he is married I have a suspicion he was crossing certain lines, if you know what I mean.”
You don’t say!
I tried to drop my jaw and put on a startled, disbelieving face.
To mend fences, I offered to teach Kalaj’s course until the department could find a replacement before the beginning of spring semester. And if a replacement wasn’t available, I’d be happy to teach his course the coming spring. “I’ve heard rumors his grammar wasn’t what I thought it was,” I said, hoping to seem a judicious and impartial observer who was not about to let friendship stand in the way of my loyalty to my department.
Fifth and final crow of the rooster.
“You’d be helping us tremendously,” said Lloyd-Greville.
“Still, a sad story.”
“Yes, very sad.”
He asked how I was coming along with my preparation for my forthcoming comprehensives. “Well.” I told him I’d finished reading a seventeenth-century author called Daniel Dyke.
Lloyd-Greville winced, then confided he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of a Daniel Dyke.
“A minor influence on La Rochefoucauld,” I said, as though it were the most obvious truth in the world. That kept him quiet.
To Kalaj I lied no less than I’d lied to Lloyd-Greville. I told him I had tried my very best to explain to the administration how eager he was to continue and how much his students liked him, but there was a quota of graduate students who had to teach, and the preference always went to those who were studying at Harvard—nothing personal.
“But who will teach my course?” he asked.
I had hoped he’d never ask.
“Everyone refused to teach so early in the morning, so I was obliged to say that I would—” This was my evasive spin on the fact that, without intending to, I’d just given my cash flow a thirty-three percent boost.
A FEW EVENINGS later I invited him to an all-you-can-eat place around Porter Square. Ever since he received the letter from the department, I made a point of not being seen with him around Harvard Square. We ate a huge meal and then walked back to my home. To my dismay, I saw him come up the stairs with me. Things with his last girlfriend were obviously not going well at all. That too had cast down his spirits. I pretended that things with Allison had resumed and that we needed the apartment. “I promise I won’t make any noise, I’ll come very late, take a shower at dawn, and be out.” I didn’t have the heart to refuse him. But I asked him not to keep his things in my home. Allison didn’t like this, Allison gets nervous when, Allison would much rather—I kept blaming Allison for everything. “And who does she think she is, your Allison, anyway? Your fiancée or the woman you neek every day?”
What saved me were rumors of two robberies on our street, rumors I built up to justify finally putting a lock on my door—exactly what I’d planned to do on the very day I told him he was welcome to stay in my apartment. We’d passed by Sears, Roebuck and I was already pricing locks. Kalaj had enough tact not to push the matter, though I am sure it didn’t go down well with him. He never told me where he slept when he didn’t sleep on my couch. I never asked. I stopped going to Café Algiers or to any of the bars around Harvard Square.
We saw each other a few weeks later. It was his idea. Same all-you-can-eat place off Porter Square. Allison was busy visiting her parents, I said. We stayed out late. Then he dropped me at my door, and I watched him drive his Checker cab toward the river and disappear. Another night with his music en sourdine, I thought. I felt like a shit.
Weeks went by without more than a couple of phone calls. Things were cooling off between us, and perhaps it was better this way, I thought. I was working very hard, knowing that I had slightly more than a month before the dreaded date. There were a few parties to go to. At their early winter get-together, Mrs. Lloyd-Greville took me to “our intimate little corner” at their house where we bandied mock-flirtatious quips. Mrs. Cherbakoff continued to ask about my parents’ health, both to find out if they were still alive and if I planned to pass my exams so that they could continue breathing a while longer. And there were the usual pre-Christmas student parties,