Harvard Square A Novel

4




THE INDIAN SUMMER WASN’T LETTING GO, EVEN AS September dragged on into early October. Mornings were chilly, but by midmorning the weather would grow warm, then unbearably hot, and then quite cool again. Ersatz weather, Kalaj called it. Why should this surprise anyone? Everything about this place was sham, bogus, fake, phony, counterfeit. Contrefaçon, he’d say, meaning that everything was counterfeit in America. Still, I liked the extended illusion of spring weather with its heady presage of summer oddly trailing on the last, first days of fall. It took me back to spring break, when summer was still weeks away. I remembered the end of the academic year. Back then I had drawn up lists of books to read or reread and had just discovered the use of the terrace upstairs. My friends Frank and Claude were still in town and Nora hadn’t even left for Europe yet. Nora, when she wasn’t with Frank, would come by sometimes and cook a Cornish hen for the two of us, though we both knew that she was coming simply to vent about how hard Frank was to live with and how she couldn’t wait to be without him for a while, which is why the two had decided to spend their summer away. The whole thing with the Cornish hen and the half-liter bottle of wine always ended up in tears. One evening we’d gone to see Annie Hall in Boston. She kept laughing; I couldn’t begin to understand why, and finally decided that perhaps Frank was right, there was something wrong with her. It never occurred to me that I had not yet grasped Woody Allen’s humor. Kalaj, when I thought back on those spring days, was still months away, as if unborn yet. To think there was a time when Kalaj hadn’t stomped into my life and altered its rhythm. I tried but didn’t really wish to restore that sheltered rhythm, though I knew that continuing on this path of bar after café after bar after café seemed equally unthinkable a way to spend my time as a scholar. But Cambridge without Kalaj seemed unthinkable now. And yet after spending an hour with Lloyd-Greville, I was starting to recover my confidence and, with my confidence, my old love for scholarship and for Cambridge and for the life it presaged.

I went back to Lowell House more frequently as soon as I received Lloyd-Greville’s temporary thumbs-up. I liked going there almost every day. I liked having a study where I could meet students and discuss their work. I liked my new students. All History and Literature majors were unusually bright and well read, and most spoke at least one foreign language. Students were in the habit of waiting for me outside my study after lunch. We discussed the books they wished to read, drew up lists, chatted, talked about life, which invariably meant sex, or the absence of sex. With yet another student, I discussed the topic of her senior thesis, things we had more or less already agreed upon before she’d left for Europe in early May. Now, five months later, she wore a tan, had perfected her French, couldn’t wait to be back in Paris for Christmas. I hadn’t seen Christmas in Paris in at least a decade. Sometimes I held tutorials in my office, or I’d invite someone over for coffee after lunch, and liked nothing more than to feel back on track with everyone else in Cambridge, liked the view into the main courtyard where students and younger tutors alike seemed to lounge about for hours on beach towels in the early afternoon, reading and studying, without another care in the world, graced by the towering, watchful presence of the blue-domed belfry and the protective manor-house gaze of this spot of paradise called Lowell House. For a few years in everyone’s life here, Harvard cordoned off the world, was the world.

Kalaj didn’t have a place in this world, and yet I knew that he’d barge himself in one way or another.

A few days after my meeting with Lloyd-Greville I ran into Kalaj at the café. He still couldn’t sleep, he said. He was, once again, as he so often was these days, in a foul mood, worse even than the last time. Could I do him a favor? Of course. He needed me to go with him to visit a lawyer. Tomorrow morning? Yes, I could do it, I said. Did he have an appointment? What for?

“You can’t walk right in to see your lawyer, you need to make an appointment.”

“So? Call now and make an appointment,” he said.

But it was past six o’clock; the lawyer had probably left already.

“Call anyway,” he said, producing the phone number from his tiny notebook after removing the rubber band. We called, or rather I called.

The lawyer picked up the phone himself.

I hadn’t had a chance to ask for an appointment when Kalaj interrupted me in French to ask if the lawyer could see him now.

“Can we come over now?”

“Now as in right now?” he asked, raising the pitch of his voice, as if the idea seemed totally outlandish.

“Maintenant?” I asked Kalaj, hoping he’d change his mind.

“Oui, maintenant,” he answered.

“Now.”

The voice at the other end of the line hesitated. “Frankly, I was getting ready to head home.”

I whispered the message to Kalaj. He immediately put an index finger to his lips, meaning say nothing. It was the equivalent of a fermata in music, the strategic prolongation of a sound, except that the sound here was silence, the deliberate silence of someone who has just plopped down a penny on the table and is waiting for you to do the same before raising you with yet another. This was the very essence of lingering. Once you’ve asked your question do not say a thing more; when you’ve put your one chip on the table don’t add a second simply because the other person is hesitating or because the silence between the two of you has become unbearable.

“How long will it take you to get here?” the lawyer asked.

Once again I whispered in French: how long did he think it would take?

“Ten minutes.”

I was baffled. It usually took almost three times as much to get there from Cambridge.

“Quick,” said the lawyer.

Standing up, Kalaj gulped down the remainder of his coffee, left some change on the table, picked up his things, and off we went. We hopped into his car and right away, after a few awkward turns through narrow alleys to the river, his huge Checker cab—the tank, the Titanic, the armored vehicle and intrepid war machine—was zipping its way at breakneck speed on Memorial Drive with the wonky grace of an aging dowager on wheels.

In my life I had never traveled so fast. We were begging for an accident. Why had I ever befriended such a nut?

“Where did you learn to drive?” I said, my way of asking him to slow down.

“In a driving school owned by a Tunisian Jew in Marseilles. That’s why we make the best pilots in the Israeli air force, didn’t you know?” he jested.

It was the lawyer himself who opened the doors to his firm on the twenty-sixth floor. “This way, gentlemen.” The collar of his striped white and blue shirt was unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up above his elbows. This, Kalaj signaled, was not someone getting ready to head home.

We entered an office overlooking the harbor. Boston looked magical from such a height. Both of us must have gasped, the way hired waiters do when they’re first shown the way from the kitchen to the main dining room in a posh mansion.

We had rehearsed our spiel in the car. What Kalaj wanted was not just for me to translate, but to read between the lines, to extract, to interpret, to intercept, from what the lawyer was saying the core of what he wasn’t saying. In this as in everything else, he wanted complicité. The lawyer put both feet on his desk, took out a fresh yellow legal pad, removed the cap of his pen with his teeth, and placed the lined pad on his thigh, meaning: OK. I’m listening.

“Kalaj’s wife is suing for divorce,” I explained.

Nod, nod, meaning: And this is surprising? He lit a giant meerschaum pipe.

“They haven’t been living together for over two months. He’s living in a tiny rented room in Cambridge. The question is: Will this hurt his chances for getting a green card?”

Nod, nod from the lawyer, meaning: Did you honestly believe that it wouldn’t?

“If both agree to go for an interview before divorce procedures are set in motion, might this help things?”

Nod, nod. It might.

“Is there anything that can be done to hasten the process before the issue of his divorce comes up?”

“We can try to ask them to hold an interview sooner—but it’s not good to push the people at Immigration. They get very suspicious. And let me warn you, they do deport people they suspect of operating in bad faith.” Silence. “Why is she suing for divorce?” he asked, as though more out of personal curiosity.

“Pourquoi veut-elle divorcer?” He understood the question, but I had to go through the motions of asking him. He whispered a few words in French.

“She alleges he cheats on her.”

Nod, nod. No shit.

“Well, gentlemen, all I can promise is to request that they move up the date of the interview.”

Kalaj did not ask me to translate.

“His father is sick in Tunisia. He needs to leave the country for ten days.”

“Not advisable.”

“Il se fout de notre gueule, ou quoi? Is he f*cking with us or what?” whispered Kalaj. Then, to the lawyer he said, “Well, thank you. And by the way,” he added, turning to a series of framed photo portraits on the wall, “they’re all wrong.”

The lawyer cast a disbelieving look at his framed photographs of heavyweight champions. “Not Carnera, Baer, Braddock, Schmeling, Louis, Charles, Marciano,” said Kalaj. “It was”—and he proceeded to list them by heart the way every French schoolboy knows his La Fontaine’s Fables—“Willard, Dempsey, Tunney, Schmeling, Sharkey, Carnera, Baer, Braddock, Louis, Charles, Walcott, Marciano, Patterson, Johansson, Liston, Ali.”

“Wow. I’ll have to look into it. Does he know Köchel numbers too?” asked the lawyer with irony in his voice as he turned to me.

“No, he’s not a Mozart fan, but if you ask him, he’ll explain exactly why asparagine emits that unmistakable smell each time you eat asparagus and go for a piss.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell Kalaj that the lawyer’s cold, disaffected replies spoke volumes and couldn’t possibly bode well. But Kalaj didn’t need me to tell him that. “I paid him three thousand dollars and all he does is smoke his huge Sherlock Holmes pipe and nod.” He made his usual imitation of Yankee nasal sounds as they’re mimicked the world over. Not advisable. Not advisable. Not advisable.

Kalaj knew of a lovely small Italian place in the North End where we could stop for dinner. He liked to show he could speak some Italian, which he had picked up in Milan. We had veal stewed in thick buttery wine sauce. I had not eaten so well in months. We usually split the bill right down the middle. This time Kalaj insisted on paying. I refused to accept. “I make five times in one day what you make in a whole month,” he said.

He was right.

He ordered a second bottle of wine. On the small television placed above what looked like a makeshift bar, the news bulletin showed Egyptian President Sadat landing in Israel, with the Israeli army band playing the Egyptian national anthem. I recognized the anthem from my old school days in Egypt. I liked the anthem now. What a glorious moment.

Did he believe there was going to be peace now?

He lifted his left wrist, looked at his watch, and said “Yes.” For the next five minutes.

“The Arab and Jew go to dinner. It should be the title of a movie.”

“When every Jew and every Arab will have killed each other, there’ll still be one Arab and one Jew left and they’ll continue drinking cinquante-quatres. I just hope there are more like us,” he said. “Do you think there are?” Then, not waiting for an answer, he added, “Some friendship. The Arab and the Jew.”

I said I didn’t know. He said he didn’t know either. We laughed. In Cambridge, there weren’t.

The waiter and the cook were muttering something in dialect. We were, Kalaj said, no longer in Boston but in Syracuse. Not too far from Pantelleria.

“Did you like Syracuse?” I asked.

“I hated it.”

“So did I.”

We started to laugh.

“Let’s have a cinquante-quatre Chez Nous.”

On the way back to Cambridge he told me that he’d loved Maupassant. Stendhal was good, yes, but Balzac was a genius. “But this fellow Sade disgusts me. Please take it back and let’s forget you ever lent me such a book.”

I had never believed that a man with so much life experience could be easily shocked. But he was genuinely upset. He was, his lifestyle aside, an unmitigated prude.

When we parked the car outside Café Algiers, I hinted that the interview with his lawyer had left me feeling very worried.

“I know. But I don’t want to think about it now.” He had a date with his Pléonasme in half an hour and had no room for more bad thoughts in addition to those she’d probably stir in him tonight. “Trust me,” he added. I assumed things were in a rocky phase.

“Did you have to go through one-tenth of what I’m going through for a green card?” he asked once we ordered coffee.

“No. I had a green card more or less waiting for me when I arrived, courtesy of my uncle in the Bronx.”

“What did your uncle in the Bronx have to do?”

“My uncle was a Freemason. He asked a Freemason to write a letter to a congressman who was also a Freemason, and from one Freemason to the other, someone finally allowed me to become a legal resident.”

“Just like that.”

“Masons are very powerful people.”

“Like Jews?”

“Like Jews.”

In less than ten days, Kalaj had not only managed to get himself invited to join a Masonic lodge, but had placed glossy stickers bearing the Masonic square and compass all over his cab—on the hood, on the dashboard, on the front and back fenders. He had even snuck two discreetly beneath the armrests right under the ashtrays.

Someone he had recently taken to the airport happened to be a Freemason who happened to have a Freemason friend who—

“You’re a genius,” he said to me.

ONE NIGHT, AFTER a heavy meal at High Table at Lowell House, I was awakened by a sharp pain on my right side. I waited for it to pass. It didn’t. The Persian curse, I immediately thought. I took some Alka-Seltzer and went back to sleep. But sleep didn’t come. The pain intensified and kept growing worse. By five in the morning I decided to call Kalaj. But he wasn’t answering. I put on some clothes, and unable to find a taxi on Concord Avenue, I had no choice but to walk all the way to the student infirmary. If I got sick I’d have a good excuse for putting off work on my comprehensives. Then the thought occurred to me: if I died, I wouldn’t have to take my exams at all. Clearly, the shot in the arm after my meeting with Lloyd-Greville had worn off.

By the time I was seen by the doctor at the infirmary, the pain had subsided. Probably trapped gas, the doctor said. What had I eaten for dinner? Harvard’s Dining Services, I explained. Figures, he replied.

This reminded me of the time a few weeks earlier in September when a wasp had stung me in my sleep and the pain was so excruciating that I put on my clothes and rushed myself to the infirmary convinced I was poisoned. They applied a few drops of ammonia where the wasp had stung me, and the pain was instantly gone. I had never seen Harvard Square at four in the morning before. It felt like an abandoned lunar station. Empty but sealed.

In both cases, as I walked out of the infirmary and felt a fresh morning gust course along the totally deserted Square, I suddenly could see how, bare of people and its usual bustle, this town couldn’t have been more foreign to me than it was at dawn, and that I was living a totally foreign, mistaken life here: this wasn’t my home, these weren’t my streets, my buildings, my people; and the hollow bland-speak spoken by the head nurse and reiterated by the attending night doctor to lift my spirits came in a language that my mother wouldn’t begin to fathom. Curses I understood. But Try to feel better, OK? and other honeyed mièvreries, as Kalaj called them, seemed to isolate me even further. I was already isolated as it was. Get sick and you realize you are a scuttled boat in a maelstrom.

To think that a few days earlier in the North End of Boston I’d been making fun of Sicily when I’d give anything to be there right now, strolling along the dank, ugly, bracken docks of Syracuse. Harvard wasn’t me, even Café Algiers wasn’t me. Nothing was me here.

I thought of Kalaj as well: he was more alone than I was: he didn’t have the illusion of an institution behind him—he barely even spoke English. All he had was his camouflage jacket, his sputtering bravado, his zeb, and his rickety man-of-war mottled all over with ridiculous Freemason stickers.

After the infirmary, I didn’t go back to sleep. I went straight to Cambridge’s only twenty-four-hour deli and ordered a full breakfast, sausages included. I took the day’s newspaper from the counter and read it. Then after Cambridge’s notorious bottomless coffee, instead of going home, I headed to my office at Lowell House. I wanted to see people. But the courtyard was entirely deserted. I was the only one alive at Lowell House. If a student happened to cross me on my way to my study, he’d probably suspect I’d spent the night with someone and was making a discreet exit before daybreak. I liked stepping on the dewy grass. I could live here, I thought. I couldn’t wait to see everyone up. How I liked the beginning of the school year, with its busy ferment of people rushing up and down Mass Ave when the town was abuzz with students winding up for a busy day. I loved Harvard Square in the fall.

There, I’d said it.

I did love it.

The feeling would go away. I knew it. It would peter out the moment I asked myself if it was possible to have a home somewhere and never belong to it.

I was the first in the dining hall for breakfast that morning. I neared the half-open window to the kitchen area where the cooks were still setting up the food and managed to send a heartfelt greeting to Abdul Majib, the kitchen attendant who wore a white uniform and always recited a beautiful, long-extended morning or evening greeting each time he saw me. It put me in a good mood. Then some students began to arrive. I sat down with two of them. Others were just waking up and stumbling in like sleepwalkers in a rush, their hair still dripping from showers taken minutes earlier. There was talk of heading out by car to see the leaves that weekend, miles and miles of leaves blazing through the landscape like wildfire over New England. Would I like to come? I didn’t care about the leaves. A wealthy producer had arranged for a private screening of Saturday Night Fever in Boston—did I care to join? I didn’t care for disco either, I’d said. It took me a few moments to realize that I was sounding exactly like Kalaj. Had I always been this way or was I learning to ape his hostility about everything whenever I felt uneasy with others. “He hates everything,” someone said about me. “No,” said a girl, who seemed to be coming to my defense, “he just doesn’t like to say he likes things.” I paid her no heed, didn’t even know her name. But I knew she’d read me through and through.

I excused myself and went back to my study, where I burrowed for hours. Could an American really see through other human beings with such uncanny insight? I had never bothered to ask myself such a question in the past. Obviously, I must have never thought that Americans understood human nature, much less had a human nature—otherwise, why would I be asking the question? Still, I admired her insight and the forthright aplomb with which she had spoken.

By noon I felt I needed to escape to Café Algiers, my base away from my base at Lowell House. Kalaj was there. I would have been perfectly happy to be by myself: corner table, smoke, read, lift my head up occasionally, order another cup, watch the people come and go. But his presence changed this. I seldom went there at lunchtime and was startled by how different the place looked, especially on a sunny weekday. Even Kalaj’s behavior seemed different at that hour, more relaxed, as though he had dismantled his Kalashnikov and was leisurely oiling and cleaning part after part. He was happy to see me too. Things must have worked out well with Léonie. Yes, they had. He asked me what I was doing that day. I was planning to head back to my office at Lowell House. Then at five I had to go to the Master’s Tea at Lowell House, followed by a cocktail reception at Lowell House. “Je me fou de ton Lowell House, I don’t give a f*ck about your Lowell House,” he finally blurted. Lowell House had become my Lowell House. “You and your Lowell House.” He disparaged it and seemed to wince each time I mentioned the word. I learned to avoid speaking of it.

In fact, Kalaj never asked, and I never explained what Master’s Tea was, but it was a weekly reception that I happened to like because there were always people I enjoyed meeting and chatting with. It was, it occurred to me, the exact opposite of Café Algiers, a touch ceremonial, quite Anglo, yet never stuffy.

He said he had a few minutes to kill before picking up his girlfriend and the boy; they were going for a picnic at Walden Pond with a Romanian au pair and the boy she babysat. Did I want to join? I thought about it for a while, wondering all along if it wasn’t going to be a bit cold for swimming. But then, it was an intensely sunny day and I had already removed my jacket and was indeed sweating. Kalaj was wearing a T-shirt only. He too had removed his jacket.

“I’ll come,” I said, “but I have to be back at Lowell House in time for dinner.”

When I explained that as a tutor I was given free meals at Lowell House he almost fell from his seat. “Free food, for an entire year!” he said, amazed at the munificence of American institutions. “What’s the catch?” There was no catch, I said, just sit and talk with students. I told him that I was hoping to be appointed a resident tutor the coming February, which could mean that the same institution would throw in not just food but two free rooms for what amounted to mere talking. “If they’re willing to give you room and board just for yaking with strangers—and, let’s face it, you and casual chitchat aren’t good together—what would they give me, then? Harvard Square? Boston? The world?”

We stopped the cab to pick up Léonie and her boy, and a few blocks farther down stopped by a private house on Highland Avenue where Ekaterina, the Romanian au pair, and her five-year-old ward were waiting for us. The women had brought wine, cheeses, lots of food—French country style. The two boys wanted to sit on the old jump seats, but Kalaj said the seats were unsteady and dangerous. On our way, I asked him to stop at one of the supermarkets and, five minutes later, returned with a huge watermelon that made everyone crack up laughing. “And how do you plan to cut this giant gourd? With karate chops?” he asked. I’d thought of everything, I said, and produced a super-cheap Japanese steak knife that I’d seen advertised time and again on television. Everyone was overjoyed.

Kalaj decided to take the scenic route to Walden Pond. On the way, we couldn’t agree which song to sing together because no one knew the songs the other wanted to sing. The only songs we all knew, including Ekaterina who had learned them from her parents in Romania, were French songs from our parents’ generation. So we started with these, and in the Checker cab headed to Walden Pond, here we all were, like two couples with their children headed for a Sunday picnic in July somewhere in the French countryside, singing Aznavour, Brel, and Bécaud songs, which the younger ones mimicked, just as all four of us had mimicked them in our childhood. Everything seemed right with us. It was a Monday, not a Sunday, and it was October, not July, and this was Massachusetts, not Provence. Details!

No one knew what Walden Pond was famous for. I didn’t want to break the spell by playing Mister Learned Professor. But I couldn’t resist telling everyone there used to be a time when investors would harvest the iced water of Walden Pond and ship it to India.

“You mean to the Indians of Arizona.”

“No, to Indians of the Ganges.”

Kalaj was totally nonplussed. “But that would be like selling sand to the Arabs,” he added, “or ice to Eskimos, or cloth to your people.” We all burst out laughing.

When we arrived, we parked the cab in a sodden, narrow alleyway in between a row of trees. We got out, took off our shoes, rolled up our pants. Not a soul in sight. The pond was entirely ours. “So what does one do here?” Kalaj finally asked, already feeling awkward.

“You swim. You picnic. You relax.”

Kalaj refused to swim. Too cold, he said. Plus he didn’t want to change. Then he looked around and said, “Tall cypresses and bathing water. They don’t mix for me.” He began describing Sidi Bou Saïd, just south of Pantelleria. Now there was a heavenly spot! “One day, we’ll all have to go there, you, me, the children. And all our friends.”

On second thought, it was peaceful here. The air felt clean, he said, and there were no people, and he liked walking along the shore on bare feet. And yet, as though catching himself, Tout ça ne me dit absolument rien, all this means absolutely nothing to me, he added once he spotted row upon row of thick, drooping tuft fringing the water, every clump of trees already looking glum, autumnal, and bereaved. This was no beach.

He played with the children. Then he said he’d take care of cutting the watermelon. It took him back to his catering days. “Is the water cold?” he asked.

“No, you can swim in your undies if you want,” said his girlfriend.

“And what do I wear afterward?”

“You’ll find something. You’ll wear your trousers only. Or swim naked.”

“He’s really a prude, didn’t you know,” said Léonie.

The babysitter Ekaterina took out a large tablecloth and laid it out on the grass and asked Léonie to watch her boy. She had, it took me a moment to realize, the awkward, boyish walk of dancers, a sort of flaunted waddle that was not unattractive to look at. Then she leaned down with her back completely straight, spread her thighs on bended knees, and began to undress. To my surprise, underneath her shirt, her bra, and blue jeans she wore no bathing suit at all. She was getting naked. “I’m going for a swim. Coming?” I said yes before realizing that what she meant was completely naked. I liked the way she waddled into the water, noticing for the first time that with her dancer’s walk came the perfect legs of a dancer. I took off everything and jumped in after her, not realizing that the water was freezing. “This is the most wonderful place in the world,” she said as we treaded water away from the others, “even if it’s totally American.”

“You’re starting to sound like him,” I said.

“Jumbo-ersatz, jumbo-ersatz,” she began to mimic, pointing her wet index finger at me in an imitation machine gun, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. We laughed out loud: “The water is ersatz, the plants are ersatz, even the fish are ersatz—there are no fish. I hate fish.” We both took turns imitating his rants when he harangued the human race and damned every man, woman, species, child, fish, tree, vegetable, mineral, rat-tat-tat. To imitate her final round of bullets she splashed me in the face, once, twice, three times.

We swam farther out where the water felt yet more chilly. Then we swam underwater, came up to breathe, then back under again. I hadn’t swum naked in years. Eventually, we saw people on one of the shores and decided to swim back. “Turn around, everyone,” she said as we came rushing out of the water. “You too, iepuraşul meu, my bunny,” she said to the five-year-old who couldn’t help staring, as I couldn’t help staring at her legs, wondering all along whether God had made her thighs or whether they were the product of some strict Eastern European ballet school regimen. “And don’t stare,” she said. Even her cagey bantering felt familiar, warm, intimate, as though something of hers had touched my hand and then held it and didn’t mean to let go. I wondered if this was because we were all speaking in French or just simply because Kalaj, as usual and without knowing it, had been stoking everyone’s libido and we were all playing by his rules, where contact among humans was easy, natural, untrammeled, and necessary. Or maybe, in the end, we were all four of us truly happy to be together and no longer felt like stranded members of a disbanded company who’d given up on themselves in a Lotusland called Cambridge. The pond wasn’t exactly ours to claim, but it let us play there, the way an empty tennis court can be yours for a day when the owners are out of town. Mild-mannered poachers trying to catch a few hours in the sun, not rogues or squatters. We were borrowing America, not settling in. The diffidence and haste with which we kept throwing the watermelon rinds in plastic bags so as not to attract bees or litter the grounds told everyone we were determined to keep a low profile. I said nothing, but I realized I was the only one among them who had a green card. Léonie plopped herself right next to Kalaj, and they embraced.

Later, during the picnic, when Ekaterina produced some Cheerios for the children, Kalaj, who had never seen the likes of Cheerios in his life, asked to taste one. Before he had put it in his mouth, she silently mouthed the words jumbo-ersatz, jumbo-ersatz, meaning: You watch, he’ll start. The square container was immense, the food was totally artificial, nature never spawned these flavors—Kalaj was starting to load his Kalashnikov. When Ekaterina took out a Ziploc bag with five large, juicy nectarines, he exploded. “You should never buy nectarines. Nectarines are totally ersatz . . .”

“Like mules,” she said.

“Yes, exactly,” he said, missing the joke at his expense. “Sesame Street is all ersatz too. It teaches people to be ersatz. Just listen to the voices of each character. Not one has a human voice.”

“But children like it, and children like nectarines, and I like nectarines. Do you want one?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” he conceded.

Her two little packs of Twinkies produced the same outraged response. Abject scorn followed by stoic acquiescence. “So, let’s see what this Twinkie thing is,” he finally said.

Then he got up and took a short stroll along the shore, dipping his toes in the water again, staring at the tops of the trees in the distance. He was enjoying Walden Pond, even America.

And right then and there I finally understood Kalaj. Behind his wholesale indictment of America, he was desperately struggling not to give in in case America decided not to yield to him first. The lawyer had mentioned the word deportation, and both of us had winced. Kalaj preferred to turn his back first, in the hope that America might ask him to look more favorably on her and give her a second chance. He was, without knowing it, doing what he’d always done: flirting . . . but this time with a superpower. America, as far as he was concerned, had not really put a penny on the table, and he was getting tired of staying in the game. America was busy stacking up its chips, while he—anyone could tell—was obviously bluffing.

Perhaps, also, by degrading America and nicknaming amerloque everything that was wrong with the world, he was forging for himself an imaginary Mediterranean identity, a Mediterranean paradise lost, something that may never have existed but that he needed to believe was out there in some imaginary other shore because otherwise he’d have nothing and nowhere to turn to in case America turned its back on him.

When it was time to fold everything back into the car and throw the garbage out in the appropriate bins, we looked at each other and realized that we had all taken more sun than we had hoped. It gave us a sort of heady good cheer, as if we’d finally caught up with a summer that had slipped us by.

Before entering the car, Kalaj asked everyone to clear their feet of any sand or mud, especially you there in the back, meaning me. Then he said he needed to piss. “So, pee,” said Léonie, who was already sitting in the seat next to his. He looked about him uneasily, slightly at a loss, then headed back to the shore, and, with his back to us, as he stared into the quiet expanse of water, started to pee. He took his time, but the idea of someone pissing so irreverently into Thoreau’s hallowed pond seemed too comical not to be put into its historical context. So when he returned to the car I explained to them the importance of Walden Pond in American literature. They all listened, attentively. “And I who simply needed to go,” he finally said after mulling the matter a while and bursting out in loud guffaws, as we all joined in, the children included, all of us breaking into song as we rode back to Cambridge, swearing we should do this again in a few days.

I was the first they dropped by car, just in time to take a very quick shower and head to Lowell House on foot. All through cocktails, though, I had one thought in mind: I wanted the day to start all over again. Just as I wanted it never to end. If I did not know in whose camp I belonged—with Lowell House or with Kalaj—what I did not mind was oscillating between the two, with one foot in each, because I belonged to both, and therefore to neither—like having a home without belonging to it. Like staring out the window of my twenty-four-hour deli early in the morning after spending the night at the infirmary and feeling a rush of love, loathing, and bile.

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

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

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

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

I decided to knock at Apartment 42.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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