Harvard Square A Novel

3




EARLY ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN I WALKED INTO CAFÉ Algiers with my books and was not expecting to run into him so early, I saw Kalaj sitting with two women. “How wonderful to see you,” he shouted, and right away embraced me. We’d never embraced before. “I’ve been waiting forever.” There was something too garrulous and flamboyant in his greeting. He was up to something. “This is the friend from Harvard I told you about.” I suddenly had a suspicion that he was drawing on my Harvard credentials to boost his own standing and show he had contacts outside of his immediate circle of Maghrebine cabbies and waiters. If he’d only known how thoroughly threadbare my connection to Harvard felt at the time, especially with the threat of catastrophe in mid-January hanging on my mornings like the rancid aftertaste of an undigested meal gulped down with cheap wine the night before.

But this wasn’t what was going on at all. He was using me as a conversation piece. I didn’t mind. Or, perhaps, I wasn’t a conversation piece at all. He was basically asking me to help. And help under those circumstances could mean one thing only: relieving him of one of the two women. The question was which of the two.

As the girls were speaking to one another, he gestured exactly what I suspected: Get them away from each other! But he added something else: Which of the two do you want? Since I was doing him a favor, it didn’t matter—I wasn’t interested in either. Besides, going along with the ploy by pretending to make advances to one of the girls to help his cause with the other seemed a touch too underhanded for my taste. My apparent reluctance to fall in with his plan baffled him. His eyes jumped at me with incomprehension. Not do anything? What an insult to them. And frankly, to him as well. I had to choose. Even they expected it.

I picked the one sitting next to me.

She was a Persian girl who had read all of Dante in Italian, then in Spanish, then in Farsi. The other was a curly-haired blonde called Sheila who was, I should have guessed, a physical therapist.

It turned out that Sheila didn’t interest him. Ironically, Miss Bathroom Problems did. She had disappeared following their first night and it was she, not he, who was being difficult now. I should have seen this coming. He wasn’t very worried, though. Cambridge was smaller than Paris. They were bound to bump into each other again. Hadn’t he taken her phone number? He’d lost it. Didn’t he know where she lived? No. Too dark, too drunk that night, hadn’t paid attention. As for Pléonasme from la soupe populaire—who did indeed turn up on the third day and proved to be, as he’d guessed, French from a Jewish-Moroccan family—he had ended up sleeping with her in his room when his landlady, dubbed Mrs. Arlington of Arlington Street, was already asleep. In no time—three days!—he’d fallen in love with Austin, the boy she took care of as a live-in babysitter. He’d break his day in two to drive her to his school to pick him up at 2:00 p.m., and together they’d drive to Faneuil Hall, park the car, and buy three ice creams. It was all a big secret, as the boy was not supposed to tell his parents that his babysitter’s boyfriend was a cabdriver who would pick them up every day and roam around Faneuil Hall until he found a parking space. He continued to pick up the boy, on his own sometimes, long after discovering that his babysitter was two-timing him with the boy’s father behind the wife’s back.

“I don’t care if she sleeps with someone else. I too sleep with others. But at least show some dignity—cheating on the man who worships the son of the very man she cheats on me with—that no! C’est de la perversité! Absolutely not.” Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

“I think he wanted to be alone with Sheila,” said the Persian girl once we were alone together that afternoon. We spoke in French, which for the second time that summer kept open a door I’d thought had been shut to me. I liked speaking to a woman in French. I had come home. There were things to say to a woman in French. Not things that couldn’t be translated or said in English, but things that would never have occurred to anyone in English and which therefore couldn’t exist in an English-speaking mind. And it wasn’t just the things themselves or even the words for them that I had warmed up to, but their emotional inflection, their underlayers, their voice, my voice, the voice of so many who had spoken French to me in childhood and whose wings now hovered over every word I spoke, listening in and barging into my speech in not unwelcome ways. Kalaj had met the two women there, at Café Algiers: the cigarette trick, the forlorn expat trying to make a comeback, the exotic whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria. She had never met Sheila before; she’d been sitting at one table, Sheila at another, and in between had sat Kalaj. All he’d done was to rapprocher the two.

Not knowing where else to go, I took her downstairs to Césarion’s for happy hour. She preferred herbal tea to cheap wine. She didn’t touch Buffalo wings—assembly-line food for the indigent, she called it.

“Rich girl from Iran?” I hazarded.

She laughed. “Very rich girl from Iran.”

There was silence for a while.

“Do you have many friends in Cambridge?” she asked, clearly meaning to change the drift of our conversation.

“No, mostly graduate students,” I replied.

She too was a graduate student, she said, though she could easily have passed for a young professor. She had arrived from Iran in July, far too early before the start of classes.

“First time in America?” I asked, hoping to prove useful in helping her navigate her first steps in Cambridge.

“No, been here many, many times,” she answered, as if she couldn’t help but underscore what had initially seemed a flippant, self-mocking very rich girl from Iran.

Her last name was Ansari.

I quoted a few lines from the Persian poet by the same name.

“Yes, yes, everyone quotes the very same verses,” she said, as though asking me to come up with a better one.

Like a croupier she had, with a quick sleight of her roulette-table rake, managed to clean up all my chips. I stared at her blankly. Her frank and dauntless gaze seemed to say: No more chips, huh?

“Might as well have dinner together,” she said, as we loitered outside of Césarion. “I don’t expect we’ll be seeing more of Sheila or Kalaj this evening.”

I suggested we have a quick bite at Anyochka’s. Quick bite was my lingo for cheap eats. With Kalaj it couldn’t possibly have meant anything else. With her, quick bite bordered on churlish haste. “What’s the rush?” she asked. I explained: Cervantes, four hours; Scarron, one; Sorel, another one; Bandello, God knows. I told her about my exams.

“When are you planning to take them?” she asked.

“Mid-January.”

“But that’s in just a few months.” Meaning: Better get cracking.

No kidding, I wanted to reply.

I admired women with the ready wit to say things as they are. I told her so. Her answer was no less amazing. “Cher ami, I live in the hic et nunc, the here and now,” she said. I wanted to tell her that I, on the other hand, inhabited the iam non and the nondum, the no more and the not yet, but then I thought it better to leave this for some other time. Not the right time for Saint Augustine. I asked if she had any other ideas about where to eat. She didn’t. Maybe it would have to be a quick bite, then, she jibed. All I remember her saying during our short dinner together was “Let me warn you about one thing, though,” which she had said while removing the very thin slices of Havarti cheese from her sandwich with her thumb and index finger. She didn’t like superfluous cheese in her sandwich, she said, as she tried to separate the cheese from the lettuce, all the while trying to push back the one or two slices of Virginia ham she had unintentionally pulled out in her effort to remove the cheese. Sandwiches were not her thing either. “Let me say it now.” I could tell that this might be an awkward admission, not so much for her, as for me. “Tell me,” I said. She seemed to ponder it a while longer. “Je suis plus grande que toi, I am older than you are.” I reassured her as best I could. But her total candor caught me off guard. I thought I’d been maneuvering the situation deftly enough—but this was too fast, too upfront, too hic et nunc. More disconcerting yet was the tone with which she seemed to be taking back an offer I hadn’t even realized was on the table. Had she spoken an undisclosed yes before I’d even asked? Had things progressed so fast between us without my even noticing? Then I realized what it was. Kalaj had simply put the two women in the mood. He had done all the spadework. How he’d done it was beyond me. Now that she was in the mood, I was as good a man as any. I kept wondering what balloon had he floated to stir her this way. Perhaps she was after him, and I was just a screen. Or perhaps she assumed I was like him and had one thing and one thing only in mind.

We parted twenty minutes after sharing a pecan pie on a bench off Holyoke Street. I could tell she wasn’t used to slumming. At least this was a here-and-now moment between us, I said. She appreciated the jest. I already knew Kalaj would nickname her Hic et nunc.

There was still some light left for an hour’s reading on the roof terrace, I thought. But I kept thinking of Linda. By now she was surely back from the library. I knocked at her door. No one answered. I tried to turn the doorknob, in case she’d left it open. I would walk in and regardless of what she was busy doing, we’d undress in a second. But the knob would not turn. I rang again. No answer.

That evening I managed to turn all the pages of Cervantes.

At around eleven o’clock that night, the buzzer rang downstairs. It was Kalaj. “Are you alone?” Of course I was alone. He rushed up four flights. “I thought you’d be with the Persian.”

“I’m reading.”

“You mean you actually said ‘no’ to her? Are you out of your mind?”

“I am reading.”

“For what, for your doctorate in paperwork?” He could not understand. “Well, I’ll leave you to your papers, my friend.” Then, on second thought, “Did you like the Persian girl?”

“She’s not bad.”

“I asked for a yes-or-no, not a more-or-less.”

“Fine, yes.”

“So why is she not here?”

“Because she is not here,” I said.

“What you did was wrong.” He thought for a while. “Actually, it was cruel.”

“Actually, I was going to knock at la quarante-deux’s door when I was done with my reading. She’s the fallback,” I added, trying to stir the spirit of male solidarity which I knew he’d appreciate.

“Great, you’re a fallback, she’s a fallback, your whole life is one big fallback. I don’t pretend to know more than you do, but the only real thing in your life is your paperwork, and who knows, maybe your paperwork could just as easily be a more devious fallback than the others. I don’t understand, and to be very frank I don’t want to. Bonne soirée.”

Rat-tat-tat.

And with that he was gone.

I couldn’t figure why he was so upset with me. Perhaps, without quite knowing it himself, he had come close to realizing that, in my world, he too had acquired the provisional status of a fallback. Fallback fellowship in a fallback city filled with fallback lives.

I found out a few days later that the reason why he had rung my buzzer and raced upstairs was to ask me and the Persian girl to join him and Sheila for a long car ride to the North End to have coffee and pastries in a small Italian café. “We would have been all four of us together, and we would have had a wonderful time—you, me, the women, the Drive and Gene Ammons’ saxophone.”

I MET NILOUFAR a few times after that. I loved her name. It meant water lilies and made me think of Money’s nenuphars and of MoMA on clear September mornings when the quiet rooms are almost empty and the painter’s blues are all yours. She told me about her family, her brother, her ex-husband, her son, her mother, some in Iran, others in Europe and South America. We became friends. Dante, Islam, the Provençal poets, and the Sicilian connection—she was going to write about all these someday. Then one afternoon, as we were both sitting waiting for Kalaj at Café Algiers, we ran out of things to say. There were no more words to fill the silence with, nor anything else to put off the unspoken admission that hovered between us. She stared at me, I stared back. This was beyond I’ll-raise-you-by-one-chip-if-you-raise-me-with-another.

Is this what I think it is? I asked myself as I tried to parse the silence between us and get a sense of what was happening. Her stare wouldn’t subside. Yes, this is what I think it is. I stare, you stare, one human with another human—the rest and everything we’ve learnt so far in life can wait outside Café Algiers. I was twenty-six years old, yet this was the first true, intimate moment I’d known with another woman besides my mother. I wondered if Kalaj and she had spoken about me. Or had they slept together? Suddenly I saw tears in her eyes. “You’re crying,” I finally said, unable to pretend I hadn’t noticed.

“No I’m not,” she said, and looked down at the table, and with the heels of both palms covered her eyes, as if she were massaging them after too much reading. Then, with more tears: “You wouldn’t understand. Give me a handkerchief.” I pulled one out of my left pocket. I didn’t ask what made her cry, but all of a sudden I felt a sense of uncertainty and confusion, like a terrible pressure in my chest for which there were no words, no outs. Part of me was praying for Kalaj not to show up and interrupt this interlude between us, while another couldn’t wait for him to help us snap out of it. I stared into her eyes, she stared back, meaning You see now? Now do you understand? Suddenly I realized that my cheeks were feeling moist, and, without knowing it, that I too had begun to shed tears.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with us. Do you?” she asked. I shook my head.

“Just hold my hand,” I said, as she pushed a hand toward mine over the table.

I suggested we have something light to eat. But neither of us was hungry. “Walk me home?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Do you have all the books you need with you?”

“Most of them,” I replied. “Why?”

“Because tonight you’re sleeping with me.”

Outside, on the narrow alleyway between Brattle and Mount Auburn, we kissed.

She lived off Putnam Avenue close to the river. Over a dish of rice and spiced meats plus wine, we sat cross-legged on a rug and spoke about what had happened to us at Café Algiers.

“Do you think I was too forward?”

“Not at all,” I replied.

“Too fast?”

“I love how you did it.” Then I kissed her again.

I had never in my life spoken to a woman so frankly about courtship as the courtship itself was progressing. We spoke of Fellini, Renoir, and Visconti. She refused to own a television, she said. A few days later I made her buy one anyway. We had tea every evening. Then drinks. Then her spiced meats with rice and minced vegetables. We spoke of my favorite director, Rohmer, and of my favorite singer, Callas. We spoke of the great poets. And of the lesser poets. I was happy to have drifted away from Kalaj. There was talk of living together, and as the days wore on, we spoke of an enduring bond. We could live in Paris part of the year, she said, and after my exams, what better place than Paris to start writing my thesis on La Princesse de Clèves, while she’d take courses at the Institute of the Arab World. But first we had to see the Kurosawa retrospective, which started in one week. When I hesitated about the retrospective, alleging the books I had to read between now and the middle of January and my approaching meeting with Lloyd-Greville to discuss the complete works of Chaucer, she said we’d just have to make the time in the here and now. I loved this about her. Our problem, she said, was not Chaucer but how to smoke during those long, uninterrupted films. Simple. We’d each take turns stepping outside while the other filled you in when you came back. Terrible idea. We’d step outside together, have a quick smoke, and rush back in. Voilà! What could one possibly miss during a two-minute break in a two-hour-plus movie? What if we quit smoking altogether, I said. Excellent idea. When? Not tonight. Tomorrow. “Make me quit, oh Lord, but not yet.” We both laughed over our play on Saint Augustine’s Make me chaste, my God, but not quite yet. This was heaven. In an access of tenderness one night, she turned to me and said, “I’d give you my eyes if you asked.” She’d said it in French, but she’d spoken in the archaic tongue of bygone worlds. This too was heaven.

“Is this what you want?” Kalaj asked me one day when I found I needed to speak with him and only him, because I knew he’d understand. “Do you really want to get married?”

I said I didn’t know.

“People are always nervous before getting married, but at some point they know.”

“Well, I don’t know. So there.” Why, had he known before getting married how-many-times-now?

“I wasn’t in love,” he replied, ignoring my little dart. “Are you in love?”

I didn’t know that either.

“She wants me to go to Spain during Christmas to meet her family.”

He pondered the matter.

“Can you afford the plane ticket?’

“No.”

“Then who will pay?”

I didn’t know.

I had never thought that marriage could be determined on so paltry a basis as the price of a round-trip ticket to Barajas Airport.

But there it was, my answer.

We decided to put off the trip till early the following summer. Meanwhile we listened to all of Beethoven’s Late Quartets during an entire Saturday afternoon. Then, on the following day, to three versions of The Art of the Fugue, after which we sat and watched 60 Minutes. Next came dinner, the usual rice and spiced meats with a glass of wine for each, followed by lovemaking, and more lovemaking—there was a reason for those spiced meats, she joked. I wanted her all the time. I had never lived like this or been so happy with someone before. In the middle of the night sometimes we’d both wake up and stand by the large glass window in her living room and stare at the magical lights on Memorial Drive. Don’t take this away, don’t take this away . . .

After about three weeks and after classes had started, I felt something coming. She complained once that I didn’t cook. “Doesn’t even want to learn,” I heard her mutter to herself, as though speaking to the kitchen sink, to her rack of spices from Iran hanging in an open cabinet over the sink, to her prized Chantal teakettle, and her tins of teas shipped directly from Mariage Frères in France. At least I should offer to wash the dishes, she said, when she stepped out of the kitchen after we’d had dinner one evening. Maybe also help with laundry. And put some of your things away. Plus, awkward as this was for her, perhaps it was time to discuss sharing expenses here. That here cut me to the quick, for it brimmed over with muffled resentment. Who knows how long she’d been stewing over this before coming out with it. Finally, she said, my lovemaking wasn’t what it was in the beginning. I used to speak while making love to her. Now I was as quiet as a mouse. And I didn’t wait for her—a man should always wait for a woman.

My heart wasn’t in it, and she had spotted it right away, even before I did.

Then, a week or so later, it finally happened. On Sunday at 2:00 a.m., just one night before my meeting with Lloyd-Greville, I woke up with the usual paralyzing anxiety about what he would ask. I knew he’d prod and prod to see how shallow my knowledge of Chaucer was. But then, with one thought leading to the next, I finally realized that it wasn’t just Harvard or Lloyd-Greville’s office I was dying to run away from, but from her as well. Suddenly, I had to get out of her bed. Actually, and it took me a few more minutes to realize this, I had to get out of her house—just get out and run away. I decided to put off leaving until we’d discussed the matter later in the morning like two adults. Perhaps I’d cool down by then and know that my exams were the cause of my anxiety. But I knew that just getting out of bed and sitting in the living room for a few minutes might trigger alarm signals for her. One word about considering slowing things down a bit, especially before my meeting with Lloyd-Greville, or of possibly taking a break for a few days—a couple of weeks, no more, I promise—and there were bound to be tears, recriminations, at which point I’d have to tell her what everyone says under these circumstances: that it was me, not her, my exams, not us, the way my life was run, and not the gifts she’d brought to it—she was perfect, I didn’t deserve her. Where would I be without her now? The now was meant to convey the extent of my loss and despair. It was just that I had to go. Please don’t fight it, I’d say, I was learning not to fight it myself. The rhetoric, I failed to realize, was lifted from A Beginner’s Guide to Breakups.

But by 3:00 a.m. I was ready to explode. Every time I’d fall asleep a nightmare would insidiously work its way into my sleep, hover over my shoulders, then quietly work its way through my left ear and wake me up, even when I knew it was a dream, to remind me I was living a lie, that this should not go on, that I no longer wanted to touch her, didn’t even want her foot to rub against mine under the sheets. By 3:30 a.m. I got up, put on my socks, my trousers, kept the T-shirt I was sleeping in, picked up a few of my books, and removed her keys from my key ring and silently placed them on the kitchen counter. When I was out of her building and felt the first cool draft of autumn fan my face, I knew that this sudden freedom was the closest thing to ecstasy I’d known since moving in with her.

From an old telephone booth, I called Kalaj. After a few bland apologies for waking him at this time of the night, I asked: “Can you pick me up?”

“J’arrive.”

No questions. No explanations. From the sound of my voice he’d already guessed why I was calling. I wasn’t the first, or the last man who wanted out—desperately. Clearly he’d done the same thing himself many times before.

I waited in the late September weather, but I didn’t have time to feel the chill, for soon, I spotted his yellow Checker cab nosing its way ever so stealthily in between two rows of parked cars. Less than ten minutes had elapsed since I’d woken up and put on my socks.

After more apologies, I got into the cab. It was warm and smelled of cigarettes. All he said was, “You’re as white as aspirin.”

He laughed, I laughed. He’d learned the expression from a Greek sailor.

“Still, it was cowardly,” he finally said.

“Yes, it was cowardly.”

Looking straight ahead of him, he added, “You’ll do the same to me some day.”

I let it pass. Something told me not to argue.

To dispel the awkward moment between us, I asked if he’d known it could come to this.

Yes, he’d known all along, he said.

Why hadn’t he said anything then?

“Would it have made any difference?” he asked.

“No.”

“That’s why I never said anything.”

But I knew he had guessed the real why.

As we drove on Memorial Drive, I kept thinking of her, of what she’d feel when she woke up, how she’d look for me everywhere before spotting the keys on the kitchen counter. How long before she’d finally put two and two together and realize that I’d left for good? He’s left me. I could just hear her mutter those words to herself as she started rinsing last night’s wineglasses that we’d left on the tea table before turning in. He’s left, the irked, embittered rise in her voice betraying how much she wished she had me there if only to unleash her fury, while a plangent strain in her voice would nail the coffin on our brief love.

Tears began to well in my eyes, especially as I saw her sitting on her sofa that had become our sofa, or worse yet, by the very spot where we’d eaten our rice and spiced meats, realizing that her life had just spun out of orbit—Paris, the Arab Institute, my dissertation, our stay in Spain, everything thrashing about her like wild birds fluttering scared before an approaching beast. I was the beast. How could I do this to someone? And the way I’d done it was worse than the offense itself.

I wanted to go back now and tiptoe my way into her apartment, climb into bed with her, and hold her tight to me, and, as we’d hug, begin to make love, for she too loved sex that sprung in mid-sleep, rough, blind, beastly sex that grew ever so tender the more we awoke to what our bodies had started.

But I didn’t have a key to get back in, and I was too embarrassed to ask Kalaj to drive me back.

“Why did I do it?” I finally asked him.

“Because you couldn’t stand it, because you were choking, that’s why. Perfectly understandable.”

No, it was not understandable. Choking was just a word, a metaphor, a nothing. I myself had found the word crawling under my pillow that very same night. It was not an answer, not an explanation, yet it seemed the only one at hand, and the only word that said everything despite my mistrust of words. Why had I left her? Because I was living someone else’s life, not mine. Because I wanted my life back, even if I didn’t know what my life was or what I even wanted it to be. Because I wanted to be alone, or not with her, or with someone else, or, better yet, with no one at all. Because I wanted to find something of me in others only to realize that others were never going to be like me and ultimately had to be unclasped, thrown out, exploded, because estrangement is branded on the soul, because love itself was foreign to me, and in its place sat resentment and bile. Why had I even started with her? To be with someone instead of no one? To be like him? Or was I already, had always been like him, but in so different a guise that it was just as easy to think us poles apart? The Arab and the Jew, the ill-tempered and the mild-mannered, the irascible and the forbearing, the this and the that! And yet, we came from the same mold, choked in the same way, and in the same way, lashed back, then ran away.

He listened to my musings as though I were reciting a delirious poem. Then he shook his head and came back to his favorite word. “It just never took. The gluten never stuck.” The onetime baker in him had spoken.

In the quiet car with its twenty-four-hour music playing en sourdine, I thought about his four words. I liked them. As if love affairs were puddings and soufflés; sometimes things took, sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they just curdled, and there was no one to blame and nothing you could do.

A second later, I realized that the same could be said about everything else in my life, and his as well. Nothing seemed to take. Even our friendship . . .

“Do you really like being alone?” he asked.

“No.”

He understood this too. No need for words. He dropped me in front of my building.

I offered to make coffee if he wanted, but he said he might as well keep driving his cab until sunup today. He hadn’t yet gone to bed when I’d called. He seldom slept. Besides, it was early on a Sunday morning, and people were still coming out of clubs and after-hours bars. Plenty of money to be made on a Sunday morning.

As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere—ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends—even ordinary friends we didn’t have, or couldn’t keep.

We were not outcasts. We were untouchables. No one knew it except us. Harvard helped me hide it so well that entire weeks, sometimes months went by without my getting a whiff of it even once, let alone allowing someone else to glimpse it. Kalaj hid it in plain sight: by shouting it to everyone he ran into.

When I opened the door to my apartment, I realized that I had scarcely seen my home at night in a very long time. It felt unfamiliar. I was more at home with Niloufar off Putnam Avenue than here. And yet neither place felt right. No wonder Kalaj preferred to drive about all day and hang out in a Cambridge dive than face his own bedroom. I fell asleep with my clothes on and the smell of Niloufar’s bed mingling with my own.

THAT SUNDAY WAS probably the worst day of my life. I had no food in the house. I was exhausted, and I had twenty-four hours to master Chaucer before my appointment with Lloyd-Greville. The thought of taking even twenty minutes to go out to find something to eat was out of the question.

Later in the morning the phone began to ring. I knew who it was and decided not to pick up. I could hear my phone ringing all the way up on the roof terrace, where I planned to spend a few hours before hunkering down to type up my notes on Chaucer. I was to meet Lloyd-Greville the next day at 10:00 a.m. By staying upstairs, though, I knew I was also hiding. Cruel, heartless, cowardly. Linda, who happened to be upstairs on this clear, warm, lovely Indian summer day and whom I hadn’t seen since I’d been more or less living elsewhere except for an occasional stop to pick up or bring back books and a few items of clothing, could tell it was my phone ringing. “Why aren’t you answering?” she finally asked. Then she guessed why. “Will she ever stop calling?” By noon, while we were mixing our second Tom Collins in my kitchen, she asked, “Want me to pick up?” I couldn’t do that to a woman who had been my soul mate. Finally Linda grabbed my phone and placed it in the bathroom, shutting the door tight behind it, like a misbehaving pet that was being punished. I wanted her to remove her light blue tank top and the bottom of her bikini and without waiting proceed to my bedroom. I loved her body, loved the untrammeled sex, savage, selfish, and without meaning. I wanted her to erase the other woman in my life; I wanted to kiss her face, her mouth, and with that face bury the other as one might bury a Tanagra statuette that had become unbearable and stirred not a drop of guilt, pity, love, or even ordinary anger, but just this thing that scared me more, because it impugned me, not her: indifference. Or worse yet than indifference: numbness, first of the heart, then of the body. Hating, by contrast was far, far kinder—and perhaps there was a touch of hatred already in me as well, for hatred helps us forget and covers up the wounds we leave on others as fast as it helps heal those they’ve inflicted on us. “You don’t want to hurt her,” Linda said. “It’s because you’re kind.” No, it’s because I’m a coward, I wanted to say. But I didn’t say anything.

KALAJ DROPPED BY to visit me that afternoon. He had frequently gotten into the habit of coming by, knowing the door was never locked.

“The one thing no man should ever do is feel sorry for a woman. You always live to regret it,” he said. “It destroys her, and it destroys you.”

I could barely think of Niloufar at all. It was the last day for going over Chaucer, and I was hopelessly behind. “Can I do anything to help?” Kalaj finally asked.

“No, you can’t help.” And then it hit me: “Or maybe you can.”

The idea seemed a stroke of genius.

“I need two editions of Chaucer’s complete works,” I said.

“And how will I find them?”

I wrote down the approximate call number of the books and gave him my library card to borrow the books with. I told him where exactly to look for them inside the Widener Library stacks and suggested he take out any other books about Chaucer sitting on the stacks.

He had never been inside Widener, didn’t know where or what Widener was.

“Past the gate on Mass Ave between Plympton and Linden Streets,” I explained in cab lingo.

“That’s it?”

I nodded.

With that he sped down the stairs.

I was hungry, ravenous. I could knock at Linda’s, but she had probably already gone to the library. Strange thing: I felt more comfortable asking Kalaj to run an errand at a place he’d never even been to than Linda, who was right now in the very stacks where I was sending Kalaj.

An hour and a half later he was back. He was carrying a brown paper bag which he rushed into the kitchen because it was about to leak and emptied it in a salad bowl. More than a dozen chicken wings. Heavenly. From one of his other pockets he produced a small bottle of beer. Then came a string of petits sandwiches. “I told the waitress you were starving but couldn’t come.”

“But she doesn’t know me.”

“Short, Jewish nose, always lugging books—she knew exactly who you were. With her compliments.”

“And the books—?” I began, fearing the worst.

Suddenly, my heart sank. He had totally forgotten about the books!

“Right, the books—” he started. “I couldn’t find some of the ones you wanted . . . so I took out these instead.”

There he was being Harpo again. Out of numberless pockets in his faded army camouflage jacket, he produced six books.

“Not bad,” I said, as I looked at their titles. They were good books. When I looked in the inside cover, my heart sank again.

“But you forgot to check them out!”

“Well, yes, see, that was a bit hard. There were long lines, and they were all asking too many questions, and frankly ’appy hower was about to end, and I didn’t want to miss it. So I put the books in my pockets and decided to leave. I can assure you nobody saw.”

I was horrified. I was pleased.

“Now, I must let you work. Any books to lend me? I still can’t sleep at night.”

I let him borrow Sade, Maupassant, Balzac, and Stendhal.

“Bonne soirée.”

And he was gone.

I’D BEEN THINKING of the next morning’s meeting with Lloyd-Greville for so long that it had begun to seem unreal, as though lodged forever in the future. I decided to type up my notes, thinking that jotting down my ideas about Chaucer might help firm them up in my mind. But I was not prepared to see that I hardly nursed one interesting idea about Chaucer. He’d want to discuss Troilus and Criseyde or “The Knight’s Tale” whereas I’d much rather go on about “The Tale of Sir Thopas,” where Chaucer makes fun of himself as a totally feckless raconteur who is ultimately interrupted by the innkeeper and told to stop, because none of the pilgrims could stand his silly prattle. Chaucer the anti-narrator: there was gold in this idea. By 11:00 p.m. I realized that I had circled the wagons too many times to know what I had to say about Chaucer. I could already hear Lloyd-Greville: What, in fine, are your thoughts about “The Book of the Duchess,” sir? Lloyd-Greville had probably picked up the Gallic in fine from Henry James, about whom he was also an expert. My point was . . . well, you see, gentlemen—and suddenly I saw myself for who I was. I was, like the narrator of Notes from the Underground, an arrogant, jittery, posturing, paranoid, dysfunctional, capricious fop. Like him, I was all double-talk, even when I was alone and nobody was listening, even when I whispered things to myself that were truer than true—imponderable double-talk just the same.

I had no idea what my thoughts on “The Book of the Duchess” were going to be, but the more I wrote, the more I jotted down ideas, the more I seemed to depend on the page itself to tell me what I was trying to say. Trying to say? I didn’t know what I was trying to say until I’d said something that looked good enough for the Lloyd-Grevilles and Cherbakoffs of this world. If they thought it passed, then it passed for me. My ideas, however, were as transient and provisional on paper as I was at Harvard, in Cambridge, on this planet. I was, and my ideas were, like Kalaj himself, all talk. And the trouble was I couldn’t tell the difference between an idea and its malingering double, chatter.

By one o’clock in the morning the phone started to ring again. I picked it up without thinking. “I’m not asking you to come over. But can I come over?” It was Niloufar, she needed to speak to me.

“I am not alone,” I lied.

“Already found someone else? Bravo,” she said, and right away hung up on me. A few minutes later she called again. “I just want you to know you’re the worst person I’ve ever met. And I’ve known some very bad ones.”

“Thank you very much.” My turn to hang up.

She called again. “What I said was not true. You are the best person I’ve ever loved. Please come back. Or I’ll take a taxi and be at your door, begging.”

“I can’t talk.”

“Oh, I see, of course. Are you ready for tomorrow morning?”

“No, not yet,” I said, thinking she was changing the subject if only to maintain a semblance of composure but also, perhaps, to thwart whatever pleasure I was enjoying at the moment. I was wrong.

“Listen to me, Monsieur Chaucer screwing La Princesse de Clèves. I hope he tears you to pieces and exposes you for the shallow, bungling petit con you’ve always been, even, and especially, in bed. I curse you and your children if they’re unlucky enough to have you as a father. A curse on you—did you hear me?—a curse!” And out came a string of words in Farsi, tears, yelps, followed by an endless series of French words sobbed out of her lungs, as though she were talking not to me, not to her lover, but to her mother, pleading first, then cursing again, then apologizing for cursing, and cursing all over again. “I curse you.” As in some of her most passionate moments, she had turned to Old World-speak, and if my heart was racing as she kept heaping curses upon me and on the children of my children, it was because I too, like her, came from a world where curses, like blessings, like pledges, like all protestations of enduring love are, even when you don’t mean a word you’re saying, binding legal tender, the currency of the soul, because once spoken, they cannot be taken back, dispelled, or parleyed with; they will hunt you down, find you, and carry out their sentence.

I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t sleep. The meeting with Lloyd-Greville and the curses were enough to keep anyone up. I had crossed the line, stepped into the lepers’ colony of the damned; there was no redemption, no pardon. From here on, I’d live out the term of her curse. As for my comprehensives, they were cursed long before I’d met her, before Kalaj, before I’d even applied to Harvard—for this had started as a fantasy and, before I’d known it, the fantasy had crossed the line and wriggled its way into real life and was now outliving its time.

I went into the kitchen and decided to make the strongest coffee I had in the house. It would take ten minutes to brew a big cup of espresso—but I needed a break. I had five hours before me; the job could be finished by then. The stovetop espresso pot was dirty from the last time I’d brewed coffee in it, probably as far back as the month of May. My friend Frank had come over one evening to grumble about his girlfriend who wouldn’t stop complaining that he wasn’t doing something to avoid losing his hair. Claude, who was also present that evening, and who never liked to listen to Frank’s amorous bellyaches, interrupted, as he always did when Frank started about Nora, saying we needed to add Cointreau to spike the coffee. We brewed three cups, then brewed three more. Eventually, we turned to wine until Frank offered to cook something in my kitchen for the three of us. All I had were eggs and tomato sauce. Any cheese? he asked. Grated Kraft Parmesan. “I’ll make dinner,” he said, having located an unopened box of pasta.

I hated being alone in my apartment, though I also welcomed being alone again. But suddenly, and, once again, because of the coffee, I remembered the day when I’d returned from Widener Library the previous winter with several books and on walking into my apartment had found it all lit up with Frank and Nora setting my kitchen table for the three of us. “You forgot to lock the door, so we let ourselves in and brought dinner. Don’t you ever lock your door?” Nora had asked. “Not always. What would anyone want to steal?” I’d said. “True,” they’d agreed. The sofa, the bed, indeed, all my furniture, as everyone knew, had been lifted off the streets of Cambridge. Even my plates and my coffee mugs and director’s chairs were the legacy of friends of friends who had left Cambridge. Nothing belonged to me. I paid month-to-month rent, without a lease. The only key I used was the mailbox key. Frank had brought cooked lasagna that night and was busy reheating it. I loved them both that evening. This had never happened before, which is why stepping into my apartment and finding that people had lit up my place and made themselves at home had turned that evening into one of my happiest and most memorable days at Harvard. Lights, friendship, wine, lasagna, coffee.

The coffeepot that morning was stuck shut. So I banged it against the kitchen counter. Then, to empty the hardened coffee grinds, I opened the service door, lifted the top of the trash container on my landing, and gently banged the metal funnel filter against it, once, twice. My neighbor opened her service door right away. “Did you knock?” she asked. “No,” I said, apologizing for the noise. “I was just emptying the coffee grinds,” I said showing her the funnel as proof I wasn’t lying. “The last time I made coffee using this thing was months ago.”

“Oh,” she said. Then because I stood there, hesitating to shut my kitchen door before she had shut hers, she asked why I was up so early.

“Work,” I said. “What about you?”

Work too, she smiled.

“Funny, though,” she said, “I happened to see your light late last night and wondered about you.”

Was this the equivalent of telling a man she’s dreamed of him?

“What did you think?”

“Nothing.”

“Good or bad?”

“Nothing special, really.”

I still did not shut the door though I could tell from her body language that she was about to shut hers.

“Tell me the next time we meet then.”

But I still didn’t signal I was shutting the door. I just stood there with parts of the dirty coffeepot in both hands. “It’s a promise then.”

She smiled but did not answer, and because she did not answer I knew at that moment that she knew about Linda and me and that she’d make sure to open her kitchen door in three days at the latest, unless she was like the Princesse de Clèves and would never open it again when she was alone in her kitchen precisely because she was dying to throw it wide open. Then, if indeed she was like the Princess, she’d tell her boyfriend, not what she had done one afternoon when he was away at work and I’d knocked and asked to borrow, say, a bottle opener, but that she had intentionally resisted opening the kitchen door because she knew who was knocking and didn’t trust herself.

I WENT TO meet Lloyd-Greville that morning at 10:00 feeling buoyed and uplifted not by my readiness to discuss Chaucer but by what had happened at 5:00 that very morning. And perhaps it was because I was in such high spirits that I must have persuaded Lloyd-Greville I was more than prepared to take my comprehensives that coming January. As I was stepping out of his office, he handed my file to Mary-Lou, saying “Our friend here could, if he wished, write a dissertation on Chaucer.” Lloyd-Greville was always stingy when it came to praise; he preferred compliments by proxy, by speaking to you via someone else, by not even looking at you. I went home, unplugged my phone, and threw myself on my sunbathed bed totally naked.