André Aciman - Harvard Square

“Yes. Dreadful. No fan, no AC, no TV, no draft, nada . I figured better here than indoors.”

“What about the roof terrace?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nah, too spooky this time of night.”

So this was going to be it, I thought. There was nothing more to say. There were, of course, plenty of silly things to say, but I couldn’t think of one with which to raise her by one tiny chip. Still, I lingered on our stoop.

“Actually, it’s quite spectacular up there at night, have you ever been?” I asked. “Cambridge as you’ve never seen it. There’s always a breeze upstairs. It’s all dark, with tiny lights speckling all around you that remind me of small towns on the Mediterranean.”

Before she could ask which towns, at which point I’d have to come up with the name of one real fast, I don’t know what took hold of me but I told her I’d been planning to grab something to drink and sit up there. “It’s stunning, you’ll see.”

It took me a moment to realize that I myself had never been up there after sundown, let alone at night. You’ll see was the verbal equivalent of touching her elbow, her wrist.

“I don’t feel like dragging a chair up.”

“I’ll bring one up for you too,” I said. “And they’re director’s chairs,” as though that would persuade her, which made us both laugh.

She followed me up the stairs. Ours was the top floor, and it had become a source of good neighborly relations whenever you met someone going up or coming down the stairs to joke about the wide stairwell in a building that could easily have housed an elevator. It explains our low rent, was the thing to say. Yes, the expected reply. We were both slightly uneasy, and neither wished to say anything about the stairs, or about the rent or the heat, perhaps for fear of showing that what was taking our breath away was not the climb. When we reached my apartment, I opened the door trying to look very relaxed and left it wide open, a gesture meant to show I was just going to look for the chairs, mix the drinks, and head upstairs to the terrace with her. This is going to take just a sec, I was signaling, not sure yet whether all this body language suggesting haste was meant to put her or myself at ease. She dawdled in the foyer, crossed her arms, and watched me head to the kitchen, then slowly she followed in, her way of showing she was waiting for the drinks, her arms still crossed, her shoulders as always glistening, her whole posture saying Just don’t take forever . She looked around. Her one-bedroom apartment was exactly like mine, she said, but strangely everything, down to the door handle, was right-side left here. Mine faced west, hers east. As she was talking, I took out a can of frozen lime juice, ran some hot water on it, and emptied an ice tray into a large bowl.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a rubber mallet I had taken out and placed on the kitchen counter.

“You’ll see.” I took out a roll of paper towels, tore out two sheets, and placed a few ice cubes between them. Then, with the rubber mallet, I pounded the cubes on the kitchen counter and emptied the cracked ice into a glass jar.

“Is this how it’s done?” she asked.

Breathless, I could do no more than repeat her words, “That’s how it’s done.” Did she want to try? I handed her the mallet. To steady her hand, I held the hammer with her and then let her pound it once. She liked cracking the ice. She pounded again, then one more time after that. We emptied the cracked pieces into the bowl. Then, just as I was opening the bottle of gin which I’d removed from the freezer, something suddenly seized me and, before I could think twice, I turned toward her and kissed her on the shoulder and then on her neck. It must have startled her but she did not seem to mind, perhaps wasn’t even surprised, and let me kiss her again on the very spot on which for days now I’d been yearning to bring my lips. Then, facing me, she met my lips and kissed me on the mouth, as though I’d been taking forever to make up my mind to kiss her there. We never made it to the terrace that evening.

Around four in the morning, though, when the heat in my apartment had become unbearable, we did go upstairs for a short spell and, standing naked on the dark terrace within sight of the neighboring buildings all around us, we watched Cambridge gleam in the misty summer night just before sunrise. It was her idea to go upstairs naked. I loved it. We came back downstairs and made love again.

SHE WAS ALREADY gone by the time I woke up the next morning. I put on some clothes and knocked at her door. No one answered. She must have already gone to the library.

The smell of her body was still on my sheets, on my skin. I didn’t want it to go away. I would shower later, but not now. Without a bite or a cup of coffee, I headed straight for Café Algiers.

Along the way down Brattle Street, I kept wondering why I was rushing. Was I gloating? Had I already forgotten her and was I thinking only of telling Kalaj about her? Why had she left so quietly? I had no answers.

Before I could begin to fathom the joy I was feeling, I was struck by an unsettling pang of horror. Had we made love because I had come with anger in my heart, because sex feeds on anger, the way it feeds on beauty, love, luck, laughter, spite, sorrow, desire, courage, and despair, because sex evens the playing field, because sex is how we reach out to the world when we have nothing else to offer the world? Is this what had happened — because of the Lloyd-Grevilles’ dismissal, because Kalaj had suddenly put distance between us when I was just about ready to embrace him as a fellow drifter? Or had I borrowed his lust, caught his lust as one catches a fever?

I had no answers there either.

At the café, Kalaj was already sitting at his old table with a cinquante-quatre , his usual objects strewn around his table, his hair still wet. He was rolling up a cigarette, telling Zeinab, who was standing next to him, that asparagus was indeed a renal cleanser — a diuretic and a detoxifier. It increased urination, which helped flush out toxins from your kidneys.

They always spoke in French.

“And I who thought the smell was the result of an internal infection,” she said, holding her wooden tray with one hand.

“No, the smell is evidence that the body is cleaning itself. As the body breaks down asparagus, it releases an amino acid called asparagine which is easily detected in the urine of people who’ve eaten asparagus.”

She was filled with admiration. “Do you know everything, Kalaj?”

“I’m an encyclopedia of bunk.”

She smiled when she heard him put himself down, perhaps her way of sympathizing with him for thinking so poorly of himself but also of showing she was not taken in by any of it. She probably saw it as an intimate admission of personal foibles he wasn’t likely to disclose to anyone else. “I don’t like it when you speak about yourself this way. Compared to you, I am so ignorant.”

“Yes, Zeinab, you are.” He sat motionless as he began to inhale. “But you’re like my sister, and I’ll kill the first man who lays a finger on you.”

“I’m not your sister and I don’t need you to kill anyone for me, Kalaj, I can take care of myself.”

“You’re a child.”

“I’m no child, and I can prove it to you in a second, and you know exactly what I mean, even if you’re pretending not to.”

“Don’t speak like that.”

He was, to my complete surprise, blushing.

“It’s as you want, Kalaj. I know how to wait,” she said, heedless of my presence as I stood there on my feet transfixed between them. “All I need is a sign, and I am yours for as long as you want me. When you’re tired, you’ll let me know. Sans obligations .”