Harvard Square

by André Aciman

  “Here,” he said, producing a tiny pocket notebook. He removed the rubber band around the notebook and slipped it around his wrist. I had never seen his handwriting before. It was everything he wasn’t: neat, tentative, timid, the product of a frightened child in harsh, French, colonial schools where they taught you self-hatred for being who you were (if you were half French), for not being French (if you were an Arab), and for wishing to be French (if you were never going to be). The handwriting of someone who had never grown up, who’d had calligraphy beaten into him. It surprised me. “Read,” he said.

  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.

  Cat snuggles on her bed.

  The stench from the litter box.

  Bathroom door never locks.

  Toilet flushes twice.

  Impossible to repair. Shower drips too.

  I see the Charles. And the Longfellow Bridge.

  Sometimes nothing because of the fog.

  And I hear nothing. Sometimes an airplane.

  No one sleeps in the adjacent room;

  It used to be her mother’s once,

  She died in her sleep.

  They never emptied her closet,

  The dresser and the turntable were hers too.

  No one plays music in the house.

  After all his put-downs and vile words about his current wife, he had written a poem for her in the style of Jacques Prévert. Was he trying to tell me he’d grown fond of her?

  “It’s all true,” he finally said, taking back the notebook, slipping the rubber band around it, and putting the notebook back in his vest pocket.

  I was tempted to say it felt very true to me as well. “Have you ever shown it to her?”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  I must have looked totally baffled.

  “I just wrote this because I didn’t want to forget what her apartment looked like.”

  Because I didn’t want to forget was the heart and soul of poetry. Had any poet been more candid about his craft?

  I was speechless with admiration. This cabdriver was a minimalist poet. He not only trained a pair of fresh yet jaundiced eyes on the world around him, but he saw into the very heart of things simply by describing stray objects. The whole thing capped with the magic of two verses: No one sleeps in the adjacent room paralleled by No one plays music in the house. Leave it to a man born in North Africa to capture the hapless, gritty lives of local Cantabrigians.

  “She claims I married her for a green card—”

  “Well, did you?” I asked, expecting an outraged, heartwarming denial.

  “Of course I did. You don’t think I married her for her good looks.”

  “Then why did you write her a poem?”

  “What poem?”

  “This thing about the dresser, turntable, ironing board.”

  His turn to look entirely nonplussed.

  “What are you, stupid?” Baffled looks on both our faces. “Poem? Me? My lawyer gave me a list of questions they ask you at Immigration Services. They’re cunning people and they want to make sure you actually live together as husband and wife and that your marriage isn’t just a ploy to get a green card to stay in this country. So they ask you to describe the bedroom, the kind of pajamas she wears, where she keeps her diaphragm, if you fuck in the kitchen . . .”

  Rat-tat-tat.

  “Me, write a poem . . . for her? You should see her face first.”

  Right away, he mimicked her mouth by pulling his nether lip all the way down to expose the roots of his gums. “When she laughs with these gums of hers your penis runs for cover. When I kiss her all I can think of are dentists. As for oral sex—!” He shakes his shoulders and feigns a shiver. Once again he emits his loud, thunderous laugh.

  “And yet she took away the only roof I had in this country. The only thing I own now is my cab. And my zeb. That’s it. I sew my own buttons like a woman and mend my own shirts like a fisherman, and I hate fish, and in my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.”

  He was reaching for the trigger. Any moment now and a string of invectives would come shooting out of his mouth.

  But soon a woman walked into Anyochka’s. She was svelte, beautiful, with lovely skin. “French,” he said. “French and Jewish.”

  “How do you know,” I whispered.

  “I know. Trust me!”

  I told him to hush. “She’s looking at us.”

  “All the better. She’s looking at us because she wants to speak to us.”

  But he went on with his rant about his wife, her teeth, his teeth—“Your teeth aren’t so hot either,” he said, referring to my own. He heaved a sigh. “Pretty soon,” he threw in, “we’ll have to go back to listen to Sabatini, the guitarist who’s playing tonight at Café Algiers, because I love guitar music.”

  There was something strained, staged, and velvety in the way he pronounced Sabatini. Declamation rippled in every syllable as his voice rose an octave. This, it suddenly occurred to me, was being said for the benefit of the woman who had just walked in. He was setting the scene. He didn’t look at her, but his thoughts and speech seemed aimed at no one else.

  At some point, he could no longer stand the silence between our tables.

  “You’re looking at us because I can tell you understand.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said in French. She was blushing.

  “We didn’t happen to say anything offensive, did we?”

  “No.”

  “We are staying here for dinner. It’s way too hot everywhere else.” She smiled back. “I think it’s croque monsieurs or cold soup today.”

  “Cold soup sounds like a good idea,” she said, not even looking at the crinkled menu. The waitress came and took the order. There were no other customers except for us this evening. He looked at her, she looked back, then looked away.

  “Unless you’re thinking of eating all by yourself or have other plans, would you like to join us?”

  It turned out that she had no plans for dinner and was happy to join us.

  He immediately shifted to the end of his side of the table. The next thing we knew we were sitting all three together. No one had told her Boston could grow this hot in the summer. She missed home. Toulouse, she answered. He missed home too, but it was much hotter there than here, though the sea helped. Obviously he was waiting for her to ask where? She did. Reluctantly, he named a tiny town in Tunisia, Sidi Bou Saïd, adding, the most beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria. Ever heard of it? No, never. There was a reason why most people had never heard of it. Why was that? she asked. The Tunisian Tourism Office was even more incompetent than the Massachusetts Tourism Office. She laughed. Why? Why? He asked rhetorically—because everyone told you about Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Walden Pond. But he still couldn’t understand who Walden Pond was or what role he played in the American Revolution. I noticed for the first time that her laughter was not simply convivial; she was laughing heartily, and Kalaj couldn’t have been happier.

  The ice was broken. He told her his name, then told her mine. But she could call him Kalaj. How long had she been here? Six months. Same exact thing with me, he exclaimed, as though the coincidence was a prescient sign of something far too meaningful to be neglected. Everything she said meant a great deal in the Book of Fate. And was she happier here than in Toulouse? A long story, she replied. You? she asked. My story is surely far longer than yours; it has good people and some not very good people. Does yours have good people? he asked, obviously a leading question. I don’t know, she replied, maybe there are fewer good people than I thought. “Others can be cruel, and we too can be cruel. Life makes us behave unfairly, doesn’t it?” he said, to show that some people are big enough to t
ake the blame and learn from their mistakes. She shrugged her shoulders, meaning she didn’t know, hadn’t decided, didn’t care to discuss. “But let me tell you one thing?” he said, and waited a few seconds before continuing with his sentence. She turned her face to him, waiting to hear what he had to say. “Amazing things still happen.”

  “Oh?”

  “Take tonight for example. I ran into my friend here but had no idea I was going to. We came here because it was boiling hot at Café Algiers. And yet, after dinner we’re headed back to Algiers to listen to Sabatini play the guitar. And in between this, that, and what else, we run into you.” Meaning: Isn’t life full of miracles? Kalaj ordered three glasses of wine. A silent look from him asked me if it was all right to order more wine, meaning he and I were splitting the bill. I nodded. But then I remembered and panicked. I immediately signaled as discreetly as possible: Could you lend me ten dollars? He read me loud and clear. Pas de problème came his immediate message. From under the table he handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill. I signaled tomorrow, I promise. He signaled an exasperated Please!!! Meaning, Not to worry. We were all happy. The wine came, he took up the joke about Walden Pond and the Tunisian Tourism Office and Sidi Bou Saïd, then skipped back to Sabatini. “Let’s face it,” he added, “the man is no concert master with the guitar. But it’s Sunday, and this is only Cambridge, Cambridge is dead tonight, and I always like to make the best of things and end a week with friends and good cheer. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  Santé!

  And with this both he and I put our worries aside. He forgot all about his green card, I about my exams, my Ph.D., everything. I liked forgetting my cares. Thanks to wine, you didn’t forget them, they just stopped scaring you for a while.

  IN NO TIME we reinvented France with the very little we had that evening. Bread, butter, three wedges of Brie, croque monsieur, a bowl of vichyssoise for her, a green salad to share, still more wine, dimmed café lights, laughter, French music in the background. Cambridge was just a detail.

  Her name was Léonie Léonard. Kalaj couldn’t resist. But it’s a pleonasm. Yes, it was, she said shyly. Pléonie Pléonasme. Laughter, laughter. I told them that this wasn’t a pleonasm, that he was confusing a pleonasm with a tautology or, more plainly, with a redundancy. He looked at me with startled eyes and said, “Are you crazy, Professor?” We burst out laughing again.

  Within minutes, we had her entire life story. He listened, posed leading questions, listened, joked, and on occasion, especially when he was laughing, reached out to touch her elbow, her wrist. He had picked up shrink talk from the women he’d met in Cambridge and understood that once a woman bares her soul there’s little else she won’t bare, the way he’d say that once a woman tells you she’s dreamed of you, you know what else she wants from you. It was just a matter of how you let her get there. He asked, she answered, he asked again, she answered, then asked, each essentially leading the other on, provided none went too fast and none folded. You were not allowed to pass. That was his rule. You had to remain in the game, at the table until everyone showed their cards. Getting bored, he once told me, was unthinkable. I interrupted their back-and-forth once or twice, and both times would have ruffled their seamless Mozart duet had either paid any attention. I had never seen someone turn la drague into a way of life. He desired women no more than anyone else, nor was he better-looking than other men. But without women he was nothing. He said so himself but never quite understood it. The important thing is that women did. He wanted women all the time. As soon as he saw a woman, a light flared in his eyes. He became excited, alert, grateful, sweet; he needed to touch, caress, kiss, bite. Women picked this up immediately. Just the way he stared at their skin, their knees, their feet screamed If I don’t touch, I am as good as dead, I don’t exist. He would stare at them straight in the eyes, brazenly, and then, eventually, let a quiver on his lips suggest a smile. He felt passion first, love much later, but interest always. Being so visibly and so boldly desired made women desire him back, which stirred his desire even further. In this as in other things, there was no ambiguity, no hesitation, no shame, no running for cover. The moral couldn’t have been simpler: if you desired someone badly enough, and desired them in the pit of your stomach, chances were they desired you no less. What you wore, who you were, what you looked like were altogether insignificant.

  He was available to all women, yet he always ended up with the same type. They were between twenty-five and thirty-five, sometimes in their early forties. They had either been married or just gotten out of terrible relationships and were clearly ready to hurtle into one that promised no better. All were handicraft artists of one stripe or another, which, in his eyes, meant they came from money and were all in therapy. They were also nurses, paralegals, florists, musicians, hygienists, decorators, hairdressers, babysitters—one was even a closet organizer/consultant, another a dog walker. It did not matter what they did, what they said, who they were. He was after passion, because he had so much of it to give; after hope, because he had so little left; after sex, because it evened the playing field between him and everyone else, because sex was his shortcut, his conduit, his way of finding humanity in an otherwise cold and lusterless world, a vagrant’s last trump card to get back into the family of man. But if you asked him what he wanted most in life, he’d have said, without hesitating, “Green card.” It defined who he was at the time, how he lived, and ultimately what everything, including getting laid, was intended to procure him: la green carte. I had a green carte. Zeinab, the girl behind the counter at Café Algiers, had a green carte, so did her brother, another cabdriver. Kalaj simply looked on, like a Titan staring at the goings-on of lesser divinities from across the crags of exclusion. As for the women who’d have done anything for a man who spoke Kalashnikov when he was hot and could reach out and touch their wrist and outshrink the sharpest therapist on Harvard Square, they had probably never even seen a green carte in their lives. They were bona fide through and through. He, on the other hand, was Monsieur Pariah, an unharnessed thoroughbred with a touch of France, a few tricks from the East, and enough gumption in his fist to remind the parents of every freethinking, ill-behaved suburban daughter that she could have brought home someone far, far worse had she really meant to scare the neighbors.

  After Anyochka’s, the three of us ambled back toward Café Algiers. She walked between us, leisurely and friendly. We’d stop for no reason, chat, pick up our pace, then stop again. At one point she even lingered before crossing the street as I went over some of the oddest aspects of English grammar. They laughed. I was laughing as well. I looked forward to iced coffee, the music, and the three of us talking about anything that came our way. But suddenly, Léonie said she had to leave. “Bonne soirée,” Kalaj said, as abruptly as she announced her departure. Bonne soirée was his version of a gallant, almost rakish send-off. It suggested that the evening was far from over yet and held out wonderful and unexpected prospects for you.

  “She must have felt the heat,” I said, trying to show I too knew a few things about women.

  “Maybe. My guess is that she is a live-in babysitter and that it’s time for her to relieve the parents. There’ll be another time.”

  He ordered two cinquante-quatres for us.

  “I give her at the most two to three days. She’ll show up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Did she give you a sign?” I said, emphasizing the word in an attempt to be humorous and show how unfounded was his assumption.

  “No sign at all. I just know.” He looked at me. “With all your Harvard education, you don’t understand women, do you?”

  “Oh?” I said stressing yet more irony in my voice to suggest that I did understand them, and how.

  “No you don’t. You’re too flustered, so you’re either too quiet or, my bet is, you rush things. In all things, and not just women, it’s how you manage time—how you sit and wait and le
t things happen.” Knowing how to distend the moment and linger—savoir traîner, he called it—dragging one’s feet and letting the things you want come to you. Luck behaved no differently.

  I said nothing, felt chastened. Was I so easy to read?

  Did he see into the future as well?

  Sabatini, as it turned out, played a few Spanish songs on his guitar. He played too slowly. But people clapped, and some cheered. A typical Sunday crowd. Fringe people. I was fringe people too. Then a young teenager, Sabatini’s pupil, borrowed his master’s guitar and played a short piece. The applause couldn’t have been more enthusiastic, and before the clapping died down, the boy immediately launched into a dreamy rendition of Chopin’s Andante spianato. It was a moving, extended tribute to his teacher, and after the applause, Kalaj immediately walked up to the boy’s father and said, “You watch, one day, one day soon . . .” He couldn’t come up with the right words or finish his sentence, but the father accepted graciously.

  Kalaj, I could tell, was shaken. Maybe it was the boy’s youth, or the son he never had, or never knew he had, or wished he had. Maybe it was just Chopin.

  “Let’s hope he plays something else,” I said, trying to ease the tension on Kalaj’s face and allow him to stay without having to ask whether I minded.

  “No. Enough classical music for one night.”

  I knew what he was thinking: there were no women at Café Algiers that evening.

  That night we ended at the Harvest, which was across the narrow passage connecting Brattle Street to Mount Auburn Street. Just some wine, we agreed. Poor man’s fare. It cost a bit more than a dollar twenty-two, but not much more. Kalaj rolled his cigarettes, which saved him a lot of money, because he was constantly smoking. From time to time, I’d glimpse a woman staring as he rolled a cigarette. He would keep rolling and rolling, seemingly unaware of everyone around him, and then suddenly, once it was rolled and he seemed happy with it, he’d whip out his finished cigarette, turn around, and hand it to the woman who’d been staring all along. It was a conversation piece. Everything was or became a conversation piece. You started with almost nothing, it didn’t matter what—Walden Pond, the weather, vichyssoise, anything—provided you started. If the other was interested, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t be, she’d raise you. Then, all you did was raise her again, always by a penny, never more. Never rush, never hesitate, never stop staring, and never fold. And be cheerful. Things, as he also liked to say, always led somewhere, most likely to a bedroom, but as long as you kept the pennies coming, they always took you by surprise, even when you knew where they were headed all along. One day in a very small café in Paris he had kept them coming. She was a rich magazine editor from Italy. They spoke about food, she loved food, she needed a cook, he knew how to cook . . . The rest, well, he’d already told everyone in Cambridge.