At dinner he meets her father, a tall, good-looking man with luxuriant white hair, Maxine's pale green-gray eyes, thin rectangular glasses perched halfway down his nose. "How do you do. I'm Gerald," he says, nodding, shaking Gogol's hand. Gerald gives him a bunch of cutlery and cloth napkins and asks him to set the table. Gogol does as he is told, aware that he is touching the everyday possessions of a family he barely knows. "You'll sit here, Nikhil," Gerald says, pointing to a chair once the silverware is laid. Gogol takes his place on one side of the table, across from Maxine. Gerald and Lydia are at either end. Gogol had skipped lunch that day in order to leave the office in time for the date with Maxine, and already the wine, at once heavier and smoother than what he is used to drinking, has gone to his head. He feels a pleasant ache at his temples, and a sudden gratitude for the day and where it has brought him. Maxine lights a pair of candles. Gerald tops off the wine. Lydia serves the food on broad white plates: a thin piece of steak rolled into a bundle and tied with string, sitting in a pool of dark sauce, the green beans boiled so that they are still crisp. A bowl of small, round, roasted red potatoes is passed around, and afterward a salad. They eat appreciatively, commenting on the tenderness of the meat, the freshness of the beans. His own mother would never have served so few dishes to a guest. She would have kept her eyes trained on Maxine's plate, insisting she have seconds and then thirds. The table would have been lined with a row of serving bowls so that people could help themselves. But Lydia pays no attention to Gogol's plate. She makes no announcement indicating that there is more. Silas sits at Lydia's feet as they eat, and at one point Lydia slices off a generous portion of her meat and feeds it to him off of her palm.
The four of them go quickly through two bottles of wine, then move on to a third. The Ratliffs are vociferous at the table, opinionated about things his own parents are indifferent to: movies, exhibits at museums, good restaurants, the design of everyday things. They speak of New York, of stores and neighborhoods and buildings they either despise or love, with an intimacy and ease that make Gogol feel as if he barely knows the city. They speak about the house, which Gerald and Lydia bought back in the seventies, when no one wanted to live in the area, about the history of the neighborhood, and about Clement Clarke Moore, who Gerald explains was a professor of classics at the seminary across the street. "He was the person responsible for local residential zoning," Gerald says. "That and writing ''Twas the Night Before Christmas,' of course." Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table. Something tells him that none of this is for his benefit, that this is the way the Ratliffs eat every night. Gerald is a lawyer. Lydia is a curator of textiles at the Met. They are at once satisfied and intrigued by his background, by his years at Yale and Columbia, his career as an architect, his Mediterranean looks. "You could be Italian," Lydia remarks at one point during the meal, regarding him in the candle's glow.
Gerald remembers a bar of French chocolate he bought on his way home, and this is unwrapped, broken apart, and passed around the table. Eventually the talk turns to India. Gerald asks questions about the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism, a topic Gogol knows little about. Lydia talks at length about Indian carpets and miniatures, Maxine about a college class she'd once taken on Buddhist stupas. They have never known a person who has been to Calcutta. Gerald has an Indian colleague at work who just went to India for his honeymoon. He'd brought back spectacular photographs, of a palace built on a lake. Was that in Calcutta?
"That's Udaipur," Gogol tells them. "I've never been there. Calcutta's in the east, closer to Thailand."
Lydia peers into the salad bowl, fishing out a stray piece of lettuce and eating it with her fingers. She seems more relaxed now, quicker to smile, her cheeks rosy from the wine. "What's Calcutta like? Is it beautiful?"
The question surprises him. He is accustomed to people asking about the poverty, about the beggars and the heat. "Parts of it are beautiful," he tells her. "There's a lot of lovely Victorian architecture left over from the British. But most of it's decaying."
"That sounds like Venice," Gerald says. "Are there canals?"
"Only during monsoons. That's when the streets flood. I guess that's the closest it comes to resembling Venice."
"I want to go to Calcutta," Maxine says, as if this has been a thing denied to her all her life. She gets up and walks over to the stove. "I feel like tea. Who wants tea?"
But Gerald and Lydia decide against tea tonight; there is an I, Claudius video they want to watch before bed. Without tending to the dishes they stand up, Gerald taking their two glasses and the rest of the wine. "Good night, dear," Lydia says, kissing Gogol lightly on the cheek. And then their footsteps creak noisily up the stairs.
"I suppose you've never been subjected to someone's parents on the first date before," Maxine says once they are alone, sipping milky cups of Lapsang Souchong from heavy white mugs.
"I enjoyed meeting them. They're charming."
"That's one way of putting it."
They remain awhile at the table, talking, the sound of the rain echoing quietly in the enclosed space behind the house. The candles shrink to stubs, and specks of wax drip onto the table. Silas, who has been softly pacing on the floor, comes and presses his head against Gogol's leg, looking up at him, wagging his tail. Gogol bends over, pats him tentatively.
"You've never had a dog, have you?" Maxine says, observing him.
"No."
"Didn't you ever want one?"
"When I was a kid. But my parents never wanted the responsibility. Plus we had to go to India every couple of years."
He realizes it's the first time he's mentioned his parents to her, his past. He wonders if perhaps she'll ask him more about these things. Instead she says, "Silas likes you. He's very picky."
He looks at her, watching as she undoes her hair, letting it hang loose for a moment over her shoulders before wrapping it thoughtlessly around her hand. She looks back at him, smiling. Once again he is aware of her nakedness beneath the cardigan.
"I should go," he says. But he is glad that she accepts his offer to help her clean up before leaving. They loiter over the task, loading the dishwasher, wiping down the table and the butcher-block island, washing and drying the pots and pans. They agree to go to the Film Forum on Sunday afternoon, to see the Antonioni double feature that Lydia and Gerald have recently been to and recommended over dinner.
"I'll walk you to the subway," Maxine says when they are finished, putting a leash around Silas. "He needs to go out." They go up to the parlor level, put on their coats. He hears the sound of a television faintly through the ceiling. He pauses at the foot of the stairs. "I forgot to thank your parents," he says.
"For what?"
"For having me over. For dinner."
She links elbows with him. "You can thank them next time."
From the very beginning he feels effortlessly incorporated into their lives. It is a different brand of hospitality from what he is used to; for though the Ratliffs are generous, they are people who do not go out of their way to accommodate others, assured, in his case correctly, that their life will appeal to him. Gerald and Lydia, busy with their own engagements, keep out of the way. Gogol and Maxine come and go as they please, from movies and dinners out. He goes shopping with her on Madison Avenue at stores they must be buzzed into, for cashmere cardigans and outrageously expensive English colognes that Maxine buys without deliberation or guilt. They go to darkened, humble-looking restaurants downtown where the tables are tiny, the bills huge. Almost without fail they wind up back at her parents' place. There is always some delicious cheese or pâté to snack on, always some good wine to drink. It is in her claw-footed tub that they soak together, glasses of wine or single-malt Scotch on the floor. At night he sleeps with her in the room she grew up in, on a soft, sagging mattress, holding her body, as warm as a furnace, through the
night, making love to her in a room just above the one in which Gerald and Lydia lie. On nights he has to stay late at work he simply comes over; Maxine keeps dinner waiting for him, and then they go upstairs to bed. Gerald and Lydia think nothing, in the mornings, when he and Maxine join them downstairs in the kitchen, their hair uncombed, seeking bowls of café au lait and toasted slices of French bread and jam. The first morning he'd slept over he'd been mortified to face them, showering beforehand, putting on his wrinkled shirt and trousers from the day before, but they'd merely smiled, still in their bathrobes, and offered him warm sticky buns from their favorite neighborhood bakery and sections of the paper.
Quickly, simultaneously, he falls in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia's manner of living, for to know her and love her is to know and love all of these things. He loves the mess that surrounds Maxine, her hundreds of things always covering her floor and her bedside table, her habit, when they are alone on the fifth floor, of not shutting the door when she goes to the bathroom. Her unkempt ways, a challenge to his increasingly minimalist taste, charm him. He learns to love the food she and her parents eat, the polenta and risotto, the bouillabaisse and osso buco, the meat baked in parchment paper. He comes to expect the weight of their flatware in his hands, and to keep the cloth napkin, still partially folded, on his lap. He learns that one does not grate Parmesan cheese over pasta dishes containing seafood. He learns not to put wooden spoons in the dishwasher, as he had mistakenly done one evening when he was helping to clean up. The nights he spends there, he learns to wake up earlier than he is used to, to the sound of Silas barking downstairs, wanting to be taken for his morning walk. He learns to anticipate, every evening, the sound of a cork emerging from a fresh bottle of wine.
Maxine is open about her past, showing him photographs of her ex-boyfriends in the pages of a marble-papered album, speaking of those relationships without embarrassment or regret. She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest difference between them, a thing far more foreign to him than the beautiful house she'd grown up in, her education at private schools. In addition, he is continually amazed by how much Maxine emulates her parents, how much she respects their tastes and their ways. At the dinner table she argues with them about books and paintings and people they know in common the way one might argue with a friend. There is none of the exasperation he feels with his own parents. No sense of obligation. Unlike his parents, they pressure her to do nothing, and yet she lives faithfully, happily, at their side.
She is surprised to hear certain things about his life: that all his parents' friends are Bengali, that they had had an arranged marriage, that his mother cooks Indian food every day, that she wears saris and a bindi. "Really?" she says, not fully believing him. "But you're so different. I would never have thought that." He doesn't feel insulted, but he is aware that a line has been drawn all the same. To him the terms of his parents' marriage are something at once unthinkable and unremarkable; nearly all their friends and relatives had been married in the same way. But their lives bear no resemblance to that of Gerald and Lydia: expensive pieces of jewelry presented on Lydia's birthday, flowers brought home for no reason at all, the two of them kissing openly, going for walks through the city, or to dinner, just as Gogol and Maxine do. Seeing the two of them curled up on the sofa in the evenings, Gerald's head resting on Lydia's shoulder, Gogol is reminded that in all his life he has never witnessed a single moment of physical affection between his parents. Whatever love exists between them is an utterly private, uncelebrated thing. "That's so depressing," Maxine says when he confesses this fact to her, and though it upsets him to hear her reaction, he can't help but agree. One day Maxine asks him if his parents want him to marry an Indian girl. She poses the question out of curiosity, without hoping for a particular response. He feels angry at his parents then, wishing they could be otherwise, knowing in his heart what the answer is. "I don't know," he tells her. "I guess so. It doesn't matter what they want."
She visits him infrequently; she and Gogol are never close to his neighborhood for any reason, and even the absolute privacy they would have had there is of no appeal. Still, some nights when her parents have a dinner party she has no interest in, or simply to be fair, she appears, quickly filling up the small space with her gardenia perfume, her coat, her big brown leather bag, her discarded clothes, and they make love on his futon as the traffic rumbles below. He is nervous to have her in his place, aware that he has put nothing up on his walls, that he has not bothered to buy lamps to replace the dismal glow of the ceiling light. "Oh, Nikhil, it's too awful," she eventually says on one of these occasions, barely three months after they've met. "I won't let you live here." When his mother had said more or less the same thing, the first time his parents had visited the apartment, he'd argued with her, hotly defending the merits of his spartan, solitary existence. But when Maxine says it, adding "you should just stay with me," he is quietly thrilled. By then he knows enough about her to know that she is not one to offer things if she doesn't mean them. Still, he demurs; what would her parents think? She shrugs. "My parents love you," she says matter-of-factly, definitively, just as she says everything else. And so he moves in with her in a way, bringing a few bags of his clothes, nothing else. His futon and his table, his kettle and toaster and television and the rest of his things, remain on Amsterdam Avenue. His answering machine continues to record his messages. He continues to receive his mail there, in a nameless metal box.
***
Within six months he has the keys to the Ratliffs' house, a set of which Maxine presents to him on a silver Tiffany chain. Like her parents, he has come to call her Max. He drops off his shirts at the dry cleaner around the corner from her place. He keeps a toothbrush and razor on her cluttered pedestal sink. In the mornings a few times a week he gets up early and goes running before work with Gerald along the Hudson, down to Battery Park City and back. He volunteers to take Silas out for walks, holding the leash as the dog sniffs and pokes at trees, and he picks up Silas's warm shit with a plastic bag. He spends entire weekends holed up in the house, reading books from Gerald and Lydia's shelves, admiring the sunlight that filters through the enormous unadorned windows during the course of the day. He comes to prefer certain sofas and chairs to others; when he is not there, he can conjure the paintings and photographs arrayed on the walls. He has to make a point of going to his studio, of resetting the tape on his answering machine, paying his rent check and his bills.
Often, on weekends, he helps to shop and prepare for Gerald and Lydia's dinner parties, peeling apples and deveining shrimp with Lydia, helping to shuck oysters, going down to the cellar with Gerald to bring up the extra chairs, the wine. He has fallen the tiniest bit in love with Lydia and with the understated, unflustered way she entertains. He is always struck by these dinners: only a dozen or so guests sitting around the candlelit table, a carefully selected mix of painters, editors, academics, gallery owners, eating the meal course by course, talking intelligently until the evening's end. How different they are from his own parents' parties, cheerfully unruly evenings to which there were never fewer than thirty people invited, small children in tow. Fish and meat served side by side, so many courses that people had to eat in shifts, the food still in the pans they were cooked in crowding the table. They sat where they could, in the different rooms of the house, half the people having finished before the other half began. Unlike Gerald and Lydia, who preside at the center of their dinners, his parents behaved more like caterers in their own home, solicitous and watchful, waiting until most of their guests' plates were stacked by the sink in order finally to help themselves. At times, as the laughter at Gerald and Lydia's table swells, and another bottle of wine is opened, and Gogol raises his glass to be filled yet again, he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine's family is a betrayal of h
is own. It isn't simply the fact that his parents don't know about Maxine, that they have no idea how much time he spends with her and Gerald and Lydia. Instead it is his knowledge that apart from their affluence, Gerald and Lydia are secure in a way his parents will never be. He cannot imagine his parents sitting at Lydia and Gerald's table, enjoying Lydia's cooking, appreciating Gerald's selection of wine. He cannot imagine them contributing to one of their dinner party conversations. And yet here he is, night after night, a welcome addition to the Ratliffs' universe, doing just that.
In June, Gerald and Lydia disappear to their lake house in New Hampshire. It is an unquestioned ritual, a yearly migration to the town where Gerald's parents live year-round. For a few days a series of canvas tote bags accumulate in the hallway, cardboard boxes full of liquor, shopping bags full of food, cases of wine. Their departure reminds Gogol of his family's preparations for Calcutta every few years, when the living room would be crowded with suitcases that his parents packed and repacked, fitting in as many gifts as possible for their relatives. In spite of his parents' excitement, there was always a solemnity accompanying these preparations, Ashima and Ashoke at once apprehensive and eager, steeling themselves to find fewer faces at the airport in Calcutta, to confront the deaths of relatives since the last time they were there. No matter how many times they'd been to Calcutta, his father was always anxious about the job of transporting the four of them such a great distance. Gogol was aware of an obligation being fulfilled; that it was, above all else, a sense of duty that drew his parents back. But it is the call of pleasure that summons Gerald and Lydia to New Hampshire. They leave without fanfare, in the middle of the day, when Gogol and Maxine are both at work. In Gerald and Lydia's wake, certain things are missing: Silas, some of the cookbooks, the food processor, novels and CDs, the fax machine so that Gerald can keep in touch with his clients, the red Volvo station wagon they keep parked on the street. A note is left on the island in the kitchen: "We're off!" Lydia has written, followed by X's and O's.
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