Unaccustomed Earth

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, ru

"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 di

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 ru

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 di

"I'm sorry I keep missing him. He seems really nice," Sang said.

"We'll see," Heather said. "Next week is our one-month a

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