Anthill_a novel

31
HARVARD: THE WORLD'S greatest university, they called it up there. Certainly at least a global university, with a culture as different from that of Clayville, Alabama, as it was possible to get and still remain in the United States. The ambience of Harvard University comes not so much from its profusion of museums and libraries, or the rat's maze of its narrow streets, but from its compression of time and space that speak centuries of history.
A cannon shot away from Cambridge Common, where Washington took command of the colonial army, lies Harvard Yard, where students rioted in 1969 against the Vietnam War, "Power to the people!," in the same small space trampled by their predecessors in the Food Riot of 1766, "Behold, our butter doth stink!" The site of the college at its founding in 1636, the Old Yard, is faced by University Hall, where hang the flags of visiting heads of state next to that of Harvard, crimson and emblazoned with the word VE-RI-TAS. Behind University Hall is the open space called the Tercentenary Theatre, which in turn is flanked by Memorial Church to the left and straight ahead by Sever and Emerson Halls, respectively the haunts of great preachers and philosophers, and to the right by massive Widener Library, given by a wealthy family to memorialize their scion who perished on the Titanic. The library, gathering place of all students and some of the world's greatest scholars, is also where a thief was severely injured falling from a window clutching Harvard's Gutenberg Bible. The library's countless front steps seat many of the twenty-four thousand that crowd into the Tercentenary Theatre on each June Commencement Day. The ceremony is marked by the conferring of honorary degrees on up to ten famous people. Their identity is kept secret until the banquet in their honor is celebrated by hundreds the night before in cavernous Memorial Hall, built in 1872 to honor Harvard men who died in the War Between the States--Union dead only, Raff noticed, not Harvard Confederate dead. The Victorian structure, whose clock tower once sheltered a nest of peregrine falcons before the species nearly went extinct from pesticide poisoning, gives way southeastward to several of the greatest art museums in America, and westward to the towering, modern Science Center, neo-ziggurat in design and devoted with imperial grandeur to undergraduate science education. Only a block northeast from Memorial Hall is the even more towering quasi-skyscraper William James Hall, housing the social sciences, and whose vicinity is avoided during winter due to the galelike arctic winds that whip around it, the shape and apartness of the building having been designed inadvertently to make it an inside-out wind tunnel. Thence on northward down Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are met the buildings and humming bustle of the popularly named Science City, dominated by the glassy palaces of molecular and cellular biology, crowding and dwarfing historic Divinity Hall, home of nineteenth-century great thinkers, and reducing to insignificance other venerable, mostly wooden buildings that house the largest privately owned collection of plants and animals in the world. In the Museum of Comparative Zoology reside a ten-foot moa skeleton from New Zealand, two of the thirty-two specimens of the extinct great auk known to exist, the world's largest fossil turtle, the reference specimen of a new species of bird collected by Lewis and Clark, and over five million carefully curated insect specimens from all over the world. And then finally, beyond to the northeast, on the margin of the university both metaphorically and literally, apart and serene, resembling nothing so much as a squashed-down cathedral, is the Divinity School, with its magnificent book collections, sometimes referred to by skeptics among the nearby scientists as the Library of Revealed Information.
Altogether a human anthill, a kaleidoscope of specialists, whose lives are molded to ensure their own well-being through service to the greater good. The most distracting concern to this son of the Gulf Coast was the length and cruelty of the winter. For as long as four months each year, while early darkness falls upon New England each evening, the region is regularly visited by cyclonic nor'easters. The storms spiral northward up the Atlantic Coast, afflicting New England for three days. Saturated with relatively warm moist air upon arrival, they unload heavy rain, sleet, and snow, whipped along by powerful winds. Boston, it turns out, is one of the three windiest cities in America. The nor'easters next pass on out into the North Atlantic, pulling down masses of arctic air upon the hapless citizens. The first day the streets and sidewalks of Cambridge are filled by rain pools and slush. The next day they are coated with black ice and walls of frozen slush. On through the third day and beyond, high winds, familiarly called the Montreal Express, drive the chill factor down while causing more pedestrians to slip and fall on the slick black ice of the strangled walkways.
There are almost no signs of life during this dreadful season, outside of humans in heavy clothing scurrying through the whistling arctic air amid desperate pigeons and house sparrows, aliens of European origin, their feathers fluffed out to keep warm, hopping about in search of rare scraps of food. Raff was reduced to asking, "Why do people stay here? Don't they know any better?"
The exhilaration Raff felt upon his arrival, in the deceptively cheery fall days, was soon darkly balanced by the hollowing sense of alienation. He would never lose it; he would always feel like an outsider. In time, he was to learn that everyone at Harvard is an outsider, or at least feels that way once in a while.
The torrent of Harvard's life spun like a vortex around the new center of Raff's life, the gray stone buildings of the Law School. To step outside his studies and sample it was like trying to sip water from a fire hose. The earnest battalions of smart people and the ideas they promoted were disorienting. Most of the students had achieved intellectual distinction before arriving. Valedictorians and National Merit Scholars were commonplace among the undergraduates. Phi Beta Kappa membership was the rule among the entering graduate students. Ideas were coin of the realm at Harvard, and competition among their champions to express them intimidating.
Before he made the trip north, Raff had comforted himself with the hope that Harvard, while quantitatively different from Florida State University, would prove to be basically the same. Harvard, he thought, might just be FSU on steroids. But he soon learned an important different truth. When any organized system, whether a university, a city, or any assembly of organisms themselves, reaches a large enough size and diverse enough a population, and has enough time to evolve, it also becomes qualitatively different. The reason is elementary: the greater the number of parts interacting with one another, the more the new phenomena that emerge within it, therefore the more surprises student and teacher alike encounter each day, and the stranger and more interesting the world as a whole becomes. Exactly the same is true of ant colonies among different species, as Bill Needham had explained to him at Florida State University. Large colonies, like those of the Nokobee anthills, have complicated division of labor, and the queens are much larger than and more physically different from the workers.
One such phenomenon true to the big and venerable principle, Raff soon discovered on campus, was the Gaia Force, a radical student environmental movement. An announcement in the Crimson announced its first meeting of the fall term.
GAIA FORCE
There will be a meeting at the Lowell House Common Room, Wednesday, September 25, at 8:00 P.M. The Gaia Force, a democratically organized group of concerned students, will discuss NATURE FIRST! FOR THE BENEFIT OF HUMANITY!
The boy from Alabama thought this might be just the group for him. He was after all an environmental radical--well, sort of; at least in Mobile he was.
An added and completely unexpected attraction within Gaia Force, for Raff upon his arrival at the Lowell House meeting, was one JoLane Simpson, a brilliant undergraduate major in social studies who hailed, of all places, from Fayetteville, Arkansas. JoLane's father was an Assembly of Jesus Christ minister, an evangelical locally famous for leading the crusade against atheism, homosexuality, evolution, abortion, socialism, and godless science. JoLane, brought to Harvard with a scholarship on a perfect-A high school record, had by the end of her freshman year rotated 180 degrees from Dad's beliefs. She had deserted her upbringing as a Fine Young Christian Woman and forged her magnolia steel into a spearpoint of socialist revolution. She settled as far to the political left as possible without seeming to be insane--even by the relaxed clinical standards of Harvard.
Yet while urging revolution against unjust regimes such as those in Fayetteville and Cambridge, JoLane Simpson nevertheless remained her father's daughter in fixity of moral outrage and in rhetorical style. There was no problematic topic about which she did not have a passionate opinion. Her greatest zeal was reserved for destroyers of the environment, whom she had witnessed operating openly in her native state.
JoLane declared that she would never vote. She decreed that no national leader, including her fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, who had recently finished his presidency, and even the sainted Ralph Nader, was capable of launching the revolution necessary to save humanity. She tried to drop her Southern accent, which to her sounded ignorant and, worse, politically conservative. But she still embarrassed herself occasionally by an accidental "y'all," "much obliged," "fixin' to," and, equally stigmatic, "wont" for "want," "git" for "get," and "ast" for "ask."
When Raff showed up at the Gaia Force reception, JoLane went straight to him and introduced herself. It was the last thing a proper young lady from Arkansas would do, and the first thing expected of a completely liberated young woman from what was often called the People's Republic of Cambridge.
"Hi, I'm JoLane Simpson, and I'm very glad you've come to our meeting tonight."
"Well, thank you, ma'am," Raff replied, in a still-undiluted Alabama accent, "I'm interested in any organization that's working for the environment."
A Southerner, thought JoLane. She took hold of Raff's arm, got him a drink, led him to a corner of the room, and worked him quickly into a lively conversation. She had to admit to herself that although she was now a global citizen who embraced all peoples, she still suffered twinges of homesickness. And anyway, Raff was in Law School. This guy might be politically useful in future Gaia activities. Most of the other Gaians were majors in English and sociology.
JoLane kept Raff out of reach of the rest of the small crowd gathering, while together they excitedly explored their respective backgrounds and philosophies. JoLane sized up Raff's qualities quickly and favorably. He was not only a fellow environmentalist, but one with a well-defined mission. He was a real down-deep Southerner with a way of talking that, in spite of her un-Southern asseverations, comforted her no end. He was a somewhat older man too, not frivolously excitable, and he wore a jacket and tie. Raff kept his hair trimmed and, most importantly, openly expressed doubts about his own Episcopalian faith.
Raff, in short, was a sharp contrast to the puerile sweat-shirted Californians who regarded themselves as the inner council and fighting vanguard of Gaia Force. He had the look of a leader, and maybe people like him, she thought, were what the group needed most. Being largely the offspring of the 1970s New Left, the other force members considered themselves keepers of the true faith of the new socialist revolution, which they were certain to begin as soon as a few wrinkles from the last time, such as the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and erection of the Berlin Wall, were ironed out. Meanwhile, no deviation from the articles of faith was permitted. They were committed to an ideology in which the chairpersonship was passed around, alternating gender and minorities to sustain ideological purity. That was of little consequence in practice, as it turned out--all decisions were made by the group at meetings.
The goal of Gaia Force was to tear down the old order to build a correctly engineered new one. What the new order would be was up for discussion, and more discussion, and more on into the future, in order to get everything right this time. The only principles solidly established thus far were two in number: the complete equality of gender and race, and freedom of sex among Gaia members, which in common parlance is called promiscuity.
Inevitably, as things go, Raff was attracted to JoLane. He couldn't help but take an interest in any attractive girl who singled him out so confidently. He assayed her as every heterosexual male does every good-looking young woman who comes into view, however fleetingly. The saccade proceeded in the usual, genetically programmed sequence. The specimen before him was, first, almost as tall as Raff; young, almost adolescent in overall aspect; thin, too much perhaps, but in concert with a quick, excitable demeanor. JoLane had a keen, intelligent face and two of the traits scientifically considered beautiful, small chin and wide-spaced eyes, but not the third, high cheekbones. Her dark brown hair was cut too short, whether for revolutionary unisex or a distaste for feminine adornment could not be divined. Nothing on the ring finger. Finally, from multiple signals in her tone of voice and body language, he presumed she was not gay.
And, of greater importance to Raff as to most intelligent men, they were both highly alert and goal-oriented. They were each anxious to tell the other about their childhood, and they could comfortably mock and laugh about their upbringing. That evening their private conversation went on for half an hour, and then after the meeting another half hour, drawing looks from other Gaia Force members, until finally the group began to dissolve. Raff was relieved that no male friend of JoLane's intruded in the conversation, and in the end none came up and said, Come on, JoLane, I'll take you home. Only later did it occur to him that lack of intervention by a possessive male might be evidence of a taboo on sexist displays, based in turn on the belief that testosteronic behavior was a defining trait of environmental evildoers.
Two days later they met for coffee at the student center in the basement of Memorial Hall. There was more talk, this time getting into serious matters of environmental activism and world affairs. Still no sign of Gaian male rivals. The next Saturday, a walk over to the Law School, a tour of the premises by Raff, more talk. The following weekend, with Raff's roommate at Richards Hall away at a Gabonese freedom rally, bed and pillow talk.
Prior to his arrival at Harvard, Raff had, unlike most of his fellow students at FSU, no experience with sex. He was too small physically and immature in physical appearance to attract even the casual attention of most girls. Further, he was shy in temperament, afraid of impregnating a girl or forming any relationship serious enough to deflect him from his planned career. In any case, he could not drive a car, a prerequisite for romance in most of America.
At Florida State University he nevertheless dated several girls with dinner, conversation, a movie in or as close as possible to the FSU campus. And twice he engaged in moderately heavy petting outside the girl's dormitory when he and his date saw other couples doing it. These encounters he frequently reviewed in his mind, and elaborated them into fantasy. He dreamed of more, but resigned himself to waiting.
Raff was totally unprepared, then, for the physical attentions that JoLane showered upon him. They were a quantum leap from anything he had dreamed he might one day experience. The young ladies of his acquaintance at FSU had been basically very modest, and monogamous. They wished to form sexual relationships with one or a very few partners, leading to a husband or at least what is euphemistically called a boyfriend--in either case, the love of their life. Raff had the same domestic concept.
JoLane, in contrast, aimed to wring from sex every pleasure it had to offer. Hers was an experimental and fearless attitude born of radical feminism. It was less raw physical desire than a political statement. With the certification granted her by ideology, she erased the very idea of limits. She approached sex with the casualness of pouring morning coffee. A wildness consumed her, as she set out to try every position, engage every orifice.
JoLane dragged Raff beyond the limits of his own fantasies. She was Lilith, Aphrodite, a force of nature. He had no way to fold their adventure into his logic-dominated worldview. A normal young male, he released himself and joined JoLane's free-form experiments, wondering where they might ultimately lead.
An affair in a major university like Harvard is like no other, independent of the magnitude of its sexual energy. Raff and JoLane were happily lost in the great brainy anthill, weaving their way through a constantly changing labyrinth of classes, study sessions, meetings with friends separate and mutual, and, whenever they could find an hour or two of privacy, or even semiprivacy, exhausting sessions of lovemaking.
Both discovered a new allure, with deepening satisfaction, in the life of Harvard and the surrounding venues of Cambridge. During a lecture by a Supreme Court justice at the Law School entitled "The Constitution and International Negotiation," she started to giggle and he hushed her. They spent an hour at the Fogg Art Museum peering at Rembrandt sketches and Byzantine iconic art. Raff was thinking about the sex to come later, but he also promised himself he would study art history when he found time--a commitment he knew would be forgotten by the following day.
The couple devoted two hours to a concert of atonal music. Raff didn't understand it at all, but everyone else seemed to, including JoLane, so he kept silent afterward. They held hands through a lecture at Science Center A entitled "Origin and Phylogeny of the Flowering Plants: A Mystery Solved," by a renowned and incomprehensible botany professor from Peking University. They attended a Free Burma rally, and wondered later what the military junta was doing with the rain forest. Both agonized over the Twin Towers attack but also hoped the people of Afghanistan would not suffer unduly. Together, the two sampled Ethiopian cooking in a small restaurant off Harvard Square, both first time, last time.
They laughed over the Harvardian eccentricities all around them. Visiting professors from the University of Oxford speaking with Oxford accents and publishing in the New York Review of Books, and American professors also speaking with Oxford accents but publishing in the London Review of Books. The forced enthusiasm of the university's official Harvard Gazette for Harvard football. The rareness of Harvard students wearing Harvard insignia on their sweatshirts and jackets, instead preferring, in egregious reverse snobbery, Georgia Tech University and Slippery Rock College.
It bothered Raff a little that no one he met, other than JoLane, had ever heard of Admiral Raphael Semmes, and she only vaguely and dismissively. But this minor insult was soon forgotten in the magical ambience of Harvard Law School. By the end of the first semester, with new friends and the rapidly evolving affair with JoLane, his life was as complete and balanced, he thought, as it might ever be. He even sometimes imagined idly what it would be like to give everything up and become a Harvard bum. Audit courses for free, slip into the back rows for big lectures and events. Crash a few receptions for drinks and hors d'oeuvres, maybe even the Faculty Club when a packed room there was partly filled with students. Live on odd jobs. Have a constant lover, maybe JoLane. Pass on into middle age with a speckled beard and ponytail. Be one of the semiprofessional chess players in Harvard Square ("Play chess with an expert, $5"). Learn enough classic chess moves to knock down the amateurs fast, and have dinner that evening in a good restaurant somewhere around the square. But it was just a fantasy. Raphael Semmes Cody soldiered on.
The interests of Raff and JoLane were broadly overlapping, but a difference in their temperament divided them. It emerged disturbingly on the key issue of environmental activism. JoLane wanted a juggernaut, and she thirsted for a revolution. Her preferred strategy was bombardment with propaganda followed by frontal assault by means of public protest and riot. She could not abide Raff's cautious, law-abiding approach.
JoLane tried to avoid the tension between them. In private conversation it diminished the freedom with which they expressed ideas. They softened some opinions and detoured around a few altogether, including race and economics. Raff worried that their conjugal intimacy was putting an edge on some of their intellectual talk, making sex less spontaneous than it had been when they were near-strangers.
Finally, one evening, when he started to talk about the methods of conflict resolution and litigation, she exploded.
"The developers are too powerful, Raff! You cannot compromise with these people. They've got the money, they've got the politicians, and not only that, they like to say what they're doing is good for the country. And then if nothing else works, they tell you it's God's will. God the Wildlife Manager, no less. How can you deal with that? You can't compete with them, Raff. You can't reason with them. They'll run over you every time. The only thing to do is to go right at them, believe me. I've learned a few things from my father. Passion and guts, Raff, you gotta have them, and you gotta leave some bodies on the field. We haven't got a lot of time either, Raff."
He did not like being pushed like this, as though his manhood were in question. "I think you want me to be a courthouse lawyer, JoLane, and keep Gaia Force members and other hard chargers out of jail. I have other plans in mind."
"What plans?" she asked, turning suddenly quiet.
"I'll tell you someday, darling." He just didn't want to prolong the argument.
JoLane was stung. She was not used to being cut off in the middle of rhetorical flight. But she too let it pass.
Raff could not offer more. He was not used to aggressive polemics, and the idea of eco-war repelled him. Above all, he could not bear the thought of breaking the law. It wasn't lack of courage. It was an understanding of how the consequences could be severe and counterproductive. He thought that surely JoLane knew that much. Driving nails in Douglas fir trunks to wreck chain saws--no way. Lying down in front of bulldozers, tearing up injunctions, risking prison, and shouting defiance at the television cameras as you're led out of the courtroom--not for him.
Civil disobedience and even occasional violent resistance might be necessary once in a great while. He understood the heroism of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Minutemen who died at Lexington and Concord. But this was not his way. He had a deeper philosophical problem with the approach favored by JoLane and the other Gaians. He just could not equate the crusade for the environment with that for civil rights. This was America, not some benighted revolutionary state. Trees and bears were not disenfranchised people. Somehow the prize could be, had to be, won within the law.
Raff began looking for intellectual and emotional support to help close the rift opening between him and JoLane Simpson. He searched about and found it in an interview with Russell Jones, the Joseph Bullard Professor of Environmental Law.
They met in Jones's office, a large rectangular room overlooking the Cambridge Common. One wall was lined with books and in a frieze above them were nineteenth-century prints of West Indian and South American birds. A second wall held award certificates and photographs of Jones with President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and other pioneers of Latin American environmental reform.
Jones was a tall man of about sixty, still trim, and fit enough to take long bird-watching trips. He had a poet's thatch of tousled medium-length snow-white hair. Before being called to Harvard (as they used to say of professorship offers in the days of Eliot and Lowell), he had served in the Department of State as an expert on Latin American environmental and trade policy. He was fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese.
They took two chairs, each displaying the Harvard seal in gold against a black background and appropriately uncomfortable, and settled them loudly scraping on the bare pinewood floor next to the single window.
"As an environmental lawyer, I don't get a lot of requests from students for interviews," Jones said. "They all seem more interested these days in working at one or the other of two extremes, pro bono for civil liberties, or making a lot of money on Wall Street."
Raff thanked him for agreeing to the meeting, then described the situation at Nokobee. It looked, he said, as though the developers might win, and the priceless heritage would be destroyed. "I'd like to be an environmental lawyer myself someday, but right now I just want to help save Nokobee and as many places like that in the South as I can. We're losing a lot down there. There's just no time left."
"Well," Jones said, "you certainly are a different kind of truth-seeker from the usual law student here. So my answer is, that kind of situation is difficult, all right, and particularly in your part of the country. But you're right, it can be managed within the law."
"Which law, though?" Raff asked. "Suppose a company owns a piece of land that ought to be a nature reserve, and it's remote and out of sight--what's to stop that company from clearing it?"
Raff was a bit irritated with himself as he asked the question. He'd noticed lately that he had begun to lose some of his Alabama accent, especially around figures of authority. He was unconsciously speeding up his speech, and clipping short the last syllable of some of the words. He didn't want that to happen. But when he tried to change back, he couldn't help exaggerating the Southern softness. He sounded, he thought, like someone from South Carolina.
"There are laws," Jones said, "and different ways to interpret laws." He paused to let that sink in. "If certain interpretations have a strong moral premise, and pick up public support, they can win in court even if precedents seem to point the other way. That's what you're in law school to learn, I hope. There are a range of legal arguments that can be made to protect the land. And they can prevail, even if the case has to go to appellate court, and, at least theoretically, all the way to the Supreme Court. It's a lot like appealing a criminal conviction."
"Lord help us," Raff said. "It's a pretty terrible thing when we have to protect nature in court like it was some kind of a criminal."
"Well, remember you're dealing with common law here, which is always complicated and always based on moral reasoning to some degree. And in the kind of case you're describing, that's particularly true. The reason is that the disputes of your sort come out of the conflict between two sacred precepts of the Republic, private property rights and America's natural heritage. If you own a piece of land, you can do with it what you please--but only up to a point. You can't change it in a way that harms the public good. You can't bury spent uranium fuel there, you can't dam a river there. If the land is important for conservation, that's a public good that could be harmed by development. So you have to make the case on behalf of the Nokobee tract that developing it would be harmful to our natural heritage, to a degree that more than offsets the public good from the increase of jobs and income that might come from developing it."
"That's very subjective."
Jones agreed. "Yeah, I'll grant it's very subjective. And, you know, it's sticky in an area that's been slow on conservation, like Alabama. And it gets harder when you've got an organization like the Gulf Gateway Coalition that pushes development as a primary public good. The bottom line is, I don't envy you."
"I don't envy me either," Raff said.
He rose, thanked his host, and walked to his room in nearby Richards Hall. His Gabonese roommate was out again. He and some of his countrymen seemed to be almost living in the Kennedy School of Government these days. Maybe plotting a revolution, who knew? Raff lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling for a while, musing on the conversation he'd just had. Well, he thought, I'm going to have to study some new subjects.
He decided to search for cases solved by conflict resolution, especially the kinds that had been decided by federal and state law. He devised what he thought would be a powerful methodology. It was to seek influence through challenge and conflict resolution. Achieve conservation while at the same time satisfying--if at all possible--the interests of the property owners and developers. If satisfying them wasn't possible, fall back to an alliance with the green warriors like the Gaians. Be prepared then to use protest and class-action suits to turn up the pressure. But however a particular case unfolded, never, ever willingly give up any of the few precious scraps of wild land still left.
One evening at Lowell House, Raff decided to describe his philosophy to a group of Gaia Force members. He knew he was taking a chance by suggesting negotiation and compromise to the self-described commandos of environmentalism. It was like throwing snowballs at the devil, but he was interested in seeing how they would take it, and, he had to admit, he wanted to impress JoLane.
It was the wrong move, clearly. He could tell that the listeners were restless. Before he could finish his lecture, one chinos-clad Californian, sprawled on a chair in the front row, loudly interrupted him.
"Jesus Christ, man, what is this? Neville Chamberlain time? What the hell do you think you're doing, anyway? Are you working for developers? Or it could be you're just plain gutless. Either way, you're full of shit."
Everyone in the room froze. Raff was speechless. This was not the Harvard way. It was trash talk you'd expect from some gang member on the street.
For a full minute the two young men glowered at each other. Raff's surprise was quickly replaced by anger. Then, oddly, he relaxed. He'd been there before. As a boy in the more primitive world of Clayville he'd had several schoolyard fights, of the kind usually set off when a bully taunts some other kid. His own ended when a teacher or older boy pulled the two scrappers apart. The usual outcome of a confrontation, however, was a standoff, with both talking trash but neither attacking the other. The others crowding around would chant, "One's scared, and the other's damn glad of it."
Raff was back in Clayville. He took a step toward the Californian, who now stood, but did not come forward himself.
It's the way of nature, Raff thought. Animals spend a lot more time displaying and bluffing than they do fighting. Even his ants held tournaments, settling their territorial boundaries without the loss of a drop of hemolymph--ant blood--most of the time.
They stood like that for another half minute. The remainder of the group remained silent. He's preserving status, Raff thought. He's bigger than me, but he may not be in very good shape. All those marijuana tokes, all that beer could have slowed him, and maybe he knows it.
Raff was sure, by the unspoken and primitive dictate of primate emotion, that if he turned and walked away from this, he would lose whatever status he had among the Gaians. More importantly, he would be humiliated in front of JoLane. She might tell him it was all right to walk away and that she was glad he didn't stoop to violence. But she wouldn't mean it.
It was Ainesley who then spoke to Raff, to a ten-year-old boy: Never back down if you're in the right. The Gaians to the rear of the room were beginning to stand up, to leave or come forward, he couldn't tell, and Raff could hear whispers. Raff thought he knew his man. It was time to call the bluff. He was ready to pay the price of a bloody nose. He took another step forward. The two were now less than four feet apart. Raff's arms were at his side but with fists clenched.
Then the showdown challenge. "You don't know jackshit about anything, do you, boy?" Raff growled. "Let me give you a piece of advice. You keep going where you're headed, boy, and you'll end up in jail somewhere. Everybody'd be better off if you did, you ridiculous loudmouth."
It was the Californian's turn to be startled. He stood his ground, but the only response he managed was "F*ck you," the traditional coward's exit line. Raff let him have that last word, making it a draw.
Then both managed to turn away from each other simultaneously, shaking their heads in mock amazement at the perfidy of the other. Testosterone did not win in the confrontation that day, no violence erupted, but it showed Raff in a way mere introspection never could that he was not gutless, and Chinos the Californian was not entirely stupid.
It was then that Raff finally realized the absurdity of the situation. Nobody, under any circumstance, has a fistfight in the Lowell House Common Room of Harvard University. But Raff felt good about the outcome anyway.
Immediately afterward a greatly relieved and proud Raff walked JoLane home to her room in Leverett House. He decided that the manly thing to do was say nothing to JoLane about the confrontation with the Californian, thus implying, Oh, that? That was nothing, I can handle that kind of thing easily. But he was puzzled that she said nothing about it herself, not even enough to signal her loyalty to him. Nothing was said when they met again two days later in the Memorial Hall cafeteria. By that time Raff had begun to put the confrontation out of his mind, but JoLane's silence still troubled him.
Raff dropped by the next Gaia Force meeting, two weeks later, determined to show that he had not been intimidated by the Californian's hostility, and wanting to continue the friendship he had made with several other members. He looked around to locate his enemy, however, determined to plant himself as far away as possible. No point in going through all that again. When he spotted the other man, he was dismayed to see him in an apparent warm conversation with JoLane. When she spotted Raff, she broke away and came over to him.
Raff felt a surge of jealousy as he struggled for the right things to say to JoLane. Why is my girl, he thought, talking with that jerk. As the feeling receded, it was replaced with a sour aftertaste of resentment.
As more days passed, Raff's annoyance grew, and with it came an ebbing away of trust. JoLane continued to offer no support. She then became too busy with a flood of classwork for sex. Raff tried to rationalize her shift in mood. He loved her, he thought, for the fierce free spirit she now was showing. And why should he think he owned her? Still, Raff began to lose some sleep trying to figure out JoLane Simpson. There seemed to be no way to solve the problem and keep his pride too.
JoLane herself brought it all to an end. After coffee in the Leverett House Common Room, she asked him to take a walk with her along the Charles River. She paused midway on the Longfellow Bridge, where lovers sometimes met, and as they gazed down the river, JoLane turned to him, tipped her head up, and kissed him on the lips.
"Raff, I've decided what I'm going to do after graduation. I've joined the American Friends of Haiti. They've got a chapter at Harvard. I'm going to go down there and see what I can do to help the people. I might go into agriculture or reforestation. You know, do something for the environment. God knows, that's what they need. Every little bit helps, doesn't it?"
With that final scrap of inanity, she walked away ahead of him back toward Harvard. It was so very JoLane, he thought. Abrupt, decisive, get on with life. He knew he would never find another woman with the same combination of intellect, fierceness of spirit, and passion as JoLane Simpson.
Wounded more deeply than he wished to fathom, Raff never attended another Gaia Force meeting. He was left to wonder whether JoLane would take the California tough guy with her to Haiti, and whether she would really in the end go herself. It didn't matter; now he had to restore his own balance. He threw himself back into the study of law.