pull over and speak to us, don’t let him be anywhere close, because it’d be just like him to turn up as I’m trying to look dapper at the Ritz-Carlton. I was ashamed of him. Ashamed of myself for being ashamed of him. Ashamed of being a snob. Ashamed of letting others see that what we had in common went far deeper than this surface thing called lousy cash flow. Ashamed that I wasn’t allowing myself to own up to how deeply I cared for him and had found it easier to think of us as transient, dirt-poor louts with a penchant for low-life café fellowship.
Tea at the Ritz-Carlton went swimmingly. The father tried to impress me with his knowledge of The Odyssey; I told him I had studied with Fitzgerald; he spoke of his years in the Middle East, I dropped all the right names. He listed the spots he loved in Paris; I told him of mine. It was a draw, but it brought us closer.
That evening we had dinner at Maison Robert, a stately French restaurant that suddenly resurrected a world I hadn’t stepped into in over a decade. Waiters, wines, luster, affluence. What did one do these days with a Ph.D., he asked? Well, one could always write or teach, I said. Then, sensing he wasn’t convinced, I reminded him that my father had become a wealthy businessman in Egypt even though all he’d ever wanted was to write books. Was I amenable to other professions as well—another career, perhaps? he asked, as he looked down, toying with the edge of his knife on the tablecloth. Absolutely, I replied, trying to sound at once earnest and casual and determined to keep an open mind.
Was he going to ask me about his daughter too? The man was too tactful for that. I never brought her up either, and the shrewd lover of The Odyssey must have read the message clearly enough. But he wasn’t going to let me off so lightly either. So he made subtle prods: about my plans, my future, my hobbies, trying best to steer clear of the stubborn if muzzled word intentions bouncing under the table like a leashed dog looking for his bone. I did not come to his rescue. Then came the heavy bream fish in some sort of buttery white sauce, served with Montrachet wine, then the chateaubriands with their sauce and the sautéed potatoes and haricots verts, accompanied by a delicious Pomerol, and at the very, very end, the tarte Tatin with a dollop of crème fraîche for each. Our dinner ended with Calvados.
Kalaj’s thundering advice, repeated every time I’d spoken to him about her these last few days, was never far. Marry her. Become rich. Buy me a fleet of taxis. I’ll make you a millionaire. Then, if you have no children and she bores you, dump her.
During dinner, while waiters tiptoed around us, I imagined that one of them was Kalaj, winking at me, whispering, Do it, just do it. The fleet of taxis. We’ll do the math later. How I longed to see him now and catch his complicit leer as he’d eye the jumbo-sized tarte Tatin they’d brought for us, immediately followed by Calvados. They like you, otherwise the interview would have stopped over tea at the Ritz-Carlton.
Father, mother, and daughter saw me to the cab that was to take me back to Cambridge. “When I was your age, my father wouldn’t give me a penny for the bus, let alone a taxi,” he said, passing me a twenty-dollar bill when his hand shook mine.
I was caught by surprise but genuinely refused the father’s money. He insisted. Finally, I relented. I remembered how a rich student had right away accepted a similar offer from me when caught without money at the ticket office of the Harvard Square Theater. Poor people refused because their dignity was already in tatters, the way an underling might refuse a tip, because it screams his poverty. Rich people accepted the money because it was not perceived as a gratuity, or charity, or a reflection on their station in life, but simply as a favor that comes with friendship. A poor person would make a point of returning the money right away. The rich man simply forgot.
I accepted, hoping he would mistake me for the second.
But because I was not, I stopped the taxi two minutes later, got out, and took the underground back to Cambridge.
At Café Algiers that night, I