Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [130]
Before that, Hema had been to Rome only once, traveling with a girlfriend after graduating from Bryn Mawr. That first visit, when she and her friend, both classics majors, earnestly walked from landmark to landmark, translating inscriptions and subsisting on panini and gelato, had left a lasting impression on Hema. But the trip with Julian was a heap of rubble that added up to nothing. She remembered breakfasts with him on the roof of the hotel, sitting among small brown birds that hopped at her feet, eating fresh ricotta and mortadella and salami under a glaring blue sky. She had been disconcerted by those salty, fleshy meats so early in the day, yet never able to resist them. She remembered the hotel room, the pink damask wallpaper, the broad bed. Every few days Julian spoke to his wife and daughters, asking them how things were in Vermont, on Lake Dunmore, where Julian and his family spent the summers. So much of their affair had taken place in hotel and motel rooms, little places Julian would seek out along the North Atlantic coast; he preferred them to the apartments Hema shared with other students throughout graduate school at CUNY. It was never possible to see each other at Julian’s home in Amherst. Even their first date had taken place at a hotel, Julian inviting her back to The Mark for a drink after her department had treated him, following his lecture, to dinner.
There was no question of Navin coming to Rome. Before getting engaged they had spent just three weekends together, spaced out over as many months, Navin coming each time from Michigan to see Hema. They wandered chastely around Boston, going to museums and movies and concerts and dinners, and then, beginning on the second weekend, he kissed Hema goodnight at the door of her home and slept at a friend’s. He admitted to her that he’d had lovers in the past, but he was old-fashioned when it came to a future wife. And it touched her to be treated, at thirty-seven, like a teenaged girl. She had not had a boyfriend until she was in graduate school, and by then she was too old for such measured advances from men.
In Rome, she communicated with Navin by e-mail and spoke to him a few times on the phone, conversations heavy with the weight of things to come but lacking the foundation of any lived history between them. They talked about their honeymoon in Goa, something Navin was planning, deciding together which of the resorts they preferred. She did not miss him but looked forward to Calcutta, to marrying him and returning with him on the plane in time to resume teaching at Wellesley. Navin was what her parents termed a “non-Bengali,” that is, someone from any province in India other than West Bengal. His parents were Hindu-Punjabis living in Calcutta, and Navin had come to America for his PhD. Navin was also a professor, of physics, at Michigan State. But MIT had promised him a job in the fall, and so he was moving to Massachusetts to be with Hema.
She refused to think of it as an arranged marriage, but knew in her heart that that was what it was. Though she’d met Navin before her parents, they had found him for her. They had asked Hema if he might phone her, and finally, after years of refusing similar requests, after years of believing that Julian would leave his wife, she’d agreed. Her parents assumed that she was single because she was shy, too devoted to her studies to bother with men. Her mother even asked, on Hema’s thirty-fifth birthday, if she preferred women. They’d had no idea, for all those years, that