Harvard Square A Novel

6




I BEGAN TO AVOID KALAJ. PERHAPS MY TEACHING obligations, now that the semester was in full swing, took me away from him. Perhaps I felt I belonged to Harvard more than I had allowed myself to believe. At a meeting of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, I had made a proposal pertaining to the quality of senior theses. Someone objected to my proposal, I began to explain its merits, there was a vote, and my proposal was approved. I felt validated and vindicated. All it took was a near-unanimous show of raised hands, and suddenly I loved Harvard, loved rubbing shoulders with the brotherhood of Americans.

There was also the possibility of a new woman in my life, Allison, though I still wasn’t sure which way things were headed. I didn’t want Kalaj to see us together, nor did I want him to see who I became, or how I behaved or even spoke when I was in her company. He would undoubtedly have dubbed me affected, precious, no less a social climber than Claude was in my eyes—and perhaps I was. But the irony is that I was probably no less affected as a Mediterranean among the habitués of Café Algiers than I was among WASPs at Lowell House.

But then something else was troubling me, and Allison’s presence made me see it more clearly. It’s not just that I did not want Kalaj to see me with her; I didn’t want her to see me with him. She was candid, bold, straightforward, and freethinking in so many unforeseen ways, willing to try many things that were not part of the immediate world she’d been brought up in. Nor was she a snob, though some might have thought so, if only because she moved in circles where everything was rarefied and where you never had to think of cost, even when you felt you needed to pretend to. She knew the things she liked and was used to and was seldom aware of their far inferior and cheaper version everyone else in the world purchased. Her family always traveled first-class; it would never have occurred to her that one could also travel coach. She had never in her life seen the back of an airplane or thought it possible to sit in the cramped spaces everyone else flew in. But she was discreet in everything. She never ordered more than two drinks because she didn’t like being sloshed; I never ordered more than two drinks because I’d have no money left for dinner. It would never have occurred to her that buying four drinks each, three days in a row, could mean my financial ruin. But she had perfect judgment, and once she was told about the rest of mankind and its strapped budgets, she made all the necessary adjustments with the surefire ease with which a rich person knows how to dress down when visiting poor relatives in the suburbs. Above all she was a very canny reader of people and could instantly have distinguished an uncommitted truant like me from a confirmed vagrant like Kalaj.

Allison had come to my apartment on Concord Avenue early on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. Not intentionally of course, and not that it bothered me in any way, since I had never observed Kippur in my life. But it was emblematic of how far apart our worlds were. When she buzzed me early that afternoon, I told her to come right upstairs; I’d recognized it was a woman’s voice but couldn’t make out whose. When she walked in wearing her orange dress I was totally surprised. I was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and had just come back from a jog. I was also sweating. I must have looked a mess. I told her to please sit on the sofa, to pick something up to read, and that I’d take no time to shower and get dressed.

She was unfazed by this. Perhaps, in her mind, she was not visiting me at home; she was just visiting a Lowell House tutor in his off-campus digs, hence the relaxed drop-by-and-show-up-whenever-you-please informality of her visit and the ease with which she adjusted to everything.

“Tell you what, do you know how to make espresso?” I asked in my distracted and flustered state.

She loved espresso but didn’t know how to make one.

“Five minutes,” I said. I’d make us two terrific lattes.

I was trying not to allow myself to get aroused by the situation.

She must have taken a good look at my bookcase and, before I’d even started the water running, shouted that she was amazed I had the complete first edition of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Had she read the whole thing yet? I shouted back behind my closed door, feeling that if she didn’t feel uncomfortable shouting back and forth with someone she scarcely knew while he was in the bathroom, who was I to quibble.

“Yes,” she replied.

Then came total silence. Was she going to undress and step into the shower with me? The thought gave me a sudden thrill that was difficult to restrain but that part of me did not wish to temper. Would I come out of the shower and expose myself? Or would she have already snuggled in my bed, naked under my sheets, her clothes dropped on the floor along the way to my bedroom as a preamble to what lay in store for us? I didn’t want to say or shout anything for fear she’d make out the arousal in my voice. All I knew was that in Kalaj’s book of rules, if I was as aroused as this, so was she.

When I came out of the shower in my bathrobe, she was lying flat on her stomach on my living room floor leafing through my diary.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Reading,” she said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Where did you find it?”

“In your bedroom, on your desk.”

I was speechless. So she’d gone into my bedroom, seen my totally unmade bed, rifled through my things, found the diary, what else?

“Do you really, really mind?”

I thought about it.

“No, I don’t mind really, really mind,” I said. “Actually, it thrills me.”

“Thrills you? How, actually?” she said, echoing my own word.

I had no idea where this was going—was she a total ingénue or did she know exactly what she was doing, which could be exactly why she showed up in the first place.

They always know. I could just hear Kalaj’s voice.

“I’m going to get dressed and make coffee.”

“Why don’t you do that.”

I’d never in my life uttered a sentence like “Why don’t you do that” to mean yes. Who knows what these words implied or meant in her world.

Naturally, I banged the espresso filter against the garbage container as loud as I could, left the door wide open for the time it took to boil the milk, then closed the door again.

Allison had come to talk to me about her senior thesis on Proust after I had encouraged her to look me up. She was working with another tutor at Adams House, she said, but was intrigued by our brief conversation outside my office. Someone else had mentioned my name to her. She wished she had known earlier, but it was too late to change tutors, she said. Now, as we both stood in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew, she gave no sense of being interested in discussing Proust. She had brought my diary into the kitchen and continued poring over it as we stood silently by the gas range. For someone reading someone else’s diary without asking permission to do so, she didn’t seem in the slightest bit ill at ease. What did ersatz mean? she asked. I told her. Who was K. then? I explained, without giving away the seamy underside. What about Walden Pond? Skip that part, I said. “So tell me about N. You wrote about her less than three weeks ago,” she said.

This was not placing penny bets. She was putting weightier, Monte Carlo chips on the table.

“You really want to know about N.?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“Why do you want to know?”

She hesitated.

“Maybe I’m trying to figure you out.”

I admired her. I’ve always like such disarming candor in a woman. Or was this something you said to someone you’d just met, no hidden agenda, nothing implied—not a penny chip at all?

“Yes, but why?” I asked.

Maybe I was ducking, or maybe it was my turn to place a bigger bet than I was used to. Maybe I wanted to make certain that heavier bets were not untimely.

“You know why,” she said, “you know exactly why.” And, changing the subject right away, she added, “I want you to read me this paragraph here so that I can hear it in your voice.”

“My voice?”

“Just read.”

It was a description of how Niloufar and I had kept staring at each other at Café Algiers one afternoon and, without saying anything, without warning, she’d started to shed tears as I reached out and held her hand, and with one thing leading to the other, had found myself in tears as well.

I caught my breath. I was too aroused. I knew I couldn’t continue this, but I certainly did not want to fold. I read it for her, with sincere feeling, all the while sensing that I was using the arousal with one woman to arouse the other.

“OK, now read me the poem.”

“What poem?” I asked, unable to recall having written a poem in my diary. My mind was beginning to draw one huge blank over everything around me right now. I could think of one thing only, and I had to struggle not to touch her.

“This poem, here,” she pointed to something I’d transcribed two months before.

I saw what she meant. To please her without disabusing her, I began reading with expression:

Dresser.

Turntable.

Television.

Striped ironing board.

A standing lamp to the left.

A night table to the right.

A tiny reading light clasped to the headboard.

She sleeps naked at night.

But then, sensing my voice wavering and feeling unequal to the task of the cad, I broke down and said:

“I can’t concentrate on any of this right now.”

She waited a second.

“To be honest, I can’t either,” she said.

And because she was much younger and because I still wasn’t sure whether any of this was appropriate, I drew close to her and asked if I could kiss her.

MY BIGGEST WORRY that afternoon and every other afternoon after that day was that Kalaj might decide to drop by unannounced, which he’d done in the past. Allison was open-minded, but watching a swarthy Che Guevara wearing a mock-guerrilla outfit open the front door and lumber into my apartment while we were making love on the Tabriz would have freaked her out. There was something very wrong in their meeting. She understood “illegal immigrant” and she understood “poor” and “very, very poor.” But what she might not understand and, outside of her very distant brushes with Harvard’s drug scene, had never rubbed shoulders with was sleaze. Everything about him was wrong, and knowing he was my friend might lead her to assume that he and I shared more in common than she was aware of.

Allison liked to drop by after her classes. We’d have lattes together and sometimes we’d cook dinner. Sometimes we read or studied in separate corners of my living room. Sometimes we listened to music together. And there were times when I would surprise myself at the voluminous number of pages I was capable of reading in her presence. By ten o’clock, which was very early for me, but not for her, we’d go to bed. At school, we made a point of not showing signs that we knew each other other than casually. This was more my decision than hers. She had nothing to hide; I, on the other hand, did not want department chairmen to start talking about my friendship with a student whose senior thesis was more than likely going to end up on my desk and whose name represented more wealth and therefore more “pull” than twenty Heathers put together. She was not invasive, but she brought some items of clothing over, and left them discreetly folded in a closet. She brought an extra bathrobe, and because mine looked ratty, decided to buy me the “His” version of the same bathrobe. The striped made-in-Germany terrycloth bathrobe, I discovered, cost more than my monthly rent. I called Kalaj and told him not to show up these days.

“Why,” he asked, “is la quarante-deux moving in?”

“No,” I said, “someone else.”

“But I thought you, Ekaterina, and la quarante-deux had become friends?” I told him not to mention that night to me. “Why not?”

“Because the two women ended up being more interested in each other than in me.” I wanted to tell him about Allison and about what was so different about her, but the only word I could come up with was the one I needed to avoid because he’d have resented it the most: she was respectable. Everything about her was respectable.

This finally came to a head one early afternoon later that fall when she took me to meet her parents at the Ritz-Carlton for tea, and all I could think of, as we parked her car and walked toward the hotel, was, Please, God, don’t let Kalaj’s cab pass by now, don’t let him pull over and speak to us, don’t let him be anywhere close, because it’d be just like him to turn up as I’m trying to look dapper at the Ritz-Carlton. I was ashamed of him. Ashamed of myself for being ashamed of him. Ashamed of being a snob. Ashamed of letting others see that what we had in common went far deeper than this surface thing called lousy cash flow. Ashamed that I wasn’t allowing myself to own up to how deeply I cared for him and had found it easier to think of us as transient, dirt-poor louts with a penchant for low-life café fellowship.

Tea at the Ritz-Carlton went swimmingly. The father tried to impress me with his knowledge of The Odyssey; I told him I had studied with Fitzgerald; he spoke of his years in the Middle East, I dropped all the right names. He listed the spots he loved in Paris; I told him of mine. It was a draw, but it brought us closer.

That evening we had dinner at Maison Robert, a stately French restaurant that suddenly resurrected a world I hadn’t stepped into in over a decade. Waiters, wines, luster, affluence. What did one do these days with a Ph.D., he asked? Well, one could always write or teach, I said. Then, sensing he wasn’t convinced, I reminded him that my father had become a wealthy businessman in Egypt even though all he’d ever wanted was to write books. Was I amenable to other professions as well—another career, perhaps? he asked, as he looked down, toying with the edge of his knife on the tablecloth. Absolutely, I replied, trying to sound at once earnest and casual and determined to keep an open mind.

Was he going to ask me about his daughter too? The man was too tactful for that. I never brought her up either, and the shrewd lover of The Odyssey must have read the message clearly enough. But he wasn’t going to let me off so lightly either. So he made subtle prods: about my plans, my future, my hobbies, trying best to steer clear of the stubborn if muzzled word intentions bouncing under the table like a leashed dog looking for his bone. I did not come to his rescue. Then came the heavy bream fish in some sort of buttery white sauce, served with Montrachet wine, then the chateaubriands with their sauce and the sautéed potatoes and haricots verts, accompanied by a delicious Pomerol, and at the very, very end, the tarte Tatin with a dollop of crème fraîche for each. Our dinner ended with Calvados.

Kalaj’s thundering advice, repeated every time I’d spoken to him about her these last few days, was never far. Marry her. Become rich. Buy me a fleet of taxis. I’ll make you a millionaire. Then, if you have no children and she bores you, dump her.

During dinner, while waiters tiptoed around us, I imagined that one of them was Kalaj, winking at me, whispering, Do it, just do it. The fleet of taxis. We’ll do the math later. How I longed to see him now and catch his complicit leer as he’d eye the jumbo-sized tarte Tatin they’d brought for us, immediately followed by Calvados. They like you, otherwise the interview would have stopped over tea at the Ritz-Carlton.

Father, mother, and daughter saw me to the cab that was to take me back to Cambridge. “When I was your age, my father wouldn’t give me a penny for the bus, let alone a taxi,” he said, passing me a twenty-dollar bill when his hand shook mine.

I was caught by surprise but genuinely refused the father’s money. He insisted. Finally, I relented. I remembered how a rich student had right away accepted a similar offer from me when caught without money at the ticket office of the Harvard Square Theater. Poor people refused because their dignity was already in tatters, the way an underling might refuse a tip, because it screams his poverty. Rich people accepted the money because it was not perceived as a gratuity, or charity, or a reflection on their station in life, but simply as a favor that comes with friendship. A poor person would make a point of returning the money right away. The rich man simply forgot.

I accepted, hoping he would mistake me for the second.

But because I was not, I stopped the taxi two minutes later, got out, and took the underground back to Cambridge.

At Café Algiers that night, I didn’t tell Kalaj what I’d done. “In your place I would have taken the money, gotten off the cab, and headed back by train.”

I looked at him and smirked.

“That’s what you did, isn’t it—that’s exactly what you did—and you weren’t going to tell me!”

I don’t think I ever bought a round of XO Cognac at Maxim’s with more gusto in my life than I did that evening with Kalaj.

The image of Kalaj as a leering waiter and me as a plutocrat had come and gone. Poverty had changed me. I was ashamed of the twenty-dollar bill. I tried to cloak what I’d done with all kinds of excuses and wished to shrug the whole thing off with affected insouciance, but there was no hiding the truth. I’d hustled the man who’d bought me dinner and whose daughter I was sleeping with.

THAT NIGHT I paid dearly for our dinner and our drinks. The pain I’d felt weeks earlier returned, an ache in the kidney area extending all the way to the right of my rib cage. One of the doctors had warned me to stay off fatty foods for a while in case it turned out to be what he feared. Well, last night’s meal was anything but lean. They had already run a test a week earlier, but I had never bothered to check the results, since I had never had a relapse. I tossed and turned, thinking of the girl who was probably wondering why I hadn’t asked her to drive me back to Cambridge, especially when it was clear that her parents liked me and knew we were sleeping together. I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to run away from the three of them—like a Cinderella whose livery would turn into cabbage and turnips if she didn’t rush back to her little hovel.

An hour into the ache I figured I might as well return to the infirmary. As irony would have it, I had no money left to take a cab and was too much in pain this time to walk myself to the Square. I called Kalaj, but once again there was no answer. Linda had no car—so there was no point in waking her. Allison, I didn’t dare call. Sexual intimacy was one thing, pain-and-money intimacy, quite another. Frank and Claude, out of the question. I couldn’t have felt lonelier or more helpless in my life. So with complete despair, I decided to knock at the kitchen door of Apartment 43. It took them a while, but eventually the boyfriend opened the door, wearing nothing but pale blue boxers. Obviously I had woken him up. “So sorry, I know it’s very, very late, but I’m in great pain. Can one of you drive me to the infirmary in the Square?” I was begging for help. I had never in my life felt so denuded of dignity. On second thought, perhaps I should have called an ambulance. But it was now too late for this. “It’ll take me a second,” he said. I heard him whispering to his girlfriend, explaining, using my name. So they knew me by name. Even doubled over in pain I wondered if she’d ever liked my name or whispered it to herself when she was alone.

The car smelled of their dog. “I hope it’s nothing,” said the boyfriend, who insisted on dropping me at the door of the emergency entrance and then helping me out of the car, holding me with one hand under my armpit as I limped to the door.

I was admitted by the same head nurse and the same doctor as before. As soon as I was stretched out on the gurney, the pain began to subside. Could it all be psychosomatic? Most people feel better the moment they step in here, said the genial head nurse in her British accent. As she sat down and spoke with me—there were no other in-patients that night—she began to ask me where I came from . . . I figured it was small talk to get me to relax. I normally answered the where-from question by saying France. Then when asked more specific questions I might add Paris. If the person happened to know French well and was in a position to detect my accent, I’d instantly switch and say that I was really from Italy, which would sufficiently throw them off the scent and prevent them from inquiring further into my origins. But this time I wanted to open up to someone without too many detours and went directly to the source: Egypt, I said.

“Well, you don’t say!” she said. She had been trained as a nurse in Egypt, during World War II.

I asked where.

“In Alexandria.”

“That’s where I was born!” More coincidentally yet, it was in an English hospital that my mother was trained as a volunteer nurse during the same war.

I missed my mother, I said. Suddenly I wanted to cry. What was happening to me? Was I going to be very sick? What was this pain? And as I lay there I remembered Kalaj’s own words, What happens to me now? What happens to me now? I started to feel the tears roll down both sides of my face.

Without a word, the nurse reached for a tissue and wiped one side of my face, and then the other.

There was something so irreducibly earnest and guileless between us that I was perfectly happy to spend the rest of the night in that area with the head nurse sitting next to me in the dimmed lights of the emergency room. “Maybe I should let you rest a while,” she said. But she didn’t move. Perhaps all she meant was there was no need to talk.

Toward dawn, they decided to admit me to an upper floor. By then they’d had a chance to look over last week’s test results. The head surgeon was going to speak to me. He was an early morning type, so I shouldn’t get too comfortable, said my new nurse.

The doctor knocked at my door around seven in the morning, carrying a manila envelope with the X-rays sticking out. He slipped them under the glass panel with the gliding, effortless grace of a man who does this thirty times a day, lit the panel with a cavalier flick of the switch, and after musing a while at what looked like an off-gray paisley design called my inner organs, said that I had gallstones. The Jewish organ par excellence, I jibed. The tall WASP gentleman stared at me with a quizzical look, more amused perhaps by my attempt to be funny than by the joke itself. “I thought Jews were obsessed with another part of the male anatomy.”

The man had a sense of humor.

He sat on my bed, crossed his legs, dangling his top leg up and down, while his penny loafer hung from the tip of his toes, exposing his entire sock.

“Anyone else in the family with gallstones?”

“All of them.”

“On both sides?”

“All four of my grandparents.”

What had I had for dinner last night?

I said, Maison Robert, as though that offered explanation enough.

A long silence elapsed between us.

“Is this going where I think it is?” I finally asked.

He bit his lower lip, looked at me, and said, “What do you mean?”

“Knife?” I asked.

He liked my joke.

“Well, we don’t like to say ‘knife.’ The dictionary is full of friendlier terms—but the long and short of it is probably yes.”

The operation was not urgent. But I had to watch my diet. No fats, no alcohol, no coffee. Meanwhile, they wanted to run a few more tests, so I should stay in bed and eat the bland food they fed me on the house.

“May I ask a question?” I finally said.

“It won’t hurt,” he answered. Apparently everyone asked that same question.

“No, that was not my question.”

“Yes?”

“How long after the operation can I have sex?”

He smiled.

“You will be very tired afterward.” And to send the message home, he let his head slump down to his chest.

I called no one. I wanted to be alone. I was ashamed of being stricken with an old man’s ailment. Might as well have the ague or the gout. By around two that afternoon, I heard a timid knock at the door. It was Allison. How on earth had she found me here? My phone wasn’t answering. She’d been ringing all morning. Rather than suppose I never wanted to see her, or had spent the night with someone else, she’d assumed the worst and checked with the hospital. What amazing confidence in herself, in people, in the power of truth and candor. In her place, the first thing I would have imagined was that I had disappeared—or, better yet, absconded with her father’s twenty-dollar bill. If only all humans were like her and thought her way, there wouldn’t be an oblique ripple left on earth.

She sat next to my bed and we spoke. She held my hand. By the way, she had some bad news. What? Chlamydia.

“Not—” I started.

“No, from me,” she said.

“Does that mean I have it too, now?”

“Yes.” The good news is that her parents loved me. They thought I was funny. They loved the way I’d complained there were no fish knives at Maison Robert. It was typical of them to have noticed this.

Later that afternoon, one or two students straggled into my room, then a few teaching fellows, colleagues. Professor Lloyd-Greville dropped in to say hello. He too, apparently, had heard. Then my entire sophomore tutorial. There were about sixteen of us in the room, the hospital staff came and complained there was too much noise and that no one was allowed to smoke.

“But I smoke,” I protested.

“Well, you can, but no one else can. And, by the way, you shouldn’t either.”

Mrs. Lloyd-Greville showed up with a tiny pot of verbena from her garden and a box of chocolates. “They’re not for you, of course, but for your guests.” It was a double-decker box with a transparent parchment sheet placed above the chocolates indicating the intricate ingredients of the equally intricate assortment. The box was being passed around the crowded room when the unthinkable finally occurred. Kalaj walked into the room, bearing three porno magazines. I wanted to disappear under my bed covers. By eight-thirty, long after official visiting hours were over, I heard the loud voice of a woman. It was Zeinab, who had heard the news through the grapevine on Harvard Square. Then, minutes later, Abdul Majib, the old Iraqi kitchen attendant from the Lowell House kitchen, decided to make an appearance as well.

So here I was in bed, trapped and helpless, in a universe where all my clever partitions had totally collapsed.

Kalaj and Allison, my students, the department head, Cherbakoff, who came by on cat’s paws, then Zeinab the waitress, my colleagues, everyone, careerists and lowlifes, were thrown together as in a Fellini movie or a clambake on Cape Cod.

I knew that, with the exception of those in the room who’d had to recobble their lives and reinvent themselves to live in the States, very few would understand that no human being is one thing and one thing only, that each one of us has as many facets as there are people we know. Would it upset Allison to discover that the person I was with Zeinab couldn’t ever be who I was with her, and that this was my unspoken reason for keeping Kalaj away from her—because I showed him far more facets than the one or two I felt laid-back enough to share with her?

I could tell Allison seemed ill at ease. She sat on a chair in a corner, silent and remote, waiting for everyone to leave, not sure whether she should be my student or my girlfriend. Kalaj, who must have originally assumed I’d be alone, leaned against one of the walls with his camouflage jacket, his beret, his gunner’s scowl, and the three porno magazines rolled into the shape of a rain stick picked up on some guerrilla expedition in the Amazonian hinterland. If you didn’t know, you’d think he was a foreigner on some Third World scholarship who’d spent all-nighters working in a soup kitchen.

He had already put one of my students in his place by saying that the Marquis de Sade disgusted him. With another he insisted that all American writers were no better than rock ’n’ roll con artists, including those he hadn’t read and wasn’t likely to start now, ending his after-hours, sotto voce shoot-out-with-silencer by reminding everyone in the room, including the nurse who came to remove my tray, that hospitals, like courthouses—including doctors and lawyers—were put on this planet to beat down your soul till it was flattened into toilet paper—and of souls, ladies and gentlemen, we were each given one only, and it had to be returned, when we were well and done with it, intact and as good as new for the next person. As Nostradamus says— And he began quoting quatrains.

In the space of five minutes, after an initial period during which he had intrigued and charmed all those in the room, he eventually managed to scare everyone away. “Who was that crackpot?” someone asked weeks later.

EVERYTHING I FEARED since school had started was beginning to happen. From a traveling companion picked up in an oasis during my lonely summer days in Cambridge, Kalaj had become a deadweight that was impossible to shake off. After my release from hospital, there was nowhere to go in Cambridge without running into him. I could not sit with anyone in public without being joined by him or, as was more often the case, without being invited to join him at his table, or, worse yet, constantly having to dream up new excuses to explain why I couldn’t talk to him just yet. In the end, I grew tired of dreading to bump into him or of running out of excuses. I was crammed with emergency excuses and white lies the way people with runny noses stuff their pockets with too many handkerchiefs. I hated myself both for being too weak to fend him off and for worrying about it all the time.

I tried to avoid the bars and coffeehouses where I was likely to bump into him. Once, at the Harvest, I was sitting with two colleagues, and there was Kalaj at the bar, drinking his usual un dollar vingt-deux. I’ll never forget his eyes. He had seen me of course, as I had seen him, but he was allowing a glazed look to settle over his eyes, as though distracted by troubling, faraway thoughts—the Free Masonry, his cab, his long-term projects in the U.S., his father, the green card, his wife. Five minutes later, I heard his explosive, detonating, hysterical laugh in response to one of the bartender’s jokes. He was sending me a message. It was impossible to miss. I don’t need you. See, I can do better. There was something overly histrionic about his laughter that reminded me of the first time we’d met. You’re trying to be like these friends of yours, he seemed to say, but I know you’ll stiff the tip when no one’s looking.

I’ll never forget that vacant look on his face. He wasn’t pretending he hadn’t seen me. He was pretending he hadn’t seen me pretending not to see him. He was letting me off the hook.

A few days later he was waiting for me outside Boylston Hall. He needed two favors. “I’ll walk with you,” he explained.

His landlady was remodeling the house, and God only knew when she’d be able to let him have his room back. She was therefore giving him fair notice.

It didn’t sound very convincing. Had he done something wrong, tried to bring women into his bedroom? I asked. “Me, soil my sheets, when I could dirty a woman’s instead? Never.”

He wanted me to go with him to help find another bed-and-breakfast. But as we knocked at door after door and were already approaching Porter Square, the old, prim ladies on Everett, Mellen, Wendell, Sacramento, and Garfield Streets took one good look at him and had no vacancies. “Can you put me up for a few days?” he finally asked me. The question had never occurred to me and I was totally unprepared for it. I was surprised by my own answer. Of course I could, I said. All he needed, he said, was a sofa to sleep on, a quick shower in the morning, and he’d be out of my way till nighttime. Maybe he’d arrange to sleep at his current girlfriend’s, though he didn’t want to push things with her right now. “I promise I won’t be in your hair.”

I was a good soul, helping a friend in need, opening my place up to someone who’d be on the street otherwise. But as I was telling him that he should make himself at home except in the afternoon and early evenings (Allison), we passed by Sears, Roebuck, which immediately made me think that perhaps it was time to start planning to install a lock on my door in a few weeks.

Midway back from Porter Square, he bought me a warm tuna fish grinder at a Greek sandwich shop. While we were eating, he told me the next news item: because of a minor infraction, they’d revoked his driver’s license for a month. With all my contacts, he began—this was his typical phrase—couldn’t I help him find a job.

I thought for a while. The only jobs I knew anything about were in education.

“I’ve taught before.”

“I mean university education.”

“Teaching is teaching.”

I’d see what I could do. Instead of going to my office, I decided to pay my chairman a brief visit.

“But has he ever taught in an American institution?” Lloyd-Greville asked, when I finally brought up Kalaj’s predicament.

“He barely speaks English—which is exactly what you’ve always said we needed in a French teacher.”

Professor Lloyd-Greville concurred and asked me to speak about the matter to Professor Cherbakoff.

“And he speaks real, live French, the kind students are likely to speak when they land in France next summer,” I explained.

Cherbakoff also concurred.

As it happened, he said, there was a slot open for a part-time French-language instructor. One of the teaching fellows had had to resign owing to a complicated pregnancy that required extended bedrest.

Ten minutes later, I was back at Café Algiers telling Kalaj to go and see Cherbakoff right away.

I could tell he was nervous.

“Kalashnikov meets Cherbakoff,” taunted the Algerian, who’d overheard the conversation. Everyone laughed. Cherbakoff, Cutitoff, Cherbakoff, hadenough, Cherbakoff, Jerkhimoff. Parodies came breezing in from the kitchen area as almost everyone in Café Algiers clapped.

An hour or two later, Kalaj walked into the café bearing a large teacher’s edition of Parlons! with accompanying teacher’s manual, exercise book, reader, and lab book.

“Tomorrow at eight o’clock, Lamont 310.”

He looked at me more puzzled than ever. What was Lamont? The name of a building, I explained. He had never heard of it. Corner of Quincy Street and Mass Ave. He knew exactly what I meant. I explained to him that there was a periodical room in Lamont. After teaching, he could read all the French newspapers and periodicals he pleased without having to pay a cent. He liked the idea of reading newspapers and periodicals after teaching.

Where was he going to hold his office hours?

He thought about it.

“Here,” he said. “This way they’ll get a taste of French cafés.”

He said that Cherbakoff had mentioned something about an ID card, but Kalaj figured it would take too much time. He’d simply borrow mine when he needed it. It was useless arguing how this would have complicated matters for the two of us. I let him borrow mine. He said he had to prepare for his class tomorrow morning.

Had they suggested how they wanted him to teach French?

“I told them I already knew,” he replied.

This was not boding well at all. Suddenly I imagined a small village school outside Tunis where a local teacher, brandishing a long stick, walked around a classroom filled with cowering frock-clad boys. When one of them hesitated with the answer, whack!

“You can’t yell,” I said. “And you can’t hit anyone.”

He thought for a while.

“How am I going to teach them anything then?”

“You can’t yell, you can’t strike, you can’t even make them feel bad about themselves.”

“So, if someone is an absolute idiot, what do I tell him—that he’s a prodigy?”

Zeinab, who had overheard the conversation, started laughing at Kalaj when she realized that his teaching at Harvard was not a joke. “How can he teach them anything when he doesn’t understand the agreement of the past participle with the direct object?”

“I understand it well enough.”

“Prove it.”

“It would take too long and I don’t have the time.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Because you don’t know.”

“What I know is that you’d do anything to go to bed with me—but it won’t work.”

Near us a couple was just about to leave. They hadn’t touched the huge wedge of Brie they had ordered.

The young man stood up and went to pay. The girl was already waiting for him outside the doorway.

Kalaj grabbed the piece of cheese and spread it richly on a slice of baguette, which he then cut neatly in two, one half for me, the other for himself. Zeinab cast an angry look at him.

“They throw away everything in this country. I, I, I, Kalaj, am not ersatz. And I’m not a thief. Food is food, and this one has already been paid for.”

“If you wanted food, Kalaj, all you had to do was ask me,” said Zeinab, who would have cut off her right hand and given it to him had he just stared at it long enough.

“You won’t even tell me how the past participle agrees with the direct object, and now you want to feed me?”

“I told you: I’ll do everything for you.”

“Back to that again! Just leave me alone. I need to study what I have to teach these ersatz minds.”

“Just mind your past participle. I’ll explain it if you could only learn to listen,” said Zeinab.

“Explain. But be brief.”

I left them, went home, and changed into better clothes. I had to be on Chestnut Hill for cocktails at Allison’s parents. I had originally thought of asking Kalaj to drive me there, but then remembered he’d had his license revoked. Besides, arriving by cab all the way from Cambridge would send the wrong message. Now, without his license, the question was moot. I was going to take the train. “Try to find me a job with all those rich contacts of yours,” he had said. “I’ll be their driver, cook, bodyguard, pimp. Anything.”

All I kept thinking for the remainder of the evening was: Now he has complete access to my apartment, has my ID card, and even teaches where I teach. I’d never felt so invaded or taken over before. I hated the feeling. It was as if my double were squeezing me out. Why had I been so weak? And why was I thinking like a tightfisted, skinflint Jew? The Jew who likes his little things in their little place, who wants what people borrow instantly returned, who doesn’t open his doors too wide for fear strangers might storm in and never leave, the Jew who doesn’t want others to open their heart, fearing he might have to open his, who won’t venture in though God knows he’s been invited in so many tacit ways. Or had I become an American now: my space, your space, and lots of spaces in between?

I hated myself both for not wanting to let him into my apartment and for surrendering without a struggle—for not refusing to go to the cocktail party at Allison’s parents, and for taking the long train ride to get there, for saying I wasn’t sure I would go and for begrudging having to go, for not wanting to marry Allison and for letting her think I wanted nothing more, for not wanting to be a student of literature, for not wanting to be in Cambridge, or in the United States, all the while continuing in a rut that felt, and indeed was from the very start, the best that life had to offer.

As I watched my own reflection on the glass panels of the Green Line car heading out to Newton that evening, I kept asking myself: Was this really me, and were these really my features standing out on this totally alien Boston scenery? Who was I? How many masks could I be wearing at the same time? Who was I when I wasn’t looking? Was I simply a being without shape, ready to be molded into what everyone wanted me to be? Or by acquiescing so easily was I simply making up in advance for the treachery I invariably brought to those who trusted the face?

I looked at my face against this strange Boston background and saw a lawyer who overtips the waiter at lunch because he knows he’ll be vicious in court that afternoon. I saw a husband who buys his wife expensive jewelry—not after cheating on her, but before finding the person who’ll help destroy his marriage. I saw a priest who absolves everyone because he has lost his faith and no longer trusts in his vocation.

That evening, Allison wanted to drive me back home. I let her, though I would have preferred the train. There was a moment at the party when I wished to undo my tie if only to let fresh air into my system, but also to show I had less in common with the guests than with the waiters, who were all wearing open-collar, buttoned-down white dress shirts. Suddenly, I wanted to be alone and watch Kalaj roll a cigarette as he made fun of this entire party with its jumbo gravity hanging from its jumbo chandeliers, the jumbo levity of the frou-froued guests who kissy-kissed and huggy-hugged with their jumbo show of plenitude and ease. Amerloques, I could hear him say. “Take this one,” he’d point to a woman in the crowd. “Skin like burlap. Three generations ago she was scrounging turnips out of the dead land. And as for these two,” he’d snicker, “they may have come on board a sailboat, but look under, and you’ll find the coarseness of a sea dog and the larceny of stevedores.”

I wanted to sit by myself in the empty train car and let the hypnotic rhythm of the wheels dull the fire within me. All these wealthy people who simply belonged. Their large cars. Their large mansions. Their startled large eyes when they repeated my name. Their professed love for the Mediterranean which they couldn’t, if you gave them ten lifetimes, begin to understand, because what they always liked instead was the cold Atlantic and the limitless Pacific, because Kalaj was right, this was another world, and this was another tongue, and these people were a different order of beings, just as their women were women plus something, or maybe minus something that made them different from the women we’d known and been raised by and been taught to worship, because, among so many things, they were everything that a man was not and could never be. Kalaj would understand. And yet now, strangely enough, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him either, because I was ashamed of him, because I was tired of him, because however much I was closer to him than to any of these people at this party, the distance between him and me was big enough to remind me, even when I missed him, that estrangement was carved into me with acid and barbed wire. I was no closer to him than I was to them.

Allison and I sat in the car outside my building. “Tell me what’s wrong?” she finally asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“I know something is wrong, very wrong, why won’t you tell me?” I hoped she wasn’t going to cry or make me feel sorry for her. I didn’t want to hate myself more than I already did.

I saw my building, and I saw my own reflection on the window of her car, and I thought of the train I’d have taken from Chestnut Hill and would probably still be on before changing at Park Square. Yes, there was plenty wrong, everything was wrong, but how could I begin to tell her when I didn’t know myself? What truth would I speak, when I didn’t even know the truth? “Is it that you don’t love me—or not enough—or not at all?” How to explain that I did love her, that of all the women I’d known, she was the one I would want to live with, and be loved by, and have children with. “I don’t want to give you up,” she finally said.

All I said in reply was “Sometimes I need to be alone.” I didn’t know I was going to say this until it had come out of my mouth.

“I thought we were happy.”

“We are.”

“Then what is it?”

I didn’t know. Like an actor who wants to sit alone in his booth after all the lights are out and everyone’s gone home, I wanted to take my time removing the makeup, the wig, the false teeth, the skin glow, the eyelashes, take time to recover myself and see the face, not the mask, not the mask again, always the mask again. I wanted to talk to myself in French, in my own French accent, speak as those who brought me into this world had taught me to speak. I was tired of English, tired of anything that didn’t smack of sea salt in the summertime and of the brine of foods prepared in our kitchens on those endless summer afternoons when the cicadas rattled like mad and time slackened and the sea beckoned, listless and sleek, through the windows of our bedrooms when we didn’t wish to nap but found ourselves lulled by the sound of the waves all the same. I was even tired of my make-believe Paris, tired of the screens I put up, tired of thinking I wore a mask, tired of longing for my face, tired of thinking it wasn’t the mask I was quarreling with, but the face—tired of fearing there’d never even been, might not ever be a face. Tired of fearing I was incapable of loving anyone or anything.

“I’m going to drive back home now. I’ll call you tomorrow. If you can’t tell me the truth, then I’ll know, and I swear I’ll never bother you again.”

She did as she promised. She called me once the next day. And then never again.

To Kalaj, when I told him what Allison had said, hers was all corporate ersatz-speak. But it was, and I knew it even then, the most honorable and most tactful behavior I’d witnessed in any woman in my life. She’d been candid and bold from start to finish. She knew what she wanted. I didn’t even know how to want, let alone what I wanted. I admired her.

As we said good night that evening, I caught myself already wishing she’d never call me the next day. I didn’t want to have the one-on-one postmortem I knew awaited us tomorrow. If to avoid that call I’d have to lose her to a fatal car accident on her way back to her parents’ house that night, so be it. I was ashamed of myself. But shame was just a metaphor, a word, nothing. In the large exchange house of the soul, it was another bankrupt word that didn’t help me get any closer to what I was feeling.

On my way to the fourth floor that night, my heart almost sank: I remembered that Kalaj would be upstairs. I caught myself making the same wish for him as well. If only they’d deport him tonight so that I wouldn’t have to explain why I wanted him out of my life. And if he and Allison were to crash into each other tonight, so much the better.

Kalaj was not upstairs. I felt for him as I pictured him cramming for his first day of teaching. I felt for Allison too, weeping, or perhaps not, as she drove all the way back to Newton tonight. And for her parents, rich and self-satisfied as they were, I felt for them too; they worried over their daughter’s crush on a man who kept ducking and slipping and leading people on like a fish who nips but never bites.