MonroeMarjory
Geregistreerd op: 28 Jun 2020
Berichten: 3
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 Geplaatst: 28-06-2020 03:11:04 Onderwerp: free knit hat patterns |
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He sprawls on the king-sized bush hat bed. The bedspread has been strewn with flower petals, a final gesture before their families withdrew. He waits for her, flipping through the channels on the television. Beside him is a bottle of champagne in a bucket, heart-shaped chocolates on a lace-covered plate. He takes a bite out of one of the chocolates. The inside is an unyielding toffee, requiring more chewing than he expects. He fidgets with the gold ring she'd placed on his finger after they'd cut the cake, identical to the one he'd placed on hers. He'd proposed to her on her birthday, giving her a diamond solitaire in addition to the hat he'd bought for her after their second date.
But she is naked, her skin smelling, a little too intensely, of some sort of berry. He kisses the dark hair on her forearms, the prominent collarbone, which she had once confessed to him is her favorite part of her body. They make love in spite of their exhaustion, her damp hair limp and cool against his face, the rose petals sticking to their elbows and shoulders and calves. He breathes in the scent of her skin, still unable to fathom that they are husband and wife. When would cool hats it sink in? Even then he does not feel fully alone with her, half waiting for someone to knock on the door and tell them how to go about things. And though he desires her as much as ever, he is relieved when they are through, lying naked side by side, knowing that nothing else is expected of them, that finally they can relax.
The amounts are for one hundred crochet hat patterns and one dollars, two hundred and one dollars, occasionally three hundred and one dollars, as Bengalis consider it inauspicious to give round figures. Gogol adds up the subtotals on each page. "Seven thousand thirty-five," he announces. "Not bad, Mr. Ganguli." "I'd say we've made a killing, Mrs. Ganguli." Only she is not Mrs. Ganguli. Moushumi has kept her last name. She doesn't adopt Ganguli, not even with a hyphen. Her own last name, Mazoomdar, is already a mouthful. With a hyphenated surname, she would no longer fit into the window of a business envelope. Besides, by now she has begun to publish under Moushumi Mazoomdar, the name printed at the top of footnoted articles on French feminist theory in a number of prestigious academic journals that always manage to give Gogol a paper cut when he tries to custom hats read them.
Though he hasn't admitted this to her, he'd hoped, the day they'd filled out the application for their marriage license, that she might consider otherwise, as a tribute to his father if nothing else. But the thought of changing her last name to Ganguli has never crossed Moushumi's mind. When relatives from India continue to address letters and cards to "Mrs. Moushumi Ganguli," she will shake her head and sigh. 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.
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.
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. She calls him the following week. By then she's dug up the free knit hat patterns postcards, saved in an unsealed, unmarked manila envelope in the box where she keeps her tax returns, and read them, too, amazed that his words, the sight of his handwriting, still manage to discombobulate her. She tells herself she's calling an old friend. She tells herself the coincidence of finding his résumé, of stumbling upon him in this way, is too great, that anyone in her position would pick up the phone and call. She tells herself he could very well be married, as she is. Perhaps all four of  them will go out to dinner, become great friends. |
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