André Aciman - Harvard Square

I walked by Berkeley Street. Nothing pleased me more than to pass by these old New England houses and be greeted by the beaming palaver of Anglo-Saxon housewives busily planting next spring’s bulbs.

Stuck in between my mailbox and my neighbor’s box was an index card. “Dropped by but you were gone. I’ll try later. Ekaterina.” She had left no phone number. I wondered if this was the handiwork of Kalaj. On the rooftop, we could have replayed yesterday’s excursion to Walden Pond. The sun was no more intense up there than it had been on the shore, and I still had some of the watermelon left and an uncorked bottle of Portuguese rosé. It would have been wonderful sweating it out under the sun until we couldn’t stand it any longer and headed downstairs to my apartment.

I removed the card and wrote a few words and then teased it back into the narrow slot between the two mailboxes, hoping that my next-door neighbor would see it when leaving the building a second time to walk her dog. “ I’m waiting upstairs .” But on my way upstairs, I ran into Linda. What was she doing now? Nothing. Did I want to come for a visit? A short one, I said. When I walked in, I suddenly realized what I hadn’t noticed the night before. Unlike mine, her apartment was decorated and looked as though someone had put the whole place together with a humble, loving hand; the place had domestic longevity written all over it, while mine was roughly furnished with a scattering of odds and ends picked up anywhere for nothing or almost nothing and thrown together in an ill-assorted, slapdash medley that bore no trace of any hand, loving or otherwise. I had a feeling that Kalaj, Ekaterina, and Léonie’s bedrooms were thrown together in as rudimentary and hasty a manner as mine — i.e., savage with niceties, impatient, hostile, and transient. Furniture didn’t stay long with us.

I soon told her I was expecting someone, and headed back to my apartment. In fact, I heard the buzzer ten minutes later. “A woman with a dog opened the downstairs door for me,” Ekaterina said as she pushed open my door. The news thrilled me to no end and made me happier than I already was to see her.

“Did you tell her you were coming to see me?”

“Yes, I did.”

She walked in with fresh muscatel grapes, whose scent suddenly suffused my living room. “I brought you these, I knew you’d like them.”

I took the grapes into the kitchen. I was looking for an excuse to open the service door, and decided that getting rid of the paper bag in which Ekaterina had brought the fruit was as good an excuse as any. I put the grapes in a bowl, crumpled the bag, and threw it in the larger trash can on the landing outside my door.

“I am so glad you came,” I said, still leaving my kitchen door open.

“Me too.” And because I felt no hesitation whatsoever, I came up to her and kissed her on the mouth. I loved her breath.

“We can eat them in the living room or upstairs on the terrace, which do you prefer?”

“I could also mix drinks,” I added. No, she couldn’t drink. She had to pick up her boy from kindergarten at 2:00.

“So let’s eat them in the other room,” I said. I took the grapes back into the bedroom, and we sat on the bed, her legs beautifully crossed on my sheets. “I want to eat these grapes naked,” I said, and before she had time to even say yes, I began removing everything I was wearing. I loved being like this. I loved watching her dancer’s thighs on my sheets.

I promised to read two whole books the moment she left.

ONE FRIDAY, TO celebrate our newfound friendship, we decided to have a dinner for all four of us and a few friends. Kalaj invited one friend, I invited Frank who had come back from a summer in Assisi and who, as my ex-roommate, had helped me through thick and thin, especially in the loan department. We had spoken by telephone but hadn’t managed to meet since his return. He was going to bring along his new Armenian girlfriend who promised to dazzle us with sensational pastries from an Armenian bakery in Watertown. There were also others: Claude, who had also recently returned from France, and a friend of his named Piero, a count in his last year at Harvard Law. I would have invited Linda had I not invited Ekaterina first. Bring both, said Kalaj. I could invite Niloufar too, he suggested. “She’d cook wonderful rice and spiced meats,” said Kalaj, bursting out laughing, because I’d told him all about the powerful effect of her spiced meats.

“No, it would hurt her, and what I’ve done to her I’ll never live down.”

“You are right,” he said.

Kalaj and I met at Café Algiers as soon as I was done teaching that Friday. It was before noon, and he was seated next to the young American whom I’d not seen since that first time in early August. Young Hemingway and Kalaj were arguing politics again. Kalaj finally called him an anarchist in diapers. The American suggested that Kalaj was a Malcolm X manqué and “might do well to revisit” his political views. Kalaj stared at this strange locution as if it were a stray dog that had come up to his table for a bite of his sandwich. He licked the end of his cigarette paper, then, staring the American in the face, finally interjected: “You have no balls.”

Startled, Young Hemingway sputtered and replied, “I have no balls?”

“Yes, they’re in your throat, here,” and with the bare tips of both thumbs to suggest tiny gonads he placed each thumb against either side of his Adam’s apple and began to emit a reedy little squeal, with which he echoed, might do well to revisit, might do well to revisit. “If you wanted to tell me I was an idiot, you should have told me, Kalaj, tu es un idiot. Can’t even speak and expects to argue… Just go back to your scrap metal shop of a university where they mass-produce you like rinky-dink umbrellas good for one rainfall.”

“I thought we were friends, Kalaj.”

“We are nothing. We just drink coffee together.” He turned to me and said, “Let’s go!”

We hopped in his cab and headed straight to Haymarket Square to buy vegetables. He had already purchased the beef for a song from the head cook at Césarion’s the day before and it was being marinated in my kitchen in a sauce of his own invention. “What’s in the sauce?” I kept asking.

“You’ll see.”

“Yes, but what kind of sauce is it?”

“A you’ll see sauce.”

He was also going to prepare a mousse the likes of which we had never tasted. He had not used a kitchen in more than six months, so this was something of a celebration. We asked everyone to bring wines. The vegetables were going to be easy — but he needed fresh chestnuts, and these were almost impossible to find. So we purchased dried chestnuts instead. They were clearing up the stalls that Friday afternoon, so the potatoes, onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and celery we managed to get for free. I was under the impression that I was going to be responsible for the cheeses. Bread and cheeses he had already taken care of, he said. “You know nothing about cheeses. The first thing you’ll do is think you’re buying French cheese when all you’ll serve is a curdled brew made with liquids that had never been inside a cow’s udder.” Kalaj did not believe in small spice jars; he bought large bags of everything from cumin and thyme to paprika.

More people said they would come, including Zeinab and Sheila. Even the woman with bathroom problems had uttered a vague maybe. Kalaj never broke up with anyone. People simply drifted in and out and back into his life, the way sand castles go up and down and are rebuilt time and again on the same spot of beach.

Kalaj wanted to find a man who was bien (right) for Zeinab, so I thought of Claude. But just in case things didn’t work out between them, I invited a young Hungarian who had studied in Turkey. And then there was the Count. “I can just see them,” said Kalaj, “Zeinab and the Count discussing Balzac on a park bench in the sixteenth arrondissement, he with an umbrella and a tennis racket between his knees, and she with a broomstick and a mop. Lovely couple!”