by André Aciman
From an old telephone booth, I called Kalaj. After a few bland apologies for waking him at this time of the night, I asked: “Can you pick me up?”
“J’arrive.”
No questions. No explanations. From the sound of my voice he’d already guessed why I was calling. I wasn’t the first, or the last man who wanted out—desperately. Clearly he’d done the same thing himself many times before.
I waited in the late September weather, but I didn’t have time to feel the chill, for soon, I spotted his yellow Checker cab nosing its way ever so stealthily in between two rows of parked cars. Less than ten minutes had elapsed since I’d woken up and put on my socks.
After more apologies, I got into the cab. It was warm and smelled of cigarettes. All he said was, “You’re as white as aspirin.”
He laughed, I laughed. He’d learned the expression from a Greek sailor.
“Still, it was cowardly,” he finally said.
“Yes, it was cowardly.”
Looking straight ahead of him, he added, “You’ll do the same to me some day.”
I let it pass. Something told me not to argue.
To dispel the awkward moment between us, I asked if he’d known it could come to this.
Yes, he’d known all along, he said.
Why hadn’t he said anything then?
“Would it have made any difference?” he asked.
“No.”
“That’s why I never said anything.”
But I knew he had guessed the real why.
As we drove on Memorial Drive, I kept thinking of her, of what she’d feel when she woke up, how she’d look for me everywhere before spotting the keys on the kitchen counter. How long before she’d finally put two and two together and realize that I’d left for good? He’s left me. I could just hear her mutter those words to herself as she started rinsing last night’s wineglasses that we’d left on the tea table before turning in. He’s left, the irked, embittered rise in her voice betraying how much she wished she had me there if only to unleash her fury, while a plangent strain in her voice would nail the coffin on our brief love.
Tears began to well in my eyes, especially as I saw her sitting on her sofa that had become our sofa, or worse yet, by the very spot where we’d eaten our rice and spiced meats, realizing that her life had just spun out of orbit—Paris, the Arab Institute, my dissertation, our stay in Spain, everything thrashing about her like wild birds fluttering scared before an approaching beast. I was the beast. How could I do this to someone? And the way I’d done it was worse than the offense itself.
I wanted to go back now and tiptoe my way into her apartment, climb into bed with her, and hold her tight to me, and, as we’d hug, begin to make love, for she too loved sex that sprung in mid-sleep, rough, blind, beastly sex that grew ever so tender the more we awoke to what our bodies had started.
But I didn’t have a key to get back in, and I was too embarrassed to ask Kalaj to drive me back.
“Why did I do it?” I finally asked him.
“Because you couldn’t stand it, because you were choking, that’s why. Perfectly understandable.”
No, it was not understandable. Choking was just a word, a metaphor, a nothing. I myself had found the word crawling under my pillow that very same night. It was not an answer, not an explanation, yet it seemed the only one at hand, and the only word that said everything despite my mistrust of words. Why had I left her? Because I was living someone else’s life, not mine. Because I wanted my life back, even if I didn’t know what my life was or what I even wanted it to be. Because I wanted to be alone, or not with her, or with someone else, or, better yet, with no one at all. Because I wanted to find something of me in others only to realize that others were never going to be like me and ultimately had to be unclasped, thrown out, exploded, because estrangement is branded on the soul, because love itself was foreign to me, and in its place sat resentment and bile. Why had I even started with her? To be with someone instead of no one? To be like him? Or was I already, had always been like him, but in so different a guise that it was just as easy to think us poles apart? The Arab and the Jew, the ill-tempered and the mild-mannered, the irascible and the forbearing, the this and the that! And yet, we came from the same mold, choked in the same way, and in the same way, lashed back, then ran away.
He listened to my musings as though I were reciting a delirious poem. Then he shook his head and came back to his favorite word. “It just never took. The gluten never stuck.” The onetime baker in him had spoken.
In the quiet car with its twenty-four-hour music playing en sourdine, I thought about his four words. I liked them. As if love affairs were puddings and soufflés; sometimes things took, sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they just curdled, and there was no one to blame and nothing you could do.
A second later, I realized that the same could be said about everything else in my life, and his as well. Nothing seemed to take. Even our friendship . . .
“Do you really like being alone?” he asked.
“No.”
He understood this too. No need for words. He dropped me in front of my building.
I offered to make coffee if he wanted, but he said he might as well keep driving his cab until sunup today. He hadn’t yet gone to bed when I’d called. He seldom slept. Besides, it was early on a Sunday morning, and people were still coming out of clubs and after-hours bars. Plenty of money to be made on a Sunday morning.
As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere—ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends—even ordinary friends we didn’t have, or couldn’t keep.
We were not outcasts. We were untouchables. No one knew it except us. Harvard helped me hide it so well that entire weeks, sometimes months went by without my getting a whiff of it even once, let alone allowing someone else to glimpse it. Kalaj hid it in plain sight: by shouting it to everyone he ran into.
When I opened the door to my apartment, I realized that I had scarcely seen my home at night in a very long time. It felt unfamiliar. I was more at home with Niloufar off Putnam Avenue than here. And yet neither place felt right. No wonder Kalaj preferred to drive about all day and hang out in a Cambridge dive than face his own bedroom. I fell asleep with my clothes on and the smell of Niloufar’s bed mingling with my own.
THAT SUNDAY WAS probably the worst day of my life. I had no food in the house. I was exhausted, and I had twenty-four hours to master Chaucer before my appointment with Lloyd-Greville. The thought of taking even twenty minutes to go out to find something to eat was out of the question.
Later in the morning the phone began to ring. I knew who it was and decided not to pick up. I could hear my phone ringing all the way up on the roof terrace, where I planned to spend a few hours before hunkering down to type up my notes on Chaucer. I was to meet Lloyd-Greville the next day at 10:00 a.m. By staying upstairs, though, I knew I was also hiding. Cruel, heartless, cowardly. Linda, who happened to be upstairs on this clear, warm, lovely Indian summer day and whom I hadn’t seen since I’d been more or less living elsewhere except for an occasional stop to pick up or bring back books and a few items of clothing, could tell it was my phone ringing. “Why aren’t you answering?” she finally asked. Then she guessed why. “Will she ever stop calling?” By noon, while we were mixing our second Tom Collins in my kitchen, she asked, “Want me to pick up?” I couldn’t do that to a woman who had been my soul mate. Finally Linda grabbed my phone and placed it in the bathroom, shutting the door tight behind it, like a misbehaving pet that was being punished. I wanted her to remove her light blue tank top and the bottom of her bikini and without waiting proceed to my bedroom. I loved her body, loved the untrammeled sex, savage, selfish, and without meaning. I wanted her to eras
e the other woman in my life; I wanted to kiss her face, her mouth, and with that face bury the other as one might bury a Tanagra statuette that had become unbearable and stirred not a drop of guilt, pity, love, or even ordinary anger, but just this thing that scared me more, because it impugned me, not her: indifference. Or worse yet than indifference: numbness, first of the heart, then of the body. Hating, by contrast was far, far kinder—and perhaps there was a touch of hatred already in me as well, for hatred helps us forget and covers up the wounds we leave on others as fast as it helps heal those they’ve inflicted on us. “You don’t want to hurt her,” Linda said. “It’s because you’re kind.” No, it’s because I’m a coward, I wanted to say. But I didn’t say anything.
KALAJ DROPPED BY to visit me that afternoon. He had frequently gotten into the habit of coming by, knowing the door was never locked.
“The one thing no man should ever do is feel sorry for a woman. You always live to regret it,” he said. “It destroys her, and it destroys you.”
I could barely think of Niloufar at all. It was the last day for going over Chaucer, and I was hopelessly behind. “Can I do anything to help?” Kalaj finally asked.
“No, you can’t help.” And then it hit me: “Or maybe you can.”
The idea seemed a stroke of genius.
“I need two editions of Chaucer’s complete works,” I said.
“And how will I find them?”
I wrote down the approximate call number of the books and gave him my library card to borrow the books with. I told him where exactly to look for them inside the Widener Library stacks and suggested he take out any other books about Chaucer sitting on the stacks.
He had never been inside Widener, didn’t know where or what Widener was.
“Past the gate on Mass Ave between Plympton and Linden Streets,” I explained in cab lingo.
“That’s it?”
I nodded.
With that he sped down the stairs.
I was hungry, ravenous. I could knock at Linda’s, but she had probably already gone to the library. Strange thing: I felt more comfortable asking Kalaj to run an errand at a place he’d never even been to than Linda, who was right now in the very stacks where I was sending Kalaj.
An hour and a half later he was back. He was carrying a brown paper bag which he rushed into the kitchen because it was about to leak and emptied it in a salad bowl. More than a dozen chicken wings. Heavenly. From one of his other pockets he produced a small bottle of beer. Then came a string of petits sandwiches. “I told the waitress you were starving but couldn’t come.”
“But she doesn’t know me.”
“Short, Jewish nose, always lugging books—she knew exactly who you were. With her compliments.”
“And the books—?” I began, fearing the worst.
Suddenly, my heart sank. He had totally forgotten about the books!
“Right, the books—” he started. “I couldn’t find some of the ones you wanted . . . so I took out these instead.”
There he was being Harpo again. Out of numberless pockets in his faded army camouflage jacket, he produced six books.
“Not bad,” I said, as I looked at their titles. They were good books. When I looked in the inside cover, my heart sank again.
“But you forgot to check them out!”
“Well, yes, see, that was a bit hard. There were long lines, and they were all asking too many questions, and frankly ’appy hower was about to end, and I didn’t want to miss it. So I put the books in my pockets and decided to leave. I can assure you nobody saw.”
I was horrified. I was pleased.
“Now, I must let you work. Any books to lend me? I still can’t sleep at night.”
I let him borrow Sade, Maupassant, Balzac, and Stendhal.
“Bonne soirée.”
And he was gone.
I’D BEEN THINKING of the next morning’s meeting with Lloyd-Greville for so long that it had begun to seem unreal, as though lodged forever in the future. I decided to type up my notes, thinking that jotting down my ideas about Chaucer might help firm them up in my mind. But I was not prepared to see that I hardly nursed one interesting idea about Chaucer. He’d want to discuss Troilus and Criseyde or “The Knight’s Tale” whereas I’d much rather go on about “The Tale of Sir Thopas,” where Chaucer makes fun of himself as a totally feckless raconteur who is ultimately interrupted by the innkeeper and told to stop, because none of the pilgrims could stand his silly prattle. Chaucer the anti-narrator: there was gold in this idea. By 11:00 p.m. I realized that I had circled the wagons too many times to know what I had to say about Chaucer. I could already hear Lloyd-Greville: What, in fine, are your thoughts about “The Book of the Duchess,” sir? Lloyd-Greville had probably picked up the Gallic in fine from Henry James, about whom he was also an expert. My point was . . . well, you see, gentlemen—and suddenly I saw myself for who I was. I was, like the narrator of Notes from the Underground, an arrogant, jittery, posturing, paranoid, dysfunctional, capricious fop. Like him, I was all double-talk, even when I was alone and nobody was listening, even when I whispered things to myself that were truer than true—imponderable double-talk just the same.
I had no idea what my thoughts on “The Book of the Duchess” were going to be, but the more I wrote, the more I jotted down ideas, the more I seemed to depend on the page itself to tell me what I was trying to say. Trying to say? I didn’t know what I was trying to say until I’d said something that looked good enough for the Lloyd-Grevilles and Cherbakoffs of this world. If they thought it passed, then it passed for me. My ideas, however, were as transient and provisional on paper as I was at Harvard, in Cambridge, on this planet. I was, and my ideas were, like Kalaj himself, all talk. And the trouble was I couldn’t tell the difference between an idea and its malingering double, chatter.
By one o’clock in the morning the phone started to ring again. I picked it up without thinking. “I’m not asking you to come over. But can I come over?” It was Niloufar, she needed to speak to me.
“I am not alone,” I lied.
“Already found someone else? Bravo,” she said, and right away hung up on me. A few minutes later she called again. “I just want you to know you’re the worst person I’ve ever met. And I’ve known some very bad ones.”
“Thank you very much.” My turn to hang up.
She called again. “What I said was not true. You are the best person I’ve ever loved. Please come back. Or I’ll take a taxi and be at your door, begging.”
“I can’t talk.”
“Oh, I see, of course. Are you ready for tomorrow morning?”
“No, not yet,” I said, thinking she was changing the subject if only to maintain a semblance of composure but also, perhaps, to thwart whatever pleasure I was enjoying at the moment. I was wrong.
“Listen to me, Monsieur Chaucer screwing La Princesse de Clèves. I hope he tears you to pieces and exposes you for the shallow, bungling petit con you’ve always been, even, and especially, in bed. I curse you and your children if they’re unlucky enough to have you as a father. A curse on you—did you hear me?—a curse!” And out came a string of words in Farsi, tears, yelps, followed by an endless series of French words sobbed out of her lungs, as though she were talking not to me, not to her lover, but to her mother, pleading first, then cursing again, then apologizing for cursing, and cursing all over again. “I curse you.” As in some of her most passionate moments, she had turned to Old World-speak, and if my heart was racing as she kept heaping curses upon me and on the children of my children, it was because I too, like her, came from a world where curses, like blessings, like pledges, like all protestations of enduring love are, even when you don’t mean a word you’re saying, binding legal tender, the currency of the soul, because once spoken, they cannot be taken back, dispelled, or parleyed with; they will hunt you down, find you, and carry out their sentence.
I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t sleep. The meeting with Lloyd-Greville and the c
urses were enough to keep anyone up. I had crossed the line, stepped into the lepers’ colony of the damned; there was no redemption, no pardon. From here on, I’d live out the term of her curse. As for my comprehensives, they were cursed long before I’d met her, before Kalaj, before I’d even applied to Harvard—for this had started as a fantasy and, before I’d known it, the fantasy had crossed the line and wriggled its way into real life and was now outliving its time.
I went into the kitchen and decided to make the strongest coffee I had in the house. It would take ten minutes to brew a big cup of espresso—but I needed a break. I had five hours before me; the job could be finished by then. The stovetop espresso pot was dirty from the last time I’d brewed coffee in it, probably as far back as the month of May. My friend Frank had come over one evening to grumble about his girlfriend who wouldn’t stop complaining that he wasn’t doing something to avoid losing his hair. Claude, who was also present that evening, and who never liked to listen to Frank’s amorous bellyaches, interrupted, as he always did when Frank started about Nora, saying we needed to add Cointreau to spike the coffee. We brewed three cups, then brewed three more. Eventually, we turned to wine until Frank offered to cook something in my kitchen for the three of us. All I had were eggs and tomato sauce. Any cheese? he asked. Grated Kraft Parmesan. “I’ll make dinner,” he said, having located an unopened box of pasta.
I hated being alone in my apartment, though I also welcomed being alone again. But suddenly, and, once again, because of the coffee, I remembered the day when I’d returned from Widener Library the previous winter with several books and on walking into my apartment had found it all lit up with Frank and Nora setting my kitchen table for the three of us. “You forgot to lock the door, so we let ourselves in and brought dinner. Don’t you ever lock your door?” Nora had asked. “Not always. What would anyone want to steal?” I’d said. “True,” they’d agreed. The sofa, the bed, indeed, all my furniture, as everyone knew, had been lifted off the streets of Cambridge. Even my plates and my coffee mugs and director’s chairs were the legacy of friends of friends who had left Cambridge. Nothing belonged to me. I paid month-to-month rent, without a lease. The only key I used was the mailbox key. Frank had brought cooked lasagna that night and was busy reheating it. I loved them both that evening. This had never happened before, which is why stepping into my apartment and finding that people had lit up my place and made themselves at home had turned that evening into one of my happiest and most memorable days at Harvard. Lights, friendship, wine, lasagna, coffee.