Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [80]
“He still doesn’t want to live together until you’re married?”
She shook her head.
“What does he say?”
“That he doesn’t want to spoil things.”
Charles shifted the weight of the box he was carrying. “But he acknowledges the fact that you’re getting married.”
She turned back to the truck. “He says things like ‘When we have kids, we’ll buy a big house in Lexington.’”
“You’ve been together three years,” Charles said. “So he’s a little old-fashioned. That’s one of the things you like about him, right?”
The next few nights, Sang slept on the couch in the living room, her things stored temporarily in the corner, in order to paint her room. Both Paul and Heather were surprised by this; neither of them had made an effort to do much to their rooms when moving in. For the walls, she had chosen a soothing sage green; for the trim, the palest lavender, a color that the paint company called “mole.” It wasn’t what she imagined a mole to look like at all, she told Paul, stirring the can vigorously on the kitchen counter. “What would you have named it?” she asked him suddenly. He could think of nothing. It was only upstairs, sitting alone at his big plywood desk, piled with thick books full of tissue-thin pages, that he thought of the ice cream his mother always ordered at Newport Creamery when his family went on Sunday nights for hamburgers. His mother had died years ago, his father soon after. They’d adopted Paul late in life, when they were in their fifties, so people had often mistaken them for his grandparents. That evening in the kitchen, when Sang walked in, Paul said, “Black raspberry.”
“What?”
“The paint.”
She had a small, slightly worried-looking smile on her face, a smile one might give a confused child. “That’s funny.”
“The name?”
“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