Harvard Square A Novel - By Andre Aciman Page 0,79

Chlamydia.

“Not—” I started.

“No, from me,” she said.

“Does that mean I have it too, now?”

“Yes.” The good news is that her parents loved me. They thought I was funny. They loved the way I’d complained there were no fish knives at Maison Robert. It was typical of them to have noticed this.

Later that afternoon, one or two students straggled into my room, then a few teaching fellows, colleagues. Professor Lloyd-Greville dropped in to say hello. He too, apparently, had heard. Then my entire sophomore tutorial. There were about sixteen of us in the room, the hospital staff came and complained there was too much noise and that no one was allowed to smoke.

“But I smoke,” I protested.

“Well, you can, but no one else can. And, by the way, you shouldn’t either.”

Mrs. Lloyd-Greville showed up with a tiny pot of verbena from her garden and a box of chocolates. “They’re not for you, of course, but for your guests.” It was a double-decker box with a transparent parchment sheet placed above the chocolates indicating the intricate ingredients of the equally intricate assortment. The box was being passed around the crowded room when the unthinkable finally occurred. Kalaj walked into the room, bearing three porno magazines. I wanted to disappear under my bed covers. By eight-thirty, long after official visiting hours were over, I heard the loud voice of a woman. It was Zeinab, who had heard the news through the grapevine on Harvard Square. Then, minutes later, Abdul Majib, the old Iraqi kitchen attendant from the Lowell House kitchen, decided to make an appearance as well.

So here I was in bed, trapped and helpless, in a universe where all my clever partitions had totally collapsed.

Kalaj and Allison, my students, the department head, Cherbakoff, who came by on cat’s paws, then Zeinab the waitress, my colleagues, everyone, careerists and lowlifes, were thrown together as in a Fellini movie or a clambake on Cape Cod.

I knew that, with the exception of those in the room who’d had to recobble their lives and reinvent themselves to live in the States, very few would understand that no human being is one thing and one thing only, that each one of us has as many facets as there are people we know. Would it upset Allison to discover that the person I was with Zeinab couldn’t ever be who I was with her, and that this was my unspoken reason for keeping Kalaj away from her—because I showed him far more facets than the one or two I felt laid-back enough to share with her?

I could tell Allison seemed ill at ease. She sat on a chair in a corner, silent and remote, waiting for everyone to leave, not sure whether she should be my student or my girlfriend. Kalaj, who must have originally assumed I’d be alone, leaned against one of the walls with his camouflage jacket, his beret, his gunner’s scowl, and the three porno magazines rolled into the shape of a rain stick picked up on some guerrilla expedition in the Amazonian hinterland. If you didn’t know, you’d think he was a foreigner on some Third World scholarship who’d spent all-nighters working in a soup kitchen.

He had already put one of my students in his place by saying that the Marquis de Sade disgusted him. With another he insisted that all American writers were no better than rock ’n’ roll con artists, including those he hadn’t read and wasn’t likely to start now, ending his after-hours, sotto voce shoot-out-with-silencer by reminding everyone in the room, including the nurse who came to remove my tray, that hospitals, like courthouses—including doctors and lawyers—were put on this planet to beat down your soul till it was flattened into toilet paper—and of souls, ladies and gentlemen, we were each given one only, and it had to be returned, when we were well and done with it, intact and as good as new for the next person. As Nostradamus says— And he began quoting quatrains.

In the space of five minutes, after an initial period during which he had intrigued and charmed all those in the room, he eventually managed to scare everyone away. “Who was that crackpot?” someone asked weeks later.

EVERYTHING I FEARED since school had started was beginning to happen. From a traveling companion picked up in an oasis during my lonely summer days in Cambridge, Kalaj had become a deadweight that was impossible to shake off. After my release from hospital, there was nowhere to go in