1994

He lives in New York now. In May he graduated from the architecture program at Columbia. He’s been working since then for a firm in midtown, with celebrated large-scale commissions to its name. It’s not the sort of job he’d envisioned for himself as a student; designing and renovating private residences was what he’d wanted to do. That might come later, his advisers have told him; for now, it was important to apprentice with the big names. And so, facing the tawny brick wall of a neighboring building across the air shaft, he works with a team on designs for hotels and museums and corporate headquarters in cities he’s never seen: Brussels, Buenos Aires, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong. His contributions are incidental, and never fully his own: a stairwell, a skylight, a corridor, an air-conditioning duct. Still, he knows that each component of a building, however small, is nevertheless essential, and he finds it gratifying that after all his years of schooling, all his crits and unbuilt projects, his efforts are to have some practical end. He typically works late into his evenings, and on most of his weekends, drawing designs on the computer, drafting plans, writing specifications, building Styrofoam and cardboard models to scale. He goes home to a studio in Morningside Heights, with two windows facing west, on Amsterdam Avenue. The entrance is easy to miss, a scratched-up glass door between a newsstand and a nail salon. It’s the first apartment he has to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school. There is so much street noise that when he is on the phone and the windows are open, people often ask if he is calling from a pay phone. The kitchen is built into what should have been an entryway, a space so small that the refrigerator stands several feet away, over by the bathroom door. On the stove sits a teakettle he has never filled with water, and on the countertop a toaster he’s never plugged in.

His parents are distressed by how little money he makes, and occasionally his father sends him checks in the mail to help him with his rent, his credit card bills. They had been disappointed that he’d gone to Columbia. They’d hoped he would choose MIT, the other architecture program to which he’d been accepted. But after four years in New Haven he didn’t want to move back to Massachusetts, to the one city in America his parents know. He didn’t want to attend his father’s alma mater, and live in an apartment in Central Square as his parents once had, and revisit the streets about which his parents speak nostalgically. He didn’t want to go home on the weekends, to go with them to pujos and Bengali parties, to remain unquestionably in their world.

He prefers New York, a place which his parents do not know well, whose beauty they are blind to, which they fear. He’d come to know the city slightly during his years at Yale, on visits with architecture classes. He’d been to a few parties at Columbia. Sometimes he and Ruth would ride in on Metro-North, and they would go to museums, or to the Village, or to browse for books at the Strand. But as a child he’d been to New York only once with his family, a trip that had given him no sense of what the city was like. They had gone one weekend to visit Bengali friends who lived in Queens. The friends had given his family a tour of Manhattan. Gogol had been ten years old, Sonia four. “I want to see Sesame Street,” Sonia had said, believing that it was an actual landmark in the city, and she had cried when Gogol had laughed at her, saying it didn’t exist. On the tour they were driven past sites like Rockefeller Center and Central Park and the Empire State Building, and Gogol had ducked his head below the car’s window to try to see how tall the buildings were. His parents had remarked endlessly at the amount of traffic, the pedestrians, the noise. Calcutta was no worse, they had said. He remembered wanting to get out and go to the top of one of the skyscrapers, the way his father had once taken him to the top of the Prudential Center in Boston when he was little.

But they were allowed out of the car only once they got to Lexington Avenue, to eat lunch at an Indian restaurant and then to buy Indian groceries, and polyester saris and 220-volt appliances to give to relatives in Calcutta. This, to his parents, was what one came to Manhattan to do. He remembered wishing that his parents would walk through the park, take him to the Museum of Natural History to see the dinosaurs, ride the subway even. But they had had no interest in such things.

One night, Evan, one of the draftsmen at work with whom he is friendly, talks him into going to a party. Evan tells Gogol that it’s an apartment worth seeing, a Tribeca loft that happens to be designed by one of the partners at the firm.

The host of the party, Russell, an old friend of Evan, works for the UN and has spent several years in Kenya, and as a result the loft is filled with an impressive collection of African furniture and sculpture and masks. Gogol imagines that it will be a party of hundreds filling up a vast space, the sort of party where he might arrive and leave undetected. But by the time Gogol and Evan get there, the party is nearly over, and there are only a dozen or so people sitting around a low coffee table surrounded by cushions, eating picked-over grapes and cheese. At one point Russell, who is diabetic, raises his shirt and injects himself in the stomach with insulin. Beside Russell is a woman Gogol can’t stop looking at. She is kneeling on the floor at Russell’s

side, spreading a generous amount of brie on a cracker, paying no attention to what Russell is doing. Instead she is arguing with a man on the other side of the coffee table about a movie by Buñuel. “Oh, come on,” she keeps saying, “it was brilliant.” At once strident and flirtatious, she is a little bit drunk. She has dirty blond hair gathered sloppily into a bun, strands falling randomly, attractively, around her face. Her forehead is high and smooth, her jawbones sloping and unusually long. Her eyes are greenish, the irises encased by thin rings of black. She is dressed in silk capri pants and a sleeveless white shirt that shows off her tan. “What did you think of it?” she asks Gogol, drawing him without warning into the discussion. When he tells her he hasn’t seen the film she looks away.

She approaches him again as he is standing idle, looking up at an imposing wooden mask that hangs above a suspended metal staircase, the hollow diamond-shaped eyes and mouth of the mask revealing the white brick wall behind it. “There’s an even scarier one in the bedroom,” she says, making a face, shuddering. “Imagine opening your eyes and seeing something like that first thing in the morning.” The way she says this makes him wonder if she speaks from experience, if she’s Russell’s lover, or ex-lover, if that is what she is implying.

Her name is Maxine. She asks him about the program at Columbia, mentioning that she’d gone to Barnard for college, majoring in art history. She leans back against a column as she speaks, smiling at him easily, drinking a glass of champagne. At first he assumes she is older than he is, closer to thirty than twenty. He is surprised to learn that she’d graduated from college the year after he started graduate school, that for a year they overlapped at Columbia, living just three blocks away from each other, and that they have in all likelihood crossed paths on Broadway or walking up the steps of Low Library or in Avery. It reminds him of Ruth, of the way they, too, had once lived in such close proximity as strangers. Maxine tells him she works as an assistant editor for a publisher of art books. Her current project is a book on Andrea Mantegna, and he impresses her, remembering correctly that his frescoes are in Mantua, in the Palazzo Ducale. They speak in that slightly strained, silly way that he associates now with flirtation—the exchange feels desperately arbitrary, fleeting. It is the sort of conversation he might have had with anybody, but Maxine has a way of focusing her attention on him completely, her pale, watchful eyes holding his gaze, making him feel, for those brief minutes, the absolute center of her world.

The next morning she calls, waking him; at ten on a Sunday he is still in bed, his head aching from the Scotch and sodas he’d consumed throughout the

evening. He answers gruffly, a bit impatiently, expecting it to be his mother calling to ask how his week has been. He has the feeling, from the tone of Maxine’s voice, that she’s been up for hours, that her breakfast has already been eaten, her Times thoroughly read. “It’s Maxine. From last night,” she says, not bothering to apologize for waking him. She tells him she’d found his number in the phone book, though he doesn’t remember telling her his last name. “God, your apartment’s noisy,” she remarks. Then, without awkwardness or pause, she invites him to dinner at her place. She specifies the evening, a Friday, tells him the address, somewhere in Chelsea. He assumes it will be a dinner party, asks if there’s anything he can bring, but she says no, it will be just him.

“I should probably warn you that I live with my parents,” she adds. “Oh.” This unexpected piece of information deflates him, confuses him.

He asks if her parents will mind his coming over, if perhaps they should meet at a restaurant instead.

But she laughs at this suggestion in a way that makes him feel vaguely foolish. “Why on earth would they mind?”

***

He takes a cab from his office to her neighborhood, getting out at a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine. It is a cool evening in September, raining steadily, the summer’s leaves still plentiful on the trees. He turns onto a remote, tranquil block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. It is his first date in a long time; with the exception of a few forgettable affairs at Columbia he’s been with no one seriously since Ruth. He doesn’t know what to make of the whole arrangement with Maxine, but as odd as the terms of the invitation seem he’d been unable to refuse. He is curious about her, attracted, flattered by the boldness of her pursuit.

He is stunned by the house, a Greek Revival, admiring it for several minutes like a tourist before opening the gate. He notes the pedimented window lintels, the Doric pilasters, the bracketed entablature, the black cruciform paneled door. He climbs a low stoop with cast-iron railings. The name below the bell is Ratliff. Several minutes after he presses it, enough to make him double-check the address on the scrap of paper in his jacket pocket, Maxine arrives. She kisses him on the cheek, leaning toward him on one foot, the other leg extended, slightly raised behind her. She is barefoot, wearing flowing black wool pants and a thin beige cardigan. As far as he can tell she wears nothing under the cardigan apart from her bra. Her hair is done up in

the same careless way. His raincoat is draped on a coat rack, his folding umbrella dropped into a stand. He glimpses himself quickly in a mirror in the foyer, smoothing his hair and his tie.

She leads him down a flight of stairs to a kitchen that appears to occupy an entire floor of the house, with a large farmhouse table at one end, and beyond that French doors leading to a garden. The walls are adorned with prints of roosters and herbs and an arrangement of copper skillets. Ceramic plates and platters are displayed on open shelves, along with what seem to be hundreds of cookbooks, food encyclopedias, and volumes of essays about eating. A woman stands at a butcher-block island by the appliances, snipping the ends of a pile of green beans with a pair of scissors.

“This is my mother, Lydia,” Maxine says. “And this is Silas,” she tells him, pointing to a reddish brown cocker spaniel dozing under the table.

Lydia is tall and slender like her daughter, with straight iron-colored hair cut youthfully to frame her face. She is carefully dressed, with gold jewelry at her ears and throat, a navy apron wrapped around her waist, gleaming black leather shoes. Though her face is lined and her complexion a bit splotchy, she is more beautiful even than Maxine, her features more regular, the cheekbones higher, the eyes more elegantly defined.

“Lovely to meet you, Nikhil,” she says, smiling brightly, and though she looks at him with interest, she does not pause in her work or offer to shake his hand.

Maxine pours him a glass of wine, not asking if perhaps he might prefer something else. “Come on,” she says, “I’ll show you the house.” She leads him up five flights of uncarpeted stairs that creak noisily beneath their combined weight. The plan of the house is simple, two immense rooms per floor, each of which, he is certain, is larger than his own apartment. Politely he admires the plaster cove moldings, the ceiling medallions, the marble mantelpieces, things he knows how to speak intelligently and at length about. The walls are painted in flamboyant colors: hibiscus pink, lilac, pistachio, and are crowded with clusters of paintings and drawings and photographs. In one room he sees an oil portrait of a small girl he assumes is Maxine, sitting in the lap of a stunning, youthful Lydia, wearing a yellow sleeveless dress. Along the hallways on every floor shelves ascend to the ceiling, crammed with all the novels one should read in a lifetime, biographies, massive monographs of every artist, all the architecture books Gogol has ever coveted. Alongside the clutter there is a starkness about the place that appeals to him: the floors are

bare, the woodwork stripped, many of the windows without curtains to highlight their generous proportions.

Maxine has the top floor to herself: a peach-colored bedroom with a sleigh bed at the back, a long black and red bath room. The shelf above the sink is full of different creams for her neck, her throat, her eyes, her feet, daytime, nighttime, sun and shade. Through the bedroom is a gray sitting room she treats as a closet, her shoes and handbags and clothes scattered across the floor, piled on a fainting couch, spilling over the backs of chairs. These patches of disorder make no difference—it is a house too spectacular to suffer distraction, forgiving of oversight and mess.

“Lovely frieze-band windows,” he comments, looking toward the ceiling. She turns to him, puzzled. “What?”

“That’s what those are called,” he explains, pointing. “They’re fairly common in houses from this period.”

She looks up, and then at him, seeming impressed. “I never knew that.”

He sits with Maxine on the fainting couch, leafing through a coffee table book she’d helped to edit on eighteenth-century French wallpapers, one side of the book resting on each of their knees. She tells him this is the house she’s grown up in, mentioning casually that she’d moved back six months ago after living with a man in Boston, an arrangement that had not worked out. When he asks if she plans to look for a place of her own she says it hasn’t occurred to her. “It’s such a bother renting a place in the city,” she says. “Besides, I love this house. There’s really nowhere else I’d rather live.” For all her sophistication he finds the fact that she’s moved back with her parents after a love affair has soured endearingly old-fashioned; it is something he cannot picture himself doing at this stage in his life.

At dinner he meets her father, a tall, good-looking man with luxuriant white hair, Maxine’s pale green-gray eyes, thin rectangular glasses perched halfway down his nose. “How do you do. I’m Gerald,” he says, nodding, shaking Gogol’s hand. Gerald gives him a bunch of cutlery and cloth napkins and asks him to set the table. Gogol does as he is told, aware that he is touching the everyday possessions of a family he barely knows. “You’ll sit here, Nikhil,” Gerald says, pointing to a chair once the silverware is laid.

Gogol takes his place on one side of the table, across from Maxine. Gerald and Lydia are at either end. Gogol had skipped lunch that day in order to leave the office in time for the date with Maxine, and already the wine, at

once heavier and smoother than what he is used to drinking, has gone to his head. He feels a pleasant ache at his temples, and a sudden gratitude for the day and where it has brought him. Maxine lights a pair of candles. Gerald tops off the wine. Lydia serves the food on broad white plates: a thin piece of steak rolled into a bundle and tied with string, sitting in a pool of dark sauce, the green beans boiled so that they are still crisp. A bowl of small, round, roasted red potatoes is passed around, and afterward a salad. They eat appreciatively, commenting on the tenderness of the meat, the freshness of the beans. His own mother would never have served so few dishes to a guest. She would have kept her eyes trained on Maxine’s plate, insisting she have seconds and then thirds. The table would have been lined with a row of serving bowls so that people could help themselves. But Lydia pays no attention to Gogol’s plate. She makes no announcement indicating that there is more. Silas sits at Lydia’s feet as they eat, and at one point Lydia slices off a generous portion of her meat and feeds it to him off of her palm.

The four of them go quickly through two bottles of wine, then move on to a third. The Ratliffs are vociferous at the table, opinionated about things his own parents are indifferent to: movies, exhibits at museums, good restaurants, the design of everyday things. They speak of New York, of stores and neighborhoods and buildings they either despise or love, with an intimacy and ease that make Gogol feel as if he barely knows the city. They speak about the house, which Gerald and Lydia bought back in the seventies, when no one wanted to live in the area, about the history of the neighborhood, and about Clement Clarke Moore, who Gerald explains was a professor of classics at the seminary across the street. “He was the person responsible for local residential zoning,” Gerald says. “That and writing ”Twas the Night Before Christmas,’ of course.” Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.

Something tells him that none of this is for his benefit, that this is the way the Ratliffs eat every night. Gerald is a lawyer. Lydia is a curator of textiles at the Met. They are at once satisfied and intrigued by his background, by his years at Yale and Columbia, his career as an architect, his Mediterranean looks. “You could be Italian,” Lydia remarks at one point during the meal, regarding him in the candle’s glow.

Gerald remembers a bar of French chocolate he bought on his way home, and this is unwrapped, broken apart, and passed around the table. Eventually the talk turns to India. Gerald asks questions about the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism, a topic Gogol knows little about. Lydia talks at length about Indian carpets and miniatures, Maxine about a college class she’d once taken

on Buddhist stupas. They have never known a person who has been to Calcutta. Gerald has an Indian colleague at work who just went to India for his honeymoon. He’d brought back spectacular photographs, of a palace built on a lake. Was that in Calcutta?

“That’s Udaipur,” Gogol tells them. “I’ve never been there. Calcutta’s in the east, closer to Thailand.”

Lydia peers into the salad bowl, fishing out a stray piece of lettuce and eating it with her fingers. She seems more relaxed now, quicker to smile, her cheeks rosy from the wine. “What’s Calcutta like? Is it beautiful?”

The question surprises him. He is accustomed to people asking about the poverty, about the beggars and the heat. “Parts of it are beautiful,” he tells her. “There’s a lot of lovely Victorian architecture left over from the British. But most of it’s decaying.”

“That sounds like Venice,” Gerald says. “Are there canals?”

“Only during monsoons. That’s when the streets flood. I guess that’s the closest it comes to resembling Venice.”

“I want to go to Calcutta,” Maxine says, as if this has been a thing denied to her all her life. She gets up and walks over to the stove. “I feel like tea.

Who wants tea?”

But Gerald and Lydia decide against tea tonight; there is an I, Claudius video they want to watch before bed. Without tending to the dishes they stand up, Gerald taking their two glasses and the rest of the wine. “Good night, dear,” Lydia says, kissing Gogol lightly on the cheek. And then their footsteps creak noisily up the stairs.

“I suppose you’ve never been subjected to someone’s parents on the first date before,” Maxine says once they are alone, sipping milky cups of Lapsang Souchong from heavy white mugs.

“I enjoyed meeting them. They’re charming.” “That’s one way of putting it.”

They remain awhile at the table, talking, the sound of the rain echoing quietly in the enclosed space behind the house. The candles shrink to stubs, and specks of wax drip onto the table. Silas, who has been softly pacing on

the floor, comes and presses his head against Gogol’s leg, looking up at him, wagging his tail. Gogol bends over, pats him tentatively.

“You’ve never had a dog, have you?” Maxine says, observing him. “No.”

“Didn’t you ever want one?”

“When I was a kid. But my parents never wanted the responsibility. Plus we had to go to India every couple of years.”

He realizes it’s the first time he’s mentioned his parents to her, his past. He wonders if perhaps she’ll ask him more about these things. Instead she says, “Silas likes you. He’s very picky.”

He looks at her, watching as she undoes her hair, letting it hang loose for a moment over her shoulders before wrapping it thoughtlessly around her hand. She looks back at him, smiling. Once again he is aware of her nakedness beneath the cardigan.

“I should go,” he says. But he is glad that she accepts his offer to help her clean up before leaving. They loiter over the task, loading the dishwasher, wiping down the table and the butcher-block island, washing and drying the pots and pans. They agree to go to the Film Forum on Sunday afternoon, to see the Antonioni double feature that Lydia and Gerald have recently been to and recommended over dinner.

“I’ll walk you to the subway,” Maxine says when they are finished, putting a leash around Silas. “He needs to go out.” They go up to the parlor level, put on their coats. He hears the sound of a television faintly through the ceiling.

He pauses at the foot of the stairs. “I forgot to thank your parents,” he says. “For what?”

“For having me over. For dinner.”

She links elbows with him. “You can thank them next time.”

From the very beginning he feels effortlessly incorporated into their lives. It is

a different brand of hospitality from what he is used to; for though the Ratliffs are generous, they are people who do not go out of their way to accommodate others, assured, in his case correctly, that their life will appeal to him. Gerald and Lydia, busy with their own engagements, keep out of the way. Gogol and Maxine come and go as they please, from movies and dinners out. He goes shopping with her on Madison Avenue at stores they must be buzzed into, for cashmere cardigans and outrageously expensive English colognes that Maxine buys without deliberation or guilt. They go to darkened, humble- looking restaurants downtown where the tables are tiny, the bills huge.

Almost without fail they wind up back at her parents’ place. There is always some delicious cheese or pâté to snack on, always some good wine to drink. It is in her claw-footed tub that they soak together, glasses of wine or single- malt Scotch on the floor. At night he sleeps with her in the room she grew up in, on a soft, sagging mattress, holding her body, as warm as a furnace, through the night, making love to her in a room just above the one in which Gerald and Lydia lie. On nights he has to stay late at work he simply comes over; Maxine keeps dinner waiting for him, and then they go upstairs to bed. Gerald and Lydia think nothing, in the mornings, when he and Maxine join them downstairs in the kitchen, their hair uncombed, seeking bowls of café au lait and toasted slices of French bread and jam. The first morning he’d slept over he’d been mortified to face them, showering beforehand, putting on his wrinkled shirt and trousers from the day before, but they’d merely smiled, still in their bathrobes, and offered him warm sticky buns from their favorite neighborhood bakery and sections of the paper.

Quickly, simultaneously, he falls in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia’s manner of living, for to know her and love her is to know and love all of these things. He loves the mess that surrounds Maxine, her hundreds of things always covering her floor and her bedside table, her habit, when they are alone on the fifth floor, of not shutting the door when she goes to the bathroom. Her unkempt ways, a challenge to his increasingly minimalist taste, charm him. He learns to love the food she and her parents eat, the polenta and risotto, the bouillabaisse and osso buco, the meat baked in parchment paper. He comes to expect the weight of their flatware in his hands, and to keep the cloth napkin, still partially folded, on his lap. He learns that one does not grate Parmesan cheese over pasta dishes containing seafood. He learns not to put wooden spoons in the dishwasher, as he had mistakenly done one evening when he was helping to clean up. The nights he spends there, he learns to wake up earlier than he is used to, to the sound of Silas barking downstairs, wanting to be taken for his morning walk. He learns to anticipate, every evening, the sound of a cork emerging from a fresh bottle of wine.

Maxine is open about her past, showing him photographs of her ex- boyfriends in the pages of a marble-papered album, speaking of those relationships without embarrassment or regret. She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest difference between them, a thing far more foreign to him than the beautiful house she’d grown up in, her education at private schools. In addition, he is continually amazed by how much Maxine emulates her parents, how much she respects their tastes and their ways. At the dinner table she argues with them about books and paintings and people they know in common the way one might argue with a friend. There is none of the exasperation he feels with his own parents. No sense of obligation.

Unlike his parents, they pressure her to do nothing, and yet she lives faithfully, happily, at their side.

She is surprised to hear certain things about his life: that all his parents’ friends are Bengali, that they had had an arranged marriage, that his mother cooks Indian food every day, that she wears saris and a bindi. “Really?” she says, not fully believing him. “But you’re so different. I would never have thought that.” He doesn’t feel insulted, but he is aware that a line has been drawn all the same. To him the terms of his parents’ marriage are something at once unthinkable and unremarkable; nearly all their friends and relatives had been married in the same way. But their lives bear no resemblance to that of Gerald and Lydia: expensive pieces of jewelry presented on Lydia’s birthday, flowers brought home for no reason at all, the two of them kissing openly, going for walks through the city, or to dinner, just as Gogol and Maxine do.

Seeing the two of them curled up on the sofa in the evenings, Gerald’s head resting on Lydia’s shoulder, Gogol is reminded that in all his life he has never witnessed a single moment of physical affection between his parents.

Whatever love exists between them is an utterly private, uncelebrated thing. “That’s so depressing,” Maxine says when he confesses this fact to her, and though it upsets him to hear her reaction, he can’t help but agree. One day Maxine asks him if his parents want him to marry an Indian girl. She poses the question out of curiosity, without hoping for a particular response. He feels angry at his parents then, wishing they could be otherwise, knowing in his heart what the answer is. “I don’t know,” he tells her. “I guess so. It doesn’t matter what they want.”

She visits him infrequently; she and Gogol are never close to his neighborhood for any reason, and even the absolute privacy they would have had there is of no appeal. Still, some nights when her parents have a dinner party she has no interest in, or simply to be fair, she appears, quickly filling

up the small space with her gardenia perfume, her coat, her big brown leather bag, her discarded clothes, and they make love on his futon as the traffic rumbles below. He is nervous to have her in his place, aware that he has put nothing up on his walls, that he has not bothered to buy lamps to replace the dismal glow of the ceiling light. “Oh, Nikhil, it’s too awful,” she eventually says on one of these occasions, barely three months after they’ve met. “I won’t let you live here.” When his mother had said more or less the same thing, the first time his parents had visited the apartment, he’d argued with her, hotly defending the merits of his spartan, solitary existence. But when Maxine says it, adding “you should just stay with me,” he is quietly thrilled. By then he knows enough about her to know that she is not one to offer things if she doesn’t mean them. Still, he demurs; what would her parents think? She shrugs. “My parents love you,” she says matter-of-factly, definitively, just as she says everything else. And so he moves in with her in a way, bringing a few bags of his clothes, nothing else. His futon and his table, his kettle and toaster and television and the rest of his things, remain on Amsterdam Avenue. His answering machine continues to record his messages. He continues to receive his mail there, in a nameless metal box.

***

Within six months he has the keys to the Ratliffs’ house, a set of which Maxine presents to him on a silver Tiffany chain. Like her parents, he has come to call her Max. He drops off his shirts at the dry cleaner around the corner from her place. He keeps a toothbrush and razor on her cluttered pedestal sink. In the mornings a few times a week he gets up early and goes running before work with Gerald along the Hudson, down to Battery Park City and back. He volunteers to take Silas out for walks, holding the leash as the dog sniffs and pokes at trees, and he picks up Silas’s warm shit with a plastic bag. He spends entire weekends holed up in the house, reading books from Gerald and Lydia’s shelves, admiring the sunlight that filters through the enormous unadorned windows during the course of the day. He comes to prefer certain sofas and chairs to others; when he is not there, he can conjure the paintings and photographs arrayed on the walls. He has to make a point of going to his studio, of resetting the tape on his answering machine, paying his rent check and his bills.

Often, on weekends, he helps to shop and prepare for Gerald and Lydia’s dinner parties, peeling apples and deveining shrimp with Lydia, helping to shuck oysters, going down to the cellar with Gerald to bring up the extra chairs, the wine. He has fallen the tiniest bit in love with Lydia and with the understated, unflustered way she entertains. He is always struck by these

dinners: only a dozen or so guests sitting around the candlelit table, a carefully selected mix of painters, editors, academics, gallery owners, eating the meal course by course, talking intelligently until the evening’s end. How different they are from his own parents’ parties, cheerfully unruly evenings to which there were never fewer than thirty people invited, small children in tow. Fish and meat served side by side, so many courses that people had to eat in shifts, the food still in the pans they were cooked in crowding the table.

They sat where they could, in the different rooms of the house, half the people having finished before the other half began. Unlike Gerald and Lydia, who preside at the center of their dinners, his parents behaved more like caterers in their own home, solicitous and watchful, waiting until most of their guests’ plates were stacked by the sink in order finally to help themselves. At times, as the laughter at Gerald and Lydia’s table swells, and another bottle of wine is opened, and Gogol raises his glass to be filled yet again, he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own. It isn’t simply the fact that his parents don’t know about Maxine, that they have no idea how much time he spends with her and Gerald and Lydia. Instead it is his knowledge that apart from their affluence, Gerald and Lydia are secure in a way his parents will never be. He cannot imagine his parents sitting at Lydia and Gerald’s table, enjoying Lydia’s cooking, appreciating Gerald’s selection of wine. He cannot imagine them contributing to one of their dinner party conversations. And yet here he is, night after night, a welcome addition to the Ratliffs’ universe, doing just that.

In June, Gerald and Lydia disappear to their lake house in New Hampshire. It is an unquestioned ritual, a yearly migration to the town where Gerald’s parents live year-round. For a few days a series of canvas tote bags accumulate in the hallway, cardboard boxes full of liquor, shopping bags full of food, cases of wine. Their departure reminds Gogol of his family’s preparations for Calcutta every few years, when the living room would be crowded with suitcases that his parents packed and repacked, fitting in as many gifts as possible for their relatives. In spite of his parents’ excitement, there was always a solemnity accompanying these preparations, Ashima and Ashoke at once apprehensive and eager, steeling themselves to find fewer faces at the airport in Calcutta, to confront the deaths of relatives since the last time they were there. No matter how many times they’d been to Calcutta, his father was always anxious about the job of transporting the four of them such a great distance. Gogol was aware of an obligation being fulfilled; that it was, above all else, a sense of duty that drew his parents back. But it is the call of

pleasure that summons Gerald and Lydia to New Hampshire. They leave without fanfare, in the middle of the day, when Gogol and Maxine are both at work. In Gerald and Lydia’s wake, certain things are missing: Silas, some of the cookbooks, the food processor, novels and CDs, the fax machine so that Gerald can keep in touch with his clients, the red Volvo station wagon they keep parked on the street. A note is left on the island in the kitchen: “We’re off!” Lydia has written, followed by X’s and O’s.

Suddenly Gogol and Maxine have the house in Chelsea to themselves.

They stray to the lower stories, making love on countless pieces of furniture, on the floor, on the island in the kitchen, once even on the pearl gray sheets of Gerald and Lydia’s bed. On weekends they wander naked from room to room, up and down the five flights of stairs. They eat in different places according to their moods, spreading an old cotton quilt on the floor, sometimes eating take- out on Gerald and Lydia’s finest china, falling asleep at odd hours as the strong summer light of the lengthened days pours through the enormous windows onto their bodies. As the days grow warmer, they stop cooking complicated things. They live off sushi and salads and cold poached salmon.

They switch from red wine to white. Now that it is just the two of them it seems to him, more than ever, that they are living together. And yet for some reason it is dependence, not adulthood, he feels. He feels free of expectation, of responsibility, in willing exile from his own life. He is responsible for nothing in the house; in spite of their absence, Gerald and Lydia continue to lord, however blindly, over their days. It is their books he reads, their music he listens to. Their front door he unlocks when he gets back from work. Their telephone messages he takes down.

He learns that the house, for all its beauty, has certain faults in the summer months, so that it makes all the more sense that it is a place Gerald and Lydia annually avoid. It lacks air-condi tioning, something Gerald and Lydia have never bothered to install because they are never there when it’s hot, and the enormous windows lack screens. As a result, the rooms are sweltering during the day, and at night, because it is necessary to leave the windows wide open, he is ambushed by mosquitoes that shriek in his ears and leave angry, lumpen welts between his toes, on his arms and thighs. He longs for a mosquito net to drape over Maxine’s bed, remembers the filmy blue nylon boxes that he and Sonia would sleep inside of on their visits to Calcutta, the corners hooked onto the four posts of the bed, the edges tucked tightly beneath the mattress, creating a temporary, tiny, impenetrable room for the night. There are times when he cannot bear it, turning on the light and standing on the bed, looking for them, a rolled-up magazine or a slipper in his hand, as Maxine, unbothered and unbitten, begs him to get back to sleep. He

sees them sometimes against the peach-colored paint on the wall, faint specks engorged with his blood, just inches below the ceiling, always too high up to kill.

With work as an excuse he does not go home to Massachusetts all summer. The firm is entering a competition, submitting designs for a new five-star hotel to be built in Miami. At eleven at night, he is still there, along with most of the other designers on his team, all rushing to finish drawings and models by the month’s end. When his phone rings, he hopes it’s Maxine, calling to coax him into leaving the office. Instead it’s his mother.

“Why are you calling me here so late?” he asks her, distracted, his eyes still focused on the computer screen.

“Because you are not at your apartment,” his mother says. “You are never at your apartment, Gogol. In the middle of the night I have called and you are not there.”

“I am, Ma,” he lies. “I need my sleep. I shut off the phone.”

“I cannot imagine why anyone would want to have a phone only to shut it off,” his mother says.

“So, is there a reason you’re calling me?”

She asks him to visit the following weekend, the Saturday before his birthday.

“I can’t,” he says. He tells her he has a deadline at work, but it’s not true— that’s the day that he and Maxine are leaving for New Hampshire, for two weeks. But his mother insists; his father is leaving for Ohio the following day

—doesn’t Gogol want to go with them to the airport, to see him off?

He knows vaguely of his father’s plans to spend nine months at a small university somewhere outside Cleveland, that he and a colleague have received a grant funded by the colleague’s university, to direct research for a corporation there. His father had sent him a clipping about the grant printed in the campus newspaper, with a photograph of his father standing outside the engineering building: “Prestigious grant for Professor Ganguli,” the caption read. At first it was assumed that his parents would shut up the house, or rent

it out to students, and that his mother would go too. But then his mother had surprised them, pointing out that there would be nothing for her to do in Ohio for nine months, that his father would be busy all day at the lab, and that she preferred to stay in Massachusetts, even if it meant staying in the house alone.

“Why do I have to see him off?” Gogol asks his mother now. He knows that for his parents, the act of travel is never regarded casually, that even the most ordinary of journeys is seen off and greeted at either end. And yet he continues, “Baba and I already live in different states. I’m practically as far from Ohio as I am from Boston.”

“That’s no way to think,” his mother says. “Please, Gogol. You haven’t been home since May.”

“I have a job, Ma. I’m busy. Besides, Sonia’s not coming.” “Sonia lives in California. You are so close.”

“Listen, I can’t come home that weekend,” he says. The truth seeps out of him slowly. He knows it’s his only defense at this point. “I’m going on a vacation. I’ve already made plans.”

“Why do you wait to tell us these things at the last minute?” his mother asks. “What sort of vacation? What plans?”

“I’m going to spend a couple of weeks in New Hampshire.”

“Oh,” his mother says. She sounds at once unimpressed and relieved. “Why do you want to go there, of all places? What’s the difference between New Hampshire and here?”

“I’m going with a girl I’m seeing,” he tells her. “Her parents have a place there.”

Though she says nothing for a while, he knows what his mother is thinking, that he is willing to go on vacation with someone else’s parents but not see his own.

“Where is this place, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in the mountains.” “What’s her name?”

“Max.”

“That’s a boy’s name.”

He shakes his head. “No, Ma. It’s Maxine.”

And so, on the way to New Hampshire, they stop off at Pemberton Road for lunch, which is what, in the end, he has agreed to. Maxine doesn’t mind, it’s on their way, after all, and she is curious by now to meet his parents. They drive up from New York in a rented car, the trunk packed with more supplies that Gerald and Lydia have asked them for on the back of a postcard: wine, bags of a particular imported pasta, a large tin of olive oil, thick wedges of Parmesan and Asiago cheese. When he asks Maxine why these things are necessary, she explains that they are going to the middle of nowhere, that if they were to depend on the general store they would have nothing to live on but potato chips and Wonder bread and Pepsi. On the way to Massachusetts, he tells her things he figures she should know in advance—that they will not be able to touch or kiss each other in front of his parents, that there will be no wine with lunch.

“There’s plenty of wine in the trunk of the car,” Maxine points out. “It doesn’t matter,” he tells her. “My parents don’t own a corkscrew.”

The restrictions amuse her; she sees them as a single afternoon’s challenge, an anomaly never to be repeated. She does not associate him with his parents’ habits; she still cannot believe that she is to be the first girlfriend he’s ever brought home. He feels no excitement over this prospect, wants simply to be done with it. Once they get off at his parents’ exit he senses that the landscape is foreign to her: the shopping plazas, the sprawling brick-faced public high school from which he and Sonia graduated, the shingled houses, uncomfortably close to one another, on their grassy quarter-acre plots. The sign that says CHILDREN AT PLAY. He knows that this sort of life, one which is such a proud accomplishment for his own parents, is of no relevance, no interest, to her, that she loves him in spite of it.

A van from a company that installs security systems blocks his parents’ driveway, and so he parks on the street, by the mailbox on the edge of the lawn. He leads Maxine up the flagstone path, ringing the bell because his parents always keep the front door locked. His mother opens the door. He can

tell she is nervous, dressed in one of her better saris, wearing lipstick and perfume, in contrast to the khakis and T-shirts and soft leather moccasins Gogol and Maxine both wear.

“Hi, Ma,” he says, leaning over, giving his mother a quick kiss. “This is Maxine. Max, this is my mother. Ashima.”

“It’s so nice to finally meet you, Ashima,” Maxine says, leaning over and giving his mother a kiss as well. “These are for you,” she says, handing Ashima a cellophane-wrapped basket full of tinned pâtés and jars of cornichons and chutneys that Gogol knows his parents will never open or enjoy. And yet when Maxine had shopped for the things to put in the basket, at Dean and DeLuca, he’d said nothing to dissuade her. He walks in with his shoes on instead of changing into a pair of flip-flops that his parents keep in the hall closet. They follow his mother across the living room and around the corner into the kitchen. His mother returns to the stove, where she is deep- frying a batch of samosas, filling the air with a haze of smoke.

“Nikhil’s father is upstairs,” his mother says to Maxine, lifting out a samosa with a slotted spatula and putting it on a paper-towel-lined plate. “With the man from the alarm company. Sorry, lunch will be ready in a minute,” she adds. “I was not expecting you to arrive for another half an hour.”

“Why on earth are we getting a security system?” Gogol wants to know. “It was your father’s idea,” his mother says, “now that I will be on my

own.” She says that there have been two burglaries recently in the neighborhood, both of them in the middle of the afternoon. “Even in good areas like this, these days there are crimes,” she says to Maxine, shaking her head.

His mother offers them glasses of frothy pink lassi, thick and sweet- tasting, flavored with rose water. They sit in the formal living room, where they normally never sit. Maxine sees the school pictures of Sonia and him in front of blue-gray backgrounds arranged on the mantel of the brick fireplace, the family portraits from Olan Mills. She looks at his childhood photo albums with his mother. She admires the material of his mother’s sari, mentioning that her mother curates textiles at the Met.

“The Met?”

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Maxine explains.

“You’ve been there, Ma,” Gogol says. “It’s the big museum on Fifth Avenue. With all the steps. I took you there to see the Egyptian temple, remember?”

“Yes, I remember. My father was an artist,” she tells Maxine, pointing to one of his grandfather’s watercolors on the wall.

They hear footsteps coming down the stairs, and then his father enters the living room, along with a uniformed man holding a clipboard. Unlike his mother, his father is not dressed up at all. He wears a pair of thin brown cotton pants, an untucked, slightly wrinkled short-sleeved shirt, and flip flops. His gray hair looks more sparse than the last time Gogol remembers, his potbelly more pronounced. “Here’s your copy of the receipt. Any problems, you just call the eight hundred number,” the uniformed man says. He and his father shake hands. “Have a nice day,” the man calls out before leaving.

“Hi, Baba,” Gogol says. “I’d like you to meet Maxine.”

“Hello,” his father says, putting up a hand, looking as if he is about to take an oath. He does not sit down with them. Instead he asks Maxine, “That is your car outside?”

“It’s a rental,” she says.

“Better to put it in the driveway,” his father tells her. “It doesn’t matter,” Gogol says. “It’s fine where it is.”

“But better to be careful,” his father persists. “The neighborhood children, they are not very careful. One time my car was on the road and a baseball went through the window. I can park it for you if you like.”

“I’ll do it,” Gogol says, getting up, irritated by his parents’ perpetual fear of disaster. When he returns to the house, the lunch is set out, too rich for the weather. Along with the samosas, there are breaded chicken cutlets, chickpeas with tamarind sauce, lamb biryani, chutney made with tomatoes from the garden. It is a meal he knows it has taken his mother over a day to prepare, and yet the amount of effort embarrasses him. The water glasses are already filled, plates and forks and paper napkins set on the dining room table they use only for special occasions, with uncomfortable high-backed chairs and seats upholstered in gold velvet.

“Go ahead and start,” his mother says, still hovering between the dining

room and the kitchen, finishing up the last of the samosas.

His parents are diffident around Maxine, at first keeping their distance, not boisterous as they typically are around their Bengali friends. They ask where she went to college, what it is her parents do. But Maxine is immune to their awkwardness, drawing them out, devoting her attention to them fully, and Gogol is reminded of the first time he’d met her, when she’d seduced him in the same way. She asks his father about his research project in Cleveland, his mother about her part-time job at the local public library, which she’s recently begun. Gogol is only partly attentive to the conversation. He is overly aware that they are not used to passing things around the table, or to chewing food with their mouths fully closed. They avert their eyes when Maxine accidentally leans over to run her hand through his hair. To his relief she eats generously, asking his mother how she made this and that, telling her it’s the best Indian food she’s ever tasted, accepting his mother’s offer to pack them some extra cutlets and samosas for the road.

When his mother confesses that she is nervous to be in the house alone, Maxine tells her she’d be nervous, too. She mentions a break-in at her parents’ once when she was by herself. When she tells them that she lives with her parents, Ashima says, “Really? I thought no one did that in America.” When she tells them she was born and raised in Manhattan, his father shakes his head. “New York is too much,” he says, “too many cars, too many tall buildings.” He tells the story of the time they’d driven in for Gogol’s graduation from Columbia, the trunk of the car broken into in just five minutes, their suitcase stolen, having to attend the commencement without a jacket and tie.

“It’s a pity you can’t stay for dinner,” his mother says as the meal comes to an end.

But his father urges them to get going. “Better not to drive in the dark,” he says.

Afterward there is tea, and bowls of payesh made in honor of his birthday.

He receives a Hallmark card signed by both of his parents, a check for one hundred dollars, a navy blue cotton sweater from Filene’s.

“He’ll need that where we’re going,” Maxine says approvingly. “The temperature can really drop at night.”

In the driveway there are hugs and kisses good-bye, initi ated by Maxine, his parents reciprocating clumsily. His mother invites Maxine to please come

again. He is given a piece of paper with his father’s new phone number in Ohio, and the date on which it will be activated.

“Have a good trip to Cleveland,” he tells his father. “Good luck with the project.”

“Okay,” his father says. He pats Gogol on the shoulder. “I’ll miss you,” he says. In Bengali he adds, “Remember to check in on your mother now and again.”

“Don’t worry, Baba. See you at Thanksgiving.”

“Yes, see you,” his father says. And then: “Drive safely, Gogol.”

At first he’s unaware of the slip. But as soon as they’re in the car, buckling their seat belts, Maxine says, “What did your dad just call you?”

He shakes his head. “It’s nothing. I’ll explain it later.” He turns on the ignition and begins to back out of the driveway, away from his parents, who stand there, waving, until the last possible moment. “Call to let us know you’ve arrived there safely,” his mother says to Gogol in Bengali. But he waves and drives off, pretending not to hear.

It’s a relief to be back in her world, heading north across the state border. For a while it’s nothing different, the same expanse of sky, the same strip of highway, large liquor stores and fast-food chains on either side. Maxine knows the way, so there is no need to consult a map. He has been to New Hampshire once or twice with his family, to see the leaves, driving for the day to places one could pull off the road and take pictures of and admire the view. But he’s never been so far north. They pass farms, spotted cows grazing in fields, red silos, white wooden churches, barns with rusted tin roofs. Small, scattered towns. The names of the towns mean nothing to him. They leave the highway behind and drive on steep, slender, two-lane ribbons of road, the mountains appearing like enormous milky waves suspended against the sky.

Wisps of cloud hang low over the summits, like smoke rising from the trees. Other clouds cast broad shadows across the valley. Eventually there are only a few cars on the road, no signs for tourist facilities or campgrounds, just more farms and woods, the roadsides full of blue and purple flowers. He has no idea where he is, or how far they’ve traveled. Maxine tells him they aren’t far from Canada, that if they’re motivated they could drive into Montreal for the

day.

They turn down a long dirt road in the middle of a forest, dense with hemlock and birch. There is nothing to mark where they turned, no mailbox or sign. At first there is no house visible, nothing but large lime-colored ferns covering the ground. Small stones spray wildly under the tires and the trees throw patterns of shade onto the hood of the car. They come to a partial clearing, to a humble house covered with bleached brown shingles and surrounded by a low wall of flat stones. Gerald and Lydia’s Volvo is parked on the grass because there is no driveway. Gogol and Maxine step out, and he is led by the hand to the back of the house, his limbs stiff from the hours in the car. Though the sun is beginning to set, its warmth is still palpable, the air lazy and mild. As they approach he sees that after a certain expanse the yard falls away, and then he sees the lake, a blue a thousand times deeper, more brilliant, than the sky and girded by pines. The mountains rise up behind them. The lake is bigger than he’d expected, a distance he cannot imagine swimming across.

“We’re here,” Maxine calls out, waving, her arms in a V. They walk toward her parents, who are sitting on Adirondack chairs on the grass, their legs and feet bare, drinking cocktails and admiring the view. Silas comes bounding toward them, barking across the lawn. Gerald and Lydia are tanner, leaner, a bit scantily dressed, Lydia in a white tank top and a denim wrap skirt, Gerald in wrinkled blue shorts, a green polo shirt faded with use. Lydia’s arms are nearly as dark as his own. Gerald has burned. Discarded books lie at their feet, facedown on the grass. A turquoise dragonfly hovers above them, then darts crookedly away. They turn their heads in greeting, shielding their eyes from the sun’s glare. “Welcome to paradise,” Gerald says.

It is the opposite of how they live in New York. The house is dark, a bit musty, full of primitive, mismatched furniture. There are exposed pipes in the bathrooms, wires stapled over doorsills, nails protruding from beams. On the walls are clusters of local butterflies, mounted and framed, a map of the region on thin white paper, photographs of the family at the lake over the years. Checkered cotton curtains hang in the windows on thin white rods.

Instead of staying with Gerald and Lydia, he and Maxine sleep in an unheated cabin down a path from the main house. No bigger than a cell, the space was originally built for Maxine to play in when she was a girl. There is a small chest of drawers, a crude night table between two twin beds, a lamp with a

plaid paper shade, two wooden chests in which extra quilts are stored. The beds are covered with ancient electric blankets. In the corner is a device whose hum is supposed to keep the bats away. Hairy, unfinished logs hold up the roof, and there is a gap between where the floor ends and the wall begins, so that one can see a thin line of grass. There are insect carcasses everywhere, squashed against the windowpanes and walls, languishing in pools of water behind the taps of the sink. “It’s sort of like being at camp,” Maxine says as they unpack their things, but Gogol has never been to camp, and though he is only three hours away from his parents’ house, this is an unknown world to him, a kind of holiday he’s never been on.

During the days he sits with Maxine’s family on a thin strip of beach, looking out onto the glittering jade lake, surrounded by other homes, overturned canoes. Long docks jut into the water. Tadpoles dart close to shore. He does as they do, sitting on a folding chair, a cotton cap on his head, applying sunblock at intervals to his arms, reading, falling asleep after barely a page. He wades into the water and swims to the dock when his shoulders grow too warm, the sand free of stones or growth, smooth and yielding under his feet. Occasionally they are joined by Maxine’s grandparents, Hank and Edith, who live on the lake several houses away. Hank, a retired professor of classical archaeology, always brings a small volume of Greek poetry to read, his long sun-spotted fingers curling over the tops of the pages. At some point he gets up, laboriously removing his shoes and socks, and walks calf-deep into the water, regarding the surroundings with his hands on his hips, his chin thrust pridefully into the air. Edith is small and thin, proportioned like a girl, her white hair cut in a bob and her face deeply wrinkled. They have traveled a bit of the world together, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Iran. “We never got as far as India,” Edith tells him. “We would certainly have loved to have seen that.”

All day he and Maxine walk about the property barefoot in their bathing suits. Gogol goes for runs around the lake with Gerald, arduous laps along steep hilly dirt roads, so infrequently traveled that they can occupy the dead center. Halfway around is a small private graveyard where members of the Ratliff family lie buried, where Gerald and Gogol always stop to catch their breath. Where Maxine will be buried one day. Gerald spends most of his time in his vegetable garden, his nails permanently blackened from his careful cultivation of lettuce and herbs. One day, Gogol and Maxine swim over to Hank and Edith’s for lunch, for egg salad sandwiches and canned tomato soup. Some nights, when it’s too warm in the cabin, he and Maxine take a flashlight and walk to the lake in their pajamas to go skinny-dipping. They swim in the dark water, under the moonlight, weeds catching their limbs, out to the neighboring dock. The unfamiliar sensation of the water surrounding

his unclothed body arouses Gogol, and when they come back to shore they make love on the grass that is wet from their bodies. He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems.

In spite of the fact that there is nothing in particular to do, the days assume a pattern. There is a certain stringency to life, a willful doing without. In the mornings they wake early to the frenzied chirping of birds, when the eastern sky is streaked with the thinnest of pink clouds. Breakfast is eaten by seven, on the screened-in porch overlooking the lake where they have all their meals, homemade preserves slathered on thick slices of bread. Their news of the world comes from the thin local paper Gerald brings back each day from the general store. In the late afternoons, they shower and dress for dinner.

They sit with their drinks on the lawn, eating pieces of the cheese Gogol and Maxine brought from New York, and watch the sun set behind the mountains, bats darting between the pines that soar as tall as ten-story buildings, all the bathing suits hung to dry on a line. Dinners are simple: boiled corn from a farm stand, cold chicken, pasta with pesto, tomatoes from the garden sliced and salted on a plate. Lydia bakes pies and cobblers with berries picked by hand. Occasionally she disappears for the day, to go antiquing in the surrounding towns. There is no television to watch in the evenings, just an old stereo on which they sometimes play a symphony or jazz. On the first rainy day Gerald and Lydia teach him to play cribbage. They are often in bed by nine. The phone, in the main house, seldom rings.

He grows to appreciate being utterly disconnected from the world. He grows used to the quiet, the scent of sun-warmed wood. The only sounds are the occasional motorboat cutting across the water, screen doors snapping shut. He presents Gerald and Lydia with a sketch of the main house done one afternoon down at the beach, the first thing he’s drawn in years that hasn’t been for work. They set it atop the crowded mantel of the stone fireplace, next to piles of books and photographs, promise to have it framed. The family seems to possess every piece of the landscape, not only the house itself but every tree and blade of grass. Nothing is locked, not the main house, or the cabin that he and Maxine sleep in. Anyone could walk in. He thinks of the alarm system now installed in his parents’ house, wonders why they cannot relax about their physical surroundings in the same way. The Ratliffs own the moon that floats over the lake, and the sun and the clouds. It is a place that has been good to them, as much a part of them as a member of the family. The idea of returning year after year to a single place appeals to Gogol deeply. Yet he cannot picture his family occupying a house like this, playing board games on rainy afternoons, watching shooting stars at night, all their relatives

gathered neatly on a small strip of sand. It is an impulse his parents have never felt, this need to be so far from things. They would have felt lonely in this setting, remarking that they were the only Indians. They would not want to go hiking, as he and Maxine and Gerald and Lydia do almost every day, up the rocky mountain trails, to watch the sun set over the valley. They would not care to cook with the fresh basil that grows rampant in Gerald’s garden or to spend a whole day boiling blueberries for jam. His mother would not put on a bathing suit or swim. He feels no nostalgia for the vacations he’s spent with his family, and he realizes now that they were never really true vacations at all. Instead they were overwhelming, disorienting expeditions, either going to Calcutta, or sightseeing in places they did not belong to and intended never to see again. Some summers there had been road trips with one or two Bengali families, in rented vans, going to Toronto or Atlanta or Chicago, places where they had other Bengali friends. The fathers would be huddled at the front, taking turns at the wheel, consulting maps highlighted by AAA. All the children would sit in the back with plastic tubs of aloo dum and cold flattened luchis wrapped in foil, fried the day before, which they would stop in state parks to eat on picnic tables. They had stayed in motels, slept whole families to a single room, swum in pools that could be seen from the road.

***

One day they canoe across the lake. Maxine teaches him how to paddle properly, angling the oar and drawing it back through the still, gray water. She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned to swim, is an essential part of her, even more so than the house in Chelsea. This was where she lost her virginity, she confesses, when she was fourteen years old, in a boathouse, with a boy whose family once summered here. He thinks of himself at fourteen, his life nothing like it is now, still called Gogol and nothing else. He remembers Maxine’s reaction to his telling her about his other name, as they’d driven up from his parents’ house. “That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard,” she’d said.

And then she’d never mentioned it again, this essential fact about his life slipping from her mind as so many others did. He realizes that this is a place that will always be here for her. It makes it easy to imagine her past, and her future, to picture her growing old. He sees her with streaks of gray in her hair, her face still beautiful, her long body slightly widened and slack, sitting on a beach chair with a floppy hat on her head. He sees her returning here, grieving, to bury her parents, teaching her children to swim in the lake, leading them with two hands into the water, showing them how to dive cleanly off the edge of the dock.

It is here that his twenty-seventh birthday is celebrated, the first birthday in his life that he hasn’t spent with his own parents, either in Calcutta or on Pemberton Road. Lydia and Maxine plan a special dinner, curling up with cookbooks for days beforehand on the beach. They decide to make a paella, drive to Maine for the mussels and clams. An angel food cake is baked from scratch. They bring the dining table out onto the lawn, a few card tables added on to make room for everyone. In addition to Hank and Edith, a number of friends from around the lake are invited. The women arrive in straw hats and linen dresses. The front lawn fills up with cars, and small children scamper among them. There is talk of the lake, the temperature dropping, the water turning cooler, summer coming to an end. There are complaints about motorboats, gossip about the owner of the general store, whose wife has run off with another man and is seeking a divorce. “Here’s the architect Max brought up with her,” Gerald says at one point, leading him over to a couple interested in building an addition to their cottage. Gogol speaks to the couple about their plans, promises to come down and have a look at their place before he leaves. At dinner he is asked by his neighbor, a middle-aged woman named Pamela, at what age he moved to America from India.

“I’m from Boston,” he says.

It turns out Pamela is from Boston as well, but when he tells her the name of the suburb where his parents live Pamela shakes her head. “I’ve never heard of that.” She goes on, “I once had a girlfriend who went to India.”

“Oh? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. All I remember is that she came back thin as a rail, and that I was horribly envious of her.” Pamela laughs. “But you must be lucky that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you must never get sick.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” he says, slightly annoyed. He looks over at Maxine, trying to catch her eye, but she’s speaking intently with her neighbor. “We get sick all the time. We have to get shots before we go. My parents devote the better part of a suitcase to medicine.”

“But you’re Indian,” Pamela says, frowning. “I’d think the climate wouldn’t affect you, given your heritage.”

“Pamela, Nick’s American,” Lydia says, leaning across the table, rescuing Gogol from the conversation. “He was born here.” She turns to him, and he sees from Lydia’s expression that after all these months, she herself isn’t sure. “Weren’t you?”

Champagne is poured with the cake. “To Nikhil,” Gerald announces, raising his glass. Everybody sings “Happy Birthday,” this group who has known him for only one evening. Who will forget him the next day. It is in the midst of the laughter of these drunken adults, and the cries of their children running barefoot, chasing fireflies on the lawn, that he remembers that his father left for Cleveland a week ago, that by now he is there, in a new apartment, alone. That his mother is alone on Pemberton Road. He knows he should call to make sure his father has arrived safely, and to find out how his mother is faring on her own. But such concerns make no sense here among Maxine and her family. That night, lying in the cabin beside Maxine, he is woken by the sound of the phone ringing persistently in the main house. He gets out of bed, convinced that it’s his parents calling to wish him a happy birthday, mortified that it will wake Gerald and Lydia from sleep. He stumbles onto the lawn, but when his bare feet strike the cold grass there is silence, and he realizes the ringing he’d heard had been a dream. He returns to bed, squeezing in beside Maxine’s warm, sleeping body, and drapes his arm around her narrow waist, fits his knees behind hers. Through the window he sees that dawn is creeping into the sky, only a handful of stars still visible, the shapes of the surrounding pines and cabins growing distinct. A bird begins to call. And then he remembers that his parents can’t possibly reach him: he has not given them the number, and the Ratliffs are unlisted. That here at Maxine’s side, in this cloistered wilderness, he is free.