Harvard Square Read Free Page B

upstairs on the terrace in her bikini, eager to make small talk, carrying a towel, suntan lotion, and always something by a British author. Did she know I could hear her passionate cries at night? I was sure she knew.
    When she stepped onto the roof terrace on Sunday mornings carrying her folding chair, she’d beam a smile at whomever was lounging there, amused, sly, and self-conscious. She wanted me to know she knew I knew. But it stopped there. When I would take a break and offer to bring her a Tom Collins, she’d decline with a smile—as always amused, sly, and self-conscious. She knew what I was thinking.
    On weekday mornings, I loved to look down from my window and watch them leave. Their life was perfectly rounded. Mine had transcendental homelessness written all over it. They headed out and came back, while I stayed put, getting progressively more tanned, more bored. There was nothing to do but read all day. I was not teaching, barely tutoring; I was not writing; I didn’t even own a TV. I would have loved to drive out somewhere. But no one I knew had a car. Cambridge was a fenced-in, isolated strip of parched land.
    Upstairs, on the terrace, is where I had decided to reread in the space of six months everything I needed for my comprehensive exams on seventeenth-century literature. Mid-January was far off yet, but in the middle of the night it felt like minutes away. Every time I was done reading a book, I’d discover many more I needed to read or reread. I’d budgeted two books a day. When it came to French prose writers I’d read three a day. The Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Restoration prose writers, definitely two a day. But then came the picaresque writers of Spain, and the prose writers of Italy, one adulterous tale after the other until the whole history of European fiction seemed written by P. G. Wodehouse on steroids. And finally German and Dutch authors. Here the solution was very simple: if I hadn’t already read them, they were never written. Ditto with some of the great French gossipmongers of the royal court: if I couldn’t remember them, they were not important. Meanwhile, I’d reread The Letters of a Portuguese Nun and Don Carlos many times and was still awed by their brilliance, which gave me hope. I was slashing my way through a jungle of books, constantly finding clever ways to assuage the pangs of conscience each time I realized I’d omitted an important work. Not exactly scholarship—but under the blazing summer sun and the near-hypnotic scent of suntan lotion around me as I watched so many thighs lounging about on tar beach, no one could ask for more.
    My dissertation advisor, Professor Lloyd-Greville the redoubtable seventeenth-century scholar, had admitted me into the department with high hopes. He had always tried to throw a few financial-aid dollars my way, and he had once expected me to pass my comprehensives with cutlass and steed, like the caliph Haroun al-Rashid jumping over impossible human hurdles. He always brought up Haroun in my company, either because Haroun, like me, came from the Middle East, or because, in addition to being a great soldier and statesman, Haroun was also a patron of the arts and sciences, all of which Lloyd-Greville aspired to. But I couldn’t begin to know what he thought of me or of Haroun. Born, bred, and blooded at Harvard, Lloyd-Greville was a paragon scholar who also happened to be an authority on Yeats. I could just picture myself knocking at his door after taking my exams a second time and hearing him say, with his courtly smile followed by that unmistakable little cough that cleared his throat before he’d utter one of his lapidary pronouncements, that this time, he was so very sorry to say, I’d definitely missed the boat to Byzantium. “Even third-class passage?” I’d ask. “Even third-class passage,” he’d say. “How about the bilge area, there are always ex-convicts and stowaways in bilge class.” “Even bilge class,” he’d