In March they go to Paris. Moushumi is invited to give a paper at a conference at the Sorbonne, and they decide to make a vacation out of it, Gogol arranging to take the week off from work. Instead of staying in a hotel, they stay in an apartment in the Bastille which belongs to a friend of Moushumi's, a male friend named Emanuel, a journalist, who is on holiday in Greece. The apartment is barely heated, minuscule, at the top of six steep flights of stairs, with a bathroom the size of a phone booth. There is a loft bed just inches from the ceiling, so that sex is a serious hazard. An espresso pot nearly fills the narrow two-burner stove. Apart from two chairs at the dining table, there is no place to sit. The weather is raw, cheerless, the sky white, the sun perpetually hidden from view. Paris is famous for such weather, Moushumi tells him. He feels hidden himself; men on the streets stare at Moushumi constantly, their glances lingering plainly, in spite of the fact that Gogol is at her side.
It is his first time in Europe. The first time he sees the sort of architecture he has read about for so many years, admired only in the pages of books and slides. For some reason, in Moushumi's company, he feels more apologetic than excited. Though they journey together one day to Chartres, and another to Versailles, he has the feeling she'd rather be meeting friends for coffee, attending panels at the conference, eating at her favorite bistros, shopping at her favorite stores. From the beginning he feels useless. Moushumi makes all the decisions, does all the talking. He is mute in the brasseries where they eat their lunches, mute in the shops where he gazes at beautiful belts, ties, paper, pens; mute on the rainy afternoon they spend together at the d'Orsay. He is particularly mute when he and Moushumi get together for dinners with groups of her French friends, drinking Pernods and feasting on couscous or choucroute, smoking and arguing around paper-covered tables. He struggles to grasp the topic of conversation—the euro, Monica Lewinsky, Y2K—but everything else is a blur, indistinguishable from the clatter of plates, the drone of echoing, laughing voices. He watches them in the giant gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, their dark heads leaning close.
Part of him knows this is a privilege, to be here with a person who knows the city so well, but the other part of him wants simply to be a tourist, fumbling with a phrase book, looking at all the buildings on his list, getting lost. When he confesses his wish to Moushumi one night as they are walking back to the apartment, she says, "Why didn't you tell me that in the first place?" and the next morning she instructs him to walk to the Métro station, have his photo taken in a booth, get a Carte Orange. And so Gogol goes sightseeing, alone, while Moushumi is off at her conference, or as she sits at the table in the apartment and puts the final touches on her paper. His only companion is Moushumi's Plan de Paris, a small red guide to the arrondissements, with a folded map attached to the back cover. On the last page, Moushumi writes in a few phrases for his benefit: "Je voudrais un café, s'il vous plaît." "Où sont les toilettes?" And she warns as he's walking out the door, "Avoid ordering a café crème unless it's morning. The French never do that."
Though the day is bright for a change, it is particularly cold, brisk air stinging his ears. He remembers his first lunch with Moushumi, the afternoon she'd dragged him to the hat store. He remembers the two of them crying out in unison as the wind blasted their faces, a time too soon for them to cling to each other for warmth. He walks now to the corner, decides to get another croissant at the boulangerie where he and Moushumi go every morning to buy breakfast. He sees a young couple standing in a patch of sunlight on the sidewalk, feeding each other pastries from a bag. Suddenly he wants to go back to the apartment, climb into the loft bed and forget about sightseeing, hold Moushumi in his arms. He wants to lie with her for hours, as they did at the beginning, skipping meals, then wandering the streets at odd hours, desperate for something to eat. But she must present her paper at the end of the week, and he knows she will not be roused from her task of reading it aloud, timing its duration, making small marks in the margin. He consults his map and for the next few days he follows the routes she has charted for him with a pencil. He wanders for miles along the famous boulevards, through the Marais, arriving after many wrong turns at the Picasso Museum. He sits on a bench and sketches the town houses in the Place des Vosges, walks along the desolate gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens. Outside the Academie des Beaux-Arts he wanders for hours through the shops selling prints, eventually buying a drawing of the Hôtel de Lauzun. He photographs the narrow sidewalks, the dark cobblestone streets, the mansard roofs, the ancient, shuttered buildings of pale beige stone. All of it he finds beautiful beyond description, and yet at the same time it depresses him that none of it is new to Moushumi, that she has seen it all hundreds of times. He understands why she lived here for as long as she did, away from her family, away from anyone she knew. Her French friends adore her. Waiters and shopkeepers adore her. She both fits in perfectly yet remains slightly novel. Here Moushumi had reinvented herself, without misgivings, without guilt. He admires her, even resents her a little, for having moved to another country and made a separate life. He realizes that this is what their parents had done in America. What he, in all likelihood, will never do.
On their last day, in the morning, he shops for gifts for his in-laws, his mother, Sonia. It is the day Moushumi is presenting her paper. He had offered to go with her, to sit in the audience and listen to her speak. But she told him that was silly, why sit in the middle of a roomful of people speaking a language he doesn't understand when there was still more of the city he could see? And so, after shopping, he sets off, alone, for the Louvre, a destination he's put off until now. At the end of the day he meets her at a café in the Latin Quarter. She is there waiting for him behind a glassed-in partition on the sidewalk, wearing a dark red lipstick, sipping a glass of wine.
He sits down, orders a coffee. "How was it? How did it go?"
She lights a cigarette. "Okay. Over with, at any rate."
She looks more regretful than relieved, her eyes lingering over the small round table between them, the veins in the marble bluish, like those in cheese.
Normally she wants a full account of his adventures, but today they sit silently, watching the passers-by. He shows her the things he's bought, a tie for his father-in-law, soaps for their mothers, a shirt for Samrat, a silk scarf for Sonia, sketchbooks for himself, bottles of ink, a pen. She admires the drawings he's done. It is a café they've been to before, and he feels the slight nostalgia it is sometimes possible to feel at the end of an extended stay in a foreign place, taking in the details that will soon evaporate from his mind: the surly waiter who has served them both times, the view of the shops across the street, the green and yellow straw chairs.
"Are you sad to be leaving?" he asks, stirring sugar into his coffee, drinking it back in one gulp.
"A little. I guess a little part of me wishes I'd never left Paris, you know?"
He leans over, takes both her hands in his. "But then we would never have met," he says, with more confidence than he feels.
"True," she acknowledges. And then: "Maybe we'll move here one day."
He nods. "Maybe."
She looks beautiful to him, tired, the concentrated light of the dying day on her face, infusing it with an amber-pink glow. He watches the smoke drift away from her. He wants to remember this moment, the two of them together, here. This is how he wants to remember Paris. He takes out his camera, focusing it on her face.
"Nikhil, please, don't," she says, laughing, shaking her head. "I look awful." She shields her face with the back of her hand.
He still holds up the camera. "Oh, come on, Mo. You're beautiful. You look great."
But she refuses to indulge him, moving her chair out of view with a scrape on the pavement; she doesn't want to be mistaken for a tourist in this city, she says.
A Saturday evening in May. A dinner party in Brooklyn. A dozen people are gathered around a long, scratched-up dining table, smoking cigarettes, drinking Chianti from juice glasses, sitting on a
series of backless wooden stools. The room is dark apart from a domed metal lamp hanging from a long cord, which casts a concentrated pool of light on the table's center. An opera plays on a battered boom box on the floor. A joint is being passed around. Gogol takes a hit, but as he sits there, holding his breath, he regrets it—he is already starved. Though it's close to ten o'clock, dinner has yet to be served. Apart from the Chianti, the only offerings so far are a loaf of bread and a small bowl of olives. A blizzard of crumbs and pointy violet olive pits litter the tabletop. The bread, like a hard, dusty cushion, is full of prune-sized holes and has a crust that hurts the roof of Gogol's mouth when he chews.
They are at the home of Moushumi's friends Astrid and Donald. It's a brownstone under renovation; Astrid and Donald, expecting their first child, are in the process of expanding their domain from a single floor of the house to the top three. Thick plastic sheets hang from rafters, creating transparent, temporary corridors. Behind them, a wall is missing. Even at this hour, guests continue to arrive. They enter complaining of the cold that has persisted this far into spring, of the stinging, bothersome wind that tosses the treetops outside. They remove their coats, introduce themselves, pour themselves Chianti. If it happens to be their first time in the house they eventually drift from the table and troop up the stairs, to admire the pocket doors, the original tin ceilings, the vast space that will eventually become the nursery, the distant, sparkling view of Manhattan visible from the top floor.
Gogol has been to the house before, a bit too frequently in his opinion. Astrid is a friend of Moushumi's from Brown. The first time he'd met Donald and Astrid had been at his wedding. At least that's what Moushumi says; he doesn't remember them. They were living in Rome the first year that Gogol and Moushumi were together, on a Guggenheim that Astrid had gotten. But they've since moved back to New York, where Astrid has begun teaching film theory at the New School. Donald is a moderately talented painter of small still lifes of single, everyday objects: an egg, a cup, a comb, suspended against brightly colored backgrounds. Donald's rendition of a spool of thread, a wedding present to Gogol and Moushumi, hangs in their bedroom. Donald and Astrid are a languidly confident couple, a model, Gogol guesses, for how Moushumi would like their own lives to be. They reach out to people, hosting dinner parties, bequeathing little bits of themselves to their friends. They are passionate spokespeople for their brand of life, giving Gogol and Moushumi a steady, unquestionable stream of advice about quotidian things. They swear by a certain bakery on Sullivan Street, a certain butcher on Mott, a certain style of coffeemaker, a certain Florentine designer of sheets for their bed. Their decrees drive Gogol crazy. But Moushumi is loyal. She regularly goes out of her way, and thus out of their budget, to buy bread at that bakery, meat at that butcher.
He recognizes a few familiar faces tonight: Edith and Colin, who teach sociology at Princeton and Yale, respectively, and Louise and Blake, both Ph.D. candidates, like Moushumi, at NYU. Oliver is an editor at an art magazine; his wife, Sally, works as a pastry chef. The rest are painter friends of Donald's, poets, documentary filmmakers. They are all married. Even now, a fact as ordinary, as obvious, as this astonishes him. All married! But this is life now, the weekend sometimes more tiring than the workweek, an endless stream of dinner parties, cocktail parties, occasional after-eleven parties with dancing and drugs to remind them that they are still young, followed by Sunday brunches full of unlimited Bloody Marys and overpriced eggs.
They are an intelligent, attractive, well-dressed crowd. Also a bit incestuous. The vast majority of them know each other from Brown, and Gogol can't ever shake the feeling that half the people in the room have slept with one another. There is the usual academic talk around the table, versions of the same conversation he can't participate in, concerning conferences, job listings, ungrateful undergraduates, proposal deadlines. At one end of the table, a woman with short red hair and cat's-eye glasses is talking about a Brecht play she'd once acted in in San Francisco, performed fully in the nude. At the other end, Sally is putting the finishing touches on a dessert she's brought, in tently assembling layers and covering them with glistening white meringue that shoots up like a dense thicket of flames. Astrid is showing a few people paint chips, which she's lined up in front of her like tarot cards, versions of an apple green she and Donald are considering for the front hallway. She wears glasses that might have belonged to Malcolm X. She eyes the paint chips with precision; though she seeks the advice of her guests, she has already made up her mind about which permutation of the shade she will choose. To Gogol's left, Edith is discussing her reasons for not eating bread. "I just have so much more energy if I stay off wheat," she maintains.
Gogol has nothing to say to these people. He doesn't care about their dissertation topics, or their dietary restrictions, or the color of their walls. In the beginning these occasions hadn't been quite so excruciating. When Moushumi had first introduced him to her crowd he and she would sit with their arms around each other, their fellow guests a footnote to their own ongoing conversation. Once, at a party at Sally and Oliver's, they'd wandered off to make quick, giddy love in Sally's walkin closet, piles of her sweaters looming over them. He knows that that sort of insular passion can't be sustained. Still, Moushumi's devotion to these people puzzles him. He looks at her now. She is lighting a Dunhill. Her smoking hadn't bothered him initially. He liked it, after sex, when she'd lean over the bedside table and strike a match, and he would lie beside her, listening to her exhale in the quiet, watching the smoke drift up over their heads. But these days the stale smell of it, in her hair and on her fingertips, and in the bedroom where she sits typing, slightly disgusts him, and from time to time he can't help but have a fleeting vision of himself, tragically abandoned as a result of her mild but persistent addiction. When he'd admitted his fear to her one day, she'd laughed. "Oh, Nikhil," she'd said, "you can't be serious."
She is laughing now, nodding intently at something Blake is saying. She seems animated in a way he doesn't remember her having been in a while. He looks at her straight, smooth hair, which she's had cut recently so that it flips up at the ends. The glasses that only emphasize her beauty. Her pale, pretty mouth. He knows that the approval of these people means something to her, though what exactly he isn't sure. And yet, as much as Moushumi enjoys seeing Astrid and Donald, Gogol has recently begun to notice that she is gloomy in the aftermath, as if seeing them serves only to remind her that their own lives will never match up. The last time they'd gone home after one of Astrid and Donald's dinner parties, she'd picked a fight with him as soon as they'd walked in the door, complaining about the noise on Third Avenue, about the sliding doors on the closets that always fall off the rails, about the fact that it's impossible to use the bathroom without being deafened by the exhaust fan. He tells himself that it's the stress—she's been studying for her orals, holed up in her carrel at the library until nine o'clock most nights. He remembers how it was studying for his licensing exam, which he failed twice before passing. He remembers the sustained isolation it had demanded, speaking to no one for days at a time, and so he doesn't say anything. Tonight he'd held out the hope that she'd use her orals as a reason to decline the invitation to Astrid and Donald's. But by now he's learned that there is never a question of saying no when it comes to them.
It was through Astrid and Donald that Moushumi had met her former fiancé, Graham; Donald had gone to prep school with him, and he had given Moushumi's number to Graham when he'd moved to Paris. Gogol doesn't like to think about the fact that Moushumi's connection to Graham persists through Astrid and Donald, that through them Moushumi has learned that Graham lives in Toronto now, is married and a father of twins. Back when Moushumi and Graham were together they'd made a foursome with Donald and Astrid, renting cottages together in Vermont, time-shares in the Hamptons. They try to incorporate Gogol into similar plans; this summer, for example, they are thinking of renting a house on the coast of Brittany. Though Astrid and Donald have welc
omed Gogol heartily into their lives, sometimes he has the feeling they still think she's with Graham. Once Astrid even called him Graham by mistake. No one had noticed except Gogol. They had all been a little drunk, but he knew he'd heard correctly, toward the end of an evening much like this one. "Mo, why don't you and Graham take some of this pork loin home," Astrid had said as they'd been clearing the dishes. "It's great for sandwiches."
At the moment, the guests are united in a single topic of conversation, talking about names for the baby. "What we want is something totally unique," Astrid is saying. Lately Gogol has started to notice a trend: now that they inhabit this world of couples, dinner party small talk gravitates to the naming of children. If a woman at the table happens to be pregnant, as Astrid is now, the subject is inevitable.
"I always liked the names of popes," Blake says.
"You mean John and Paul?" Louise asks.
"More like Innocent and Clement."