“Oh, like … kind of like a Christmas pageant, you know? Acting out the Christmas story, except it’s the Book of Mormon, and hundreds of people are in it. I saw it when I was a kid, with my family. I always wanted to be in it, so I applied and I’m going. You should come out and see it. Bring that girlfriend.”
Jonas had known about Rochelle even before her visit to their room. He had known since Lewyn returned from spring break so radically altered not even a normally myopic male college student could fail to notice something major had taken place. Moreover, Jonas had declared himself not very surprised that the object of his roommate’s affection was Rochelle Steiner, the tiny girl from the Passover Seder.
Don’t be stupid. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. She’s just so cute!
“Oh, well…” Lewyn said now. “I don’t know.”
“I bet she’d find it interesting.”
Lewyn doubted this very much, but he didn’t say so. It was morning, and Jonas was loading his textbooks into his backpack.
“Okay. Maybe.”
Jonas turned. He had also changed over the long months at college. He had come in clipped and neat, but now sported a few leisurely patches of beard and his blond hair drifted south of his chin. Lauren apparently approved of this length. Lauren was their spectral third roommate; consistently invoked, if seldom present in the flesh.
“Maybe what?” he said.
“Maybe we’ll come see you. In the pageant.”
“Oh. Cool,” said Jonas.
They had been good roommates, in the end. They had not fought or held resentments toward each other, and they had tolerated each other’s less than optimal personal habits with equanimity (or, viewed slightly differently, with a mutual lack of consciousness). Still, they were not moving on together. Jonas had a room picked out on the third floor of AGR for the following year. Lewyn, with a good housing lottery number, had selected a single in 112 Edgmoor Lane, a small dorm in an old house near Collegetown. He had compelling reasons to want a single now.
After the exams were done and the final papers turned in, after Jonas had stored his boxes at the fraternity house and left town, and—crucially—after Rochelle reported that her roommate had already moved out—Lewyn accepted Rochelle’s invitation to come see the room where she and his sister had lived since the previous September. For the first time since Freshman Week, he opened the door to Balch Hall and stepped onto its black-and-white-tiled lobby. He climbed the gray speckled stairs up to the second floor and turned right past a paneled living room with a baronial (if clearly nonworking) fireplace, and into a carpeted corridor, where the door to Sally’s home away from home stood open.
Inside, Rochelle was seated cross-legged on a twin bed, her flip phone to her ear. She was nodding rapidly, and didn’t immediately look up, but Lewyn knew this posture and this tone; she was talking with her mother, or more accurately, listening to her mother talk. He took in the room: dingy walls and grimy floor and the same institutional off-white roller shade. The view was of a far-off corner of his own dormitory, though not the corner he’d actually lived in.
“Hi!” Rochelle said, snapping shut her phone. She got up, stepped to the doorway, and embraced him. He closed his eyes. His chin rested on the top of her head.
“So this is where you’ve been living,” he said.
“With my roommate, Sally. Also named Oppenheimer,” she agreed.
He cringed at the strangeness: his sister’s name in Rochelle’s voice.
“So. Do you want to go get dinner?” He glanced at the door. It occurred to him that they could close that door and stay inside. When had they ever been this alone together?
“Okay. If you’re hungry,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not,” he told her. So they didn’t go out after all. And very late that night, still mainly clothed but sprawled across the now pushed-together beds, with her head on her pillow and his head on—incredibly—the left-behind pillow of his sister Sally, Rochelle said something that seemed unattached to anything that had happened in the previous hours, or been said in the previous hours, which had themselves been crowded with a wild array of incredible things and profound sensations. She said:
“I’ve thought this for a while, actually, but mainly since March, because something happened in March, and I didn’t say anything to you, because I felt, I wanted to separate this, I mean you, from that. She never actually put it into words or made any declaration or anything like that. But I know.”
“What?” Lewyn asked. He was suddenly so sleepy, and the idea of falling asleep with her, in a bed (two beds) with her, pulled so strongly at him that he had to make himself listen, which is how he knew he was absolutely hearing her.
“Oh. That she’s … I mean, I wish I knew another way to say this or something else to call it. But: in love with me. She was. I mean, she is. And I feel really terrible for her, because I could see how unhappy it made her, but I never knew what to do about it. It’s kind of why I never wanted you to meet her, or come to the room, if I’m being honest. You must have wondered about it. Didn’t you wonder?”
No, he thought. “Yes,” he said. “But now I understand.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Go Down, Moses
In which Harrison Oppenheimer ventures below the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time, and is compelled to relate “The Watermelon Affair” to his new friends there
Roarke didn’t have anything so banal as a summer vacation, but students were given leave as needed in June and July, subject to their responsibilities on the farm and pending written application. Harrison and Eli submitted their requests together, with a joint letter of invitation from the Hayek Institute.
The invitation encompassed not only travel, lodging, food, and inclusion in what Eli promised would be an enlightening intellectual conclave, but also, as he had implied, a presentation of Harrison’s own, on any topic that might contribute some insights into his generation. Harrison spent many evenings in the Stearns Room in May and June, trying to settle on a subject, and finally, in the absence of any better idea, he decided to write about the political journey of American Jews from the early nineteenth century to the present. Harrison didn’t ask Eli’s opinion about his topic. He was afraid to be told it was too general, too well-trodden, or, worst of all, too obvious for a young conservative intellectual who happened to be Jewish, and besides, both of them were already inundated with academic and administrative work: end-of-term projects in history and philosophy, not to speak of his final generation of chickens (soon, blessedly, to be handed off to an incoming first-year), and Eli was preoccupied with the search for a history of science faculty member, and the winnowing of fifty-three finalist applicants for the next Roarke class down to fourteen brilliant young men from eight states, England, Canada, Italy, and Iceland. The farm, meanwhile, turned a corner to summer, and as it did, the last foul remnants of the plagiarism charge, and the taint of their departed classmates, Carlos, Tony, and Gordon, seemed finally to dissipate.
In the middle of July, Eli and Harrison flew to Charlottesville. Harrison had long been taught that the south was a foreign country, and one to be vilified. (How many units on slavery? How many spirituals solemnly sung by the children of wealth?)
“First time below the Mason-Dixon Line,” he told Eli as they descended. Then, reflexively, he apologized.
“What for?” said Eli.
“Well, I don’t mean to be … insensitive.” He halfheartedly tried to make it a joke, but there was too much Walden in him, after all. “Actually, my forebears weren’t exactly first-class citizens here, either.”
Eli looked at Harrison. “You’re referring to postwar carpetbaggers?”
“I was thinking Leo Frank, actually.”
“You know, it’s interesting,” said Eli. “I think this is the first time you’ve self-identified as Jewish.”
It was an observation, not an insult, but Harrison cringed, nonetheless.