neighboring buildings all around us, we watched Cambridge gleam in the misty summer night just before sunrise. It was her idea to go upstairs naked. I loved it. We came back downstairs and made love again.
SHE WAS ALREADY gone by the time I woke up the next morning. I put on some clothes and knocked at her door. No one answered. She must have already gone to the library.
The smell of her body was still on my sheets, on my skin. I didn’t want it to go away. I would shower later, but not now. Without a bite or a cup of coffee, I headed straight for Café Algiers.
Along the way down Brattle Street, I kept wondering why I was rushing. Was I gloating? Had I already forgotten her and was I thinking only of telling Kalaj about her? Why had she left so quietly? I had no answers.
Before I could begin to fathom the joy I was feeling, I was struck by an unsettling pang of horror. Had we made love because I had come with anger in my heart, because sex feeds on anger, the way it feeds on beauty, love, luck, laughter, spite, sorrow, desire, courage, and despair, because sex evens the playing field, because sex is how we reach out to the world when we have nothing else to offer the world? Is this what had happened—because of the Lloyd-Grevilles’ dismissal, because Kalaj had suddenly put distance between us when I was just about ready to embrace him as a fellow drifter? Or had I borrowed his lust, caught his lust as one catches a fever?
I had no answers there either.
At the café, Kalaj was already sitting at his old table with a cinquante-quatre, his usual objects strewn around his table, his hair still wet. He was rolling up a cigarette, telling Zeinab, who was standing next to him, that asparagus was indeed a renal cleanser—a diuretic and a detoxifier. It increased urination, which helped flush out toxins from your kidneys.
They always spoke in French.
“And I who thought the smell was the result of an internal infection,” she said, holding her wooden tray with one hand.
“No, the smell is evidence that the body is cleaning itself. As the body breaks down asparagus, it releases an amino acid called asparagine which is easily detected in the urine of people who’ve eaten asparagus.”
She was filled with admiration. “Do you know everything, Kalaj?”
“I’m an encyclopedia of bunk.”
She smiled when she heard him put himself down, perhaps her way of sympathizing with him for thinking so poorly of himself but also of showing she was not taken in by any of it. She probably saw it as an intimate admission of personal foibles he wasn’t likely to disclose to anyone else. “I don’t like it when you speak about yourself this way. Compared to you, I am so ignorant.”
“Yes, Zeinab, you are.” He sat motionless as he began to inhale. “But you’re like my sister, and I’ll kill the first man who lays a finger on you.”
“I’m not your sister and I don’t need you to kill anyone for me, Kalaj, I can take care of myself.”
“You’re a child.”
“I’m no child, and I can prove it to you in a second, and you know exactly what I mean, even if you’re pretending not to.”
“Don’t speak like that.”
He was, to my complete surprise, blushing.
“It’s as you want, Kalaj. I know how to wait,” she said, heedless of my presence as I stood there on my feet transfixed between them. “All I need is a sign, and I am yours for as long as you want me. When you’re tired, you’ll let me know. Sans obligations.”
“Speak to him, not to me,” Kalaj pointed at me, which was his way of greeting me that day.
“Him? He doesn’t even look at me. At least you do. As I said: for as long as you want and not a minute more.”
With that she was gone behind the counter.
“Another one,” said Kalaj when she was out of earshot. Using his right hand, he pulled up a chair with the effortless grace of a defense attorney preparing a chair for a prisoner who’s just walked into the visitation room.
“So tell me.”
“You tell me first.”
We exchanged stories.
He had been right about the woman with bathroom problems. “She has bathroom problems . . . during orgasm.” He laughed. Even Zeinab, who was arranging small pastries on a large platter behind the counter, snickered on hearing the story. “You men