Unaccustomed Earth - Unaccustomed Earth Part 9
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Unaccustomed Earth Part 9

"No. It's just a little funny the way you picked up a conversation we had, like, six hours ago, and expected me to remember what you were talking about."

As soon as Paul opened the door of his room the next morning, he detected the fresh yet cloying smell of paint, heard the swish of the roller as it moved up and down a wall. After Heather had left the house, Sang started to play music: one Billie Holiday CD after another. They were having a spell of sticky, sweltering days, and Paul was working in the relative cool of the living room, a few paces across the landing from Sang.

"Oh, my God," she exclaimed, noticing him on her way to the bathroom. "This music must be driving you crazy." She wore cutoff jeans, a black tank top with straps like those of a brassiere. Her feet were bare, her calves and thighs flecked with paint.

He lied, telling her he often studied to music. Because he noticed it was the kitchen she went to most often, to rinse her brushes or eat some yogurt out of a big tub, the second day he moved himself there, where he made a pot of tea, and, much to her amusement, set the alarm on his wristwatch to know when to take out the leaves. In the afternoon, her sister called, from London, with a voice identical to Sang's. For a moment, Paul actually believed it was Sang herself, mysteriously calling him from her room. "Can't talk, I'm painting my room sage and mole," she reported cheerfully to her sister, and when she replaced the receiver of the dark brown phone there were a few of her mole-colored fingerprints on the surface.

He liked studying in her fleeting company. She was impressed with how far he'd got on his PhD-she told him that after she dropped out of Harvard a year ago, her mother locked herself up in her bedroom for a week and her father refused to speak to her. She'd had it with academia, hated how competitive it was, how monkish it forced one to become. That was what her boyfriend did, always blocking off chunks of his day and working at home with the phone unplugged, writing papers for the next conference. "You'll be good at it," she assured Paul. "You're devoted, I can tell." When she asked him what his exam entailed, he told her it would last three hours, that there would be three questioners, and that it would cover three centuries of English and European literature.

"And they can ask you anything?" she wanted to know.

"Within reason."

"Wow."

He didn't tell her the truth-that he'd already taken the exam the year before and failed. His committee and a handful of students were the only ones who knew, and it was to avoid them that Paul preferred to stay at home now. He had failed not because he wasn't prepared but because his mind had betrayed him that bright May morning, inexplicably cramped like a stubborn muscle that curled his foot during sleep. For five harrowing minutes, as the professors stared at him with their legal pads full of questions, as trains came and went along Commonwealth Avenue, he had not been able to reply to the first question, about comic villainy in Richard III. He had read the play so many times he could picture each scene, not as it might be performed on a stage but, rather, as the pale printed columns in his Pelican Shakespeare. He felt himself go crimson; it was the nightmare he had been having for months before the exam. His interrogators were patient, tried another question, which he stammered miserably through, pausing in the middle of a thought and unable to continue, until, finally, one of the professors, white hair like a snowy wreath around his otherwise naked head, put out a hand, as might a policeman stopping traffic, and said, "The candidate's simply not ready." Paul had walked home, the tie he'd bought for the occasion stuffed into his pocket, and for a week he had not left the house. When he returned to campus, he was ten pounds thinner, and the department secretary asked him if he'd fallen in love.

Sang had been living with them for a week when a suitor called. By then, the painting was finished, the dreary room transformed. She was removing masking tape from the edges of the windowpanes when Paul told her someone named Asim Bhattacharya was calling from Geneva. "Tell him I'm not in," she said, without hesitating. He wrote down the name, spelled out carefully by the caller, who had said before hanging up, "Just tell her it's Pinkoo."

More men called. One asked Paul, dejectedly, if he was Sang's boyfriend. The mere possibility, articulated by a stranger, jolted him. Such a thing had happened once before in the house, the first year Paul lived there-two housemates had fallen in love, had moved out in order to marry each other. "No," he told the caller. "I'm just her housemate." Nevertheless, for the rest of the day he felt burdened by the question, worried that he'd transgressed somehow simply by answering the phone. A few days later, he told Sang. She laughed. "He's probably horrified now, knowing that I live with a man," she said. "Next time," she advised him, "say yes."

A week afterward, the three of them were in the kitchen, Heather filling a thermos with echinacea tea because she had come down with a cold and had to spend all day in classes, Sang hunched over the newspaper and coffee. The night before, she had locked herself up in her bathroom, and now there were some reddish highlights in her hair. When the phone rang and Paul picked up, he assumed it was another suitor on the line, for, like many of Sang's suitors, the caller had a slight foreign accent, though this one was more refined than awkward. The only difference was that instead of asking for Sangeeta he asked to speak to Sang. When Paul asked who was calling, he said, in a slightly impatient way, "I am her boyfriend." The words landed in Paul's chest like the dull yet painful taps of a doctor's instrument. He saw that Sang was looking up at him expectantly, her chair already partly pushed back from the table.

"For me?"

He nodded, and Sang took the phone into her room.

"Boyfriend," Paul reported to Heather.

"What's his name?"

Paul shrugged. "Didn't say."

"Well, she must be happy as a clam," Heather remarked with some asperity, screwing the lid onto her thermos.

Paul felt sorry for Heather, with her red, chapped nose and her thick-waisted body, but more than that he felt protective of Sang. "What do you mean?" he said.

"Because her lover's back, and now she can tell all those other guys to fuck off."

The boyfriend was standing on the sidewalk with Sang, looking up at the house, as Paul returned on his bike from a day of photocopying at the library. A bottle-green BMW was parked at the curb. The couple stood with an assumed intimacy, their dark heads tilting toward each other.

"Keep away from the window when you change your clothes," Paul heard him say. "I can see through the curtain. Couldn't you get a room at the back?" Paul stepped off his bike at a slight distance from them, adjusted the straps of his backpack. He was uncomfortably aware that he was shabbily dressed-in shorts, and Birkenstocks, and an old Dartmouth T-shirt, his pale legs covered with matted blond hair. The boyfriend wore perfectly fitted faded jeans, a white shirt, a navy-blue blazer, and brown leather shoes. His sharp features commanded admiration without being imposing. His hair, in contrast, was on the long side, framing his face in a lavish, unexpected style. He looked several years older than Sang, Paul decided, but in certain ways he strongly resembled her, for they shared the same height, the same gilded complexion, the same sprinkle of moles above and below their lips. As Paul walked toward them, Sang's boyfriend was still inspecting the house, searching the yellow-and-ochre Victorian facade as if for defects, until he looked away suddenly, distracted by the bark of a dog.

"Your roommates have a dog?" the boyfriend asked. He took an odd, dancelike step to the left, moving partly behind Sang.

"No, silly," Sang said teasingly, running her hand down the back of his head. "No dogs, no smokers. Those were the only listings I called, because of you." The barking stopped, and the ensuing silence seemed to punctuate her words. There was a necklace around her neck, lapis beads she now fingered in a way that made Paul think they were a gift. "Paul, this is Farouk. Farouk's afraid of dogs." She kissed Farouk on the cheek.

"Freddy," Farouk said, nodding rather than extending a hand, his words directed more to Sang than to Paul. She shook her head.

"For the millionth time, I'm not calling you Freddy."

Farouk glanced at her without humor. "Why not? You expect people to call you Sang."

She was unbothered. "That's different. That's actually a part of my name."

"Well, I'm Paul, and that's pretty much all you can call me," Paul said. No one laughed.

Suddenly, she was never at home. When she was, she stayed in her room, often on the phone, the door shut. By dinner, she tended to be gone. The items on her shelf of the refrigerator, the big tubs of yogurt and the crackers and the tabouli, sat untouched. The yogurt eventually sported a mantle of green fuzz, setting off shrieks of disgust when Sang finally opened the lid. It was only natural, Paul told himself, for the two of them to want to be alone together. He was surprised to run into her one day in the small gourmet grocery in the neighborhood, her basket piled high with food she never brought back to the house, purple net bags of shallots, goat cheese in oil, meat wrapped in butcher paper. Because it was raining, Paul, who had his car with him, offered her a ride. She told him no thank you, and headed off to the T stop, a Harvard baseball cap on her head, hugging the grocery bag to her chest. He had no idea where Farouk lived; he pictured a beautiful house on Brattle Street, French doors and pretty molding.

It was always something of a shock to find Farouk in the house. He visited infrequently and seemed to appear and disappear without a trace. Unless Paul looked out the window and saw the BMW, always precisely parked under the shade of a birch tree, it was impossible to tell if he was there. He never said hello or good-bye; instead, he behaved as if Sang were the sole occupant of the house. They never sat in the living room, or in the kitchen. Only once, when Paul returned from a bike ride, did he see them overhead, eating lunch on the deck. They were sitting next to each other, cross-legged, and Sang was extending a fork toward Farouk's mouth, her other hand cupped beneath it. By the time Paul entered the house, they had retreated into her room.

When she wasn't with Farouk, she did things for him. She read through proofs of an article he'd written, checking it for typos. She scheduled his doctor's appointments. Once, she spent all morning with the Yellow Pages, pricing tiles; Farouk was thinking of redoing his kitchen.

By the end of September, Paul was aware of a routine: Mondays, which Sang had off from the bookstore, Farouk came for lunch. The two of them would eat in her room; sometimes he heard the sounds of their talking as they ate, or their spoons tapping against soup bowls, or the Nocturnes of Chopin. They were silent lovers-mercifully so, compared with other couples he'd overheard in the house through the years-but their presence soon prompted him to go to the library on Mondays, for he was affected nevertheless, embarrassed by the time her door had been partly open and he'd seen Farouk zipping his jeans. Three years had passed since Theresa, the one girlfriend he'd ever had. He'd dated no one since. Because of Theresa, he'd chosen a graduate school in Boston. For a few months, he had lived with her in her apartment on St. Botolph Street. For Thanksgiving, he'd gone with her to her parents' house in Deerfield. It was there that it had ended. "I'm sorry, Paul, I can't help it, I just don't like the way you kiss me," she told him once they'd gone to bed. He remembered himself sitting naked on one side of the mattress, in a room he was suddenly aware he was never again to see. He had not argued; in the wake of his shame, he became strangely efficient and agreeable, with her, with everyone.

Late one night, Paul was in bed reading when he heard a car pull up to the house. The clock on his desk said twenty past two. He shut off his lamp and got up to look through the window. It was November. A full moon illuminated the wide, desolate street, lined with trash bags and recycling bins. There was a taxi in front of the house, the engine still running. Sang emerged from it alone. For close to a minute, she stood there on the sidewalk. He waited by the window until she climbed up to the porch, then listened as she climbed the staircase and shut the door to her room. Farouk had picked her up that afternoon; Paul had seen her stepping into his car. He thought perhaps they'd fought, though the next day he detected no signs of discord. He overheard her speaking to Farouk on the phone in good spirits, deciding on a video to rent. But that night, around the same time, the same thing happened. The third night, he stayed awake on purpose, making sure she got in.

The following morning, a Sunday, Paul, Heather, and Sang had pancakes together in the kitchen. Sang was playing Louis Armstrong on the CD player in her room while Paul fried the pancakes in two cast-iron skillets.

"Kevin's sleeping over tonight," Heather said. She'd met him recently. He was a physicist at MIT. "I hope that's okay."

"Sure thing," Paul said. He liked Kevin. He had been coming over often for dinner and brought beers and helped with the dishes afterward, talking to Paul as much as he talked to Heather.

"I'm sorry I keep missing him. He seems really nice," Sang said.

"We'll see," Heather said. "Next week is our one-month anniversary."

Sang smiled, as if this modest commemoration were in fact something of much greater significance. "Congratulations."

Heather crossed her fingers. "I guess the next stage is when you assume you're going to spend weekends together."

Paul glanced at Sang, who said nothing. She got up, returning five minutes later from the cellar with a basket full of laundry.

"Nice Jockeys," Heather said, noticing several pairs folded on top of the pile.

"They're Farouk's," Sang said.

"He doesn't have a washing machine?" Heather wanted to know.

"He does," Sang said, oblivious of Heather's disapproving expression. "But it's coin-operated."

The arguments started around Thanksgiving. Paul would hear Sang crying into the phone in her room, the gray plastic cord stretched across the linoleum and then across the landing, disappearing under her door. One of the fights had something to do with a party Sang had been invited to, which Farouk didn't want to attend. Another was about Farouk's birthday. Sang had spent the day before making a cake. The house smelled of oranges and almonds and Paul heard the electric beater going late at night. But the next afternoon, he saw the cake in the trash can.

Once, returning from school, he discovered that Farouk was there, the BMW parked outside. It was a painfully cold December day; early that morning, the season's first flakes had fallen. Walking past Sang's room, Paul heard her raised voice. She was accusing: Why didn't he ever want to meet her friends? Why didn't he invite her to his cousin's house for Thanksgiving. Why didn't he like to spend the night together? Why, at the very least, didn't he drive her home?

"I pay for the cabs," Farouk said quietly. "What difference does it make?"

"I hate it, Farouk. It's abnormal."

"You know I don't sleep well when you're there."

"How are we ever going to get married?" she demanded. "Are we supposed to live in separate houses forever?"

"Sang, please," Farouk said. "Try to be calm. Your roommates will hear."

"Will you stop about my roommates," Sang shouted.

"You're hysterical," Farouk said.

She began to cry.

"I've warned you, Sang," Farouk said. He sounded desperate. "I will not spend my life with a woman who makes scenes."

"Fuck you."

Something, a plate or a glass, struck a wall and broke. Then the room went quiet. After much deliberation, Paul knocked softly. No one replied. A few hours later, Paul nearly bumped into Sang as she was emerging from her bathroom, wrapped in a large dark pink towel. Her wet hair was uncombed and tangled, a knot bulging like a small nest on one side of her head. For weeks, he had longed to catch a glimpse of her this way, and still he felt wholly unprepared for the vision of her bare legs and arms, her damp face and shoulders.

"Hey," he said, sidling quickly past.

"Paul," she called out after a moment, as if his presence had registered only then. He turned to look at her; though it was barely past four, the sun was already setting in the living-room window, casting a golden patch of light to one side of her in the hallway.

"What's up?" he said.

She crossed her arms in front of her, a hand concealing each shoulder. A spot on her forehead was coated with what appeared to be toothpaste. "I'm sorry about earlier."

"That's okay."

"It's not. You have an exam to study for."

Her eyes were shining brightly, and she had a funny frozen smile on her face, her lips slightly parted. He began to smile back when he saw she was about to cry. He nodded. "It doesn't matter."

For a week, Farouk didn't call, though when the phone rang she flew to answer it. She was home every night for dinner. She had long conversations with her sister in London. "Tell me if you think this is normal," Paul overheard her say as he walked into the kitchen. "We were driving one time and he told me I smelled bad. Sweaty. He told me to wash under my arms. He kept saying it wasn't a criticism, that people in love should be able to say things like that to each other." One day, Charles took Sang out and in the evening she returned, with shopping bags from the outlets in Kittery. Another night, she accepted an invitation to see a movie at the Coolidge with Paul and Heather and Kevin, but once they'd reached the box office she told them she had a headache and walked back to the house. "I bet you they've split up," Heather said, once they'd settled into their seats.

But the following week Farouk called when Sang was at work. Though Farouk hadn't bothered to identify himself, Paul called the bookstore, leaving her the message.

The relationship resumed its course, but Paul noticed that Farouk no longer set foot in the house. He wouldn't even ring the bell. He would pause at the curb, the engine of his car still running, beeping three times to signal that he was waiting for her, and then she would disappear.

Over winter break, she went away, to London. Her sister had had a baby boy recently. Sang showed Paul the things she bought for the baby: playsuits full of snaps, a stuffed octopus, a miniature French sailor's shirt, a mobile of stars and planets that glowed in the dark. "I'm going to be called Sang Mashi," she told him excitedly, explaining that Mashi was the Bengali word for "Aunt." The word sounded strange on her lips. She spoke Bengali infrequently-never to her sister, never to her suitors, only a word here and there to her parents, in Michigan, to whom she spoke on weekends.

"How do you say 'bon voyage'?" Paul asked.

She told him she wasn't sure.

Without her there, it was easier for Paul to study, his mind spacious and clear. His exam was less than six months away. A date and time had been scheduled, the first Tuesday in May, at ten o'clock, marked with an "X" on the calendar over his desk.

Since summer, he had worked his way, yet again, through the list of poems and critical essays and plays, typing summaries of them into his computer. He had printed out these summaries, three-hole-punched them, put them in a series of binders. He wrote further summaries of the summaries on index cards that he reviewed before bed, filed in shoe boxes. For Christmas, he was invited to an aunt's house in Buffalo, as usual. This year, with his exam as an excuse, he declined the invitation, mailing off gifts. Heather was away, too; she and Kevin had gone skiing in Vermont.

To mark the new year, Paul set up a new routine, spreading himself all over the house. In the mornings, he reviewed poetry at the kitchen table. After lunch, criticism in the living room. A Shakespeare play before bed. He began to leave his things, his binders and his shoe boxes and his books, on the kitchen table, on certain steps of the staircase, on the coffee table in the living room. He was slouched in the papasan chair one snowy afternoon, reading his notes on Aristotle's Poetics, when the doorbell rang.

It was a UPS man with a package for Sang, something from J. Crew. Paul signed for it and took it upstairs. He leaned it against the door of her room, which caused the door to open slightly. He closed it firmly, and for a moment he stood there, his hand still on the knob. Even though she was in London, he knocked before entering. The futon was neatly made, a red batik bedspread covering the top. The green walls were bare but for two framed Indian miniatures of palace scenes, men smoking hookahs and reclining on cushions, bare-bellied women dancing in a ring. There was none of the disarray he for some reason pictured every time he walked by her room; only outside, through the windows, was there the silent chaos of the storm. The snow fell in disorderly swirls, yet it covered the brown porch railing below, neatly, as if it were a painted trim. A single panel of a white seersucker curtain was loosely cinched with a peach silk scarf that Sang sometimes knotted at her throat, causing the fabric of the curtain to gather in the shape of a slim hourglass. Paul untied the scarf, letting the curtain cover the windowpane. Without touching his face to the scarf, he smelled the perfume that lingered in its weave. He went to the futon and sat down, his legs extending along the oatmeal carpet. He took off his shoes and socks. On a wine crate next to the futon was a glass of water that had gathered bubbles, a small pot of Vaseline. He undid his belt buckle, but suddenly the desire left him, absent from his body just as she was absent from the room. He buckled his belt again, and then slowly he lifted the bedspread. The sheets were flannel, blue and white, a pattern of fleur-de-lis.

He had drifted off to sleep when he heard the phone ring. He stumbled barefoot out of Sang's room, into the kitchen, the linoleum chilly.

"Hello?"

No one replied on the other end, and he was about to hang up when he heard a dog barking.

"Hello?" he repeated. It occurred to him it might be Sang, a poor connection from London. "Sang, is that you?"

The caller hung up.

That evening, after dinner, the phone rang again. When he picked it up, he heard the same dog he'd heard earlier.

"Balthazar, shush!" a woman said, as soon as Paul said hello. Her voice was hesitant. Was Sang in? she wanted to know.

"She's not here. May I take a message?"

She left her name, Deirdre Frain, and a telephone number. Paul wrote it down on the message pad, under Partha Mazoomdar, a suitor who'd called from Cleveland in the morning.

The next day, Deirdre called again. Again Paul told her Sang wasn't there, adding that she wouldn't be back until the weekend.

"Where is she?" Deirdre asked.

"She's out of the country."

"In Cairo?"

This took him by surprise. "No, London."

"In London," she repeated. She sounded relieved. "London. Okay. Thanks."

The fourth call was very late at night, when Paul was already in bed. He went downstairs, feeling for the phone in the dark.

"It's Deirdre." She sounded slightly out of breath, as if it were she, not he, who'd just rushed to the phone.

He flicked on the light switch, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. "Um, as I said, Sang's not back yet."

"I don't want to talk to Sang." She was slurring her words, exaggerating the pronunciation of Sang's name in a slightly cruel way.

Paul heard music, a trumpet crooning softly. "You don't?"

"No," she said. "Actually, I have a question."

"A question?"

"Yes." There was a pause, the clink of an ice cube falling into a glass. Her tone had become flirtatious. "So, what's your name?"

He took off his glasses, allowing the room to go blurry. He couldn't recall the last time a woman had spoken to him that way. "Paul."