The Namesake (29 page)

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

"When would you like to eat?" she says. "Are you hungry?"

"Whenever. What are you making?"

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

He shrugs. "It already smells great. I'll help you." He rolls up his sleeves. "What can I do?"

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

"In with the chicken?"

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

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

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

"You told her I was coming over?"

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

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

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

With both hands he pries the glasses from her face, clasping the frames where they meet her temples. He puts them on the counter. And then he leans over and kisses her. He touches his fingers to her bare arms, cool in spite of the warmth of the kitchen. He presses her close, a hand at the small of her back, against the knot of her dress, tasting the warm, slightly sour tang of her mouth. They make their way through the living room, to the bedroom. He sees a box spring and mattress without a frame. He unties the knot at the back of her dress with difficulty, then swiftly undoes the long zipper, leaving a small black pool at her feet. In the light cast from the living room, he glimpses black mesh underwear and a matching bra. She is curvier than she appears clothed, her breasts fuller, her hips generously flared. They make love on top of the covers, quickly, efficiently, as if they've known each other's bodies for years. But when they are finished she switches on the lamp by her bed and they examine each other, quietly discovering moles and marks and ribs.

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

He looks down at her face. "You're beautiful."

"And you."

"Can you even see me without those glasses?"

"Only if you stay close," she says.

"Then I'd better not move."

"Don't."

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

Within three months they have clothes and toothbrushes at each other's apartments. He sees her for entire weekends without make-up, sees her with gray shadows under her eyes as she types papers at her desk, and when he kisses her head he tastes the oil that accumulates on her scalp between shampoos. He sees the hair that grows on her legs between waxings, the black roots that emerge between appointments at the salon, and in these moments, these glimpses, he believes he has known no greater intimacy. He learns that she sleeps, always, with her left leg straight and her right leg bent, ankle over knee, in the shape of a 4. He learns that she is prone to snoring, ever so faintly, sounding like a lawn mower that will not start, and to gnashing her jaws, which he massages for her as she sleeps. At restaurants and bars, they sometimes slip Bengali phrases into their conversation in order to comment with impunity on another diner's unfortunate hair or shoes.

They talk endlessly about how they know and do not know each other. In a way there is little to explain. There had been the same parties to attend when they were growing up, the same episodes of
The Love Boat
and
Fantasy Island
the children watched as the parents feasted in another part of the house, the same meals served to them on paper plates, the carpets lined with newspapers when the hosts happened to be particularly fastidious. He can imagine her life, even after she and her family moved away to New Jersey, easily. He can imagine the large suburban house her family owned; the china cabinet in the din
ing room, her mother's prized possession; the large public high school in which she had excelled but that she had miserably attended. There had been the same frequent trips to Calcutta, being plucked out of their American lives for months at a time. They calculate the many months that they were in that distant city together, on trips that had overlapped by weeks and once by months, unaware of each other's presence. They talk about how they are both routinely assumed to be Greek, Egyptian, Mexican—even in this misrendering they are joined.

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

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

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

The shameful truth was that she was not involved, was in fact desperately lonely. She had rebuffed the Indian men she wasn't interested in, and she had been forbidden as a teenager to date. In college she had harbored lengthy infatuations, with students with whom she never spoke, with professors and TAs.
In her mind she would have relationships with these men, structuring her days around chance meetings in the library, or a conversation during office hours, or the one class she and a fellow student shared, so that even now she associated a particular year of college with the man or boy she had silently, faithfully, absurdly, desired. Occasionally one of her infatuations would culminate in a lunch or coffee date, an encounter on which she would pin all her hopes but which would lead to nothing. In reality there had been no one, so that toward the end of college, as graduation loomed, she was convinced in her bones that there would be no one at all. Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn't love that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off. She shakes her head as she speaks, irritated with having revisited this aspect of her past. Even now she regrets herself as a teenager. She regrets her obedience, her long, unstyled hair, her piano lessons and lace-collared shirts. She regrets her mortifying lack of confidence, the extra ten pounds she carried on her frame during puberty. "No wonder you never talked to me back then," she says. He feels tenderness toward her when she disparages herself this way. And though he had witnessed that stage of her himself, he can no longer picture it; those vague recollections of her he's carried with him all his life have been wiped clean, replaced by the woman he knows now.

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

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

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