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.
At the dinner table at the Harvest, the professor and his friend made perfunctory pleasantries on the subject of comprehensive exams and dissertations and recalled how dreadful and humiliating these public spectacles used to be in their