He lay down his razor and turned on the shower to warm up the room. He heard a knock, and then Megan opened the door.

"I can't go to the wedding," she said, shaking her head. She said this definitively, the way she told the girls that they weren't allowed to watch another program on television, or spend another five minutes in the tub.

"What are you talking about?"

"Look," she said, pointing to the skirt she'd put on. Above it she wore only her bra, flesh-colored and dingy at the straps. The skirt reached her ankles, and it was made of a diaphanous, smoky gray material, layered over a silk panel of a slightly darker shade. She held up a section, and his eyes went immediately to a spot in the fabric. At first he thought it was a stain, but then he realized it was a burn that had created a small empty patch, charred around the edges. Beneath it, the silk lining looked unsightly, like the bright flesh exposed when a scab is forcibly lifted away.

"It looks awful," she said. "There's no way to hide it."

"Did you pack a spare outfit?"

She shook her head, looking at him with annoyance. "Did you?"

Amit wiped his hands on a towel and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. Running his hands between the two layers of fabric, he felt the gauzy material brushing his palm, the silk at the back of his fingers. In medical school he'd considered being a surgeon, learning to piece together the most minuscule tissues of the body. But he'd never made it to any rotations, had only learned from textbooks and labs. As far as he could see there was no hope for repairing the skirt. It was so simple, so sheer, that the missing patch, through which the pad of one of his fingers was now visible, had ruined it.

"I can't believe I didn't notice when I was packing," Megan said. "It must have happened the last time I wore it. Sparks from a cigarette or something."

He knew it wasn't her fault, and yet he couldn't stop himself from blaming her a little, for not paying closer attention. And he couldn't help but wonder if it was an unconscious move on her part, to avoid Pam's wedding, to sabotage things. It occurred to him that with the excuse of Megan's skirt they might blow off the wedding altogether and spend the night in the hotel, watching movies in bed. Their absence would go unnoticed in such a big crowd, their place settings ignored as the waiters circled the tables. Had the Chadwick Inn been nicer he might have been tempted.

"Is there a store nearby?" Megan asked. "Somewhere I could dash out and buy something else while you get ready?"

"There used to be a mall, but it was about an hour's drive from here. I don't remember any clothing stores in town. Not nice ones."

She turned the skirt to one side, so that the burn was no longer visible from the front. Then she stood beside him in front of the mirror over the sink, their bare arms touching. Normally Megan did not wear makeup, but for the occasion she had painted her mouth with a reddish lipstick. He found it distracting, preferred the intelligent, old-fashioned beauty of her face. It was the face of someone he could imagine living in a previous era, a simpler time, in an America that was oblivious to India altogether. Her dark brown hair was wound up as always, pulled away without fuss from her face and her long pale neck. She wore glasses, frameless oval lenses that seemed necessary to protect her sensitive gaze. They were the same height, five foot nine, tall for a woman but short for a man, and she was five years older, forty-two. And yet of the two of them it was Amit who already looked, at first glance, middle-aged, for by the age of twenty-one his hair had turned completely gray. It was here, at Langford, that it had begun, when he was in the sixth form. At first it was just a few strands, well concealed in his black hair. But by the time he was a junior at Columbia it was the black hairs he could count on one hand. He'd read it was possible, after a traumatic experience, for a person's hair to turn gray in youth. But there had been no sudden death he could point to, no accident. No profound life change, apart from his parents sending him to Langford.

"I suppose if you stood right next to me all night, no one would notice," Megan said, pressing up against him. He felt the warmth of her arms and a twitch of desire, too mired by exhaustion to act upon.

"Do you really think you can survive a whole evening without leaving my side?" he asked her.

"I can if you can." There was a note of challenge in her voice, and Amit smiled, amused by the idea, motivated to go to the wedding now that he would have a specific task to perform. At the same time he thought that in the early days of their love this would not have been an issue, their bodies continuously touching through the course of an evening, something that would have been taken for granted.

"It's a deal," he said.

They looked at their reflections in the mirror, she in her torn skirt and dingy bra, he naked, his penis flaccid, his face covered with bright white shaving cream. Megan shook her head. "What a vision we'll be."

He'd assumed they'd walk to the school-it was just across the road, a few minutes over a sloping field. But Megan was wearing heels and didn't want to get them muddy, so they got into the car. The seats were still full of evidence of their daughters- abandoned books, tiny dolls, the plastic horses Maya had begun collecting. Only the car seats were gone, transferred into his in-laws' car for the weekend. He thought of the girls now at their grandparents', playing in the treehouse his father-in-law had built for their occasional visits, his mother-in-law providing slices of pound cake and juice boxes for a tea party. His daughters looked nothing like him, nothing like his family, and in spite of the distance Amit felt from his parents, this fact bothered him, that his mother and father had passed down nothing, physically, to his children. Both Maya and Monika had inherited Megan's coloring, without a trace of Amit's deeply tan skin and black eyes, so that apart from their vaguely Indian names they appeared fully American. "Are they yours?" people sometimes asked when he was alone with them, in stores, or at the playground in the park.

After just two minutes they pulled off the road and turned up the wide tree-lined drive that led to the gates of the school. The leaves were glossy and abundant, but his memories were of the blazing branches of autumn and the purplish light of the mountains, the shadows that spread in their curves and dips, and the snow that covered the tops of the gates in winter. The school itself was more or less as he remembered it, embarrassingly large and well maintained, pieces of rounded abstract sculpture here and there on the grass.

"This place is nicer than where I went to college," Megan said as they walked across the campus, taking in the pristine buildings, the sculptures.

"It's a bit over the top," he said. When they'd first met

Megan had been impressed by his prep school education, but at the same time she'd teased him about it. She was not bitter toward the privileged, but she was sometimes judgmental; were he not Indian, Megan would have probably avoided someone like him. She was the youngest of five children, her father a policeman, her mother a kindergarten teacher. She'd gotten a job after graduating from high school, in a photocopy store during the days and as a telemarketer in the evenings, not beginning college until she was twenty, going part time because she'd had to continue working. In that sense, she worked harder than anyone he'd ever known, including his own father and his parents' uniformly successful crowd of Bengali friends. Megan's ordinary background had displeased his parents, as had the fact that she was five years older than he was. Her stark prettiness, her refusal to wear contact lenses, her height, had not charmed them. The fact that she was a doctor did not make up for it. If anything, it made their disappointment in Amit worse.