Harvard Square (9 page)

“Where is your wife?” I asked.

“No idea.”

“Does she travel a lot?”

“I told you I have no idea. Don’t you understand when I speak?”

Rat-tat-tat
, but aimed at me this time. What was I even doing having dinner with this creep? I was about to explain my question.

“No need to apologize. I don’t give a damn. Well,” he changed his mind, “let me explain.”

Five minutes.

They met in an underground station in Boston. He had just missed the train to Park Square and, without thinking, had muttered a curse in French. You seem upset, the woman on the platform had said. I
am
upset. She thought he was speaking to her. No, he wasn’t. He was just cursing out loud. But one thing led to another. Things invariably did with him. Within days they were married. Soon after their wedding he filed his application for a green card.

What had made him come to the States?

“Let me explain.”

Four minutes.

And how did he come to be interested in computers?

“Well, you see—”

Four more minutes.

The tales were gnarled together and could take forever to sort out, but I listened because they had all the makings of a latter-day picaresque novel. After his French wife had abandoned him—she had kicked him out, actually—he befriended an Italian businesswoman who was staying in Paris and who had hired him as her personal chef. From cook he became her driver, then her social secretary, till he graduated to a more meaningful occupation and was invited to live with her in Milan while her husband was away. The husband returned, heard all he needed to hear, and threatened to come after Kalaj. That is when Kalaj believed it was time to flee, and through her contacts, ended up in, of all places, Harvard Square, to stay with her best friend, who was an Italian graduate student at Harvard and whom, it happened, I knew quite well and I liked. “Like her all you want,” was his reply. After about two weeks, the graduate student and her live-in boyfriend took Kalaj aside and informed him that perhaps he should start thinking of moving elsewhere.

Perhaps you should start thinking of moving elsewhere,
he mimicked, making fun of their couched language. He moved out that same afternoon. Better a park bench. Better the grimy floor in a soup kitchen. Better a public bathroom. They needed
space
!
Space
was a concept that was totally foreign to him—as though humans had suddenly become galactic mutants in need of huge magnetic shields. “Me, impose on people?—God forbid.” In fact, he had just been kicked out from his newer digs when he missed that underground train to Park Square. This time last year, he finally said, he had never even heard of Cambridge, much less of Harvard Square. Now he knew more than he’d ever wished. He and his
amerloque
wife had split up. Actually, she too had kicked him out. She was a lay analyst. Shelley. Very rich parents. Jewish.

“Probably didn’t like having an Arab taxi driver for a husband,” I threw in.

“No, that wasn’t it.”

“She didn’t know French and you didn’t know English well enough?”

“No, not that either.”

“What, then?”

Out poured yet another screed against American women. Did I know the one about the Arab necrophiliac? Yes, I did. He had told me the joke last week. Well, she was the dead woman in his bed. Even his left hand was more sensual. After sex, it was like leaving a motel room: you slammed the door shut, slipped your keys under the doormat, and headed for your car. You didn’t even bother switching the TV off.

Now she was divorcing him.

“At some point,” he went on, “I couldn’t do it with her any longer. I became numb. Like my friend the Algerian, whose ship doesn’t sail, and whose arrows won’t fly—you understand, right?—poor fellow. I didn’t want to ask him for his pills, but a friend told me that peanut butter helped a lot. So I downed so much peanut butter that the color of my skin began to change. But no waking my
Monsieur Zeb
. I was so worried. Because without him, you know, I am nothing, I have nothing. Because he’s all the gold I carry. But then I met someone else . . . and
bam!
I’m a Sputnik, a Kalashnikov, a Trans-Siberian locomotive with triple the horsepower of the mounted cavalry at the battle of Friedland, stiffer than oak and harder than marble and bigger than Zeinab’s broomstick.” He laughed. “Still, I do miss her sometimes. She was my wife, you know.”

“Here,” he said, producing a tiny pocket notebook. He removed the rubber band around the notebook and slipped it around his wrist. I had never seen his handwriting before. It was everything he wasn’t: neat, tentative, timid, the product of a frightened child in harsh, French, colonial schools where they taught you self-hatred for being who you were (if you were half French), for not being French (if you were an Arab), and for wishing to be French (if you were never going to be). The handwriting of someone who had never grown up, who’d had calligraphy beaten into him. It surprised me. “Read,” he said.

Dresser.

Turntable.

Television.

Striped ironing board.

A standing lamp to the left.

A night table to the right.

A tiny reading light clasped to the headboard.

She sleeps naked at night.

Cat snuggles on her bed.

The stench from the litter box.

Bathroom door never locks.

Toilet flushes twice.

Impossible to repair. Shower drips too.

I see the Charles. And the Longfellow Bridge.

Sometimes nothing because of the fog.

And I hear nothing. Sometimes an airplane.

No one sleeps in the adjacent room;

It used to be her mother’s once,

She died in her sleep.

They never emptied her closet,

The dresser and the turntable were hers too.

No one plays music in the house.

After all his put-downs and vile words about his current wife, he had written a poem for her in the style of Jacques Prévert. Was he trying to tell me he’d grown fond of her?

“It’s all true,” he finally said, taking back the notebook, slipping the rubber band around it, and putting the notebook back in his vest pocket.

I was tempted to say it felt very true to me as well. “Have you ever shown it to her?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

I must have looked totally baffled.

“I just wrote this because I didn’t want to forget what her apartment looked like.”

Because I didn’t want to forget
was the heart and soul of poetry. Had any poet been more candid about his craft?

I was speechless with admiration. This cabdriver was a minimalist poet. He not only trained a pair of fresh yet jaundiced eyes on the world around him, but he saw into the very heart of things simply by describing stray objects. The whole thing capped with the magic of two verses:
No one sleeps in the adjacent room
paralleled by
No one plays music in the house
. Leave it to a man born in North Africa to capture the hapless, gritty lives of local Cantabrigians.

“She claims I married her for a green card—”

“Well, did you?” I asked, expecting an outraged, heartwarming denial.

“Of course I did. You don’t think I married her for her good looks.”

“Then why did you write her a poem?”

“What poem?”

“This thing about the dresser, turntable, ironing board.”

His turn to look entirely nonplussed.

“What are you, stupid?” Baffled looks on both our faces. “Poem? Me? My lawyer gave me a list of questions they ask you at Immigration Services. They’re cunning people and they want to make sure you actually live together as husband and wife and that your marriage isn’t just a ploy to get a green card to stay in this country. So they ask you to describe the bedroom, the kind of pajamas she wears, where she keeps her diaphragm, if you fuck in the kitchen . . .”

Rat-tat-tat
.

“Me, write a poem . . . for her? You should see her face first.”

Right away, he mimicked her mouth by pulling his nether lip all the way down to expose the roots of his gums. “When she laughs with these gums of hers your penis runs for cover. When I kiss her all I can think of are dentists. As for oral sex—!” He shakes his shoulders and feigns a shiver. Once again he emits his loud, thunderous laugh.

“And yet she took away the only roof I had in this country. The only thing I own now is my cab. And my
zeb
. That’s it. I sew my own buttons like a woman and mend my own shirts like a fisherman, and I hate fish, and in my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.”

He was reaching for the trigger. Any moment now and a string of invectives would come shooting out of his mouth.

But soon a woman walked into Anyochka’s. She was svelte, beautiful, with lovely skin. “French,” he said. “French and Jewish.”

“How do you know,” I whispered.

“I know. Trust me!”

I told him to hush. “She’s looking at us.”

“All the better. She’s looking at us because she wants to speak to us.”

But he went on with his rant about his wife, her teeth, his teeth—“Your teeth aren’t so hot either,” he said, referring to my own. He heaved a sigh. “Pretty soon,” he threw in, “we’ll have to go back to listen to Sabatini, the guitarist who’s playing tonight at Café Algiers, because I love guitar music.”

There was something strained, staged, and velvety in the way he pronounced
Sabatini
. Declamation rippled in every syllable as his voice rose an octave. This, it suddenly occurred to me, was being said for the benefit of the woman who had just walked in. He was setting the scene. He didn’t look at her, but his thoughts and speech seemed aimed at no one else.

At some point, he could no longer stand the silence between our tables.

“You’re looking at us because I can tell you understand.”

“Yes, I do,” she said in French. She was blushing.

“We didn’t happen to say anything offensive, did we?”

“No.”

“We are staying here for dinner. It’s way too hot everywhere else.” She smiled back. “I think it’s
croque monsieurs
or cold soup today.”

“Cold soup sounds like a good idea,” she said, not even looking at the crinkled menu. The waitress came and took the order. There were no other customers except for us this evening. He looked at her, she looked back, then looked away.

“Unless you’re thinking of eating all by yourself or have other plans, would you like to join us?”

It turned out that she had no plans for dinner and was happy to join us.

He immediately shifted to the end of his side of the table. The next thing we knew we were sitting all three together. No one had told her Boston could grow this hot in the summer. She missed home. Toulouse, she answered. He missed home too, but it was much hotter there than here, though the sea helped. Obviously he was waiting for her to ask
where?
She did. Reluctantly, he named a tiny town in Tunisia, Sidi Bou Saïd, adding, the most beautiful whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria. Ever heard of it? No, never. There was a reason why most people had never heard of it. Why was that? she asked. The Tunisian Tourism Office was even more incompetent than the Massachusetts Tourism Office. She laughed. Why? Why? He asked rhetorically—because everyone told you about Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Walden Pond. But he still couldn’t understand who Walden Pond was or what role he played in the American Revolution. I noticed for the first time that her laughter was not simply convivial; she was laughing heartily, and Kalaj couldn’t have been happier.

The ice was broken. He told her his name, then told her mine. But she could call him Kalaj. How long had she been here? Six months. Same exact thing with me, he exclaimed, as though the coincidence was a prescient sign of something far too meaningful to be neglected. Everything she said meant a great deal in the Book of Fate. And was she happier here than in Toulouse? A long story, she replied. You? she asked. My story is surely far longer than yours; it has good people and some not very good people. Does yours have good people? he asked, obviously a leading question. I don’t know, she replied, maybe there are fewer good people than I thought. “Others can be cruel, and we too can be cruel. Life makes us behave unfairly, doesn’t it?” he said, to show that some people are big enough to take the blame and learn from their mistakes. She shrugged her shoulders, meaning she didn’t know, hadn’t decided, didn’t care to discuss. “But let me tell you one thing?” he said, and waited a few seconds before continuing with his sentence. She turned her face to him, waiting to hear what he had to say. “Amazing things still happen.”

“Oh?”

“Take tonight for example. I ran into my friend here but had no idea I was going to. We came here because it was boiling hot at Café Algiers. And yet, after dinner we’re headed back to Algiers to listen to Sabatini play the guitar. And in between this, that, and what else, we run into you.” Meaning:
Isn’t life full of miracles?
Kalaj ordered three glasses of wine. A silent look from him asked me if it was all right to order more wine, meaning he and I were splitting the bill. I nodded. But then I remembered and panicked. I immediately signaled as discreetly as possible:
Could you lend me ten dollars?
He read me loud and clear.
Pas de problème
came his immediate message. From under the table he handed me a crisp twenty-dollar bill. I signaled
tomorrow, I promise
. He signaled an exasperated
Please!!!
Meaning,
Not to worry
. We were all happy. The wine came, he took up the joke about Walden Pond and the Tunisian Tourism Office and Sidi Bou Saïd, then skipped back to Sabatini. “Let’s face it,” he added, “the man is no concert master with the guitar. But it’s Sunday, and this is only Cambridge, Cambridge is dead tonight, and I always like to make the best of things and end a week with friends and good cheer. Don’t you?”