André Aciman - Harvard Square

He wanted to hide. He didn’t even have it in him to mention the matter to Léonie, who, even after they were finished, still came around to Café Algiers to have a cinquante-quatre with him. “Do you still pummel each other?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“No, we stopped that nonsense long ago.” Then after thinking: “Can I stay at your place for one more night?”

Of course he could.

When it got very cold and I had no more blankets, I explained to him that there were people in America who slept under electric blankets.

“What do you mean?”

I explained. He’d never heard of such a thing. He was horrified. “No wonder it’s a nation of vibrators and electric chairs.”

The next morning I made coffee and eggs for the two of us. I wanted to make sure he was on a full stomach. Then he went to teach.

It was only later in the day that I learned what had happened. He’d gone to class, distributed the homework he had meticulously corrected the night before, told everyone in class what the department had done to him, and right then and there walked out of the classroom, not before dropping his copy of Parlons! and his other textbooks along with the teacher’s manual into the garbage bin. He knew he’d be forfeiting his monthly paycheck but it gave him no end of satisfaction. “I have three things: my cab, my zeb , and my dignity. Without one, the other two are worthless.” On his way out of the building, he happened to cross none other than Professor Lloyd-Greville, who was walking with visiting scholars, and, miming the gesture with his hand, told Lloyd-Greville to beat off. Kalaj had socked it to him, and in front of everyone. Lloyd-Greville retaliated by saying he would report him to the dean of the faculty. “The who?”

We laughed about it. He wanted to cook dinner for the two of us. Then, as if it came as an afterthought, “I think I’ll sleep here tonight also,” he said.

I could see this was going to become a pattern. Without knowing it, I caught myself wondering how long it had taken poor Lloyd-Greville to write his letter to Kalaj. When was I going to break the news to Kalaj and prove to him yet again in his life that the world was made of two-faced people? I thought of his wife and of Léonie, and of his first wife in France, and of the U.S. government — everyone had had to battle with the same thing, how to tell poor Kalaj that he wasn’t loved, wasn’t wanted.

The matter reached a point when Lloyd-Greville, who had always been a friendly mentor to me, particularly after our Chaucer interlude, began to shun me in the corridors. It was not Kalaj who had overstepped the line now; it was I. He greeted me hastily, obviously feeling very angry but also somewhat guilty of the bad thoughts he’d been nursing about me. Eventually, I figured I had to repair the damage before I too was cast out as a pariah.

“I had no idea what Kalaj was capable of,” I told Lloyd-Greville when I stepped into his office. I’d thought him an overeducated man from the colonies who had run adrift and needed to be gently nudged back into the world of the academy. But I had very recently discovered from his wife that he had a very, very serious problem.

“What problem is that?” asked Lloyd-Greville, clearly impatient with my visit and not looking me in the eye as he shuffled a few papers in an effort to seem busy tidying up his desk. I looked at him and lowered my voice.

“Drugs.”

A rooster should have crowed at this very instant.

Lloyd-Greville said he would report him to the police.

“No, he’s already in a program now.” I said. “But these things take a very long time. And his wife says he’s doing much better than when he first started.”

“I never knew he was married.”

“Yes, they have a lovely little boy too.”

The cock would have crowed a second time, a third, and a fourth. It helped buttress the impression that I too, like everyone else, including his wife, had been taken in, but that deep down he was a good family man with good values and well on his way to recovery, slow and treacherous as such recoveries always were — unfortunately.

“Poor fellow.”

“Poor fellow indeed.”

Then upon reflection.

“He made fun of me to the students.”

And well he should have, I wanted to say.

Lloyd-Greville added: “Even though he is married I have a suspicion he was crossing certain lines, if you know what I mean.”

You don’t say!

I tried to drop my jaw and put on a startled, disbelieving face.

To mend fences, I offered to teach Kalaj’s course until the department could find a replacement before the beginning of spring semester. And if a replacement wasn’t available, I’d be happy to teach his course the coming spring. “I’ve heard rumors his grammar wasn’t what I thought it was,” I said, hoping to seem a judicious and impartial observer who was not about to let friendship stand in the way of my loyalty to my department.

Fifth and final crow of the rooster.

“You’d be helping us tremendously,” said Lloyd-Greville.

“Still, a sad story.”

“Yes, very sad.”

He asked how I was coming along with my preparation for my forthcoming comprehensives. “Well.” I told him I’d finished reading a seventeenth-century author called Daniel Dyke.

Lloyd-Greville winced, then confided he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of a Daniel Dyke.

“A minor influence on La Rochefoucauld,” I said, as though it were the most obvious truth in the world. That kept him quiet.

To Kalaj I lied no less than I’d lied to Lloyd-Greville. I told him I had tried my very best to explain to the administration how eager he was to continue and how much his students liked him, but there was a quota of graduate students who had to teach, and the preference always went to those who were studying at Harvard — nothing personal.

“But who will teach my course?” he asked.

I had hoped he’d never ask.

“Everyone refused to teach so early in the morning, so I was obliged to say that I would—” This was my evasive spin on the fact that, without intending to, I’d just given my cash flow a thirty-three percent boost.

A FEW EVENINGS later I invited him to an all-you-can-eat place around Porter Square. Ever since he received the letter from the department, I made a point of not being seen with him around Harvard Square. We ate a huge meal and then walked back to my home. To my dismay, I saw him come up the stairs with me. Things with his last girlfriend were obviously not going well at all. That too had cast down his spirits. I pretended that things with Allison had resumed and that we needed the apartment. “I promise I won’t make any noise, I’ll come very late, take a shower at dawn, and be out.” I didn’t have the heart to refuse him. But I asked him not to keep his things in my home. Allison didn’t like this, Allison gets nervous when, Allison would much rather — I kept blaming Allison for everything. “And who does she think she is, your Allison, anyway? Your fiancée or the woman you neek every day?”

What saved me were rumors of two robberies on our street, rumors I built up to justify finally putting a lock on my door — exactly what I’d planned to do on the very day I told him he was welcome to stay in my apartment. We’d passed by Sears, Roebuck and I was already pricing locks. Kalaj had enough tact not to push the matter, though I am sure it didn’t go down well with him. He never told me where he slept when he didn’t sleep on my couch. I never asked. I stopped going to Café Algiers or to any of the bars around Harvard Square.

We saw each other a few weeks later. It was his idea. Same all-you-can-eat place off Porter Square. Allison was busy visiting her parents, I said. We stayed out late. Then he dropped me at my door, and I watched him drive his Checker cab toward the river and disappear. Another night with his music en sourdine , I thought. I felt like a shit.