one at hand, and the only word that said everything despite my mistrust of words. Why had I left her? Because I was living someone else’s life, not mine. Because I wanted my life back, even if I didn’t know what my life was or what I even wanted it to be. Because I wanted to be alone, or not with her, or with someone else, or, better yet, with no one at all. Because I wanted to find something of me in others only to realize that others were never going to be like me and ultimately had to be unclasped, thrown out, exploded, because estrangement is branded on the soul, because love itself was foreign to me, and in its place sat resentment and bile. Why had I even started with her? To be with someone instead of no one? To be like him? Or was I already, had always been like him, but in so different a guise that it was just as easy to think us poles apart? The Arab and the Jew, the ill-tempered and the mild-mannered, the irascible and the forbearing, the this and the that! And yet, we came from the same mold, choked in the same way, and in the same way, lashed back, then ran away.
He listened to my musings as though I were reciting a delirious poem. Then he shook his head and came back to his favorite word. “It just never took. The gluten never stuck.” The onetime baker in him had spoken.
In the quiet car with its twenty-four-hour music playing en sourdine, I thought about his four words. I liked them. As if love affairs were puddings and soufflés; sometimes things took, sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they just curdled, and there was no one to blame and nothing you could do.
A second later, I realized that the same could be said about everything else in my life, and his as well. Nothing seemed to take. Even our friendship . . .
“Do you really like being alone?” he asked.
“No.”
He understood this too. No need for words. He dropped me in front of my building.
I offered to make coffee if he wanted, but he said he might as well keep driving his cab until sunup today. He hadn’t yet gone to bed when I’d called. He seldom slept. Besides, it was early on a Sunday morning, and people were still coming out of clubs and after-hours bars. Plenty of money to be made on a Sunday morning.
As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere—ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends—even ordinary friends we didn’t have, or couldn’t keep.
We were not outcasts. We were untouchables. No one knew it except us. Harvard helped me hide it so well that entire weeks, sometimes months went by without my getting a whiff of it even once, let alone allowing someone else to glimpse it. Kalaj hid it in plain sight: by shouting it to everyone he ran into.
When I opened the door to my apartment, I realized that I had scarcely seen my home at night in a very long time. It felt unfamiliar. I was more at home with Niloufar off Putnam Avenue than here. And yet neither place felt right. No wonder Kalaj preferred to drive about all day and hang out in a Cambridge dive than face his own bedroom. I fell asleep with my clothes on and the smell of Niloufar’s bed mingling with my own.
THAT SUNDAY WAS probably the worst day of my life. I had no food in the house. I was exhausted, and I had twenty-four hours to master Chaucer before my appointment with Lloyd-Greville. The thought of taking even twenty minutes to go out to find something to eat was out of the question.
Later in the morning the phone began to ring. I knew who it was and decided not to pick up. I could hear my phone ringing all the way up on the roof terrace, where I planned to spend a few hours before hunkering down to type up my notes on Chaucer. I was to meet Lloyd-Greville the next day at 10:00 a.m. By staying upstairs, though, I knew I was also hiding. Cruel, heartless, cowardly. Linda,