Harvard Square A Novel

EPILOGUE

AFTER MY SON AND I LEFT THE OFFICE OF ADMISSIONS, I suggested we walk to my old house on Concord Avenue before returning to the Square. It was a short distance from the patio and was going to be the last place I’d revisit with him. I’d saved it for last.

The front door to the building was locked as usual. But someone was just coming out and let us in with a quick nod-hello. The mailboxes had not changed, the smell of the lobby had not changed, the buzzer was still the same, and there was still no elevator. Nothing had changed.

I looked at the list of names on the buzzer: the couple in Apartment 43 had disappeared, Linda’s was gone too, and mine—as if this should have surprised me—had disappeared as well. Someone else was being me at Number 45. I pointed out the names to my son as if still looking for a trace of myself here. He must have thought I was losing my mind.

I felt as awkward as an organ donor who comes back to see, just to see, whether that organ that was once his still ticks the way he remembered in someone else’s body. But I could have rung the buzzer and I could have gone upstairs, and maybe later I’d explain to the police when they handcuffed me and took me to the precinct station for trespassing that I’d come back to take a look, Officers, just to take a look. But I wasn’t even really up for taking a look. Whatever I’d come looking for I’d either found or didn’t really care to find, or time had simply squandered the whole thing and I was just not willing to face that I’d grown numb to it.

The same had happened at Café Algiers the day before. I’d stopped first outside the Harvest and noticed without going in that it had altogether changed. The horseshoe bar where I’d had my last drink by myself thinking of him had been dismantled. The spot where he’d stood that night when I pretended not to see him, and he knew, just knew, had also disappeared. Instead, I opened the door and asked the maître d’ to let me take a copy of that day’s menu. “Voilà,” he said.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked my son, who all along had been humoring our amble down memory lane.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. Leave it in our hotel room most likely. Or toss it somewhere. But I didn’t let go of it. The menu sits framed against my wall today.

We walked back to Café Algiers and stood outside as we’d done the day before, staring at the menu’s familiar green and white logo.

“Are you going to ask for their menu here as well?” he asked.

But here I caught myself hesitating just as I’d hesitated the day before. Perhaps I shouldn’t go in at all. Better than recognizing things I hadn’t thought of in years or remembering those I hadn’t entirely forgotten, I wanted to imagine them, keep stepping back till I saw what was inside me, not what was out there. As if in order to experience this thing called the past, I needed distance, temperance, tact, an inflection of sloth and humor even—because memory, like revenge, is best served chilled.

Ersatz stuff, Kalaj would have said.

Suddenly, I wanted to imagine him still sitting there, as always happy to see me, still rolling his cigarettes, still lambasting the world for being the dirty, grimy, insipid, shallow cesspool it was. He’d have just about finished reading yesterday’s paper, and he and the Algerian would have sparred a tiny bit already, just enough to get their day started. I’d be on my way to the library or to meet students and had scarcely time for a cinquante-quatre. Now a cinquante-quatre would probably cost six times as much, more perhaps. I imagined the corner table where I used to like to sit and where I’d once promised myself to finish reading the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, which after all these years, I still hadn’t finished.

They were good times. But I wouldn’t want to relive them. Nor did I want to step inside Café Algiers. I wanted to imagine that his portrait now hung framed right next to the image of a deserted beach in Tipaza. I could just imagine him scoffing at both, with a rhyme: Kalaj à la plage, Kalaj at the beach. What idiots, he’d have said. Then he’d pick up his things, which were always scattered on his table, and say he’d drive me to my class, Let’s go! How much time do you have? Fifteen minutes, I’d say. Good, we’ll do a tour by car and talk a bit, I need your advice on something.

That’s when I wished his old cab would suddenly emerge on Brattle Street. My son and I would hail it, tell the new cabbie that we needed to be driven back to the Office of Admissions, and could he please step on it.

“And take Memorial Drive, would you?” I’d say.

“But that’s ridiculous,” the cabbie would object, “we’re just three blocks away.”

“Yes, I know.”

My son and I would probably be stifling laughter at this point. And I’d be relishing the prospect of returning late to a nearly empty Office of Admissions, winking at my son and saying to the admissions officer, “Very sorry, most very sorry, we’ve missed the boat to Byzantium, haven’t we?”

No sooner would we have gotten into the cab than I’d be reminded of that summer’s oppressive heat. I’d be back to the books I read each day while drinking Tom Collins up on my roof terrace on Concord Avenue, and to those summer days so hot and so scented with suntan lotion that you’d think you were somewhere on the Mediterranean coastline, not far from Sidi Bou Saïd, south of Pantelleria, which I had still never been to, much less thought of after he’d left Cambridge. I’d be back to the French songs we sang in the car on our way to Walden Pond, or of that French song by an Alexandrian Jew about two friends ending up together after so many detours, and of the way Kalaj, who always talked so much, sat and listened to me when he came to pick me up one night because I needed to run away. I’ll never forget the way his car, like a spy boat entering enemy waters to help a prisoner escape, had edged its slow, silent way from Putnam Avenue and then, with its engine still running, had turned its lights on and off twice, just as in spy movies. I’d ask the cabdriver where he’d purchased this car, who from, and when. And as I’d have him distracted, in the backseat I’d ask my son to look for a Freemason sticker somewhere. Kalaj had ended up with so many round stickers after visiting the Masonic Lodge that, not knowing what to do with the last two, he finally stuck them in the least likely spots—right below the armrests under each ashtray, in case you were a smoker and still hadn’t gotten the point! Had there been such a sticker, I would have unpeeled it without the driver’s noticing, and held it. That sticker would have been his time-delayed message to me—Thank God you found me. I’m well. I have two daughters. I have good memories. I love you.

And I love you too.