Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [82]
“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,