Harvard Square (26 page)

“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 women 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.

“I’m going to drive back home now. I’ll call you tomorrow. If you can’t tell me the truth, then I’ll know, and I swear I’ll never bother you again.”

She did as she promised. She called me once the next day. And then never again.

To Kalaj, when I told him what Allison had said, hers was all corporate ersatz-speak. But it was, and I knew it even then, the most honorable and most tactful behavior I’d witnessed in any woman in my life. She’d been candid and bold from start to finish. She knew what she wanted. I didn’t even know how to want, let alone what I wanted. I admired her.

As we said good night that evening, I caught myself already wishing she’d never call me the next day. I didn’t want to have the one-on-one postmortem I knew awaited us tomorrow. If to avoid that call I’d have to lose her to a fatal car accident on her way back to her parents’ house that night, so be it. I was ashamed of myself. But shame was just a metaphor, a word, nothing. In the large exchange house of the soul, it was another bankrupt word that didn’t help me get any closer to what I was feeling.

On my way to the fourth floor that night, my heart almost sank: I remembered that Kalaj would be upstairs. I caught myself making the same wish for him as well. If only they’d deport him tonight so that I wouldn’t have to explain why I wanted him out of my life. And if he and Allison were to crash into each other tonight, so much the better.

Kalaj was not upstairs. I felt for him as I pictured him cramming for his first day of teaching. I felt for Allison too, weeping, or perhaps not, as she drove all the way back to Newton tonight. And for her parents, rich and self-satisfied as they were, I felt for them too; they worried over their daughter’s crush on a man who kept ducking and slipping and leading people on like a fish who nips but never bites.

7

I WAS NOT READY FOR THE COLD WEATHER OF LATE
fall in Cambridge. Usually I welcomed that time of year, with its early twilight and the look of bare trees against the sky and the lull that hovered over Cambridge past seven in the evening. But the late summer had been so intense that I was reluctant to see it go. Kalaj, however, fell in love with the colder weather. He put on a heavier jacket, wore a gray scarf around his neck, and would frequently walk with his hands dug deep in his coat pockets. This would be his first winter in Cambridge, and the prospect thrilled him.

In the darkening days before Thanksgiving, Kalaj would come over to consult my dictionaries and correct sheets of homework, staying up till two in the morning. It made him feel as though he too were a graduate student and that we were roommates living it out in some sort of American Bohemia. He took whatever extra jobs he could find to tide him over. Money was always scarce. But somehow we always managed, and there were days when, by one miracle or another, we could always arrange to head out to the North End and bring back food to organize a few intimate dinners with friends. When we felt we had more women than men and needed an extra male, we’d always say, by way of a joke, why not invite Count? Someone always ended up making a joke about Count Dracula and his two missing teeth.