Harvard Square A Novel

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 the 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 bench. 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.”

“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 f*ck 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 take 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 let 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.

In this case, the woman to whom he offered a cigarette was the model with bathroom problems we had seen the week before at Café Algiers. Even before I’d noticed anything, he had already scanned the room, spotted her seat, and then zeroed in on the table next to hers with the instant accuracy of a sharpshooter. The conversation started. Over a nothing.

“Do you like the cigarette?”

“Very much,” she replied.

He nodded at her answer, then paused before speaking, as though appraising the deeper meaning of her answer.

“You know, though, that Dutch tobacco is better than regular Virginia.”

She nodded.

“But the tobacco I like best is Turkish.”

“Well, Turkish, yes, of course,” she immediately said. She too, it seemed, was an expert in matters tobacco. I wanted to laugh. The glint in his eye when he caught my attempt to stifle a laugh told me that he too had caught her attempt to put on a show of knowing a thing or two about tobacco.

“I started smoking Turkish tobacco in my native city.”

“Where is it?”

“Sidi Bou Saïd, the most beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria. In the summertime, the pumice stones roll to the shores and the children gather them up in large wicker baskets and sell them to the tourists for nothing.”

She looked totally spellbound by his description. “Where is Pantelleria?”

“Where is Pantelleria?” he asked, as though everyone was supposed to know. “It’s an amazing island in the Straits of Sicily. Ever been to Sicily?”

“Never. Have you?” she asked.

His thoughtful, drawn-out nod was meant to suggest that Pantelleria was not just a place but an experience to which words could do no justice.

I knew where this was going and excused myself to go to the bathroom.

On my way there, I peeked into the main dining room, and bumped into Professor Lloyd-Greville. He was the last person I wanted to be seen by in a bar, given my standing in the department. I’d been avoiding him since failing my comprehensives. He was having dinner with his wife and an academic couple from Paris in the more fashionable and far more expensive French part of the establishment. Would I mind coming and saying hello? Of course not. I knew his wife from departmental parties. She and I always ended up making small talk in what she called “our intimate little corner” in their large living room overlooking the Charles. Departmental parties are usually the bane of academic wives, but she had turned her husband’s position into a thriving source of clients for her real estate business, which she operated nonstop, even when they were away during their long summer stay in Normandy. She was originally from Germany but had lived and studied in France and enjoyed playing the role of the deracinated soul cast ashore in New England who was forever sympathizing with equally deracinated sister souls, especially if they were younger, callow graduate students. “And how is the thesis coming along?” she asked. I affected a horrified gasp as though to say: Lady, would you please, it’s still summer. She put on an amused if mildly mischievous pout to mean: So what naughty things have you been up to this summer that are keeping you away from your work? It was not flirting, just verbal ping-pong. I was dying to slam the ball but too polite to stop the back-and-forth.

I told her about my comprehensives. She was sad, thought a while, then almost winked, meaning, I’ll look into this, as she gave her husband a reprobatory gaze to suggest he had been a bad boy and should have known better than to flunk a young man like me. It meant: I’ll see what I can work at my end. But it could just as easily have meant nothing at all.

She had spotted me once having lunch by myself at the Faculty Club and never forgot it. Playing the impoverished grad student, are you? Well, you’re not fooling anyone, my dear. Trying to disabuse her would have required making too many admissions, and she’d still think me a liar, which would have made things worse. So I let her think I was not starving. To keep up appearances, I’d always manage to send her a new book that we happened to discuss in our “intimate little corner” during the monthly evening get-togethers in her living room. A new hardcover book was out of the question in my budget, but calling the publisher in New York and claiming I was eager to review a specific title was easy, and they usually fell for it when I alleged to have an assignment from some obscure journal. I called it reading on credit, since I’d always make a point of looking over the volume before wrapping it with gift paper and dropping it with Mary-Lou, our departmental secretary, who’d make sure to let Mrs. Lloyd-Greville know there was a petite surprise waiting for her. A few days later a small, thick, square envelope, lined in pearl gray paper bearing her embossed name on the outside, would arrive in my mailbox with a friendly thank-you message written in royal blue ink. You were not meant to spot—but of course were definitely meant to notice—the crested, semi-faded watermark bearing the expensive jeweler’s name.

At the dinner table at the Harvest, the professor and his friend made perfunctory pleasantries on the subject of comprehensive exams and dissertations and recalled how dreadful and humiliating these public spectacles used to be in their day when the two were students in Paris.

“Remember So-and-so, and then such-and-such?”

“Say no more,” replied his guest, “but let me tell you”—turning to me—“you guys have it easy.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Greville, twitching her features in a coded expression that mimed a look of subtle solidarity with yet another wink-wink. “Are you still going to write on La Princesse de Clèves one day?” she asked with a peevish little grin implying, See, I haven’t forgotten. I nodded.

“Oh, La Princesse de Clèves, it’s been ages,” said Lloyd-Greville’s guest.

“I’ve just reread it,” added Lloyd-Greville’s wife. Trying to earn points, was she? A moment of silence passed over all five of us.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” asked the professor, almost standing up to make room for an extra chair in case I was going to be gauche enough to accept. I hesitated, and was practically tempted to give the matter a second thought, when I caught Mrs. Lloyd-Greville slicing a corner off her artichoke heart, as though she had totally failed to notice her husband’s gesture and was already assuming I would turn down the offer and let the four of them return to their meal without further intrusion from this graduate student who had shown up at the wrong time and wasn’t going away fast enough. I apologized before declining—I was with friends in the small bar. “Ah, youth!” they said in a chorus. Then, with one or two nodding motions meant to signify something I wasn’t quick enough to catch, they returned to their oversized appetizers. A moment of silence passed. Then it hit me: I was being congédié, dismissed. Very cordially, the little clan had bolted its door in my face.

I had never even wished to join them but I suddenly understood why people burst with road rage, brandished Kalashnikovs, and mowed down real or imagined foes, it didn’t matter which, because no one was your friend here, and bunk was forever closing in on you, no matter where you turned. Bunk, their foodie palates; bunk, La Princesse de Clèves; bunk, their venomous little white canines darting from behind their puckered smiles as they nodded goodbye and savored their fried Carciofi alla giudía that would turn cold if they didn’t gobble them up right away while I stood there trying to negotiate a gracious exit. Why was I being reminded that I was a hopeless, feckless, unkempt, unwelcome, and thoroughly unfit waif on this niggardly strip of earth called Cambridge, Mass.?

I would never forgive them, never forgive myself. Why ask me to their table, why overstay my welcome, why couldn’t I read the signs? Kalaj would surely have known how to read the signs.

I was, it occurred to me, no different from Kalaj. Among Arabs he was a Berber, among Frenchmen an Arab, among his own a nothing, as I’d been a Jew among Arabs, an Egyptian among strangers, and now an alien among WASPs, the clueless janitor trying out for the polo team.

I hated everything this side of the Atlantic.

Come to think of it, I hated everything that side of it as well.

I hated America, I hated Europe, I hated North Africa, and right now I hated France, because the France everyone else worshipped in Cambridge wasn’t the imagined douce France I’d grown up loving in Egypt, a France of Babar and Tintin and illustrated old history books that always started with Caesar’s ruthless siege of Alessia and ended with the heroic battle of Bir Hakim between French legionnaires in North Africa and the German Reich—a France even the French no longer cared for, much less remembered. France had become jumbo-ersatz as well, a gourmet haven for puckered lips and highborn gluttons.

A decade ago, I began thinking, none of them were good enough to step into my parents’ service entrance; now they were snubbing me with a ghetto dish my grandmother wouldn’t be caught dead serving to her guests. Artichokes à la Jewish!

The thought might have brought a smirk to my face, but it couldn’t soothe me. I might as well have been barking jumbo-ersatz at the poor artichokes themselves and their distant cousins the nectarines, before grabbing each choke on their plates and forcibly stuffing them into Mrs. Lloyd-Greville’s leering kisser and down her dewlapped bill.

I knew I was beginning to sound like Kalaj. I liked sounding like him, I wanted to sound like him. I liked how it felt. He was the voice of my anger, my rage, a reminder that I hadn’t imagined the insult tonight, even when I knew no insult was intended. I was bruised all over and yet no one had cut or meant to injure me. Still, I liked mimicking his rage, liked wearing it. As senseless as it was, it made me feel stronger, made things simpler, gave me courage, and filled my chest. It reminded me of who I was here. I had for so long stopped knowing who I was that I needed a total outcast to remind me that I was no nectarine, that not being able to graft oneself onto this society came with a price but was not a failure.

I wanted to shout out the words. Nectarines ersatz, nectarines ersatz!

I went to the bathroom and as soon as I had shut the door read the prophetic inscription over the urinal: I’m OK, you suck.

Everyone sucked. Everything sucked. The world sucked. Kalaj sucked. I sucked.

WHEN I RETURNED to our table, Kalaj had already managed to invite the woman sitting next to us to our table—or, rather, he had asked her to move over to his spot on the cushioned bench and come closer to him. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he whispered when he pointed to my books, which now stood in a neat pile on the far corner of his table, “but I think it’s time we separated.”

I was obviously cramping his style. Perhaps I was a touch stung, but I liked the honesty. It confirmed our camaraderie. He was a survivor. Tonight he wasn’t sleeping alone. He reminded me of hunters, who wake up at dawn and are determined to forage for food and won’t come back till they’ve dragged a fresh carcass to feed their clan on. I was a gatherer: I waited for things to grow, to come my way, to fall into my hands. He went out and grabbed; I stayed put. We were different. Like Esau and Jacob.

In this I was still wrong: I didn’t even know how to wait. There was haste, not hope, in my waiting. Kalaj had seen through this as well. He called it savoir traîner.

And yet it dawned on me that evening as I headed home through Berkeley Street, where guests at a garden party were still lingering long past party hours, that I was finally glad to be rid of this guy who could waylay you for hours and, just because I didn’t know how to brush him off, assumed that I had nothing better to do than trail after him and watch him troll every woman. A sleaze and a freak, I thought. That’s what he was. I decided to avoid Café Algiers for the next few days.

What a contrast he was to these quiet, contented academics on Berkeley Street who seemed perfectly capable of extending their weekend hours by gathering a few friends and sitting about on their wide porch drinking gin and tonics, and whose only worry that Sunday evening as they sat together in the dark, was how to avoid attracting bugs. I always envied my neighbors on Berkeley Street.

Thank God I hadn’t run into anyone from Harvard in his company. The last thing I wanted was to have Kalaj show up next to me somewhere and, by virtue of just a grimace, a grunt, a word, let alone his bearing and his clothes, give away the sleazy underworld that had brought us together. I could just picture Professor Lloyd-Greville giving Kalaj the once-over before turning to his wife and saying, “He’s hanging out with drifters now.”

Then I remembered their artichokes, their foodie snouts doused in claret and scholarship. Nectarines at the pumping station of art. The world was filled with nectarophiliacs plying away at their hollow, nectarosclerotic little professions where people shuffled about their nectaroleptic lives.

If only I had the courage to get out now.

WHEN I ARRIVED at my building, I saw the girl from Apartment 42 sitting on the stoop, a book in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She was wearing a white tank top, her bare, tan shoulders glistening smoothly under the light from the lobby.

“The heat got to you?” I said, trying the blandest greeting in the world dabbed with a touch of irony. I suspected something else was bothering her, but weather was better than silence.

“Yes. Dreadful. No fan, no AC, no TV, no draft, nada. I figured better here than indoors.”

“What about the roof terrace?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nah, too spooky this time of night.”

So this was going to be it, I thought. There was nothing more to say. There were, of course, plenty of silly things to say, but I couldn’t think of one with which to raise her by one tiny chip. Still, I lingered on our stoop.

“Actually, it’s quite spectacular up there at night, have you ever been?” I asked. “Cambridge as you’ve never seen it. There’s always a breeze upstairs. It’s all dark, with tiny lights speckling all around you that remind me of small towns on the Mediterranean.”

Before she could ask which towns, at which point I’d have to come up with the name of one real fast, I don’t know what took hold of me but I told her I’d been planning to grab something to drink and sit up there. “It’s stunning, you’ll see.”

It took me a moment to realize that I myself had never been up there after sundown, let alone at night. You’ll see was the verbal equivalent of touching her elbow, her wrist.

“I don’t feel like dragging a chair up.”

“I’ll bring one up for you too,” I said. “And they’re director’s chairs,” as though that would persuade her, which made us both laugh.

She followed me up the stairs. Ours was the top floor, and it had become a source of good neighborly relations whenever you met someone going up or coming down the stairs to joke about the wide stairwell in a building that could easily have housed an elevator. It explains our low rent, was the thing to say. Yes, the expected reply. We were both slightly uneasy, and neither wished to say anything about the stairs, or about the rent or the heat, perhaps for fear of showing that what was taking our breath away was not the climb. When we reached my apartment, I opened the door trying to look very relaxed and left it wide open, a gesture meant to show I was just going to look for the chairs, mix the drinks, and head upstairs to the terrace with her. This is going to take just a sec, I was signaling, not sure yet whether all this body language suggesting haste was meant to put her or myself at ease. She dawdled in the foyer, crossed her arms, and watched me head to the kitchen, then slowly she followed in, her way of showing she was waiting for the drinks, her arms still crossed, her shoulders as always glistening, her whole posture saying Just don’t take forever. She looked around. Her one-bedroom apartment was exactly like mine, she said, but strangely everything, down to the door handle, was right-side left here. Mine faced west, hers east. As she was talking, I took out a can of frozen lime juice, ran some hot water on it, and emptied an ice tray into a large bowl.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a rubber mallet I had taken out and placed on the kitchen counter.

“You’ll see.” I took out a roll of paper towels, tore out two sheets, and placed a few ice cubes between them. Then, with the rubber mallet, I pounded the cubes on the kitchen counter and emptied the cracked ice into a glass jar.

“Is this how it’s done?” she asked.

Breathless, I could do no more than repeat her words, “That’s how it’s done.” Did she want to try? I handed her the mallet. To steady her hand, I held the hammer with her and then let her pound it once. She liked cracking the ice. She pounded again, then one more time after that. We emptied the cracked pieces into the bowl. Then, just as I was opening the bottle of gin which I’d removed from the freezer, something suddenly seized me and, before I could think twice, I turned toward her and kissed her on the shoulder and then on her neck. It must have startled her but she did not seem to mind, perhaps wasn’t even surprised, and let me kiss her again on the very spot on which for days now I’d been yearning to bring my lips. Then, facing me, she met my lips and kissed me on the mouth, as though I’d been taking forever to make up my mind to kiss her there. We never made it to the terrace that evening.

Around four in the morning, though, when the heat in my apartment had become unbearable, we did go upstairs for a short spell and, standing naked on the dark terrace within sight of the neighboring buildings all around us, we watched Cambridge gleam in the misty summer night just before sunrise. It was her idea to go upstairs naked. I loved it. We came back downstairs and made love again.

SHE WAS ALREADY gone by the time I woke up the next morning. I put on some clothes and knocked at her door. No one answered. She must have already gone to the library.

The smell of her body was still on my sheets, on my skin. I didn’t want it to go away. I would shower later, but not now. Without a bite or a cup of coffee, I headed straight for Café Algiers.

Along the way down Brattle Street, I kept wondering why I was rushing. Was I gloating? Had I already forgotten her and was I thinking only of telling Kalaj about her? Why had she left so quietly? I had no answers.

Before I could begin to fathom the joy I was feeling, I was struck by an unsettling pang of horror. Had we made love because I had come with anger in my heart, because sex feeds on anger, the way it feeds on beauty, love, luck, laughter, spite, sorrow, desire, courage, and despair, because sex evens the playing field, because sex is how we reach out to the world when we have nothing else to offer the world? Is this what had happened—because of the Lloyd-Grevilles’ dismissal, because Kalaj had suddenly put distance between us when I was just about ready to embrace him as a fellow drifter? Or had I borrowed his lust, caught his lust as one catches a fever?

I had no answers there either.

At the café, Kalaj was already sitting at his old table with a cinquante-quatre, his usual objects strewn around his table, his hair still wet. He was rolling up a cigarette, telling Zeinab, who was standing next to him, that asparagus was indeed a renal cleanser—a diuretic and a detoxifier. It increased urination, which helped flush out toxins from your kidneys.

They always spoke in French.

“And I who thought the smell was the result of an internal infection,” she said, holding her wooden tray with one hand.

“No, the smell is evidence that the body is cleaning itself. As the body breaks down asparagus, it releases an amino acid called asparagine which is easily detected in the urine of people who’ve eaten asparagus.”

She was filled with admiration. “Do you know everything, Kalaj?”

“I’m an encyclopedia of bunk.”

She smiled when she heard him put himself down, perhaps her way of sympathizing with him for thinking so poorly of himself but also of showing she was not taken in by any of it. She probably saw it as an intimate admission of personal foibles he wasn’t likely to disclose to anyone else. “I don’t like it when you speak about yourself this way. Compared to you, I am so ignorant.”

“Yes, Zeinab, you are.” He sat motionless as he began to inhale. “But you’re like my sister, and I’ll kill the first man who lays a finger on you.”

“I’m not your sister and I don’t need you to kill anyone for me, Kalaj, I can take care of myself.”

“You’re a child.”

“I’m no child, and I can prove it to you in a second, and you know exactly what I mean, even if you’re pretending not to.”

“Don’t speak like that.”

He was, to my complete surprise, blushing.

“It’s as you want, Kalaj. I know how to wait,” she said, heedless of my presence as I stood there on my feet transfixed between them. “All I need is a sign, and I am yours for as long as you want me. When you’re tired, you’ll let me know. Sans obligations.”

“Speak to him, not to me,” Kalaj pointed at me, which was his way of greeting me that day.

“Him? He doesn’t even look at me. At least you do. As I said: for as long as you want and not a minute more.”

With that she was gone behind the counter.

“Another one,” said Kalaj when she was out of earshot. Using his right hand, he pulled up a chair with the effortless grace of a defense attorney preparing a chair for a prisoner who’s just walked into the visitation room.

“So tell me.”

“You tell me first.”

We exchanged stories.

He had been right about the woman with bathroom problems. “She has bathroom problems . . . during orgasm.” He laughed. Even Zeinab, who was arranging small pastries on a large platter behind the counter, snickered on hearing the story. “You men are swine,” she said. “Nothing is sacred to you, Kalaj. And you want to treat me like your little sister?”

He ignored her and asked about my evening. I told him about the woman in Apartment 42, and how we’d stood naked on the terrace facing all of Cambridge in the dark. He immediately dubbed her la quarante-deux, Miss 42.

“Her name is Linda,” I said.

He preferred la quarante-deux.

“We were probably overheard by our neighbors—especially by the woman next door to mine.”

“All the better.”

He asked if we’d done it on the terrace. I didn’t know how to answer without giving everything away. “Let’s say we started there,” I said.

“You too are a pig,” came Zeinab’s comment.

“Who told you to listen? This is man talk.”

“The things I could teach you men . . .” she echoed from the kitchen.

Kalaj did not like to skimp details, so I heard all about his night. She lived in Watertown, but liked to come to Cambridge in the evening. Big smirk, meaning: We know why. She worked in the art section of a university library, had beautiful art in her house, lived alone, not even a pet. Very uninhibited in bed, wild sex. Then, on second thought, mechanical sex. Passion with eyes shut tight. Which was why he wasn’t going to see her again. One night was enough. What was wrong with her? I asked. Not for me, came his answer. He’d have given her at most four nights, then she’d start asking for this, and then that, then she’d pout, and why wasn’t he doing this, sulk some more, and why not that . . . ? He knew the litany well enough. It was called domesticity. These women are always depressed, then they depress you, and when they’ve got you well and soundly depressed, they hold it against you, lose interest, and look for someone new to depress. As always, his biggest fear was that getting too close to such people would eventually unseat and kill his artisanal, homespun self and replace it, in the dark of night, with his mass-produced, ersatz double. It scared him—because his other fear was that he might grow to like being ersatz, or, worse yet, forget he had once been otherwise. Even his Monsieur Zeb would become ersatz, and then where would he be?

But there was another reason why he knew better than to seek her out. “I burn through things too fast,” he told me, and there was no longevity in the things he touched.

After sex she had wanted to sketch him. Absolutely not, he’d said. Why not? I asked. “Take a look at this.” And, like Harpo Marx producing a steaming cup of coffee from under his raincoat, he pulled out a sheet of blue construction paper that had been folded in four. He unfolded it, slapped it on the table, and, to hold it down, placed his damp saucer right on top of one of its corners. “This is me?” he asked, outrage sizzling in his voice, “Is this me?”

With Cray-Pas, she had sketched his face and bare shoulders.

“Yes, it is you,” I said. It was quite masterfully done. “Stunning and expressive work.”

“This is shit. Her parents had spent a fortune on her education, and all she can do at the age of thirty is neek the first Arab she meets in some underground café and then ask him to sit still when he is dying to sleep so she can produce this? This?”

He yanked out the sheet from under the saucer, asked Zeinab to come over here right away, and held it out for her to see. This?

Zeinab stepped out of the kitchen and was already drying her hands on her apron as she rushed toward our table. “What?”

“This,” he said.

“Let’s see.” She held the picture in front of her, made an amused click in her throat, and then, without batting an eyelash, kissed the portrait. “Tu es beau,” she rhapsodized, “tu es vraiment beau, you are really handsome!”

“Then you keep it. You’ve already lost your mind as it is.”

“I’ll keep it and how. Do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Write today’s date on it. My hands are wet.”

Out of one of the many pockets in his jacket, he pulled out a pencil with a rubber band wrapped so tightly around its head that it had formed a ball on the eraser.

“Why do you have a rubber band on your pencil?” she asked.

“Because when I need a rubber band I’ll know where to find one. What else do you want to know?”

He held his pencil as would a ten-year-old boy, with his fingers almost touching the lead. Its stubby point showed it has been sharpened not in a regular pencil sharpener but with a blade. I recognized the uneven marks around the edge of the pencil where it was shaved. It took me right back to my childhood, when I couldn’t find my pencil sharpener in class and didn’t want my teacher to know I had lost it. You took out a penknife—all of us had penknives—and in total silence under your desk shaved the edge of the pencil until, like a new tooth pushing its way out of the hollow of your gum, the new point began to emerge. Using a knife made you feel brawny, like a sailor with a dagger whittling away at a piece of driftwood because this is how he whiled away his hours when there was nothing better to do, because real men always found something useful to do with their hands.

“And write neatly,” she said.

Again, like a conscientious and dutiful young pupil, he leaned forward, his face so close to the table you’d think he had eye trouble, and penciled the date.

Voilà.

“Now you two can go back to your slop,” said Zeinab.

“Exactly,” he said, and turning to me: “So tell me about la quarante-deux.”

I told him the whole story again.

Kalaj said that if she had come upstairs with me that night it was because I had done one thing right: I had lingered, just lingered, because when I was standing in front of her as she sat smoking in silence on the stoop, I had not moved, had kept very quiet, had made it very obvious that I was aching and longing for her, that all I could think of at that hour of the night was her shoulders, and that I would make her laugh and be happy, that I would take care of everything, including the two chairs.

But, as always, Kalaj immediately corrected himself. She’d probably made up her mind about me the moment she’d seen me walking toward her, or maybe even on the rooftop weeks earlier.

“Now tell me about being naked on the terrace.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“You mean how she suddenly sat on my lap naked and I felt the hair of her vagina on my zeb and couldn’t believe I could go at it again so soon?”

“Oké, stop!”

WE HAD HAD such a warm moment together that morning, that in the days and weeks afterward, I made a point of showing up at Café Algiers just as it was about to open. The place smelled of bleach and Mr. Clean, the chairs were still upturned as the floor was drying, and Zeinab was still mopping the kitchen area, all the while making sure the coffee was already brewing and Arab songs playing. When she was in good spirits, she’d put on George Brassens or, as I later found out, her favorite, Barbara, and she’d sing along to Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux and, in mock-cabaret-singer, sidle up to the man who happened to be sitting nearest to the kitchen and sing to him, and to him alone, her favorite verses of the song by Aragon.

In the back of Café Algiers, as always, that picture of Tipaza—in case any of us early birds forgot why we were there. This was more like home than anywhere else, and more home now than home itself, since no one really had one to go back to.

Kalaj was always in a rush. He’d stand up before finishing his coffee, busily start collecting all of his stray items on the table, and after taking one last gulp, he’d light up the cigarette he had been rolling while eating his croissant, and dash out through the front door, which took him through the tiny back lot where he normally parked his cab.

Once he was gone, I’d open my books and sink deep into the seventeenth century. I’d sit there till I needed to shake my legs and move to another locale. If too many customers started coming in, I’d leave to avoid the noise. Then I’d head to the library where I read for a good part of the morning.

I liked this ritual. I liked rituals. Rituals were like home.

Sometimes, after Algiers, I’d avoid the Square altogether and, because it was still warm, would head back to my apartment, change, and be back to my usual spot on the roof terrace—bathing suit, sunglasses, suntan lotion, books, everything I needed, including my small radio. There I continued reading until exhaustion set in and the subject matter of my books began to blend with the surrounding scene. The list of Jesuit abuses are now forever inscribed not only in a cheap pocket edition of Pascal’s Provinciales, but in the scent of Coppertone, the tint of my Ray-Bans, and in the sound of warbling pigeons who sometimes alighted on the roof terrace, where they gathered, before flying elsewhere under the torrid summer sun. Invariably I’d think of Linda.

How easily had things happened with her. Maybe this is what kept stirring me, not just the beauty but the sheer ease of it. Part of me still wanted to understand how it had sprung, or why. Was it because she’d laughed when I’d offered to bring two folding chairs? Because of how I’d mixed the drinks, or left my door wide open? Or was it simply because I had said something instead of saying nothing.

No, it was because I had lingered, Kalaj had said.

I couldn’t wait to ask him what exactly had he meant by lingering. What was it about lingering? The refusal to duck after you’d been given the silent treatment? The will to wait things out until the other spoke, until things eventually turned your way? Or was it the laying bare of one’s desire, because one could not believe it wasn’t being reciprocated? Or was lingering nothing more than the sheer belief in one’s body, in one’s beauty?

No, lingering was knowing how to stretch things out, sometimes beyond their breaking point. Not everyone had the balls for this. You sat and waited. And waited and waited. Mind you, though, this was not passivity. What was one man’s strategic genius was another man’s way of sweet-talking fate. Moumou, who had listened in on that conversation, had no patience with Kalaj’s philosophic disquisitions. Sometimes all it took was luck, he said. You got lucky. We all get lucky. Sometimes. “Well, with all the vitamins you take . . .” started Kalaj.

“Well, what about my vitamins? The vitamins help—and how.”

ONE EVENING, WHEN I was busy reading at Café Algiers, Kalaj walked in looking dazed. He spotted me right away, came over, dropped his bag right next to the empty chair facing my table, and said he wanted to talk about something serious.

I was about to talk to him about la quarante-deux. But he cut me short.

“I don’t want to talk about women, not last night’s, not tonight’s, not yours, not mine.”

“What is it then?”

“Actually, maybe I don’t want to talk at all.”

“I see,” I said, trying not to show I’d been wrong-footed by the sudden turn from his usual locker-room mirth to his downright hostile tone. “I’ll leave you alone then.”

I picked up my book and began to read, determined to ignore him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he finally said. “Are you really going to sulk now? Every woman I know ends up sulking—now you?” I didn’t reply. “There. He’s pouting. Come on, talk to me. I am in a terrible mood, that’s all.”

“Why are you in a terrible mood?”

Was he sick? Did he get a fine, did he have an accident, was he robbed?

The sudden hand gesture with the flat of his palm waved once in the air meant Don’t ask.

“L’enfer.” he said. “Hell, that’s what it is.”

In a few days, he announced, he would have to be interviewed by Immigration Services. His wife had originally promised she’d accompany him, but her lawyer had just informed Kalaj that she had changed her mind. Would I go with him instead? Yes, I said. Good. The problem was that he had to rehearse what he needed to say. Would I help coach him before the interview if he gave me a list of questions and answers that his lawyer said they normally asked at Immigration?

“Again?” I asked.

“Yes, again,” he replied, as if to remind me this was serious business and not a time for joking. Once again, as he’d done before, he whipped out his notebook from one of his many pockets and tore out four to five sheets on which were scribbled all the questions they were likely to ask. “I need to memorize the answers and don’t know how to study them alone, and you’re a teacher, so I thought better with you than anyone else, right?”

“When should we meet?”

“In a few days. Or now.”

“Where?”

“Right here.”

I told him he was welcome to come visit me, where we might focus better without all the brouhaha of Café Algiers. Besides, my door was always unlocked, I said, so he could come in whenever he pleased. “I like the noise,” he said. I felt sorry for him. What demonic monsters must crawl around him the moment he is alone, I thought. He preferred bad company to no company, an argument to silence, a twisted life that coiled like barbed wire around him when he sparred with anyone to the protracted beep of a dead patient’s heart monitor.

I held the few sheets he handed over to me and went over them in front of him. OK, I could do this. It was like studying the multiplication table; you needed to be blitzed by unexpected questions: four times eight, nine times six, seven times six, on and on. To bring back some mirth in his life, I decided to bombard him with fatuous questions. Where did you f*ck last, how many times, who comes first . . . Explosive laughter.

But why wasn’t his wife going with him to Immigration?

“Because that’s how she is,” he said. “Because she is selfish. Because of her gums.”

I looked at him with a puzzled look.

He pulled down his nether lip and exposed his gums. “Because I hate my wife! Because she wants a divorce. My God, you are really thick sometimes.”

His lawyer had just informed him that, given their probable divorce, Immigration Services was still not sure they would go ahead with the interview but that he should prepare for it nonetheless.

He started rolling a cigarette. It was his way to avoid staring me in the face. Then looking up, “I need to find a new lawyer,” he said. Did I know of a lawyer? No, I did not. “With all your Harvard contacts you don’t know a lawyer? This school manufactures the best lawyers in the world and you want me to believe you can’t come up with a single one?

“Not one,” I replied.

“You’re definitely the wrong kind of Jew. And I’m definitely the wrong kind of Arab.”

I laughed. He laughed.

“So,” I added, taking out the pieces of paper he had given me, “let’s go over some of the questions again.” He ordered coffee, sat back, and began smoking.

“Have you ever had anal sex with your wife?” I started.

He was such a good-natured soul that this alone brought a smile to his face. “That’s the kind of thing they might ask,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“How should I know?”

Then I asked again: “Well, have you had anal sex with your wife?”

“I don’t think we have.”

“Yes or no?” I said sternly, mimicking an official of the federal government.

“Yes.”

And together that evening we went back and forth with questions and answers. I learned more about his life on that day than anything I’d heard him say out loud when he wished others to overhear. He started life as a deserter. Why? Because two sailors had attacked him on the navy ship. He had just turned seventeen, not a speck of hair on his face, and was too shy to fight them off or tell anyone what they had done. From then on, the mere sight of blood, his own or anyone else’s, filled him with dread and shame, and then rage. In Marseilles he had met a very kind doctor who was also a Tunisian and who had helped him find a job in a bakery, then in a restaurant. When one of the chefs slit his own finger by accident, Kalaj had yelled at him for being careless and was summarily fired. Even now when he shaves, he hates to see blood. Where does he shave? In front of the mirror, where else? Does his wife shave her legs? No idea what she does with her legs. Her underarms? Her p-ssy? What does she keep in her medicine cabinet? Never looked. “You need to know,” I said. He tried to remember. Aspirin. What else. She jogged and used a muscle pain relieving cream that stinks of camphor and burns your skin so much when you touch her that your zeb is ready to wilt. In Marseilles, he went on, he enrolled in a school to obtain his baccalaureate, but he needed to work and eventually stopped going to school. He never got his bac. Then he moved to Paris where he worked in another bakery, always bakeries, and then a restaurant, then another, and another, until he got tired of working for others. He befriended Tunisian Jews in Paris who needed someone to cook Tunisian meals for them . . . but kosher. How did he know about kosher meals? He knew. Yes, but how? He just knew, oké? Suddenly he burst out laughing. Why was he laughing now? “Because you asked if my wife and I had anal sex.”

Was I sure I didn’t know any lawyers?

I nodded apologetically.

“What kind of a Jew!”

He was right to be nonplussed. I’d been at Harvard for four years and didn’t know a soul in the professional world. I didn’t even have a doctor outside of the one I saw at the Harvard infirmary each time I thought I was dying of gonorrhea and needed to be told that I wasn’t. As for a dentist, not one either. Psychiatrists, not a clue.

“Psychiatrists I can find with my eyes closed.” Every woman he’d known in Cambridge was seeing one at least once a week.

“You’re of no help,” he said. Then, changing topics, he asked: “And how is your work?”

“My work?” I looked at him, smiled, and said, “Better not ask. Let’s just say that by next year I will probably not even be here.” I already caught myself missing Café Algiers.

“L’enfer for you as well, then.”

“L’enfer.”

This was the first time that I finally understood how terrible my parents’ lives must have been in their final year in Egypt. Waiting to be expelled, hoping they might not be. Waiting for their assets to be seized, waiting for someone to ring their door with terrible news, waiting to be arrested on some trumped-up charge, waiting, waiting.

A FEW DAYS later I arrived a bit late in the evening at Café Algiers after attending a lecture and a dinner. I had had a bit to drink and was in no shape to study. I wanted company. He was there, looking more glum than ever, sitting by himself, smoking, not even reading yesterday’s paper. Peeking at the bill under his saucer, I could see that he had already drunk four cinquante-quatres. He was fidgety, fussy, ill-tempered, a gathering storm desperately searching for a lightning rod or else it might unleash its fury on the ten to fifteen earthlings minding their own business at Café Algiers. Tonight, he explained, he was driving on the night shift again.

I’d hate to be a driver on the same road, I thought.

Then he started sulking.

We drank our respective coffees in silence. Everyone, it occurred to me, was meant to notice he was brooding. Zeinab was the first. On his way out, even Moumou came and put a hand on his shoulder and asked, “Ça ne va pas?” The answer was curt: “Non, ça ne va pas.” Zeinab brought him a soup. On the house, she said. It was a Tunisian recipe he’d surely recognize. He wasn’t hungry. “I brought it and you’ll say no?”

He took a spoonful, slurped it, said he liked it very much. It was a good soup—really. But he wasn’t hungry.

When she went back to the kitchen, he looked at me, put on a wry smile, and said: “What Tunisian specialty? It’s an ordinary chicken soup.”

A second later he put his jacket on. “Come, I’ll drive you home.”

“Let’s go then.”

We walked out in total silence. When we reached Ash Street, there it was, his glinting off-yellow Titan among cars. He might as well have been introducing me to the love of his life.

“Everything I own I’ve put into this monster. Life savings that started the day I snuck into Marseilles to the moment I arrived in Paris, then to every menial job I held in Paris and Milan. Here, knock on this hood,” he said, clearly proud of the car. “Don’t pat it, knock with your knuckles—real steel, can you hear it? Dong, dong, dong. Like cathedral bells. Now knock on this car,” he said, as he walked over to the first car parked right next to his. Seeing I hesitated to play along, he grabbed my hand and forced me to pound my knuckles on the hood of a green Toyota. “Hear the ersatz dead thud? Hear the hollow rustle of crumpled aluminum foil? Hear?” Yes, I heard, I said. “Well, I’m like my car. I’ll outlive every one of these spit-glue men and women whose imagination is as limp as a used condom.”

We got into the car. It was my first time. The car was spotless and I liked its smell, the smell of old leather and old steel. When, two minutes later, we reached my building, I began to feel sorry for him but didn’t know what to say or how to help. I was too shy to ask him to open up and tell me about this cloud that had cast such a gloomy shadow over him. Instead I suggested something so flatfooted that I’m surprised it did not irritate him even more than he was already. I told him to head home and sleep the whole thing off, as if sleep could free a castaway from his island. No, he needed to work, he replied. Besides, he was looking forward to driving at night. He loved cruising Boston by night. He loved jazz, old jazz, Gene Ammons—especially played en sourdine, with the volume really low—as the tenor sax invariably blocked all bad feelings and made him think of romance and of sultry summer nights where a woman dances cheek to cheek with you to the saxophone’s prolonged lyrical strains that made you want love even after you’d stopped trusting love exists on this planet. He loved the music on Memorial Drive and on Storrow Drive as he cruised those large damp thoroughfares watching the tiny lights flicker off Beacon Hill and Back Bay and all along the Esplanade. “I feel American when I drive at night, as in those films noirs where all they do is smoke and drive with their Stetson brim tilted down to eye level.” Once, when a fare asked him to change the music, Kalaj ignored him. When the man repeated his request, Kalaj slammed on the brakes right in the middle of Roxbury and told the pure white gentleman to get out of his cab.

At another time when a black man told him to turn off the Om Kalsoum tape he’d been playing en sourdine, Kalaj once again screeched on the brakes, and when the man refused to step out of the car and indeed threatened to fight it out, Kalaj simply turned around and shouted, “My ancestors sold yours into slavery—now get out before I do the same to you.”

Kalaj, who never once said anything against Jews, had told a Jewish passenger, who’d heard him listening to Arabic music and refused to tip him because he was an Arab, that it was a great pity they hadn’t shipped his grandmother and his baby father straight into the gas chambers, because, given the chance, he would have loved to light the ovens himself.

He knew where to hurt.

He must have known exactly where I’d hurt. He never touched that spot.

I MET KALAJ over coffee almost every evening after that, sometimes by pure chance, sometimes because we both happened to be at Café Algiers at the same time, sometimes because neither of us knew what to do when the Indian summer evenings wore on long after we’d worked ourselves to exhaustion. I would read all day, pretend I was elsewhere, and find all manner of ways to avoid worrying that the new academic year was just round the corner. I didn’t want to think of the academic year with all of its attendant duties and obligations: teaching, tutorials, committee of this and that, responsibilities at Lowell House, students to meet and interview, departmental parties and get-togethers—to say nothing of my second attempt at passing comprehensives in mid-January and, if I succeeded, my orals following immediately after. Lloyd-Greville had told all first-year graduate students to read every book in the English Literature library. Was he serious, I had asked a fourth-year graduate student. He never jokes, he replied. The joke was on me. I knew I was allowing Kalaj to distract me from my work; I knew there’d be a price to pay soon enough; perhaps I even wanted to pay that price. But the thought of losing Harvard would wake me up at night and stir up a massive state of panic. There was no sleeping after that. One night, I woke up with such an overwhelming feeling of dread that all I wished to do was write a poem to a woman I had loved years earlier and had completely lost track of. On another night I started writing what I was sure was going to bring me a substantial income: a pornographic tale about two rogue nuns in a convent. Usually, though, all I did was warm up some milk and try to imagine that someone close by had warmed it for me before heading back to bed. I’d eventually fall asleep on my couch. Sometimes watching dawn from my bedroom window overlooking so many rooftops made me think of the beach, and thinking of the beach brought peace in my heart. If you refused to look out to check the window, the illusion of a resort town lingered, and that was good.

Lloyd-Greville had had Mary-Lou call me to make an appointment. He wanted to discuss Chaucer with me. “Which tale?” I asked her. “All Chaucer,” she replied, as though I’d yet once more forgotten what kind of institution Harvard was. The appointment was set for mid-September, following Lloyd-Greville’s return from Russia. He taught Russian literature to Russians. He was—I should have known—fluent in Russian as well.

I knew that spending time at Café Algiers was not helping my reading regimen, but Café Algiers helped stave off the many phantoms that seemed to haunt me even during my waking hours. It also occurred to me that, despite having a few friends in Cambridge, I had never been so close or on such intimate terms with anyone else in my life as I was with Kalaj, and I didn’t want to lose this. We had a little world all our own here, a house-of-cards world with its house-of-cards cafés and house-of-cards rituals held together by our house-of-cards France. We called Café Algiers Chez Nous, because it was so obviously made for the likes of us—part North African, part faux-French, part dreamplace for the displaced, and always part-something-from-somewhere-else for those who were neither quite here nor altogether elsewhere. At Café Algiers we always ordered a cinquante-quatre and later a glass of wine with chili at Anyochka’s, which he liked to call la soupe populaire, the soup kitchen. Wine, all wines, he nicknamed un dollar vingt-deux: his girlfriend, when she soon became his girlfriend, mon pléonasme; and Linda from my building, whose name he refused to remember, la quarante-deux. His other recent conquest never got a name: she remained Miss Bathroom Problems. Césarion’s, we both agreed, was le petit trou, the little hole, and the Harvest, pronounced Arvèst, with the accent on the last syllable, became Maxim’s, or sometimes, le grand trou. Casablanca, for some reason, never got baptized and remained Casablanca. Our daily walks usually took us from Maxim’s to la soupe populaire, with an occasional stop back Chez Nous. Chez Nous was where we read, played backgammon, made friends, and on certain evenings would sit around and listen to Sabatini. From time to time, the guitarist would bring his star pupil along who’d know to play the Andante spianato, because Kalaj always begged to hear it. On Sundays evenings, once the school year got under way, we’d always manage to catch an art film at the Harvard Epworth Church, for a dollar each. He called it going to Mass.

He renamed everything around him to snub the world and show there were other ways of seeing and calling things and that everything had to go through baptismal fire to be cleansed of all cant and pieties before he’d let them into his world. It was his way of reinventing the world in his own image, or in the image of what he wanted the world to be—his way of taking this cold, inhospitable, ersatz, shallow town and bringing it down a few notches to see it turn into a kinder, more intimate, more complicit, sunnier place that would open up a secret passageway for him and ultimately yield to him with a smile—if only, like Ali Baba, he could find the right nickname for it in this French language of his own invention. He defaced the world by applying improvised monikers, leaving his fingerprint on everything he touched in the hope that the world might one day seek the hand that had left such deep scuff marks at its door and pull him in saying, “You’ve knocked long enough. Come in, you belong here.”

In that huddled, provisional world of his he crammed and made room for everyone at Café Algiers, but to one person he gave the best and the airiest room. And that person was me. He needed an accomplice who was also a blood brother.

What he did not see is that the more he opened other worlds and kept challenging and pushing Cambridge further away from me to show there were other ways of living and doing things, the more desperately I clung to the small privileges and to the tentative promises Harvard held out for me.