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?”
“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