Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [95]
For a few days, nothing happened. He collected her mail. The bookstore called to ask where she was. Paul told them she had the flu. Two weeks later, the bookstore called again. This time it was to fire her. The third week, Farouk began to call, asking to speak to her. He didn’t identify himself, didn’t press Paul when he said, night after night, “Sang’s not in.” He was polite to Paul, in a way he had never been before, saying, thank you, that he’d try later. Paul relished these calls. He liked depriving Farouk of the knowledge of where Sang was. But then, one day when he called, Heather, holed up in the house that week to study for an exam, happened to answer and said, “She’s left the country,” putting an end to Farouk’s calls.
At the end of the month, the rent was due. Paul and Heather didn’t have enough to cover it. Instead of contacting Sang’s parents, he looked up her sister’s phone number in London on an old telephone bill. A woman answered, who sounded just like her.
“Sang?”
The phone switched hands, and a man came on the line. “Who is this?”
“This is her housemate in America, in Brookline. Paul. I’m trying to reach Sang.”
There was a long pause. After some minutes had passed, he wondered if he ought to hang up and try again. But then the man picked up the phone. He didn’t apologize for the delay. “She’s indisposed at the moment. I’m sure she’ll appreciate your call.”
Charles came that weekend to pack up Sang’s things. He tossed her clothes into garbage bags, stripped the futon of its sheets, and asked Paul to help him put it out on the sidewalk. Wrapping the framed Indian miniatures in newspaper at the kitchen table, he told Paul he’d talked to Sang on the phone, said that she’d be living in London with her sister through the summer. “You know, I kept telling her to leave him. Can you believe, I never even met the guy?”
Charles loaded up the back of his truck, until all that was left of Sang in the house was the sage and mole paint on the walls of her room, and the hanging plant over the dish drainer. “I guess that’s everything,” Charles said.
The truck disappeared, but Paul stood a while longer, looking at the houses lining the street. Though Charles was her friend, she had not told him. She had not told Charles that Paul had known for months about Deirdre. That night at Farouk’s apartment, after washing up in the bathroom, Sang had got down on all fours and crawled into Farouk’s coat closet, weeping uncontrollably, at one point hitting herself with a shoe. She’d refused to emerge from the closet until the policeman lifted her by the armpits and dragged her forcefully from the apartment, telling Paul to see her home. Tiny pieces of flower petals and leaves were still stuck in her hair. She had taken Paul’s hand in the elevator, and all the way back to the house. In the car, she had cried continuously with her head between her knees, not letting go of Paul’s hand, gripping it even as he shifted gears. He had put the seatbelt on her; her body had been stiff, unyielding. She seemed to know, without looking up, when they turned in to their road. By then, she had stopped crying. Her nose was running. She wiped it with the back of her hand. A light rain had begun to fall, and within seconds the windows and the windshield seemed covered with scratches, similar to the ones she’d inflicted on herself, the drops beading up in small diagonal lines.
The day Paul passed his exams, two of his professors took him to the Four Seasons bar for a drink. He had many drinks that afternoon, ice-cold Martinis on an unseasonably warm spring day. He drank them quickly on an empty stomach and little sleep the night before, and suddenly he was drunk. He had answered every question, passed with honors the three-hour ordeal.