(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
From the very beginning Gogol felt effortlessly incorporated into the family of Maxine. It was different brand of hospitality from what he was used to ; for though the Ratliffs were generous, they were people who didn't go by their way to accommodate others, assured, in his case correctly, that their life would appeal to him. Gerald and Lydia, busy with their own engagements, kept out of the way. Gogol and Maxine came and went as they pleased, from movies and dinners out. He went shopping with her on Madison Avenue at stores they must be buzzed into, for cashmere cardigans and outrageously expensive English colognes that Maxine bought without deliberation or guilt. They went to darkened humble-looking restaurants downtown where the tables were tiny, the bills huge. Almost without fail they wound up back at parents' place. There was always some delicious cheese or pate to snack on, always some good wine to drink. It was in her claw-footed tub that they soaked together, glasses of wine, or single-malt scotch on the floor. At night he slept 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 had to stay late at work he simply came over ; Maxine kept dinner waiting for him, and then they went upstairs to bed. Lydia and Gerald thought nothing, in the mornings, when he and Maxine join them downstairs in the kitchen, their hair uncombed seeking bowls of cafe au lait and toasted slices of French bread and jam. The first morning he had 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.
Gogol fell in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia's manner of living , for to know and love her was to know and love all these things. He loved the mess that surrounded Maxine, her hundreds of things always covering her floor and her bedside table, her habit, when they were alone on the fifth floor, of not shutting the door when they went to bathroom. Her unkempt ways, a challenge to his increasingly minimalist taste, charmed him. He learned to love the food she and her parents ate, the polenta and risotto, the bouillabaisse and osso buco, the meat baked in parchment paper. He came to expect the weight of their flatware in his hands, and to keep the cloth napkin, still partially folded, on his lap. He learned that one did not grate Parmesan cheese over pasta dishes containing seafood. He learned 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 spent there, he learned to wake up earlier than he was used to, to the sound of Silas barking downstairs, wanting to be taken for his morning walk. He learned to anticipate, every evening the sound of a cork emerging from a fresh bottle of wine.
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