More men called. One asked Paul dejectedly if he was Sang's boyfriend. The mere possibility, articulated by a stranger, had jolted him. Such a thing had happened once before in the house, the first year Paul had lived there — two housemates had fallen in love, had moved out in order to marry each other. "No," he told the caller. "I'm just her housemate." Nevertheless, for the rest of the day he had felt burdened by the question, worried that he'd transgressed somehow, simply by answering the phone. A few days later, he told Sang. She laughed. "He's probably horrified now, knowing that I live with a man," she said. "Next time," she advised him, "say yes."
A week afterward, the three of them were in the kitchen, Heather filling a thermos with echinacea tea because she had come down with a cold and had to spend all day in classes, Sang hunched over the newspaper and coffee. The night before, she had locked herself up in her bathroom, and now there were some reddish highlights in her hair. When the phone rang and Paul picked up, he assumed it was another suitor on the line, for like many of Sang's suitors, the caller had a slight foreign accent, though this one was more refined than awkward. The only difference was that instead of asking for Sangeeta he asked to speak to Sang. When Paul asked who was calling, he said, in a slightly impatient way, "I am her boyfriend." The words landed in Paul's chest like the dull yet painful taps of a doctor's instrument. He saw that Sang was looking up at him expectantly, her chair already partly pushed back from the table.
"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, dance like 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 is 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, always precisely parked under the shade of a birch tree, it was impossible to tell if he was there. He never said hello or goodbye; 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 three 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 had 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 okay.