André Aciman - Harvard Square

Allison had come to my apartment on Concord Avenue early on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. Not intentionally of course, and not that it bothered me in any way, since I had never observed Kippur in my life. But it was emblematic of how far apart our worlds were. When she buzzed me early that afternoon, I told her to come right upstairs; I’d recognized it was a woman’s voice but couldn’t make out whose. When she walked in wearing her orange dress I was totally surprised. I was wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and had just come back from a jog. I was also sweating. I must have looked a mess. I told her to please sit on the sofa, to pick something up to read, and that I’d take no time to shower and get dressed.

She was unfazed by this. Perhaps, in her mind, she was not visiting me at home; she was just visiting a Lowell House tutor in his off-campus digs, hence the relaxed drop-by-and-show-up-whenever-you-please informality of her visit and the ease with which she adjusted to everything.

“Tell you what, do you know how to make espresso?” I asked in my distracted and flustered state.

She loved espresso but didn’t know how to make one.

“Five minutes,” I said. I’d make us two terrific lattes.

I was trying not to allow myself to get aroused by the situation.

She must have taken a good look at my bookcase and, before I’d even started the water running, shouted that she was amazed I had the complete first edition of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu . Had she read the whole thing yet? I shouted back behind my closed door, feeling that if she didn’t feel uncomfortable shouting back and forth with someone she scarcely knew while he was in the bathroom, who was I to quibble.

“Yes,” she replied.

Then came total silence. Was she going to undress and step into the shower with me? The thought gave me a sudden thrill that was difficult to restrain but that part of me did not wish to temper. Would I come out of the shower and expose myself? Or would she have already snuggled in my bed, naked under my sheets, her clothes dropped on the floor along the way to my bedroom as a preamble to what lay in store for us? I didn’t want to say or shout anything for fear she’d make out the arousal in my voice. All I knew was that in Kalaj’s book of rules, if I was as aroused as this, so was she.

When I came out of the shower in my bathrobe, she was lying flat on her stomach on my living room floor leafing through my diary.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Reading,” she said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Where did you find it?”

“In your bedroom, on your desk.”

I was speechless. So she’d gone into my bedroom, seen my totally unmade bed, rifled through my things, found the diary, what else?

“Do you really, really mind?”

I thought about it.

“No, I don’t mind really, really mind,” I said. “Actually, it thrills me.”

“Thrills you? How, actually ?” she said, echoing my own word.

I had no idea where this was going — was she a total ingénue or did she know exactly what she was doing, which could be exactly why she showed up in the first place.

They always know . I could just hear Kalaj’s voice.

“I’m going to get dressed and make coffee.”

“Why don’t you do that.”

I’d never in my life uttered a sentence like “Why don’t you do that” to mean yes. Who knows what these words implied or meant in her world.

Naturally, I banged the espresso filter against the garbage container as loud as I could, left the door wide open for the time it took to boil the milk, then closed the door again.

Allison had come to talk to me about her senior thesis on Proust after I had encouraged her to look me up. She was working with another tutor at Adams House, she said, but was intrigued by our brief conversation outside my office. Someone else had mentioned my name to her. She wished she had known earlier, but it was too late to change tutors, she said. Now, as we both stood in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew, she gave no sense of being interested in discussing Proust. She had brought my diary into the kitchen and continued poring over it as we stood silently by the gas range. For someone reading someone else’s diary without asking permission to do so, she didn’t seem in the slightest bit ill at ease. What did ersatz mean? she asked. I told her. Who was K. then? I explained, without giving away the seamy underside. What about Walden Pond? Skip that part, I said. “So tell me about N. You wrote about her less than three weeks ago,” she said.

This was not placing penny bets. She was putting weightier, Monte Carlo chips on the table.

“You really want to know about N.?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“Why do you want to know?”

She hesitated.

“Maybe I’m trying to figure you out.”

I admired her. I’ve always like such disarming candor in a woman. Or was this something you said to someone you’d just met, no hidden agenda, nothing implied — not a penny chip at all?

“Yes, but why?” I asked.

Maybe I was ducking, or maybe it was my turn to place a bigger bet than I was used to. Maybe I wanted to make certain that heavier bets were not untimely.

“You know why,” she said, “you know exactly why.” And, changing the subject right away, she added, “I want you to read me this paragraph here so that I can hear it in your voice.”

“My voice?”

“Just read.”

It was a description of how Niloufar and I had kept staring at each other at Café Algiers one afternoon and, without saying anything, without warning, she’d started to shed tears as I reached out and held her hand, and with one thing leading to the other, had found myself in tears as well.

I caught my breath. I was too aroused. I knew I couldn’t continue this, but I certainly did not want to fold. I read it for her, with sincere feeling, all the while sensing that I was using the arousal with one woman to arouse the other.

“OK, now read me the poem.”

“What poem?” I asked, unable to recall having written a poem in my diary. My mind was beginning to draw one huge blank over everything around me right now. I could think of one thing only, and I had to struggle not to touch her.

“This poem, here,” she pointed to something I’d transcribed two months before.

I saw what she meant. To please her without disabusing her, I began reading with expression:

Dresser.

Turntable.

Television.

Striped ironing board.

A standing lamp to the left.

A night table to the right.

A tiny reading light clasped to the headboard.

She sleeps naked at night.

But then, sensing my voice wavering and feeling unequal to the task of the cad, I broke down and said:

“I can’t concentrate on any of this right now.”

She waited a second.

“To be honest, I can’t either,” she said.

And because she was much younger and because I still wasn’t sure whether any of this was appropriate, I drew close to her and asked if I could kiss her.

MY BIGGEST WORRY that afternoon and every other afternoon after that day was that Kalaj might decide to drop by unannounced, which he’d done in the past. Allison was open-minded, but watching a swarthy Che Guevara wearing a mock-guerrilla outfit open the front door and lumber into my apartment while we were making love on the Tabriz would have freaked her out. There was something very wrong in their meeting. She understood “illegal immigrant” and she understood “poor” and “very, very poor.” But what she might not understand and, outside of her very distant brushes with Harvard’s drug scene, had never rubbed shoulders with was sleaze. Everything about him was wrong, and knowing he was my friend might lead her to assume that he and I shared more in common than she was aware of.