to take the train. “Try to find me a job with all those rich contacts of yours,” he had said. “I’ll be their driver, cook, bodyguard, pimp. Anything.”
All I kept thinking for the remainder of the evening was: Now he has complete access to my apartment, has my ID card, and even teaches where I teach. I’d never felt so invaded or taken over before. I hated the feeling. It was as if my double were squeezing me out. Why had I been so weak? And why was I thinking like a tightfisted, skinflint Jew? The Jew who likes his little things in their little place, who wants what people borrow instantly returned, who doesn’t open his doors too wide for fear strangers might storm in and never leave, the Jew who doesn’t want others to open their heart, fearing he might have to open his, who won’t venture in though God knows he’s been invited in so many tacit ways. Or had I become an American now: my space, your space, and lots of spaces in between?
I hated myself both for not wanting to let him into my apartment and for surrendering without a struggle—for not refusing to go to the cocktail party at Allison’s parents, and for taking the long train ride to get there, for saying I wasn’t sure I would go and for begrudging having to go, for not wanting to marry Allison and for letting her think I wanted nothing more, for not wanting to be a student of literature, for not wanting to be in Cambridge, or in the United States, all the while continuing in a rut that felt, and indeed was from the very start, the best that life had to offer.
As I watched my own reflection on the glass panels of the Green Line car heading out to Newton that evening, I kept asking myself: Was this really me, and were these really my features standing out on this totally alien Boston scenery? Who was I? How many masks could I be wearing at the same time? Who was I when I wasn’t looking? Was I simply a being without shape, ready to be molded into what everyone wanted me to be? Or by acquiescing so easily was I simply making up in advance for the treachery I invariably brought to those who trusted the face?
I looked at my face against this strange Boston background and saw a lawyer who overtips the waiter at lunch because he knows he’ll be vicious in court that afternoon. I saw a husband who buys his wife expensive jewelry—not after cheating on her, but before finding the person who’ll help destroy his marriage. I saw a priest who absolves everyone because he has lost his faith and no longer trusts in his vocation.
That evening, Allison wanted to drive me back home. I let her, though I would have preferred the train. There was a moment at the party when I wished to undo my tie if only to let fresh air into my system, but also to show I had less in common with the guests than with the waiters, who were all wearing open-collar, buttoned-down white dress shirts. Suddenly, I wanted to be alone and watch Kalaj roll a cigarette as he made fun of this entire party with its jumbo gravity hanging from its jumbo chandeliers, the jumbo levity of the frou-froued guests who kissy-kissed and huggy-hugged with their jumbo show of plenitude and ease. Amerloques, I could hear him say. “Take this one,” he’d point to a woman in the crowd. “Skin like burlap. Three generations ago she was scrounging turnips out of the dead land. And as for these two,” he’d snicker, “they may have come on board a sailboat, but look under, and you’ll find the coarseness of a sea dog and the larceny of stevedores.”
I wanted to sit by myself in the empty train car and let the hypnotic rhythm of the wheels dull the fire within me. All these wealthy people who simply belonged. Their large cars. Their large mansions. Their startled large eyes when they repeated my name. Their professed love for the Mediterranean which they couldn’t, if you gave them ten lifetimes, begin to understand, because what they always liked instead was the cold Atlantic and the limitless Pacific, because Kalaj was right, this was another world, and this was another tongue, and these people were a different order of beings, just as their women were