by André Aciman
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 th
e 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.”
