Unaccustomed Earth Read online

  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, always precisely parked under the shade of a birch tree, it was impossible to tell if he was there. He never said hello or good-bye; instead, he behaved as if Sang were the sole occupant of the house. They never sat in the living room, or in the kitchen. Only once, when Paul returned from a bike ride, did he see them overhead, eating lunch on the deck. They were sitting next to each other, cross-legged, and Sang was extending a fork toward Farouk’s mouth, her other hand cupped beneath it. By the time Paul entered the house, they had retreated into her room.

  When she wasn’t with Farouk, she did things for him. She read through proofs of an article he’d written, checking it for typos. She scheduled his doctor’s appointments. Once, she spent all morning with the Yellow Pages, pricing tiles; Farouk was thinking of redoing his kitchen.

  By the end of September, Paul was aware of a routine: Mondays, which Sang had off from the bookstore, Farouk came for lunch. The two of them would eat in her room; sometimes he heard the sounds of their talking as they ate, or their spoons tapping against soup bowls, or the Nocturnes of Chopin. They were silent lovers—mercifully so, compared with other couples he’d overheard in the house through the years—but their presence soon prompted him to go to the library on Mondays, for he was affected nevertheless, embarrassed by the time her door had been partly open and he’d seen Farouk zipping his jeans. Three years had passed since Theresa, the one girlfriend he’d ever had. He’d dated no one since. Because of Theresa, he’d chosen a graduate school in Boston. For a few months, he had lived with her in her apartment on St. Botolph Street. For Thanksgiving, he’d gone with her to her parents’ house in Deerfield. It was there that it had ended. “I’m sorry, Paul, I can’t help it, I just don’t like the way you kiss me,” she told him once they’d gone to bed. He remembered himself sitting naked on one side of the mattress, in a room he was suddenly aware he was never again to see. He had not argued; in the wake of his shame, he became strangely efficient and agreeable, with her, with everyone.

  Late one night, Paul was in bed reading when he heard a car pull up to the house. The clock on his desk said twenty past two. He shut off his lamp and got up to look through the window. It was November. A full moon illuminated the wide, desolate street, lined with trash bags and recycling bins. There was a taxi in front of the house, the engine still running. Sang emerged from it alone. For close to a minute, she stood there on the sidewalk. He waited by the window until she climbed up to the porch, then listened as she climbed the staircase and shut the door to her room. Farouk had picked her up that afternoon; Paul had seen her stepping into his car. He thought perhaps they’d fought, though the next day he detected no signs of discord. He overheard her speaking to Farouk on the phone in good spirits, deciding on a video to rent. But that night, around the same time, the same thing happened. The third night, he stayed awake on purpose, making sure she got in.

  The following morning, a Sunday, Paul, Heather, and Sang had pancakes together in the kitchen. Sang was playing Louis Armstrong on the CD player in her room while Paul fried the pancakes in two cast-iron skillets.

  “Kevin’s sleeping over tonight,” Heather said. She’d met him recently. He was a physicist at MIT. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure thing,” Paul said. He liked Kevin. He had been coming over often for dinner and brought beers and helped with the dishes afterward, talking to Paul as much as he talked to Heather.

  “I’m sorry I keep missing him. He seems really nice,” Sang said.

  “We’ll see,” Heather said. “Next week is our one-month anniversary.”

  Sang smiled, as if this modest commemoration were in fact something of much greater significance. “Congratulations.”

  Heather crossed her fingers. “I guess the next stage is when you assume you’re going to spend weekends together.”

  Paul glanced at Sang, who said nothing. She got up, returning five minutes later from the cellar with a basket full of laundry.

  “Nice Jockeys,” Heather said, noticing several pairs folded on top of the pile.

  “They’re Farouk’s,” Sang said.

  “He doesn’t have a washing machine?” Heather wanted to know.

  “He does,” Sang said, oblivious of Heather’s disapproving expression. “But it’s coin-operated.”

  The arguments started around Thanksgiving. Paul would hear Sang crying into the phone in her room, the gray plastic cord stretched across the linoleum and then across the landing, disappearing under her door. One of the fights had something to do with a party Sang had been invited to, which Farouk didn’t want to attend. Another was about Farouk’s birthday. Sang had spent the day before making a cake. The house smelled of oranges and almonds and Paul heard the electric beater going late at night. But the next afternoon, he saw the cake in the trash can.

  Once, returning from school, he discovered that Farouk was there, the BMW parked outside. It was a painfully cold December day; early that morning, the season’s first flakes had fallen. Walking past Sang’s room, Paul heard her raised voice. She was accusing: Why didn’t he ever want to meet her friends? Why didn’t he invite her to his cousin’s house for Thanksgiving? Why didn’t he like to spend the night together? Why, at the very least, didn’t he drive her home?

  “I pay for the cabs,” Farouk said quietly. “What difference does it make?”

  “I hate it, Farouk. It’s abnormal.”

  “You know I don’t sleep well when you’re there.”

  “How are we ever going to get married?” she demanded. “Are we supposed to live in separate houses forever?”

  “Sang, please,” Farouk said. “Try to be calm. Your roommates will hear.”

  “Will you stop about my roommates,” Sang shouted.

  “You’re hysterical,” Farouk said.

  She began to cry.

  “I’ve warned you, Sang,” Farouk said. He sounded desperate. “I will not spend my life with a woman who makes scenes.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Something, a plate or a glass, struck a wall and broke. Then the room went quiet. After much deliberation, Paul knocked softly. No one replied. A few hours later, Paul nearly bumped into Sang as she was emerging from her bathroom, wrapped in a large dark pink towel. Her wet hair was uncombed and tangled, a knot bulging like a small nest on one side of her head. For weeks, he had longed to catch a glimpse of her this way, and still he felt wholly unprepared for the vision of her bare legs and arms, her damp face and shoulders.

  “Hey,” he said, sidling quickly past.

  “Paul,” she called out after a moment, as if his presence had registered only then. He turned to look at her; though it was barely past four, the sun was already setting in the living-room window, casting a golden patch of light to one side of her in the hallway.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  She crossed her arms in front of her, a hand concealing each shoulder. A spot on her forehead was coated with what appeared to be toothpaste. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s not. You have an exam to study for.”

  Her eyes were shining brightly, and she had a funny frozen smile on her face, her lips slightly parted. He began to smile back when he saw she was about to cry. He nodded. “It doesn’t matter.”

  For a week, Farouk didn’t call, though when the phone rang she flew to answer it. She was home every night for dinner. She had long conversations with her sister in London. “Tell me if you think this is normal,” Paul overheard her say as he walked into the kitchen. “We were driving one time and he told me I smelled bad. Sweaty. He told me to wash under my arms. He kept saying it wasn’t a criticism, that people in love should be able to say things like that to each other.” One day, Charles took Sang out and in the evening she returned, with shopping bags from the outlets in Kitt
ery. Another night, she accepted an invitation to see a movie at the Coolidge with Paul and Heather and Kevin, but once they’d reached the box office she told them she had a headache and walked back to the house. “I bet you they’ve split up,” Heather said, once they’d settled into their seats.

  But the following week Farouk called when Sang was at work. Though Farouk hadn’t bothered to identify himself, Paul called the bookstore, leaving her the message.

  The relationship resumed its course, but Paul noticed that Farouk no longer set foot in the house. He wouldn’t even ring the bell. He would pause at the curb, the engine of his car still running, beeping three times to signal that he was waiting for her, and then she would disappear.

  Over winter break, she went away, to London. Her sister had had a baby boy recently. Sang showed Paul the things she bought for the baby: playsuits full of snaps, a stuffed octopus, a miniature French sailor’s shirt, a mobile of stars and planets that glowed in the dark. “I’m going to be called Sang Mashi,” she told him excitedly, explaining that Mashi was the Bengali word for “Aunt.” The word sounded strange on her lips. She spoke Bengali infrequently—never to her sister, never to her suitors, only a word here and there to her parents, in Michigan, to whom she spoke on weekends.

  “How do you say ‘bon voyage’?” Paul asked.

  She told him she wasn’t sure.

  Without her there, it was easier for Paul to study, his mind spacious and clear. His exam was less than six months away. A date and time had been scheduled, the first Tuesday in May, at ten o’clock, marked with an “X” on the calendar over his desk. Since summer, he had worked his way, yet again, through the list of poems and critical essays and plays, typing summaries of them into his computer. He had printed out these summaries, three-hole-punched them, put them in a series of binders. He wrote further summaries of the summaries on index cards that he reviewed before bed, filed in shoe boxes. For Christmas, he was invited to an aunt’s house in Buffalo, as usual. This year, with his exam as an excuse, he declined the invitation, mailing off gifts. Heather was away, too; she and Kevin had gone skiing in Vermont.

  To mark the new year, Paul set up a new routine, spreading himself all over the house. In the mornings, he reviewed poetry at the kitchen table. After lunch, criticism in the living room. A Shakespeare play before bed. He began to leave his things, his binders and his shoe boxes and his books, on the kitchen table, on certain steps of the staircase, on the coffee table in the living room. He was slouched in the papasan chair one snowy afternoon, reading his notes on Aristotle’s Poetics, when the doorbell rang.

  It was a UPS man with a package for Sang, something from J. Crew. Paul signed for it and took it upstairs. He leaned it against the door of her room, which caused the door to open slightly. He closed it firmly, and for a moment he stood there, his hand still on the knob. Even though she was in London, he knocked before entering. The futon was neatly made, a red batik bedspread covering the top. The green walls were bare but for two framed Indian miniatures of palace scenes, men smoking hookahs and reclining on cushions, bare-bellied women dancing in a ring. There was none of the disarray he for some reason pictured every time he walked by her room; only outside, through the windows, was there the silent chaos of the storm. The snow fell in disorderly swirls, yet it covered the brown porch railing below, neatly, as if it were a painted trim. A single panel of a white seersucker curtain was loosely cinched with a peach silk scarf that Sang sometimes knotted at her throat, causing the fabric of the curtain to gather in the shape of a slim hourglass. Paul untied the scarf, letting the curtain cover the windowpane. Without touching his face to the scarf, he smelled the perfume that lingered in its weave. He went to the futon and sat down, his legs extending along the oatmeal carpet. He took off his shoes and socks. On a wine crate next to the futon was a glass of water that had gathered bubbles, a small pot of Vaseline. He undid his belt buckle, but suddenly the desire left him, absent from his body just as she was absent from the room. He buckled his belt again, and then slowly he lifted the bedspread. The sheets were flannel, blue and white, a pattern of fleur-de-lis.

  He had drifted off to sleep when he heard the phone ring. He stumbled barefoot out of Sang’s room, into the kitchen, the linoleum chilly.

  “Hello?”

  No one replied on the other end, and he was about to hang up when he heard a dog barking.

  “Hello?” he repeated. It occurred to him it might be Sang, a poor connection from London. “Sang, is that you?”

  The caller hung up.

  That evening, after dinner, the phone rang again. When he picked it up, he heard the same dog he’d heard earlier.

  “Balthazar, shush!” a woman said, as soon as Paul said hello. Her voice was hesitant. Was Sang in? she wanted to know.

  “She’s not here. May I take a message?”

  She left her name, Deirdre Frain, and a telephone number. Paul wrote it down on the message pad, under Partha Mazoomdar, a suitor who’d called from Cleveland in the morning.

  The next day, Deirdre called again. Again Paul told her Sang wasn’t there, adding that she wouldn’t be back until the weekend.

  “Where is she?” Deirdre asked.

  “She’s out of the country.”

  “In Cairo?”

  This took him by surprise. “No, London.”

  “In London,” she repeated. She sounded relieved. “London. Okay. Thanks.”

  The fourth call was very late at night, when Paul was already in bed. He went downstairs, feeling for the phone in the dark.

  “It’s Deirdre.” She sounded slightly out of breath, as if it were she, not he, who’d just rushed to the phone.

  He flicked on the light switch, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. “Um, as I said, Sang’s not back yet.”

  “I don’t want to talk to Sang.” She was slurring her words, exaggerating the pronunciation of Sang’s name in a slightly cruel way.

  Paul heard music, a trumpet crooning softly. “You don’t?”

  “No,” she said. “Actually, I have a question.”

  “A question?”

  “Yes.” There was a pause, the clink of an ice cube falling into a glass. Her tone had become flirtatious. “So, what’s your name?”

  He took off his glasses, allowing the room to go blurry. He couldn’t recall the last time a woman had spoken to him that way. “Paul.”

  “Paul,” she repeated. “Can I ask you another question, Paul?”

  “What?”

  “It’s about Sang.”

  He stiffened. Again, she had said the name without kindness. “What about Sang?”

  Deirdre paused. “She’s your housemate, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I was wondering, then, if you’d know if—are they cousins?”

  “Who?”

  “Sang and Freddy.”

  He put his glasses on again, drawing things into focus. He was unnerved by this woman’s curiosity. It wasn’t her business, he wanted to tell her. But before he could do that, Deirdre began quietly crying.

  He looked at the clock on the stove; it was close to three in the morning. It was his own fault. He shouldn’t have answered the phone so late. He wished he hadn’t told the woman his name.

  “Deirdre,” he said after a while, tired of listening to her. “Are you still there?”

  She stopped crying. Her breathing was uneven, penetrating his ear.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Paul said. “I don’t understand why you’re calling me.”

  “I love him.”

  He hung up, his heart hammering. He had the urge to take a shower. He wanted to erase her name from the legal pad. He stared at the receiver, remnants of Sang’s mole-colored fingerprints still visible here and there. For the first time since the winter break had begun, he felt lonely in the house. The call had to be a fluke. Some other Sang the woman was referring to. Maybe it was a scheme on behalf of one of her Indian suitors, to cast suspicion, to
woo her away from Farouk. Before Sang left for London, the fights had subsided, and things between Sang and Farouk, as far as Paul could tell, were still the same. In the living room, she’d been wrapping a brown leather satchel, a pair of men’s driving gloves. The night before she left, she made a dinner reservation for the two of them at Biba. Farouk had driven her to the airport.

  The ringing of the phone woke Paul the next morning. He remained in bed, listening to it, looking at the ashen branches of the tree outside his window. He counted twelve rings before they stopped. The phone rang half an hour later, and he ignored it again. The third time, he was in the kitchen. When it stopped, he unplugged the cord from the jack.

  Though he studied in silence for the remainder of the day, he felt fitful. Sitting in the kitchen that evening with a bricklike volume of Spenser, he was unable to concentrate on the lines, irritated by the footnotes, by how much there was left to learn. He wondered how many times Deirdre had tried to call him since he’d unplugged the phone. Had she given up? The calling seemed obsessive to him. He wondered whether she was the type to do something. To take a bottle of pills.

  After dinner, he plugged the phone back into the jack. There were no further calls. And yet his mind continued to wander. Something told him that she’d try again. He’d made the mistake of telling her when Sang would be back. Perhaps Deirdre was waiting to speak to her directly. Perhaps Deirdre would tell Sang the same thing she’d told him, about loving Farouk. Before going to bed, he poured himself a glass of Dewar’s, a gift sent by his aunt in Buffalo. Then he dialed the number Deirdre had given him. She picked up right away, with a lilting hello.