1999
On the morning of their first anniversary, Moushumi’s parents call, waking them, wishing them a happy anniversary before they’ve had the chance to say it to each other. In addition to their anniversary, there is something else to celebrate: Moushumi successfully passed her orals the week before, is now officially ABD. There’s a third thing worth celebrating but which she hasn’t mentioned—she’s been awarded a research fellowship to work on her dissertation in France for the year. She’d applied for the grant secretly, just before the wedding, simply curious to see if she’d get it. It was always good practice, she’d reasoned, to strive for such things. Two years ago she would have said yes on the spot. But it’s no longer possible to fly off to France for the year, now that she has a husband, a marriage, to consider. So when the good news came she decided it was easier to decline the fellowship quietly, to file away the letter, not to bring it up.
She’s taken the initiative for the evening, making reservations at a place in midtown, which Donald and Astrid have recommended. She feels a bit guilty for all these months of studying, aware that with her exams as an excuse, she has ignored Nikhil perhaps more than necessary. There were nights that she told him she was at her carrel in the library when really she’d met Astrid and her baby, Esme, in SoHo, or gone for a walk by herself. Sometimes she would sit at a restaurant alone, at the bar, ordering sushi or a sandwich and a glass of wine, simply to remind herself that she was still capable of being on her own. This assurance is important to her; along with the Sanskrit vows she’d repeated at her wedding, she’d privately vowed that she’d never grow fully dependent on her husband, as her mother has. For even after thirty-two years abroad, in England and now in America, her mother does not know how to drive, does not have a job, does not know the difference between a checking and a savings account. And yet she is a perfectly intelligent woman, was an honors student in philology at Presidency College before she was married off at twenty-two.
They’ve both dressed up for the occasion—when she emerges from the bathroom she sees that he is wearing the shirt she’s given him, moss-colored with a velvet Nehru collar of slightly darker green. It was only after the salesman had wrapped it that she’d remembered the rule about giving paper on the first anniversary. She considered saving the shirt for Christmas, going to Rizzoli and buying him an architecture book instead. But there hasn’t been
the time. She is wearing the black dress she’d worn the first time he’d come to dinner, the first time they’d slept together, and over it, a lilac pashmina shawl, Nikhil’s anniversary present to her. She still remembers their very first date, liking the slightly untamed look of his hair as he’d approached her at the bar, the dark pine stubble on his cheeks, the shirt he’d worn with green stripes and thinner stripes of lavender, the collar beginning to fray. She still remembers her bewilderment, looking up from her book and seeing him, her heart skipping, feeling the attraction instantly, powerfully, in her chest. For she had been expecting an older version of the boy she remembered, distant, quiet, in corduroy jeans and a sweatshirt, a few pimples dotting his chin. The day before the date, she’d had lunch with Astrid. “I just don’t see you with some Indian guy,” Astrid had said dismissively over salads at City Bakery. At the time Moushumi had not protested, maintaining apologetically that it was just one date. She’d been deeply skeptical herself—apart from the young Shashi Kapoor and a cousin in India, she had never until then found herself attracted to an Indian man. But she’d genuinely liked Nikhil. She’d liked that he was neither a doctor nor an engineer. She’d liked that he’d changed his name from Gogol to Nikhil; though she’d known him all those years, it was a thing that made him somehow new, not the person her mother had mentioned.
They decide to walk to the restaurant, thirty blocks north of their apartment, four blocks west. Though it’s dark already, the evening is pleasantly warm, so much so that she hesitates under the awning of their building, wondering if the pashmina is necessary. She has nowhere to put it, her evening bag is too small. She lets the shawl drop from her shoulders, gathers it up in her hands.
“Maybe I should leave this upstairs.”
“What if we want to walk back?” he says. “You’ll probably need it then.” “I guess.”
“It looks nice on you, by the way.” “Do you remember this dress?”
He shakes his head. She’s disappointed but not surprised. By now she’s learned that his architect’s mind for detail fails when it comes to everyday things. For example, he had not bothered to hide the receipt for the shawl, leaving it, along with change emptied from his pocket, on top of the bureau they share. She can’t really blame him for not remembering. She herself can no longer remember the exact date of that evening. It had been a Saturday in
November. But now those landmarks in their courtship have faded, have given way to the occasion they are now celebrating.
They walk up Fifth Avenue, past the stores that sell Oriental carpets, unfurled in illuminated windows. Past the public library. Instead of proceeding to the restaurant, they decide to wander up the sidewalk for a while; there are still twenty minutes before their reservation. Fifth Avenue is eerily uncluttered, only a handful of people and cabs in a neighborhood usually choked with shoppers and tourists. She comes here seldom, only to buy make-up at Bendel’s, or to see the odd movie at the Paris, and once, with Graham and his father and stepmother, to have drinks at the Plaza. They walk past the windows of closed shops displaying watches, luggage, trench coats. A pair of turquoise sandals causes Moushumi to stop. The shoes are arranged on a Lucite pedestal, glowing under a spotlight, the gladiator-style straps festooned with rhinestones.
“Ugly or beautiful?” she asks him. It is a question she poses to him often, as they leaf together through apartments featured in Architectural Digest or the design section of the Times magazine. Often his answers surprise her, convincing her to appreciate an object she would have otherwise dismissed.
“I’m pretty certain they’re ugly. But I would have to see them on.” “I agree. Guess how much they cost,” she says.
“Two hundred dollars.”
“Five. Can you believe it? I saw them featured in Vogue.”
She begins to walk away. After a few paces she turns back and sees that he’s still standing there, bent down to see if there’s a price tag on the bottom of the shoe. There is something at once innocent and irreverent about the gesture, and she is reminded, forcefully, of why she still loves him. It reminds her of how grateful she’d felt when he’d reappeared in her life. By the time she’d met him she’d begun to fear that she was retreating into her former self, before Paris—untouched, bookish, alone. She recalled the panic she’d felt, all her friends married. She’d even considered placing a personal ad. But he had accepted her, had obliterated her former disgrace. She believed that he would be incapable of hurting her as Graham had. After years of clandestine relationships, it felt refreshing to court in a fish-bowl, to have the support of her parents from the very start, the inevitability of an unquestioned future, of marriage, drawing them along. And yet the familiarity that had once drawn her to him has begun to keep her at bay. Though she knows it’s not his fault,
she can’t help but associate him, at times, with a sense of resignation, with the very life she had resisted, had struggled so mightily to leave behind. He was not who she saw herself ending up with, he had never been that person.
Perhaps for those very reasons, in those early months, being with him, falling in love with him, doing precisely what had been expected of her for her entire life, had felt forbidden, wildly transgressive, a breach of her own instinctive will.
They can’t find the restaurant at first. Though they have the exact address, written on a slip of folded paper in Moushumi’s evening bag, it leads them only to a suite of offices in a town house. They press the buzzer, peer through the glass door into the empty, carpeted foyer, at a big vase of flowers at the foot of the stairs.
“It can’t be this,” she says, putting her hands up to the glass, shielding either side of her face in order to block out the glare.
“Are you sure you wrote down the address right?” Gogol asks.
They wander partway up and down the block, look on the other side.
They return to the town house, looking up at the darkened windows for signs of life.
“There it is,” he says, noticing a couple emerging from a basement door below the steps. There, in an entryway lit by a single sconce, they find a plaque nailed discreetly into the facade of the building bearing the restaurant’s name, Antonia. A small fleet gathers to welcome them, to tick their names off a list at a podium, to lead them to their table. The fuss feels unwarranted as they step into a stark, sunken dining room. The atmosphere is somber, vaguely abandoned, as the streets had been. There is a family eating after the theater, she guesses, the two small daughters in absurdly fancy dresses with petticoats and large lacy collars. There are a few wealthy-looking middle- aged couples in suits. A well-dressed elderly gentleman is dining alone. She finds it suspicious that there are so many empty tables, that no music plays.
She’d been hoping for something more bustling, warmer. Given that it’s subterranean, the place seems surprisingly vast, the ceilings high. The air- conditioning is too strong, chilling her bare legs and arms. She wraps the pashmina tightly around her shoulders.
“I’m freezing. Do you think they’d turn down the AC if I asked?” “I doubt that. Would you like my jacket?” Nikhil offers.
“No, it’s okay.” She smiles at him. And yet she feels uncomfortable, depressed. She is depressed by the pair of teenaged Bangladeshi busboys who wear tapestry waistcoats and black trousers, serving them warm bread with silver tongs. It annoys her that the waiter, perfectly attentive, looks neither of them in the eye as he describes the menu, speaking instead to the bottle of mineral water positioned between them. She knows it’s too late to change their plans now. But even after they place their order, a part of her has a nagging urge, feels like standing up, leaving. She had done something similar a few weeks ago, sitting in the chair of an expensive hair salon, walking out after the apron had been tied behind her neck, while the stylist had gone to check on another client, simply because something about the stylist’s manner, the bored expression on her face as she’d lifted a lock of Moushumi’s hair and studied it in the mirror, had felt insulting. She wonders what Donald and Astrid like about this place, decides it must be the food. But when it arrives, it too disappoints her. The meal, served on square white plates, is fussily arranged, the portions microscopically small. As usual they trade plates partway through the meal, but this time she doesn’t like the taste of his so she sticks to her own. She finishes her entree of scallops too quickly, sits for a very long time, it seems, watching Nikhil work his way through his quail.
“We shouldn’t have come here,” she says suddenly, frowning.
“Why not?” He looks approvingly around the room. “It’s nice enough.” “I don’t know. It’s not what I thought it would be.”
“Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”
But she is not able to enjoy herself. As they near the end of the meal, it occurs to her that she is neither very drunk nor full. In spite of two cocktails and the bottle of wine they’d shared she feels distressingly sober. She looks at the hair-thin quail bones Nikhil has discarded on his plate and is faintly repulsed, wishing he’d finish so that she could light her after-dinner cigarette.
“Madam, your shawl,” one of the busboys says, picking it up from the floor and handing it to her.
“Sorry,” she says, feeling clumsy, unkempt. Then she notices that her black dress is coated with lilac fibers. She brushes at the material, but the fibers cling stubbornly, like cat hair.
“What’s the matter?” Nikhil asks, looking up from his plate.
“Nothing,” she says, not wanting to hurt his feelings, to find fault with his costly gift.
They are the last of the diners to leave. It’s been wildly expensive, far more than they’d expected. They put down a credit card. Watching Nikhil sign the receipt, she feels cheap all of a sudden, irritated that they have to leave such a generous tip though there had been no real reason to fault the waiter’s performance. She notices that a number of tables have already been cleared, chairs placed upside down on their surfaces.
“I can’t believe they’re already stripping the tables.”
He shrugs. “It’s late. They probably close early on Sundays.”
“You’d think they could wait for us to leave,” she says. She feels a lump form in her throat, tears filming her eyes.
“Moushumi, what’s wrong? Is there something you want to talk about?”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t feel like explaining. She wants to be home, crawl into bed, put the evening behind her. Outside, she’s relieved that it’s drizzling, so that instead of walking back to the apartment as they’d planned they can hail a cab.
“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?” he says as they are riding home. He’s beginning to lose patience with her, she can tell.
“I’m still hungry,” she says, looking out the window, at the restaurants still open at this hour—brashly lit diners with specials scrawled on paper plates, cheap calzone places with sawdust-coated floors, the type of restaurants she would never think to enter normally but which look suddenly enticing. “I could eat a pizza.”
Two days later, a new semester begins. It’s Moushumi’s eighth semester at NYU. She is finished with classes, will never in her life take a class again. Never again will she sit for an exam. This fact delights her—finally, a formal emancipation from studenthood. Though she still has a dissertation to write, still has an adviser to monitor her progress, she feels unmoored already, somehow beyond the world that has defined and structured and limited her for so long. This is the third time she’s taught the class. Beginning French,
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a total of three hours a week. All she’s had to do is look ahead in her calendar and change the date of the class meetings. Her biggest effort will be to learn her students’ names. She is always flattered when they assume she herself is French, or half-French. She enjoys their looks of disbelief when she tells them she is from New Jersey, born to Bengali parents.
Moushumi’s been given an eight A.M. section, something that had annoyed her at first. But now that she’s up, showered, dressed, walking down the street, a latte from the deli on their block in one hand, she’s invigorated. Being out at this hour al ready feels like an accomplishment. When she’d left the apartment, Nikhil had still been asleep, undisturbed by the persistent beeping of the alarm. The night before, she’d laid out her clothes, her papers, something she had not done since she was a girl preparing for school. She likes walking through the streets so early, had liked rising by herself in semidarkness, liked the sense of promise it lent the day. It’s a pleasant change from their usual routine—Nikhil showered, in his suit, flying out the door as she’s just pouring herself a first cup of coffee. She’s thankful not to have to face her desk in the corner of their bedroom first thing, surrounded as it is by sacks full of dirty clothes they keep meaning to drop off at the laundry but get around to only once a month, when buying new socks and underwear becomes necessary. Moushumi wonders how long she will live her life with the trappings of studenthood in spite of the fact that she is a married woman, that she’s as far along in her studies as she is, that Nikhil has a respectable if not terribly lucrative job. It would have been different with Graham—he’d made more than enough money for the both of them. And yet that, too, had been frustrating, causing her to fear that her career was somehow an indulgence, unnecessary. Once she has a job, a real full-time tenure-track job, she reminds herself, things will be different. She imagines where that first job might take her, assumes it will be in some far-flung town in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes she jokes with Nikhil about their having to pick up and move, in a few years, to Iowa, to Kalama-zoo. But they both know it’s out of the question for him to leave New York, that she will be the one to fly back and forth on weekends. There is something appealing to her about this prospect, to make a clean start in a place where no one knows her, as she had done in Paris. It’s the one thing about her parents’ lives she truly admires— their ability, for better or for worse, to turn their back on their homes.
As she approaches the department she sees that something is wrong. An ambulance is parked on the sidewalk, the doors at the back flung open. Static crackles from a paramedic’s walkie-talkie. She peeks into the ambulance as she crosses the street, sees the resuscitative equipment but no people. The
sight causes her to shudder nevertheless. Upstairs, the hallway is crowded. She wonders who’s hurt, whether it’s a student or a professor. She recognizes no one, only a group of bewildered-looking freshmen bearing add-drop forms. “I think someone fainted,” people are saying. “I have no idea.” A door opens and they are told to make way. She expects to see someone in a wheelchair, is startled to see a body covered by a sheet, being carried out on a stretcher. A number of onlookers cry out in alarm. Moushumi’s hand goes to her mouth.
Half the crowd is looking down, away, shaking their heads. From the splayed feet at one end of the stretcher, wearing a pair of beige flat-heeled shoes, she can tell that it’s a woman. From a professor, she learns what happened: Alice, the administrative assistant, had fallen suddenly by the mailboxes. One minute she was sorting campus mail, the next minute she was out cold. By the time the paramedics had arrived she was dead from an aneurysm. She was in her thirties, unmarried, perpetually sipping herbal tea. Moushumi had never been particularly fond of her. There had been a brittle quality to her, something unyielding, a young person who carried about her a premonition of old age.
Moushumi feels sick at the thought of it, of a death so sudden, of a woman so marginal and yet so central to her world. She enters the office she shares with the other TAs, empty now. She calls Nikhil at home, at work. No answer. She looks at her watch, realizes he must be on the subway, on his way to work. Suddenly she’s glad he’s unreachable—she’s reminded of the way Nikhil’s father had died, instantly, without warning. Surely this would remind him of that. She has the urge to leave campus, return to the apartment. But she has a class to teach in half an hour. She goes back to the Xerox room to copy her syllabus and a short passage from Flaubert to translate in class. She pushes the button to collate the syllabus but forgets to push the button for staples. She searches in the supply closet for a stapler, and when she fails to find one, goes instinctively to Alice’s desk. The phone is ringing. A cardigan is draped over the back of the chair. She opens up Alice’s drawer, afraid to touch anything. She finds a stapler behind paper clips and Sweet’N Low packets in the drawer. ALICE is written on masking tape stuck to the top. The faculty mailboxes are still half-empty, the mail piled in a bin.
Moushumi goes to her mailbox to look for her class roster. Her box is empty, so she roots through the bin for her mail. As she picks up each piece of mail, addressed to this or that faculty member or TA, she begins putting it into the appropriate box, matching name to name. Even after she’s found her roster, she continues, completing the task Alice left undone. The mindlessness soothes her nerves. As a child she always had a knack for organization; she would take it upon herself to neaten closets and drawers, not only her own but
her parents’ as well. She had organized the cutlery drawer, the refrigerator. These self-appointed tasks would occupy her during quiet, hot days of her summer vacation, and her mother would look on in disbelief, sipping watermelon sherbet in front of the fan. There is just a handful of items left in the bin. She bends over to pick them up. And then another name, a sender’s name typed in the upper left-hand corner of a business-sized envelope, catches her eye.
She takes the stapler and the letter and the rest of her things into her office. She shuts the door, sits at her desk. The envelope is addressed to a professor of Comparative Literature who teaches German as well as French. She opens the envelope. Inside she finds a cover letter and a résumé. For a minute she simply stares at the name centered at the top of the résumé, laser- printed in an elegant font. She remembers the name, of course. The name alone, when she’d first learned it, had been enough to seduce her. Dimitri Desjardins. He pronounced Desjardins the English way, the s’s intact, and in spite of her training in French this is how she still thinks of it. Underneath the name is an address on West 164 th Street. He is looking for an adjunct position, teaching German part-time. She reads through the résumé, learns exactly where he’s been and what he’s done for the past decade. Travels in Europe. A job working with the BBC. Articles and reviews published in Der Spiegel, Critical Inquiry. A Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Heidelberg.
She had met him years ago, in her final months of high school. It was a period in which she and two of her friends, in their eagerness to be college students, in desperation over the fact that no one their own age was interested in dating them, would drive to Princeton, loiter on the campus, browse in the college bookstore, do their homework in buildings they could enter without an ID. Her parents had encouraged these expeditions, believing she was at the library, or attending lectures—they hoped she would go to Princeton for college, live with them at home. One day, as she and her friends were sitting on the grass, they were invited to join a student coalition from the university, a coalition protesting apartheid in South Africa. The group was planning a march on Washington, calling for sanctions.
They took a chartered overnight bus to D.C. in order to be at the rally by early morning. Each of them had lied to their parents, claiming to be sleeping over at one another’s homes. Everyone on the bus was smoking pot and listening to the same Crosby, Stills, and Nash album continuously, on a tape player running on batteries. Moushumi had been facing backward, leaning over and talking to her friends, who were in the two seats behind her, and
when she turned back around he was in the neighboring seat. He seemed aloof from the rest of the group, not an actual member of the coalition, somehow dismissive of it all. He was wiry, slight, with small, downward-sloping eyes and an intellectual, ravaged-looking face that she found sexy though not handsome. His hairline was already receding, his hair curly and fair. He needed a shave; his finger nails needed paring. He was wearing a white
button-down shirt, faded Levi’s with threadbare knees, pliable gold-framed spectacles that wrapped around his ears. Without introducing himself he began talking to her, as if they were already acquainted. He was twenty- seven, had gone to Williams College, was a student of European history. He was taking a German course at Princeton now, living with his parents, both of whom taught at the university, and he was going out of his mind. He had spent the years after college traveling around Asia, Latin America. He told her he probably wanted to get a Ph.D., eventually. The randomness of all this had appealed to her. He asked her what her name was and when she told him he had leaned toward her, cupping his ear, even though she knew he had heard it perfectly well. “How in the world do you spell that?” he’d asked, and when she told him, he mispronounced it, as most people did. She corrected him, saying that “Mou” rhymed with “toe,” but he shook his head and said, “I’ll just call you Mouse.”
The nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own. As the bus grew quiet, as everyone began to fall asleep, she had let him lean his head against her shoulder.
Dimitri was asleep, or so she thought. And so she pretended to fall asleep too. After a while she felt his hand on her leg, on top of the white denim skirt she was wearing. And then slowly, he began to unbutton the skirt. Several minutes passed between his undoing of one button and the next, his eyes closed all the while, his head still on her shoulder, as the bus hurtled down the empty, dark highway. It was the first time in her life a man had touched her.
She held herself perfectly still. She was desperate to touch him too, but she was terrified. Finally Dimitri opened his eyes. She felt his mouth near her ear, and she turned to him, prepared to be kissed, at seventeen, for the very first time. But he had not kissed her. He had only looked at her, and said, “You’re going to break hearts, you know.” And then he leaned back, in his own seat this time, removed his hand from her lap, and closed his eyes once again. She had stared at him in disbelief, angry that he assumed she hadn’t broken any hearts yet, and at the same time flattered. For the rest of the journey she kept her skirt unbuttoned, hoping he would return to the task. But he didn’t touch her after that, and in the morning there was no acknowledgment of what had passed between them. At the demonstration he had wandered off, paid her no
attention. On the way back they had sat apart.
Afterward she returned to the university every day to try to run into him. After some weeks she saw him striding across campus, alone, holding a copy of The Man Without Qualities. They shared some coffee and sat on a bench outside. He had asked her to see a movie, Goddard’s Alphaville, and to have Chinese food. She had worn an outfit that still causes her to wince, an old blazer of her father’s that was too long for her, over jeans, the sleeves of the blazer rolled up as if it were a shirt, to reveal the striped lining inside. It had been the first date of her life, strategically planned on an evening her parents were at a party. She recalled nothing of the movie, had eaten nothing at the restaurant, part of a small shopping complex off Route 1. And then, after watching Dimitri eat both of their fortune cookies without reading either prediction, she had made her error: she had asked him to be her date to her senior prom. He had declined, driven her home, kissed her lightly on her cheek in the driveway, and then he never called her again. The evening had humiliated her; he had treated her like a child. Sometime over the summer she bumped into him at the movies. He was with a date, a tall freckled girl with hair to her waist. Moushumi had wanted to flee, but he’d made a point of introducing her to the girl. “This is Moushumi,” Dimitri had said deliberately, as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity to say her name for weeks. He told her he was going to Europe for a while, and from the look on the date’s face she realized that she was going with him. Moushumi told him she’d been accepted at Brown. “You look great,” he told her when the date wasn’t listening.
While she was at Brown, postcards would arrive from time to time, envelopes plastered with colorful, oversized stamps. His handwriting was minuscule but sloppy, always causing her eyes to strain. There was never a return address. For a time she carried these letters in her book bag, to her classes, thickening her agenda. Periodically he sent her books he’d read and thought she might like. A few times he called in the middle of the night, waking her, and she spoke to him for hours in the dark, lying in bed in her dorm room, then sleeping through her morning classes. A single call kept her sailing for weeks. “I’ll come visit you. I’ll take you to dinner,” he told her. He never did. Eventually the letters tapered off. His last communication had been a box of books, along with several postcards he’d written to her in Greece and Turkey but not managed to send at the time. And then she’d moved to Paris.
She reads Dimitri’s résumé again, then the cover letter. The letter reveals nothing other than earnest pedagogical intent, mentions a panel Dimitri and the professor to whom it’s addressed attended some years ago. Practically the
same letter exists in a file on her computer. His third sentence is missing a period, which she now carefully inserts with her finest-nibbed fountain pen. She can’t bring herself to write down his address, though she doesn’t want to forget it. In the Xerox room, she makes a copy of the résumé. She sticks it in the bottom of her bag. Then she types up a new envelope and puts the original in the professor’s mailbox. As she returns to her office, she realizes there’s no stamp or postmark on the new envelope, worries that the professor will suspect something. But she reassures herself that Dimitri could easily have delivered the letter personally; the idea of him standing in the department, occupying the same space she occupies now, fills her with the same combination of desperation and lust he’s always provoked.
The hardest part is deciding where to write down the phone number, in what part of her agenda. She wishes she had a code of some sort. In Paris she had briefly dated an Iranian professor of philosophy who would write the names of his students in Persian on the backs of index cards, along with some small, cruel detail to help him distinguish among them. Once he read the cards to Moushumi. Bad skin, one said. Thick ankles, said another. Moushumi can’t resort to such trickery, can’t write in Bengali. She barely remembers how to write her own name, something her grandmother had once taught her.
Finally she writes it on the D page, but she doesn’t include his name beside it. Just the numbers, disembodied, don’t feel like a betrayal. They could be anybody’s. She looks outside. As she sits down at her desk, her eye travels upward; the window in the office reaches the top of the wall, so that the rooftop of the building across the street stretches across the bottom edge of the sill. The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity’s pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven.
At home that night, after dinner, Moushumi hunts among the shelves in the living room she and Nikhil share. Their books have merged since they’ve gotten married, Nikhil had unpacked them all, and nothing is where she expects it to be. Her eyes pass over stacks of Nikhil’s design magazines, thick books on Gropius and Le Corbusier. Nikhil, bent over a blueprint at the dining table, asks what she’s looking for.
“Stendhal,” she tells him. It’s not a lie. An old Modern Library edition of The Red and the Black in English, inscribed to Mouse. Love Dimitri, he’d written. It was the one book he’d inscribed to her. Back then it was the closest thing she’d ever had to a love letter; for months she had slept with the book
under her pillow, and later, slipped it between her mattress and box spring. Somehow she managed to hold on to it for years; it’s moved with her from Providence to Paris to New York, a secret talisman on her shelves that she would glance at now and again, still faintly flattered by his peculiar pursuit of her, and always faintly curious as to what had become of him. But now that she’s desperate to locate the book she’s convinced that it won’t be in the apartment, that maybe Graham had taken it by mistake when he’d moved out of their place on York Avenue, or that it’s in the basement of her parents’ house, in one of the boxes she’d shipped there a few years ago, when her shelves were getting too full. She doesn’t remember packing it from her old apartment, doesn’t remember unpacking it when she and Nikhil moved in together. She wishes she could ask Nikhil if he’s seen it—a small green clothbound book missing its dust jacket, the title embossed in a rectangle of black on the spine. And then suddenly she sees it herself, sitting in plain view, on a shelf she’d scanned a minute ago. She opens the book, sees the Modern Library emblem, the dashing, naked, torch-bearing figure. She sees the inscription, the force of the ballpoint pen he’d used slightly crimping the other side of the page. She’d abandoned the novel after the second chapter. Her place is still marked by a yellowing receipt for shampoo. By now she’s read the book in French three times. She finishes Scott-Moncrieff’s English translation within days, reading it at her desk in the department, and in her carrel in the library. In the evenings, at home, she reads it in bed until Nikhil comes in to join her—then she puts it away and opens something else.
She calls him the following week. By then she’s dug up the postcards, saved in an unsealed, unmarked manila envelope in the box where she keeps her tax returns, and read them, too, amazed that his words, the sight of his handwriting, still manage to discombobulate her. She tells herself she’s calling an old friend. She tells herself the coincidence of finding his résumé, of stumbling upon him in this way, is too great, that anyone in her position would pick up the phone and call. She tells herself he could very well be married, as she is. Perhaps all four of them will go out to dinner, become great friends. Still, she doesn’t tell Nikhil about the résumé. One night in her office, after seven o’clock when only a janitor roams the halls, after a few sips from the small bottle of Maker’s Mark she has stashed at the back of her file cabinet, she calls. A night Nikhil thinks she’s working on revisions for an article for PMLA.
She dials the number, listens as it rings four times. She wonders if he’ll
even remember her. Her heart races. Her finger moves to the cradle, ready to press down.
“Hello?”
It’s his voice. “Hi. Dimitri?” “Speaking. Who’s this?”
She pauses. She can still hang up if she wants. “It’s Mouse.”
They begin seeing each other Mondays and Wednesdays, after she teaches her class. She takes the train uptown and they meet at his apartment, where lunch is waiting. The meals are ambitious: poached fish; creamy potato gratins; golden, puffed chickens roasted with whole lemons in their cavities. There is always a bottle of wine. They sit at a table with his books and papers and laptop pushed to one side. They listen to WQXR, drink coffee and cognac and smoke a cigarette afterward. Only then does he touch her. Sunlight streams through large dirty windows into the shabby prewar apartment. There are two spacious rooms, flaking plaster walls, scuffed parquet floors, towering stacks of boxes he has not yet bothered to unpack. The bed, a brand-new mattress and box spring on wheels, is never made. After sex they are always amazed to discover that the bed has moved several inches away from the wall, pushing up against the bureau on the other side of the room. She likes the way he looks at her when their limbs are still tangled together, out of breath as if he’d been chasing her, his expression anxious before relaxing into a smile. Some gray has come into Dimitri’s hair and chest, some lines around the mouth and eyes. He’s heavier than before, his stomach undeniably wide, so that his thin legs appear slightly comic. He recently turned thirty-nine. He has not been married. He does not seem very desperate to be employed. He spends his days cooking meals, reading, listening to classical music. She gathers that he has inherited some money from his grandmother.
The first time they met, the day after she called him, at the bar of a crowded Italian restaurant near NYU, they had not been able to stop staring at each other, not been able to stop talking about the résumé, and the uncanny way it had fallen into Moushumi’s hands. He had moved to New York only a month ago, had tried to look her up but the phone is listed under Nikhil’s last name. It didn’t matter, they agreed. It was better this way. They drank glasses of prosecco. She agreed to an early dinner with Dimitri that night, sitting at
the bar of the restaurant, for the prosecco had gone quickly to their heads. He had ordered a salad topped with warm lambs’ tongue, a poached egg, and pecorino cheese, something she swore she would not touch but ended up eating the better part of. Afterward she’d gone into Balducci’s to buy the pasta and ready-made vodka sauce she would have at home with Nikhil.
On Mondays and Wednesdays no one knows where she is. There are no Bengali fruit sellers to greet her on the walk from Dimitri’s subway stop, no neighbors to recognize her once she turns onto Dimitri’s block. It reminds her of living in Paris—for a few hours at Dimitri’s she is inaccessible, anonymous. Dimitri is not terribly curious about Nikhil, does not ask her his name. He expresses no jealousy. When she told him in the Italian restaurant that she was married, his expression had not changed. He regards their time together as perfectly normal, as destined, and she begins to see how easy it is. Moushumi refers to Nikhil in conversation as “my husband”: “My husband and I have a dinner to go to next Thursday.” “My husband’s given me this cold.”
At home, Nikhil suspects nothing. As usual they have dinner, talk of their days. They clean up the kitchen together, then sit on the sofa and watch television while she corrects her students’ quizzes and exercises. During the eleven o’clock news, they have bowls of Ben and Jerry’s, then brush their teeth. As usual they get into bed, kiss, then slowly they turn away from each other in order to stretch comfortably into sleep. Only Moushumi stays awake. Each Monday and Wednesday night, she fears that he will sense something, that he will put his arms around her and instantly know. She stays awake for hours after they’ve turned out the lights, prepared to answer him, prepared to lie to his face. She had gone shopping, she would tell him if he were to ask, for in fact she had done this on her way home that first Monday, halting her journey back from Dimitri’s in midstream, getting out of the subway at 72d Street before continuing downtown, stopping in a store she’d never been in, buying a pair of the most ordinary-looking black shoes.
One night it’s worse than usual. It’s three o’clock, then four. Construction work has been taking place for the past few nights on their street, giant bins of rubble and concrete are moved and crushed, and Moushumi feels angry at Nikhil for being able to sleep through it. She’s tempted to get up, pour herself a drink, take a bath, anything. But fatigue keeps her in bed. She watches the shadows that the passing traffic throws onto their ceiling, listens to a truck
wailing in the distance like a solitary, nocturnal beast. She is convinced she will be up to see the sun rise. But somehow she falls asleep again. She is woken just after dawn by the sound of rain beating against the bedroom window, pelting it with such ferocity that she almost expects the glass to shatter. She has a splitting headache. She gets out of bed and parts the curtains, then returns to bed and shakes Nikhil awake. “Look,” she says, pointing at the rain, as if it were something truly extraordinary. Nikhil obliges, fully asleep, sits upright, then closes his eyes again.
At seven-thirty she gets out of bed. The morning sky is clear. She walks out of the bedroom and sees that rain has leaked through the roof, left an unsightly yellow patch on the ceiling and puddles in the apartment: one in the bathroom, another in the front hall. The sill of a window left open in the living room is soaked, streaked with mud, as are the bills and books and papers piled on it. The sight of it makes her weep. At the same time she’s thankful that there’s something tangible for her to be upset about.
“Why are you crying?” Nikhil asks, squinting at her in his pajamas. “There are cracks in the ceiling,” she says.
Nikhil looks up. “They’re not too bad. I’ll call the super.” “The rainwater came right through the roof.”
“What rain?”
“Don’t you remember? It was pouring rain at dawn. It was incredible. I woke you.”
But Nikhil doesn’t remember a thing.
A month of Mondays and Wednesdays passes. She begins to see him on Fridays as well. One Friday she finds herself alone in Dimitri’s apartment; he goes out as soon as she arrives, to buy a stick of butter for a white sauce he is making to pour over trout. Bartók plays on the stereo, expensive components scattered on the floor. She watches him from the window, walking down the block, a small, balding, unemployed middle-aged man, who is enabling her to wreck her marriage. She wonders if she is the only woman in her family ever to have betrayed her husband, to have been unfaithful. This is what upsets her
most to admit: that the affair causes her to feel strangely at peace, the complication of it calming her, structuring her day. After the first time, washing up in the bathroom, she’d been horrified by what she’d done, at the sight of her clothes scattered throughout the two rooms. Before leaving, she’d combed her hair in the bathroom mirror, the only one in the apartment. She’d kept her head bent low, glancing up only briefly at the end. When she did she saw that it was one of those mirrors that was for some reason particularly flattering, due to some trick of the light or the quality of the glass, causing her skin to glow.
There is nothing on Dimitri’s walls. He is still living out of a series of mammoth duffel bags. She is glad not to be able to picture his life in all its detail, its mess. The only things he’s set up are the kitchen, the stereo components, and some of his books. Each time she visits, there are modest signs of progress. She wanders around his living room, looks at the books he is beginning to organize on his plywood shelves. Apart from all the German, their personal libraries are similar. There is the same lime green spine of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. The same edition of Mimesis. The same boxed set of Proust. She pulls out an oversized volume of photographs of Paris, by Atget. She sits on an armchair, Dimitri’s only piece of living room furniture. It was here that she’d sat the first time she’d visited, and he’d stood behind her, massaging a spot on her shoulder, arousing her, until she stood up, and they’d walked together to the bed.
She opens up the book to regard the streets and the landmarks she once knew. She thinks of her wasted fellowship. A large square of sunlight appears on the floor. The sun is directly behind her, and the shadow of her head spreads across the thick, silken pages, a few strands of her hair strangely magnified, quivering, as if viewed through a microscope. She leans back her head, closes her eyes. When she opens them a moment later the sun has slipped away, a lone sliver of it now diminishing into the floorboards, like the gradual closing of a curtain, causing the stark white pages of the book to turn gray. She hears Dimitri’s footsteps on the stairs, then the clean sound of his key in the lock, slicing sharply into the apartment. She gets up to put the book away, searching for the gap in which it had stood.
