Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [142]
“I envy them that,” Hema said.
“Do you?”
“I’ve never belonged to any place that way.”
Kaushik laughed. “You’re complaining to the wrong person.”
“What if you hate Hong Kong? Where will you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you come back to Italy?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He poured more wine into her glass, then his. He leaned forward slightly, looking at her, then seeming to change his mind about what he wanted to say. “I’ve reached an end here, that’s all.”
The meal ended without conversation, with vin santo and a slice of chestnut cake. They stepped outside, into the first twilight, for a last look at the town. It was the hour of the passeggiata, the older people promenading arm-in-arm through the streets. The men were with men, women with women, segregated as Hema’s and Kaushik’s parents once tended to be at parties. There was a uniformity to their appearances, their faces and their clothing, the flat woolen caps on the men’s heads, the straight skirts and low-heeled black and navy-blue shoes of the women. With them, alongside them, were children and grandchildren, the generations knit casually and fondly together.
“Come with me,” Kaushik said.
“Where?”
“To Hong Kong.” And then he said, “Don’t marry him, Hema.”
She stopped walking. They were on a street of steps, lined with cypress trees, working their way down. Those behind her in the collective procession murmured permesso and pressed past. She felt the lurch of a head rush. The boy who had not paid attention to her; the man who’d embarked on an affair knowing she could never be his; at the last moment he was asking for more. A piece of her was elated. But she was also struck by his selfishness, by the fact that he was telling her what to do. Unlike Navin, he was not offering to come to her.
“Don’t answer now,” he said, pulling her toward him, guiding her down a few more steps, his arm around her waist. “Go to India first, straighten things out. I can wait.”
She moved away, upset for the first time by his touch. “It’s too late, Kaushik.”
He extended a finger toward her jaw, turned her gently to look at him, into the tired eyes she had begun to love. His face glowed with affection for her, with hope, and she knew then that it was not just the wine talking, that he meant what he’d said. “In a few weeks it will be. Not yet.”
He sought her hand again, and they continued walking. They entered a small piazza where she was aware everywhere of children, boys and girls of five and seven, eight and ten, swarming around them as if a school had just been dismissed. She had known Kaushik at that age, she had worn his coat, given him her bed, dreamed of him kissing her, these facts of the past haunting her and steadying her at the same time. The Italian children, eager for Christmas’s approach, calling out Buon Natale as they greeted one another, were embracing in the cold air, their youthful excitement infectious and pure, so much so that Hema’s heart leapt with theirs. In ten years, she imagined, these boys and girls would begin to fall in love with one another; in another five, their own children would be at their feet.
On the drive down from Volterra, as the landscape disappeared and they traveled through the night, she told him. She explained her reasons, reasons that had nothing to do with Navin. She told Kaushik she was not able to give up her life, not able to follow him that way. And that she didn’t expect it of him. She said she didn’t want to try to change him, didn’t want to be accused, one day, of pinning him down.
“It doesn’t mean we can’t continue to see each other,” she said, afraid to suggest it, more afraid not to.
“I’m not interested in any sort of arrangement,” he said, in the cold tone she had not heard since they were teenagers. It was the only thing he said during the drive, until he pulled up in front of Giovanna’s apartment in the middle of the night. Then he said, “You’re a coward.