André Aciman - Harvard Square

WHEN I AWOKE the next morning, it was almost eleven. The first thing that raced through my mind was that a whole day had passed and I had not read a single page. All that sun, and the swimming, and all those sherries, and then the agitated night in Apartment 42.

In the middle of the night I had decided to leave her apartment. I had opened her door, uttered a loud good night, leman mine in Chaucerese, then let her door bang itself shut, also loudly, and right away opened mine as fast and as noisily as I could and slammed it shut as well. I wanted my other neighbor to hear and to put two and two together. I decided to call her the Princesse de Clèves, because part of me already knew she’d heard the two doors bang and was already not pleased by what the noises implied. Tomorrow at dawn I’d play the same trick with the coffee grinds and see where that took us. I’d say something about work, I work all the time. No you don’t, she’d reply. What do you mean? You know exactly what I mean.

Then I’d do what I did best: allow myself to blush. You’re blushing, she’d say. I am blushing, but not because of what you think. Why are you blushing? I’d look down and say: Seeing you makes me blush. And I’d wait for her to say something, anything, even if it was as gauche and gimp-legged as what I’d just said. Provided she said something, I’d always have a comeback.

But I was so tired that night that I slept through five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock, eight, nine, and ten. By now she’d be walking their collie through the Cambridge Common. Too late.

SOMETHING VERY NEW WAS HAPPENING TO ME. I FELT as though every sinew, every bone, muscle, and cell in my body was thrilled to belong to me, to be alive in me, through me, for me. I knew that Ekaterina had longed to be with me last night and that, if I’d found a way to call her, she’d have met me anywhere, taken a taxi, rushed upstairs. The truth is that on that strange morning I didn’t give a damn about my exams, because it was clear to me that anyone I’d cast a glance at from here on would simply crave to touch me, to sleep with me. Whence had this strange, unusual feeling sprung? Why wasn’t I always like this? What must I do to keep this thrill, this buzz alive in me? And where had it been hiding for so very long? Was this what living Kalaj meant?

Would the feeling die as soon as I returned to my usual life — my old self, my old, tired, humdrum home that had no lock, no food, no life, my books, my rooftop, my students, my little corner where I whiled away the hours thinking I was indeed headed somewhere, my Lloyd-Grevilles, my tea parties, my cocktails — were they all going to come back when I least wanted them?

More importantly: how did one feed this fever? Did one walk around brandishing a Kalashnikov? How did one keep this fervor of might, abundance, and pride forever alive? It reminded me of how primitive people were said to have carried live embers wherever they went simply because they hadn’t learned yet how to light a fire. I had embers in every one of my pockets, and my pockets were lined with steel, and I loved the feeling.

The first thing I did that day to make sure I didn’t lose this feeling was not to shower. I wanted to reek of sex, touch every part of me and know where it had been, what it had done, what had been done to it last night.

When I arrived at the department, Mary-Lou was just coming out of the supply room adjacent to her office and immediately reminded me that I had yet to give her the names of my other two examiners. I’d do so as soon as I met with them, I said. She swung around her desk and photocopied a list of instructions for the exam, because, she said, Harvard had very fussy guidelines when it came to comprehensives and I wasn’t always mindful of them. As I was sitting and reading over the instructions, she said I looked better without a beard. I told her that this was the first time anyone had complimented me on my face. Don’t people compliment you often? she asked. I said nothing, thought of Kalaj, and could almost hear her loose change being stacked on her side of her huge desk. All I had to do was raise her by one tiny penny and, who knows, we’d be doing it in the windowless supply room where she kept the extra jars of freeze dried coffee, the paper clips, the blue books, and reams of stationery bearing the department’s letterhead. The question facing me now was: would she hold it against me if I omitted to raise her by that penny? The sight of her beefy face and Botero legs that tapered into tiny feet shod in satin blue pumps made me hesitate.

I decided to say something about the summer’s terrible weather and manage to throw in a casual reference to my girlfriend and her parents’ summer home in the Vineyard where they’d had air-conditioning recently installed in the television room and where we ended up spending so many hours, the whole family together. That, I figured, would take care of things.

Outside the tiny office reserved for teaching fellows to which I had a key, and where I kept some books, a student was standing and was waiting to meet her tutor. She was wearing sandals and an orange dress that flattered her dark tan and her thick, light brown hair. While I stood there with her, I asked about her courses, she about those I was teaching. We spoke about her senior thesis. As we were speaking, I couldn’t keep my eyes off hers. She, I discovered, couldn’t keep hers off mine. I loved the way her eyes kept searching mine, and mine hers, and how each caressed and lingered on the other’s gaze. We were making love, and yet, without denying it, neither was calling attention to it.

We both discovered we loved Proust. She was writing her senior thesis on Proust. Could we talk sometime? I normally met students in my other office at Lowell House. But, not being my student, she was welcome to drop by at Concord Avenue if she wanted. In typical bland-speak that meant everything and nothing at all, the girl in the orange dress simply said, “I’d like that very much.” I could just imagine how Kalaj would have mimicked the phrase. Her first name was Allison. The last name was dauntingly familiar. I told her it was nice meeting her. She said we’d already met once before. I must have given her a quizzical look, for she immediately said, “When you said you didn’t care to see the leaves or to watch Saturday Night Fever .”

This was the girl who had disabused me about America. Why hadn’t I noticed how beautiful she was that time over breakfast?

What on earth was happening? I loved this new me. Here we were discussing Marcel Proust and building all manner of bridges, while part of me hadn’t quite left and indeed still smelled of Apartment 42. If only Emerson, Thoreau, and Justice Holmes, to say nothing of Henry James, father and son, knew what slop was being visited on their beloved and pristine Massachusetts!

I was crossing Harvard Square when I heard someone yell out to me in French, “Do you always talk to yourself?” It was Kalaj. He had stopped for a red light and was leaning his head out of his cab as I was crossing the street. In the back sat a slim white-haired lady dressed in a well-pressed lilac business suit.

“More ersatz than this you cannot get,” he said referring to his passenger. “Where were you headed?”

“To have a cup of coffee and read.”

“Ah, the leisurely life.” he said. “I’ll see you later.”

It was nearing noon. I loved Cambridge at noon. It was time to head to the roof terrace before the weather finally changed. All I wanted now was to read the memoirs of the seventeenth-century Cardinal de Retz, which I’d started a year earlier and promised I’d read as soon as I could. Put everything aside, and spend an entire afternoon with this man who, of all men on this planet, was more an intrepid soldier, courtier, lover, jailbird, and diplomat than a man of the cloth.