Authors: Jhumpa Lahiri
She lifts up her narrow body and in a single, swift motion arranges the coat beneath her buttocks and legs. It's a face he recognizes from campus, someone he's crossed paths with in the corridors of buildings as he walks to and from class. He remembers that freshman year she'd had hair dyed an emphatic shade of cranberry red, cut to her jaw. She's grown it to her shoulders now, and allowed it to resume what appears to be its natural shade, light brown with bits of blond here and there. It is parted just off-center, a bit crooked at the base. The hair of her eyebrows is darker, lending her otherwise friendly features a serious expression. She wears a pair of nicely faded jeans, brown leather boots with yellow laces and thick rubber soles. A cabled sweater the same flecked gray of her eyes is too large for her, the sleeves coming partway up her hands. A man's billfold bulges prominently from the front pocket of her jeans.
"Hi, I'm Ruth," she says, recognizing him in that same vague way.
"I'm Nikhil." He sits, too exhausted to put his duffel bag away in the luggage rack overhead. He shoves it as best he can under his seat, his long legs bent awkwardly, aware that he is perspiring. He unzips his blue down parka. He massages
his fingers, crisscrossed with welts from the leather straps of the bag.
"Sorry," Ruth says, watching him. "I guess I was just trying to put off the inevitable."
Still seated, he pries his arms free of the parka. "What do you mean?"
"Making it look like someone was sitting here. With the coat."
"It's pretty brilliant, actually. Sometimes I pretend to fall asleep for the same reason," he admits. "No one wants to sit next to me if I'm sleeping."
She laughs softly, putting a strand of her hair behind her ear. Her beauty is direct, unassuming. She wears no make-up apart from something glossy on her lips; two small brown moles by her right cheekbone are the only things that distract from the pale peach of her complexion. She has slim, small hands with unpolished nails and ragged cuticles. She leans over to put the magazine away and get a book from the bag at her feet, and he briefly glimpses the skin above her waistband.
"Are you going to Boston?" he asks.
"Maine. That's where my dad lives. I have to switch to a bus at South Station. It's another four hours from there. What college are you in?"
"J.E."
He learns that she is in Silliman, that she is planning to be an English major. Comparing notes of their experiences at college so far, they discover that they had both taken Psychology 110 the previous spring. The book in her hands is a paperback copy of
Timon of Athens,
and though she keeps a finger marking her page she never reads a word of it. Nor does he bother to open up the volume on perspective he's pulled out of his duffel. She tells him she was raised on a commune in Vermont, the child of hippies, educated at home until the seventh grade. Her parents are divorced now. Her father lives with her stepmother, raising llamas on a farm. Her mother, an anthropologist, is doing fieldwork on midwives in Thailand.
He cannot imagine coming from such parents, such a background, and when he describes his own upbringing it feels bland by comparison. But Ruth expresses interest, asking about his visits to Calcutta. She tells him her parents went to India once, to an ashram somewhere, before she was born. She asks what the streets are like, and the houses, and so on the blank back page of his book on perspective Gogol draws a floor plan of his maternal grandparents' flat, navigating Ruth along the verandas and the terrazzo floors, telling her about the chalky blue walls, the narrow stone kitchen, the sitting room with cane furniture that looked as if it belonged on a porch. He draws with confidence, thanks to the drafting course he is taking this term. He shows her the room where he and Sonia sleep when they visit, and describes the view of the tiny lane lined with corrugated tin-roofed businesses. When he is finished, Ruth takes the book from him and looks at the drawing he's made, trailing her finger through the rooms. "I'd love to go," she says, and suddenly he imagines her face and arms tan, a backpack strapped to her shoulders, walking along Chowringhee as other Western tourists do, shopping in New Market, staying at the Grand.
As they are talking a woman across the aisle reprimands them; she's been trying to take a nap, she says. This only goads them into talking further, in lowered voices, their heads leaning in toward each other. Gogol is unaware of which state they are in, which stations they've passed. The train rumbles over a bridge; the setting sun is feverishly beautiful, casting a striking pink glow on the facades of the clapboard houses that dot the water's edge. In minutes these shades fade, replaced by the pallor that precedes dusk. When it is dark he sees that their images are reflected at an angle in the glass, hovering as if outside the train. Their throats are parched from talking and at one point he offers to go to the café car. She asks him to get her a bag of potato chips and a cup of tea with milk. He likes that she doesn't bother to pull the billfold out of her jeans, that she allows him to buy them for her. He returns with a coffee for
himself, and the chips and the tea, along with a paper cup of milk the bartender has given him instead of the regulation container of cream. They continue talking, Ruth eating the chips, brushing the salt from around her lips with the back of her hand. She offers some to Gogol, pulling them out for him one by one. He tells her about the meals he'd eaten on Indian trains the time he traveled with his family to Delhi and Agra, the rotis and slightly sour dal ordered at one station and delivered hot at the next, the thick vegetable cutlets served with bread and butter for breakfast. He tells her about the tea, how it was bought through the window from men on the platform who poured it from giant aluminum kettles, the milk and sugar already mixed in, and how it was drunk in crude clay cups that were smashed afterward on the tracks. Her appreciation for these details flatters him; it occurs to him that he has never spoken of his experiences in India to any American friend.
They part suddenly, Gogol working up the nerve to ask for her number at the last minute, writing it into the same book where he'd drawn her the floor plan. He wishes he could wait with her at South Station for her bus to Maine, but he has a commuter train to catch in ten minutes to take him to the suburbs. The days of the holiday feel endless; all he can think of is getting back to New Haven and calling Ruth. He wonders how many times they've crossed paths, how many meals they've unwittingly shared in Commons. He thinks back to Psychology 110, wishing his memory would yield some image of her, taking notes on the other side of the law school auditorium, her head bent over her desk. Most often he thinks of the train, longs to sit beside her again, imagines their faces flushed from the heat of the compartment, their bodies cramped in the same way, her hair shining from the yellow lights overhead. On the ride back he looks for her, combing each and every compartment, but she is nowhere and he ends up sitting next to an elderly nun with a brown habit and prominent white down on her upper lip, who snores all the way.
The following week, back at Yale, Ruth agrees to meet him for coffee at the Atticus bookshop. She is a few minutes late and dressed in the same jeans and boots and chocolate suede coat she'd worn when they met. Again she asks for tea. At first he senses an awkwardness he hadn't felt on the train. The café feels loud and hectic, the table between them too wide. Ruth is quieter than before, looking down at her cup and playing with the sugar packets, her eyes occasionally wandering to the books that line the walls. But soon enough they are conversing easily, as they had before, exchanging tales of their respective holidays. He tells her about how he and Sonia occupied the kitchen on Pemberton Road for a day, stuffing a turkey and rolling out dough for pies, things his mother did not particularly like to do. "I looked for you on my way back," he admits to her, telling her about the snoring nun. Afterward they walk together through the Center for British Art; there is an exhibit of Renaissance works on paper, which they've both been meaning to see. He walks her back to Silliman, and they arrange to have coffee a few days later. After saying good night, Ruth lingers by the gate, looking down at the books pressed up to her chest, and he wonders if he should kiss her, which is what he's been wanting to do for hours, or whether, in her mind, they are only friends. She starts walking backward toward her entryway, smiling at him, taking an impressive number of steps before giving a final wave and turning away.
He begins to meet her after her classes, remembering her schedule, looking up at the buildings and hovering casually under the archways. She always seems pleased to see him, stepping away from her girlfriends to say hello. "Of course she likes you," Jonathan tells Gogol, patiently listening to a minute account of their acquaintance one night in the dining hall. A few days later, following Ruth back to her room because she's forgotten a book she needs for a class, he places his hand over hers as she reaches for the doorknob. Her roommates are out. He waits for her on the sofa in the common room as she
searches for the book. It is the middle of the day, overcast, lightly raining. "Found it," she says, and though they both have classes, they remain in the room, sitting on the sofa and kissing until it is too late to bother going.
Every evening they study together at the library, sitting at either end of a table to keep from whispering. She takes him to her dining hall, and he to hers. He takes her to the sculpture garden. He thinks of her constantly, while leaning over the slanted board in his drafting class, under the strong white lights of the studio, and in the darkened lecture hall of his Renaissance architecture class, as images of Palladian villas flash onto the screen from a slide projector. Within weeks the end of the semester is upon them, and they are besieged by exams and papers and hundreds of pages of reading. Far more than the amount of work he faces, he dreads the month of separation they will have to endure at winter break. One Saturday afternoon, just before exams, she mentions to him in the library that both her roommates will be out all day. They walk together through Cross Campus, back to Silliman, and he sits with her on her unmade bed. The room smells as she does, a powdery floral smell that lacks the acridness of perfume. Postcards of authors are taped to the wall over her desk, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. Their lips and faces are still numb from the cold, and at first they still keep their coats on. They lie together against the shearling lining of hers, and she guides his hand beneath her bulky sweater. It had not been like this the first time, the only other time, that he'd been with a girl. He recalled nothing from that episode, only being thankful, afterward, that he was no longer a virgin.
But this time he is aware of everything, the warm hollow of Ruth's abdomen, the way her lank hair rests in thick strands on the pillow, the way her features change slightly when she is lying down. "You're great, Nikhil," she whispers as he touches small breasts set wide apart, one pale nipple slightly larger than the other. He kisses them, kisses the moles scattered on her
stomach as she arcs gently toward him, feels her hands on his head and then on his shoulders, guiding him between her parted legs. He feels inept, clumsy, as he tastes and smells her there, and yet he hears her whispering his name, telling him it feels wonderful. She knows what to do, unzipping his jeans, standing up at one point and getting a diaphragm case from her bureau drawer.
A week later he is home again, helping Sonia and his mother decorate the tree, shoveling the driveway with his father, going to the mall to buy last-minute gifts. He mopes around the house, restless, pretending to be coming down with a cold. He wishes he could simply borrow his parents' car and drive up to Maine to see Ruth after Christmas, or that she could visit him. He was perfectly welcome, she'd assured him, her father and stepmother wouldn't mind. They'd put him in the guest room, she'd said; at night he'd creep into her bed. He imagines himself in the farmhouse she's described to him, waking up to eggs frying in a skillet, walking with her through snowy, abandoned fields. But such a trip would require telling his parents about Ruth, something he has no desire to do. He has no patience for their surprise, their nervousness, their quiet disappointment, their questions about what Ruth's parents did and whether or not the relationship was serious. As much as he longs to see her, he cannot picture her at the kitchen table on Pemberton Road, in her jeans and her bulky sweater, politely eating his mother's food. He cannot imagine being with her in the house where he is still Gogol.
He speaks to her when his family is asleep, quietly in the empty kitchen, charging the calls to his telephone at school. They arrange to meet one day in Boston and spend the day together in Harvard Square. There is a foot of snow on the ground, and the sky is a piercing blue. They go first to a movie at the Brattle, buying tickets for whatever is about to begin, sitting at the back of the balcony and kissing, causing people to turn back and stare. They have lunch at Cafe Pamplona, eating
pressed ham sandwiches and bowls of garlic soup off in a corner. They exchange presents: she gives him a small used book of drawings by Goya, and he gives her a pair of blue woolen mittens and a mixed tape of his favorite Beatles songs. They discover a store just above the café that sells nothing but architecture books, and he browses the aisles, treating himself to a paperback edition of Le Corbusier's
Journey to the East,
for he is thinking of declaring himself an architecture major in the spring. Afterward they wander hand in hand, kissing now and then against a building, along the very streets he was pushed up and down in his stroller as a child. He shows her the American professor's house where he and his parents once lived, a time before Sonia was born, years that he has no memory of. He's seen the house in pictures, knows from his parents the name of the street. Whoever lives there now appears to be away; the snow hasn't been cleared from the porch steps, and a number of rolled-up newspapers have collected on the doormat. "I wish we could go inside," he says. "I wish we could be alone together." Looking at the house now, with Ruth at his side, her mittened hand in his, he feels strangely helpless. Though he was only an infant at the time, he feels nevertheless betrayed by his inability to know then that one day, years later, he would return to the house under such different circumstances, and that he would be so happy.