Obviously, there was plenty to worry about. In fact, Lewyn would spend the following months in a near-constant state of worry. What if she asked him to pick her up at her room? What if she pressed him about his parents? Or even asked to meet them? Should he compound his earlier evasions with new and even more labyrinthine evasions? What if he forgot his prior statements and contradicted them—Rochelle was exactly the kind of person who would remember and investigate. Or the most terrible scenario of all, and the one that tormented him: What if he and Rochelle actually ran into Sally on campus, or Sally and Rochelle actually ran into him? The fact that neither of these things had happened already, not once since the previous September, gave him absolutely no comfort, and he lived with a thrum of terror at all times. He knew his luck could not possibly hold forever, and he understood that he truly would have to do something, say something, to head it off or at least mitigate it. More than once he even attempted to compose a letter to her on his computer, explaining that he had made an awful mistake in not telling her, that he’d been afraid of what she might think of him, or of Sally, or of their sibling bond (or lack thereof), which was so normal to the two of them that it seemed benign, but to the rest of the world he imagined must appear anything but. These letters did not progress past their torturous first paragraphs, and were all abandoned, but he continued to compose them in his head. They were a dark cloud, perpetually overshadowing his happiness. And the weeks passed, and he got deeper in, and then too deep to ever fully apologize or explain.
Rochelle, in contrast to all this self-inflicted torment, seemed to take real joy in telling him things. Her father was dead, but not until years after leaving her and her mother in that town he’d never heard of before meeting her. She had no siblings, but had run in a pack of girls, all scattered now at colleges around the country (except for one, who was apparently nearly six feet tall and a fashion model in Tokyo). She had deliberately chosen not to replicate that dynamic in college, declining no fewer than three invitations to join the Jewish sororities and addressing herself to individual connections she made in the course of her life at Cornell: in class, at meetings for Tzedek (the Jewish social justice group), or in the dormitory. Her only hesitation seemed to surround the topic of her mother, with whom she was obviously deeply connected, and he had the sense that she was in some form her mother’s supporter, possibly even caregiver, necessitating long and intense phone calls, often several times a day. When they came through on Rochelle’s flip phone, she moved automatically away from Lewyn to speak, hunched over, whispering. The calls left her uncharacteristically dull, and sometimes plainly sad. He didn’t ask her about them. He was pretty sure she didn’t want him to.
He also didn’t ask about her dorm room, or the person she shared it with, so afraid to find out anything that would render his psychic affliction even more acute. Once, on the walkway between their dormitories, when she said she needed to run back upstairs for a book, he invented some forgotten thing in his own room so as not to accompany her. Thus far, Rochelle had only come to his own room once, and in anticipation of this occasion he cleaned (or “cleaned”) to the best of his abilities. There was nothing personal on display, and most of her attention, in any case, had been directed at Jonas, who happened to be home, studying for an infectious disease midterm.
Always, he reveled in her. Rochelle Steiner! Who could not cross any bridge, quad, or street on or near the Cornell campus without running into someone who was happy to see her, and who might have a question about the exam for the Bill of Rights class or the individual presentations for the postwar international relations seminar. Lewyn, a half step behind, would watch her reach back into her ponderous red backpack and retrieve her much-inscribed Filofax to insert or scratch away some upcoming item in the appropriate color: red for academic, blue for extracurricular, yellow for gym appointments (and other leisure and social pursuits), and black for notes to herself. He, who did not possess an agenda, paper or otherwise, who was still carrying around the official sheet of his class times and locations he’d received at the beginning of the term, and who had yet to visit the Cornell gym or join a club or arrange to meet friends for dinner on campus or in town, could only marvel at the expansive brain in Rochelle Steiner’s small head, and that it had somehow selected for companionship his own far less impressive brain in its own much larger head.
And yet: this proved and was continuing to prove to be precisely the case.
In the mornings they ate breakfast in Willard Straight Hall, in Central Campus, drinking coffee and eating fruit salad and sharing the New York Times before parting (with a hug!) on East Avenue for their classes (the eternal art history survey for him, the Bill of Rights seminar for her). In the evenings she came to meet him at the Green Dragon after her meetings (she had so many meetings), and they finished the night with more coffee and more talk, unless her mother called. The first time she took his hand was on the bridge one night in May, as the wind blew through the gorge, and this was thrilling, not least because it felt so natural and so innocent. Spring had taken forever to warm up, and people were walking around as if there was still snow on the ground, in parkas and layers of sweatshirts and those ubiquitous Uggs. Lewyn himself had not much altered his wardrobe of Tshirts and sweatshirts, but one morning after the weather finally started to change, he was shrugging on the same Big Red shirt he’d been handed six months earlier at registration and found that it was large, in fact huge on his frame. With an almost clinical curiosity, he gathered and lifted the length of it and looked into the mirror mounted to his closet door.
Ribs. And below them, nothing, by which he understood that the padding of fat—not rolls of fat but padding of fat—was no longer there. The shirt was so far gone that it had lost a good portion of its lettering, and the hem was shredded. He threw it away. After his morning class, he went to the Cornell store and bought four more shirts, all of which hung in proximity to the actual new dimensions of his actual new body. It was neither good nor bad, and he attached no sense of accomplishment to it, mainly because he hadn’t been attempting to accomplish anything at all and hadn’t even been aware that it was being accomplished. This was just how things were, because of her.
That first time, on the bridge, when she took his hand, Lewyn was assailed by the strangest memory of being forced to hold hands with his sister and brother while posing for the obligatory birthday photograph on the back porch in Chilmark, and what followed this memory was an unmistakable wave of unease. He held tight to resist that, and then it passed and he breathed deeply and was calm again. He was more than calm. He squeezed the hand of Rochelle Steiner in his own hand, even as she called hello to someone walking across in the other direction and waved with her other hand.
One day, a little before the end of term, she asked him what he was planning for the summer, because she herself was intending to take a job resident-advising the high school students who came to Cornell for the experience of “college” life (and something to write about on their own applications for admission). It was decent money, and wouldn’t it be nice, after exams, to relax on the campus and take a bit of a break? The spring had cheated them out of that brief (but legendary!) time in Ithaca when winter could barely be remembered, and people took to the quads and the gorges and showed their sun-starved bodies to the sun. Perhaps, if Lewyn wasn’t rushing off to some job in the city or a holiday with his parents, he might like to take a summer class or get a local job and stay on with her. And Lewyn, who of course had no summer plans at all, who could barely think past the next time he would see Rochelle Steiner, eagerly agreed.
I’m going to stay in Ithaca this summer, he emailed his mother.
“I’m going to stay in Ithaca this summer,” he told Jonas, who surprised him by saying that he would also be remaining in upstate New York after the semester ended.
“Really?” said Lewyn. “In Ithaca?”
“No, I’m going to Palmyra, for the pageant.”
Lewyn had a brief and hilarious vision of Jonas Bingham walking across a stage in a bathing suit and high heels, a sash inscribed Miss Ogden, Utah knotted at his hip.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but what?”
“It’s an LDS thing. At the Hill Cumorah. You know, where Joseph Smith found the golden plates?”
Lewyn nodded. Now, the vision was of Jonas Bingham, in his bathing suit and heels, walking across the summit of a hill. “But what kind of pageant?”