André Aciman - Harvard Square

The coffeepot that morning was stuck shut. So I banged it against the kitchen counter. Then, to empty the hardened coffee grinds, I opened the service door, lifted the top of the trash container on my landing, and gently banged the metal funnel filter against it, once, twice. My neighbor opened her service door right away. “Did you knock?” she asked. “No,” I said, apologizing for the noise. “I was just emptying the coffee grinds,” I said showing her the funnel as proof I wasn’t lying. “The last time I made coffee using this thing was months ago.”

“Oh,” she said. Then because I stood there, hesitating to shut my kitchen door before she had shut hers, she asked why I was up so early.

“Work,” I said. “What about you?”

Work too, she smiled.

“Funny, though,” she said, “I happened to see your light late last night and wondered about you.”

Was this the equivalent of telling a man she’s dreamed of him?

“What did you think?”

“Nothing.”

“Good or bad?”

“Nothing special, really.”

I still did not shut the door though I could tell from her body language that she was about to shut hers.

“Tell me the next time we meet then.”

But I still didn’t signal I was shutting the door. I just stood there with parts of the dirty coffeepot in both hands. “It’s a promise then.”

She smiled but did not answer, and because she did not answer I knew at that moment that she knew about Linda and me and that she’d make sure to open her kitchen door in three days at the latest, unless she was like the Princesse de Clèves and would never open it again when she was alone in her kitchen precisely because she was dying to throw it wide open. Then, if indeed she was like the Princess, she’d tell her boyfriend, not what she had done one afternoon when he was away at work and I’d knocked and asked to borrow, say, a bottle opener, but that she had intentionally resisted opening the kitchen door because she knew who was knocking and didn’t trust herself.

I WENT TO meet Lloyd-Greville that morning at 10:00 feeling buoyed and uplifted not by my readiness to discuss Chaucer but by what had happened at 5:00 that very morning. And perhaps it was because I was in such high spirits that I must have persuaded Lloyd-Greville I was more than prepared to take my comprehensives that coming January. As I was stepping out of his office, he handed my file to Mary-Lou, saying “Our friend here could, if he wished, write a dissertation on Chaucer.” Lloyd-Greville was always stingy when it came to praise; he preferred compliments by proxy, by speaking to you via someone else, by not even looking at you. I went home, unplugged my phone, and threw myself on my sunbathed bed totally naked.

THE INDIAN SUMMER WASN’T LETTING GO, EVEN AS September dragged on into early October. Mornings were chilly, but by midmorning the weather would grow warm, then unbearably hot, and then quite cool again. Ersatz weather, Kalaj called it. Why should this surprise anyone? Everything about this place was sham, bogus, fake, phony, counterfeit. Contrefaçon , he’d say, meaning that everything was counterfeit in America. Still, I liked the extended illusion of spring weather with its heady presage of summer oddly trailing on the last, first days of fall. It took me back to spring break, when summer was still weeks away. I remembered the end of the academic year. Back then I had drawn up lists of books to read or reread and had just discovered the use of the terrace upstairs. My friends Frank and Claude were still in town and Nora hadn’t even left for Europe yet. Nora, when she wasn’t with Frank, would come by sometimes and cook a Cornish hen for the two of us, though we both knew that she was coming simply to vent about how hard Frank was to live with and how she couldn’t wait to be without him for a while, which is why the two had decided to spend their summer away. The whole thing with the Cornish hen and the half-liter bottle of wine always ended up in tears. One evening we’d gone to see Annie Hall in Boston. She kept laughing; I couldn’t begin to understand why, and finally decided that perhaps Frank was right, there was something wrong with her. It never occurred to me that I had not yet grasped Woody Allen’s humor. Kalaj, when I thought back on those spring days, was still months away, as if unborn yet. To think there was a time when Kalaj hadn’t stomped into my life and altered its rhythm. I tried but didn’t really wish to restore that sheltered rhythm, though I knew that continuing on this path of bar after café after bar after café seemed equally unthinkable a way to spend my time as a scholar. But Cambridge without Kalaj seemed unthinkable now. And yet after spending an hour with Lloyd-Greville, I was starting to recover my confidence and, with my confidence, my old love for scholarship and for Cambridge and for the life it presaged.

I went back to Lowell House more frequently as soon as I received Lloyd-Greville’s temporary thumbs-up. I liked going there almost every day. I liked having a study where I could meet students and discuss their work. I liked my new students. All History and Literature majors were unusually bright and well read, and most spoke at least one foreign language. Students were in the habit of waiting for me outside my study after lunch. We discussed the books they wished to read, drew up lists, chatted, talked about life, which invariably meant sex, or the absence of sex. With yet another student, I discussed the topic of her senior thesis, things we had more or less already agreed upon before she’d left for Europe in early May. Now, five months later, she wore a tan, had perfected her French, couldn’t wait to be back in Paris for Christmas. I hadn’t seen Christmas in Paris in at least a decade. Sometimes I held tutorials in my office, or I’d invite someone over for coffee after lunch, and liked nothing more than to feel back on track with everyone else in Cambridge, liked the view into the main courtyard where students and younger tutors alike seemed to lounge about for hours on beach towels in the early afternoon, reading and studying, without another care in the world, graced by the towering, watchful presence of the blue-domed belfry and the protective manor-house gaze of this spot of paradise called Lowell House. For a few years in everyone’s life here, Harvard cordoned off the world, was the world.

Kalaj didn’t have a place in this world, and yet I knew that he’d barge himself in one way or another.

A few days after my meeting with Lloyd-Greville I ran into Kalaj at the café. He still couldn’t sleep, he said. He was, once again, as he so often was these days, in a foul mood, worse even than the last time. Could I do him a favor? Of course. He needed me to go with him to visit a lawyer. Tomorrow morning? Yes, I could do it, I said. Did he have an appointment? What for?

“You can’t walk right in to see your lawyer, you need to make an appointment.”

“So? Call now and make an appointment,” he said.

But it was past six o’clock; the lawyer had probably left already.

“Call anyway,” he said, producing the phone number from his tiny notebook after removing the rubber band. We called, or rather I called.

The lawyer picked up the phone himself.

I hadn’t had a chance to ask for an appointment when Kalaj interrupted me in French to ask if the lawyer could see him now.

“Can we come over now?”

“Now as in right now ?” he asked, raising the pitch of his voice, as if the idea seemed totally outlandish.

“Maintenant?” I asked Kalaj, hoping he’d change his mind.

“Oui, maintenant,” he answered.

“Now.”

The voice at the other end of the line hesitated. “Frankly, I was getting ready to head home.”