he first time the professor called Mrs. Khanh by the wrong name was at a wedding banquet, the kind of crowded affair they attended often, usually out of obligation. As the bride and groom approached their table, Mrs. Khanh noticed the professor reading his palms, where he’d jotted down his toast and the names of the newlyweds, whom they had never met. Leaning close to be heard over the chatter of four hundred guests and the din of the band, she found her husband redolent of well-worn paperbacks and threadbare carpet. It was a comforting mustiness, one that she associated with secondhand bookstores.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ve done this a thousand times.”
“Have I?” The professor rubbed his hands on his pants. “I can’t seem to recall.” His fair skin was thin as paper and lined with blue veins. From the precise part of his silver hair to the gleam on his brown oxfords, he appeared to be the same man who’d taught so many students he could no longer count them. During the two minutes the newlyweds visited their table, he didn’t miss a beat, calling the couple by their correct names and bestowing the good wishes expected of him as the eldest among the ten guests. But while the groom tugged at the collar of his Nehru jacket and the bride plucked at the skirt of her empire-waist gown, Mrs. Khanh could think only of the night of the diagnosis, when the professor had frightened her by weeping for the first time in their four decades together. Only after the young couple left could she relax, sighing as deeply as she could in the strict confines of her velvet ao dai.
“The girl’s mother tells me they’re honeymooning for the first week in Paris.” She spooned a lobster claw onto the professor’s plate. “The second week they’ll be on the French Riviera.”
“Is that so?” Cracked lobster in tamarind sauce was Professor Khanh’s favorite, but tonight he stared with doubt at the claw pointing toward him. “What did the French call Vung Tau?”
“Cap Saint Jacques.”
“We had a very good time there. Didn’t we?”
“That’s when you finally started talking to me.”
“Who wouldn’t be shy around you,” the professor murmured. Forty years ago, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-three, they had honeymooned at a beachside hotel on the cape. It was on their balcony, under a full, bright moon, listening to the French singing and shouting on their side of the beach, that the professor had suddenly started talking. “Imagine!” he said, voice filled with wonder as he began speaking about how the volume of the Pacific equaled the moon’s. When he was finished, he went on to talk about the strange fish of deep sea canyons and then the inexplicability of rogue waves. If after a while she lost track of what he said, it hardly mattered, for by then the sound of his voice had seduced her, as reassuring in its measured tones as the first time she’d heard it, eavesdropping from her family’s kitchen as he explained to her father his dissertation on the Kuroshio current’s thermodynamics.
Now the professor’s memories were gradually stealing away from him, and along with them the long sentences he once favored. When the band swung into “I’d Love You to Want Me,” he loosened the fat Windsor knot of his tie and said, “Remember this song?”
“What about it?”
“We listened to it all the time. Before the children were born.”
The song hadn’t been released yet during her first pregnancy, but Mrs. Khanh said, “That’s right.”
“Let’s dance.” The professor leaned closer, draping one arm over the back of her chair. A fingerprint smudged one lens of his glasses. “You always insisted we dance when you heard this song, Yen.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Khanh took a slow sip from her glass of water, hiding her surprise at being called by someone else’s name. “When did we ever dance?”
The professor didn’t answer, for the swelling chorus of the song had brought him to his feet. As he stepped toward the parquet dance floor, Mrs. Khanh seized the tail of his gray pinstripe jacket. “Stop it!” she said, pulling hard. “Sit down!”
Giving her a wounded look, the professor obeyed. Mrs. Khanh was aware of the other guests at their table staring at them. She held herself very still, unable to account for any woman named Yen. Perhaps Yen was an old acquaintance whom the professor never saw fit to mention, or the maternal grandmother whom Mrs. Khanh had never met and whose name she couldn’t now recall, or a grade school teacher with whom he’d once been infatuated. Mrs. Khanh had begun preparing for many things, but she wasn’t prepared for unknown people emerging from the professor’s mind.
“The song’s almost over,” the professor said.