They marry within a year, at a DoubleTree hotel in New Jersey, close to the suburb where her parents live. It’s not the type of wedding either of them really wants. They would have preferred the sorts of venues their American friends choose, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens or the Metropolitan Club or the Boat House in Central Park. They would have preferred a sit-down dinner, jazz played during the reception, black-and-white photographs, keeping things small. But their parents insist on inviting close to three hundred people, and serving Indian food, and providing easy parking for all the guests. Gogol and Moushumi agree that it’s better to give in to these expectations than to put up a fight. It’s what they deserve, they joke, for having listened to their mothers, and for getting together in the first place, and the fact that they are united in their resignation makes the consequences somewhat bearable.
Within weeks of announcing their engagement, the date is settled, the hotel booked, the menu decided, and though for a while there are nightly phone calls, her mother asking if they prefer a sheet cake or layers, sage- or rose- colored napkins, Chardonnay or Chablis, there is little for either Gogol or Moushumi to do other than listen and say yes, whichever seems best, it all sounds fine. “Consider yourselves lucky,” Gogol’s coworkers tell him.
Planning a wedding is in credibly stressful, the first real trial of a marriage, they say. Still, it feels a little strange to be so uninvolved in his own wedding, and he is reminded of the many other celebrations in his life, all the birthdays and graduation parties his parents had thrown when he was growing up, in his honor, attended by his parents’ friends, occasions from which he had always felt at a slight remove.
The Saturday of the wedding they pack suitcases, rent a car, and drive down to New Jersey, separating only when they get to the hotel, where they are claimed one last time by their respective families. Starting tomorrow, he realizes with a shock, he and Moushumi will be regarded as a family of their own. They have not seen the hotel beforehand. Its most memorable feature is a glass elevator that rises and falls ceaselessly at its center, much to the amusement of children and adults alike. The rooms are gathered around successive elliptical balconies that can be seen from the lobby, reminding Gogol of a parking garage. He has a room to himself, on a floor with his mother and Sonia and a few of the Gangulis’ closest family friends.
Moushumi stays chastely on the floor above, next door to her parents, though by now she and Gogol are practically living together at her place. His mother has brought him the things he is to wear, a parchment-colored Punjabi top that had once belonged to his father, a prepleated dhoti with a drawstring waist, a
pair of nagrai slippers with curling toes. His father had never worn the punjabi, and Gogol has to hang it in the bathroom, hot water running in the shower, to get the creases out. “His blessings are always with you,” his mother says, reaching up and placing both her hands for a moment on his head. For the first time since his father’s death, she is dressed with care, wearing a pretty pale green sari, a pearl necklace at her throat, has agreed to let Sonia put some lipstick on her lips. “Is it too much?” his mother worries, regarding herself in the mirror. Still, he has not seen her looking this lovely, this happy, this excited, in years. Sonia wears a sari, too, fuchsia with silver em broidery, a red rose stuck into her hair. She gives him a box wrapped in tissue.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“You didn’t think I forgot your thirtieth birthday, did you?”
It had been a few days ago, a weeknight he and Moushumi had both been too busy to celebrate properly. Even his mother, preoccupied with last-minute wedding details, had forgotten to call him first thing in the morning, as she normally did.
“I think I’m officially at the age when I want people to forget my birthday,” he says, accepting the gift.
“Poor Goggles.”
Inside he finds a small bottle of bourbon and a red leather flask. “I had it engraved,” she says, and when he turns the flask over he sees the letters ng. He remembers poking his head into Sonia’s room years ago, telling her about his decision to change his name to Nikhil. She’d been thirteen or so, doing her homework on her bed. “You can’t do that,” she’d told him then, shaking her head, and when he’d asked her why not she’d simply said, “Because you can’t. Because you’re Gogol.” He watches her now, applying her make-up in his room, pulling at the skin next to her eye and painting a thin black line on the lid, and he recalls photographs of his mother at her own wedding.
“You’re next, you know,” he says.
“Don’t remind me.” She grimaces, then laughs. Their shared giddiness, the excitement of the preparations, saddens him, all of it reminding him that his father is dead. He imagines his father wearing an outfit similar to his own, a shawl draped over one shoulder, as he used to during pujo. The ensemble he fears looks silly on himself would have looked dignified, elegant, befitting his
father in a way he knows it does not him. The nagrais are a size too large and need to be stuffed with tissues. Unlike Moushumi, who is having her hair and make-up professionally styled and applied, Gogol is ready in a matter of minutes. He regrets not having brought his running shoes along; he could have done a few miles on the treadmill before preparing himself for the event.
There is an hour-long watered-down Hindu ceremony on a platform covered with sheets. Gogol and Moushumi sit cross-legged, first opposite each other, then side by side. The guests sit facing them in folding metal chairs; the accordion wall between two windowless banquet rooms, with dropped ceilings, has been opened up to expand the space. A video camera and hand-held white lights hover above their faces. Shenai music plays on a boom box. Nothing has been rehearsed or explained to them beforehand. A cluster of mashis and meshos surround them, telling them continually what to do, when to speak or stand or throw flowers at a small brass urn. The priest is a friend of Moushumi’s parents, an anesthesiologist who happens to be a Brahmin. Offerings are made to pictures of their grandparents and his father, rice poured into a pyre that they are forbidden by the management of the hotel to ignite. He thinks of his parents, strangers until this moment, two people who had not spoken until after they were actually wed. Suddenly, sitting next to Moushumi, he realizes what it means, and he is astonished by his parents’ courage, the obedience that must have been involved in doing such a thing.
It’s the first time he’s seen Moushumi in a sari, apart from all those pujos years ago, which she had suffered through silently. She has about twenty pounds of gold on her—at one point, when they are sitting face to face, their hands wrapped up together in a checkered cloth, he counts eleven necklaces. Two enormous paisleys have been painted in red and white on her cheeks.
Until now, he has continued to call Moushumi’s father Shubir Mesho, and her mother Rina Mashi, as he always has, as if they were still his uncle and aunt, as if Moushumi were still a sort of cousin. But by the end of the night he will become their son-in-law and so be expected to address them as his second set of parents, an alternative Baba and Ma.
For the reception he changes into a suit, she into a red Ba narasi gown with spaghetti straps, something she’d designed herself and had made by a seamstress friend. She wears the gown in spite of her mother’s protests—what was wrong with a salwar kameeze, she’d wanted to know—and when Moushumi happens to forget her shawl on a chair and bares her slim, bronze shoulders, which quietly sparkle from a special powder she’s applied to them, her mother manages, in the midst of that great crowd, to shoot her reproachful glances, which Moushumi ignores. Countless people come to congratulate
Gogol, saying they had seen him when he was so little, asking him to pose for photographs, to wrap his arms around families and smile. He is numbly drunk through it all, thanks to the open bar her parents have sprung for. Moushumi is horrified, in the banquet room, to see the tables wreathed with tulle, the ivy and baby’s breath twisted around the columns. They bump into each other on her way out of the ladies’ room and exchange a quick kiss, the smoke on her breath faintly masked by the mint she is chewing. He imagines her smoking in the stall, the lid of the toilet seat down. They’ve barely said a word to each other all evening; throughout the ceremony she’d kept her eyes lowered, and during the reception, each time he’d looked at her, she’d been deep in conversation with people he didn’t know. He wants to be alone with her suddenly, wishes they could sneak off to her room or his, ignore the rest of the party as he would when he was a boy. “Come on,” he urges, motioning toward the glass elevator, “fifteen minutes. No one will notice.” But the dinner has begun, and table numbers are being called one by one on the loudspeaker. “I’d need someone to redo my hair,” she says. The heated silver chafing dishes are labeled for the American guests. It’s typical north Indian fare, mounds of hot pink tandoori, aloo gobi in thick orange sauce. He overhears someone in the line saying the chickpeas have gone bad. They sit at the head table in the center of the room, with his mother and Sonia, her parents and a handful of her relatives visiting from Calcutta, and her brother, Samrat, who is missing out on his orientation at the University of Chicago in order to attend the wedding. There are awkward champagne toasts and speeches by their families, their parents’ friends. Her father stands up, smiling nervously, forgets to raise his glass, and says, “Thank you very much for coming,” then turns to Gogol and Moushumi: “Okay, be happy.” Forks are tapped against glasses by giggling, sari-clad mashis, instructing them when to kiss. Each time he obliges them and kisses his bride tamely on the cheek.
A cake is wheeled out, “Nikhil Weds Moushumi” piped across its surface.
Moushumi smiles as she always smiles for a camera, her mouth closed, her head tilted slightly downward and to the left. He is aware that together he and Moushumi are fulfilling a collective, deep-seated desire—because they’re both Bengali, everyone can let his hair down a bit. At times, looking out at the guests, he can’t help but think that two years ago he might have been sitting in the sea of round tables that now surround him, watching her marry another man. The thought crashes over him like an unexpected wave, but quickly he reminds himself that he is the one sitting beside her. The red Banarasi wedding sari and the gold had been bought two years ago, for her wedding to Graham. This time all her parents have had to do is bring down the boxes from a closet shelf, retrieve the jewels from the safety deposit box, find the itemized list for the caterer. The new invitation, designed by Ashima, the
English translation lettered by Gogol, is the only thing that isn’t a leftover.
Since Moushumi has to teach a class three days after the wedding, they have to postpone the honeymoon. The closest they come is a night alone in the DoubleTree, which they are both dying to leave. But their parents have gone to great trouble and expense to book the newlywed suite. “I have got to take a shower,” she says as soon as they are finally alone, and disappears into the bathroom. He knows she is exhausted, as he is—the night had ended with a long session of dancing to Abba songs. He examines the room, opening drawers and pulling out the stationery, opening the minibar, reading the contents of the room service menu, though he is not at all hungry. If anything, he feels slightly ill, from the combination of the bourbon and the two large pieces of cake he’d had because he had not had any dinner. He sprawls on the king-sized bed. The bedspread has been strewn with flower petals, a final gesture before their families withdrew. He waits for her, flipping through the channels on the television. Beside him is a bottle of champagne in a bucket, heart-shaped chocolates on a lace-covered plate. He takes a bite out of one of the chocolates. The inside is an unyielding toffee, requiring more chewing than he expects.
He fidgets with the gold ring she’d placed on his finger after they’d cut the cake, identical to the one he’d placed on hers. He’d proposed to her on her birthday, giving her a diamond solitaire in addition to the hat he’d bought for her after their second date. He’d made a production out of it, using her birthday as an excuse to take her to a country inn for the weekend, in a town upstate on the banks of the Hudson, the first trip they’d taken together that wasn’t to her parents’ place in New Jersey, or to Pemberton Road. It was springtime, the velvet hat out of season by then. She’d been overwhelmed that he’d remembered it all this time. “I can’t believe the store still had it,” she said. He didn’t tell her the truth about when he’d bought the hat. He’d presented it to her downstairs, in the dining room, after a Châteaubriand that had been carved for them at the table. Strangers turned to admire Moushumi when the hat was on her head. After trying it on, she’d put the box away under her chair, not noticing the smaller box lost among the tissue. “There’s something else in there,” he’d been forced to say. In retrospect he decided that she had been more shocked by the hat than by his proposal. For while the former was a true surprise, the latter was something expected—from the very beginning it was safely assumed by their families, and soon enough by themselves, that as long as they liked each other their courtship would not lag and they would surely wed. “Yes,” she’d told him, grinning, looking up from the hatbox before he’d even had to ask.
She emerges now in the snow-white terry-cloth hotel robe. She has taken off her make-up and her jewels; the vermilion with which he’d stained her part at the end of the ceremony has been rinsed from her hair. Her feet are free of the three-inch heels she’d worn as soon as the religious part of the wedding was over, causing her to tower over almost everyone. This is the way he still finds her most ravishing, unadorned, aware that it is a way she is willing to look for no one but him. She sits on the edge of the mattress, applies some blue cream from a tube to her calves and the bottoms of her feet. She’d massaged the cream onto his own feet once, the day they’d walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, causing them to tingle and go cold. And then she lies against the pillows, and looks at him, and puts out a hand. Underneath the robe he expects to find some racy lingerie—back in New York he’d glimpsed the pile of things she’d received for her shower in the corner of her bedroom. But she is naked, her skin smelling, a little too intensely, of some sort of berry. He kisses the dark hair on her forearms, the prominent collarbone, which she had once confessed to him is her favorite part of her body. They make love in spite of their exhaustion, her damp hair limp and cool against his face, the rose petals sticking to their elbows and shoulders and calves. He breathes in the scent of her skin, still unable to fathom that they are husband and wife. When would it sink in? Even then he does not feel fully alone with her, half waiting for someone to knock on the door and tell them how to go about things. And though he desires her as much as ever, he is relieved when they are through, lying naked side by side, knowing that nothing else is expected of them, that finally they can relax.
Afterward they open up the champagne and sit together on the bed, going through a large shopping bag full of cards with personal checks inside them. The checks have been given to them by their parents’ hundreds of friends. She had not wanted to register for gifts. She told Gogol it was because she didn’t have the time, but he sensed that it was something she couldn’t bring herself to face the second time around. It’s fine with him, not to have their apartment crammed with a dozen crystal vases and platters and matching pots and pans. There is no calculator, and so they add up the figures on numerous sheets of the hotel stationery. Most of the checks have been written out to Mr. and Mrs. Nikhil and Moushumi Ganguli. Several are written to Gogol and Moushumi Ganguli. The amounts are for one hundred and one dollars, two hundred and one dollars, occasionally three hundred and one dollars, as Bengalis consider it inauspicious to give round figures. Gogol adds up the subtotals on each page.
“Seven thousand thirty-five,” he announces.
“Not bad, Mr. Ganguli.”
“I’d say we’ve made a killing, Mrs. Ganguli.”
Only she is not Mrs. Ganguli. Moushumi has kept her last name. She doesn’t adopt Ganguli, not even with a hyphen. Her own last name, Mazoomdar, is already a mouthful. With a hyphenated surname, she would no longer fit into the window of a business envelope. Besides, by now she has begun to publish under Moushumi Mazoomdar, the name printed at the top of footnoted articles on French feminist theory in a number of prestigious academic journals that always manage to give Gogol a paper cut when he tries to read them. Though he hasn’t admitted this to her, he’d hoped, the day they’d filled out the application for their marriage license, that she might consider otherwise, as a tribute to his father if nothing else. But the thought of changing her last name to Ganguli has never crossed Moushumi’s mind.
When relatives from India continue to address letters and cards to “Mrs. Moushumi Ganguli,” she will shake her head and sigh.
***
They put the money toward a security deposit for a one-bedroom apartment in the Twenties, off Third Avenue. It’s slightly more than they can comfortably afford, but they are won over by the maroon awning, the part-time doorman, the lobby paved with pumpkin-colored tiles. The apartment itself is small but luxurious, with built-in mahogany bookcases rising to the ceiling and dark, oily, wide-planked floors. There is a living room with a skylight, a kitchen with expensive stainless-steel appliances, a bathroom with a marble floor and walls. There is a Juliet balcony off the bedroom, in one corner of which Moushumi sets up her desk, her computer and printer, her files. They are on the top floor, and if one leans far enough to the left outside the bathroom window it’s possible to see the Empire State Building. They spend a few weekends taking the shuttle bus to Ikea and filling up the rooms: imitation Noguchi lamps, a black sectional sofa, kilim and flokati carpets, a blond wood platform bed. Both her parents and Ashima are at once impressed and puzzled when they come to visit for the first time. Isn’t it a bit small, now that they are married? But Gogol and Moushumi aren’t thinking of children at the moment, certainly not until Moushumi finishes her dissertation. On Saturdays they shop together for food at the farmers’ market in Union Square, with canvas bags over their shoulders. They buy things they are not certain how to prepare, leeks and fresh fava beans and fiddleheads, looking up recipes in the cookbooks they’ve received for their wedding. From time to time when they cook they set off the fire alarm, which is overly sensitive, and they bang it
into silence with the handle of a broom.
They entertain together on occasion, throwing the sorts of parties their parents never had, mixing martinis in a stainless-steel shaker for a few of the architects at Gogol’s work or Moushumi’s graduate student friends at NYU. They play bossa nova and serve bread and salami and cheese. He transfers the money in his bank account over to hers, and they have pale green checks with both their names printed in the corner. The pass code they decide on for their ATM card, Lulu, is the name of the French restaurant where they had their first meal together. They eat most nights side by side on the stools at the kitchen counter or at the coffee table, watching TV. They make Indian food infrequently—usually it’s pasta or broiled fish or take-out from the Thai restaurant down the block. But sometimes, on a Sunday, both craving the food they’d grown up eating, they ride the train out to Queens and have brunch at Jackson Diner, piling their plates with tandoori chicken and pakoras and kabobs, and shop afterward for basmati rice and the spices that need replenishing. Or they go to one of the hole-in-the-wall tea shops and drink tea in paper cups with heavy cream, asking the waitress in Bengali to bring them bowls of sweet yogurt and haleem. He calls every evening before leaving the office to say he is on his way home, asks if he needs to pick up lettuce or a loaf of bread. After dinner they watch television, as Moushumi writes out thank-you cards to all their parents’ friends, for the checks they had needed twenty different slips to deposit. These are the things that make him feel married. Otherwise it’s the same, only now they’re always together. At night she sleeps beside him, always rolling onto her stomach, waking up every morning with a pillow pressed over her head.
Occasionally, in the apartment, he finds odd remnants of her life before he’d appeared in it, her life with Graham—the inscription to the two of them in a book of poems, a postcard from Provence stuffed into the back of a dictionary, addressed to the apartment they’d secretly shared. Once, unable to stop himself, he’d walked to this address during his lunch break, wondering what her life had been like back then. He imagined her walking along the sidewalk, carrying grocery bags from the supermarket that was on the next corner, in love with another man. He doesn’t feel jealous of her past per se. It’s only that sometimes Gogol wonders whether he represents some sort of capitulation or defeat. He doesn’t feel this always, just enough to nag at him, settling over his thoughts like a web. But then he looks around the apartment for reassurance, reminding himself of the life they’ve set up together and share. He looks at the photograph taken at their wedding, in which matching garlands hang from their necks. It sits in a tasteful leather frame on top of the television set. He wanders into the bedroom, where she’s working, kissing her
on the shoulder, drawing her to bed. But in the closet they now share is a garment bag containing a white dress he knows she would have worn a month after the Indian ceremony that had been planned for her and Graham, a second ceremony before a justice of the peace on Graham’s father’s lawn in Pennsylvania. She had told him about it. A patch of the dress is visible through a plastic window in the garment bag. He’d unzipped it once, glimpsed something sleeveless, to the knee, with a plain round neck, reminding him of a tennis dress. One day he asks her why she still keeps it. “Oh that,” she says with a shrug. “I keep meaning to have it dyed.”
In March they go to Paris. Moushumi is invited to give a paper at a conference at the Sorbonne, and they decide to make a vacation out of it, Gogol arranging to take the week off from work. Instead of staying in a hotel, they stay in an apartment in the Bastille which belongs to a friend of Moushumi’s, a male friend named Emanuel, a journalist, who is on holiday in Greece. The apartment is barely heated, minuscule, at the top of six steep flights of stairs, with a bathroom the size of a phone booth. There is a loft bed just inches from the ceiling, so that sex is a serious hazard. An espresso pot nearly fills the narrow two-burner stove. Apart from two chairs at the dining table, there is no place to sit. The weather is raw, cheerless, the sky white, the sun perpetually hidden from view. Paris is famous for such weather, Moushumi tells him. He feels hidden himself; men on the streets stare at Moushumi constantly, their glances lingering plainly, in spite of the fact that Gogol is at her side.
It is his first time in Europe. The first time he sees the sort of architecture he has read about for so many years, admired only in the pages of books and slides. For some reason, in Moushumi’s company, he feels more apologetic than excited. Though they journey together one day to Chartres, and another to Versailles, he has the feeling she’d rather be meeting friends for coffee, attending panels at the conference, eating at her favorite bistros, shopping at her favorite stores. From the beginning he feels useless. Moushumi makes all the decisions, does all the talking. He is mute in the brasseries where they eat their lunches, mute in the shops where he gazes at beautiful belts, ties, paper, pens; mute on the rainy afternoon they spend together at the d’Orsay. He is particularly mute when he and Moushumi get together for dinners with groups of her French friends, drinking Pernods and feasting on couscous or choucroute, smoking and arguing around paper-covered tables. He struggles to grasp the topic of conversation—the euro, Monica Lewinsky, Y2K—but
everything else is a blur, indistinguishable from the clatter of plates, the drone of echoing, laughing voices. He watches them in the giant gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, their dark heads leaning close.
Part of him knows this is a privilege, to be here with a person who knows the city so well, but the other part of him wants simply to be a tourist, fumbling with a phrase book, looking at all the buildings on his list, getting lost. When he confesses his wish to Moushumi one night as they are walking back to the apartment, she says, “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” and the next morning she instructs him to walk to the Métro station, have his photo taken in a booth, get a Carte Orange. And so Gogol goes sightseeing, alone, while Moushumi is off at her conference, or as she sits at the table in the apartment and puts the final touches on her paper. His only companion is Moushumi’s Plan de Paris, a small red guide to the arrondissements, with a folded map attached to the back cover. On the last page, Moushumi writes in a few phrases for his benefit: “Je voudrais un café, s’il vous plaît.” “Où sont les toilettes?” And she warns as he’s walking out the door, “Avoid ordering a café crème unless it’s morning. The French never do that.”
Though the day is bright for a change, it is particularly cold, brisk air stinging his ears. He remembers his first lunch with Moushumi, the afternoon she’d dragged him to the hat store. He remembers the two of them crying out in unison as the wind blasted their faces, a time too soon for them to cling to each other for warmth. He walks now to the corner, decides to get another croissant at the boulangerie where he and Moushumi go every morning to buy breakfast. He sees a young couple standing in a patch of sunlight on the sidewalk, feeding each other pastries from a bag. Suddenly he wants to go back to the apartment, climb into the loft bed and forget about sightseeing, hold Moushumi in his arms. He wants to lie with her for hours, as they did at the beginning, skipping meals, then wandering the streets at odd hours, desperate for something to eat. But she must present her paper at the end of the week, and he knows she will not be roused from her task of reading it aloud, timing its duration, making small marks in the margin. He consults his map and for the next few days he follows the routes she has charted for him with a pencil. He wanders for miles along the famous boulevards, through the Marais, arriving after many wrong turns at the Picasso Museum. He sits on a bench and sketches the town houses in the Place des Vosges, walks along the desolate gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens. Outside the Academie des Beaux-Arts he wanders for hours through the shops selling prints, eventually buying a drawing of the Hôtel de Lauzun. He photographs the narrow sidewalks, the dark cobblestone streets, the mansard roofs, the ancient,
shuttered buildings of pale beige stone. All of it he finds beautiful beyond description, and yet at the same time it depresses him that none of it is new to Moushumi, that she has seen it all hundreds of times. He understands why she lived here for as long as she did, away from her family, away from anyone she knew. Her French friends adore her. Waiters and shopkeepers adore her. She both fits in perfectly yet remains slightly novel. Here Moushumi had reinvented herself, without misgivings, without guilt. He admires her, even resents her a little, for having moved to another country and made a separate life. He realizes that this is what their parents had done in America. What he, in all likelihood, will never do.
On their last day, in the morning, he shops for gifts for his in-laws, his mother, Sonia. It is the day Moushumi is presenting her paper. He had offered to go with her, to sit in the audience and listen to her speak. But she told him that was silly, why sit in the middle of a roomful of people speaking a language he doesn’t understand when there was still more of the city he could see? And so, after shopping, he sets off, alone, for the Louvre, a destination he’s put off until now. At the end of the day he meets her at a café in the Latin Quarter. She is there waiting for him behind a glassed-in partition on the sidewalk, wearing a dark red lipstick, sipping a glass of wine.
He sits down, orders a coffee. “How was it? How did it go?” She lights a cigarette. “Okay. Over with, at any rate.”
She looks more regretful than relieved, her eyes lingering over the small round table between them, the veins in the marble bluish, like those in cheese.
Normally she wants a full account of his adventures, but today they sit silently, watching the passers-by. He shows her the things he’s bought, a tie for his father-in-law, soaps for their mothers, a shirt for Samrat, a silk scarf for Sonia, sketchbooks for himself, bottles of ink, a pen. She admires the drawings he’s done. It is a café they’ve been to before, and he feels the slight nostalgia it is sometimes possible to feel at the end of an extended stay in a foreign place, taking in the details that will soon evaporate from his mind: the surly waiter who has served them both times, the view of the shops across the street, the green and yellow straw chairs.
“Are you sad to be leaving?” he asks, stirring sugar into his coffee, drinking it back in one gulp.
“A little. I guess a little part of me wishes I’d never left Paris, you know?”
He leans over, takes both her hands in his. “But then we would never have met,” he says, with more confidence than he feels.
“True,” she acknowledges. And then: “Maybe we’ll move here one day.” He nods. “Maybe.”
She looks beautiful to him, tired, the concentrated light of the dying day on her face, infusing it with an amber-pink glow. He watches the smoke drift away from her. He wants to remember this moment, the two of them together, here. This is how he wants to remember Paris. He takes out his camera, focusing it on her face.
“Nikhil, please, don’t,” she says, laughing, shaking her head. “I look awful.” She shields her face with the back of her hand.
He still holds up the camera. “Oh, come on, Mo. You’re beautiful. You look great.”
But she refuses to indulge him, moving her chair out of view with a scrape on the pavement; she doesn’t want to be mistaken for a tourist in this city, she says.
A Saturday evening in May. A dinner party in Brooklyn. A dozen people are gathered around a long, scratched-up dining table, smoking cigarettes, drinking Chianti from juice glasses, sitting on a series of backless wooden stools. The room is dark apart from a domed metal lamp hanging from a long cord, which casts a concentrated pool of light on the table’s center. An opera plays on a battered boom box on the floor. A joint is being passed around.
Gogol takes a hit, but as he sits there, holding his breath, he regrets it—he is already starved. Though it’s close to ten o’clock, dinner has yet to be served. Apart from the Chianti, the only offerings so far are a loaf of bread and a small bowl of olives. A blizzard of crumbs and pointy violet olive pits litter the tabletop. The bread, like a hard, dusty cushion, is full of prune-sized holes and has a crust that hurts the roof of Gogol’s mouth when he chews.
They are at the home of Moushumi’s friends Astrid and Donald. It’s a brownstone under renovation; Astrid and Donald, expecting their first child, are in the process of expanding their domain from a single floor of the house to the top three. Thick plastic sheets hang from rafters, creating transparent,
temporary corridors. Behind them, a wall is missing. Even at this hour, guests continue to arrive. They enter complaining of the cold that has persisted this far into spring, of the stinging, bothersome wind that tosses the treetops outside. They remove their coats, introduce themselves, pour themselves Chianti. If it happens to be their first time in the house they eventually drift from the table and troop up the stairs, to admire the pocket doors, the original tin ceilings, the vast space that will eventually become the nursery, the distant, sparkling view of Manhattan visible from the top floor.
Gogol has been to the house before, a bit too frequently in his opinion.
Astrid is a friend of Moushumi’s from Brown. The first time he’d met Donald and Astrid had been at his wedding. At least that’s what Moushumi says; he doesn’t remember them. They were living in Rome the first year that Gogol and Moushumi were together, on a Guggenheim that Astrid had gotten. But they’ve since moved back to New York, where Astrid has begun teaching film theory at the New School. Donald is a moderately talented painter of small still lifes of single, everyday objects: an egg, a cup, a comb, suspended against brightly colored backgrounds. Donald’s rendition of a spool of thread, a wedding present to Gogol and Moushumi, hangs in their bedroom. Donald and Astrid are a languidly confident couple, a model, Gogol guesses, for how Moushumi would like their own lives to be. They reach out to people, hosting dinner parties, bequeathing little bits of themselves to their friends. They are passionate spokespeople for their brand of life, giving Gogol and Moushumi a steady, unquestionable stream of advice about quotidian things. They swear by a certain bakery on Sullivan Street, a certain butcher on Mott, a certain style of coffeemaker, a certain Florentine designer of sheets for their bed.
Their decrees drive Gogol crazy. But Moushumi is loyal. She regularly goes out of her way, and thus out of their budget, to buy bread at that bakery, meat at that butcher.
He recognizes a few familiar faces tonight: Edith and Colin, who teach sociology at Princeton and Yale, respectively, and Louise and Blake, both Ph.D. candidates, like Moushumi, at NYU. Oliver is an editor at an art magazine; his wife, Sally, works as a pastry chef. The rest are painter friends of Donald’s, poets, documentary filmmakers. They are all married. Even now, a fact as ordinary, as obvious, as this astonishes him. All married! But this is life now, the weekend sometimes more tiring than the workweek, an endless stream of dinner parties, cocktail parties, occasional after-eleven parties with dancing and drugs to remind them that they are still young, followed by Sunday brunches full of unlimited Bloody Marys and overpriced eggs.
They are an intelligent, attractive, well-dressed crowd. Also a bit
incestuous. The vast majority of them know each other from Brown, and Gogol can’t ever shake the feeling that half the people in the room have slept with one another. There is the usual academic talk around the table, versions of the same conversation he can’t participate in, concerning conferences, job listings, ungrateful undergraduates, proposal deadlines. At one end of the table, a woman with short red hair and cat’s-eye glasses is talking about a Brecht play she’d once acted in in San Francisco, performed fully in the nude. At the other end, Sally is putting the finishing touches on a dessert she’s brought, in tently assembling layers and covering them with glistening white meringue that shoots up like a dense thicket of flames. Astrid is showing a few people paint chips, which she’s lined up in front of her like tarot cards, versions of an apple green she and Donald are considering for the front hallway. She wears glasses that might have belonged to Malcolm X. She eyes the paint chips with precision; though she seeks the advice of her guests, she has already made up her mind about which permutation of the shade she will choose. To Gogol’s left, Edith is discussing her reasons for not eating bread. “I just have so much more energy if I stay off wheat,” she maintains.
Gogol has nothing to say to these people. He doesn’t care about their dissertation topics, or their dietary restrictions, or the color of their walls. In the beginning these occasions hadn’t been quite so excruciating. When Moushumi had first introduced him to her crowd he and she would sit with their arms around each other, their fellow guests a footnote to their own ongoing conversation. Once, at a party at Sally and Oliver’s, they’d wandered off to make quick, giddy love in Sally’s walkin closet, piles of her sweaters looming over them. He knows that that sort of insular passion can’t be sustained. Still, Moushumi’s devotion to these people puzzles him. He looks at her now. She is lighting a Dunhill. Her smoking hadn’t bothered him initially. He liked it, after sex, when she’d lean over the bedside table and strike a match, and he would lie beside her, listening to her exhale in the quiet, watching the smoke drift up over their heads. But these days the stale smell of it, in her hair and on her fingertips, and in the bedroom where she sits typing, slightly disgusts him, and from time to time he can’t help but have a fleeting vision of himself, tragically abandoned as a result of her mild but persistent addiction. When he’d admitted his fear to her one day, she’d laughed. “Oh, Nikhil,” she’d said, “you can’t be serious.”
She is laughing now, nodding intently at something Blake is saying. She seems animated in a way he doesn’t remember her having been in a while. He looks at her straight, smooth hair, which she’s had cut recently so that it flips up at the ends. The glasses that only emphasize her beauty. Her pale, pretty mouth. He knows that the approval of these people means something to her,
though what exactly he isn’t sure. And yet, as much as Moushumi enjoys seeing Astrid and Donald, Gogol has recently begun to notice that she is gloomy in the aftermath, as if seeing them serves only to remind her that their own lives will never match up. The last time they’d gone home after one of Astrid and Donald’s dinner parties, she’d picked a fight with him as soon as they’d walked in the door, complaining about the noise on Third Avenue, about the sliding doors on the closets that always fall off the rails, about the fact that it’s impossible to use the bathroom without being deafened by the exhaust fan. He tells himself that it’s the stress—she’s been studying for her orals, holed up in her carrel at the library until nine o’clock most nights. He remembers how it was studying for his licensing exam, which he failed twice before passing. He remembers the sustained isolation it had demanded, speaking to no one for days at a time, and so he doesn’t say anything. Tonight he’d held out the hope that she’d use her orals as a reason to decline the invitation to Astrid and Donald’s. But by now he’s learned that there is never a question of saying no when it comes to them.
It was through Astrid and Donald that Moushumi had met her former fiancé, Graham; Donald had gone to prep school with him, and he had given Moushumi’s number to Graham when he’d moved to Paris. Gogol doesn’t like to think about the fact that Moushumi’s connection to Graham persists through Astrid and Donald, that through them Moushumi has learned that Graham lives in Toronto now, is married and a father of twins. Back when Moushumi and Graham were together they’d made a foursome with Donald and Astrid, renting cottages together in Vermont, time-shares in the Hamptons. They try to incorporate Gogol into similar plans; this summer, for example, they are thinking of renting a house on the coast of Brittany. Though Astrid and Donald have welcomed Gogol heartily into their lives, sometimes he has the feeling they still think she’s with Graham. Once Astrid even called him Graham by mistake. No one had noticed except Gogol. They had all been a little drunk, but he knew he’d heard correctly, toward the end of an evening much like this one. “Mo, why don’t you and Graham take some of this pork loin home,” Astrid had said as they’d been clearing the dishes. “It’s great for sandwiches.”
At the moment, the guests are united in a single topic of conversation, talking about names for the baby. “What we want is something totally unique,” Astrid is saying. Lately Gogol has started to notice a trend: now that they inhabit this world of couples, dinner party small talk gravitates to the naming of children. If a woman at the table happens to be pregnant, as Astrid is now, the subject is inevitable.
“I always liked the names of popes,” Blake says. “You mean John and Paul?” Louise asks.
“More like Innocent and Clement.”
There are nonsensical names, like Jet and Tipper. These elicit groans.
Someone claims to have once known a girl named Anna Graham—”Get it? Anagram!”—and everyone laughs.
Moushumi argues that a name like hers is a curse, complains that no one can say it properly, that the kids at school pronounced it Moosoomi and shortened it to Moose. “I hated being the only Moushumi I knew,” she says.
“See now, I’d have loved that,” Oliver tells her.
Gogol pours himself another juice glass of Chianti. He hates contributing to these conversations, hates listening. A number of name books are passed around the table: Finding the Perfect Name, Alternative Baby Names, The Idiot’s Guide to Naming Your Baby. One is called What Not to Name Your Baby. Pages are folded down, some with stars and checks in the margins.
Someone suggests Zachary. Someone else says she once had a dog named Zachary. Everyone wants to look up his or her own name to see what it means, is by turns pleased and disappointed. Both Gogol and Moushumi are absent from these books, and for the first time all evening he feels a hint of that odd bond that had first drawn them together. He goes over to where she’s sitting, takes one of her hands, which have been resting flat on the surface of the table, her arms extended. She turns to look at him.
“Hey there,” she says. She smiles at him, temporarily leaning her head on his shoulder, and he realizes that she’s drunk.
“What does Moushumi mean?” Oliver asks on the other side of her.
“A damp southwesterly breeze,” she says, shaking her head, rolling her eyes.
“Sort of like the one outside?”
“I always knew you were a force of nature,” Astrid says, laughing.
Gogol turns to Moushumi. “Really?” he says. He realizes that it’s something he’d never thought to ask about her, something he hadn’t known.
“You never told me that,” he says.
She shakes her head, confused. “I haven’t?”
It bothers him, though he’s not quite sure why. But it’s not the time to dwell on it. Not in the middle of all this. He gets up to go to the bathroom. When he is finished, instead of returning to the dining room, he walks up a flight of stairs, to check out the renovations. He pauses at the doors to a series of whitewashed rooms with nothing but ladders in them. Others are filled with boxes, stacked six or seven deep. He stops to inspect some blueprints spread out on the floor. He remembers that when he and Moushumi were first dating they’d spent an entire afternoon, in a bar, drawing a plan of the ideal house.
He’d argued for something modernist, full of glass and light, but she’d wanted a brownstone like this one. In the end they’d designed something implausible, a town house of poured concrete with a glass facade. It was before they’d slept together, and he remembers how they’d both grown embarrassed when deciding where the bedroom should go.
He ends up in the kitchen, where Donald is only now beginning to prepare spaghetti alle vongole. It’s an old kitchen from one of the former rental units, which they’re using until their new one is ready. Dingy linoleum and appliances lining a single wall remind Gogol of his former place on Amsterdam Avenue. On the stove is an empty, gleaming stainless-steel stockpot so large that it covers two burners. Salad leaves are in a bowl covered with dampened paper towels. A heap of tiny pale green clams no larger than quarters soak in the deep porcelain sink.
Donald is tall, wearing jeans and flip-flops and a paprika-colored shirt whose sleeves are rolled up to just above his elbows. He is handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light brown hair. He wears an apron over his clothes, and is busily plucking leaves from an excessively large bunch of parsley.
“Hey there,” Gogol says. “Need any help?”
“Nikhil. Welcome.” Donald hands over the parsley. “Be my guest.” Gogol is grateful for something to do, to be occupied and productive,
even in the role of sous-chef to Donald. “So, how are the renovations going?”
“Don’t ask,” Donald says. “We just fired our contractor. At this rate our
kid will already have moved out by the time the nursery’s ready.”
Gogol watches as Donald begins to remove the clams from their bath, scrubbing the shells with something that looks like a tiny toilet bowl brush, then tossing them one by one into the stockpot. Gogol pokes his head into the pot and sees the vongole, their shells uniformly parted in a quietly foaming broth.
“So when are you guys moving out to this neighborhood?” Donald asks.
Gogol shrugs. He has no interest in moving to Brooklyn, not in such proximity to Donald and Astrid, anyway. “I haven’t really considered it. I prefer Manhattan. Moushumi does too.”
Donald shakes his head. “You’re wrong. Moushumi adores Brooklyn. We practically had to kick her out after the whole Graham thing.”
The mention of the name pricks him, deflates him as it always does. “She stayed here with you?”
“Right down the hall. She was here for a couple of months. She was a real mess. I’ve never seen anyone so devastated.”
He nods. This was something else she’d never told him. He wonders why. He hates the house suddenly, aware that it was here, with Donald and Astrid, that she spent her darkest hour. That it was here she’d mourned for another man.
“But you’re much better for her,” Donald concludes. Gogol looks up, surprised.
“Don’t get me wrong, Graham’s a great guy. But they were too alike somehow, too intense together.”
Gogol does not find this observation particularly reassuring. He finishes plucking the last of the parsley leaves, watches as Donald grabs a knife and chops them, expertly and swiftly, a hand held flat over the top of the blade.
Gogol feels incompetent all of a sudden. “I’ve never quite figured out how to do that,” he says.
“All you need is a really good knife,” Donald tells him. “I swear by
these.”
Gogol is sent off with a stack of plates, a bunch of forks and knives. On his way he pokes his head into the room down the hall where Moushumi had stayed. It’s empty now, a drop cloth on the floor, a tangle of wires poking out of the center of the ceiling. He imagines her in a bed in the corner, sullen, emaciated, a cloud of smoke over her head. Downstairs, he takes his place beside Moushumi. She kisses his earlobe. “Where did you wander off to?”
“Just keeping Donald company.”
The name conversation is still going full force. Colin says he likes names that signify a virtue: Patience, Faith, Chastity. He says his great-grandmother was named Silence, something nobody wants to believe.
“What about Prudence? Isn’t Prudence one of the virtues?” Donald says, coming down the stairs with a platter of spaghetti. The platter is lowered onto the table to scattered applause. The pasta is served, the plates passed around.
“It just feels like such a huge responsibility to name a baby. What if he hates it,” Astrid frets.
“So he’ll change it,” Louise says. “By the way. Remember Joe Chapman from college? I heard he’s a Joanne now.”
“God, I would never change my name,” Edith says. “It’s my grandmother’s.”
“Nikhil changed his,” Moushumi blurts out suddenly, and for the first time all evening, with the exception of the opera singers, the room goes completely quiet.
He stares at her, stunned. He has never told her not to tell anyone. He simply assumed she never would. His expression is lost on her; she smiles back at him, unaware of what she’s done. The dinner guests regard him, their mouths hanging open in confused smiles.
“What do you mean he changed his name?” Blake asks slowly.
“Nikhil. It wasn’t the name he was born with.” She nods, her mouth full, tossing a clamshell onto the table. “Not his name when we were kids.”
“What name were you born with?” Astrid says, looking at him
suspiciously, her eyebrows furrowed for effect.
For a few seconds he says nothing. “Gogol,” he says finally. It has been years since he’s been Gogol to anyone other than his family, their friends. It sounds as it always does, simple, impossible, absurd. He stares at Moushumi as he says it, but she’s too drunk to absorb his reproach.
“As in ‘The Overcoat’?” Sally asks.
“I get it,” Oliver says. “Nick-olai Gogol.”
“I can’t believe you’ve kept this from us, Nick,” Astrid chides.
“What in the world made your parents choose that name?” Donald wants to know.
He thinks back to the story he cannot bring himself to tell these people, at once as vivid and as elusive as it’s always been: the capsized train in the middle of the night, his father’s arm sticking through a window, the crumpled page of a book clutched in his fist. It’s a story he’d told Moushumi, in the months after they’d first met. He’d told her of the accident, and then he’d told her about the night his father had told him, in the driveway at Pemberton Road. He’d confessed to her that he still felt guilty at times for changing his name, more so now that his father was dead. And she’d assured him that it was understandable, that anyone in his place would have done the same. But now it’s become a joke to her. Suddenly he regrets having ever told Moushumi; he wonders whether she’ll proclaim the story of his father’s accident to the table as well. By morning, half the people in the room will have forgotten. It will be a tiny, odd fact about him, an anecdote, perhaps, for a future dinner party. This is what upsets him most.
“My father was a fan,” he says finally.
“Then maybe we should call the baby Verdi,” Donald muses, just as the opera surges to its closing bars, and the tape ends with a click.
“You’re not helping,” Astrid says, petulant, kissing Donald on the nose. Gogol watches them, knowing that it’s all in jest—they’re not the type to do something so impulsive, so naive, to blunder, as his own parents had done.
“Relax,” Edith says. “The perfect name will come to you in time.” Which is when Gogol announces, “There’s no such thing.”
“No such thing as what?” Astrid says.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen,” he adds. “Until then, pronouns.”
People shake their heads dismissively. Moushumi shoots him a look that he ignores. The salad is served. The conversation takes a new turn, carries on without him. And yet he can’t help but recall a novel he’d once picked up from the pile on Moushumi’s side of the bed, an English translation of something French, in which the main characters were simply referred to, for hundreds of pages, as He and She. He had read it in a matter of hours, oddly relieved that the names of the characters were never revealed. It had been an unhappy love story. If only his own life were so simple.
