(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
One night, Evan, one of the draftsmen at work with whom he was friendly, talked him into going to a party. Evan told Gogol that it's an apartment worth seeing, a Tribeca loft that happened to have been designed by one of the partners at the firm. The host of the party, Russel, an old friend of Evan, worked for for the UN and had spent several years in Kenya, and as a result the loft was filled with impressive collections of African furniture and sculpture and masks. Gogol imagined that it would be 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 got there, the party was nearly over, and there were only a dozen or so people sitting around a low coffee table surrounded by cushions, eating picked-over grapes and cheese. Gogol found a lady arguing with a man on the other side of the table about a movie. She had dirty blond hair gathered sloppily into a bun, strands falling randomly, attractively, around her face. Her forehead was high and smooth, her jawbones sloping and unusually long. Her eyes were greenish, the irises encased by thin rings of black. She was dressed in silk capri pants and a sleeveless white shirt that showed off her tan. She was little bit drunk, strident and flirtatious. When she tried to involve Gogol into the discussion about the movie that she was talking about, he said that he hadn't seen the movie.
She approached him again as he was standing idle, started explaining looking up at an imposing wooden mask that hung above a suspended metal staircase. The way she was explaining made him wonder if she spoke from experience, if she was Russel's lover, or ex-lover, if that was what she was implying.
Her name was Maxine. She asked him about the program at Columbia, mentioning that she'd gone to Bernard for college, majoring in art history. She leaned back against a column as she spoke, smiling at him easily, drinking a glass of champagne. At first he assumed she was older than he was, closer to thirty than twenty. He was 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 they had in all likelihood crossed paths on Broadway or walking up the steps of Low Library or in Avery. It reminded him of Ruth, of the way they, too, had once lived in such close proximity as strangers. Maxine told him she worked as an assistant editor for a publisher of art books. Her current project was a book on Andrea Mantegna, and he impressed her, remembering correctly that his frescoes were in Mantua, in the Palazzo Ducale. Maxine had, however, a way of focusing her attention on him completely, her pale, watchful holding his gaze, making him feel, for those brief minutes, the absolute center of her world.
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