was already sitting in the seat next to his. He looked about him uneasily, slightly at a loss, then headed back to the shore, and, with his back to us, as he stared into the quiet expanse of water, started to pee. He took his time, but the idea of someone pissing so irreverently into Thoreau’s hallowed pond seemed too comical not to be put into its historical context. So when he returned to the car I explained to them the importance of Walden Pond in American literature. They all listened, attentively. “And I who simply needed to go,” he finally said after mulling the matter a while and bursting out in loud guffaws, as we all joined in, the children included, all of us breaking into song as we rode back to Cambridge, swearing we should do this again in a few days.
I was the first they dropped by car, just in time to take a very quick shower and head to Lowell House on foot. All through cocktails, though, I had one thought in mind: I wanted the day to start all over again. Just as I wanted it never to end. If I did not know in whose camp I belonged—with Lowell House or with Kalaj—what I did not mind was oscillating between the two, with one foot in each, because I belonged to both, and therefore to neither—like having a home without belonging to it. Like staring out the window of my twenty-four-hour deli early in the morning after spending the night at the infirmary and feeling a rush of love, loathing, and bile.
After the cocktail reception, I ducked dinner and found my way to Café Algiers, then to Casablanca, then to the Harvest. But Kalaj was nowhere. When I asked the waiters and bartenders, they said they hadn’t seen him. Suddenly I felt something fierce. Why did it take so long to admit why I’d come looking for him? I wanted to find all three of them, him, Léonie, and Ekaterina. And if I didn’t find the three of them, I wanted Léonie to tell me where to find Ekaterina. And if Léonie was nowhere, I wanted to find Ekaterina sitting alone. If only I had skipped the Master’s Tea and the cocktails immediately following. Perhaps it was the three sherries on an empty stomach speaking, perhaps it was too much sun, or perhaps it was just that we hadn’t had a real moment together except while swimming, and tonight it seemed there wasn’t going to be a similar moment again. And yet I was sure that something had happened when we were in the water together, from the way she’d been looking at me while drying herself, knowing I couldn’t keep my eyes off. I wasn’t making it up, and maybe this is why I couldn’t let go of that fleeting something between us, because I couldn’t quite put my finger on it or know when precisely it had happened. And then it hit me: the sheer obvious simplicity of it. I should have seized my moment then. Or asked for her phone number when we were in the car together. So what if Kalaj might guess why. This was the first thing Kalaj assumed about every man and woman on the planet. And if Léonie knew, what of it? I was there when she met Kalaj, and he had asked for her number in front of me—it was the kind of thing you asked without thinking. Had I not asked because I didn’t want to seem interested, or didn’t want to ask in my usually flustered way and look more flustered yet if she hesitated?
I tried one more place. But no one was there either. I headed home by way of Berkeley Street, passing by all those patrician houses, thinking now of the nectarine Kalaj had bit into and said he liked.
I could just imagine Kalaj speaking to her about me. “Of course you should call him. Better yet, go to his house,” he would have said. “When?” “When? What a question. Tonight. Now. His door is literally always open.” I could just hear him speaking to her while driving her home and shouting at his windshield. Maintenant, aujourd’hui, ce soir! Would I have gone and waited outside of her employer’s house on Highland Avenue?
“My instincts are intact,” he had once said, meaning that mine were totally warped, tarnished, compromised. “Intact,” he had said on the night he took me to see his