André Aciman - Harvard Square

“Speak to him, not to me,” Kalaj pointed at me, which was his way of greeting me that day.

“Him? He doesn’t even look at me. At least you do. As I said: for as long as you want and not a minute more.”

With that she was gone behind the counter.

“Another one,” said Kalaj when she was out of earshot. Using his right hand, he pulled up a chair with the effortless grace of a defense attorney preparing a chair for a prisoner who’s just walked into the visitation room.

“So tell me.”

“You tell me first.”

We exchanged stories.

He had been right about the woman with bathroom problems. “She has bathroom problems… during orgasm.” He laughed. Even Zeinab, who was arranging small pastries on a large platter behind the counter, snickered on hearing the story. “You men are swine,” she said. “Nothing is sacred to you, Kalaj. And you want to treat me like your little sister?”

He ignored her and asked about my evening. I told him about the woman in Apartment 42, and how we’d stood naked on the terrace facing all of Cambridge in the dark. He immediately dubbed her la quarante-deux , Miss 42.

“Her name is Linda,” I said.

He preferred la quarante-deux .

“We were probably overheard by our neighbors — especially by the woman next door to mine.”

“All the better.”

He asked if we’d done it on the terrace. I didn’t know how to answer without giving everything away. “Let’s say we started there,” I said.

“You too are a pig,” came Zeinab’s comment.

“Who told you to listen? This is man talk.”

“The things I could teach you men…” she echoed from the kitchen.

Kalaj did not like to skimp details, so I heard all about his night. She lived in Watertown, but liked to come to Cambridge in the evening. Big smirk, meaning: We know why . She worked in the art section of a university library, had beautiful art in her house, lived alone, not even a pet. Very uninhibited in bed, wild sex. Then, on second thought, mechanical sex. Passion with eyes shut tight. Which was why he wasn’t going to see her again. One night was enough. What was wrong with her? I asked. Not for me, came his answer. He’d have given her at most four nights, then she’d start asking for this, and then that, then she’d pout, and why wasn’t he doing this, sulk some more, and why not that…? He knew the litany well enough. It was called domesticity. These women are always depressed, then they depress you, and when they’ve got you well and soundly depressed, they hold it against you, lose interest, and look for someone new to depress. As always, his biggest fear was that getting too close to such people would eventually unseat and kill his artisanal, homespun self and replace it, in the dark of night, with his mass-produced, ersatz double. It scared him — because his other fear was that he might grow to like being ersatz, or, worse yet, forget he had once been otherwise. Even his Monsieur Zeb would become ersatz, and then where would he be?

But there was another reason why he knew better than to seek her out. “I burn through things too fast,” he told me, and there was no longevity in the things he touched.

After sex she had wanted to sketch him. Absolutely not, he’d said. Why not? I asked. “Take a look at this.” And, like Harpo Marx producing a steaming cup of coffee from under his raincoat, he pulled out a sheet of blue construction paper that had been folded in four. He unfolded it, slapped it on the table, and, to hold it down, placed his damp saucer right on top of one of its corners. “This is me?” he asked, outrage sizzling in his voice, “Is this me?”

With Cray-Pas, she had sketched his face and bare shoulders.

“Yes, it is you,” I said. It was quite masterfully done. “Stunning and expressive work.”

“This is shit. Her parents had spent a fortune on her education, and all she can do at the age of thirty is neek the first Arab she meets in some underground café and then ask him to sit still when he is dying to sleep so she can produce this? This? ”

He yanked out the sheet from under the saucer, asked Zeinab to come over here right away, and held it out for her to see. This?

Zeinab stepped out of the kitchen and was already drying her hands on her apron as she rushed toward our table. “What?”

“This,” he said.

“Let’s see.” She held the picture in front of her, made an amused click in her throat, and then, without batting an eyelash, kissed the portrait. “Tu es beau,” she rhapsodized, “ tu es vraiment beau, you are really handsome!”

“Then you keep it. You’ve already lost your mind as it is.”

“I’ll keep it and how. Do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Write today’s date on it. My hands are wet.”

Out of one of the many pockets in his jacket, he pulled out a pencil with a rubber band wrapped so tightly around its head that it had formed a ball on the eraser.

“Why do you have a rubber band on your pencil?” she asked.

“Because when I need a rubber band I’ll know where to find one. What else do you want to know?”

He held his pencil as would a ten-year-old boy, with his fingers almost touching the lead. Its stubby point showed it has been sharpened not in a regular pencil sharpener but with a blade. I recognized the uneven marks around the edge of the pencil where it was shaved. It took me right back to my childhood, when I couldn’t find my pencil sharpener in class and didn’t want my teacher to know I had lost it. You took out a penknife — all of us had penknives — and in total silence under your desk shaved the edge of the pencil until, like a new tooth pushing its way out of the hollow of your gum, the new point began to emerge. Using a knife made you feel brawny, like a sailor with a dagger whittling away at a piece of driftwood because this is how he whiled away his hours when there was nothing better to do, because real men always found something useful to do with their hands.

“And write neatly,” she said.

Again, like a conscientious and dutiful young pupil, he leaned forward, his face so close to the table you’d think he had eye trouble, and penciled the date.

Voilà.

“Now you two can go back to your slop,” said Zeinab.

“Exactly,” he said, and turning to me: “So tell me about la quarante-deux .”

I told him the whole story again.

Kalaj said that if she had come upstairs with me that night it was because I had done one thing right: I had lingered, just lingered, because when I was standing in front of her as she sat smoking in silence on the stoop, I had not moved, had kept very quiet, had made it very obvious that I was aching and longing for her, that all I could think of at that hour of the night was her shoulders, and that I would make her laugh and be happy, that I would take care of everything, including the two chairs.

But, as always, Kalaj immediately corrected himself. She’d probably made up her mind about me the moment she’d seen me walking toward her, or maybe even on the rooftop weeks earlier.

“Now tell me about being naked on the terrace.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“You mean how she suddenly sat on my lap naked and I felt the hair of her vagina on my zeb and couldn’t believe I could go at it again so soon?”

“ Oké , stop!”

WE HAD HAD such a warm moment together that morning, that in the days and weeks afterward, I made a point of showing up at Café Algiers just as it was about to open. The place smelled of bleach and Mr. Clean, the chairs were still upturned as the floor was drying, and Zeinab was still mopping the kitchen area, all the while making sure the coffee was already brewing and Arab songs playing. When she was in good spirits, she’d put on George Brassens or, as I later found out, her favorite, Barbara, and she’d sing along to Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux and, in mock-cabaret-singer, sidle up to the man who happened to be sitting nearest to the kitchen and sing to him, and to him alone, her favorite verses of the song by Aragon.