He remembers once going to a Christmas party at her parents' home. He and Sonia had not wanted to go; Christmas was supposed to be spent with just family. But their parents had replied that in America, Bengali friends were the closest thing they had to family, and so they had gone to Bedford, where the Mazoomdars lived. Her mother, Rina Mashi, had served cold pound cake and warmed-up frozen doughnuts that deflated at the touch. Her brother, Samrat, now a senior in high school, had been a boy of four, obsessed with Spider-Man. Rina Mashi had gone to a great deal of trouble to organize an anonymous gift exchange. Each family was asked to bring as many gifts as there were members, so that there would be something for everyone to open. Gogol had been asked to write numbers on squares of paper, one set to tape onto the gifts and another to pass around, folded up in a drawstring pouch, to the guests. Everyone gathered in a single room, cramming through the two doorways. He remembers sitting in their living room, listening with all the other guests to Moushumi play something on the piano. On the wall above her was a framed reproduction of Renoir's girl with a green watering can. After great deliberation, just as people were beginning to fidget, she had played a short piece by Mozart, adapted for children, but the guests wanted her to play "Jingle Bells." She shook her head no, but her mother said, "Oh, Moushumi's just being shy, she knows very well how to play 'Jingle Bells.'" For an instant she had glared at her mother, but then she'd played the song, again and again, as the numbers were called out and people claimed their gifts, sitting with her back to the room.
A week later they meet for lunch. It is the middle of the week and she has offered to meet him someplace near his office, so he's told her to come to the building where he works. When the receptionist tells him she is waiting in the lobby he feels the anticipation rise in his chest; all morning he'd been unable to concentrate on the elevation he was working on. He spends a few minutes showing her around, pointing out photographs of projects he's worked on, introducing her to one of the principal designers, showing her the room where the partners meet. His coworkers in the drafting room look up from their desks as she passes by. It is early November, a day on which the temperature has suddenly dropped, bringing the first true cold of the year. Outside, unprepared pedestrians scurry past unhappily, arms folded across their chests. Fallen leaves, battered and bleached, scuttle in swirls on the pavement. Gogol has no hat or gloves, and as they walk he puts his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Moushumi, in contrast, seems enviably protected, at ease in the cold. She wears a navy wool coat, a black wool scarf at her throat, long black leather boots that zip up the sides.
He takes her to an Italian restaurant where he goes from time to time with people at work, to celebrate birthdays and promotions and projects well done. The entrance is a few steps below street level, the windows shielded with panels of lace. The waiter recognizes him, smiles. They are led to a small table at the back as opposed to the long one in the center that he normally sits at. Underneath the coat he sees that she is wearing a nubbly gray suit, with large buttons on the jacket and a bell-shaped skirt that stops short of her knees.
"I taught today," she explains, aware that he is looking at her—she preferred to wear a suit when she taught, she says, given that her students were only a decade younger than she was. Otherwise she feels no sense of authority. He envies her students suddenly, seeing her without fail, three times a week, pictures them gathered together around a table, staring at her continuously as she writes on the board.
"The pastas are usually pretty good here," he says as the waiter hands them menus.
"Join me for a glass of wine," she says. "I'm done for the day."
"Lucky you. I have a stressful meeting to go to after this."
She looks at him, closing the menu. "All the more reason for a drink," she points out cheerfully.
"True," he concedes.
"Two glasses of the merlot," he says when the waiter re turns. She orders what he does, porcini ravioli and a salad of arugula and pears. He's nervous that she'll be disappointed by the choice, but when the food arrives she eyes it approvingly, and she eats heartily, quickly, sopping up the leftover sauce on her plate with bread. As they drink their wine and eat their meal, he admires the light on her face, the faint pale hairs that shine against the contours of her cheek. She speaks of her students, the topic for the dissertation she plans to write, about twentieth-century francophone poets from Algeria. He tells her about his memory of the Christmas party, of her being forced to play "Jingle Bells."
"Do you remember that night?" he asks, hopeful that she will.
"No. My mother was always forcing me to do things like that."
"Do you still play?"
She shakes her head. "I never wanted to learn in the first place. My mother had this fantasy. One of many. I think my mother's taking lessons now."
The room is quiet again, the lunch crowd has come and gone. He looks around for the waiter, signals for the check, dismayed that their plates are empty, that the hour has passed.
"She is your sister, signore?" the waiter asks as he sets the check between them, glancing at Moushumi and then back at Gogol.
"Oh, no," Gogol says, shaking his head, laughing, at once insulted and oddly aroused. In a way, he realizes, it's true—they share the same coloring, the straight eyebrows, the long, slender bodies, the high cheekbones and dark hair.
"You are sure?" the waiter persists.
"Quite sure," Gogol says.
"But you could be," the waiter says. "Sì, sì, there is quite a resemblance."
"You think so?" Moushumi says. She appears to be at ease with the comparison, looking comically askance at Gogol. And yet he notices that some color has risen to her cheeks, whether from the wine or from self-consciousness he doesn't know.
"It's funny he should say that," she says, once they have stepped out into the cold.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's just funny to think that all our lives our parents raised us according to the illusion that we were cousins, that we were all part of some makeshift extended Bengali family, and now here we are, years later, and someone actually thinks we're related."
He does not know what to say. The waiter's comment has discomfited him, making his attraction to Moushumi feel mildly illicit.
"You're not dressed warmly enough," she observes, twisting the woolen scarf securely around her neck.
"It's so damn hot in my apartment all the time," he says. "The heat just got turned on. For some reason I can never get my mind around the fact that it won't be the same temperature outside."
"Don't you check the paper?"
"I get it on my way to work."
"I always check the weather by phone when I leave the house," Moushumi says.
"You're joking." He stares at her, surprised that she should actually be the type to go to such lengths. "Please tell me you're joking."
She laughs. "I don't admit that to just anyone, you know." She finishes arranging her scarf, and then, without removing her hands from it, she says, "Why don't you borrow this?" and begins to untie it again.
"Please, I'm fine." He puts a hand to his throat, against the knot of his tie.
"Sure?"
He nods, half tempted to say yes, to feel her scarf against his skin.
"Well, at the very least you need a hat," she tells him. "I know a place nearby. Do you need to be back at work right away?"
She leads him to a little boutique on Madison. The window is crowded with women's hats perched on gray, featureless heads, with sloping necks nearly a foot long.
"They have men's stuff in the back," she says. The shop is crowded with women. The back is relatively tranquil, stacks of fedoras and berets arrayed on curved wooden shelves. He picks up a fur hat, a top hat, trying them on as a joke. The glass of wine has made him tipsy. Moushumi begins rummaging through a basket.
"This will be warm," she says, placing her fingers inside a thick navy cap with yellow stripes on the brim. She stretches the hat with her f
ingers. "What do you think?" She puts it on his head, touching his hair, his scalp. She smiles, pointing to the mirror. She watches as he studies himself.
He is aware that she is looking at him rather than at his reflection. He wonders what her face looks like without her glasses, when her hair is loose. He wonders what it might be like to kiss her on the mouth. "I like it," he says. "I'll take it."
She pulls it off his head quickly, spoiling his hair.
"What are you doing?"
"I want to buy it for you."
"You don't have to do that."
"I want to," she says, already heading toward the register. "It was my idea, anyway. You were perfectly happy freezing to death."
At the register the cashier notices Moushumi eyeing a brown wool and velvet hat decorated with feathers. "It's an exquisite piece," the cashier says, carefully lifting it off the bust. "Handmade by a woman in Spain. No two are alike. Would you like to try it?"
Moushumi places it on her head. A customer compliments her. So does the cashier. "Not many women can pull off a hat like that," the cashier says.
Moushumi blushes, glances at the price tag dangling from a thread on one side of her face. "I'm afraid it's out of my budget for today," she says.
The cashier replaces the hat on the shelf. "Well, now you know what to get her for her birthday," she says, looking at Gogol.
He puts on the new cap and they step out of the store. He is late for his meeting. If it weren't for that, he would be tempted to stay with her, to walk through the streets beside her, or disappear with her into the dark of a movie theater. The day has turned even colder, the wind more forceful, the sun a faint white patch. She walks him back to his office. For the rest of the day, throughout his meeting and as he struggles, afterward, to get back to work, he thinks of her. When he leaves the office, instead of walking to the subway, he retraces the steps they'd taken together earlier, past the restaurant where people are now having their dinners, and finds his way to the hat store, the sight of it lifting his spirits. It is nearly eight o'clock, dark outside. He assumes the store will be closed, is surprised to see the lights still on inside, the grate only partly lowered. He studies the items in the window, and his reflection in the glass, wearing the cap she'd bought for him. Eventually he walks in. He is the only customer; he can hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner running at the rear of the store.
"I knew you'd be back," the saleswoman says as he walks through the door. She takes the brown velvet hat off the Styro-foam head without his having to ask. "He was here earlier today with his girlfriend," she explains to her assistant. "Shall I wrap it for you?"
"That would be great." It excites him to hear himself referred to that way. He watches as the hat is placed in a round chocolate-colored box, tied with a thick, creamy ribbon. He realizes that he has not asked the price, but without a thought he signs the receipt for two hundred dollars. He takes the hat back to his apartment, hiding it at the back of his closet even though Moushumi has never been there. He would give it to her on her birthday, in spite of the fact that he has no idea when her birthday is.
And yet he has the feeling that he has been to a few of her birthdays, and she to his. That weekend, at his parents' house, he confirms this; at night, after his mother and Sonia have gone up to bed, he hunts for her in the photo albums that his mother has assembled over the years. Moushumi is there, lined up behind a blazing cake in his parents' dining room. She is looking away, a pointed paper hat on her head. He stares straight at the lens, the knife in his hand, poised, for the camera's benefit, over the cake, his face shining with impending adolescence. He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past.
The following weekend she invites him over for dinner at her place. She has to come downstairs in order to let him into the building; the buzzer is broken, she'd warned him when they'd made their plans.
"Nice cap," she says. She wears a sleeveless black dress tied loosely at the back. Her legs are bare, her feet slim, her toe-nails, exposed at the tops of her sandals, painted maroon. Strands of hair have come loose from her chignon. She holds half a cigarette between her fingers, but just before she leans forward to kiss him on the cheeks she lets it drop and crushes it with the toe of her sandal. She leads him up the steps to an apartment on the third floor. She's left the door open. The apartment smells strongly of cooking; on the stove, a few large pieces of chicken are browning in a pan full of oil. Music is playing, a man singing songs in French. Gogol gives her a bunch of sunflowers whose massive stems are heavier in his arms than the bottle of wine he's also brought. She does not know where to put the flowers; the countertops, limited to begin with, are crammed with evidence of the meal she is preparing, onions and mushrooms, flour, a stick of butter rap idly softening in the heat, a glass of wine she is in the process of drinking, plastic grocery bags she has not had time to put away.
"I should have brought something more manageable," he says as she looks around the kitchen, the flowers resting against her shoulder, as if expecting a surface to miraculously clear.
"I've been meaning for weeks to buy myself some sunflowers," she says. She glances quickly at the pan on the stove and takes him through the kitchen and into the living room. She unwraps the flowers. "There's a vase up there," she says, pointing to the top of a bookcase. "Would you mind getting it down?"
She carries the vase into the bathroom, and he can hear water running in the tub. He takes the opportunity to remove his coat and cap, drape them over the back of the sofa. He has dressed with care, a blue-and-white-striped Italian shirt that Sonia had bought for him at Filene's Basement, a pair of black jeans. She returns and fills the vase with the flowers, putting it on the coffee table. The place is nicer than he expected from the grimy look of the lobby. The floors have been redone, the walls freshly painted, the ceiling dotted with track lights. The living room has a square dining table in one corner, and a desk and file cabinets set up in another. Three particleboard bookcases line one wall. On the dining table, there is a pepper mill, a saltcellar, bright, clear-skinned clementines arranged in a bowl. He recognizes versions of things he knows from home: a Kashmiri crewelwork carpet on the floor, Rajasthani silk pillows on the sofa, a cast-iron Natraj on one of the bookcases.
Back in the kitchen she sets out some olives and some goat cheese coated with ash. She hands him a corkscrew and asks him to open the bottle he's brought, to pour himself a glass. She dredges more of the chicken on a plate of flour. The pan is sputtering loudly and has showered the wall behind the stove with oil. He stands there as she refers to a cookbook by Julia Child. He is overwhelmed by the production taking place for his benefit. In spite of the meals they've already shared, he is nervous about eating with her.
"When would you like to eat?" she says. "Are you hungry?"
"Whenever. What are you making?"
She looks at him doubtfully. "Coq au vin. I haven't made it before. I just found out that you're supposed to cook it twenty-four hours in advance. I'm afraid I'm running a bit behind."
He shrugs. "It already smells great. I'll help you." He rolls up his sleeves. "What can I do?"
"Let's see," she says, reading. "Oh. Okay. You can take those onions, and make X's in the bottom with a knife, and drop them into that pan."
"In with the chicken?"
"No. Shoot." She kneels down and retrieves a pot from one of the lower cupboards. "In here. They need to boil for a minute and then you take them out."
He does as he is told, filling the pan with water and turning on the flame. He finds a knife and scores the onions, as he had once been taught to do with Brussels sprouts in the Ratliffs' kitchen. He watches her measure wine and tomato paste into the pan containing the chicken. She searches in a cupboard for a stainless-steel spice caddy and throws in a bay leaf.
"Of course, my mother is appalled that I'm not making you Indian food," she says, studying the conte
nts of the pan.
"You told her I was coming over?"
"She happened to call today." Then she asks him, "What about you? Have you been giving your mother updates?"
"I haven't gone out of my way. But she probably suspects something given that it's a Saturday and I'm not at home with her and Sonia."
Moushumi leans over the pan, watching the contents come to a simmer, prodding the pieces of chicken with a wooden spoon. She glances back at the recipe. "I think I need to add more liquid," she says, pouring water from a teakettle into the pan, causing her glasses to steam. "I can't see." She laughs, stepping away so that she stands a bit closer to him. The CD has ended and the apartment is silent apart from the sounds on the stove. She turns to him, still laughing, her eyes still obscured. She holds up her hands, messy from cooking, coated with flour and chicken fat. "Would you mind taking these off for me?"
With both hands he pries the glasses from her face, clasping the frames where they meet her temples. He puts them on the counter. And then he leans over and kisses her. He touches his fingers to her bare arms, cool in spite of the warmth of the kitchen. He presses her close, a hand at the small of her back, against the knot of her dress, tasting the warm, slightly sour tang of her mouth. They make their way through the living room, to the bedroom. He sees a box spring and mattress without a frame. He unties the knot at the back of her dress with difficulty, then swiftly undoes the long zipper, leaving a small black pool at her feet. In the light cast from the living room, he glimpses black mesh underwear and a matching bra. She is curvier than she appears clothed, her breasts fuller, her hips generously flared. They make love on top of the covers, quickly, efficiently, as if they've known each other's bodies for years. But when they are finished she switches on the lamp by her bed and they examine each other, quietly discovering moles and marks and ribs.