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 she was involved with anyone, never mind a married man. Even as she looked for the home her parents had helped her to buy in Newton, even as she sat signing the closing papers in the lawyer's office, putting her solitary signature where there was always space for another, she believed that eventually she would have to add Julian's name. It was her inability, ultimately, to approach middle age without a husband, without children, with her parents living now on the other side of the world, and yet to own a home and shovel the driveway when it snowed and pay her mortgage bill when it came-though she had proven to herself, to her parents, to everyone, that she was capable of all of those things-it was her unwillingness to abide that life indefinitely that led her to Navin.
From the beginning it was assumed that as long as she and Navin were attracted to each other, as long as they got along, they would marry. And after years of uncertainty with Julian, Hema found this very certainty, an attitude to love she had scorned in the past, liberating, with the power to seduce her just as Julian once had. It allowed her to find Navin physically appealing, to like his tranquil brown eyes, his long tan face, the black line of mustache that grounded it. After Navin there were no more surprise visits by Julian, no more bells ringing in the middle of the afternoon demolishing the rest of her day. No more waiting for the situation to change. After nearly a decade, a single phone conversation had ended it. "I'm engaged to be married," she told Julian the last time he wanted to arrange a weekend away, and he accused her of deceiving him, called her heartless, and then he did not call again.
Now she was free of both of them, free of her past and free of her future in a place where so many different times stood cheek by jowl like guests at a crowded party. She was alone with her work, alone abroad for the first time in her life, aware that her solitary existence was about to end. In Rome she savored her isolation, immersed without effort in the silent routine of her days. At night, after a bath, she slept soundly in Giovanna's bed, in a room with meager square footage but breathtaking height, enormous shuttered windows that shielded her from the sun but let in every sound: the scooters and cars on Via Arenula, the grates of the shops being raised for business, the perpetual singsong of ambulance sirens that she found strangely soothing. Certain elements of Rome reminded her of Calcutta: the grand weathered buildings, the palm trees, the impossibility of crossing the main streets. Like Calcutta, which she'd visited throughout childhood, Rome was a city she knew on the one hand intimately and on the other hand not at all-a place that fully absorbed her and also kept her at bay. She knew the ancient language of Rome, its rulers and writers, its history from founding to collapse. But she was a tourist in everyday Italy, and apart from Giovanna, who was in Berlin on sabbatical, she did not have a single Roman friend.
In the mornings she made espresso and heated up milk and spread jam on squares of packaged toast, and by eight she was at Giovanna's desk, colonized now with the ferment of Hema's books, her notebooks, her laptop, her Latin grammar and dictionary. In spite of the hundreds of things she might be doing or seeing in the city, until one o'clock each day she maintained this routine. This was her anchor, this had been her anchor for years. She was a professor now, her dissertation on Lucretius a bound, published, quietly praised thing. And yet it was the aspect of her job that required her to sit for hours alone at a desk that still fulfilled her more than anything. Since eighth grade, reading Latin had been an addiction, every line a puzzle to coax into meaning. The knowledge she'd slowly accumulated, the ancient words and declensions and syntax that dwelled in her brain, felt sacred, enabling her to bring a dead world to life.
The Etruscans were her focus now. A few months ago she had attended a lecture in Boston about Etruscan references in
Virgil, and this had ushered her headlong into that mysterious civilization prior to Rome, people who had possibly wandered from Asia Minor to central Italy and flourished for four centuries, who had ruled Rome for one hundred years before turning obsolete. Their literature was nonexistent, their language obscure. Their primary legacy was tombs and the things that were put in them: jewels, pottery, weapons to accompany the dead. She was learning about the haruspices, augurs who interpreted the will of the gods through the entrails of animals, lightning bolts, dreams of pregnant women, flights of birds. She wanted to put a seminar together when she returned to Wellesley, about Etruscan influence in Roman antiquity, and possibly, based on her research, a proposal for a second book. She had gone to the Vatican to see the Etruscan collection at the Gregorian Museum, and also to the Villa Giulia. She was combing through Cicero and Seneca, Livy and Pliny, reading fragments of the occultist senator Nigidius Figulus, typing notes into her laptop, marking up the many books she read.
And so Hema had not yet called anyone, not contacted any of Giovanna's friends so that they could meet her for a coffee or drive her out to Tivoli or to Ostia, as Giovanna assured her they would. She was content to spend the days alone, working, reading, and then having lunch by the Portico. In the afternoons she wandered in and out of churches, along dark cramped streets that opened into enormous light-filled squares. She walked everywhere, almost never resorting to a bus or the metro. In the evenings she retreated, preparing dinner at home, simple meals she ate while watching Italian television. It felt wrong to be out alone at night, more awkward to sit by herself at dinner than lunch. During her years with Julian, even when she was by herself, men had sensed that her heart was taken, that she would not pause to consider them, as if she were a passing taxi with its off-duty light on. But now, though she was engaged, she was aware of the Roman men who looked at her, sometimes called out. And though she was flattered by their attention, it reminded her that her heart did not belong to Navin in the same way.