Harvard Square: A Novel

by André Aciman

  After the cocktail reception, I ducked dinner and found my way to Café Algiers, then to Casablanca, then to the Harvest. But Kalaj was nowhere. When I asked the waiters and bartenders, they said they hadn’t seen him. Suddenly I felt something fierce. Why did it take so long to admit why I’d come looking for him? I wanted to find all three of them, him, Léonie, and Ekaterina. And if I didn’t find the three of them, I wanted Léonie to tell me where to find Ekaterina. And if Léonie was nowhere, I wanted to find Ekaterina sitting alone. If only I had skipped the Master’s Tea and the cocktails immediately following. Perhaps it was the three sherries on an empty stomach speaking, perhaps it was too much sun, or perhaps it was just that we hadn’t had a real moment together except while swimming, and tonight it seemed there wasn’t going to be a similar moment again. And yet I was sure that something had happened when we were in the water together, from the way she’d been looking at me while drying herself, knowing I couldn’t keep my eyes off. I wasn’t making it up, and maybe this is why I couldn’t let go of that fleeting something between us, because I couldn’t quite put my finger on it or know when precisely it had happened. And then it hit me: the sheer obvious simplicity of it. I should have seized my moment then. Or asked for her phone number when we were in the car together. So what if Kalaj might guess why. This was the first thing Kalaj assumed about every man and woman on the planet. And if Léonie knew, what of it? I was there when she met Kalaj, and he had asked for her number in front of me—it was the kind of thing you asked without thinking. Had I not asked because I didn’t want to seem interested, or didn’t want to ask in my usually flustered way and look more flustered yet if she hesitated?

  I tried one more place. But no one was there either. I headed home by way of Berkeley Street, passing by all those patrician houses, thinking now of the nectarine Kalaj had bit into and said he liked.

  I could just imagine Kalaj speaking to her about me. “Of course you should call him. Better yet, go to his house,” he would have said. “When?” “When? What a question. Tonight. Now. His door is literally always open.” I could just hear him speaking to her while driving her home and shouting at his windshield. Maintenant, aujourd’hui, ce soir! Would I have gone and waited outside of her employer’s house on Highland Avenue?

  “My instincts are intact,” he had once said, meaning that mine were totally warped, tarnished, compromised. “Intact,” he had said on the night he took me to see his car and, on impulse, had made me knock on the hood of the car parked right next to his. The Western man’s instincts were like pockets with holes in them. Sooner or later, everything slips through. “But I am like those beggars who line the inside of their tattered pockets with steel. Their clothes are all frayed, but the inside is a vault.”

  I decided to knock at Apartment 42.

  Linda opened the door and right away walked back to where she’d been sitting and watching TV on her sofa. I shut the door.

  She had passed her exams. I congratulated her. Mine were almost slightly over three months away.

  She tucked both legs under her light blue terrycloth bathrobe. All I had to do was pull the belt and the knot was undone.

  WHEN I AWOKE the next morning, it was almost eleven. The first thing that raced through my mind was that a whole day had passed and I had not read a single page. All that sun, and the swimming, and all those sherries, and then the agitated night in Apartment 42.

  In the middle of the night I had decided to leave her apartment. I had opened her door, uttered a loud good night, leman mine in Chaucerese, then let her door bang itself shut, also loudly, and right away opened mine as fast and as noisily as I could and slammed it shut as well. I wanted my other neighbor to hear and to put two and two together. I decided to call her the Princesse de Clèves, because part of me already knew she’d heard the two doors bang and was already not pleased by what the noises implied. Tomorrow at dawn I’d play the same trick with the coffee grinds and see where that took us. I’d say something about work, I work all the time. No you don’t, she’d reply. What do you mean? You know exactly what I mean.

  Then I’d do what I did best: allow myself to blush. You’re blushing, she’d say. I am blushing, but not because of what you think. Why are you blushing? I’d look down and say: Seeing you makes me blush. And I’d wait for her to say something, anything, even if it was as gauche and gimp-legged as what I’d just said. Provided she said something, I’d always have a comeback.

  But I was so tired that night that I slept through five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight, nine, and ten. By now she’d be walking their collie through the Cambridge Common. Too late.

  5

  SOMETHING VERY NEW WAS HAPPENING TO ME. I FELT as though every sinew, every bone, muscle, and cell in my body was thrilled to belong to me, to be alive in me, through me, for me. I knew that Ekaterina had longed to be with me last night and that, if I’d found a way to call her, she’d have met me anywhere, taken a taxi, rushed upstairs. The truth is that on that strange morning I didn’t give a damn about my exams, because it was clear to me that anyone I’d cast a glance at from here on would simply crave to touch me, to sleep with me. Whence had this strange, unusual feeling sprung? Why wasn’t I always like this? What must I do to keep this thrill, this buzz alive in me? And where had it been hiding for so very long? Was this what living Kalaj meant?

  Would the feeling die as soon as I returned to my usual life—my old self, my old, tired, humdrum home that had no lock, no food, no life, my books, my rooftop, my students, my little corner where I whiled away the hours thinking I was indeed headed somewhere, my Lloyd-Grevilles, my tea parties, my cocktails—were they all going to come back when I least wanted them?

  More importantly: how did one feed this fever? Did one walk around brandishing a Kalashnikov? How did one keep this fervor of might, abundance, and pride forever alive? It reminded me of how primitive people were said to have carried live embers wherever they went simply because they hadn’t learned yet how to light a fire. I had embers in every one of my pockets, and my pockets were lined with steel, and I loved the feeling.

  The first thing I did that day to make sure I didn’t lose this feeling was not to shower. I wanted to reek of sex, touch every part of me and know where it had been, what it had done, what had been done to it last night.

  When I arrived at the department, Mary-Lou was just coming out of the supply room adjacent to her office and immediately reminded me that I had yet to give her the names of my other two examiners. I’d do so as soon as I met with them, I said. She swung around her desk and photocopied a list of instructions for the exam, because, she said, Harvard had very fussy guidelines when it came to comprehensives and I wasn’t always mindful of them. As I was sitting and reading over the instructions, she said I looked better without a beard. I told her that this was the first time anyone had complimented me on my face. Don’t people compliment you often? she asked. I said nothing, thought of Kalaj, and could almost hear her loose change being stacked on her side of her huge desk. All I had to do was raise her by one tiny penny and, who knows, we’d be doing it in the windowless supply room where she kept the extra jars of freeze dried coffee, the paper clips, the blue books, and reams of stationery bearing the department’s letterhead. The question facing me now was: would she hold it against me if I omitted to raise her by that penny? The sight of her beefy face and Botero legs that tapered into tiny feet shod in satin blue pumps made me hesitate.

  I decided to say something about the summer’s terrible weather and manage to throw in a casual reference to my girlfriend and her parents’ summer home in the Vineyard where they’d had air-conditioning recently installed in the television room and where we ended up spending so many hours, the whole family together. That, I figured, would take care of things.

  Outside the tiny office reserved for teaching fellows to which I had a key, and where I kept some books, a student was standing and was waiting to meet her tutor. She was wearing sandals and an o
range dress that flattered her dark tan and her thick, light brown hair. While I stood there with her, I asked about her courses, she about those I was teaching. We spoke about her senior thesis. As we were speaking, I couldn’t keep my eyes off hers. She, I discovered, couldn’t keep hers off mine. I loved the way her eyes kept searching mine, and mine hers, and how each caressed and lingered on the other’s gaze. We were making love, and yet, without denying it, neither was calling attention to it.

  We both discovered we loved Proust. She was writing her senior thesis on Proust. Could we talk sometime? I normally met students in my other office at Lowell House. But, not being my student, she was welcome to drop by at Concord Avenue if she wanted. In typical bland-speak that meant everything and nothing at all, the girl in the orange dress simply said, “I’d like that very much.” I could just imagine how Kalaj would have mimicked the phrase. Her first name was Allison. The last name was dauntingly familiar. I told her it was nice meeting her. She said we’d already met once before. I must have given her a quizzical look, for she immediately said, “When you said you didn’t care to see the leaves or to watch Saturday Night Fever.”

  This was the girl who had disabused me about America. Why hadn’t I noticed how beautiful she was that time over breakfast?

  What on earth was happening? I loved this new me. Here we were discussing Marcel Proust and building all manner of bridges, while part of me hadn’t quite left and indeed still smelled of Apartment 42. If only Emerson, Thoreau, and Justice Holmes, to say nothing of Henry James, father and son, knew what slop was being visited on their beloved and pristine Massachusetts!

  I was crossing Harvard Square when I heard someone yell out to me in French, “Do you always talk to yourself?” It was Kalaj. He had stopped for a red light and was leaning his head out of his cab as I was crossing the street. In the back sat a slim white-haired lady dressed in a well-pressed lilac business suit.

  “More ersatz than this you cannot get,” he said referring to his passenger. “Where were you headed?”

  “To have a cup of coffee and read.”

  “Ah, the leisurely life.” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

  It was nearing noon. I loved Cambridge at noon. It was time to head to the roof terrace before the weather finally changed. All I wanted now was to read the memoirs of the seventeenth-century Cardinal de Retz, which I’d started a year earlier and promised I’d read as soon as I could. Put everything aside, and spend an entire afternoon with this man who, of all men on this planet, was more an intrepid soldier, courtier, lover, jailbird, and diplomat than a man of the cloth.

  I walked by Berkeley Street. Nothing pleased me more than to pass by these old New England houses and be greeted by the beaming palaver of Anglo-Saxon housewives busily planting next spring’s bulbs.

  Stuck in between my mailbox and my neighbor’s box was an index card. “Dropped by but you were gone. I’ll try later. Ekaterina.” She had left no phone number. I wondered if this was the handiwork of Kalaj. On the rooftop, we could have replayed yesterday’s excursion to Walden Pond. The sun was no more intense up there than it had been on the shore, and I still had some of the watermelon left and an uncorked bottle of Portuguese rosé. It would have been wonderful sweating it out under the sun until we couldn’t stand it any longer and headed downstairs to my apartment.

  I removed the card and wrote a few words and then teased it back into the narrow slot between the two mailboxes, hoping that my next-door neighbor would see it when leaving the building a second time to walk her dog. “I’m waiting upstairs.” But on my way upstairs, I ran into Linda. What was she doing now? Nothing. Did I want to come for a visit? A short one, I said. When I walked in, I suddenly realized what I hadn’t noticed the night before. Unlike mine, her apartment was decorated and looked as though someone had put the whole place together with a humble, loving hand; the place had domestic longevity written all over it, while mine was roughly furnished with a scattering of odds and ends picked up anywhere for nothing or almost nothing and thrown together in an ill-assorted, slapdash medley that bore no trace of any hand, loving or otherwise. I had a feeling that Kalaj, Ekaterina, and Léonie’s bedrooms were thrown together in as rudimentary and hasty a manner as mine—i.e., savage with niceties, impatient, hostile, and transient. Furniture didn’t stay long with us.

  I soon told her I was expecting someone, and headed back to my apartment. In fact, I heard the buzzer ten minutes later. “A woman with a dog opened the downstairs door for me,” Ekaterina said as she pushed open my door. The news thrilled me to no end and made me happier than I already was to see her.

  “Did you tell her you were coming to see me?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  She walked in with fresh muscatel grapes, whose scent suddenly suffused my living room. “I brought you these, I knew you’d like them.”

  I took the grapes into the kitchen. I was looking for an excuse to open the service door, and decided that getting rid of the paper bag in which Ekaterina had brought the fruit was as good an excuse as any. I put the grapes in a bowl, crumpled the bag, and threw it in the larger trash can on the landing outside my door.

  “I am so glad you came,” I said, still leaving my kitchen door open.

  “Me too.” And because I felt no hesitation whatsoever, I came up to her and kissed her on the mouth. I loved her breath.

  “We can eat them in the living room or upstairs on the terrace, which do you prefer?”

  “I could also mix drinks,” I added. No, she couldn’t drink. She had to pick up her boy from kindergarten at 2:00.

  “So let’s eat them in the other room,” I said. I took the grapes back into the bedroom, and we sat on the bed, her legs beautifully crossed on my sheets. “I want to eat these grapes naked,” I said, and before she had time to even say yes, I began removing everything I was wearing. I loved being like this. I loved watching her dancer’s thighs on my sheets.

  I promised to read two whole books the moment she left.

  ONE FRIDAY, TO celebrate our newfound friendship, we decided to have a dinner for all four of us and a few friends. Kalaj invited one friend, I invited Frank who had come back from a summer in Assisi and who, as my ex-roommate, had helped me through thick and thin, especially in the loan department. We had spoken by telephone but hadn’t managed to meet since his return. He was going to bring along his new Armenian girlfriend who promised to dazzle us with sensational pastries from an Armenian bakery in Watertown. There were also others: Claude, who had also recently returned from France, and a friend of his named Piero, a count in his last year at Harvard Law. I would have invited Linda had I not invited Ekaterina first. Bring both, said Kalaj. I could invite Niloufar too, he suggested. “She’d cook wonderful rice and spiced meats,” said Kalaj, bursting out laughing, because I’d told him all about the powerful effect of her spiced meats.

  “No, it would hurt her, and what I’ve done to her I’ll never live down.”

  “You are right,” he said.

  Kalaj and I met at Café Algiers as soon as I was done teaching that Friday. It was before noon, and he was seated next to the young American whom I’d not seen since that first time in early August. Young Hemingway and Kalaj were arguing politics again. Kalaj finally called him an anarchist in diapers. The American suggested that Kalaj was a Malcolm X manqué and “might do well to revisit” his political views. Kalaj stared at this strange locution as if it were a stray dog that had come up to his table for a bite of his sandwich. He licked the end of his cigarette paper, then, staring the American in the face, finally interjected: “You have no balls.”

  Startled, Young Hemingway sputtered and replied, “I have no balls?”

  “Yes, they’re in your throat, here,” and with the bare tips of both thumbs to suggest tiny gonads he placed each thumb against either side of his Adam’s apple and began to emit a reedy little squeal, with which he echoed, might do well to revisit, might do well to revisit. “If you wanted to tell me I was an
idiot, you should have told me, Kalaj, tu es un idiot. Can’t even speak and expects to argue . . . Just go back to your scrap metal shop of a university where they mass-produce you like rinky-dink umbrellas good for one rainfall.”

  “I thought we were friends, Kalaj.”

  “We are nothing. We just drink coffee together.” He turned to me and said, “Let’s go!”

  We hopped in his cab and headed straight to Haymarket Square to buy vegetables. He had already purchased the beef for a song from the head cook at Césarion’s the day before and it was being marinated in my kitchen in a sauce of his own invention. “What’s in the sauce?” I kept asking.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Yes, but what kind of sauce is it?”

  “A you’ll see sauce.”

  He was also going to prepare a mousse the likes of which we had never tasted. He had not used a kitchen in more than six months, so this was something of a celebration. We asked everyone to bring wines. The vegetables were going to be easy—but he needed fresh chestnuts, and these were almost impossible to find. So we purchased dried chestnuts instead. They were clearing up the stalls that Friday afternoon, so the potatoes, onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and celery we managed to get for free. I was under the impression that I was going to be responsible for the cheeses. Bread and cheeses he had already taken care of, he said. “You know nothing about cheeses. The first thing you’ll do is think you’re buying French cheese when all you’ll serve is a curdled brew made with liquids that had never been inside a cow’s udder.” Kalaj did not believe in small spice jars; he bought large bags of everything from cumin and thyme to paprika.

  More people said they would come, including Zeinab and Sheila. Even the woman with bathroom problems had uttered a vague maybe. Kalaj never broke up with anyone. People simply drifted in and out and back into his life, the way sand castles go up and down and are rebuilt time and again on the same spot of beach.