by André Aciman
“I don’t care if she sleeps with someone else. I too sleep with others. But at least show some dignity—cheating on the man who worships the son of the very man she cheats on me with—that no! C’est de la perversité! Absolutely not.” Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
“I think he wanted to be alone with Sheila,” said the Persian girl once we were alone together that afternoon. We spoke in French, which for the second time that summer kept open a door I’d thought had been shut to me. I liked speaking to a woman in French. I had come home. There were things to say to a woman in French. Not things that couldn’t be translated or said in English, but things that would never have occurred to anyone in English and which therefore couldn’t exist in an English-speaking mind. And it wasn’t just the things themselves or even the words for them that I had warmed up to, but their emotional inflection, their underlayers, their voice, my voice, the voice of so many who had spoken French to me in childhood and whose wings now hovered over every word I spoke, listening in and barging into my speech in not unwelcome ways. Kalaj had met the two women there, at Café Algiers: the cigarette trick, the forlorn expat trying to make a comeback, the exotic whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria. She had never met Sheila before; she’d been sitting at one table, Sheila at another, and in between had sat Kalaj. All he’d done was to rapprocher the two.
Not knowing where else to go, I took her downstairs to Césarion’s for happy hour. She preferred herbal tea to cheap wine. She didn’t touch Buffalo wings—assembly-line food for the indigent, she called it.
“Rich girl from Iran?” I hazarded.
She laughed. “Very rich girl from Iran.”
There was silence for a while.
“Do you have many friends in Cambridge?” she asked, clearly meaning to change the drift of our conversation.
“No, mostly graduate students,” I replied.
She too was a graduate student, she said, though she could easily have passed for a young professor. She had arrived from Iran in July, far too early before the start of classes.
“First time in America?” I asked, hoping to prove useful in helping her navigate her first steps in Cambridge.
“No, been here many, many times,” she answered, as if she couldn’t help but underscore what had initially seemed a flippant, self-mocking very rich girl from Iran.
Her last name was Ansari.
I quoted a few lines from the Persian poet by the same name.
“Yes, yes, everyone quotes the very same verses,” she said, as though asking me to come up with a better one.
Like a croupier she had, with a quick sleight of her roulette-table rake, managed to clean up all my chips. I stared at her blankly. Her frank and dauntless gaze seemed to say: No more chips, huh?
“Might as well have dinner together,” she said, as we loitered outside of Césarion. “I don’t expect we’ll be seeing more of Sheila or Kalaj this evening.”
I suggested we have a quick bite at Anyochka’s. Quick bite was my lingo for cheap eats. With Kalaj it couldn’t possibly have meant anything else. With her, quick bite bordered on churlish haste. “What’s the rush?” she asked. I explained: Cervantes, four hours; Scarron, one; Sorel, another one; Bandello, God knows. I told her about my exams.
“When are you planning to take them?” she asked.
“Mid-January.”
“But that’s in just a few months.” Meaning: Better get cracking.
No kidding, I wanted to reply.
I admired women with the ready wit to say things as they are. I told her so. Her answer was no less amazing. “Cher ami, I live in the hic et nunc, the here and now,” she said. I wanted to tell her that I, on the other hand, inhabited the iam non and the nondum, the no more and the not yet, but then I thought it better to leave this for some other time. Not the right time for Saint Augustine. I asked if she had any other ideas about where to eat. She didn’t. Maybe it would have to be a quick bite, then, she jibed. All I remember her saying during our short dinner together was “Let me warn you about one thing, though,” which she had said while removing the very thin slices of Havarti cheese from her sandwich with her thumb and index finger. She didn’t like superfluous cheese in her sandwich, she said, as she tried to separate the cheese from the lettuce, all the while trying to push back the one or two slices of Virginia ham she had unintentionally pulled out in her effort to remove the cheese. Sandwiches were not her thing either. “Let me say it now.” I could tell that this might be an awkward admission, not so much for her, as for me. “Tell me,” I said. She seemed to ponder it a while longer. “Je suis plus grande que toi, I am older than you are.” I reassured her as best I could. But her total candor caught me off guard. I thought I’d been maneuvering the situation deftly enough—but this was too fast, too upfront, too hic et nunc. More disconcerting yet was the tone with which she seemed to be taking back an offer I hadn’t even realized was on the table. Had she spoken an undisclosed yes before I’d even asked? Had things progressed so fast between us without my even noticing? Then I realized what it was. Kalaj had simply put the two women in the mood. He had done all the spadework. How he’d done it was beyond me. Now that she was in the mood, I was as good a man as any. I kept wondering what balloon had he floated to stir her this way. Perhaps she was after him, and I was just a screen. Or perhaps she assumed I was like him and had one thing and one thing only in mind.
We parted twenty minutes after sharing a pecan pie on a bench off Holyoke Street. I could tell she wasn’t used to slumming. At least this was a here-and-now moment between us, I said. She appreciated the jest. I already knew Kalaj would nickname her Hic et nunc.
There was still some light left for an hour’s reading on the roof terrace, I thought. But I kept thinking of Linda. By now she was surely back from the library. I knocked at her door. No one answered. I tried to turn the doorknob, in case she’d left it open. I would walk in and regardless of what she was busy doing, we’d undress in a second. But the knob would not turn. I rang again. No answer.
That evening I managed to turn all the pages of Cervantes.
At around eleven o’clock that night, the buzzer rang downstairs. It was Kalaj. “Are you alone?” Of course I was alone. He rushed up four flights. “I thought you’d be with the Persian.”
“I’m reading.”
“You mean you actually said ‘no’ to her? Are you out of your mind?”
“I am reading.”
“For what, for your doctorate in paperwork?” He could not understand. “Well, I’ll leave you to your papers, my friend.” Then, on second thought, “Did you like the Persian girl?”
“She’s not bad.”
“I asked for a yes-or-no, not a more-or-less.”
“Fine, yes.”
“So why is she not here?”
“Because she is not here,” I said.
“What you did was wrong.” He thought for a while. “Actually, it was cruel.”
“Actually, I was going to knock at la quarante-deux’s door when I was done with my reading. She’s the fallback,” I added, trying to stir the spirit of male solidarity which I knew he’d appreciate.
“Great, you’re a fallback, she’s a fallback, your whole life is one big fallback. I don’t pretend to know more than you do, but the only real thing in your life is your paperwork, and who knows, maybe your paperwork could just as easily be a more devious fallback than the others. I don’t understand, and to be very frank I don’t want to. Bonne soirée.”
Rat-tat-tat.
And with that he was gone.
I couldn’t figure why he was so upset with me. Perhaps, without quite knowing it himself, he had come close to realizing that, in my world, he too had acquired the provisional status of a fallback. Fallback fellowship in a fallback city filled with fallback lives.
I found out a few days later that the reason why he had rung my buzzer and raced upstairs was to ask me and the Persian girl to join him and Sheila for a long car ride to the
North End to have coffee and pastries in a small Italian café. “We would have been all four of us together, and we would have had a wonderful time—you, me, the women, the Drive and Gene Ammons’ saxophone.”
I MET NILOUFAR a few times after that. I loved her name. It meant water lilies and made me think of Money’s nenuphars and of MoMA on clear September mornings when the quiet rooms are almost empty and the painter’s blues are all yours. She told me about her family, her brother, her ex-husband, her son, her mother, some in Iran, others in Europe and South America. We became friends. Dante, Islam, the Provençal poets, and the Sicilian connection—she was going to write about all these someday. Then one afternoon, as we were both sitting waiting for Kalaj at Café Algiers, we ran out of things to say. There were no more words to fill the silence with, nor anything else to put off the unspoken admission that hovered between us. She stared at me, I stared back. This was beyond I’ll-raise-you-by-one-chip-if-you-raise-me-with-another.
Is this what I think it is? I asked myself as I tried to parse the silence between us and get a sense of what was happening. Her stare wouldn’t subside. Yes, this is what I think it is. I stare, you stare, one human with another human—the rest and everything we’ve learnt so far in life can wait outside Café Algiers. I was twenty-six years old, yet this was the first true, intimate moment I’d known with another woman besides my mother. I wondered if Kalaj and she had spoken about me. Or had they slept together? Suddenly I saw tears in her eyes. “You’re crying,” I finally said, unable to pretend I hadn’t noticed.
“No I’m not,” she said, and looked down at the table, and with the heels of both palms covered her eyes, as if she were massaging them after too much reading. Then, with more tears: “You wouldn’t understand. Give me a handkerchief.” I pulled one out of my left pocket. I didn’t ask what made her cry, but all of a sudden I felt a sense of uncertainty and confusion, like a terrible pressure in my chest for which there were no words, no outs. Part of me was praying for Kalaj not to show up and interrupt this interlude between us, while another couldn’t wait for him to help us snap out of it. I stared into her eyes, she stared back, meaning You see now? Now do you understand? Suddenly I realized that my cheeks were feeling moist, and, without knowing it, that I too had begun to shed tears.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with us. Do you?” she asked. I shook my head.
“Just hold my hand,” I said, as she pushed a hand toward mine over the table.
I suggested we have something light to eat. But neither of us was hungry. “Walk me home?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Do you have all the books you need with you?”
“Most of them,” I replied. “Why?”
“Because tonight you’re sleeping with me.”
Outside, on the narrow alleyway between Brattle and Mount Auburn, we kissed.
She lived off Putnam Avenue close to the river. Over a dish of rice and spiced meats plus wine, we sat cross-legged on a rug and spoke about what had happened to us at Café Algiers.
“Do you think I was too forward?”
“Not at all,” I replied.
“Too fast?”
“I love how you did it.” Then I kissed her again.
I had never in my life spoken to a woman so frankly about courtship as the courtship itself was progressing. We spoke of Fellini, Renoir, and Visconti. She refused to own a television, she said. A few days later I made her buy one anyway. We had tea every evening. Then drinks. Then her spiced meats with rice and minced vegetables. We spoke of my favorite director, Rohmer, and of my favorite singer, Callas. We spoke of the great poets. And of the lesser poets. I was happy to have drifted away from Kalaj. There was talk of living together, and as the days wore on, we spoke of an enduring bond. We could live in Paris part of the year, she said, and after my exams, what better place than Paris to start writing my thesis on La Princesse de Clèves, while she’d take courses at the Institute of the Arab World. But first we had to see the Kurosawa retrospective, which started in one week. When I hesitated about the retrospective, alleging the books I had to read between now and the middle of January and my approaching meeting with Lloyd-Greville to discuss the complete works of Chaucer, she said we’d just have to make the time in the here and now. I loved this about her. Our problem, she said, was not Chaucer but how to smoke during those long, uninterrupted films. Simple. We’d each take turns stepping outside while the other filled you in when you came back. Terrible idea. We’d step outside together, have a quick smoke, and rush back in. Voilà! What could one possibly miss during a two-minute break in a two-hour-plus movie? What if we quit smoking altogether, I said. Excellent idea. When? Not tonight. Tomorrow. “Make me quit, oh Lord, but not yet.” We both laughed over our play on Saint Augustine’s Make me chaste, my God, but not quite yet. This was heaven. In an access of tenderness one night, she turned to me and said, “I’d give you my eyes if you asked.” She’d said it in French, but she’d spoken in the archaic tongue of bygone worlds. This too was heaven.
“Is this what you want?” Kalaj asked me one day when I found I needed to speak with him and only him, because I knew he’d understand. “Do you really want to get married?”
I said I didn’t know.
“People are always nervous before getting married, but at some point they know.”
“Well, I don’t know. So there.” Why, had he known before getting married how-many-times-now?
“I wasn’t in love,” he replied, ignoring my little dart. “Are you in love?”
I didn’t know that either.
“She wants me to go to Spain during Christmas to meet her family.”
He pondered the matter.
“Can you afford the plane ticket?’
“No.”
“Then who will pay?”
I didn’t know.
I had never thought that marriage could be determined on so paltry a basis as the price of a round-trip ticket to Barajas Airport.
But there it was, my answer.
We decided to put off the trip till early the following summer. Meanwhile we listened to all of Beethoven’s Late Quartets during an entire Saturday afternoon. Then, on the following day, to three versions of The Art of the Fugue, after which we sat and watched 60 Minutes. Next came dinner, the usual rice and spiced meats with a glass of wine for each, followed by lovemaking, and more lovemaking—there was a reason for those spiced meats, she joked. I wanted her all the time. I had never lived like this or been so happy with someone before. In the middle of the night sometimes we’d both wake up and stand by the large glass window in her living room and stare at the magical lights on Memorial Drive. Don’t take this away, don’t take this away . . .
After about three weeks and after classes had started, I felt something coming. She complained once that I didn’t cook. “Doesn’t even want to learn,” I heard her mutter to herself, as though speaking to the kitchen sink, to her rack of spices from Iran hanging in an open cabinet over the sink, to her prized Chantal teakettle, and her tins of teas shipped directly from Mariage Frères in France. At least I should offer to wash the dishes, she said, when she stepped out of the kitchen after we’d had dinner one evening. Maybe also help with laundry. And put some of your things away. Plus, awkward as this was for her, perhaps it was time to discuss sharing expenses here. That here cut me to the quick, for it brimmed over with muffled resentment. Who knows how long she’d been stewing over this before coming out with it. Finally, she said, my lovemaking wasn’t what it was in the beginning. I used to speak while making love to her. Now I was as quiet as a mouse. And I didn’t wait for her—a man should always wait for a woman.
My heart wasn’t in it, and she had spotted it right away, even before I did.
Then, a week or so later, it finally happened. On Sunday at 2:00 a.m., just one night before my meeting with Lloyd-Greville, I woke up with the usual paralyzing anxiety about what he would ask. I knew he’d prod and prod to see how shallow
my knowledge of Chaucer was. But then, with one thought leading to the next, I finally realized that it wasn’t just Harvard or Lloyd-Greville’s office I was dying to run away from, but from her as well. Suddenly, I had to get out of her bed. Actually, and it took me a few more minutes to realize this, I had to get out of her house—just get out and run away. I decided to put off leaving until we’d discussed the matter later in the morning like two adults. Perhaps I’d cool down by then and know that my exams were the cause of my anxiety. But I knew that just getting out of bed and sitting in the living room for a few minutes might trigger alarm signals for her. One word about considering slowing things down a bit, especially before my meeting with Lloyd-Greville, or of possibly taking a break for a few days—a couple of weeks, no more, I promise—and there were bound to be tears, recriminations, at which point I’d have to tell her what everyone says under these circumstances: that it was me, not her, my exams, not us, the way my life was run, and not the gifts she’d brought to it—she was perfect, I didn’t deserve her. Where would I be without her now? The now was meant to convey the extent of my loss and despair. It was just that I had to go. Please don’t fight it, I’d say, I was learning not to fight it myself. The rhetoric, I failed to realize, was lifted from A Beginner’s Guide to Breakups.
But by 3:00 a.m. I was ready to explode. Every time I’d fall asleep a nightmare would insidiously work its way into my sleep, hover over my shoulders, then quietly work its way through my left ear and wake me up, even when I knew it was a dream, to remind me I was living a lie, that this should not go on, that I no longer wanted to touch her, didn’t even want her foot to rub against mine under the sheets. By 3:30 a.m. I got up, put on my socks, my trousers, kept the T-shirt I was sleeping in, picked up a few of my books, and removed her keys from my key ring and silently placed them on the kitchen counter. When I was out of her building and felt the first cool draft of autumn fan my face, I knew that this sudden freedom was the closest thing to ecstasy I’d known since moving in with her.