The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  While she was at Brown, postcards would arrive from time to time, envelopes plastered with colorful, oversized stamps. His handwriting was minuscule but sloppy, always causing her eyes to strain. There was never a return address. For a time she carried these letters in her book bag, to her classes, thickening her agenda. Periodically he sent her books he'd read and thought she might like. A few times he called in the middle of the night, waking her, and she spoke to him for hours in the dark, lying in bed in her dorm room, then sleeping through her morning classes. A single call kept her sailing for weeks. "I'll come visit you. I'll take you to dinner," he told her. He never did. Eventually the letters tapered off. His last communication had been a box of books, along with several postcards he'd written to her in Greece and Turkey but not managed to send at the time. And then she'd moved to Paris.

  She reads Dimitri's résumé again, then the cover letter. The letter reveals nothing other than earnest pedagogical intent, mentions a panel Dimitri and the professor to whom it's addressed attended some years ago. Practically the same letter exists in a file on her computer. His third sentence is missing a period, which she now carefully inserts with her finest-nibbed fountain pen. She can't bring herself to write down his address, though she doesn't want to forget it. In the Xerox room, she makes a copy of the résumé. She sticks it in the bottom of her bag. Then she types up a new envelope and puts the original in the professor's mailbox. As she returns to her office, she realizes there's no stamp or postmark on the new envelope, worries that the professor will suspect something. But she reassures herself that Dimitri could easily have delivered the letter personally; the idea of him standing in the department, occupying the same space she occupies now, fills her with the same combination of desperation and lust he's always provoked.

  The hardest part is deciding where to write down the phone number, in what part of her agenda. She wishes she had a code of some sort. In Paris she had briefly dated an Iranian professor of philosophy who would write the names of his students in Persian on the backs of index cards, along with some small, cruel detail to help him distinguish among them. Once he read the cards to Moushumi. Bad skin, one said. Thick ankles, said another. Moushumi can't resort to such trickery, can't write in Bengali. She barely remembers how to write her own name, something her grandmother had once taught her. Finally she writes it on the D page, but she doesn't include his name beside it. Just the numbers, disembodied, don't feel like a betrayal. They could be anybody's. She looks outside. As she sits down at her desk, her eye travels upward; the window in the office reaches the top of the wall, so that the rooftop of the building across the street stretches across the bottom edge of the sill. The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity's pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven.

  At home that night, after dinner, Moushumi hunts among the shelves in the living room she and Nikhil share. Their books have merged since they've gotten married, Nikhil had unpacked them all, and nothing is where she expects it to be. Her eyes pass over stacks of Nikhil's design magazines, thick books on Gropius and Le Corbusier. Nikhil, bent over a blueprint at the dining table, asks what she's looking for.

  "Stendhal," she tells him. It's not a lie. An old Modern Library edition of The Red and the Black in English, inscribed to Mouse. Love Dimitri, he'd written. It was the one book he'd inscribed to her. Back then it was the closest thing she'd ever had to a love letter; for months she had slept with the book under her pillow, and later, slipped it between her mattress and box spring. Somehow she managed to hold on to it for years; it's moved with her from Providence to Paris to New York, a secret talisman on her shelves that she would glance at now and again, still faintly flattered by his peculiar pursuit of her, and always faintly curious as to what had become of him. But now that she's desperate to locate the book she's convinced that it won't be in the apartment, that maybe Graham had taken it by mistake when he'd moved out of their place on York Avenue, or that it's in the basement of her parents' house, in one of the boxes she'd shipped there a few years ago, when her shelves were getting too full. She doesn't remember packing it from her old apartment, doesn't remember unpacking it when she and Nikhil moved in together. She wishes she could ask Nikhil if he's seen it—a small green clothbound book missing its dust jacket, the title embossed in a rectangle of black on the spine. And then suddenly she sees it herself, sitting in plain view, on a shelf she'd scanned a minute ago. She opens the book, sees the Modern Library emblem, the dashing, naked, torch-bearing figure. She sees the inscription, the force of the ballpoint pen he'd used slightly crimping the other side of the page. She'd abandoned the novel after the second chapter. Her place is still marked by a yellowing receipt for shampoo. By now she's read the book in French three times. She finishes Scott-Moncrieff's English translation within days, reading it at her desk in the department, and in her carrel in the library. In the evenings, at home, she reads it in bed until Nikhil comes in to join her—then she puts it away and opens something else.

  She calls him the following week. By then she's dug up the postcards, saved in an unsealed, unmarked manila envelope in the box where she keeps her tax returns, and read them, too, amazed that his words, the sight of his handwriting, still manage to discombobulate her. She tells herself she's calling an old friend. She tells herself the coincidence of finding his résumé, of stumbling upon him in this way, is too great, that anyone in her position would pick up the phone and call. She tells herself he could very well be married, as she is. Perhaps all four of them will go out to dinner, become great friends. Still, she doesn't tell Nikhil about the résumé. One night in her office, after seven o'clock when only a janitor roams the halls, after a few sips from the small bottle of Maker's Mark she has stashed at the back of her file cabinet, she calls. A night Nikhil thinks she's working on revisions for an article for PMLA.

  She dials the number, listens as it rings four times. She wonders if he'll even remember her. Her heart races. Her finger moves to the cradle, ready to press down.

  "Hello?"

  It's his voice. "Hi. Dimitri?"

  "Speaking. Who's this?"

  She pauses. She can still hang up if she wants. "It's Mouse."

  They begin seeing each other Mondays and Wednesdays, after she teaches her class. She takes the train uptown and they meet at his apartment, where lunch is waiting. The meals are ambitious: poached fish; creamy potato gratins; golden, puffed chickens roasted with whole lemons in their cavities. There is always a bottle of wine. They sit at a table with his books and papers and laptop pushed to one side. They listen to WQXR, drink coffee and cognac and smoke a cigarette afterward. Only then does he touch her. Sunlight streams through large dirty windows into the shabby prewar apartment. There are two spacious rooms, flaking plaster walls, scuffed parquet floors, towering stacks of boxes he has not yet bothered to unpack. The bed, a brand-new mattress and box spring on wheels, is never made. After sex they are always amazed to discover that the bed has moved several inches away from the wall, pushing up against the bureau on the other side of the room. She likes the way he looks at her when their limbs are still tangled together, out of breath as if he'd been chasing her, his expression anxious before relaxing into a smile. Some gray has come into Dimitri's hair and chest, some lines around the mouth and eyes. He's heavier than before, his stomach undeniably wide, so that his thin legs appear slightly comic. He recently turned thirty-nine. He has not been married. He does not seem very desperate to be employed. He spends his days cooking meals, reading, listening to classical music. She gathers that he has 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 stop staring at each other, not been able to stop talking about the résumé, 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 is listed under Nikhil's last name. It didn
't matter, they agreed. It was better this way. They drank glasses of prosecco. 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. Afterward she'd 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 is. There are no Bengali fruit sellers to greet her on the walk from Dimitri's subway stop, no neighbors to recognize her once she turns onto Dimitri's block. It reminds her of living in Paris—for a few hours at Dimitri's she is inaccessible, anonymous. Dimitri is not terribly curious about Nikhil, does not ask her his name. He expresses no jealousy. When she told him in the Italian restaurant that she was married, his expression had not changed. He regards their time together as perfectly normal, as destined, and she begins to see how easy it is. Moushumi refers 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 suspects nothing. As usual they have dinner, talk of their days. They clean up the kitchen together, then sit on the sofa and watch television while she corrects her students' quizzes and exercises. During the eleven o'clock news, they have bowls of Ben and Jerry's, then brush their teeth. As usual they get into bed, kiss, then slowly they turn away from each other in order to stretch comfortably into sleep. Only Moushumi stays awake. Each Monday and Wednesday night, she fears that he will sense something, that he will put his arms around her and instantly know. She stays awake for hours after they've 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.

  One night it's worse than usual. It's three o'clock, then four. Construction work has been taking place for the past few nights on their street, giant bins of rubble and concrete are moved and crushed, and Moushumi feels angry at Nikhil for being able to sleep through it. She's tempted to get up, pour herself a drink, take a bath, anything. But fatigue keeps her in bed. She watches the shadows that the passing traffic throws onto their ceiling, listens to a truck wailing in the distance like a solitary, nocturnal beast. She is convinced she will be up to see the sun rise. But somehow she falls asleep again. She is woken just after dawn by the sound of rain beating against the bedroom window, pelting it with such ferocity that she almost expects the glass to shatter. She has a splitting headache. She gets out of bed and parts the curtains, then returns to bed and shakes Nikhil awake. "Look," she says, pointing at the rain, as if it were something truly extraordinary. Nikhil obliges, fully asleep, sits upright, then closes his eyes again.

  At seven-thirty she gets out of bed. The morning sky is clear. She walks out of the bedroom and sees that rain has leaked through the roof, left an unsightly yellow patch on the ceiling and puddles in the apartment: one in the bathroom, another in the front hall. The sill of a window left open in the living room is soaked, streaked with mud, as are the bills and books and papers piled on it. The sight of it makes her weep. At the same time she's thankful that there's something tangible for her to be upset about.

  "Why are you crying?" Nikhil asks, squinting at her in his pajamas.

  "There are cracks in the ceiling," she says.

  Nikhil looks up. "They're not too bad. I'll call the super."

  "The rainwater came right through the roof."

  "What rain?"

  "Don't you remember? It was pouring rain at dawn. It was incredible. I woke you."

  But Nikhil doesn't remember a thing.

  A month of Mondays and Wednesdays passes. She begins to see him on Fridays as well. One Friday she finds herself alone in Dimitri's apartment; he goes out as soon as she arrives, to buy a stick of butter for a white sauce he is making to pour over trout. Bartók plays on the stereo, expensive components scattered on the floor. She watches him from the window, walking down the block, a small, balding, unemployed middle-aged man, who is enabling her to wreck her marriage. She wonders if she is the only woman in her family ever to have betrayed her husband, to have been unfaithful. This is what upsets her most to admit: that the affair causes her to feel strangely at peace, the complication of it calming her, structuring her day. After the first time, washing up in the bathroom, she'd been horrified by what she'd done, at the sight of her clothes scattered throughout the two rooms. Before leaving, she'd combed her hair in the bathroom mirror, the only one in the apartment. She'd kept her head bent low, glancing up only briefly at the end. When she did she saw that it was one of those mirrors that was for some reason particularly flattering, due to some trick of the light or the quality of the glass, causing her skin to glow.

  There is nothing on Dimitri's walls. He is still living out of a series of mammoth duffel bags. She is glad not to be able to picture his life in all its detail, its mess. The only things he's set up are the kitchen, the stereo components, and some of his books. Each time she visits, there are modest signs of progress. She wanders around his living room, looks at the books he is beginning to organize on his plywood shelves. Apart from all the German, their personal libraries are similar. There is the same lime green spine of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. The same edition of Mimesis. The same boxed set of Proust. She pulls out an oversized volume of photographs of Paris, by Atget. She sits on an armchair, Dimitri's only piece of living room furniture. It was here that she'd sat the first time she'd visited, and he'd stood behind her, massaging a spot on her shoulder, arousing her, until she stood up, and they'd walked together to the bed.

  She opens up the book to regard the streets and the landmarks she once knew. She thinks of her wasted fellowship. A large square of sunlight appears on the floor. The sun is directly behind her, and the shadow of her head spreads across the thick, silken pages, a few strands of her hair strangely magnified, quivering, as if viewed through a microscope. She leans back her head, closes her eyes. When she opens them a moment later the sun has slipped away, a lone sliver of it now diminishing into the floorboards, like the gradual closing of a curtain, causing the stark white pages of the book to turn gray. She hears Dimitri's footsteps on the stairs, then the clean sound of his key in the lock, slicing sharply into the apartment. She gets up to put the book away, searching for the gap in which it had stood.

  11

  Gogol wakes up late on a Sunday morning, alone, from a bad dream he cannot recall. He looks over at Moushumi's side of the bed, at the untidy pile of her books and magazines on the end table, the bottle of lavender room spray she likes to squirt sometimes on their pillows, the tortoiseshell barrette with strands of her hair caught in its clasp. She's at another conference this weekend, in Palm Beach. By tonight she'll be home. She claimed she'd told him about the conference months ago, but he doesn't remember. "Don't worry," she'd said as she was packing, "I won't be there long enough to get a tan." But when he'd seen her bathing suit on top of the clothing on the bed, a strange panic had welled up inside of him as he thought of her lying without him by a hotel pool, her eyes closed, a book at her side. At least one of us isn't cold, he thinks to himself now, crossing his arms tightly in front of his chest. Since yesterday afternoon the building's boiler has been broken, turning the apartment into an icebox. Last night he'd had to turn the oven on in order to tolerate being in the living room, and he'd worn his old Yale sweatpants, a thick sweater over a T-shirt, and a pair of rag-wool socks to bed. He throws back the comforter and the extra blanket he'd placed on top of it in the middle of the night. He couldn't find the blanket at first, nearly called Moushumi at the hotel to ask where she kept it. But
by then it was nearly three in the morning, and so, eventually, he'd hunted it down himself, found it wedged on the top shelf of the hall closet, an unused wedding gift still in its zippered plastic case.

  He gets out of bed, brushes his teeth with freezing-cold water from the tap, decides to skip shaving. He pulls on jeans and an extra sweater, and Moushumi's bathrobe over that, not caring how ridiculous he looks. He makes a pot of coffee, toasts some bread to eat with butter and jam. He opens the front door and retrieves the Times, removing the blue wrapper, putting it on the coffee table to read later. There is a drawing for work he must complete by tomorrow, a cross section for a high school auditorium in Chicago. He unrolls the plan from its tube and spreads it out on the dining table, securing the corners with paperback books he grabs off the bookcase. He puts on his Abbey Road CD, skipping ahead to the songs that would have been on side 2 of the album, and tries to work on the drawing, making sure his measurements correspond to the principal designer's notes. But his fingers are stiff and so he rolls up the plan, leaves a note for Moushumi on the kitchen counter, and goes in to the office.

  He's glad to have an excuse to be out of the apartment, instead of waiting for her, at some point this evening, to return. It feels milder outside, the air pleasantly damp, and instead of taking the train he walks the thirty blocks, up Park Avenue and over to Madison. He is the only person at the office. He sits in the darkened drafting room, surrounded by the desks of his coworkers, some piled with drawings and models, others as neat as a pin. He crouches over his table, a single pool of light from a swinging metal lamp illuminating the large sheet of paper. Tacked to the wall over his desk is a tiny calendar showing the entire year, which is coming once again to a close. At the end of the week, it will be the fourth anniversary of his father's death. Circled dates indicate all his deadlines, past and future. Meetings, site visits, conferences with clients. A lunch with an architect who's interested, possibly, in hiring him. He's eager to move to a smaller firm, to have some domestic commissions, to work with fewer people. Next to the calendar there is a postcard of a Duchamp painting he has always loved, of a chocolate grinder that reminds him of a set of drums, suspended against a gray background. Several Post-it notes. The photograph of his mother and Sonia and himself at Fatehpur Sikri, salvaged from his father's refrigerator door in Cleveland. And next to this, a picture of Moushumi, an old passport photo he'd found and asked to keep. She is in her early twenties, her hair loose, her heavy-lidded eyes slightly lowered, looking to one side. It was taken before he'd begun to date her, when she was living in Paris. A time in her life in which he was still Gogol to her, a remnant from her past with little likelihood of appearing in her future. And yet they had met; after all her adventures, it was he whom she had married. He with whom she shared her life.