by André Aciman
Around four in the morning, though, when the heat in my apartment had become unbearable, we did go upstairs for a short spell and, standing naked on the dark terrace within sight of the neighboring buildings all around us, we watched Cambridge gleam in the misty summer night just before sunrise. It was her idea to go upstairs naked. I loved it. We came back downstairs and made love again.
SHE WAS ALREADY gone by the time I woke up the next morning. I put on some clothes and knocked at her door. No one answered. She must have already gone to the library.
The smell of her body was still on my sheets, on my skin. I didn’t want it to go away. I would shower later, but not now. Without a bite or a cup of coffee, I headed straight for Café Algiers.
Along the way down Brattle Street, I kept wondering why I was rushing. Was I gloating? Had I already forgotten her and was I thinking only of telling Kalaj about her? Why had she left so quietly? I had no answers.
Before I could begin to fathom the joy I was feeling, I was struck by an unsettling pang of horror. Had we made love because I had come with anger in my heart, because sex feeds on anger, the way it feeds on beauty, love, luck, laughter, spite, sorrow, desire, courage, and despair, because sex evens the playing field, because sex is how we reach out to the world when we have nothing else to offer the world? Is this what had happened—because of the Lloyd-Grevilles’ dismissal, because Kalaj had suddenly put distance between us when I was just about ready to embrace him as a fellow drifter? Or had I borrowed his lust, caught his lust as one catches a fever?
I had no answers there either.
At the café, Kalaj was already sitting at his old table with a cinquante-quatre, his usual objects strewn around his table, his hair still wet. He was rolling up a cigarette, telling Zeinab, who was standing next to him, that asparagus was indeed a renal cleanser—a diuretic and a detoxifier. It increased urination, which helped flush out toxins from your kidneys.
They always spoke in French.
“And I who thought the smell was the result of an internal infection,” she said, holding her wooden tray with one hand.
“No, the smell is evidence that the body is cleaning itself. As the body breaks down asparagus, it releases an amino acid called asparagine which is easily detected in the urine of people who’ve eaten asparagus.”
She was filled with admiration. “Do you know everything, Kalaj?”
“I’m an encyclopedia of bunk.”
She smiled when she heard him put himself down, perhaps her way of sympathizing with him for thinking so poorly of himself but also of showing she was not taken in by any of it. She probably saw it as an intimate admission of personal foibles he wasn’t likely to disclose to anyone else. “I don’t like it when you speak about yourself this way. Compared to you, I am so ignorant.”
“Yes, Zeinab, you are.” He sat motionless as he began to inhale. “But you’re like my sister, and I’ll kill the first man who lays a finger on you.”
“I’m not your sister and I don’t need you to kill anyone for me, Kalaj, I can take care of myself.”
“You’re a child.”
“I’m no child, and I can prove it to you in a second, and you know exactly what I mean, even if you’re pretending not to.”
“Don’t speak like that.”
He was, to my complete surprise, blushing.
“It’s as you want, Kalaj. I know how to wait,” she said, heedless of my presence as I stood there on my feet transfixed between them. “All I need is a sign, and I am yours for as long as you want me. When you’re tired, you’ll let me know. Sans obligations.”
“Speak to him, not to me,” Kalaj pointed at me, which was his way of greeting me that day.
“Him? He doesn’t even look at me. At least you do. As I said: for as long as you want and not a minute more.”
With that she was gone behind the counter.
“Another one,” said Kalaj when she was out of earshot. Using his right hand, he pulled up a chair with the effortless grace of a defense attorney preparing a chair for a prisoner who’s just walked into the visitation room.
“So tell me.”
“You tell me first.”
We exchanged stories.
He had been right about the woman with bathroom problems. “She has bathroom problems . . . during orgasm.” He laughed. Even Zeinab, who was arranging small pastries on a large platter behind the counter, snickered on hearing the story. “You men are swine,” she said. “Nothing is sacred to you, Kalaj. And you want to treat me like your little sister?”
He ignored her and asked about my evening. I told him about the woman in Apartment 42, and how we’d stood naked on the terrace facing all of Cambridge in the dark. He immediately dubbed her la quarante-deux, Miss 42.
“Her name is Linda,” I said.
He preferred la quarante-deux.
“We were probably overheard by our neighbors—especially by the woman next door to mine.”
“All the better.”
He asked if we’d done it on the terrace. I didn’t know how to answer without giving everything away. “Let’s say we started there,” I said.
“You too are a pig,” came Zeinab’s comment.
“Who told you to listen? This is man talk.”
“The things I could teach you men . . .” she echoed from the kitchen.
Kalaj did not like to skimp details, so I heard all about his night. She lived in Watertown, but liked to come to Cambridge in the evening. Big smirk, meaning: We know why. She worked in the art section of a university library, had beautiful art in her house, lived alone, not even a pet. Very uninhibited in bed, wild sex. Then, on second thought, mechanical sex. Passion with eyes shut tight. Which was why he wasn’t going to see her again. One night was enough. What was wrong with her? I asked. Not for me, came his answer. He’d have given her at most four nights, then she’d start asking for this, and then that, then she’d pout, and why wasn’t he doing this, sulk some more, and why not that . . . ? He knew the litany well enough. It was called domesticity. These women are always depressed, then they depress you, and when they’ve got you well and soundly depressed, they hold it against you, lose interest, and look for someone new to depress. As always, his biggest fear was that getting too close to such people would eventually unseat and kill his artisanal, homespun self and replace it, in the dark of night, with his mass-produced, ersatz double. It scared him—because his other fear was that he might grow to like being ersatz, or, worse yet, forget he had once been otherwise. Even his Monsieur Zeb would become ersatz, and then where would he be?
But there was another reason why he knew better than to seek her out. “I burn through things too fast,” he told me, and there was no longevity in the things he touched.
After sex she had wanted to sketch him. Absolutely not, he’d said. Why not? I asked. “Take a look at this.” And, like Harpo Marx producing a steaming cup of coffee from under his raincoat, he pulled out a sheet of blue construction paper that had been folded in four. He unfolded it, slapped it on the table, and, to hold it down, placed his damp saucer right on top of one of its corners. “This is me?” he asked, outrage sizzling in his voice, “Is this me?”
With Cray-Pas, she had sketched his face and bare shoulders.
“Yes, it is you,” I said. It was quite masterfully done. “Stunning and expressive work.”
“This is shit. Her parents had spent a fortune on her education, and all she can do at the age of thirty is neek the first Arab she meets in some underground café and then ask him to sit still when he is dying to sleep so she can produce this? This?”
He yanked out the sheet from under the saucer, asked Zeinab to come over here right away, and held it out for her to see. This?
Zeinab stepped out of the kitchen and was already drying her hands on her apron as she rushed toward our table. “What?”
“This,” he said.
“Let’s see.” She held the picture in front of her, made an amused click in her thr
oat, and then, without batting an eyelash, kissed the portrait. “Tu es beau,” she rhapsodized, “tu es vraiment beau, you are really handsome!”
“Then you keep it. You’ve already lost your mind as it is.”
“I’ll keep it and how. Do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Write today’s date on it. My hands are wet.”
Out of one of the many pockets in his jacket, he pulled out a pencil with a rubber band wrapped so tightly around its head that it had formed a ball on the eraser.
“Why do you have a rubber band on your pencil?” she asked.
“Because when I need a rubber band I’ll know where to find one. What else do you want to know?”
He held his pencil as would a ten-year-old boy, with his fingers almost touching the lead. Its stubby point showed it has been sharpened not in a regular pencil sharpener but with a blade. I recognized the uneven marks around the edge of the pencil where it was shaved. It took me right back to my childhood, when I couldn’t find my pencil sharpener in class and didn’t want my teacher to know I had lost it. You took out a penknife—all of us had penknives—and in total silence under your desk shaved the edge of the pencil until, like a new tooth pushing its way out of the hollow of your gum, the new point began to emerge. Using a knife made you feel brawny, like a sailor with a dagger whittling away at a piece of driftwood because this is how he whiled away his hours when there was nothing better to do, because real men always found something useful to do with their hands.
“And write neatly,” she said.
Again, like a conscientious and dutiful young pupil, he leaned forward, his face so close to the table you’d think he had eye trouble, and penciled the date.
Voilà.
“Now you two can go back to your slop,” said Zeinab.
“Exactly,” he said, and turning to me: “So tell me about la quarante-deux.”
I told him the whole story again.
Kalaj said that if she had come upstairs with me that night it was because I had done one thing right: I had lingered, just lingered, because when I was standing in front of her as she sat smoking in silence on the stoop, I had not moved, had kept very quiet, had made it very obvious that I was aching and longing for her, that all I could think of at that hour of the night was her shoulders, and that I would make her laugh and be happy, that I would take care of everything, including the two chairs.
But, as always, Kalaj immediately corrected himself. She’d probably made up her mind about me the moment she’d seen me walking toward her, or maybe even on the rooftop weeks earlier.
“Now tell me about being naked on the terrace.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
“You mean how she suddenly sat on my lap naked and I felt the hair of her vagina on my zeb and couldn’t believe I could go at it again so soon?”
“Oké, stop!”
WE HAD HAD such a warm moment together that morning, that in the days and weeks afterward, I made a point of showing up at Café Algiers just as it was about to open. The place smelled of bleach and Mr. Clean, the chairs were still upturned as the floor was drying, and Zeinab was still mopping the kitchen area, all the while making sure the coffee was already brewing and Arab songs playing. When she was in good spirits, she’d put on George Brassens or, as I later found out, her favorite, Barbara, and she’d sing along to Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux and, in mock-cabaret-singer, sidle up to the man who happened to be sitting nearest to the kitchen and sing to him, and to him alone, her favorite verses of the song by Aragon.
In the back of Café Algiers, as always, that picture of Tipaza—in case any of us early birds forgot why we were there. This was more like home than anywhere else, and more home now than home itself, since no one really had one to go back to.
Kalaj was always in a rush. He’d stand up before finishing his coffee, busily start collecting all of his stray items on the table, and after taking one last gulp, he’d light up the cigarette he had been rolling while eating his croissant, and dash out through the front door, which took him through the tiny back lot where he normally parked his cab.
Once he was gone, I’d open my books and sink deep into the seventeenth century. I’d sit there till I needed to shake my legs and move to another locale. If too many customers started coming in, I’d leave to avoid the noise. Then I’d head to the library where I read for a good part of the morning.
I liked this ritual. I liked rituals. Rituals were like home.
Sometimes, after Algiers, I’d avoid the Square altogether and, because it was still warm, would head back to my apartment, change, and be back to my usual spot on the roof terrace—bathing suit, sunglasses, suntan lotion, books, everything I needed, including my small radio. There I continued reading until exhaustion set in and the subject matter of my books began to blend with the surrounding scene. The list of Jesuit abuses are now forever inscribed not only in a cheap pocket edition of Pascal’s Provinciales, but in the scent of Coppertone, the tint of my Ray-Bans, and in the sound of warbling pigeons who sometimes alighted on the roof terrace, where they gathered, before flying elsewhere under the torrid summer sun. Invariably I’d think of Linda.
How easily had things happened with her. Maybe this is what kept stirring me, not just the beauty but the sheer ease of it. Part of me still wanted to understand how it had sprung, or why. Was it because she’d laughed when I’d offered to bring two folding chairs? Because of how I’d mixed the drinks, or left my door wide open? Or was it simply because I had said something instead of saying nothing.
No, it was because I had lingered, Kalaj had said.
I couldn’t wait to ask him what exactly had he meant by lingering. What was it about lingering? The refusal to duck after you’d been given the silent treatment? The will to wait things out until the other spoke, until things eventually turned your way? Or was it the laying bare of one’s desire, because one could not believe it wasn’t being reciprocated? Or was lingering nothing more than the sheer belief in one’s body, in one’s beauty?
No, lingering was knowing how to stretch things out, sometimes beyond their breaking point. Not everyone had the balls for this. You sat and waited. And waited and waited. Mind you, though, this was not passivity. What was one man’s strategic genius was another man’s way of sweet-talking fate. Moumou, who had listened in on that conversation, had no patience with Kalaj’s philosophic disquisitions. Sometimes all it took was luck, he said. You got lucky. We all get lucky. Sometimes. “Well, with all the vitamins you take . . .” started Kalaj.
“Well, what about my vitamins? The vitamins help—and how.”
ONE EVENING, WHEN I was busy reading at Café Algiers, Kalaj walked in looking dazed. He spotted me right away, came over, dropped his bag right next to the empty chair facing my table, and said he wanted to talk about something serious.
I was about to talk to him about la quarante-deux. But he cut me short.
“I don’t want to talk about women, not last night’s, not tonight’s, not yours, not mine.”
“What is it then?”
“Actually, maybe I don’t want to talk at all.”
“I see,” I said, trying not to show I’d been wrong-footed by the sudden turn from his usual locker-room mirth to his downright hostile tone. “I’ll leave you alone then.”
I picked up my book and began to read, determined to ignore him.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he finally said. “Are you really going to sulk now? Every woman I know ends up sulking—now you?” I didn’t reply. “There. He’s pouting. Come on, talk to me. I am in a terrible mood, that’s all.”
“Why are you in a terrible mood?”
Was he sick? Did he get a fine, did he have an accident, was he robbed?
The sudden hand gesture with the flat of his palm waved once in the air meant Don’t ask.
“L’enfer.” he said. “Hell, that’s what it is.”
In a few days, he announced, he would have to
be interviewed by Immigration Services. His wife had originally promised she’d accompany him, but her lawyer had just informed Kalaj that she had changed her mind. Would I go with him instead? Yes, I said. Good. The problem was that he had to rehearse what he needed to say. Would I help coach him before the interview if he gave me a list of questions and answers that his lawyer said they normally asked at Immigration?
“Again?” I asked.
“Yes, again,” he replied, as if to remind me this was serious business and not a time for joking. Once again, as he’d done before, he whipped out his notebook from one of his many pockets and tore out four to five sheets on which were scribbled all the questions they were likely to ask. “I need to memorize the answers and don’t know how to study them alone, and you’re a teacher, so I thought better with you than anyone else, right?”
“When should we meet?”
“In a few days. Or now.”
“Where?”
“Right here.”
I told him he was welcome to come visit me, where we might focus better without all the brouhaha of Café Algiers. Besides, my door was always unlocked, I said, so he could come in whenever he pleased. “I like the noise,” he said. I felt sorry for him. What demonic monsters must crawl around him the moment he is alone, I thought. He preferred bad company to no company, an argument to silence, a twisted life that coiled like barbed wire around him when he sparred with anyone to the protracted beep of a dead patient’s heart monitor.
I held the few sheets he handed over to me and went over them in front of him. OK, I could do this. It was like studying the multiplication table; you needed to be blitzed by unexpected questions: four times eight, nine times six, seven times six, on and on. To bring back some mirth in his life, I decided to bombard him with fatuous questions. Where did you fuck last, how many times, who comes first . . . Explosive laughter.
But why wasn’t his wife going with him to Immigration?