All Lewyn wanted was to be with Rochelle, to curl his length around her small body in the single beds they had pushed together at the end of that corridor in Jameson Hall, and learn the topography of her skin, and read silently with her, and bring her her favored chai lattes each morning and afternoon, and generally express his love for her in any and every way she would permit. It was Rochelle who let him know that her roommate was also in Ithaca for the summer; she had run into Sally at the Hot Truck one night in early June when Lewyn was mercifully elsewhere, and the two of them chatted as they waited for their pizza subs, or at least “chatted” was the word Rochelle had used. Sally was apparently living off campus, in some house with—Rochelle wasn’t sure she’d understood this correctly—a woman who bought and sold furniture. Lewyn listened, concentrating on his own expression, and wondering if his thudding heart was audible to anyone but himself. It was certainly a disappointment that his sister was still in Ithaca, but at least she was no longer right next door, and also the Cornell campus was vast, and the town around it also vast and sort of amoebic in shape, coiling around its baffling congregation of rivers and gorges, which was a gift to people hoping to avoid certain other people. (He’d been here nearly a year already, and half the time he’d had no idea where he was in relation to anywhere else, or in which direction he was walking. The other half he did have some idea, but was often wrong.) And also—ever since Rochelle had told him that thing she had told him, he had taken a measure of weird comfort in the fact that she, too, had been working to keep Sally and Lewyn Oppenheimer apart. Theirs was a mutual project, in other words, undertaken separately, in mutual ignorance, and for very different reasons, but still it comforted him. Somehow, they had been in it together, and perhaps their combined will had averted the crossing of paths they both, apparently, dreaded.
Even so, Lewyn couldn’t help feeling a certain unease about Sally, herself: aimless in Ithaca, done with the dorms, living with a woman who bought and sold furniture? What did this mean for the remainder of Sally’s Cornell career, let alone for the life his sister would live after college? It had never been difficult to imagine Harrison in the world. Harrison would find some corral of smarmy, clever types, in international finance or business consulting, where he and they could convene to be superior to everyone else, but Sally … Sally he could not imagine with select comrades. Let alone a partner. What Rochelle had said, a few weeks earlier, in the room she and his sister had shared … well, to be honest it had shocked him, but afterward he’d begun to wonder if this might not explain certain other things about his sister: her secrecy, her compulsion to withdraw. And also he could not fault Sally for falling in love with Rochelle. He, obviously, had fallen in love with Rochelle. It seemed to him that any sane person would.
Those summer weeks were as near to bliss as any he had ever spent. Rochelle had somewhere procured an old Handybreeze electric fan for the room in Jameson Hall, ponderous to lift but, once switched on, deliciously effective. (The dorms were not air-conditioned, something she was at pains to explain, again and again, to the mystified youngsters in the pre-college program, most of them from families of means, away from home for the first time, and unable to comprehend why the temperature in their rooms should not be magically comfortable.) The two of them lay on their pushed-together beds with the windows open and the shrill air pulsating above them, and the din the fan made effectively obscured their own noises from the ears of others.
He’d enrolled in an art history course when the summer term began. It was on Flemish painting, and those gray, flat lowland skies and pasty, pockmarked faces made a kind of invigorating inversion of his own happiness. He loved them for that, but then again, he loved everything then; there was simply no bringing him down, not on days he woke to the peculiar position of Rochelle in sleep (hands palm to palm and wedged between her bent knees) and spent the rest of the hours parting from and reuniting with her around classes, study, mentoring (hers), and his own hours in the art history collection, only to end with those hands, once again palm to palm, once again between her angular knees, as she curled away from him and the fan blew over their warm bodies, drowning out the rest of the world. It took Lewyn no time at all to persuade himself that this could be his life in perpetuity, a nonterminating and thoroughly normal existence for the two of them, as if “normal” might feature the conveniences and ease of a college campus in summer, with low-stakes classes in a subject he now felt a genuine interest in and this wondrous girl who, miraculously, inexplicably, returned not only his affection but his desire. He was fine and he was normal and he was in love with Rochelle Steiner.
One night, the two of them came out of Moosewood (feeling virtuous but also still hungry) to find Jonas and Mark in one of the outdoor cafés on Cayuga. They had half-eaten hamburgers on their plates. Lewyn fought a powerful urge to grab one and stuff it in his own mouth.
“Thought you were gone,” he said to his now-former roommate. “Doing that pageant.”
Rochelle’s laugh sounded slightly like a bark. “What does that mean?”
“I am,” said Jonas. “We had a night off rehearsal. Decided to drive back for a real meal. There’s not much in Palmyra.”
“Not a beauty pageant,” said Lewyn. He and Rochelle were holding hands.
“Still planning on coming?” said Jonas. “Mark’s driving up next weekend.”
“We haven’t discussed it yet,” he said to Rochelle, echoing a phrase he’d heard one of his parents say to the other too many times to count. It made him feel strong and partnered, saying it.
“Discussed what?” Rochelle said, with a definite edge to her voice.
“Uh-oh,” said Mark, with obvious delight.
“I get to play a Lamanite, which is a lot more fun than playing a Nephite, though my mom wasn’t happy. She was holding out hope I’d get cast as Nephi or Joseph Smith himself. I’m like, Mom, I get that you think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread and I love you for it, but I’m having a blast. We do these warlike grimaces and gestures, because we’re actually so far from where the audience is sitting that everything has to be kind of exaggerated. But the best part is we’re doing it on the actual hill where Joseph Smith found the golden plates. The ultimate site-specific.”
Rochelle was looking up at Lewyn. Her eyes said paragraphs.
“C’mon, Rochelle. You’re a student of religion. You’ll get a kick out of it.”
“I’m not a student of religion,” she said. “I’m going to be a lawyer.”
“I mean, you respect the traditions. We’re the fastest-growing religion in the world, did you know that? Plus, we’re super fun,” he grinned. “Plus, we crashed your party. You should crash ours.”
“You were invited,” Rochelle said. “And we were glad to have you.”
“And you are invited,” said Jonas heartily. “And we’ll be glad to have you. We’re even glad to have the hecklers.”
“What hecklers?” Mark said.
“Oh, they yell about how we’re apostates and we’re not Christians and blah blah. We get it. Oppression is nothing new for members of our church, you know. We’ve had it constantly, literally since the church was founded.”
Rochelle, again, gave Lewyn a look of the most exquisite disgust. She might not know this particular history of religious persecution, but she knew how to compare an elephant to a gnat. “I see,” she said. “Yes, nearly two centuries of oppression.”
“Take a chance, Rochelle!” said Jonas. “Give it a try. Besides, Lewyn wants to come.”
She turned her sharp little face up to him.
“And Mark can drive you out with him. Right, Mark?”
“Happy to,” said Mark. “Happy for the company.”
Lewyn could imagine how much less compelling Mark’s company would render the prospect for Rochelle, but Jonas was right: he sort of did want to go. He wanted to see Palmyra, and the hill where Joseph Smith dug up the golden plates, and maybe that Sacred Grove where angels had supposedly appeared. It would be up to him to persuade Rochelle, and he didn’t want to go to a religious pageant without her. He didn’t want to go anywhere without her.
It wasn’t straightforward at all. Back in their room that night, Rochelle subjected him to a vigorous interrogation.
Why did he want to go? Golden plates? Talking angels? Jesus astral-visiting America for three days while his physical body lay in an Israeli tomb? And the politics of these people! What about that?
They were interrupted then by a sad girl from Lake Forest whose roommate was apparently spreading malicious untruths about her all up and down the corridor. And she had never been anything but nice! Also, the roommate was too lazy to go to the bathroom and insisted on putting her used maxi pads in the wastebasket! And was there no empty room on this massive campus where she could spend the remaining five and a half weeks away from this evil and repulsive person, whom she furthermore suspected of stealing her pink Reeboks?
When Rochelle returned, he took the opportunity to observe that pink Reeboks should be stolen as a matter of principle, but she was not in the mood. On the other hand, she was too depleted to continue arguing against their trip.
They left four days later in Mark’s Toyota, driving north along Cayuga’s western edge and then west on the Thruway.
“Remind me why we’re going this early?” said Rochelle. “I thought it doesn’t start till the sun goes down.”
“Well, there’s a Sacred Grove somewhere,” said Lewyn.
“A what?” Rochelle turned in the front seat to look back at him.
“Where Joseph Smith saw God and Jesus.”