day when the two were students in Paris.
“Remember So-and-so, and then such-and-such?”
“Say no more,” replied his guest, “but let me tell you”—turning to me—“you guys have it easy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Lloyd-Greville, twitching her features in a coded expression that mimed a look of subtle solidarity with yet another wink-wink. “Are you still going to write on La Princesse de Clèves one day?” she asked with a peevish little grin implying, See, I haven’t forgotten. I nodded.
“Oh, La Princesse de Clèves, it’s been ages,” said Lloyd-Greville’s guest.
“I’ve just reread it,” added Lloyd-Greville’s wife. Trying to earn points, was she? A moment of silence passed over all five of us.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” asked the professor, almost standing up to make room for an extra chair in case I was going to be gauche enough to accept. I hesitated, and was practically tempted to give the matter a second thought, when I caught Mrs. Lloyd-Greville slicing a corner off her artichoke heart, as though she had totally failed to notice her husband’s gesture and was already assuming I would turn down the offer and let the four of them return to their meal without further intrusion from this graduate student who had shown up at the wrong time and wasn’t going away fast enough. I apologized before declining—I was with friends in the small bar. “Ah, youth!” they said in a chorus. Then, with one or two nodding motions meant to signify something I wasn’t quick enough to catch, they returned to their oversized appetizers. A moment of silence passed. Then it hit me: I was being congédié, dismissed. Very cordially, the little clan had bolted its door in my face.
I had never even wished to join them but I suddenly understood why people burst with road rage, brandished Kalashnikovs, and mowed down real or imagined foes, it didn’t matter which, because no one was your friend here, and bunk was forever closing in on you, no matter where you turned. Bunk, their foodie palates; bunk, La Princesse de Clèves; bunk, their venomous little white canines darting from behind their puckered smiles as they nodded goodbye and savored their fried Carciofi alla giudía that would turn cold if they didn’t gobble them up right away while I stood there trying to negotiate a gracious exit. Why was I being reminded that I was a hopeless, feckless, unkempt, unwelcome, and thoroughly unfit waif on this niggardly strip of earth called Cambridge, Mass.?
I would never forgive them, never forgive myself. Why ask me to their table, why overstay my welcome, why couldn’t I read the signs? Kalaj would surely have known how to read the signs.
I was, it occurred to me, no different from Kalaj. Among Arabs he was a Berber, among Frenchmen an Arab, among his own a nothing, as I’d been a Jew among Arabs, an Egyptian among strangers, and now an alien among WASPs, the clueless janitor trying out for the polo team.
I hated everything this side of the Atlantic.
Come to think of it, I hated everything that side of it as well.
I hated America, I hated Europe, I hated North Africa, and right now I hated France, because the France everyone else worshipped in Cambridge wasn’t the imagined douce France I’d grown up loving in Egypt, a France of Babar and Tintin and illustrated old history books that always started with Caesar’s ruthless siege of Alessia and ended with the heroic battle of Bir Hakim between French legionnaires in North Africa and the German Reich—a France even the French no longer cared for, much less remembered. France had become jumbo-ersatz as well, a gourmet haven for puckered lips and highborn gluttons.
A decade ago, I began thinking, none of them were good enough to step into my parents’ service entrance; now they were snubbing me with a ghetto dish my grandmother wouldn’t be caught dead serving to her guests. Artichokes à la Jewish!
The thought might have brought a smirk to my face, but it couldn’t soothe me. I might as well have been barking jumbo-ersatz at the poor artichokes themselves and their distant cousins the nectarines, before grabbing each choke on their plates and forcibly stuffing them into Mrs. Lloyd-Greville’s leering kisser and down her dewlapped bill.
I knew I was beginning to sound like Kalaj. I liked sounding like him, I wanted to sound like him. I liked how it felt. He was the voice of my anger, my rage, a reminder that I hadn’t