by André Aciman
In this case, the woman to whom he offered a cigarette was the model with bathroom problems we had seen the week before at Café Algiers. Even before I’d noticed anything, he had already scanned the room, spotted her seat, and then zeroed in on the table next to hers with the instant accuracy of a sharpshooter. The conversation started. Over a nothing.
“Do you like the cigarette?”
“Very much,” she replied.
He nodded at her answer, then paused before speaking, as though appraising the deeper meaning of her answer.
“You know, though, that Dutch tobacco is better than regular Virginia.”
She nodded.
“But the tobacco I like best is Turkish.”
“Well, Turkish, yes, of course,” she immediately said. She too, it seemed, was an expert in matters tobacco. I wanted to laugh. The glint in his eye when he caught my attempt to stifle a laugh told me that he too had caught her attempt to put on a show of knowing a thing or two about tobacco.
“I started smoking Turkish tobacco in my native city.”
“Where is it?”
“Sidi Bou Saïd, the most beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria. In the summertime, the pumice stones roll to the shores and the children gather them up in large wicker baskets and sell them to the tourists for nothing.”
She looked totally spellbound by his description. “Where is Pantelleria?”
“Where is Pantelleria?” he asked, as though everyone was supposed to know. “It’s an amazing island in the Straits of Sicily. Ever been to Sicily?”
“Never. Have you?” she asked.
His thoughtful, drawn-out nod was meant to suggest that Pantelleria was not just a place but an experience to which words could do no justice.
I knew where this was going and excused myself to go to the bathroom.
On my way there, I peeked into the main dining room, and bumped into Professor Lloyd-Greville. He was the last person I wanted to be seen by in a bar, given my standing in the department. I’d been avoiding him since failing my comprehensives. He was having dinner with his wife and an academic couple from Paris in the more fashionable and far more expensive French part of the establishment. Would I mind coming and saying hello? Of course not. I knew his wife from departmental parties. She and I always ended up making small talk in what she called “our intimate little corner” in their large living room overlooking the Charles. Departmental parties are usually the bane of academic wives, but she had turned her husband’s position into a thriving source of clients for her real estate business, which she operated nonstop, even when they were away during their long summer stay in Normandy. She was originally from Germany but had lived and studied in France and enjoyed playing the role of the deracinated soul cast ashore in New England who was forever sympathizing with equally deracinated sister souls, especially if they were younger, callow graduate students. “And how is the thesis coming along?” she asked. I affected a horrified gasp as though to say: Lady, would you please, it’s still summer. She put on an amused if mildly mischievous pout to mean: So what naughty things have you been up to this summer that are keeping you away from your work? It was not flirting, just verbal ping-pong. I was dying to slam the ball but too polite to stop the back-and-forth.
I told her about my comprehensives. She was sad, thought a while, then almost winked, meaning, I’ll look into this, as she gave her husband a reprobatory gaze to suggest he had been a bad boy and should have known better than to flunk a young man like me. It meant: I’ll see what I can work at my end. But it could just as easily have meant nothing at all.
She had spotted me once having lunch by myself at the Faculty Club and never forgot it. Playing the impoverished grad student, are you? Well, you’re not fooling anyone, my dear. Trying to disabuse her would have required making too many admissions, and she’d still think me a liar, which would have made things worse. So I let her think I was not starving. To keep up appearances, I’d always manage to send her a new book that we happened to discuss in our “intimate little corner” during the monthly evening get-togethers in her living room. A new hardcover book was out of the question in my budget, but calling the publisher in New York and claiming I was eager to review a specific title was easy, and they usually fell for it when I alleged to have an assignment from some obscure journal. I called it reading on credit, since I’d always make a point of looking over the volume before wrapping it with gift paper and dropping it with Mary-Lou, our departmental secretary, who’d make sure to let Mrs. Lloyd-Greville know there was a petite surprise waiting for her. A few days later a small, thick, square envelope, lined in pearl gray paper bearing her embossed name on the outside, would arrive in my mailbox with a friendly thank-you message written in royal blue ink. You were not meant to spot—but of course were definitely meant to notice—the crested, semi-faded watermark bearing the expensive jeweler’s name.
At the dinner table at the Harvest, the professor and his friend made perfunctory pleasantries on the subject of comprehensive exams and dissertations and recalled how dreadful and humiliating these public spectacles used to be in their day when the two were students in Paris.
“Remember So-and-so, and then such-and-such?”
“Say no more,” replied his guest, “but let me tell you”—turning to me—“you guys have it easy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Greville, twitching her features in a coded expression that mimed a look of subtle solidarity with yet another wink-wink. “Are you still going to write on La Princesse de Clèves one day?” she asked with a peevish little grin implying, See, I haven’t forgotten. I nodded.
“Oh, La Princesse de Clèves, it’s been ages,” said Lloyd-Greville’s guest.
“I’ve just reread it,” added Lloyd-Greville’s wife. Trying to earn points, was she? A moment of silence passed over all five of us.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” asked the professor, almost standing up to make room for an extra chair in case I was going to be gauche enough to accept. I hesitated, and was practically tempted to give the matter a second thought, when I caught Mrs. Lloyd-Greville slicing a corner off her artichoke heart, as though she had totally failed to notice her husband’s gesture and was already assuming I would turn down the offer and let the four of them return to their meal without further intrusion from this graduate student who had shown up at the wrong time and wasn’t going away fast enough. I apologized before declining—I was with friends in the small bar. “Ah, youth!” they said in a chorus. Then, with one or two nodding motions meant to signify something I wasn’t quick enough to catch, they returned to their oversized appetizers. A moment of silence passed. Then it hit me: I was being congédié, dismissed. Very cordially, the little clan had bolted its door in my face.
I had never even wished to join them but I suddenly understood why people burst with road rage, brandished Kalashnikovs, and mowed down real or imagined foes, it didn’t matter which, because no one was your friend here, and bunk was forever closing in on you, no matter where you turned. Bunk, their foodie palates; bunk, La Princesse de Clèves; bunk, their venomous little white canines darting from behind their puckered smiles as they nodded goodbye and savored their fried Carciofi alla giudía that would turn cold if they didn’t gobble them up right away while I stood there trying to negotiate a gracious exit. Why was I being reminded that I was a hopeless, feckless, unkempt, unwelcome, and thoroughly unfit waif on this niggardly strip of earth called Cambridge, Mass.?
I would never forgive them, never forgive myself. Why ask me to their table, why overstay my welcome, why couldn’t I read the signs? Kalaj would surely have known how to read the signs.
I was, it occurred to me, no different from Kalaj. Among Arabs he was a Berber, among Frenchmen an Arab, among his own a nothing, as I’d been a Jew among Arabs, an Egyptian among strangers, and now an alien among WASPs, the clueless janitor trying out for the polo team.
I hated everything this s
ide of the Atlantic.
Come to think of it, I hated everything that side of it as well.
I hated America, I hated Europe, I hated North Africa, and right now I hated France, because the France everyone else worshipped in Cambridge wasn’t the imagined douce France I’d grown up loving in Egypt, a France of Babar and Tintin and illustrated old history books that always started with Caesar’s ruthless siege of Alessia and ended with the heroic battle of Bir Hakim between French legionnaires in North Africa and the German Reich—a France even the French no longer cared for, much less remembered. France had become jumbo-ersatz as well, a gourmet haven for puckered lips and highborn gluttons.
A decade ago, I began thinking, none of them were good enough to step into my parents’ service entrance; now they were snubbing me with a ghetto dish my grandmother wouldn’t be caught dead serving to her guests. Artichokes à la Jewish!
The thought might have brought a smirk to my face, but it couldn’t soothe me. I might as well have been barking jumbo-ersatz at the poor artichokes themselves and their distant cousins the nectarines, before grabbing each choke on their plates and forcibly stuffing them into Mrs. Lloyd-Greville’s leering kisser and down her dewlapped bill.
I knew I was beginning to sound like Kalaj. I liked sounding like him, I wanted to sound like him. I liked how it felt. He was the voice of my anger, my rage, a reminder that I hadn’t imagined the insult tonight, even when I knew no insult was intended. I was bruised all over and yet no one had cut or meant to injure me. Still, I liked mimicking his rage, liked wearing it. As senseless as it was, it made me feel stronger, made things simpler, gave me courage, and filled my chest. It reminded me of who I was here. I had for so long stopped knowing who I was that I needed a total outcast to remind me that I was no nectarine, that not being able to graft oneself onto this society came with a price but was not a failure.
I wanted to shout out the words. Nectarines ersatz, nectarines ersatz!
I went to the bathroom and as soon as I had shut the door read the prophetic inscription over the urinal: I’m OK, you suck.
Everyone sucked. Everything sucked. The world sucked. Kalaj sucked. I sucked.
WHEN I RETURNED to our table, Kalaj had already managed to invite the woman sitting next to us to our table—or, rather, he had asked her to move over to his spot on the cushioned bench and come closer to him. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he whispered when he pointed to my books, which now stood in a neat pile on the far corner of his table, “but I think it’s time we separated.”
I was obviously cramping his style. Perhaps I was a touch stung, but I liked the honesty. It confirmed our camaraderie. He was a survivor. Tonight he wasn’t sleeping alone. He reminded me of hunters, who wake up at dawn and are determined to forage for food and won’t come back till they’ve dragged a fresh carcass to feed their clan on. I was a gatherer: I waited for things to grow, to come my way, to fall into my hands. He went out and grabbed; I stayed put. We were different. Like Esau and Jacob.
In this I was still wrong: I didn’t even know how to wait. There was haste, not hope, in my waiting. Kalaj had seen through this as well. He called it savoir traîner.
And yet it dawned on me that evening as I headed home through Berkeley Street, where guests at a garden party were still lingering long past party hours, that I was finally glad to be rid of this guy who could waylay you for hours and, just because I didn’t know how to brush him off, assumed that I had nothing better to do than trail after him and watch him troll every woman. A sleaze and a freak, I thought. That’s what he was. I decided to avoid Café Algiers for the next few days.
What a contrast he was to these quiet, contented academics on Berkeley Street who seemed perfectly capable of extending their weekend hours by gathering a few friends and sitting about on their wide porch drinking gin and tonics, and whose only worry that Sunday evening as they sat together in the dark, was how to avoid attracting bugs. I always envied my neighbors on Berkeley Street.
Thank God I hadn’t run into anyone from Harvard in his company. The last thing I wanted was to have Kalaj show up next to me somewhere and, by virtue of just a grimace, a grunt, a word, let alone his bearing and his clothes, give away the sleazy underworld that had brought us together. I could just picture Professor Lloyd-Greville giving Kalaj the once-over before turning to his wife and saying, “He’s hanging out with drifters now.”
Then I remembered their artichokes, their foodie snouts doused in claret and scholarship. Nectarines at the pumping station of art. The world was filled with nectarophiliacs plying away at their hollow, nectarosclerotic little professions where people shuffled about their nectaroleptic lives.
If only I had the courage to get out now.
WHEN I ARRIVED at my building, I saw the girl from Apartment 42 sitting on the stoop, a book in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She was wearing a white tank top, her bare, tan shoulders glistening smoothly under the light from the lobby.
“The heat got to you?” I said, trying the blandest greeting in the world dabbed with a touch of irony. I suspected something else was bothering her, but weather was better than silence.
“Yes. Dreadful. No fan, no AC, no TV, no draft, nada. I figured better here than indoors.”
“What about the roof terrace?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nah, too spooky this time of night.”
So this was going to be it, I thought. There was nothing more to say. There were, of course, plenty of silly things to say, but I couldn’t think of one with which to raise her by one tiny chip. Still, I lingered on our stoop.
“Actually, it’s quite spectacular up there at night, have you ever been?” I asked. “Cambridge as you’ve never seen it. There’s always a breeze upstairs. It’s all dark, with tiny lights speckling all around you that remind me of small towns on the Mediterranean.”
Before she could ask which towns, at which point I’d have to come up with the name of one real fast, I don’t know what took hold of me but I told her I’d been planning to grab something to drink and sit up there. “It’s stunning, you’ll see.”
It took me a moment to realize that I myself had never been up there after sundown, let alone at night. You’ll see was the verbal equivalent of touching her elbow, her wrist.
“I don’t feel like dragging a chair up.”
“I’ll bring one up for you too,” I said. “And they’re director’s chairs,” as though that would persuade her, which made us both laugh.
She followed me up the stairs. Ours was the top floor, and it had become a source of good neighborly relations whenever you met someone going up or coming down the stairs to joke about the wide stairwell in a building that could easily have housed an elevator. It explains our low rent, was the thing to say. Yes, the expected reply. We were both slightly uneasy, and neither wished to say anything about the stairs, or about the rent or the heat, perhaps for fear of showing that what was taking our breath away was not the climb. When we reached my apartment, I opened the door trying to look very relaxed and left it wide open, a gesture meant to show I was just going to look for the chairs, mix the drinks, and head upstairs to the terrace with her. This is going to take just a sec, I was signaling, not sure yet whether all this body language suggesting haste was meant to put her or myself at ease. She dawdled in the foyer, crossed her arms, and watched me head to the kitchen, then slowly she followed in, her way of showing she was waiting for the drinks, her arms still crossed, her shoulders as always glistening, her whole posture saying Just don’t take forever. She looked around. Her one-bedroom apartment was exactly like mine, she said, but strangely everything, down to the door handle, was right-side left here. Mine faced west, hers east. As she was talking, I took out a can of frozen lime juice, ran some hot water on it, and emptied an ice tray into a large bowl.
“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a rubber mallet I had taken out and placed on the kitchen counter.
“You’ll see.” I took out a roll
of paper towels, tore out two sheets, and placed a few ice cubes between them. Then, with the rubber mallet, I pounded the cubes on the kitchen counter and emptied the cracked ice into a glass jar.
“Is this how it’s done?” she asked.
Breathless, I could do no more than repeat her words, “That’s how it’s done.” Did she want to try? I handed her the mallet. To steady her hand, I held the hammer with her and then let her pound it once. She liked cracking the ice. She pounded again, then one more time after that. We emptied the cracked pieces into the bowl. Then, just as I was opening the bottle of gin which I’d removed from the freezer, something suddenly seized me and, before I could think twice, I turned toward her and kissed her on the shoulder and then on her neck. It must have startled her but she did not seem to mind, perhaps wasn’t even surprised, and let me kiss her again on the very spot on which for days now I’d been yearning to bring my lips. Then, facing me, she met my lips and kissed me on the mouth, as though I’d been taking forever to make up my mind to kiss her there. We never made it to the terrace that evening.