warmed up to, but their emotional inflection, their underlayers, their voice, my voice, the voice of so many who had spoken French to me in childhood and whose wings now hovered over every word I spoke, listening in and barging into my speech in not unwelcome ways. Kalaj had met the two women there, at Café Algiers: the cigarette trick, the forlorn expat trying to make a comeback, the exotic whitewashed town on the Mediterranean, south of Pantelleria. She had never met Sheila before; she’d been sitting at one table, Sheila at another, and in between had sat Kalaj. All he’d done was to rapprocher the two.
Not knowing where else to go, I took her downstairs to Césarion’s for happy hour. She preferred herbal tea to cheap wine. She didn’t touch Buffalo wings—assembly-line food for the indigent, she called it.
“Rich girl from Iran?” I hazarded.
She laughed. “Very rich girl from Iran.”
There was silence for a while.
“Do you have many friends in Cambridge?” she asked, clearly meaning to change the drift of our conversation.
“No, mostly graduate students,” I replied.
She too was a graduate student, she said, though she could easily have passed for a young professor. She had arrived from Iran in July, far too early before the start of classes.
“First time in America?” I asked, hoping to prove useful in helping her navigate her first steps in Cambridge.
“No, been here many, many times,” she answered, as if she couldn’t help but underscore what had initially seemed a flippant, self-mocking very rich girl from Iran.
Her last name was Ansari.
I quoted a few lines from the Persian poet by the same name.
“Yes, yes, everyone quotes the very same verses,” she said, as though asking me to come up with a better one.
Like a croupier she had, with a quick sleight of her roulette-table rake, managed to clean up all my chips. I stared at her blankly. Her frank and dauntless gaze seemed to say: No more chips, huh?
“Might as well have dinner together,” she said, as we loitered outside of Césarion. “I don’t expect we’ll be seeing more of Sheila or Kalaj this evening.”
I suggested we have a quick bite at Anyochka’s. Quick bite was my lingo for cheap eats. With Kalaj it couldn’t possibly have meant anything else. With her, quick bite bordered on churlish haste. “What’s the rush?” she asked. I explained: Cervantes, four hours; Scarron, one; Sorel, another one; Bandello, God knows. I told her about my exams.
“When are you planning to take them?” she asked.
“Mid-January.”
“But that’s in just a few months.” Meaning: Better get cracking.
No kidding, I wanted to reply.
I admired women with the ready wit to say things as they are. I told her so. Her answer was no less amazing. “Cher ami, I live in the hic et nunc, the here and now,” she said. I wanted to tell her that I, on the other hand, inhabited the iam non and the nondum, the no more and the not yet, but then I thought it better to leave this for some other time. Not the right time for Saint Augustine. I asked if she had any other ideas about where to eat. She didn’t. Maybe it would have to be a quick bite, then, she jibed. All I remember her saying during our short dinner together was “Let me warn you about one thing, though,” which she had said while removing the very thin slices of Havarti cheese from her sandwich with her thumb and index finger. She didn’t like superfluous cheese in her sandwich, she said, as she tried to separate the cheese from the lettuce, all the while trying to push back the one or two slices of Virginia ham she had unintentionally pulled out in her effort to remove the cheese. Sandwiches were not her thing either. “Let me say it now.” I could tell that this might be an awkward admission, not so much for her, as for me. “Tell me,” I said. She seemed to ponder it a while longer. “Je suis plus grande que toi, I am older than you are.” I reassured her as best I could. But her total candor caught me off guard. I thought I’d been maneuvering the situation deftly enough—but this was too fast, too upfront, too hic et nunc. More disconcerting yet was the tone with which she seemed to be taking back an offer I hadn’t even realized was on the table. Had she spoken an undisclosed yes before I’d even asked? Had