The place is nicer than he expected from the grimy look of the lobby. The floors have been redone, the walls freshly painted, the ceiling dotted with track lights. The living room has a square dining table in one corner, and a desk and file cabinets set up in another. Three particleboard bookcases line one wall. On the dining table, there is a pepper mill, a saltcellar, bright, clear-skinned clementines arranged in a bowl. He recognizes versions of things he knows from home: a Kashmiri crewelwork carpet on the floor, Rajasthani silk pillows on the sofa, a cast-iron Natraj on one of the bookcases.

Back in the kitchen she sets out some olives and some goat cheese coated with ash. She hands him a corkscrew and asks him to open the bottle he’s brought, to pour himself a glass. She dredges more of the chicken on a plate of flour. The pan is sputtering loudly and has showered the wall behind the stove with oil. He stands there as she refers to a cookbook by Julia Child. He is overwhelmed by the production taking place for his benefit. In spite of the meals they’ve already shared, he is nervous about eating with her.

“When would you like to eat?” she says. “Are you hungry?” “Whenever. What are you making?”

She looks at him doubtfully. “Coq au vin. I haven’t made it before. I just found out that you’re supposed to cook it twenty-four hours in advance. I’m afraid I’m running a bit behind.”

He shrugs. “It already smells great. I’ll help you.” He rolls up his sleeves. “What can I do?”

“Let’s see,” she says, reading. “Oh. Okay. You can take those onions, and make X’s in the bottom with a knife, and drop them into that pan.”

“In with the chicken?”

“No. Shoot.” She kneels down and retrieves a pot from one of the lower cupboards. “In here. They need to boil for a minute and then you take them out.”

He does as he is told, filling the pan with water and turning on the flame. He finds a knife and scores the onions, as he had once been taught to do with Brussels sprouts in the Ratliffs’ kitchen. He watches her measure wine and tomato paste into the pan containing the chicken. She searches in a cupboard for a stainless-steel spice caddy and throws in a bay leaf.

“Of course, my mother is appalled that I’m not making you Indian food,” she says, studying the contents of the pan.

“You told her I was coming over?”

“She happened to call today.” Then she asks him, “What about you? Have you been giving your mother updates?”

“I haven’t gone out of my way. But she probably suspects something given that it’s a Saturday and I’m not at home with her and Sonia.”

Moushumi leans over the pan, watching the contents come to a simmer, prodding the pieces of chicken with a wooden spoon. She glances back at the recipe. “I think I need to add more liquid,” she says, pouring water from a teakettle into the pan, causing her glasses to steam. “I can’t see.” She laughs, stepping away so that she stands a bit closer to him. The CD has ended and the apartment is silent apart from the sounds on the stove. She turns to him, still laughing, her eyes still obscured. She holds up her hands, messy from cooking, coated with flour and chicken fat. “Would you mind taking these off for me?”

With both hands he pries the glasses from her face, clasping the frames where they meet her temples. He puts them on the counter. And then he leans over and kisses her. He touches his fingers to her bare arms, cool in spite of the warmth of the kitchen. He presses her close, a hand at the small of her back, against the knot of her dress, tasting the warm, slightly sour tang of her mouth. They make their way through the living room, to the bedroom. He sees a box spring and mattress without a frame. He unties the knot at the back of her dress with difficulty, then swiftly undoes the long zipper, leaving a small black pool at her feet. In the light cast from the living room, he glimpses black mesh underwear and a matching bra. She is curvier than she

appears clothed, her breasts fuller, her hips generously flared. They make love on top of the covers, quickly, efficiently, as if they’ve known each other’s bodies for years. But when they are finished she switches on the lamp by her bed and they examine each other, quietly discovering moles and marks and ribs.

“Who would have thought,” she says, her voice tired, satisfied. She is smiling, her eyes partly closed.

He looks down at her face. “You’re beautiful.” “And you.”

“Can you even see me without those glasses?” “Only if you stay close,” she says.

“Then I’d better not move.” “Don’t.”

They peel back the covers and lie together, sticky and spent, in each other’s arms. He begins to kiss her again, and she wraps her legs around him. But the smell of something burn ing causes them to bolt naked from the bed, rushing comically to the kitchen, laughing. The sauce has evaporated and the chicken is irreparably scorched, so much so that the pan itself has to be thrown away. By then they are starving and because they lack the energy either to go out or to prepare another meal they end up ordering in, feeding each other tart, tiny wedges of clementines as they wait for Chinese food to arrive.

Within three months they have clothes and toothbrushes at each other’s apartments. He sees her for entire weekends without make-up, sees her with gray shadows under her eyes as she types papers at her desk, and when he kisses her head he tastes the oil that accumulates on her scalp between shampoos. He sees the hair that grows on her legs between waxings, the black roots that emerge between appointments at the salon, and in these moments, these glimpses, he believes he has known no greater intimacy. He learns that she sleeps, always, with her left leg straight and her right leg bent, ankle over knee, in the shape of a 4. He learns that she is prone to snoring, ever so

faintly, sounding like a lawn mower that will not start, and to gnashing her jaws, which he massages for her as she sleeps. At restaurants and bars, they sometimes slip Bengali phrases into their conversation in order to comment with impunity on another diner’s unfortunate hair or shoes.

They talk endlessly about how they know and do not know each other. In a way there is little to explain. There had been the same parties to attend when they were growing up, the same episodes of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island the children watched as the parents feasted in another part of the house, the same meals served to them on paper plates, the carpets lined with newspapers when the hosts happened to be particularly fastidious. He can imagine her life, even after she and her family moved away to New Jersey, easily. He can imagine the large suburban house her family owned; the china cabinet in the din ing room, her mother’s prized possession; the large public high school in which she had excelled but that she had miserably attended.

There had been the same frequent trips to Calcutta, being plucked out of their American lives for months at a time. They calculate the many months that they were in that distant city together, on trips that had overlapped by weeks and once by months, unaware of each other’s presence. They talk about how they are both routinely assumed to be Greek, Egyptian, Mexican—even in this misrendering they are joined.

She speaks with nostalgia of the years her family had spent in England, living at first in London, which she barely remembers, and then in a brick semidetached house in Croydon, with rosebushes in front. She describes the narrow house, the gas fireplaces, the dank odor of the bathrooms, eating Weetabix and hot milk for breakfast, wearing a uniform to school. She tells him that she had hated moving to America, that she had held on to her British accent for as long as she could. For some reason, her parents feared America much more than England, perhaps because of its vastness, or perhaps because in their minds it had less of a link to India. A few months before their arrival in Massachusetts, a child had disappeared while playing in his yard and was never found; for a long time afterward there were posters in the supermarket. She remembers always having to call her mother every time she and her friends moved to another house in the neighborhood, a house visible from her own, to play with another girl’s toys, to have another family’s cookies and punch. She would have to excuse herself upon entering and ask for the telephone. The American mothers were at once charmed and perplexed by her sense of duty. “I’m at Anna’s house,” she would report to her mother in English. “I’m at Sue’s.”

He does not feel insulted when she tells him that for most of her life he

was exactly the sort of person she had sought to avoid. If anything it flatters him. From earliest girlhood, she says, she had been determined not to allow her parents to have a hand in her marriage. She had always been admonished not to marry an American, as had he, but he gathers that in her case these warnings had been relentless, and had therefore plagued her far more than they had him. When she was only five years old, she was asked by her relatives if she planned to get married in a red sari or a white gown. Though she had refused to indulge them, she knew, even then, what the correct response was. By the time she was twelve she had made a pact, with two other Bengali girls she knew, never to marry a Bengali man. They had written a statement vowing never to do so, and spit on it at the same time, and buried it somewhere in her parents’ backyard.

From the onset of adolescence she’d been subjected to a series of unsuccessful schemes; every so often a small group of unmarried Bengali men materialized in the house, young colleagues of her father’s. She never spoke to them; she strutted upstairs with the excuse of homework and did not come downstairs to say good-bye. During summer visits to Calcutta, strange men mysteriously appeared in the sitting room of her grandparents’ flat. Once on a train to Durgapur to visit an uncle, a couple had been bold enough to ask her parents if she was engaged; they had a son doing his surgical residency in Michigan. “Aren’t you going to arrange a wedding for her?” relatives would ask her parents. Their inquiries had filled her with a cold dread. She hated the way they would talk of the details of her wedding, the menu and the different colors of saris she would wear for the different ceremonies, as if it were a fixed certainty in her life. She hated when her grandmother would unlock her almari, showing her which jewels would be hers when the day came.

The shameful truth was that she was not involved, was in fact desperately lonely. She had rebuffed the Indian men she wasn’t interested in, and she had been forbidden as a teenager to date. In college she had harbored lengthy infatuations, with students with whom she never spoke, with professors and TAs. In her mind she would have relationships with these men, structuring her days around chance meetings in the library, or a conversation during office hours, or the one class she and a fellow student shared, so that even now she associated a particular year of college with the man or boy she had silently, faithfully, absurdly, desired. Occasionally one of her infatuations would culminate in a lunch or coffee date, an encounter on which she would pin all her hopes but which would lead to nothing. In reality there had been no one, so that toward the end of college, as graduation loomed, she was convinced in her bones that there would be no one at all. Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn’t love that had caused her,

subconsciously, to shut herself off. She shakes her head as she speaks, irritated with having revisited this aspect of her past. Even now she regrets herself as a teenager. She regrets her obedience, her long, unstyled hair, her piano lessons and lace-collared shirts. She regrets her mortifying lack of confidence, the extra ten pounds she carried on her frame during puberty. “No wonder you never talked to me back then,” she says. He feels tenderness toward her when she disparages herself this way. And though he had witnessed that stage of her himself, he can no longer picture it; those vague recollections of her he’s carried with him all his life have been wiped clean, replaced by the woman he knows now.

At Brown her rebellion had been academic. At her parents’ insistence, she’d majored in chemistry, for they were hopeful she would follow in her father’s footsteps. Without telling them, she’d pursued a double major in French. Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever. Her four years of secret study had prepared her, at the end of college, to escape as far as possible. She told her parents she had no inten tion of being a chemist and, deaf to their protests, she’d scraped together all the money she had and moved to Paris, with no specific plans.

Suddenly it was easy, and after years of being convinced she would never have a lover she began to fall effortlessly into affairs. With no hesitation, she had allowed men to seduce her in cafés, in parks, while she gazed at paintings in museums. She gave herself openly, completely, not caring about the consequences. She was exactly the same person, looked and behaved the same way, and yet suddenly, in that new city, she was transformed into the kind of girl she had once envied, had believed she would never become. She allowed the men to buy her drinks, dinners, later to take her in taxis to their apartments, in neighborhoods she had not yet discovered on her own. In retrospect she saw that her sudden lack of inhibition had intoxicated her more than any of the men had. Some of them had been married, far older, fathers to children in secondary school. The men had been French for the most part, but also German, Persian, Italian, Lebanese. There were days she slept with one man after lunch, another after dinner. They were a bit excessive, she tells Gogol with a roll of her eyes, the type to lavish her with perfume and jewels.

She found a job working for an agency, helping American businesspeople learn conversational French, and French businesspeople learn conversational English. She would meet with them in cafés, or speak with them by phone,

asking questions about their families, their backgrounds, their favorite books and foods. She began to socialize with other American expatriates. Her fiancé was part of that crowd. He was an investment banker from New York, living in Paris for a year. His name was Graham. She had fallen in love and very quickly moved in with him. It was for Graham that she’d applied to NYU. They took a place together on York Avenue. They lived there in secret, with two telephone lines so that her parents would never know. When her parents came to the city, he’d disappear to a hotel, removing all traces of himself from the apartment. It had been exciting at first, maintaining such an elaborate lie. But then it had gotten tiresome, impossible. She brought him home to New Jersey, prepared herself for battle, but in fact, to her enormous surprise, her parents were relieved. By then she was old enough so that it didn’t matter to them that he was an American. Enough of their friends’ children had married Americans, had produced pale, dark-haired, half-American grandchildren, and none of it was as terrible as they had feared. And so her parents did their best to accept him. They told their Bengali friends that Graham was well behaved, Ivy educated, earned an impressive salary. They learned to overlook the fact that his parents were divorced, that his father had remarried not once but twice, that his second wife was only ten years older than Moushumi.

One night, in a taxi stuck in midtown traffic, she had impulsively asked him to marry her. Looking back on it, she supposed it was all those years of people attempting to claim her, choose her, of feeling an invisible net cast around her, that had led her to this proposal. Graham had accepted, gave her his grandmother’s diamond. He had agreed to fly with her and her parents to Calcutta, to meet her extended family and ask for her grandparents’ blessing. He had charmed them all, learned to sit on the floor and eat with his fingers, take the dust from her grandparents’ feet. He had visited the homes of dozens of her relatives, eaten the plates full of syrupy mishti, patiently posed for countless photographs on rooftops, surrounded by her cousins. He had agreed to a Hindu wedding, and so she and her mother had gone shopping in Gariahat and New Market, selected a dozen saris, gold jewelry in red cases with purple velvet linings, a dhoti and a topor for Graham that her mother carried by hand on the plane ride back. The wedding was planned for summer in New Jersey, an engagement party thrown, a few gifts already received. Her mother had typed up an explanation of Bengali wedding rituals on the computer and mailed it to all the Americans on the guest list. A photograph of the two of them was taken for the local paper in her parents’ town.

A few weeks before the wedding, they were out to dinner with friends, getting happily drunk, and she heard Graham talking about their time in Calcutta. To her surprise, he was complaining about it, commenting that he

found it taxing, found the culture repressed. All they did was visit her relatives, he said. Though he thought the city was fascinating, the society, in his opinion, was somewhat provincial. People tended to stay at home most of the time. There was nothing to drink. “Imagine dealing with fifty in-laws without alcohol. I couldn’t even hold her hand on the street without attracting stares,” he had said. She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family’s heritage, another to hear it from him. She realized that he had fooled everyone, including her. On their walk home from the restaurant, she brought it up, saying that his comments had upset her, why hadn’t he told her these things? Was he only pretending to enjoy himself all that time? They’d begun to argue, a chasm opening up between them, swallowing them, and suddenly, in a rage, she had removed his grandmother’s ring from her finger and tossed it into the street, into oncoming traffic, and then Graham had struck her on the face as pedestrians watched. By the end of the week, he had moved out of the apartment they shared. She stopped going to school, filed for incompletes in all her classes. She swallowed half a bottle of pills, was forced to drink charcoal in an emergency room. She was given a referral to a therapist. She called her adviser at NYU, told him she’d had a nervous breakdown, took off the rest of the semester. The wedding was canceled, hundreds of phone calls made. They lost the deposit they’d paid to Shah Jahan caterers, as well as to their honeymoon destination, Palace on Wheels. The gold was taken to a bank vault, the saris and blouses and petticoats put away in a mothproof box.

Her first impulse was to move back to Paris. But she was in school, too invested to drop out, and besides, she had no money for that. She fled the apartment on York Avenue, unable to afford it on her own. She refused to go home to her parents. Some friends in Brooklyn took her in. It was painful, she told him, living with a couple at that particular time, listening to them shower together in the mornings, watching them kiss and shut the door to their bedroom at the end of each night, but in the beginning she could not face being alone. She started temping. By the time she’d saved enough to move to her own place in the East Village, she was thankful to be alone. All summer she went to movies by herself, sometimes as many as three a day. She bought TV Guide every week and read it from cover to cover, planning her nights around her favorite shows. She began to subsist on a diet of raita and Triscuits. She grew thinner than she’d ever been in her life, so that in the few pictures taken of her in that period her face is faintly unrecognizable. She went to end-of-summer sales and bought everything in a size four; six months later she would be forced to donate it all to a thrift shop. When autumn came, she threw herself into her studies, catching up on all the work she had

abandoned that spring, began every now and then to date. And then one day her mother called, asking if she remembered a boy named Gogol.