Harvard Square (14 page)

I knew that spending time at Café Algiers was not helping my reading regimen, but Café Algiers helped stave off the many phantoms that seemed to haunt me even during my waking hours. It also occurred to me that, despite having a few friends in Cambridge, I had never been so close or on such intimate terms with anyone else in my life as I was with Kalaj, and I didn’t want to lose this. We had a little world all our own here, a house-of-cards world with its house-of-cards cafés and house-of-cards rituals held together by our house-of-cards France. We called Café Algiers
Chez Nous
, because it was so obviously made for the likes of us—part North African, part faux-French, part dreamplace for the displaced, and always part-something-from-somewhere-else for those who were neither quite here nor altogether elsewhere. At Café Algiers we always ordered a
cinquante-quatre
and later a glass of wine with chili at Anyochka’s, which he liked to call
la
soupe populaire
, the soup kitchen. Wine, all wines, he nicknamed
un dollar vingt-deux
: his girlfriend, when she soon became his girlfriend,
mon pléonasme
; and Linda from my building, whose name he refused to remember,
la quarante-deux.
His other recent conquest never got a name: she remained
Miss
Bathroom Problems.
Césarion’s, we both agreed, was
le petit trou
, the little hole, and the Harvest, pronounced
Arvèst
, with the accent on the last syllable, became
Maxim’s
, or sometimes,
le grand trou.
Casablanca, for some reason, never got baptized and remained Casablanca. Our daily walks usually took us from
Maxim’s
to
la soupe populaire
, with an occasional stop back
Chez Nous
.
Chez Nous
was where we read, played backgammon, made friends, and on certain evenings would sit around and listen to Sabatini. From time to time, the guitarist would bring his star pupil along who’d know to play the
Andante spianato
, because Kalaj always begged to hear it. On Sundays evenings, once the school year got under way, we’d always manage to catch an art film at the Harvard Epworth Church, for a dollar each. He called it
going to Mass
.

He renamed everything around him to snub the world and show there were other ways of seeing and calling things and that everything had to go through baptismal fire to be cleansed of all cant and pieties before he’d let them into his world. It was his way of reinventing the world in his own image, or in the image of what he wanted the world to be—his way of taking this cold, inhospitable, ersatz, shallow town and bringing it down a few notches to see it turn into a kinder, more intimate, more complicit, sunnier place that would open up a secret passageway for him and ultimately yield to him with a smile—if only, like Ali Baba, he could find the right nickname for it in this French language of his own invention. He defaced the world by applying improvised monikers, leaving his fingerprint on everything he touched in the hope that the world might one day seek the hand that had left such deep scuff marks at its door and pull him in saying, “You’ve knocked long enough. Come in, you belong here.”

In that huddled, provisional world of his he crammed and made room for everyone at Café Algiers, but to one person he gave the best and the airiest room. And that person was me. He needed an accomplice who was also a blood brother.

What he did not see is that the more he opened other worlds and kept challenging and pushing Cambridge further away from me to show there were other ways of living and doing things, the more desperately I clung to the small privileges and to the tentative promises Harvard held out for me.

3

EARLY ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN I WALKED INTO CAFÉ
Algiers with my books and was not expecting to run into him so early, I saw Kalaj sitting with two women. “How wonderful to see you,” he shouted, and right away embraced me. We’d never embraced before. “I’ve been waiting forever.” There was something too garrulous and flamboyant in his greeting. He was up to something. “This is the friend from Harvard I told you about.” I suddenly had a suspicion that he was drawing on my Harvard credentials to boost his own standing and show he had contacts outside of his immediate circle of Maghrebine cabbies and waiters. If he’d only known how thoroughly threadbare my connection to Harvard felt at the time, especially with the threat of catastrophe in mid-January hanging on my mornings like the rancid aftertaste of an undigested meal gulped down with cheap wine the night before.

But this wasn’t what was going on at all. He was using me as a conversation piece. I didn’t mind. Or, perhaps, I wasn’t a conversation piece at all. He was basically asking me to help. And help under those circumstances could mean one thing only: relieving him of one of the two women. The question was which of the two.

As the girls were speaking to one another, he gestured exactly what I suspected:
Get them away from each other!
But he added something else:
Which of the two do you want?
Since I was doing him a favor, it didn’t matter—I wasn’t interested in either. Besides, going along with the ploy by pretending to make advances to one of the girls to help his cause with the other seemed a touch too underhanded for my taste. My apparent reluctance to fall in with his plan baffled him. His eyes jumped at me with incomprehension.
Not do anything?
What an insult to
them
. And frankly, to him as well. I had to choose. Even they expected it.

I picked the one sitting next to me.

She was a Persian girl who had read all of Dante in Italian, then in Spanish, then in Farsi. The other was a curly-haired blonde called Sheila who was, I should have guessed, a physical therapist.

It turned out that Sheila didn’t interest him. Ironically,
Miss Bathroom Problems
did. She had disappeared following their first night and it was she, not he, who was being difficult now. I should have seen this coming. He wasn’t very worried, though. Cambridge was smaller than Paris. They were bound to bump into each other again. Hadn’t he taken her phone number? He’d lost it. Didn’t he know where she lived? No. Too dark, too drunk that night, hadn’t paid attention. As for
Pléonasme
from
la soupe populaire
—who did indeed turn up on the third day and proved to be, as he’d guessed, French from a Jewish-Moroccan family—he had ended up sleeping with her in his room when his landlady, dubbed
Mrs. Arlington
of Arlington Street, was already asleep. In no time—three days!—he’d fallen in love with Austin, the boy she took care of as a live-in babysitter. He’d break his day in two to drive her to his school to pick him up at 2:00 p.m., and together they’d drive to Faneuil Hall, park the car, and buy three ice creams. It was all a big secret, as the boy was not supposed to tell his parents that his babysitter’s boyfriend was a cabdriver who would pick them up every day and roam around Faneuil Hall until he found a parking space. He continued to pick up the boy, on his own sometimes, long after discovering that his babysitter was two-timing him with the boy’s father behind the wife’s back.

“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.