Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [88]
“They’re cousins, right?” Deirdre said. He could barely hear her. “Aren’t they?”
The desperation with which she asked him brought with it a crushing certainty. He knew that all she had told him was true, the knowledge of something having gone terribly wrong leveling him the way his exam had. The way Theresa’s words had.
“Sang and Farouk are not cousins,” he said. He felt a strange, inward power as he spoke, aware that the information could devastate her.
She was silent.
“They’re boyfriend and girlfriend, Deirdre,” he said. “A serious couple.”
“Oh, yeah?” Her tone was challenging. “How serious?”
He thought for a moment. “They see each other four or five nights a week.”
“They do?” To Paul’s satisfaction, Deirdre sounded wounded by this information.
“Yes,” he said, adding, “they’ve been together for over three years.”
“Three?” The word trailed off weakly, in a way that made Paul wonder if she might cry again. But when she spoke next her voice was clear. “Well, we’re a serious couple, too. I picked him up from the airport yesterday when he came back from Cairo. I saw him tonight. He was here for dinner, here in my house. He made love to me on my staircase, Paul. An hour ago, I could still feel him dripping down my thighs.”
Sang returned from London with presents for the house, KitKats in red wrappers, tea from Harrods, marmalade, chocolate-coated biscuits. A snapshot of her nephew went up on the refrigerator, his small smiling face pressed against Sang’s. Paul, from his room, saw that it was Farouk who dropped her off at the house. Eventually, Paul had gone downstairs, down the magnificent staircase, which he was now unable to descend without a fleeting image of Farouk naked on top of a woman who was not Sang. In the kitchen he opened his cupboard and pulled down the Dewar’s.
“Wow. Things have really changed around here,” Sang said, smiling, her eyebrows raised in amusement, watching him pour the drink.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re drinking Scotch. If I’d known, I would have bought you some single malt in duty-free, instead of the KitKats.”
The thought of her buying him a gift depressed him. They were friendly, but they were not friends. He offered her a glass of the Scotch, which she accepted. They sat together at the table. She clinked her glass against his.
She began sorting through the mail Paul had collected for her. Her hair was a few inches shorter; she smelled intensely of a spicy perfume.
“I don’t know any Deirdres,” she said, reading her messages on the legal pad. “Did she say why she was calling?”
He’d drained his glass and was already pacified by the drink. He shook his head.
“I wonder what I should do.”
“About what?”
“Well, should I call her back?”
He stood up and opened the freezer to get ice cubes for a second drink. When he returned to the table, she was crossing out the name with a pencil. “Forget it. She’s probably a telemarketer or something.”
Avoiding Sang was easy. The university library, which Paul normally found so charmless, with its cement floors and gray metal shelves and carrels full of anonymous ballpoint philosophy, was where he began to spend his days. At home, he discovered that it was just as easy to take a sandwich up to his room. Winter gave way to a wet, reluctant spring, full of wind and slanted rains that lashed the window by Paul’s bed. Whenever the phone rang, he didn’t answer. In the first few days after Sang’s return, he was convinced, each time, that it would be Deirdre, demanding to talk to Sang. But Deirdre never called. He waited for her voice, the things she had told him, to fade from his memory. But the conversations had lodged themselves stubbornly in his mind, alongside all the plays and poems and essays. He saw two people swimming in Walden Pond, their heads above the surface of the water. But then there was Sang, day after day, disappearing to eat dinner at Farouk’s. There she was, sitting at the kitchen table, booking Farouk’s tickets to Cairo for the summer, his credit card number written on a sheet of paper. After two