Harvard Square

by André Aciman

  “How do you know all this?”

  “How do I know! Easy. He’s going through the motions, but you can tell he’s hoping she’ll ask him to stop. Either this, or he’s decided it’s a loss but keeps at it to prove that at least he tried. And besides, there’s another reason.” Here, with his back leaning against the wall, he finally lit the cigarette he’d been dangling from his lips ever since rolling it at Café Algiers. “The fact is he’s ugly, and he knows it. All that stubble on his face is intended to make him look cool, but it doesn’t work.”

  I was beginning to wonder what he thought of me. Had he already figured me out? I was not sure I wanted to know.

  One of the waiters came and asked if we wanted another glass of wine. “In a moment,” said Kalaj, almost offended that management was trying to push drinks now. “Can’t he see I’m still drinking?”

  Meanwhile another waitress had removed the empty bowl of chicken wings only to return moments later and put down another bowl brimming with more of the same. “A few more bites won’t hurt us,” he said.

  Soon, the friend he had left behind at Café Algiers also stepped in. “There he is again. Let’s leave.”

  I was just starting to like Césarion’s. I had grown to like the petits sandwiches, and the chicken wings weren’t so bad either.

  “There’s nothing happening here tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The women are taken.”

  “What about the one leaning on the pillar,” I pointed out, if only to persuade him to stay a while longer.

  “She works here.”

  I didn’t have to leave or follow him, and yet I walked out with him. As we stepped out into the early evening light, he muttered, “Je déteste ’appy hower.”

  It was nearing sunset. I never liked sunsets around Harvard Square, never liked Mount Auburn Street, especially late on Sunday afternoons when its tired, declining light and its shuttered, old New-England-town look suggested a mix of lingering wealth, incipient decrepitude, and the stealthy patter of movements in quiet nursing homes where early supper is being served as soon as Sunday’s visitors have left. Mount Auburn had always stood for the grungy backside of Cambridge, and now that the students were gone, its deserted sidewalks and ugly post office looked as gray and wretched as an aging dowager sans makeup.

  I was growing restless and needed to get back to my reading. Besides, Kalaj was beginning to buttonhole me, and I didn’t like it.

  Suddenly, as we were still on the stairway leading up to the street, he gave me his hand and shook mine. “Time went by faster than I thought. I must drive my cab.”

  He must have read what was going through my mind. It would be just like him to end a conversation abruptly. It made saying goodbye easy. “Maybe we’ll see each other another time. Bonne soirée.” Snap!

  Before going home, on impulse, I headed back downstairs to Césarion’s. I had always been a light eater and what I’d seen during happy hour there could easily pass for tonight’s fare if I managed to wolf down more wings. Yet after only a few moments downstairs by myself I couldn’t have felt more out of place. Not my crowd, not my scene. Without Kalaj and the unreal France he projected on everything around us that afternoon, I felt awkward, exposed; everyone seemed to be an habitué here, whereas I needed to be seen talking to someone, someone who knew his way around this strange ritual called happy hour and who had lived long enough on the fringe of things not to feel uncomfortable or even louche when caught slumming for more than five minutes. I couldn’t even find the gumption to pick up another chicken wing. So, before daring to touch the food, I hesitated, then finally managed to order another glass of wine. By the time the bartender served me a glass of red, the big bowl of chicken wings had disappeared. Perhaps they would replenish it soon. But the large bowl of petits sandwiches had also been taken away. It took me a while to realize that happy hour was over and that the price of wine, when I finally asked how much I owed the bartender, had doubled.

  Crestfallen, I walked back to the Square and headed toward Lowell House. The locked gate made me feel more lonely and homesick. But if Kalaj were sitting in his cab near the Square and happened to spot me on my way to Lowell House, I wanted him to know that the world I was headed back to right now was the furthest thing from the greasy-fingered warren of shabby happy-hour scavengers who’d champ down whatever was dished out with a cheap glass of pale red wine for a dollar twenty-two. I was angry. I wanted him to envy me, perhaps because I needed another’s gaze to help me look more kindly on my life and not see that, like so many left over in Cambridge this summer, I too was reduced to slumming. Perhaps I wanted to prove to him, and to myself through him, that I hadn’t sunk so low, that however privileged my life had once been in Alexandria, I had found ways to put both the Middle East and Europe behind me now and discovered, if not a new home, at least a new place in the world that could, to anyone who didn’t know better, pass for a baronial estate. I could never allow myself to think this was a home, because I knew that the precarious smidgen of privilege that Harvard doled out to people like me could, at a moment’s notice and with little more than a few scratches from Lloyd-Greville’s vintage Montegrappa pen, be readily taken away and put me back on the street by mid-January.

  As I walked on the quiet cobbled sidewalk that led up to the locked gateway of Lowell House, I knew I was momentarily allowing myself to slip into the comforting childhood memory of erstwhile summers back in Egypt where you showered just before dinnertime, put on clean clothes after spending the day at the beach, and awaited whatever life might throw your way that evening. I peered through the locked gate entrance and spied the entirely deserted grassy courtyard where, months earlier that year, I’d sat and taught my class after students had begged me to hold the class outside. Now students and teachers were summering at places that weren’t necessarily far from Cambridge but whose whereabouts along the eastern seaboard I knew nothing of. I envied them their beaches, their summers.

  Maybe Kalaj and I were not so different after all. Everything about us was transient and provisional, as if history wasn’t done experimenting on us and couldn’t decide what to do next.

  But there was a difference: he was the control in the experiment; I the experimented-on. He was given the placebo, I the real medicine. I had witnessed the effects of the new drug, while he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working. Neither of us belonged, but he was still the nomad, I had a ground to stand on. I had a green card, he a driver’s license. He saw the precipice every day of his life, I never had to look down that deep. There was always a fence or a hedge to block the view; he had run out of all partitions. But there was another difference between us: he knew how to wiggle his way around the precipice; I, however, put him right between the precipice and me. He was my screen, my mentor, my voice. Perhaps his was the life I was desperate to try out.

  2

  A WEEK LATER, ON SUNDAY, I CAME ONCE AGAIN TO Café Algiers, hoping that Kalaj wouldn’t show up, yet sensing all along that he might. This was another hot, stifling late summer day, and there was nowhere to go for cool air except the movies, but I didn’t want to spend the money. I looked at where he’d been sitting last week. A couple with a baby was occupying that table, so I found a table elsewhere in the café, sat down, and took out a copy of La Rochefoucauld’s Mémoires. Suddenly, I heard his voice. He was seated not far from me and was arguing with his backgammon opponent.

  “You’ve done it again; don’t do it. This is a warning.”

  I couldn’t tell whether this was the common verbal squabbling between backgammon players or an earnest warning. Just then Kalaj slapped a black ivory chip very loudly on the backgammon bar, almost in a rage.

  “Nique ta mère, neek your mother!”

  Another dice throw, and his opponent, Moumou the Algerian, yelped, “Nique la tienne, neek yours!”

  “With what?” bandied Kalaj.

  “Just play!” said Moumou.

  Kalaj rolled th
e dice again, a double something, I couldn’t tell what, but I knew it was a double because I immediately heard slap, slap, slap, slap, four times. This was the endgame and he was going to win. But then he exploded.

  “Not again! I refuse to play with you!”

  “Why?” the Algerian asked.

  “I will never, never, never play with you again.”

  “Did I cheat?”

  “Did I say you cheated?”

  “Then what are you objecting to, what are you saying?”

  “I am saying that you cannot keep rolling threes and ones every single time.”

  “Why?”

  “Parce que c’est mathématiquement impossible.”

  Kalaj insisted on having him throw the dice again, because he was persuaded there was something fishy in his manner of holding the dice that kept rolling a three and a one. The Algerian was glad to oblige but said that the three and one he originally played still counted. He threw a five and a six.

  “No,” objected Kalaj, “hold the dice the way you did before, in that underhanded way you have of slamming the dice against the corner of the box. Everything about you is underhanded. Like your people.”

  “Like this you mean?” asked the Algerian, holding the dice in the way Kalaj had described.

  “Exactly.”

  “But that’s how I always throw my dice.”

  “Just play!”

  The man threw his dice and rolled a three and one.

  “What did I tell you? Every time you throw the dice that way it’s a three and one.”

  “But you’re absolutely mad, no wonder you have the brains of a tapir.”

  “I am not mad.”

  “You try then.”

  Kalaj grabbed the dice and rolled a four and a two.

  “Well, it’s because I don’t know how to do it your way. I’m never playing with you again. Bonne journée.”

  He stood up, looked around, saw me, and walked over to my table. I knew I’d have to give up reading my book. He pulled up a chair and sat at my table, gave me a big handshake, tousled my hair, scanned the place from where he was now sitting in case he’d missed something during backgammon, and ordered coffee. “It’s way too hot,” he said. After ten or so minutes, he stood up, gulped down the remaining coffee, and said he knew of a place where it might be cooler—“Let’s go!”

  Together we walked out to a small French patisserie on Holyoke Street. This was where the younger members of the faculty sometimes had coffee with graduate students when they wished to seem less formal. This was where you griped and groused and poured your heart out to teachers who meant well but couldn’t really change the system or do anything to help. This is also where they met you when they didn’t get tenure and grumbled on and on only to remind you that you were no less ineffectual as a friend than they were when you yourself were in the doghouse. Yet this, I told Kalaj, was where I had tutored French to Heather twice a week during the previous spring term.

  “Hezer, who?” he asked. Heather an undergraduate rower. I could just imagine the jokes he’d make at the expense of a woman whose voice was far lower than mine. I told him how at one point Heather had looked up at me during one of our tutorials and, on a whim it seemed, asked if I was interested in becoming a tutor at Lowell House. Of course I was interested. But how would she be able to help? Her answer couldn’t have been more lapidary. “No problem, then!” I didn’t understand what no problem meant. “No problem, as in pas de problème,” she joked in the French she knew she’d never learn to speak. Gruff, husky, a touch butch. Seeing I wasn’t persuaded, she added, “I mean gladly!” “You’re sure?” “Sure I’m sure.” But noticing I continued to nurse lingering doubts about her offer, she finally blurted, “Look, I have pull.” Abrupt, no-nonsense, to the point. This, it took me a long while to realize, was how Park Avenue WASPs spoke their candor and how they went out of their way to make things happen when they wished to make them happen. I didn’t believe she had pull, or anything like it. But a month later I was asked to apply to become a non-resident house tutor.

  She liked rowing every morning, she liked George Eliot, and she worshipped Parsifal. Go figure.

  Kalaj was not surprised. He asked if I had to sleep with her after that. “No,” I said. “This was not about sex.”

  “Of course it’s about sex,” he shot back. “You’re the type who never sees that it’s always about sex. Always, always.” Maybe he was right, I said, thinking back to Heather and suddenly realizing that perhaps she’d been trying to tell me something I had failed to hear. “Was she ugly?” he asked. “No. Despite the voice, quite sexy.” He made me imitate her voice, her manner of speaking, her gestures, finally bursting out laughing when I consented to imitate her French accent.

  “They’re put together differently, these women,” he finally said, and right away launched into his sermon on nectarines.

  Two minutes.

  Anyochka’s was totally empty that night, its large glass door wide open. The AC was broken. We ordered two croque monsieurs, a luxury in my budget, but it was summer vacation, and I felt like spoiling myself. Amid the dimmed lights and the whir of an old ceiling fan, he told me all about his childhood in Tunisia and about his studies in France. His specialty: informatique. He explained what precisely a byte was, 1’s and 0’s. I couldn’t understand a thing. He explained again. Still couldn’t understand. He tried a third time. Then he let the matter drop. “You’re simply incapable, hopeless.” Seeing no immediate future in informatique, he became a self-employed caterer. He married his sous-chef, though it became obvious enough by the rest of the tale that it was her money that had set him up in business. “She betrayed me. She destroyed me. And she ruined me.” He was now married to an American.

  “Where is your wife?” I asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Does she travel a lot?”

  “I told you I have no idea. Don’t you understand when I speak?”

  Rat-tat-tat, but aimed at me this time. What was I even doing having dinner with this creep? I was about to explain my question.

  “No need to apologize. I don’t give a damn. Well,” he changed his mind, “let me explain.”

  Five minutes.

  They met in an underground station in Boston. He had just missed the train to Park Square and, without thinking, had muttered a curse in French. You seem upset, the woman on the platform had said. I am upset. She thought he was speaking to her. No, he wasn’t. He was just cursing out loud. But one thing led to another. Things invariably did with him. Within days they were married. Soon after their wedding he filed his application for a green card.

  What had made him come to the States?

  “Let me explain.”

  Four minutes.

  And how did he come to be interested in computers?

  “Well, you see—”

  Four more minutes.

  The tales were gnarled together and could take forever to sort out, but I listened because they had all the makings of a latter-day picaresque novel. After his French wife had abandoned him—she had kicked him out, actually—he befriended an Italian businesswoman who was staying in Paris and who had hired him as her personal chef. From cook he became her driver, then her social secretary, till he graduated to a more meaningful occupation and was invited to live with her in Milan while her husband was away. The husband returned, heard all he needed to hear, and threatened to come after Kalaj. That is when Kalaj believed it was time to flee, and through her contacts, ended up in, of all places, Harvard Square, to stay with her best friend, who was an Italian graduate student at Harvard and whom, it happened, I knew quite well and I liked. “Like her all you want,” was his reply. After about two weeks, the graduate student and her live-in boyfriend took Kalaj aside and informed him that perhaps he should start thinking of moving elsewhere.

  Perhaps you should start thinking of moving elsewhere, he mimicked, making fun of their couched language. He moved out that same afternoon. Better a park ben
ch. Better the grimy floor in a soup kitchen. Better a public bathroom. They needed space! Space was a concept that was totally foreign to him—as though humans had suddenly become galactic mutants in need of huge magnetic shields. “Me, impose on people?—God forbid.” In fact, he had just been kicked out from his newer digs when he missed that underground train to Park Square. This time last year, he finally said, he had never even heard of Cambridge, much less of Harvard Square. Now he knew more than he’d ever wished. He and his amerloque wife had split up. Actually, she too had kicked him out. She was a lay analyst. Shelley. Very rich parents. Jewish.

  “Probably didn’t like having an Arab taxi driver for a husband,” I threw in.

  “No, that wasn’t it.”

  “She didn’t know French and you didn’t know English well enough?”

  “No, not that either.”

  “What, then?”

  Out poured yet another screed against American women. Did I know the one about the Arab necrophiliac? Yes, I did. He had told me the joke last week. Well, she was the dead woman in his bed. Even his left hand was more sensual. After sex, it was like leaving a motel room: you slammed the door shut, slipped your keys under the doormat, and headed for your car. You didn’t even bother switching the TV off.

  Now she was divorcing him.

  “At some point,” he went on, “I couldn’t do it with her any longer. I became numb. Like my friend the Algerian, whose ship doesn’t sail, and whose arrows won’t fly—you understand, right?—poor fellow. I didn’t want to ask him for his pills, but a friend told me that peanut butter helped a lot. So I downed so much peanut butter that the color of my skin began to change. But no waking my Monsieur Zeb. I was so worried. Because without him, you know, I am nothing, I have nothing. Because he’s all the gold I carry. But then I met someone else . . . and bam! I’m a Sputnik, a Kalashnikov, a Trans-Siberian locomotive with triple the horsepower of the mounted cavalry at the battle of Friedland, stiffer than oak and harder than marble and bigger than Zeinab’s broomstick.” He laughed. “Still, I do miss her sometimes. She was my wife, you know.”