"I don't have one."
He studied the bangle, turning it slowly around. "What kind of man proposes without a ring?"
She explained, then, that there had not been a proposal, that she hardly knew Navin. She was looking away, at a dried-out plant on the terrace, but she felt his eyes on her, intrigued, unafraid.
"Then why are you marrying him?"
She told him the truth, a truth she had not told anybody. "I thought it might fix things."
He did not question her further. Unlike her friends back in America, who either thought she was doing something outrageously stupid or thrillingly bold, Kaushik neither judged nor commended her, and the formal presentation of the facts, the declaration that she was taken, opened the door. Only his kisses, rough, aggressive kisses that were nothing like Navin's schoolboy behavior at her door, made Hema feel guilty. But the rest of what they did that night felt fresh, new, because she and Navin had never done them before, and there was nothing with which to compare. Navin had never looked at her body unclothed, never explored her with his hands, never told her she was beautiful. Hema remembered that it was Kaushik's mother who had first paid her that compliment, in a fitting room shopping for bras, and she told this to Kaushik. It was the first mention, between them, of his mother, and yet it did not cause them to grow awkward. If anything it bound them closer together, and Hema knew, without having to be told, that she was the first person he'd ever slept with who'd known his mother, who was able to remember her as he did. His bare feet were warm, surprisingly smooth against her soles as they lay afterward side by side. He slept on his back and at one point was startled awake by a nightmare, lunging forward and springing off the edge of the bed before falling asleep again. It was Hema who stayed awake, listening to him breathing, craving his touch again as light came into the sky. In the morning, looking into the small mirror over the sink in Kaushik's bathroom, she saw that the area around her lips, at the sides of her mouth, was covered with small red bumps. And she was pleased by that unbecoming proof, pleased that already he had marked her.
At first Hema tried to stick to her morning routine at Gio-vanna's desk. But by eleven the phone would ring, and twenty minutes later she would be crossing the Ponte Garibaldi to meet him, or he would pull up to Giovanna's building in his Fiat to take her out for the day. And so she put away her books, lowered the screen of her laptop, knowing she would not touch them again until she returned to Wellesley. At night he took her to out-of-the-way restaurants and bars, to fountains in abandoned squares where they sat like a teenaged couple, kissing. They went outside the city walls, to places she'd never been and that he wanted to see for the last time. It was Kaushik who drove her to Ostia and Tivoli, and to Cerveteri to visit the hilly tombs of the Etruscan necropolis.
Hema told him about the history of those places, who had built them and why. She told him what she was learning about the Etruscans, that it was they who taught the Romans how to build their roads and irrigate their fields. She told him about the Etruscans' love of the natural world, their belief in signs and portents, their obsession with the journey out of life. They did not speak of their own future, of where their days together would lead. Nor did they discuss the past, the months during which he had lived in her home, the friendship between their parents that was already dying, along with his mother, during that time. Their parents had liked one another only for the sake of their origins, for the sake of a time and place to which they'd lost access. Hema had never been drawn to a person for that reason, until now.
Almost always, an international news channel played without sound on the small television in Kaushik's apartment. His work depended wholly on the present, and on things yet to come. It was not the repeated resurrection of texts that had already been composed, of a time and people that had passed, and it made Hema aware of the sheltered quality not only of her life but her mind. One day, after she asked him to, he showed her his Web site. He left her alone to look at it, going out to buy food for their dinner. She sat on his bed, wrapped in a sheet, his laptop humming against her legs.
There were countless images, terrible things she'd read about in the newspaper and never had to think about again. Buses blasted apart by bombs, bodies on stretchers, young boys throwing stones. He had witnessed these things, unseen and uninvolved, yet with an immediacy she had never felt. Because he had become her lover, these images upset her. Kaushik had told her about fellow photographers who were killed on the job, about the time an Israeli police officer bashed his camera in his face. And she was secretly glad, as his mother would have been, that his work would soon be different, that he would be behind a desk in Hong Kong presiding over meetings. That he would not be constantly in harm's way.
There were also shots of dusty streets and villages, markets and homes and shop windows, arid, barren landscapes, pictures of people. An old man sat peeling an orange under a tree, a flea-bitten dog dozing at his feet. A group of women in head scarves threw back their heads, laughing. A young girl poked her head out from behind a studded metal gate, baring a gap-toothed smile. As she looked at the pictures, she began to appreciate his ability, perhaps his need, to connect to strangers in this way, and the willingness of strangers to connect to him. She began to understand his willingness-and she thought perhaps this was also a need-to disappear at any moment. He lived in a rented room with rented furniture, rented sheets and towels. In the corner his camera bags and tripods were always packed, his passport always in his pocket. Apart from a detailed map of the West Bank there was nothing on his walls. She suspected that even if it were possible to turn back the clock, to never have met Navin and wait to bump into Kaushik in Rome, it would not have made a difference. She guessed that he had casually been with many women, that she should consider herself no different. And she refused to go to that miserable place Julian had dragged her to so many times, to hope for a thing that was unchangeable.
The key turned in the lock, and then Kaushik was with her again. He set down the bags of food on a small square table set with two chairs, the only furniture, apart from the bed, in his apartment. For the first time he seemed hesitant in her presence, not kissing her first thing. He hung his coat on a hook, loosened the thin red wool scarf at his throat.
"They're amazing," she said.
"They don't all pay the bills."
"Does it affect you, seeing these things?"
He shrugged, opened the cupboard, took out two glasses for wine. "It doesn't help anyone if I'm affected."
They stayed in that night, eating the bread and cheese he'd bought, the sliced meats and wine. Kaushik spent a while uploading images from his camera onto his Web site, writing captions. She helped him to pack stacks of contact sheets into boxes for the movers, gather up old photo magazines for the trash. He showed her a portfolio of pictures he hoped someday might form a book. For the first time they fell asleep without sex, not for lack of desire but because a familiarity was growing.
But then she felt him pressing up against her, felt his breath and his lips on the back of her neck, and she turned to face him, gave him her mouth. He could be aloof in bed as he could be in general, focusing on some part of her body to the point of seeming to forget her. But that distance no longer threatened her. It was only in bed that he uttered her name, the hot word filling her ear. It was a Saturday night, lingering voices in the piazza giving way to silence and at times the distant barking of dogs.
"It does affect me," he said afterward as they lay in the dark, awake.
"What?"
"Taking pictures. Not always, but sometimes. Sometimes in ways I don't like." He lit a cigarette, and then he told her about a day last summer, when he was driving back from Fre-gene and passed an accident: two cars had collided at an intersection. A crowd gathered, but the police had not yet arrived. Inside one of the cars, a child was crying. It turned out that the passengers were not badly hurt. Kaushik had pulled over, rushed out, but the first thing he'd done was take a picture. "The first thing," he told Hema. "Before even asking if they were okay."