Harvard Square (10 page)

“Yes, I do,” she said.

Santé!

And with this both he and I put our worries aside. He forgot all about his green card, I about my exams, my Ph.D., everything. I liked forgetting my cares. Thanks to wine, you didn’t forget them, they just stopped scaring you for a while.

IN NO TIME
we reinvented France with the very little we had that evening. Bread, butter, three wedges of Brie,
croque monsieur
, a bowl of vichyssoise for her, a green salad to share, still more wine, dimmed café lights, laughter, French music in the background. Cambridge was just a detail.

Her name was Léonie Léonard. Kalaj couldn’t resist. But it’s a pleonasm. Yes, it was, she said shyly.
Pléonie Pléonasme
. Laughter, laughter. I told them that this wasn’t a pleonasm, that he was confusing a pleonasm with a tautology or, more plainly, with a redundancy. He looked at me with startled eyes and said, “Are you crazy, Professor?” We burst out laughing again.

Within minutes, we had her entire life story. He listened, posed leading questions, listened, joked, and on occasion, especially when he was laughing, reached out to touch her elbow, her wrist. He had picked up shrink talk from the women he’d met in Cambridge and understood that once a woman bares her soul there’s little else she won’t bare, the way he’d say that once a woman tells you she’s dreamed of you, you know what else she wants from you. It was just a matter of how you let her get there. He asked, she answered, he asked again, she answered, then asked, each essentially leading the other on, provided none went too fast and none folded. You were not allowed to pass. That was his rule. You had to remain in the game, at the table until everyone showed their cards. Getting bored, he once told me, was unthinkable. I interrupted their back-and-forth once or twice, and both times would have ruffled their seamless Mozart duet had either paid any attention. I had never seen someone turn
la drague
into a way of life. He desired women no more than anyone else, nor was he better-looking than other men. But without women he was nothing. He said so himself but never quite understood it. The important thing is that women did. He wanted women all the time. As soon as he saw a woman, a light flared in his eyes. He became excited, alert, grateful, sweet; he needed to touch, caress, kiss, bite. Women picked this up immediately. Just the way he stared at their skin, their knees, their feet screamed
If I don’t touch, I am as good as dead, I don’t exist.
He would stare at them straight in the eyes, brazenly, and then, eventually, let a quiver on his lips suggest a smile. He felt passion first, love much later, but interest always. Being so visibly and so boldly desired made women desire him back, which stirred his desire even further. In this as in other things, there was no ambiguity, no hesitation, no shame, no running for cover. The moral couldn’t have been simpler: if you desired someone badly enough, and desired them in the pit of your stomach, chances were they desired you no less. What you wore, who you were, what you looked like were altogether insignificant.

He was available to all women, yet he always ended up with the same type. They were between twenty-five and thirty-five, sometimes in their early forties. They had either been married or just gotten out of terrible relationships and were clearly ready to hurtle into one that promised no better. All were handicraft artists of one stripe or another, which, in his eyes, meant they came from money and were all in therapy. They were also nurses, paralegals, florists, musicians, hygienists, decorators, hairdressers, babysitters—one was even a closet organizer/consultant, another a dog walker. It did not matter what they did, what they said, who they were. He was after passion, because he had so much of it to give; after hope, because he had so little left; after sex, because it evened the playing field between him and everyone else, because sex was his shortcut, his conduit, his way of finding humanity in an otherwise cold and lusterless world, a vagrant’s last trump card to get back into the family of man. But if you asked him what he wanted most in life, he’d have said, without hesitating, “Green card.” It defined who he was at the time, how he lived, and ultimately what everything, including getting laid, was intended to procure him:
la green carte
. I had a
green carte
. Zeinab, the girl behind the counter at Café Algiers, had a
green carte
, so did her brother, another cabdriver. Kalaj simply looked on, like a Titan staring at the goings-on of lesser divinities from across the crags of exclusion. As for the women who’d have done anything for a man who spoke Kalashnikov when he was hot and could reach out and touch their wrist and outshrink the sharpest therapist on Harvard Square, they had probably never even seen a
green carte
in their lives. They were bona fide through and through. He, on the other hand, was Monsieur Pariah, an unharnessed thoroughbred with a touch of France, a few tricks from the East, and enough gumption in his fist to remind the parents of every freethinking, ill-behaved suburban daughter that she could have brought home someone far, far worse had she really meant to scare the neighbors.

After Anyochka’s, the three of us ambled back toward Café Algiers. She walked between us, leisurely and friendly. We’d stop for no reason, chat, pick up our pace, then stop again. At one point she even lingered before crossing the street as I went over some of the oddest aspects of English grammar. They laughed. I was laughing as well. I looked forward to iced coffee, the music, and the three of us talking about anything that came our way. But suddenly, Léonie said she had to leave.
“Bonne soirée,”
Kalaj said, as abruptly as she announced her departure.
Bonne soirée
was his version of a gallant, almost rakish send-off. It suggested that the evening was far from over yet and held out wonderful and unexpected prospects for you.

“She must have felt the heat,” I said, trying to show I too knew a few things about women.

“Maybe. My guess is that she is a live-in babysitter and that it’s time for her to relieve the parents. There’ll be another time.”

He ordered two
cinquante-quatres
for us.

“I give her at the most two to three days. She’ll show up.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Did she give you a
sign
?” I said, emphasizing the word in an attempt to be humorous and show how unfounded was his assumption.

“No sign at all. I just know.” He looked at me. “With all your Harvard education, you don’t understand women, do you?”

“Oh?” I said stressing yet more irony in my voice to suggest that I did understand them, and how.

“No you don’t. You’re too flustered, so you’re either too quiet or, my bet is, you rush things. In all things, and not just women, it’s how you manage time—how you sit and wait and let things happen.” Knowing how to distend the moment and linger—
savoir traîner
, he called it—dragging one’s feet and letting the things you want come to you. Luck behaved no differently.

I said nothing, felt chastened. Was I so easy to read?

Did he see into the future as well?

Sabatini, as it turned out, played a few Spanish songs on his guitar. He played too slowly. But people clapped, and some cheered. A typical Sunday crowd. Fringe people. I was fringe people too. Then a young teenager, Sabatini’s pupil, borrowed his master’s guitar and played a short piece. The applause couldn’t have been more enthusiastic, and before the clapping died down, the boy immediately launched into a dreamy rendition of Chopin’s
Andante spianato
. It was a moving, extended tribute to his teacher, and after the applause, Kalaj immediately walked up to the boy’s father and said, “You watch, one day, one day soon . . .” He couldn’t come up with the right words or finish his sentence, but the father accepted graciously.

Kalaj, I could tell, was shaken. Maybe it was the boy’s youth, or the son he never had, or never knew he had, or wished he had. Maybe it was just Chopin.

“Let’s hope he plays something else,” I said, trying to ease the tension on Kalaj’s face and allow him to stay without having to ask whether I minded.

“No. Enough classical music for one night.”

I knew what he was thinking: there were no women at Café Algiers that evening.

That night we ended at the Harvest, which was across the narrow passage connecting Brattle Street to Mount Auburn Street. Just some wine, we agreed. Poor man’s fare. It cost a bit more than a dollar twenty-two, but not much more. Kalaj rolled his cigarettes, which saved him a lot of money, because he was constantly smoking. From time to time, I’d glimpse a woman staring as he rolled a cigarette. He would keep rolling and rolling, seemingly unaware of everyone around him, and then suddenly, once it was rolled and he seemed happy with it, he’d whip out his finished cigarette, turn around, and hand it to the woman who’d been staring all along. It was a conversation piece. Everything was or became a conversation piece. You started with almost nothing, it didn’t matter what—Walden Pond, the weather, vichyssoise, anything—provided you started. If the other was interested, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t be, she’d raise you. Then, all you did was raise her again, always by a penny, never more. Never rush, never hesitate, never stop staring, and never fold. And be cheerful. Things, as he also liked to say, always led somewhere, most likely to a bedroom, but as long as you kept the pennies coming, they always took you by surprise, even when you knew where they were headed all along. One day in a very small café in Paris he had kept them coming. She was a rich magazine editor from Italy. They spoke about food, she loved food, she needed a cook, he knew how to cook . . . The rest, well, he’d already told everyone in Cambridge.

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.