André Aciman - Harvard Square

Allison liked to drop by after her classes. We’d have lattes together and sometimes we’d cook dinner. Sometimes we read or studied in separate corners of my living room. Sometimes we listened to music together. And there were times when I would surprise myself at the voluminous number of pages I was capable of reading in her presence. By ten o’clock, which was very early for me, but not for her, we’d go to bed. At school, we made a point of not showing signs that we knew each other other than casually. This was more my decision than hers. She had nothing to hide; I, on the other hand, did not want department chairmen to start talking about my friendship with a student whose senior thesis was more than likely going to end up on my desk and whose name represented more wealth and therefore more “pull” than twenty Heathers put together. She was not invasive, but she brought some items of clothing over, and left them discreetly folded in a closet. She brought an extra bathrobe, and because mine looked ratty, decided to buy me the “His” version of the same bathrobe. The striped made-in-Germany terrycloth bathrobe, I discovered, cost more than my monthly rent. I called Kalaj and told him not to show up these days.

“Why,” he asked, “is la quarante-deux moving in?”

“No,” I said, “someone else.”

“But I thought you, Ekaterina, and la quarante-deux had become friends?” I told him not to mention that night to me. “Why not?”

“Because the two women ended up being more interested in each other than in me.” I wanted to tell him about Allison and about what was so different about her, but the only word I could come up with was the one I needed to avoid because he’d have resented it the most: she was respectable . Everything about her was respectable.

This finally came to a head one early afternoon later that fall when she took me to meet her parents at the Ritz-Carlton for tea, and all I could think of, as we parked her car and walked toward the hotel, was, Please, God, don’t let Kalaj’s cab pass by now, don’t let him pull over and speak to us, don’t let him be anywhere close, because it’d be just like him to turn up as I’m trying to look dapper at the Ritz-Carlton . I was ashamed of him. Ashamed of myself for being ashamed of him. Ashamed of being a snob. Ashamed of letting others see that what we had in common went far deeper than this surface thing called lousy cash flow. Ashamed that I wasn’t allowing myself to own up to how deeply I cared for him and had found it easier to think of us as transient, dirt-poor louts with a penchant for low-life café fellowship.

Tea at the Ritz-Carlton went swimmingly. The father tried to impress me with his knowledge of The Odyssey ; I told him I had studied with Fitzgerald; he spoke of his years in the Middle East, I dropped all the right names. He listed the spots he loved in Paris; I told him of mine. It was a draw, but it brought us closer.

That evening we had dinner at Maison Robert, a stately French restaurant that suddenly resurrected a world I hadn’t stepped into in over a decade. Waiters, wines, luster, affluence. What did one do these days with a Ph.D., he asked? Well, one could always write or teach, I said. Then, sensing he wasn’t convinced, I reminded him that my father had become a wealthy businessman in Egypt even though all he’d ever wanted was to write books. Was I amenable to other professions as well — another career, perhaps? he asked, as he looked down, toying with the edge of his knife on the tablecloth. Absolutely, I replied, trying to sound at once earnest and casual and determined to keep an open mind.

Was he going to ask me about his daughter too? The man was too tactful for that. I never brought her up either, and the shrewd lover of The Odyssey must have read the message clearly enough. But he wasn’t going to let me off so lightly either. So he made subtle prods: about my plans, my future, my hobbies, trying best to steer clear of the stubborn if muzzled word intentions bouncing under the table like a leashed dog looking for his bone. I did not come to his rescue. Then came the heavy bream fish in some sort of buttery white sauce, served with Montrachet wine, then the chateaubriands with their sauce and the sautéed potatoes and haricots verts, accompanied by a delicious Pomerol, and at the very, very end, the tarte Tatin with a dollop of crème fraîche for each. Our dinner ended with Calvados.

Kalaj’s thundering advice, repeated every time I’d spoken to him about her these last few days, was never far. Marry her. Become rich. Buy me a fleet of taxis. I’ll make you a millionaire. Then, if you have no children and she bores you, dump her.

During dinner, while waiters tiptoed around us, I imagined that one of them was Kalaj, winking at me, whispering, Do it, just do it. The fleet of taxis. We’ll do the math later. How I longed to see him now and catch his complicit leer as he’d eye the jumbo-sized tarte Tatin they’d brought for us, immediately followed by Calvados. They like you, otherwise the interview would have stopped over tea at the Ritz-Carlton.

Father, mother, and daughter saw me to the cab that was to take me back to Cambridge. “When I was your age, my father wouldn’t give me a penny for the bus, let alone a taxi,” he said, passing me a twenty-dollar bill when his hand shook mine.

I was caught by surprise but genuinely refused the father’s money. He insisted. Finally, I relented. I remembered how a rich student had right away accepted a similar offer from me when caught without money at the ticket office of the Harvard Square Theater. Poor people refused because their dignity was already in tatters, the way an underling might refuse a tip, because it screams his poverty. Rich people accepted the money because it was not perceived as a gratuity, or charity, or a reflection on their station in life, but simply as a favor that comes with friendship. A poor person would make a point of returning the money right away. The rich man simply forgot.

I accepted, hoping he would mistake me for the second.

But because I was not, I stopped the taxi two minutes later, got out, and took the underground back to Cambridge.

At Café Algiers that night, I didn’t tell Kalaj what I’d done. “In your place I would have taken the money, gotten off the cab, and headed back by train.”

I looked at him and smirked.

“That’s what you did, isn’t it — that’s exactly what you did — and you weren’t going to tell me!”

I don’t think I ever bought a round of XO Cognac at Maxim’s with more gusto in my life than I did that evening with Kalaj.

The image of Kalaj as a leering waiter and me as a plutocrat had come and gone. Poverty had changed me. I was ashamed of the twenty-dollar bill. I tried to cloak what I’d done with all kinds of excuses and wished to shrug the whole thing off with affected insouciance, but there was no hiding the truth. I’d hustled the man who’d bought me dinner and whose daughter I was sleeping with.

THAT NIGHT I paid dearly for our dinner and our drinks. The pain I’d felt weeks earlier returned, an ache in the kidney area extending all the way to the right of my rib cage. One of the doctors had warned me to stay off fatty foods for a while in case it turned out to be what he feared. Well, last night’s meal was anything but lean. They had already run a test a week earlier, but I had never bothered to check the results, since I had never had a relapse. I tossed and turned, thinking of the girl who was probably wondering why I hadn’t asked her to drive me back to Cambridge, especially when it was clear that her parents liked me and knew we were sleeping together. I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to run away from the three of them — like a Cinderella whose livery would turn into cabbage and turnips if she didn’t rush back to her little hovel.