Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [81]
“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.