The Namesake (35 page)

Moushumi feels sick at the thought of it, of a death so sudden, of a woman so marginal and yet so central to her world. She enters the office she shares with the other TAs, empty now. She calls Nikhil at home, at work. No answer. She looks at her watch, realizes he must be on the subway, on his way to work. Suddenly she's glad he's unreachable—she's reminded of the way Nikhil's father had died, instantly, without warning. Surely this would remind him of that. She has the urge to leave campus, return to the apartment. But she has a class to teach in half an hour. She goes back to the Xerox room to copy her syllabus and a short passage from Flaubert to translate in class. She pushes the button to collate the syllabus but forgets to push
the button for staples. She searches in the supply closet for a stapler, and when she fails to find one, goes instinctively to Alice's desk. The phone is ringing. A cardigan is draped over the back of the chair. She opens up Alice's drawer, afraid to touch anything. She finds a stapler behind paper clips and Sweet'N Low packets in the drawer.
ALICE
is written on masking tape stuck to the top. The faculty mailboxes are still half-empty, the mail piled in a bin.

Moushumi goes to her mailbox to look for her class roster. Her box is empty, so she roots through the bin for her mail. As she picks up each piece of mail, addressed to this or that faculty member or TA, she begins putting it into the appropriate box, matching name to name. Even after she's found her roster, she continues, completing the task Alice left undone. The mindlessness soothes her nerves. As a child she always had a knack for organization; she would take it upon herself to neaten closets and drawers, not only her own but her parents' as well. She had organized the cutlery drawer, the refrigerator. These self-appointed tasks would occupy her during quiet, hot days of her summer vacation, and her mother would look on in disbelief, sipping watermelon sherbet in front of the fan. There is just a handful of items left in the bin. She bends over to pick them up. And then another name, a sender's name typed in the upper left-hand corner of a business-sized envelope, catches her eye.

She takes the stapler and the letter and the rest of her things into her office. She shuts the door, sits at her desk. The envelope is addressed to a professor of Comparative Literature who teaches German as well as French. She opens the envelope. Inside she finds a cover letter and a résumé. For a minute she simply stares at the name centered at the top of the résumé, laser-printed in an elegant font. She remembers the name, of course. The name alone, when she'd first learned it, had been enough to seduce her. Dimitri Desjardins. He pronounced Desjardins the English way, the
s's
intact, and in spite of her training in French this is how she still thinks of it. Underneath
the name is an address on West 164 th Street. He is looking for an adjunct position, teaching German part-time. She reads through the résumé, learns exactly where he's been and what he's done for the past decade. Travels in Europe. A job working with the BBC. Articles and reviews published in
Der Spiegel, Critical Inquiry.
A Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Heidelberg.

She had met him years ago, in her final months of high school. It was a period in which she and two of her friends, in their eagerness to be college students, in desperation over the fact that no one their own age was interested in dating them, would drive to Princeton, loiter on the campus, browse in the college bookstore, do their homework in buildings they could enter without an ID. Her parents had encouraged these expeditions, believing she was at the library, or attending lectures—they hoped she would go to Princeton for college, live with them at home. One day, as she and her friends were sitting on the grass, they were invited to join a student coalition from the university, a coalition protesting apartheid in South Africa. The group was planning a march on Washington, calling for sanctions.

They took a chartered overnight bus to D.C. in order to be at the rally by early morning. Each of them had lied to their parents, claiming to be sleeping over at one another's homes. Everyone on the bus was smoking pot and listening to the same Crosby, Stills, and Nash album continuously, on a tape player running on batteries. Moushumi had been facing backward, leaning over and talking to her friends, who were in the two seats behind her, and when she turned back around he was in the neighboring seat. He seemed aloof from the rest of the group, not an actual member of the coalition, somehow dismissive of it all. He was wiry, slight, with small, downward-sloping eyes and an intellectual, ravaged-looking face that she found sexy though not handsome. His hairline was already receding, his hair curly and fair. He needed a shave; his finger
nails needed paring. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, faded Levi's with threadbare knees, pliable gold-framed spectacles that wrapped around his ears. Without introducing himself he began talking to her, as if they were already acquainted. He was twenty-seven, had gone to Williams College, was a student of European history. He was taking a German course at Princeton now, living with his parents, both of whom taught at the university, and he was going out of his mind. He had spent the years after college traveling around Asia, Latin America. He told her he probably wanted to get a Ph.D., eventually. The randomness of all this had appealed to her. He asked her what her name was and when she told him he had leaned toward her, cupping his ear, even though she knew he had heard it perfectly well. "How in the world do you spell that?" he'd asked, and when she told him, he mispronounced it, as most people did. She corrected him, saying that "Mou" rhymed with "toe," but he shook his head and said, "I'll just call you Mouse."

The nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own. As the bus grew quiet, as everyone began to fall asleep, she had let him lean his head against her shoulder. Dimitri was asleep, or so she thought. And so she pretended to fall asleep too. After a while she felt his hand on her leg, on top of the white denim skirt she was wearing. And then slowly, he began to unbutton the skirt. Several minutes passed between his undoing of one button and the next, his eyes closed all the while, his head still on her shoulder, as the bus hurtled down the empty, dark highway. It was the first time in her life a man had touched her. She held herself perfectly still. She was desperate to touch him too, but she was terrified. Finally Dimitri opened his eyes. She felt his mouth near her ear, and she turned to him, prepared to be kissed, at seventeen, for the very first time. But he had not kissed her. He had only looked at her, and said,
"You're going to break hearts, you know." And then he leaned back, in his own seat this time, removed his hand from her lap, and closed his eyes once again. She had stared at him in disbelief, angry that he assumed she hadn't broken any hearts yet, and at the same time flattered. For the rest of the journey she kept her skirt unbuttoned, hoping he would return to the task. But he didn't touch her after that, and in the morning there was no acknowledgment of what had passed between them. At the demonstration he had wandered off, paid her no attention. On the way back they had sat apart.

Afterward she returned to the university every day to try to run into him. After some weeks she saw him striding across campus, alone, holding a copy of
The Man Without Qualities.
They shared some coffee and sat on a bench outside. He had asked her to see a movie, Goddard's
Alphaville,
and to have Chinese food. She had worn an outfit that still causes her to wince, an old blazer of her father's that was too long for her, over jeans, the sleeves of the blazer rolled up as if it were a shirt, to reveal the striped lining inside. It had been the first date of her life, strategically planned on an evening her parents were at a party. She recalled nothing of the movie, had eaten nothing at the restaurant, part of a small shopping complex off Route 1. And then, after watching Dimitri eat both of their fortune cookies without reading either prediction, she had made her error: she had asked him to be her date to her senior prom. He had declined, driven her home, kissed her lightly on her cheek in the driveway, and then he never called her again. The evening had humiliated her; he had treated her like a child. Sometime over the summer she bumped into him at the movies. He was with a date, a tall freckled girl with hair to her waist. Moushumi had wanted to flee, but he'd made a point of introducing her to the girl. "This is Moushumi," Dimitri had said deliberately, as if he'd been waiting for the opportunity to say her name for weeks. He told her he was going to Europe for a while, and from the look on the date's face she realized
that she was going with him. Moushumi told him she'd been accepted at Brown. "You look great," he told her when the date wasn't listening.

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.