flannel suit with a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. I recognized the Charvet tie. He saw me admiring it. “Courtesy Goodwill,” he said. But the suit was French. As was the shirt. Either he already owned the suit, the shirt, the black shoes, or he’d gone out and bought them in Boston for the occasion. Che Guevara wearing a bespoke suit. Kalaj had shaved off his mustache, combed his hair with a touch of brilliantine and looked at least seven years younger. He made me think of someone who was going to the opera for the first time. “I’ll call you when it’s all over. Maybe you’ll meet me for a drink at Maxim’s. We’ll find new women.”
I watched him leave.
The munificent dinner sold him on the wonders of America. He never ate pork, but the sight of the juicy roasted ham with pineapple slices and cloves, coupled with the most oversized shrimps he’d ever seen elsewhere in his life, were simply too much for him to resist. And the best part of it was that every time he thought it was time for dessert, something would always remind him that this was only the beginning. He ate things he had never seen alive and couldn’t recognize if you whispered their name to him, but they tasted of heaven, and there was so much of it that part of him kept looking for a paper bag in which to put extras either for me, or for his friends at Café Algiers, or to remember the evening by. The American paradise was an inexhaustible PX of all that was ever jumbo and ersatz on earth. He loved it. “When we have a party we must cook roasted ham with pineapples.”
Then he mused a little while.
“I must tell you, all evening long I was thinking of one thing and one thing only.”
“What?”
“You must marry Allison.”
“Why?”
“If you won’t do it for you, do it for your children, do it for those you love, and do it for me too, because this country is ersatz-fantastic.”
AS SOON AS he was hooked, he became weak. Until then, he had flaunted his hatred of America because it dignified his pariah status. He could survey the New World from a quarantined balcony, but he couldn’t get near, much less touch it, so he shouted curses at it. But being invited in, if only to take a tiny peek for an evening, made an instant convert of him. In his heart of hearts, I am sure, he couldn’t wait to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I asked him what did it—the opulence, the abundance, the sheer self-satisfaction of the rich? “Actually,” he said, “it was the ham. And maybe the fact that their red wines put to shame our measly un dollar vingt-deux.”
He began to like his students and to have lunch at some of the houses that were willing to offer him a free meal if he sat with students and chatted in French with them. He discovered the wonders of Harvard’s French Tables where students gathered for dinner in smaller dining rooms where only French was spoken and for which he was asked to purchase the wines and cheeses every week. With students, he never spoke about politics or women. Instead he spoke about computer syntax. They all listened with rapt faces that reminded me of how his lawyer had gawked at him on hearing him list all the heavyweight champions. But after the famous dinner party, after his first and only football game, after all those eager students who had never known a man like him before and who’d timidly step into Café Algiers to meet him during his office hours and sip a Turkish coffee instead of conjugate verbs, his resistance began to flag. Even when he was allowed to drive his cab again, he continued to wake up earlier than usual to teach his eight o’clock class. Sometimes he worried. “One Friday night one of my students will leave an after-hours club, hail a cab, and it will be mine. What do I tell them then?”
“You tell them the truth.”
“Do you tell them the truth?” he asked. I was going to say that I seldom did. Instead, I suggested he dodge the subject altogether and say that there is little he loved more than listening to jazz en sourdine on Storrow Drive.
Harvard sucked him in during the fall semester. His crowning moment came when he was invited to two Thanksgiving dinners,