"What about you?" Deirdre asked suddenly.

"What about me?"

"Well, here I am going on and you haven't said a thing. What are you like, Paul? Are you happy?"

He had sacrificed an hour to this woman. The edge of his ear ached from pressing the phone to it for so long. "This isn't about me." He swallowed, shutting the door to Sang's room. "It's about Sang."

"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 tele-marketer 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 months, Deirdre still hadn't called, and Paul finally stopped fearing that she would.

Paul took the week of his spring break off from studying. "Stop cramming. That's probably what happened the first time. Go to the Caribbean," his adviser suggested. Instead, Paul stayed at home, but declared himself officially on vacation. He went to movies at the Brattle, spent two days making a cas-soulet. He drove to Wellfleet one day, forcing himself not to take a book. He decided to ride out to Concord on his bike, to see Emerson's house; on Saturday morning, he discovered that the chain needed to be fixed, and he brought the bike up to the deck. When he looked up, Sang was standing there, the phone in her hands, the cord stretched as far as it could go. "Something weird just happened, "she said.

"What?"

"It was that Deirdre woman. The one you took the message from when I was away."

Paul bent down, pretending to root around for something in his toolbox. "She was asking for Farouk," Sang continued. "She says she's a friend of his, visiting from out of town."

"Oh. So that must have been why she was calling," he said, relieved to hear that this was all Deirdre had said.

"He's never mentioned a Deirdre."

"Oh."

Sang sat down in a beach chair, the phone in her lap, her body leaning into it. She straightened, staring at the phone, pressing numbers at random without picking up the receiver. "Farouk doesn't have any friends," she said. "Ever since I've known him, he's never introduced me to a single friend. I'm his only friend, really." She looked intently at Paul, and for a second he feared she was about to draw some sort of parallel, point out that Paul didn't have friends, either. Instead, she said, "How did she get my number, anyway?"

She'd looked it up in Farouk's address book; Deirdre had confessed this to Paul. Farouk had made it easy for her, writing it under "S" for Sang, the name of the cousin he had mentioned in a way that made her suspicious. Paul shook his head, standing up, squeezing the hand brakes on the bicycle. "Don't know. I guess I'd ask Farouk."

"Right. Ask Farouk." She stood up and went back into the house.

That evening, when Paul returned from Concord, he found Sang at the kitchen table. She said nothing as he went to the refrigerator to pull out the remains of the cassoulet.

"Farouk isn't in," she said, as if responding to a question on Paul's part. "He hasn't been in all day."

He lifted the lid of the baking dish and sprinkled a few drops of water on top of the cassoulet. "You want some of this?"

"No, thanks." She was frowning.

Paul put the cassoulet in the oven and poured a Scotch. The muscles in his arms and his thighs ached pleasantly. He wanted to take a shower before eating.

"So, when exactly did this Deirdre person call?" Sang said, stopping him as he walked out of the kitchen.

He turned to face her, pivoting on his heels. "I don't remember. It was when you were away."

"And did she say anything to you?"

"What do you mean?"

"What did she say to you, exactly?"

"Nothing. I didn't talk to her," he said, his pulse racing; he was thankful that he was already coated with sweat. "She just wanted you to call her back."

"Well, I can't call her back. She didn't even leave her number. It was weird. Did she sound like a weird sort of person to you?"