“Sirena.” I tried to say it the way she did, but it didn’t sound the same. “All we can do is be vigilant, at this point. Unless there’s another incident, which I very much hope there won’t be …”
“Perhaps we can have coffee?” The voltage struck again. It was extraordinary what the body was capable of, for no reason at all. Except if she had recognized me too. And then I felt the other had been an excuse—not only an excuse, but still.
“Coffee? Sure.”
“To explain. If I can speak to you about Reza: he’s coming from such a different world. It’s important to me that this year in America be a good one for him. He didn’t want so much to come, so …”
So, not an excuse. An actual reason. A chance to be a better teacher. “Of course. When would be convenient for you?”
We fixed our date for two days after the Back to School Night. We planned to meet at Burdick’s café in Harvard Square, which is strange because I don’t care for it, and I don’t think she suggested it. I must have proposed it as a highlight of local life; but it always feels stuffy to me, and the windows get steamed up, and it’s hard to get a place to sit, and their cakes are too rich and very expensive, but it always feels wasteful, if you’ve gone to the trouble of going to Burdick’s, not to have one. I prefer Starbucks, where the food is frankly bad and there’s no awkwardness about avoiding it. It’s difficult, though, to suggest Starbucks to someone from Paris.
I’ve often wondered how much of the Shahids’ appeal stemmed from their foreignness. I’ve always been attracted to foreignness. In my junior year of high school, we had an exchange student from London named Hattie, and I decided before she ever came that I’d befriend her. Ethereally pale, moon-faced with big blue eyes, she had a bleached bob that fell glamorously over half her face, and a retro black mac with a bull’s-eye printed on the back. She was sturdy not in a fat way but in a strong way, and she wore black lace-up DM boots and she listened to Joy Division and the Clash. And she came from London, England. There wasn’t anyone at the high school who could hold a candle to her, and I served as both her guide and her amanuensis for the year. It made me much cooler, in the eyes of my classmates. It was only halfway through her time there that she revealed that she was as young as I was, or almost, and I was both awed and dismayed, the latter because it seemed, then, that my one claim to specialness was suddenly nothing, a single arrow in her ample quiver.
But foreignness: there was nothing foreign about my father, with his unconsidered Brooks Brothers wardrobe and his upbringing in Wenham, Massachusetts. Nothing foreign about my mother but an Italian grandmother, of whom she possessed a single photograph, the ancestor having died when my mother was two; and a deeply Catholic sister who had contemplated taking orders, which seemed fairly foreign to us. As a boy, my brother Matt was so American he hated vegetables and all kinds of ethnic food—Indian, Chinese, Thai, he’d spurn it all, claiming it was horsemeat slathered in brown sauce. I’m not sure how different he is even now. No, my yearning was all my own.
“There have been Eldridges here since almost the beginning,” my father was known to say, smugly, while opening a bottle of wine or doling out mashed potatoes. “We’re old stock.” And in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a short bike ride from the grand seaside houses of the gentry, I’d think how telling was my father’s “almost,” how that “almost” led, grimly, to our humble front door.
I always thought I’d live in Paris, Rome, Madrid—at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn’t dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl’s fantasy, a blanched almond of a fantasy. Today, even that is enough to clench my fists and curl my toes.
In the past few years, I’ve often thought of the Marianne Faithfull song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”—“At the age of thirty-seven, she realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair