His sister Sally—fulfilling her promise to herself, if not to our father—had refrained from checking in on Lewyn that very night of their arrival, and when Lewyn went to find her in 213 Balch Hall the following day, neither she nor her roommate were there. He felt thoroughly self-conscious standing at their locked door, on a long corridor of identical doors, in a women’s dormitory, in all of his own disheveled and possibly malodorous maleness. So he’d used the pen on the string to write a brief message on his sister’s whiteboard: Hi! I stopped by to say hello. L. She would know who L. was, he reasoned. He hoped she would know. But she didn’t return the visit or send an email.
They went off on separate freshman trips and after he returned to campus he went to Balch a second time, on the morning of Convocation, ostensibly to ask how Sally’s canoe expedition to the Adirondacks had been but really because the Freshman Week activities had left him feeling distinctly alone, which obviously was not their purpose, and this time she was home. The roommate (her bed had a heart-shaped cushion people had scribbled all over, and sheets with butterflies) was fortunately not there that morning, because the ensuing conversation, unpleasant as it was, would have been far worse in front of a stranger. It was nasty, brutish, and short, but even to Lewyn not entirely unexpected. “I just think,” his sister said, “that we should act as if we’ve left home. I mean, we have left home. And I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, I guess.”
So that was how it would be, apparently, and just to show her he was quite capable of getting along without her, Lewyn didn’t go to her room again. In the months to come he would only occasionally catch sight of Sally across wide collegiate courtyards, or a dining hall, and once in the first lecture of a massive intro psych course she then apparently dropped. He didn’t tell anyone he had a sister at Cornell who was also a freshman and who lived in the dormitory next door, and he only wished he hadn’t told his own roommate about Sally, something that happened on their very first night together in 308 Clara Dickson Hall, because what was Jonas (Lewyn’s roommate) going to think about the fact that this sister never stopped by once as the weeks and then months passed? Lewyn was prepared to imply that he and Sally met regularly outside the room, for walks or meals or parties, even, but in fact Jonas was quickly distracted by a full Cornell life of his own, and never brought it up again.
Jonas was a tall—very tall—and very pale kid from Ogden, Utah, who was studying to be a vet. “Large animal,” he clarified, that same first night, which only confused Lewyn. Practically the first thing he had done, on entering 308 Clara Dickson for the first time, was scoop up a small brown object called an “Idaho Spud,” part of the candy hoard Johanna had left for them, and actually crow with delight.
“Where the heck did you find this?” he asked. “My brothers said no way on the East Coast.”
Lewyn wondered if he should point out that Ithaca was far from any coast, but he didn’t want to come off like an ass. “We stopped at Cracker Barrel,” he said instead. “My mom went kind of crazy. Too bad it wasn’t booze,” he said bravely. “Right?”
“Oh, I don’t drink,” said Jonas. He had already torn open the brown paper and eaten half the spud. “Do you?”
Lewyn frowned. He wasn’t sure of the answer. Yes? Because there was no reason not to say yes. No? Because he didn’t, not really. Or he hadn’t. But he could, maybe, now, away from home. “Sure,” he said finally.
Jonas had traveled light. There was a shiny comforter on his bed, a pillow and sheets in basic white, and on the desk a stack of pristine textbooks: Color Atlas of Veterinary Anatomy, Diseases of Dairy Cattle, Large Animal Theriogenology. Taped to the wall above the pile, a single photograph of two parents and six children: all stick-lean, all pale, all yellow-blond and all with bright, bright white and even teeth. He was, it turned out, more than two years older than Lewyn, though this would not emerge until a couple of months into their cohabitation, but he did not seem overly burdened by relative maturity. He had an insatiable appetite for SpongeBob SquarePants, for one thing, and possessed a full DVD library of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which he was stunned to learn Lewyn had never watched. And while he was diligent in his veterinary studies he would also partake, with enthusiasm, of Cornell’s robust fraternity culture, dividing his early loyalties between Alpha Gamma Rho and Acacia. He was, by any meaningful standard, a reassuringly normal and inoffensive cohabitant.
Down the hall, by contrast, two roommates were about to begin an appalling fall, with first one and then the other coming out, and first one and then the other falling in love with the other, and then one but not the other falling out of love with the other. By late September they were in a state of constant erotic fervor and not attending classes. By late October they were not speaking. The previous week, one had apparently spent the night with an ice hockey teammate and the other set fire to his roommate’s bed, necessitating the 2:00 A.M. evacuation of the dorm into an already frigid Ithaca night. Now, one of them remained in Clara Dickson and the other was at Cayuga Medical Center, bound for a behavioral services facility back home in Illinois.
The two-year hiatus in Jonas’s education came to light after a fairly routine conversation about the looming 2000 election, in which Lewyn planned to cast his first presidential vote for Gore and Jonas planned to cast his first presidential vote for Bush. Each had responsibly ordered an absentee ballot, which arrived two weeks before Election Day.
“Well, that’s a relief,” Jonas said, tossing his onto the bed and cracking a soda from Lewyn’s refrigerator. “For the midterms I didn’t get it till a month after it was due. Not that it would have made much of a difference in Utah.”
Lewyn looked up from his computer. He was clawing his way through the Roman chapters of Janson’s History of Art. “You voted in the midterms?” It did not occur to him that Jonas could be older. What occurred to him was: Are the rules different in Utah?
“Well, I tried. I was in England, on my mission.”
My mission. The two words, separately, were innocuous, but together they clack-clack-clacked into something bigger.
Religion, in fact, was another thing that had not come up between them. He and Jonas might be living in close quarters, but they seldom overlapped beyond their room and the occasional trip to the dining hall. Jonas’s academic life was entirely confined to the Agricultural Quad, and Lewyn, unsurprisingly, was drifting: a bit of aimless flotsam in a sea of Cornellian drive. When he had nothing to do and nowhere specific to be, he had taken to hiding himself under the dome of Sibley Hall, where the art history library was housed, but only because he was reluctant to go back to the room and be alone there. It probably shouldn’t have struck him as strange that the word “mission” hadn’t yet passed between them.
“So,” Lewyn managed, “where did you go on your … mission?”
“Newcastle and Northumberland. The wettest, coldest place you never want to be.”
Lewyn nodded, as if this was something he agreed with, or had ever considered.
“What was it like? I mean, what did you have to do?”
Jonas started to grin. “You want the short answer? Or the nonbeliever-is-opening-the-door-so-step-through-it-and-connect answer?”
Shit, Lewyn thought.
“I’m Jewish, you know,” he said, instead of answering the question.
Jonas was slitting open the ballot. He did not seem terrifically invested in the conversation. “Yeah, I figured,” he said, without taking his eyes off the page.
I figured? Lewyn went a little cold as an alternate narrative began to impose itself on the past weeks: Church missionary bides his time while planning conversion assault on Jewish roommate.
“Well. Oppenheimer?”
Well, Lewyn? he wanted to say. Their names had been ridiculously de-Semitized, although each of the triplets had been named, in the Jewish tradition, for a dead relative: Sally for Sarai Braunsberg, Salo’s maternal grandmother, Harrison for Salo’s paternal grandfather (who, like his father, was named Hermann), and Lewyn himself for Lou, his mother’s grandfather.
“Do you know anything about the Oppenheimer family?” he heard himself ask. It landed horribly wrong: on one hand, with undeniable snobbery—Don’t you know who we are?—on the other, with the appalling prospect of a lecture to come.