André Aciman - Harvard Square

She liked rowing every morning, she liked George Eliot, and she worshipped Parsifal . Go figure.

Kalaj was not surprised. He asked if I had to sleep with her after that. “No,” I said. “This was not about sex.”

“Of course it’s about sex,” he shot back. “You’re the type who never sees that it’s always about sex. Always, always.” Maybe he was right, I said, thinking back to Heather and suddenly realizing that perhaps she’d been trying to tell me something I had failed to hear. “Was she ugly?” he asked. “No. Despite the voice, quite sexy.” He made me imitate her voice, her manner of speaking, her gestures, finally bursting out laughing when I consented to imitate her French accent.

“They’re put together differently, these women,” he finally said, and right away launched into his sermon on nectarines.

Two minutes.

Anyochka’s was totally empty that night, its large glass door wide open. The AC was broken. We ordered two croque monsieurs , a luxury in my budget, but it was summer vacation, and I felt like spoiling myself. Amid the dimmed lights and the whir of an old ceiling fan, he told me all about his childhood in Tunisia and about his studies in France. His specialty: informatique . He explained what precisely a byte was, 1’s and 0’s. I couldn’t understand a thing. He explained again. Still couldn’t understand. He tried a third time. Then he let the matter drop. “You’re simply incapable , hopeless.” Seeing no immediate future in informatique , he became a self-employed caterer. He married his sous-chef, though it became obvious enough by the rest of the tale that it was her money that had set him up in business. “She betrayed me. She destroyed me. And she ruined me.” He was now married to an American.

“Where is your wife?” I asked.

“No idea.”

“Does she travel a lot?”

“I told you I have no idea. Don’t you understand when I speak?”

Rat-tat-tat , but aimed at me this time. What was I even doing having dinner with this creep? I was about to explain my question.

“No need to apologize. I don’t give a damn. Well,” he changed his mind, “let me explain.”

Five minutes.

They met in an underground station in Boston. He had just missed the train to Park Square and, without thinking, had muttered a curse in French. You seem upset, the woman on the platform had said. I am upset. She thought he was speaking to her. No, he wasn’t. He was just cursing out loud. But one thing led to another. Things invariably did with him. Within days they were married. Soon after their wedding he filed his application for a green card.

What had made him come to the States?

“Let me explain.”

Four minutes.

And how did he come to be interested in computers?

“Well, you see—”

Four more minutes.

The tales were gnarled together and could take forever to sort out, but I listened because they had all the makings of a latter-day picaresque novel. After his French wife had abandoned him — she had kicked him out, actually — he befriended an Italian businesswoman who was staying in Paris and who had hired him as her personal chef. From cook he became her driver, then her social secretary, till he graduated to a more meaningful occupation and was invited to live with her in Milan while her husband was away. The husband returned, heard all he needed to hear, and threatened to come after Kalaj. That is when Kalaj believed it was time to flee, and through her contacts, ended up in, of all places, Harvard Square, to stay with her best friend, who was an Italian graduate student at Harvard and whom, it happened, I knew quite well and I liked. “Like her all you want,” was his reply. After about two weeks, the graduate student and her live-in boyfriend took Kalaj aside and informed him that perhaps he should start thinking of moving elsewhere.

Perhaps you should start thinking of moving elsewhere, he mimicked, making fun of their couched language. He moved out that same afternoon. Better a park bench. Better the grimy floor in a soup kitchen. Better a public bathroom. They needed space! Space was a concept that was totally foreign to him — as though humans had suddenly become galactic mutants in need of huge magnetic shields. “Me, impose on people? — God forbid.” In fact, he had just been kicked out from his newer digs when he missed that underground train to Park Square. This time last year, he finally said, he had never even heard of Cambridge, much less of Harvard Square. Now he knew more than he’d ever wished. He and his amerloque wife had split up. Actually, she too had kicked him out. She was a lay analyst. Shelley. Very rich parents. Jewish.

“Probably didn’t like having an Arab taxi driver for a husband,” I threw in.

“No, that wasn’t it.”

“She didn’t know French and you didn’t know English well enough?”

“No, not that either.”

“What, then?”

Out poured yet another screed against American women. Did I know the one about the Arab necrophiliac? Yes, I did. He had told me the joke last week. Well, she was the dead woman in his bed. Even his left hand was more sensual. After sex, it was like leaving a motel room: you slammed the door shut, slipped your keys under the doormat, and headed for your car. You didn’t even bother switching the TV off.

Now she was divorcing him.

“At some point,” he went on, “I couldn’t do it with her any longer. I became numb. Like my friend the Algerian, whose ship doesn’t sail, and whose arrows won’t fly — you understand, right? — poor fellow. I didn’t want to ask him for his pills, but a friend told me that peanut butter helped a lot. So I downed so much peanut butter that the color of my skin began to change. But no waking my Monsieur Zeb . I was so worried. Because without him, you know, I am nothing, I have nothing. Because he’s all the gold I carry. But then I met someone else… and bam! I’m a Sputnik, a Kalashnikov, a Trans-Siberian locomotive with triple the horsepower of the mounted cavalry at the battle of Friedland, stiffer than oak and harder than marble and bigger than Zeinab’s broomstick.” He laughed. “Still, I do miss her sometimes. She was my wife, you know.”

“Here,” he said, producing a tiny pocket notebook. He removed the rubber band around the notebook and slipped it around his wrist. I had never seen his handwriting before. It was everything he wasn’t: neat, tentative, timid, the product of a frightened child in harsh, French, colonial schools where they taught you self-hatred for being who you were (if you were half French), for not being French (if you were an Arab), and for wishing to be French (if you were never going to be). The handwriting of someone who had never grown up, who’d had calligraphy beaten into him. It surprised me. “Read,” he said.

Dresser.

Turntable.

Television.

Striped ironing board.

A standing lamp to the left.

A night table to the right.

A tiny reading light clasped to the headboard.

She sleeps naked at night.

Cat snuggles on her bed.

The stench from the litter box.

Bathroom door never locks.

Toilet flushes twice.

Impossible to repair. Shower drips too.

I see the Charles. And the Longfellow Bridge.

Sometimes nothing because of the fog.

And I hear nothing. Sometimes an airplane.

No one sleeps in the adjacent room;

It used to be her mother’s once,

She died in her sleep.

They never emptied her closet,