by André Aciman
I wrote around this story for two decades. Over the years, it was the one story I thought about whenever I thought of writing; it hovered over me like an unclaimed ghost begging for an honorable burial. More insidiously, that unfinished story gradually changed the meaning of writing for me. My inability to rewrite the story mirrored my inability to return to Egypt, and I began to feel that the acts of writing and returning were bound in such intricate ways that without returning I would never be able to write anything at all, but that returning would close the book on Egypt before I’d done so on paper.
Egypt itself had become a metaphor. Losing Egypt, reclaiming Egypt, or even trying to forget Egypt, was no less of a metaphor than writing about it I had invented another Egypt, a mirror Egypt, an Egypt meant to be speculated about, an Egypt that stood beyond time, because although it gave every indication of having been lost, there was scant evidence that it had ever existed, an Egypt I kept frozen, tucked, secret, cosseted, an Egypt “on margin,” an Egypt “on spec,” an Egypt I “castled” with every other place I might have called home, an Egypt from the past that kept intruding on the present to remind me, among so many other things, that if I loved summoning the past more than the past I summoned up, and if it was not really Egypt I loved but remembering Egypt, this was also because my trouble was no longer with Egypt but with life itself. Not knowing how to let go of things was nothing more than the mirror image of not knowing how to take them when they were offered, for my deepest fear of all, which came to me obliquely that evening in Cambridge as I thought of Wordsworth and of this girl whose life seemed so rooted in the present, was of living directly under the noonday sun, without the shadows of past or future.
Many years later, walking with my brother on the Upper West Side one Sunday afternoon, I tried to explain to him how standing on that spot on West End Avenue looking toward the Hudson reminded me so much of our childhood and how I felt closer to him there than I had in a long time, but I sensed that he had no patience for this and fell silent.
I wanted to tell my brother that this spot on West End Avenue would always be special to me, that in years to come I’d make a point of returning here, that if I failed to come back again he should remember it for me. I wanted to tell him that I had learned all this, not in Egypt, not in Italy, not in Cambridge, not in New York, but in Wordsworth, and that if I ever wrote my book about Egypt I already knew I would have to end it with Wordsworth, with my brother and me standing in Alexandria, looking out to sea, already thinking of that evening when, years hence, whether in Europe or in America, we’d think back on our last night in Alexandria and, if we could, catch our own gaze going out the other way.
But my brother had no use for Egypt as metaphor. That evening I looked at “Tintern Abbey” in an old Scott Foresman anthology of British literature I had purchased on my last day of school before leaving Egypt. I had used the same volume in my senior year in Rome, as well as in a freshman course in college, but for me the poem is forever locked in that one evening in Cambridge, where, after writing a paper for a girl and emptying my third cup of Earl Grey from an old teapot she had placed on the table for me, I looked out the window over that strange darkened side street, from which dun-colored tones of dusk had crept over everything in the room, and rather than put my pen away, perhaps because I wanted an excuse to stay a little longer, or perhaps because I had just seen a connection that came to me in the form of a parable, I began scribbling a tale which, over the years, evolved into a book not just about memories of Egypt but about all the times I had remembered Egypt once I had left Egypt. I wrote this story both to remember Egypt and to put Egypt behind me, but also to revisit all those times when I’d looked for Egypt in Italy or in Cambridge or in New York, in Wordsworth, in Dante, in Homer or Proust
In October 1995, after the publication of Out of Egypt, I finally did go back to Alexandria and decided to visit the Jewish cemetery, not just for my grandfather’s and my father’s sakes but also as a way of returning to a scene I had imagined in Cambridge almost twenty years earlier. Uncannily enough, everything I had invented in the short story was borne out by experience: the warden, my inability to locate the grave, the washing of the tombstone, the silence around me, the warden’s child, the dog, and the dusty, dusty road. When I did eventually find the tombstone, it was only because I remembered how I’d discovered it in the story. I had returned to fiction—or had, at least, stepped into a realm where memory and imagination traded places with the dizzying agility of an entrechat.
There were a few differences: there was no slab on which to sit and enjoy the warm autumnal light that afternoon. Nor was there anything to drink. I tried to think about the meaning of my visit and about the decades I’d spent waiting for it, and I tried to decide—as though such decisions meant anything—which of the many places I’d lived in felt more real to me now that I’d finally seen Egypt again. I didn’t know the answer. I thought of the lighter with my initials and of the Coca-Cola stand, of dark flannel trousers on warm sunny days, of Rome and of Linden Street, and of the girl in whose studio this tale was born more than a quarter of a century ago. I thought of Earl Grey tea, and of my tutors, and of the spoon she had placed so deftly to my right before saying goodbye. I had brought all these images with me, as if to free each one here, the way ornithologists, having studied and labeled various birds in their laboratories in North America, will travel all the way back to the Amazon to release them in their natural habitat. I had come to place each one like a tiny pebble at my grandfather’s grave, already sensing, as in “The Parable of the Talents,” that I had perhaps been a false steward for them, one “who has much received and renders nothing back” I had stood and waited too long. Was this all I had to show for the years? All I could think of were Wordsworth’s own words: Was it for this?
Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song …
I did not want to answer the question. I did not want to be with the dead. I suddenly wished I were elsewhere again.
When I had finished writing, that evening in Cambridge many years ago, and was about to head home, I went over to the girl’s kitchen sink to wash my mug, but stopped short of doing so, depositing the mug in the sink instead, after rinsing it somewhat, to show that I was civil but not servile.
I remember, in the adjoining room, her bed undone. I remember the scent of her crumpled sheets when I leaned over and touched them, as though they held deep secrets that I would never dare to ask about. And, as I surveyed her room, I thought to myself that it would take very little to persuade me to wait for her, especially since she had said I could, for I already knew not only that one day soon we would sleep together on this bed, between these very sheets, but that on the night when this did happen I’d look back on this moment when I stood up from the table, feeling quite pleased with myself and, stepping toward her bed, swore to remember that, while thinking about Tintern Abbey and Alexandria and this girl and this bed and these sheets and everything else I wished to write about, I had also committed an act of arbitrage. I had marked this moment as one of those to which I knew I’d return many times over, and not just on our first night together but in future years as well, and in other homes, perhaps with other women, and in other cities, or in Alexandria itself, who knows, because it was not even this moment, or this place, or this girl that mattered anymore but how I’d woven my desire to live and be happy with each, and that even if nothing were to happen in my life to make me happy, the very act of thinking back on things could, in the end, make me no less happy than an experienced Ulysses waking up in Ithaca still thinking of the journey home.
Counterintuition
On the inside of the back cover of my small Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon, published by Oxford University Press and with me since my undergraduate days, is an address on MacDougal Street. It was written down in haste on May 27, 1969. Next to it is a telephone number. For weeks, eager
to persuade myself that I was not so interested in the girl who had given it to me, I had refused to learn the number by heart. Nor had I yet called her often enough to commit it to memory, since the two of us were just barely starting what I failed to realize had already ended
I began to feel things might have taken a wrong turn at Caffè Reggio on MacDougal Street on that hot June afternoon when, after I had waited about two hours, it began to dawn on me that this awful thing, which I’d vaguely heard someone call being stood up, had—unless I was totally mistaken—very possibly befallen me as well, and that the only way to prevent it from happening at all was for me to leave instantly, i.e., before it had definitely occurred.
The girl never apologized or made excuses. She didn’t call, nor did she return my calls. I never forgave her and, probably, have made every woman pay for it since.
But because I had left Caffè Reggio in a flustered state on that hot afternoon in June, I began to suspect that perhaps she might have shown up after all, though very late, and that I owed her a call to determine whether it wasn’t she, but I, who had to apologize.
To my college friends who assured me this was the most sublime piece of self-deception mounted by a spurned lover, I answered by saying I’d have agreed with them about any other girl, but that in this case things were just different. It did not occur to me that if there is one thing that makes all love stories identical, it’s the conviction that each one is different.
But there was unfinished business at Caffè Reggio, and I would return that summer, sometimes more than once a day, the way not only criminals but victims, too, go back to the scene that made them who they are, seeking to recover something I felt I’d lost there, trying to become so familiar, so immune to caffè Reggio as never to experience that disquieting ache each time I caught its name written by her hand on the back of my Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon. I wanted to make the place mine, reinvent it, wash it down the way we wash down poison, blot it out, since I couldn’t blot out the girl who had brought me there. I wanted to steal Caffè Reggio from her, to banish her from it, and give it back only if she begged. I wanted to push back time, undo the memory of that afternoon and of the next one when I returned hoping I’d gotten the date wrong and of all the following ones when I came back thinking to retrieve what I’d lost when I walked out in a fury, saying, “That’s it, I’ve waited long enough!” In the end, I wanted Caffè Reggio to remind me not of her but of me, the way I hoped she’d think of me and no one else someday when she’d eventually return.
Being at Caffè Reggio consisted in having to sit, smoke, and read, striking up an air of indifference that I felt would not only make me look attractive in case she did walk in but, by dint of being rehearsed every day, might persuade me that I’d ultimately grown indifferent and was well on my way to recovery.
I had learned this in one of the books I was reading that summer, The Red and the Black. If you like someone, brace yourself, don’t show it; behave counterintuitively, keep zigzagging, feel with a forked heart, because such is the way of the world. If anything, show that you don’t care, be distant. It will make her wonder, and in wondering she will warm to you, and in warming be snared. The formula was supposed to work. Never mind that the one person for whom it failed with abysmal regularity was the very author of The Red and the Black.
She called a year later. Did I want to go out that evening? Of course I did. By then I knew that if she’d called me it was only because I was the last in a long list. We went to see a movie. Then she had to run home.
Of course, my desperate phone calls amounted to nothing. Her mother, who took dutiful messages, always sided with me—surely an excellent sign, I thought, not realizing that mothers who side with spurned lovers are no more inclined to make things better for them than are their daughters. To forgive the daughter, I learned to hate the mother.
Another year passes. Then another. One weekday evening, same thing: she calls—would I like to go out?—of course I would. We end up in the Village, on MacDougal Street, her favorite café, she says, forgetting she’d already told me all about her favorite café years earlier, while I’m feeling rather pleased with myself for resisting the needling impulse to say something either about the date-that-never-was or about this place, which is so layered with my own passage that it almost feels she’s offered to come visit me at home. And so here we are, sitting in the back of Caffè Reggio, on my familiar little bench that feels more like a pew, and the place is crowded, everyone seems happy this weekday night in spring, and right by the large antique cylindrical espresso machine, she says, “Look at me,” and begins kissing me. I wanted to tell her that this was precisely what I’d always dreamed of, that I’d almost given up, that I didn’t know how I would ever come back here and go on as before after tonight. But I didn’t interrupt.
Later, as we’re walking up MacDougal and Washington Square, I look at her face and catch her smiling. Why is she smiling all the time? I ask. It dawns on me only then that I’ve been smiling all along, too. She leans against a wall and says, “Kiss me again.” I thought she was testing herself, then I thought she was testing me, then I thought she was testing someone else she wanted to be with but wasn’t. Or was it just me she wanted to be kissed by? I took her home. Her mother was sleeping in the room next to the kitchen. After a while she said, hesitantly, that maybe I’d have to think of leaving. I did not press the point.
That night at home I sat at my desk sensing I had come full circle and was almost vindicated. From the boy who’d been stood up on MacDougal Street I had become a man whose late-night advances had been uneasily staved off. I decided to jot down the times I’d seen her, from the first on a subway platform, when I didn’t know her name, to the time my heart had literally skipped a beat when I caught her standing right next to me at the library, to the moment this same evening when she walked me to the door of her apartment on Fort Washington Road.
It never occurred to me that perhaps what she’d meant by her maybe I’d have to think of leaving was that I should stay awhile longer all the same.
I didn’t see her again for another two years. By then I had already graduated from college and was working. When we bumped into each other one day, I was almost indifferent, glad to be indifferent, eager to show that I was. It cost me almost nothing to say, “I was madly in love with you once.” I made certain she knew I was speaking postmortem. But I was trying too hard for someone who had given up trying. We even made light of our first kiss on the night of miracles. We made light of the people who had watched us from the other tables. We made light of her mother sleeping in the room next to the kitchen. “I live alone now,” she said as we strolled toward Thompson Street afterward. Walking her to the door of her building, I hesitated a moment, then, without knowing what else to do, said goodbye, almost abruptly. “I thought you’d come upstairs,” I heard her say. I went upstairs, almost reluctantly.
Until today, what I remember of the few weeks we spent together in the early spring of 1973 is the sight of MacDougal Street every morning, the smell of cigarettes and roasted coffee beans hovering on the sidewalks.
Three weeks later we argued.
A week after that, a friend wrote me a prescription for Valium. I showed her the prescription. Was that supposed to move her? she asked. Instead, she moved in with someone else.
The landlord, an Italian, had taken a liking to me. Did I want to assume her lease for the next six months? I said I would. One day, by common agreement, I left for a few hours. When I returned, everything that was hers was gone.
As I stood looking for the farewell note I knew it wasn’t in her style to write, I vowed never to fall in love in quite that way again, and certainly never with a woman I couldn’t understand, with whom the opposite of what I thought was always right except when I was sure it was wrong.
The number on the back of the Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon means nothing to me now, but on it is inscribed a bizarre ache in the history of pain. The
love may be gone—but the pain is hardly gone at all. I find it on the pavements of MacDougal Street on hot, steamy, midsummer afternoons, when the heat is unbearable, when, no matter how often they sprinkle the street or scour the sidewalks, something like a long, sleek blemish won’t wash off. It never goes away, never went away, but stands there like one of those moments that cut us in two, with a before and an after that stare at each other uncomprehendingly, like two strangers on opposite sidewalks, each looking away when their eyes meet, never for a second realizing that what stands between them is not just a missed opportunity but a possibility that never went away. It is still there and beckons still.
So here I stand a quarter of a century later.
It is a late-December weekday afternoon past four-thirty, and I’m on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker Streets on my way to the Peacock Caffè a few blocks north. The day is just beginning to darken, and, after heavy showers this afternoon, everything glistens, the streetlights especially, speckling the wet pavement from one end of MacDougal to the other. I am, as happens so seldom, far ahead of time, enjoying this slow, damp, dreamy walk to Greenwich Avenue.
I like four-thirty. People are just beginning to come out of work, and there’s a touch of indecision in the city, as though it’s too late to start anything new today and yet still early enough to take a stab at it. Like me, most people are strolling about the streets, taking their time, probably avoiding something they should be doing, caught as everyone is in this interim dreamspace that is neither day nor night, hardly cold enough to prevent an extended walk, and yet almost cold enough for me to look forward to a warm drink at the Peacock with my wife. It is, in short, and as anyone who’s read Baudelaire knows, dusk. This is the time of day when those with busy night lives haven’t yet picked out their clothes, while those at work, with loosened neckties and collars undone, can’t wait to get out of theirs. It is the hour of the dressing room, when actors are not quite off the street but hardly yet onstage.
