Eight Days Ago

THE MORNING AFTER my date with Valerio, I had coffee with Jahan. We met at a café on the main Viale. There was one right underneath Jahan’s apartment, a narrow coffee bar where you stood and ordered—posso avere un caffè, per favore—but Jahan preferred the one on the Viale because it was owned by a butch lesbian Italian woman. Support your local queers, he liked to say.

“So you’re in love,” he said.

“With the Sistine Chapel, yes. She was beautiful. Even if she did play hard to get.”

Jahan knocked back his coffee in one shot. Espresso. The Italians only drink espresso. “Ahh. All right, lover boy. So you’re seeing him today.”

“I need to work today,” I said. I had promised two different people I would make their Wikipedia pages today. That was a whole month’s rent.

“This weekend?”

“He’s out of town. Visiting his family in Puglia.”

“Oh, he’s from Puglia! Poor boy. It’s even hotter down there than it is here.” Jahan wiped a rivulet of sweat from his forehead. Even standing at the bar directly in front of a spinning fan, we were drowning in our own sweat. “Well, you know what I say about boys.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever told me what you say about boys.”

“Fuck ’em.”

“Jahan.”

“Yes, fuck ’em,” said the café owner. She was a short-haired, short-bodied, thick-armed Italian woman with a big mole on her lip.

“See, even the lesbian said to fuck ’em!”

“I don’t think she meant it the way you mean it . . .” I laughed. “Oh, Jahan. I can’t believe you’re leaving Rome next week.”

“If I manage to pass this algebra class,” Jahan said, knocking back another shot of espresso. “Ahh. It’s not looking so good right now. I keep failing these damn practice tests. I came up, like, two questions short on the last one.”

“Shut up. What the hell are we doing here, then?”

We went back to Jahan’s apartment, where I practically shoved his algebra textbook into his hands. It seemed counterproductive—I wanted Jahan to stay in Rome, didn’t I?—but I wanted him to pass this exam more, and I felt personally invested in it, so I quizzed him on the Pythagorean theorem and made him tell me what PEMDAS stood for, and then I made him use it to solve an annoyingly complex equation, and finally, when he was tired of my “authoritarian drill-sergeant bullshit,” I forced him to take a practice test.

After he handed me his test to grade, Jahan went into his room to take a nap. I finished grading pretty quickly. He didn’t do very well, so instead of waking him up, I went and flipped through some of the books scattered around his living room. There were more poetry books—poets I had never heard of, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ocean Vuong—as well as Persian short story collections, fairy tales, the complete works of Hafiz.

After a while, Jahan emerged from his room and sat on the floor next to me.