Harvard Square: A Novel by André Aciman

Author:André Aciman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780393088601
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

4

THE INDIAN SUMMER WASN’T LETTING GO, EVEN AS September dragged on into early October. Mornings were chilly, but by midmorning the weather would grow warm, then unbearably hot, and then quite cool again. Ersatz weather, Kalaj called it. Why should this surprise anyone? Everything about this place was sham, bogus, fake, phony, counterfeit. Contrefaçon, he’d say, meaning that everything was counterfeit in America. Still, I liked the extended illusion of spring weather with its heady presage of summer oddly trailing on the last, first days of fall. It took me back to spring break, when summer was still weeks away. I remembered the end of the academic year. Back then I had drawn up lists of books to read or reread and had just discovered the use of the terrace upstairs. My friends Frank and Claude were still in town and Nora hadn’t even left for Europe yet. Nora, when she wasn’t with Frank, would come by sometimes and cook a Cornish hen for the two of us, though we both knew that she was coming simply to vent about how hard Frank was to live with and how she couldn’t wait to be without him for a while, which is why the two had decided to spend their summer away. The whole thing with the Cornish hen and the half-liter bottle of wine always ended up in tears. One evening we’d gone to see Annie Hall in Boston. She kept laughing; I couldn’t begin to understand why, and finally decided that perhaps Frank was right, there was something wrong with her. It never occurred to me that I had not yet grasped Woody Allen’s humor. Kalaj, when I thought back on those spring days, was still months away, as if unborn yet. To think there was a time when Kalaj hadn’t stomped into my life and altered its rhythm. I tried but didn’t really wish to restore that sheltered rhythm, though I knew that continuing on this path of bar after café after bar after café seemed equally unthinkable a way to spend my time as a scholar. But Cambridge without Kalaj seemed unthinkable now. And yet after spending an hour with Lloyd-Greville, I was starting to recover my confidence and, with my confidence, my old love for scholarship and for Cambridge and for the life it presaged.

I went back to Lowell House more frequently as soon as I received Lloyd-Greville’s temporary thumbs-up. I liked going there almost every day. I liked having a study where I could meet students and discuss their work. I liked my new students. All History and Literature majors were unusually bright and well read, and most spoke at least one foreign language. Students were in the habit of waiting for me outside my study after lunch. We discussed the books they wished to read, drew up lists, chatted, talked about life, which invariably meant sex, or the absence of sex. With yet another student, I discussed the topic of her senior thesis, things we had more or less already agreed upon before she’d left for Europe in early May.

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