by André Aciman
Mrs. Lloyd-Greville showed up with a tiny pot of verbena from her garden and a box of chocolates. “They’re not for you, of course, but for your guests.” It was a double-decker box with a transparent parchment sheet placed above the chocolates indicating the intricate ingredients of the equally intricate assortment. The box was being passed around the crowded room when the unthinkable finally occurred. Kalaj walked into the room, bearing three porno magazines. I wanted to disappear under my bed covers. By eight-thirty, long after official visiting hours were over, I heard the loud voice of a woman. It was Zeinab, who had heard the news through the grapevine on Harvard Square. Then, minutes later, Abdul Majib, the old Iraqi kitchen attendant from the Lowell House kitchen, decided to make an appearance as well.
So here I was in bed, trapped and helpless, in a universe where all my clever partitions had totally collapsed.
Kalaj and Allison, my students, the department head, Cherbakoff, who came by on cat’s paws, then Zeinab the waitress, my colleagues, everyone, careerists and lowlifes, were thrown together as in a Fellini movie or a clambake on Cape Cod.
I knew that, with the exception of those in the room who’d had to recobble their lives and reinvent themselves to live in the States, very few would understand that no human being is one thing and one thing only, that each one of us has as many facets as there are people we know. Would it upset Allison to discover that the person I was with Zeinab couldn’t ever be who I was with her, and that this was my unspoken reason for keeping Kalaj away from her—because I showed him far more facets than the one or two I felt laid-back enough to share with her?
I could tell Allison seemed ill at ease. She sat on a chair in a corner, silent and remote, waiting for everyone to leave, not sure whether she should be my student or my girlfriend. Kalaj, who must have originally assumed I’d be alone, leaned against one of the walls with his camouflage jacket, his beret, his gunner’s scowl, and the three porno magazines rolled into the shape of a rain stick picked up on some guerrilla expedition in the Amazonian hinterland. If you didn’t know, you’d think he was a foreigner on some Third World scholarship who’d spent all-nighters working in a soup kitchen.
He had already put one of my students in his place by saying that the Marquis de Sade disgusted him. With another he insisted that all American writers were no better than rock ’n’ roll con artists, including those he hadn’t read and wasn’t likely to start now, ending his after-hours, sotto voce shoot-out-with-silencer by reminding everyone in the room, including the nurse who came to remove my tray, that hospitals, like courthouses—including doctors and lawyers—were put on this planet to beat down your soul till it was flattened into toilet paper—and of souls, ladies and gentlemen, we were each given one only, and it had to be returned, when we were well and done with it, intact and as good as new for the next person. As Nostradamus says— And he began quoting quatrains.
In the space of five minutes, after an initial period during which he had intrigued and charmed all those in the room, he eventually managed to scare everyone away. “Who was that crackpot?” someone asked weeks later.
EVERYTHING I FEARED since school had started was beginning to happen. From a traveling companion picked up in an oasis during my lonely summer days in Cambridge, Kalaj had become a deadweight that was impossible to shake off. After my release from hospital, there was nowhere to go in Cambridge without running into him. I could not sit with anyone in public without being joined by him or, as was more often the case, without being invited to join him at his table, or, worse yet, constantly having to dream up new excuses to explain why I couldn’t talk to him just yet. In the end, I grew tired of dreading to bump into him or of running out of excuses. I was crammed with emergency excuses and white lies the way people with runny noses stuff their pockets with too many handkerchiefs. I hated myself both for being too weak to fend him off and for worrying about it all the time.
I tried to avoid the bars and coffeehouses where I was likely to bump into him. Once, at the Harvest, I was sitting with two colleagues, and there was Kalaj at the bar, drinking his usual un dollar vingt-deux. I’ll never forget his eyes. He had seen me of course, as I had seen him, but he was allowing a glazed look to settle over his eyes, as though distracted by troubling, faraway thoughts—the Free Masonry, his cab, his long-term projects in the U.S., his father, the green card, his wife. Five minutes later, I heard his explosive, detonating, hysterical laugh in response to one of the bartender’s jokes. He was sending me a message. It was impossible to miss. I don’t need you. See, I can do better. There was something overly histrionic about his laughter that reminded me of the first time we’d met. You’re trying to be like these friends of yours, he seemed to say, but I know you’ll stiff the tip when no one’s looking.
I’ll never forget that vacant look on his face. He wasn’t pretending he hadn’t seen me. He was pretending he hadn’t seen me pretending not to see him. He was letting me off the hook.
A few days later he was waiting for me outside Boylston Hall. He needed two favors. “I’ll walk with you,” he explained.
His landlady was remodeling the house, and God only knew when she’d be able to let him have his room back. She was therefore giving him fair notice.
It didn’t sound very convincing. Had he done something wrong, tried to bring women into his bedroom? I asked. “Me, soil my sheets, when I could dirty a woman’s instead? Never.”
He wanted me to go with him to help find another bed-and-breakfast. But as we knocked at door after door and were already approaching Porter Square, the old, prim ladies on Everett, Mellen, Wendell, Sacramento, and Garfield Streets took one good look at him and had no vacancies. “Can you put me up for a few days?” he finally asked me. The question had never occurred to me and I was totally unprepared for it. I was surprised by my own answer. Of course I could, I said. All he needed, he said, was a sofa to sleep on, a quick shower in the morning, and he’d be out of my way till nighttime. Maybe he’d arrange to sleep at his current girlfriend’s, though he didn’t want to push things with her right now. “I promise I won’t be in your hair.”
I was a good soul, helping a friend in need, opening my place up to someone who’d be on the street otherwise. But as I was telling him that he should make himself at home except in the afternoon and early evenings (Allison), we passed by Sears, Roebuck, which immediately made me think that perhaps it was time to start planning to install a lock on my door in a few weeks.
Midway back from Porter Square, he bought me a warm tuna fish grinder at a Greek sandwich shop. While we were eating, he told me the next news item: because of a minor infraction, they’d revoked his driver’s license for a month. With all my contacts, he began—this was his typical phrase—couldn’t I help him find a job.
I thought for a while. The only jobs I knew anything about were in education.
“I’ve taught before.”
“I mean university education.”
“Teaching is teaching.”
I’d see what I could do. Instead of going to my office, I decided to pay my chairman a brief visit.
“But has he ever taught in an American institution?” Lloyd-Greville asked, when I finally brought up Kalaj’s predicament.
“He barely speaks English—which is exactly what you’ve always said we needed in a French teacher.”
Professor Lloyd-Greville concurred and asked me to speak about the matter to Professor Cherbakoff.
“And he speaks real, live French, the kind students are likely to speak when they land in France next summer,” I explained.
Cherbakoff also concurred.
As it happened, he said, there was a slot open for a part-time French-language instructor. One of the teaching fellows had had to resign owing to a complicated pregnancy that required extended bedrest.
Ten minutes later, I was back at Café Algiers telling Kalaj to go and see Cherbakoff right away.
I could tell he was nervous.
“Kalashnikov m
eets Cherbakoff,” taunted the Algerian, who’d overheard the conversation. Everyone laughed. Cherbakoff, Cutitoff, Cherbakoff, hadenough, Cherbakoff, Jerkhimoff. Parodies came breezing in from the kitchen area as almost everyone in Café Algiers clapped.
An hour or two later, Kalaj walked into the café bearing a large teacher’s edition of Parlons! with accompanying teacher’s manual, exercise book, reader, and lab book.
“Tomorrow at eight o’clock, Lamont 310.”
He looked at me more puzzled than ever. What was Lamont? The name of a building, I explained. He had never heard of it. Corner of Quincy Street and Mass Ave. He knew exactly what I meant. I explained to him that there was a periodical room in Lamont. After teaching, he could read all the French newspapers and periodicals he pleased without having to pay a cent. He liked the idea of reading newspapers and periodicals after teaching.
Where was he going to hold his office hours?
He thought about it.
“Here,” he said. “This way they’ll get a taste of French cafés.”
He said that Cherbakoff had mentioned something about an ID card, but Kalaj figured it would take too much time. He’d simply borrow mine when he needed it. It was useless arguing how this would have complicated matters for the two of us. I let him borrow mine. He said he had to prepare for his class tomorrow morning.
Had they suggested how they wanted him to teach French?
“I told them I already knew,” he replied.
This was not boding well at all. Suddenly I imagined a small village school outside Tunis where a local teacher, brandishing a long stick, walked around a classroom filled with cowering frock-clad boys. When one of them hesitated with the answer, whack!
“You can’t yell,” I said. “And you can’t hit anyone.”
He thought for a while.
“How am I going to teach them anything then?”
“You can’t yell, you can’t strike, you can’t even make them feel bad about themselves.”
“So, if someone is an absolute idiot, what do I tell him—that he’s a prodigy?”
Zeinab, who had overheard the conversation, started laughing at Kalaj when she realized that his teaching at Harvard was not a joke. “How can he teach them anything when he doesn’t understand the agreement of the past participle with the direct object?”
“I understand it well enough.”
“Prove it.”
“It would take too long and I don’t have the time.”
“Prove it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Because you don’t know.”
“What I know is that you’d do anything to go to bed with me—but it won’t work.”
Near us a couple was just about to leave. They hadn’t touched the huge wedge of Brie they had ordered.
The young man stood up and went to pay. The girl was already waiting for him outside the doorway.
Kalaj grabbed the piece of cheese and spread it richly on a slice of baguette, which he then cut neatly in two, one half for me, the other for himself. Zeinab cast an angry look at him.
“They throw away everything in this country. I, I, I, Kalaj, am not ersatz. And I’m not a thief. Food is food, and this one has already been paid for.”
“If you wanted food, Kalaj, all you had to do was ask me,” said Zeinab, who would have cut off her right hand and given it to him had he just stared at it long enough.
“You won’t even tell me how the past participle agrees with the direct object, and now you want to feed me?”
“I told you: I’ll do everything for you.”
“Back to that again! Just leave me alone. I need to study what I have to teach these ersatz minds.”
“Just mind your past participle. I’ll explain it if you could only learn to listen,” said Zeinab.
“Explain. But be brief.”
I left them, went home, and changed into better clothes. I had to be on Chestnut Hill for cocktails at Allison’s parents. I had originally thought of asking Kalaj to drive me there, but then remembered he’d had his license revoked. Besides, arriving by cab all the way from Cambridge would send the wrong message. Now, without his license, the question was moot. I was going to take the train. “Try to find me a job with all those rich contacts of yours,” he had said. “I’ll be their driver, cook, bodyguard, pimp. Anything.”
All I kept thinking for the remainder of the evening was: Now he has complete access to my apartment, has my ID card, and even teaches where I teach. I’d never felt so invaded or taken over before. I hated the feeling. It was as if my double were squeezing me out. Why had I been so weak? And why was I thinking like a tightfisted, skinflint Jew? The Jew who likes his little things in their little place, who wants what people borrow instantly returned, who doesn’t open his doors too wide for fear strangers might storm in and never leave, the Jew who doesn’t want others to open their heart, fearing he might have to open his, who won’t venture in though God knows he’s been invited in so many tacit ways. Or had I become an American now: my space, your space, and lots of spaces in between?
I hated myself both for not wanting to let him into my apartment and for surrendering without a struggle—for not refusing to go to the cocktail party at Allison’s parents, and for taking the long train ride to get there, for saying I wasn’t sure I would go and for begrudging having to go, for not wanting to marry Allison and for letting her think I wanted nothing more, for not wanting to be a student of literature, for not wanting to be in Cambridge, or in the United States, all the while continuing in a rut that felt, and indeed was from the very start, the best that life had to offer.
As I watched my own reflection on the glass panels of the Green Line car heading out to Newton that evening, I kept asking myself: Was this really me, and were these really my features standing out on this totally alien Boston scenery? Who was I? How many masks could I be wearing at the same time? Who was I when I wasn’t looking? Was I simply a being without shape, ready to be molded into what everyone wanted me to be? Or by acquiescing so easily was I simply making up in advance for the treachery I invariably brought to those who trusted the face?
I looked at my face against this strange Boston background and saw a lawyer who overtips the waiter at lunch because he knows he’ll be vicious in court that afternoon. I saw a husband who buys his wife expensive jewelry—not after cheating on her, but before finding the person who’ll help destroy his marriage. I saw a priest who absolves everyone because he has lost his faith and no longer trusts in his vocation.
That evening, Allison wanted to drive me back home. I let her, though I would have preferred the train. There was a moment at the party when I wished to undo my tie if only to let fresh air into my system, but also to show I had less in common with the guests than with the waiters, who were all wearing open-collar, buttoned-down white dress shirts. Suddenly, I wanted to be alone and watch Kalaj roll a cigarette as he made fun of this entire party with its jumbo gravity hanging from its jumbo chandeliers, the jumbo levity of the frou-froued guests who kissy-kissed and huggy-hugged with their jumbo show of plenitude and ease. Amerloques, I could hear him say. “Take this one,” he’d point to a woman in the crowd. “Skin like burlap. Three generations ago she was scrounging turnips out of the dead land. And as for these two,” he’d snicker, “they may have come on board a sailboat, but look under, and you’ll find the coarseness of a sea dog and the larceny of stevedores.”
I wanted to sit by myself in the empty train car and let the hypnotic rhythm of the wheels dull the fire within me. All these wealthy people who simply belonged. Their large cars. Their large mansions. Their startled large eyes when they repeated my name. Their professed love for the Mediterranean which they couldn’t, if you gave them ten lifetimes, begin to understand, because what they always liked instead was the cold Atlantic and the limitless Pacific, because Kalaj was right, this was another world, and this was another tongue, and these people were a different order of beings, just as their wome
n were women plus something, or maybe minus something that made them different from the women we’d known and been raised by and been taught to worship, because, among so many things, they were everything that a man was not and could never be. Kalaj would understand. And yet now, strangely enough, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him either, because I was ashamed of him, because I was tired of him, because however much I was closer to him than to any of these people at this party, the distance between him and me was big enough to remind me, even when I missed him, that estrangement was carved into me with acid and barbed wire. I was no closer to him than I was to them.
Allison and I sat in the car outside my building. “Tell me what’s wrong?” she finally asked.
“Nothing,” I replied.
“I know something is wrong, very wrong, why won’t you tell me?” I hoped she wasn’t going to cry or make me feel sorry for her. I didn’t want to hate myself more than I already did.
I saw my building, and I saw my own reflection on the window of her car, and I thought of the train I’d have taken from Chestnut Hill and would probably still be on before changing at Park Square. Yes, there was plenty wrong, everything was wrong, but how could I begin to tell her when I didn’t know myself? What truth would I speak, when I didn’t even know the truth? “Is it that you don’t love me—or not enough—or not at all?” How to explain that I did love her, that of all the women I’d known, she was the one I would want to live with, and be loved by, and have children with. “I don’t want to give you up,” she finally said.
All I said in reply was “Sometimes I need to be alone.” I didn’t know I was going to say this until it had come out of my mouth.
“I thought we were happy.”
“We are.”
“Then what is it?”
I didn’t know. Like an actor who wants to sit alone in his booth after all the lights are out and everyone’s gone home, I wanted to take my time removing the makeup, the wig, the false teeth, the skin glow, the eyelashes, take time to recover myself and see the face, not the mask, not the mask again, always the mask again. I wanted to talk to myself in French, in my own French accent, speak as those who brought me into this world had taught me to speak. I was tired of English, tired of anything that didn’t smack of sea salt in the summertime and of the brine of foods prepared in our kitchens on those endless summer afternoons when the cicadas rattled like mad and time slackened and the sea beckoned, listless and sleek, through the windows of our bedrooms when we didn’t wish to nap but found ourselves lulled by the sound of the waves all the same. I was even tired of my make-believe Paris, tired of the screens I put up, tired of thinking I wore a mask, tired of longing for my face, tired of thinking it wasn’t the mask I was quarreling with, but the face—tired of fearing there’d never even been, might not ever be a face. Tired of fearing I was incapable of loving anyone or anything.