(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Dimitri and Moushumi began seeing each other Mondays and Wednesdays, after she taught her classes. She took the train uptown and they met at his apartment, where lunch was waiting. The meals were ambitious : poached fish, creamy potato gratins ; golden, puffed chickens roasted with whole lemons in their cavities. There was always a bottle of wine. They sat at a table with his books and papers and laptop pushed to one side. They listened to WQXR, drank coffee and cognac and smoked a cigarette afterward. Only then did he touch her. Sunlight streamed through large dirty windows into the shabby prewar apartment. There were two spacious rooms, flaking plaster walls, scuffed parquet floors, towering stacks of boxes, he had not yet bothered to unpack. The bed, a brand- new mattress and box spring on wheels, was never made. After sex they were always amazed to discover that the bed was moved several inches away from the wall, pushing up against the bureau on the other side of the room. She liked the way he looked at her when their limbs were still tangled together, out of breath, as if he'd been chasing her, his expression anxious before relaxing into a smile. Some gray had come into Dimitri's hair and chest, some lines around the mouth and eyes. He was heavier than before, his stomach undeniably wide, so that his thin legs appeared slightly comic. He recently turned thirty-nine. He had not been married. He didn't seem very desperate to be employed. He spent his days cooking meals, reading, listening to the classical music. She gathered that he had inherited some money from his grandmother.
The first time they met, the day after she called him, at the bar of a crowded Italian restaurant near NYU, they had not been able to to stop staring at each other, not been able to stop talking about the resume, and the uncanny way it had fallen into Moushumi's hands. He had moved to New York only a month ago, had tried to look her up but the phone was listed under Nikhil's last name. It didn't matter, they agreed. It was better this way. They drank glasses of prosecco, an Italian wine made from grapes. She agreed to an early dinner with Dimitri that night, sitting at the bar of the restaurant, for the prosecco had gone quickly to their heads. He had ordered a salad topped with warm lambs' tongue, a poached egg, and pecorino cheese, something she swore she would not touch but ended up eating the better part of. After ward she had gone into Balducci's to buy the pasta and ready-made vodka sauce she would have at home with Nikhil.
On Mondays and Wednesdays no one knows where she was. There were no Bengali fruit sellers to greet her on the walk from Demitri's subway stop, no neighbors to recognize her once she turned on to Dimitri's block. It reminded her of living in Paris ; for a few hours at Dimitri's she was inaccessible, anonymous. Dimitri was not terribly curious about Nikhil, did not ask her his name. He expressed no jealousy. When she told him in the Italian restaurant that she was married, his expression had not changed. He regarded their time together as perfectly normal, as destined, and she began to see how easy it was. Moushumi referred to Nikhil in conversation as "my husband" : "My husband and I have a dinner to go to next Thursday." "My husband's given me this cold."
At home , Nikhil suspected nothing. As usual they had dinner, talked of their days. They cleaned up kitchen together, then sat on the sofa and watched television while she corrected her students' quizzes and exercises. During the eleven o'clock news, they had bowls of Ben and Jerry's, then brushed their teeth. As usual they got into bed, kissed, then slowly they turned away from each other in order to stretch comfortably into sleep. Only Moushumi stayed awake. Each Monday and Wednesday night, she feared that he would sense something, that he would put his arms around her and instantly know. She stayed awake for hours after they had turned out the lights, prepared to answer him, prepared to lie to his face. She had gone shopping, she would tell him if he were to ask, for in fact she had done this on her way home that first Monday, halting her journey back from Dimitri's in midstream, getting out of the subway at 72d street before continuing downtown, stopping in a store she'd never been in, buying a pair of the most ordinary-looking black shoes.
No comments:
Post a Comment