(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
The next morning Maxine called, waking Gogol up, at ten on a Sunday he was still in bed, his head aching from the scotch and sodas he'd consumed throughout the evening. He answered gruffly, a bit impatiently, expecting it to be his mother calling to ask how his week had been. He had the feeling, from the tone of Maxine's voice, that she'd been up for hours, that her breakfast had already been eaten. "It's Maxine. From last night," she said, not bothering to apologize for waking him.She told him she'd found his number in the phone book, though he didn't remember telling her his last name. "Good, your apartment's noisy," she remarked. Then, without awkwardness or pause, she invited him to dinner at her place. She specified the evening, a Friday, told him the address, somewhere in Chelsea. He assumed it would be a dinner party, asked if there's anything he can bring, but she said no, it would be just him.
"I should probably warn you that I live with my parents," she added.
"Oh." This unexpected piece of information deflated him, confused him. He asked if her parents would mind his coming over, if perhaps they should meet at a restaurant instead.
But she laughed at this suggestion in a way that made him feel vaguely foolish. "Why on earth would they mind ?"
He took a cab from his office to her neighborhood, getting out at a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine. It was a cool evening in September, raining steadily. He turned onto a remote, tranquil block Ninth and Tenth Avenue. It was his first date in a long time, with the exception of a few forgettable affairs at Columbia he'd been with no one seriously since Ruth. He didn't know what to make of the whole arrangement with Maxine, but as odd as the terms of invitation seemed he'd been unable to refuse. He was curious about her, attracted, flattered by the boldness of her pursuit.
He was stunned by the house, a Greek revival, admiring it for several minutes like a tourist before opening the gate. He noted the pedimented window lintels, the Doric pilasters, the bracketed entablature,, the black cruciform paneled door. He climbed a low stoop with cast-iron railings. The name below the bell was Ratliff. Several minutes after he pressed it, enough to make the double-check the address on the scrap of paper in his jacket pocket, Maxine arrived. She kissed him on the cheek, leaning toward him on one foot, the other leg extended, slightly raised behind her. She was barefoot, wearing flowing black wool pants and a thin beige cardigan. As far as he could tell she wore nothing under the cardigan apart from her bra. Her hair was done up in the same careless way. His raincoat was draped on a coat rack, his folding umbrella dropped into a stand. He glimpsed himself quickly in a mirror in the foyer, smoothing his hair and his tie.
She lead him down a flight of stairs to a kitchen that appears to occupy an entire floor of the house, with a large farm-house table at one end, and beyond that French doors leading to a garden. A woman stood 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 said. "And this is Silas," she told him, pointing to a reddish brown cocker spaniel dozing under the table.
Lydia was tall and slender like her daughter, with straight iron-colored hair cut youthfully to frame her face. She was carefully dressed, with gold jewelry at her ears and throat, a navy apron wrapped around her waist, gleaming black leather shoes. Though her face was lined and her complexion a bit splotchy, she was more beautiful even than Maxine, her features more regular, the cheekbones higher, the eyes more elegantly defined.
"Lovely to meet you, Nikhil," she said, smiling brightly, and though she looked at him with interest, she didn't pause in her work or offered to shake his hand.
Maxine poured him a glass of wine, not asking if perhaps he might prefer something else. "Come on," she said, "I'll show you the house." She lead him up five flights of uncarpeted stairs that creaked noisily beneath their combined weight. The plan of the house was simple, two immense rooms per floor. Politely he admired the house, things he knew how to speak intelligently and at length about. Along the hallways in every floor shelves ascended to he ceiling, crammed with all novels one should read in a life time, biographies, massive monographs of every artist, all the architecture books Gogol had ever coveted
Maxine had 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 was full of different creams for her neck, her throat, her eyes, her feet, daytime, nighttime, sun and shade. Though the bedroom was a gray sitting room she treated as a closet, her shoes and handbags and clothes scattered across the floor, spilling over the backs of chairs
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