Harvard Square A Novel

5




SOMETHING VERY NEW WAS HAPPENING TO ME. I FELT as though every sinew, every bone, muscle, and cell in my body was thrilled to belong to me, to be alive in me, through me, for me. I knew that Ekaterina had longed to be with me last night and that, if I’d found a way to call her, she’d have met me anywhere, taken a taxi, rushed upstairs. The truth is that on that strange morning I didn’t give a damn about my exams, because it was clear to me that anyone I’d cast a glance at from here on would simply crave to touch me, to sleep with me. Whence had this strange, unusual feeling sprung? Why wasn’t I always like this? What must I do to keep this thrill, this buzz alive in me? And where had it been hiding for so very long? Was this what living Kalaj meant?

Would the feeling die as soon as I returned to my usual life—my old self, my old, tired, humdrum home that had no lock, no food, no life, my books, my rooftop, my students, my little corner where I whiled away the hours thinking I was indeed headed somewhere, my Lloyd-Grevilles, my tea parties, my cocktails—were they all going to come back when I least wanted them?

More importantly: how did one feed this fever? Did one walk around brandishing a Kalashnikov? How did one keep this fervor of might, abundance, and pride forever alive? It reminded me of how primitive people were said to have carried live embers wherever they went simply because they hadn’t learned yet how to light a fire. I had embers in every one of my pockets, and my pockets were lined with steel, and I loved the feeling.

The first thing I did that day to make sure I didn’t lose this feeling was not to shower. I wanted to reek of sex, touch every part of me and know where it had been, what it had done, what had been done to it last night.

When I arrived at the department, Mary-Lou was just coming out of the supply room adjacent to her office and immediately reminded me that I had yet to give her the names of my other two examiners. I’d do so as soon as I met with them, I said. She swung around her desk and photocopied a list of instructions for the exam, because, she said, Harvard had very fussy guidelines when it came to comprehensives and I wasn’t always mindful of them. As I was sitting and reading over the instructions, she said I looked better without a beard. I told her that this was the first time anyone had complimented me on my face. Don’t people compliment you often? she asked. I said nothing, thought of Kalaj, and could almost hear her loose change being stacked on her side of her huge desk. All I had to do was raise her by one tiny penny and, who knows, we’d be doing it in the windowless supply room where she kept the extra jars of freeze dried coffee, the paper clips, the blue books, and reams of stationery bearing the department’s letterhead. The question facing me now was: would she hold it against me if I omitted to raise her by that penny? The sight of her beefy face and Botero legs that tapered into tiny feet shod in satin blue pumps made me hesitate.

I decided to say something about the summer’s terrible weather and manage to throw in a casual reference to my girlfriend and her parents’ summer home in the Vineyard where they’d had air-conditioning recently installed in the television room and where we ended up spending so many hours, the whole family together. That, I figured, would take care of things.

Outside the tiny office reserved for teaching fellows to which I had a key, and where I kept some books, a student was standing and was waiting to meet her tutor. She was wearing sandals and an orange dress that flattered her dark tan and her thick, light brown hair. While I stood there with her, I asked about her courses, she about those I was teaching. We spoke about her senior thesis. As we were speaking, I couldn’t keep my eyes off hers. She, I discovered, couldn’t keep hers off mine. I loved the way her eyes kept searching mine, and mine hers, and how each caressed and lingered on the other’s gaze. We were making love, and yet, without denying it, neither was calling attention to it.

We both discovered we loved Proust. She was writing her senior thesis on Proust. Could we talk sometime? I normally met students in my other office at Lowell House. But, not being my student, she was welcome to drop by at Concord Avenue if she wanted. In typical bland-speak that meant everything and nothing at all, the girl in the orange dress simply said, “I’d like that very much.” I could just imagine how Kalaj would have mimicked the phrase. Her first name was Allison. The last name was dauntingly familiar. I told her it was nice meeting her. She said we’d already met once before. I must have given her a quizzical look, for she immediately said, “When you said you didn’t care to see the leaves or to watch Saturday Night Fever.”

This was the girl who had disabused me about America. Why hadn’t I noticed how beautiful she was that time over breakfast?

What on earth was happening? I loved this new me. Here we were discussing Marcel Proust and building all manner of bridges, while part of me hadn’t quite left and indeed still smelled of Apartment 42. If only Emerson, Thoreau, and Justice Holmes, to say nothing of Henry James, father and son, knew what slop was being visited on their beloved and pristine Massachusetts!

I was crossing Harvard Square when I heard someone yell out to me in French, “Do you always talk to yourself?” It was Kalaj. He had stopped for a red light and was leaning his head out of his cab as I was crossing the street. In the back sat a slim white-haired lady dressed in a well-pressed lilac business suit.

“More ersatz than this you cannot get,” he said referring to his passenger. “Where were you headed?”

“To have a cup of coffee and read.”

“Ah, the leisurely life.” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

It was nearing noon. I loved Cambridge at noon. It was time to head to the roof terrace before the weather finally changed. All I wanted now was to read the memoirs of the seventeenth-century Cardinal de Retz, which I’d started a year earlier and promised I’d read as soon as I could. Put everything aside, and spend an entire afternoon with this man who, of all men on this planet, was more an intrepid soldier, courtier, lover, jailbird, and diplomat than a man of the cloth.

I walked by Berkeley Street. Nothing pleased me more than to pass by these old New England houses and be greeted by the beaming palaver of Anglo-Saxon housewives busily planting next spring’s bulbs.

Stuck in between my mailbox and my neighbor’s box was an index card. “Dropped by but you were gone. I’ll try later. Ekaterina.” She had left no phone number. I wondered if this was the handiwork of Kalaj. On the rooftop, we could have replayed yesterday’s excursion to Walden Pond. The sun was no more intense up there than it had been on the shore, and I still had some of the watermelon left and an uncorked bottle of Portuguese rosé. It would have been wonderful sweating it out under the sun until we couldn’t stand it any longer and headed downstairs to my apartment.

I removed the card and wrote a few words and then teased it back into the narrow slot between the two mailboxes, hoping that my next-door neighbor would see it when leaving the building a second time to walk her dog. “I’m waiting upstairs.” But on my way upstairs, I ran into Linda. What was she doing now? Nothing. Did I want to come for a visit? A short one, I said. When I walked in, I suddenly realized what I hadn’t noticed the night before. Unlike mine, her apartment was decorated and looked as though someone had put the whole place together with a humble, loving hand; the place had domestic longevity written all over it, while mine was roughly furnished with a scattering of odds and ends picked up anywhere for nothing or almost nothing and thrown together in an ill-assorted, slapdash medley that bore no trace of any hand, loving or otherwise. I had a feeling that Kalaj, Ekaterina, and Léonie’s bedrooms were thrown together in as rudimentary and hasty a manner as mine—i.e., savage with niceties, impatient, hostile, and transient. Furniture didn’t stay long with us.

I soon told her I was expecting someone, and headed back to my apartment. In fact, I heard the buzzer ten minutes later. “A woman with a dog opened the downstairs door for me,” Ekaterina said as she pushed open my door. The news thrilled me to no end and made me happier than I already was to see her.

“Did you tell her you were coming to see me?”

“Yes, I did.”

She walked in with fresh muscatel grapes, whose scent suddenly suffused my living room. “I brought you these, I knew you’d like them.”

I took the grapes into the kitchen. I was looking for an excuse to open the service door, and decided that getting rid of the paper bag in which Ekaterina had brought the fruit was as good an excuse as any. I put the grapes in a bowl, crumpled the bag, and threw it in the larger trash can on the landing outside my door.

“I am so glad you came,” I said, still leaving my kitchen door open.

“Me too.” And because I felt no hesitation whatsoever, I came up to her and kissed her on the mouth. I loved her breath.

“We can eat them in the living room or upstairs on the terrace, which do you prefer?”

“I could also mix drinks,” I added. No, she couldn’t drink. She had to pick up her boy from kindergarten at 2:00.

“So let’s eat them in the other room,” I said. I took the grapes back into the bedroom, and we sat on the bed, her legs beautifully crossed on my sheets. “I want to eat these grapes naked,” I said, and before she had time to even say yes, I began removing everything I was wearing. I loved being like this. I loved watching her dancer’s thighs on my sheets.

I promised to read two whole books the moment she left.

ONE FRIDAY, TO celebrate our newfound friendship, we decided to have a dinner for all four of us and a few friends. Kalaj invited one friend, I invited Frank who had come back from a summer in Assisi and who, as my ex-roommate, had helped me through thick and thin, especially in the loan department. We had spoken by telephone but hadn’t managed to meet since his return. He was going to bring along his new Armenian girlfriend who promised to dazzle us with sensational pastries from an Armenian bakery in Watertown. There were also others: Claude, who had also recently returned from France, and a friend of his named Piero, a count in his last year at Harvard Law. I would have invited Linda had I not invited Ekaterina first. Bring both, said Kalaj. I could invite Niloufar too, he suggested. “She’d cook wonderful rice and spiced meats,” said Kalaj, bursting out laughing, because I’d told him all about the powerful effect of her spiced meats.

“No, it would hurt her, and what I’ve done to her I’ll never live down.”

“You are right,” he said.

Kalaj and I met at Café Algiers as soon as I was done teaching that Friday. It was before noon, and he was seated next to the young American whom I’d not seen since that first time in early August. Young Hemingway and Kalaj were arguing politics again. Kalaj finally called him an anarchist in diapers. The American suggested that Kalaj was a Malcolm X manqué and “might do well to revisit” his political views. Kalaj stared at this strange locution as if it were a stray dog that had come up to his table for a bite of his sandwich. He licked the end of his cigarette paper, then, staring the American in the face, finally interjected: “You have no balls.”

Startled, Young Hemingway sputtered and replied, “I have no balls?”

“Yes, they’re in your throat, here,” and with the bare tips of both thumbs to suggest tiny gonads he placed each thumb against either side of his Adam’s apple and began to emit a reedy little squeal, with which he echoed, might do well to revisit, might do well to revisit. “If you wanted to tell me I was an idiot, you should have told me, Kalaj, tu es un idiot. Can’t even speak and expects to argue . . . Just go back to your scrap metal shop of a university where they mass-produce you like rinky-dink umbrellas good for one rainfall.”

“I thought we were friends, Kalaj.”

“We are nothing. We just drink coffee together.” He turned to me and said, “Let’s go!”

We hopped in his cab and headed straight to Haymarket Square to buy vegetables. He had already purchased the beef for a song from the head cook at Césarion’s the day before and it was being marinated in my kitchen in a sauce of his own invention. “What’s in the sauce?” I kept asking.

“You’ll see.”

“Yes, but what kind of sauce is it?”

“A you’ll see sauce.”

He was also going to prepare a mousse the likes of which we had never tasted. He had not used a kitchen in more than six months, so this was something of a celebration. We asked everyone to bring wines. The vegetables were going to be easy—but he needed fresh chestnuts, and these were almost impossible to find. So we purchased dried chestnuts instead. They were clearing up the stalls that Friday afternoon, so the potatoes, onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and celery we managed to get for free. I was under the impression that I was going to be responsible for the cheeses. Bread and cheeses he had already taken care of, he said. “You know nothing about cheeses. The first thing you’ll do is think you’re buying French cheese when all you’ll serve is a curdled brew made with liquids that had never been inside a cow’s udder.” Kalaj did not believe in small spice jars; he bought large bags of everything from cumin and thyme to paprika.

More people said they would come, including Zeinab and Sheila. Even the woman with bathroom problems had uttered a vague maybe. Kalaj never broke up with anyone. People simply drifted in and out and back into his life, the way sand castles go up and down and are rebuilt time and again on the same spot of beach.

Kalaj wanted to find a man who was bien (right) for Zeinab, so I thought of Claude. But just in case things didn’t work out between them, I invited a young Hungarian who had studied in Turkey. And then there was the Count. “I can just see them,” said Kalaj, “Zeinab and the Count discussing Balzac on a park bench in the sixteenth arrondissement, he with an umbrella and a tennis racket between his knees, and she with a broomstick and a mop. Lovely couple!”

The evening started on the wrong foot. Earlier, while Kalaj was busily cooking the meat with all manner of diced vegetables, and Ekaterina was helping with the salads and the vegetables, we heard the voice of Maria Callas on the radio singing one aria after the other. This was quite unusual until the announcer said what I was beginning to dread. Maria Callas had died that day in Paris. It put a damper on everything. My ex-roommate’s girlfriend and I were both fans. Count, as Kalaj suddenly dubbed him, thinking it was his first name even though he’d introduced himself as Piero, was beside himself, since his father had been a lifelong friend of hers and had her signed portrait in his office. The talk turned to Callas, and because I owned a few recordings, I decided to play two to three arias, trying as best as I could to explain why she was prima donna assoluta. A comparison of a few arias sung by other sopranos was meant to drive the point home.

Kalaj, who had nothing to say on the subject, was unusually quiet for a man used to brandishing his loud weaponry wherever he went. Asked by Léonie why he wasn’t speaking, he simply put on an affected simper that was meant to call attention to its contrived character. “Me, I’m listening,” he replied. “I like to listen.” But I could tell that he was seething inside and, without instant recourse to his Kalashnikov, had lost his ability to say anything. This was probably not the scene he had imagined, and he must have felt like an outsider at his own dinner party. Ekaterina began to talk to him, trying to draw him out, but he’d lapse into silence as soon as he uttered a few words. Something was clearly bothering him. Zeinab finally put her arm around him: “Tu boudes, are you sulking?”

“I am not sulking,” he said, shrugging his shoulders to free them of her arm. “Just leave me alone, will you?” We left him alone.

We changed topics and someone spoke of a movie he had just seen called The Lacemaker about a humble, self-effacing apprentice who works in a beauty salon and who becomes the mistress of an intellectual who soon tires of her and ends up dropping her. This was more to Kalaj’s liking, and right away, he had loaded and cocked his gun, ready to aim and fire, and was soon inveighing both against all women for wanting to rise in the world by exploiting men and against all young men for exploiting the women who exploited them. There were no prisoners, everyone was being mowed down.

Kalaj and Léonie, however, disagreed. Claude, clearly happy to have brought along a count and still eager to shine in his eyes, said this was a circular argument and was headed nowhere. But Count was willing to be more indulgent and said that history was filled with similar instances and that it was no longer possible to take sides, but if sides had to be taken, he’d side with the woman. “Why with the woman and not the man?” Rat-tat-tat-tat. Because in the end men are frequently given second chances, women seldom are. “Are you so sure that men get second chances—are you so sure?” Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

“I think everyone in this room will agree with me.”

“And what about the men who always give women a second chance but are never given a second chance, what about them?” Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

“I am not competent to comment on this, sorry.”

“Not competent, not competent, I’ll tell you why you’re not competent. Because you’ve never really had to help anyone, man or woman. What do you know about poor girls from the country or from another country who land in strange, big cities and whose last recourse is always the same—le trottoir, the sidewalk—what could you possibly know except as a consumer, and even then, what does a consumer know about the exploitation of women after he’s said au revoir et merci, or of the exploitation of men, because, yes sir, there are men who exploit men in that very same way among the dockers in Marseilles.”

“How do you know?” asked Count.

“I know, and how!”

The skirmish between the two men would have devolved into something ugly if the large pot with the meat didn’t require Kalaj’s attention. Moments later, the food was ready and everyone was urged to sit down around a table that could handle no more than four persons. People sat on the sofa, on the floor. We improvised a chair by using a tiny stepladder I’d found on the street; Zeinab could use it as a stool. I had an impulse to go downstairs and invite the twins from Apartment 21, but then thought better of it. As for the neighbors across the service entrance, I had no doubt that they knew a party was going on. Had they wanted to, they could have invited themselves. We drank lots of wine, and thank goodness Frank had prepared enough baked lasagna for a regiment, because we would have moved from the beef and the chestnuts and vegetables to the breads and cheeses without much of anything else in between. Kalaj was ecstatic and kissed Frank on his shimmering bald pate. “One doesn’t sit around a table for the food only. Food is there to feed friendship,” he said. I don’t think any of us understood the wisdom of the saying, but it sounded good, and perhaps we were all in the mood to believe just about anything that spoke well of friends and good fellowship. Count had brought many goodies from some hilly area in Umbria, and no one doubted that this had turned into a feast far, far superior to the tiny supper originally planned.

At some point, a song I had long ago taped on a tiny cassette came on, and Kalaj immediately pricked up his ears and asked us to be quiet for a moment because he wanted to hear the words. He hadn’t heard the song in a very long time, he said. “A very long time,” he repeated. Then, having caught the right words and synced his lips to the singer’s as he sometimes would with Om Kalsoum at Café Algiers, he began to whine the words ever so softly, as though he was ashamed of being seen singing, because for all he knew, he was just singing to himself because he needed to hear the words from his own mouth for him to feel them. The song was about a man thinking of a woman he hasn’t seen in a very long time but whom he knows he’ll meet again when their paths cross. The path to each is crooked and filled with detours—she’s met other men, and he’s met women too—but he knows that eventually they will meet and make love and speak of the incidental lovers each had loved along the way.

“This is not necessarily about a man and a woman,” said Frank, “It could be about a man who’s lost his way and decides to give his homeland a woman’s name. The woman is just a metaphor for home.” Kalaj listened attentively. Had Count said such a thing he would have strafed him with a machine gun filled with ire and contradiction, but coming from Frank, the comment seemed to placate something very deep in Kalaj. “The woman is a metaphor for home,” he said, echoing Frank’s impromptu remark, “the woman is a metaphor for home,” he repeated. Then he asked me to play the song again. But before the second stanza started, he suddenly rushed out and headed straight into the kitchen.

When he came back and Zeinab had started serving the Armenian desserts and the mousse, Léonie could still be heard carrying on about the woman who had sacrificed her life for a man who’d outgrown her too soon.

Léonie and Count agreed that the issue wasn’t as simple as all that. Kalaj disagreed. Why they had resurrected the topic wasn’t clear at all, especially after the song we’d heard had put him in so contemplative a mood. But as soon as it became obvious that Count had joined forces with Léonie, Kalaj left the table, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door behind him. Maybe he was making a phone call, maybe the food wasn’t agreeing with him. Zeinab seemed perplexed but didn’t say anything, and the Armenian girl and Frank kept exchanging mystified looks, all the while determined to sample their desserts and stay out of the Tunisian’s bad temper. Something was definitely wrong. A few moments later, I opened the door slowly and stepped into my bedroom. He had not only shut the door but had turned off the lights and was lying on my bed in total darkness, smoking.

We all have our phantoms, and I was seeing Kalaj’s for the first time, perhaps because, for the first time, he wasn’t able to shoo them away by shouting.

Something very serious was troubling him. Was he missing someone, was this reminding him of something somewhere else, were his problems catching up with him—the green card, money, solitude, divorce, deportation? “No, nothing, nothing,” he replied. I made a motion to leave the bedroom to let him be by himself, since it was clear he didn’t want to speak. When I was about to open the door, he simply asked me to stay.

“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me.”

He caught his breath. “I cooked this whole dinner for everyone and everyone is having a great time, but, you see, what about me?” He hesitated a moment, “Et moi?” he said. “Et moi?” “I don’t understand,” I said, “everyone is happy because of you. Everyone is grateful. And no one is ignoring you or has even done or said anything to slight you.”

“That’s because you see the surface, but you don’t look underneath. But what about me?”

I still had no idea what he was getting at or what was eating him.

“In exactly a year’s time I will not be here. Each and every one of you will be here, but I won’t be among you. I will miss all this so terribly, that I don’t even want to think beyond this minute. You see now? Has anyone thought about me?”

I was dumbfounded. Silence was my only way of agreeing with him and of saying what I would never had had the courage or the cruelty to say to his face: You are right, my friend, we completely failed to think of you, we do not see your hell, you are all alone in this, and, yes, you may be right about this too: you may not be among us next year, may not even be in our thoughts next year.

“Now you see?” he asked.

“Now I see,” I said, meaning: There is nothing, nothing I can say to buoy your spirits. I was helpless. I felt like the captain of a cruise ship who shouts “Man overboard . . . but, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing we can do, it’s time for lunch, and the food is waiting.” To say anything so as to say something would have forced me to utter fatuous palliatives, and I had drunk too much already to lie persuasively.

But I suddenly realized one thing very clearly in this dark bedroom. By looking at him I was almost looking at myself. He was the measure of how close I might come to falling apart and losing everything here. He was just my destiny three steps ahead of me. I could fail my exams, be sent packing to New York, and in a year from now, no one would recall this dinner party, much less remember to think of me.

“See? I’m like someone who prepares a whole feast knowing he is dying, and everyone is happily eating and drinking away and forgets that the cook will be carried away by the end of the meal. I don’t want to be the dying cook of the party. I don’t want to leave and be elsewhere. I need help and there is no one, no one.”

I heard the catch in his voice.

“So, what about me?” he asked, as though coming back to a nagging question that hadn’t just cropped up because of this evening but that he’d been brewing perhaps since childhood, since forever, and the answer was always going to be the same; there is no answer. “Et moi?” he repeated, feeling desperately sorry for himself, while I still stood there, unable to say or do anything for him.

And, for the first time that evening, I saw that this short mantra of his also had another meaning, which had simply eluded me all the time I’d been standing there in the dark listening to him. It didn’t just mean And what about me? but spoke an injured, hopeless What happens to me now?

He wasn’t asking me for an answer, or invoking my help, or even pleading with the god of fairness and forgiveness overseeing his affairs in North America; he was just groping in the dark and repeating words of incantation that would eventually lead him out of his cave in the only way he knew: with tears. With tears came solace and surrender, pardon and courage.

That night as I watched him cry, you could almost touch his despair and its ephemeral balm, hope. When, seconds later, he actually started to sob as he’d done on the day he heard of his father’s sickness in Tunis, I knew that here was the loneliest man I’d ever known in my life, and that anger, sorrow, fear, and even the shame of being caught crying were nothing compared to this monsoon of loneliness and despair that was buffeting him every minute of his days.

A part of me didn’t want him to know that I could see he was crying, so I made to go back to the living room and attend to the guests.

“Don’t go yet. Sit down. Please.”

It’s what one said to a nurse when one didn’t want to be alone once they’d turned off the light in your room and dimmed those in the corridor. But all the chairs were in the living room and there was nowhere to sit except on the bed, so I sat on the edge, next to him. He wasn’t speaking and he was no longer crying, just breathing and smoking.

When, a minute or two later, after thinking his crisis had subsided, I made a motion to leave again, he said, “Don’t go.”

I wanted to reach out to him with my hand and touch him to comfort him, maybe even to show compassion and solidarity, but we’d never touched other than fleetingly, and it felt awkward doing so now. So, instead, I reached for his palm but found the top of his hand and held it, gently at first, then more firmly. This was not easy for me, and I suppose it was not easy for him either, because he did not respond or return my grasp. For two men who claimed to be so inveterately Mediterranean we couldn’t have been less expressive or more inhibited. Perhaps we were both holding back, perhaps he was thinking the exact same thing, which is why, in an unexpected gesture, instead of standing up again, I lay down right next to him, facing him, and put one arm across his chest. Only then did he reach out to hold my hand, and then, turning to me, put a leg around me and began to cradle and hug me, both of us entirely silent except for his muted sobbing. We said nothing more.

Shortly after, I got up and told him, “Pull yourself together and let’s step outside.” I did not shut the door behind me.

WHEN I RETURNED to the living room, I noticed it right away though I thought nothing of it at first, and perhaps didn’t want to register it. Léonie was sitting on the sofa and Count was sitting on the floor, his neck resting against her knees while the back of his head lay flat against her thigh. Frank had put on more music by Callas. The others were busy cutting the two desserts Zeinab had brought.

Catching my glance in his direction, Count stood up and said he was going to buy cigarettes around the corner. Claude immediately offered him his. But Count smoked Dunhills only. “I should have known,” said Claude, “you always pick the very best, Piero.” A matter of minutes, said Count, trying to justify his brief exit. Léonie looked up and said she’d walk him downstairs and, seeing Kalaj entering the room, asked to let her have the keys to the car to get her sweater.

He gave her the keys.

“You should learn to roll your own,” said Kalaj to Count.

“I don’t need to,” replied Count as he let Léonie out the front door, then discreetly shut the door behind him.

“Nique ta mère,” muttered Kalaj under his breath.

We carved the cakes in long wedges and served dessert on paper napkins, and because there weren’t enough clean forks, we ate with our hands. Pecan pie is the best thing since the invention of the telephone. No, cheesecake, said someone else. Cheesecake too, said Kalaj. We opened more wine, there was even talk of finally finishing the gallon of vodka I had appropriated along with the Beefeater gin from the departmental party last April. We passed the freezing cold vodka around, everyone agreed it was stupendous, so that a second round was de rigueur, and I was just on my way to the kitchen to start the coffee when I saw Kalaj bolt out of the living room, tear open the front door, and rush down the stairs.

The rest of us looked bewildered and exchanged panicked glances. “What got into him tonight?” asked Ekaterina.

Zeinab, who knew him better than any of us, simply said, “He’s always a pill when everyone else is having a good time.”

Ten minutes later he was back upstairs. Not a word. He headed directly into the dark bedroom again and slammed the door shut once more. Everyone looked at one another very puzzled. Zeinab said she’d seen him upset before, but never like this.

The rest of the evening seemed to last forever. We wanted to put a happy face on things, but everyone’s thoughts were turned to the man who’d locked himself in my bedroom. No one, not even I had the courage to go inside to look in on him. To kill time, we cleaned up, put things away, washed dishes, wrapped everything, and everyone was asked to take something home. I’d take care of the garbage, my mind already thinking of the trash container on the service door landing. It seemed to me that Linda and Ekaterina, for all their newly sprung friendship, were perhaps vying to see who of the two would outstay the other. Part of me wanted them to sort it out among themselves; the other part began to hope they’d both come up with a better plan.

Kalaj came out only after most of the guests had left. Someone had dropped a strawberry from one of the cakes on the carpet and then stepped on it. It was impossible to remove the stain. Ekaterina said it was Count. A friend had lent me this antique Persian Tabriz because my living room was larger than his. One day, though, he’d want it back exactly as he had lent it to me.

Kalaj said he’d clean the rug. He knew how to remove stains. But by then I had scraped the strawberry with a sharp knife and then poured stain remover on the rug.

“I wish I had thrown gasoline on her face. And on his.”

“What happened?” we asked.

“What happened? What happened? Couldn’t you hear?”

None of us had heard a thing.

“I beat them up. That’s what’s happened. Now you know.”

“What do you mean you beat them up?” I asked, unable to believe the obvious.

“They were in my cab. Together. Neeking.”

Ekaterina exclaimed What!

“Well, she’s a woman, so I slapped her a bit. But he’s a man. So I punched him in the face.”

Kalaj didn’t have a scratch on him.

“Where are they now?”

“They ran away, both of them.”

I looked at him.

“Let me call her and make sure she’s all right,” said Ekaterina.

“Don’t you dare.”

Ekaterina quickly picked up the receiver and called her friend.

There was no answer.

“I know what she’s doing.”

“What?” I asked.

“I already told you. They’re neeking.”

“You should never hit anyone.”

“Pummel her, that’s what I should have done.”

He picked up his fatigue jacket and turned to Ekaterina and said he was driving her home.

“I’m staying,” she said, “or I’ll walk. I don’t know, I’ll see. You go home.”

With that he uttered his usual “Bonne soirée” and was abruptly gone.

All three of us sat on the same sofa dazed and immobilized. As I awoke to the reality of the night’s events, I made my mind up never to have anything to do with Kalaj again. Enough was enough. “That’s the end of that friendship,” I said. “And I’m never speaking to him again,” Ekaterina said.

But none of us budged from our spot on the sofa. Perhaps we needed to seem more dazed than we really were. Perhaps we wished to stay dazed, for all three of us had a good inkling of where things were headed tonight, though neither would do anything to bring them about or interfere if they happened. I turned off all the lights and in the dark brought out the big bottle of vodka and poured a generous amount for each in three plastic glasses. This, whatever spell we were under, needed booze. I knew I’d start with Linda’s shoulder. I wanted Ekaterina to kiss her other shoulder.

IN THE MORNING, my buzzer rang.

It was Léonie. When she appeared on the landing of my floor, I couldn’t believe my eyes. She had a big bruise on her cheekbone and red blotches all over her face. “And that’s nothing,” she said, once she realized how shocked I was. “Feel my head.” She grabbed my hand and let me feel under her hair. Her scalp was full of lumps and bumps.

“And he pulled out my hair. And tore my clothes too.”

She had no one to turn to except me, she said. Her employer, Austin’s mother, wanted to report the incident to the police. But Léonie said she needed to see me first. Why? I asked. Because it was complicated, she said.

She sat down in my kitchenette area while I started to boil some water for tea.

First of all, was she in pain? I asked. And Count, how was he?

“He too wants to report it to the police. Kalaj broke two of his teeth, and to top everything Count is furious with me. He says I should have told him I was with Kalaj. I told him we were over quite a while ago.”

“I didn’t know. You seemed so lovey-dovey at Walden Pond.”

“By then it was long over. We were just friends.”

I was surprised.

“So what are you going to do now?” I asked, like a lawyer opening a file with a new client. All I needed was to take out a yellow legal pad, intersperse my questions with a few nods, and light a giant meerschaum pipe.

“If you report him and file a complaint,” I finally said, “they’ll deport him. Even a restraining order will get him deported.”

I didn’t know a thing about the legalities of what I was saying, but what I said seemed to make sense.

“I know,” she said, “but what do you want me to do? He’s crazy. He’ll kill me. I don’t want him near me. I was so scared last night that I ended up calling my mother in France. I was almost ready to go back, but I love Austin and Austin loves me, and I love the family also.”

“Perhaps too much,” I threw in.

“So he’s told you about that too—of course!”

“Yes. It upset him a lot.”

“Everything upsets him a lot.”

“So what do you want to do?” I asked, nodding, meaning: Let’s get down to brass tacks.

“If Austin’s mother reports him to the police, Kalaj will let her know that I’ve slept with her husband. I know he’ll tell her, I know him. If I file a report, he’ll still tell the wife. If Count goes to the police, he’ll right away tell Austin’s mother. If they could deport him this afternoon without giving him a chance to call anyone, I would do it. He is the worst mistake of my life, and I’ve made huge ones before, which is why I came to the States. Better yet, if he could disappear somewhere in the Midwest I’d be perfectly happy, because then I won’t even have it on my conscience that he was deported because of me.”

I had every sympathy for Léonie. But, without knowing why, I wanted to prevent Kalaj’s deportation.

The best thing I could do was, first, to persuade her not to file a complaint and, second, to make sure they made up, or at least had a talk—in my presence if they wished. I’d seen it done in movies. People airing their differences, their grievances. “Very ersatz,” I finally said.

She laughed. Then, seeing herself laugh, she began to cry. It was the first time she was crying about this, she said. She’d held up well enough until now. No one had ever beaten her before, not even raised their hand against her. And now this fellow, this convict wanted to lord it over her? Who did he think he was?

The big question was how to prevent Count from going to the police. “He’s vindictive. You saw how he argued with Kalaj last night. Plus he probably feels mortified for getting beaten up without putting up a fight, not even to protect me. He doesn’t want to see me again.”

The first thing I did after she was gone was to call Claude. Claude was aware of what happened to his friend, whom he refused to call Count, as we all did to make fun of him. “Piero knows some very powerful people in Italy. They could cause Kalaj serious problems. He could also make things difficult for you for hosting the brawl and for me as well for bringing him to it.”

“Plus Count has two broken teeth,” I said.

“Plus Piero has two broken teeth,” he corrected.

We had to come up with a plan.

I told Claude not to do anything. I would rush over to his house and together we’d work out some sort of plan to discourage Count from filing with the police.

When I arrived at Claude’s house, nearby, he’d already had a conversation with Count.

“But I thought you were going to wait for me?”

“Well, I had an idea and I called him right away.”

“Were you afraid I might insist on talking to him first—is that what it is? Now you’ve just made things ten times worse,” I told Claude.

“How could I have made things worse if Piero says he won’t file anything with the police.”

“Count won’t?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“No, Piero considers Kalaj a wretched marocchino who’ll soon enough get himself deported one way or another. Besides, this is his last year in Law School and he wants to put last night completely behind him. He’s already made an appointment with a famous dentist in New York and is flying there this afternoon to be seen on Sunday. Then he comes back and wants nothing to do with your friends, or my friends, which means you, of course, and that poor woman.”

“Count gets new teeth and she goes back to babysitting. Count was right about women seldom getting a second chance,” I said, trying to underscore the irony of the situation.

“Your problem is you lost someone who could have been an important friend to you.”

Claude, a social climber? I’d never seen that side of him before.

I WAS SO happy to hear that Count was not going to go to the police that I immediately called Léonie and told her the news. She was not happy to hear that Count had buckled, but she was relieved. Things would get back to what they’d been before Kalaj. This, I felt, was perhaps the story of his life. No matter how long you knew him, and how he disrupted the world of those around him, eventually he’d be out of your life and things would go back to being what they’d been before him. Despite his dogged efforts to recast the world in his own image, he made no impact, changed nothing, left no mark. In fact, he’d already walked out of history and the family of man long before he or any of us knew it. He reminded me of a mythological beast that the earth sprouts forth on some demented whim and that wreaks great harm on earthlings, ravages the countryside, and then, without explanation, is suddenly swallowed back up by earth. The dead are forgotten, the wounds heal, people move on.

Eventually I did arrange for Kalaj and Léonie to meet. Perhaps they should not have met, for both managed to unearth a demon neither probably suspected they had in them. When they met in public a few days later, things seemed to go very well. Kalaj took Austin under his wing again and was kinder than any father could be to the boy. But one evening, he showed up at Café Algiers with scratch marks streaked all over his neck. When he rolled up his sleeves, I saw that his right forearm was full of bruises. “What on earth is going on?” I asked.

He smiled it off.

“Do you guys beat each other up now?” I asked, trying to make light of it. Had I suspected the truth, I would never have asked.

He didn’t answer. Then, a few seconds later, as if out of nowhere, he said, “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“We like it.”

“You what?”

“Some people need drugs. Others alcohol. She likes to slap me.”

“Do you really like it when she slaps you?”

I couldn’t believe my ears.

He thought about it as though the question had never occurred to him before. Who in his right mind would dare ask such a question of a Berber?

“I don’t mind,” he said.

“You’re both sick.”

“We are.”

Had he pushed his self-destructiveness so far?

It couldn’t last. Léonie broke up with him one evening at Café Algiers. She dashed in through the back door, walked up to our table, told him “Écoute, c’est fini,” gave him a plastic bag in which some of his things were folded, and walked out.

“Everyone does this to me,” he said. “Either they shut their door to me or they bring me remnants. As if I needed remnants and underwear.” And with all his might and all his rage, he hurled the plastic bag into the kitchen area. The owner of the café came out of the kitchen, walked to our table, and said, “If you go on like this, you won’t be able to come here.”

“What did I tell you?” Kalaj turned to me without even looking at the owner. “Everyone shuts their door in the end.”

The whole scene put me in a terrible mood, because it did not just make me think of the numberless times I too had promised to shut my door at him and have no more to do with him, but of how close I myself had come to seeing Harvard’s door shut in my own face.