(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
A year had passed since Gogol's father's death. He still lived in New York, rented the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. He worked for the same firm. The only significant difference in his life, apart from the permanent absence of his father, was the additional absence of Maxine. At first she had been patient with him, and for a while he'd allowed himself to fall back into her life, going home after work to her parents' house, to their world in which nothing had changed. Initially she had tolerated his silence at the dinner table, his indifference in bed, his need to speak to his mother and Sonia every evening, and to visit them, on weekends, without her. But she couldn't tolerate being excluded from the family's plans to travel to Calcutta that summer to see their relatives and scatter Ashoke's ashes in the Ganges. They began to argue about this and other things, Maxine going so far one day as to admit that she felt jealous of his mother and sister, an accusation that struck Gogol as so absurd that he had no energy to argue any more. And so, a few months after his father's death, he stepped out of Maxine's life for good. Recently, when he met Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter's engagement to another man.
On weekends he visited Massachusetts, to the house in which his father's photograph, hung in a frame on a wall in the upstairs hallway, draped a garland of rose petals around the frame and anointed his father's forehead with sandal wood paste through the glass. It was the photograph more than anything that drew the Gogol back to the house again and again.
His visits home were different now, often it was Sonia who did the cooking. Sonia was still there with his mother, four days a week she left the house at five-thirty in the morning, took a train to downtown Boston. She worked as a paralegal, was applying to law schools nearby. It was she who drove his mother to weekend parties, and to Haymarket on Saturday mornings. Their mother had become thinner, her hair gray. The sight of her bare wrists, the white column of her part, pained Gogol when he first caught sight of her. From Sonia he learned of how her mother spent her evenings, alone in her bed, unable to sleep, watching television without sound. One weekend he suggested going to one of the beaches where his father liked to walk. At first his mother agreed, cheered by, but as soon as they stepped out into the windy parking lot she got back into the car, saying she would wait.
He was preparing for his registration exam, the two-day ordeal that would enable him to become a licensed architect, to stamp drawings and design things under his own name. He studied in his apartment, and occasionally up at one of the libraries at Columbia, learning about the matter-of- fact aspects of his profession : electricity, materials, lateral forces. He enrolled in a review class to help him prepare for the exam. The class met twice a week in the evenings, after work. He enjoyed the passivity of sitting in a class room again, listening to an instructor, being taught what he didn't know. It was a small class, and afterward several of them soon began going out for drinks. Though he was invited to join them, he always said no. Then one day, as they were all filing out of the classroom, one of the women approached him, and said, "So what's your excuse ?" and because he had none, that night he tagged along. The woman's name was Bridget, and at bar she sat beside him. She was starkly attractive, with brown hair cut exclusively short, the sort of style that would have looked disastrous on most women. She spoke slowly, deliberately, her speech unhurried. She was raised in the south, in New Orleans. She told him that she worked for a small firm, a husband-and-wife team who operate out of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. For a while they talked about the projects they were working on, the architects they both admired : Gropius, van der Rohe, Saarinen. She was his age, married. She saw her husband on weekends, he was a professor at a college in Boston. He thought of his parents then, living apart for the final months of his father's life. "That must be difficult," he told her. "It can be ," she said. "But it was either that or adjuncting in New York." she told him about the house her husband rented in Brookline, a sprawling Victorian that costed less than half of their one-bedroom apartment in Murray Hill. She said that her husband had insisted on putting her name on the mailbox, her voice on the answering machine. He had even insisted on hanging a few items of her clothing in the closet, putting a tube of her lipstick in the medicine cabinet. She told Gogol that her husband delighted in illusion like these, was consoled by them, whereas she found them simply to be reminders of what was missing.
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