André Aciman - Harvard Square

Later, during the picnic, when Ekaterina produced some Cheerios for the children, Kalaj, who had never seen the likes of Cheerios in his life, asked to taste one. Before he had put it in his mouth, she silently mouthed the words jumbo-ersatz, jumbo-ersatz, meaning: You watch, he’ll start . The square container was immense, the food was totally artificial, nature never spawned these flavors — Kalaj was starting to load his Kalashnikov. When Ekaterina took out a Ziploc bag with five large, juicy nectarines, he exploded. “You should never buy nectarines. Nectarines are totally ersatz…”

“Like mules,” she said.

“Yes, exactly,” he said, missing the joke at his expense. “ Sesame Street is all ersatz too. It teaches people to be ersatz. Just listen to the voices of each character. Not one has a human voice.”

“But children like it, and children like nectarines, and I like nectarines. Do you want one?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” he conceded.

Her two little packs of Twinkies produced the same outraged response. Abject scorn followed by stoic acquiescence. “So, let’s see what this Twinkie thing is,” he finally said.

Then he got up and took a short stroll along the shore, dipping his toes in the water again, staring at the tops of the trees in the distance. He was enjoying Walden Pond, even America.

And right then and there I finally understood Kalaj. Behind his wholesale indictment of America, he was desperately struggling not to give in in case America decided not to yield to him first. The lawyer had mentioned the word deportation, and both of us had winced. Kalaj preferred to turn his back first, in the hope that America might ask him to look more favorably on her and give her a second chance. He was, without knowing it, doing what he’d always done: flirting… but this time with a superpower. America, as far as he was concerned, had not really put a penny on the table, and he was getting tired of staying in the game. America was busy stacking up its chips, while he — anyone could tell — was obviously bluffing.

Perhaps, also, by degrading America and nicknaming amerloque everything that was wrong with the world, he was forging for himself an imaginary Mediterranean identity, a Mediterranean paradise lost, something that may never have existed but that he needed to believe was out there in some imaginary other shore because otherwise he’d have nothing and nowhere to turn to in case America turned its back on him.

When it was time to fold everything back into the car and throw the garbage out in the appropriate bins, we looked at each other and realized that we had all taken more sun than we had hoped. It gave us a sort of heady good cheer, as if we’d finally caught up with a summer that had slipped us by.

Before entering the car, Kalaj asked everyone to clear their feet of any sand or mud, especially you there in the back , meaning me. Then he said he needed to piss. “So, pee,” said Léonie, who was already sitting in the seat next to his. He looked about him uneasily, slightly at a loss, then headed back to the shore, and, with his back to us, as he stared into the quiet expanse of water, started to pee. He took his time, but the idea of someone pissing so irreverently into Thoreau’s hallowed pond seemed too comical not to be put into its historical context. So when he returned to the car I explained to them the importance of Walden Pond in American literature. They all listened, attentively. “And I who simply needed to go,” he finally said after mulling the matter a while and bursting out in loud guffaws, as we all joined in, the children included, all of us breaking into song as we rode back to Cambridge, swearing we should do this again in a few days.

I was the first they dropped by car, just in time to take a very quick shower and head to Lowell House on foot. All through cocktails, though, I had one thought in mind: I wanted the day to start all over again. Just as I wanted it never to end. If I did not know in whose camp I belonged — with Lowell House or with Kalaj — what I did not mind was oscillating between the two, with one foot in each, because I belonged to both, and therefore to neither — like having a home without belonging to it. Like staring out the window of my twenty-four-hour deli early in the morning after spending the night at the infirmary and feeling a rush of love, loathing, and bile.

After the cocktail reception, I ducked dinner and found my way to Café Algiers, then to Casablanca, then to the Harvest. But Kalaj was nowhere. When I asked the waiters and bartenders, they said they hadn’t seen him. Suddenly I felt something fierce. Why did it take so long to admit why I’d come looking for him? I wanted to find all three of them, him, Léonie, and Ekaterina. And if I didn’t find the three of them, I wanted Léonie to tell me where to find Ekaterina. And if Léonie was nowhere, I wanted to find Ekaterina sitting alone. If only I had skipped the Master’s Tea and the cocktails immediately following. Perhaps it was the three sherries on an empty stomach speaking, perhaps it was too much sun, or perhaps it was just that we hadn’t had a real moment together except while swimming, and tonight it seemed there wasn’t going to be a similar moment again. And yet I was sure that something had happened when we were in the water together, from the way she’d been looking at me while drying herself, knowing I couldn’t keep my eyes off. I wasn’t making it up, and maybe this is why I couldn’t let go of that fleeting something between us, because I couldn’t quite put my finger on it or know when precisely it had happened. And then it hit me: the sheer obvious simplicity of it. I should have seized my moment then. Or asked for her phone number when we were in the car together. So what if Kalaj might guess why. This was the first thing Kalaj assumed about every man and woman on the planet. And if Léonie knew, what of it? I was there when she met Kalaj, and he had asked for her number in front of me — it was the kind of thing you asked without thinking. Had I not asked because I didn’t want to seem interested, or didn’t want to ask in my usually flustered way and look more flustered yet if she hesitated?

I tried one more place. But no one was there either. I headed home by way of Berkeley Street, passing by all those patrician houses, thinking now of the nectarine Kalaj had bit into and said he liked.

I could just imagine Kalaj speaking to her about me. “Of course you should call him. Better yet, go to his house,” he would have said. “When?” “When? What a question. Tonight. Now. His door is literally always open.” I could just hear him speaking to her while driving her home and shouting at his windshield. Maintenant, aujourd’hui, ce soir! Would I have gone and waited outside of her employer’s house on Highland Avenue?

“My instincts are intact,” he had once said, meaning that mine were totally warped, tarnished, compromised. “Intact,” he had said on the night he took me to see his car and, on impulse, had made me knock on the hood of the car parked right next to his. The Western man’s instincts were like pockets with holes in them. Sooner or later, everything slips through. “But I am like those beggars who line the inside of their tattered pockets with steel. Their clothes are all frayed, but the inside is a vault.”

I decided to knock at Apartment 42.

Linda opened the door and right away walked back to where she’d been sitting and watching TV on her sofa. I shut the door.

She had passed her exams. I congratulated her. Mine were almost slightly over three months away.

She tucked both legs under her light blue terrycloth bathrobe. All I had to do was pull the belt and the knot was undone.