to allow myself to get aroused by the situation.
She must have taken a good look at my bookcase and, before I’d even started the water running, shouted that she was amazed I had the complete first edition of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Had she read the whole thing yet? I shouted back behind my closed door, feeling that if she didn’t feel uncomfortable shouting back and forth with someone she scarcely knew while he was in the bathroom, who was I to quibble.
“Yes,” she replied.
Then came total silence. Was she going to undress and step into the shower with me? The thought gave me a sudden thrill that was difficult to restrain but that part of me did not wish to temper. Would I come out of the shower and expose myself? Or would she have already snuggled in my bed, naked under my sheets, her clothes dropped on the floor along the way to my bedroom as a preamble to what lay in store for us? I didn’t want to say or shout anything for fear she’d make out the arousal in my voice. All I knew was that in Kalaj’s book of rules, if I was as aroused as this, so was she.
When I came out of the shower in my bathrobe, she was lying flat on her stomach on my living room floor leafing through my diary.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Reading,” she said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Where did you find it?”
“In your bedroom, on your desk.”
I was speechless. So she’d gone into my bedroom, seen my totally unmade bed, rifled through my things, found the diary, what else?
“Do you really, really mind?”
I thought about it.
“No, I don’t mind really, really mind,” I said. “Actually, it thrills me.”
“Thrills you? How, actually?” she said, echoing my own word.
I had no idea where this was going—was she a total ingénue or did she know exactly what she was doing, which could be exactly why she showed up in the first place.
They always know. I could just hear Kalaj’s voice.
“I’m going to get dressed and make coffee.”
“Why don’t you do that.”
I’d never in my life uttered a sentence like “Why don’t you do that” to mean yes. Who knows what these words implied or meant in her world.
Naturally, I banged the espresso filter against the garbage container as loud as I could, left the door wide open for the time it took to boil the milk, then closed the door again.
Allison had come to talk to me about her senior thesis on Proust after I had encouraged her to look me up. She was working with another tutor at Adams House, she said, but was intrigued by our brief conversation outside my office. Someone else had mentioned my name to her. She wished she had known earlier, but it was too late to change tutors, she said. Now, as we both stood in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew, she gave no sense of being interested in discussing Proust. She had brought my diary into the kitchen and continued poring over it as we stood silently by the gas range. For someone reading someone else’s diary without asking permission to do so, she didn’t seem in the slightest bit ill at ease. What did ersatz mean? she asked. I told her. Who was K. then? I explained, without giving away the seamy underside. What about Walden Pond? Skip that part, I said. “So tell me about N. You wrote about her less than three weeks ago,” she said.
This was not placing penny bets. She was putting weightier, Monte Carlo chips on the table.
“You really want to know about N.?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“Why do you want to know?”
She hesitated.
“Maybe I’m trying to figure you out.”
I admired her. I’ve always like such disarming candor in a woman. Or was this something you said to someone you’d just met, no hidden agenda, nothing implied—not a penny chip at all?
“Yes, but why?” I asked.
Maybe I was ducking, or maybe it was my turn to place a bigger bet than I was used to. Maybe I wanted to make certain that heavier bets were not untimely.
“You know why,” she said, “you know exactly why.” And, changing the subject right away, she added, “I want you to read me this paragraph here so that I can hear it in your voice.”
“My voice?”
“Just read.”
It was a description of how Niloufar and I had kept staring