The Latecomer

“Oh. Well, it couldn’t have been that bad,” I said warily.

But it was. It was so bad that Sally actually began to falter as she told this story, which was all about a person named Rochelle Steiner who had been her freshman-year roommate, and her friend, and … well, this was actually a big part of the problem. “You can’t imagine,” Sally said, “how deep in denial I was. It was a catastrophe that I thought I might be gay. Obviously, people were, and they were out. Plenty of gay women here at Cornell, and Walden was totally ahead of the curve, a very gay-friendly place. And it’s not like I grew up in some Born Again home in Indiana. The world really was okay in 2000, or at least the part of it I was living in. But to me it wasn’t okay, and it wouldn’t be for a long time after that. So all during my freshman year I was sharing a tiny little room with this woman, and falling in love with her, and the effort it took to not let that out, or not even let it get through to myself, was just overwhelming. And then this incredibly unlikely thing happened. She met Lewyn and the two of them fell in love.”

I stared at her. “That’s … wow,” was all I could think of to say. “Inconvenient. Awful, actually.”

Lewyn had never mentioned a person named Rochelle Steiner. He had never mentioned any woman at all, not in a romantic sense, except the one from his master’s program.

“Rochelle Steiner,” I said aloud, hearing the name in my own voice.

“He lied to her, of course. Like I said. That was his contribution. But by the time he did that, I’d already been lying to her for months. I said I had a twin brother, and he went to college in New Hampshire. I don’t even know why I told her that. I was so angry at him. And her. All I could think of was how to punish them. So I brought her up to the Vineyard with me, and sprung her on him. On all of us, I guess. That was the same night, the night I told Dad what a horrible person he was.”

“And this was the crappy thing.”

“Yes. Highly crappy.”

“You must have been very unhappy,” I said, whereupon Sally burst into tears.

I sat, watching her, my hand on her wrist. There were others in the café, scattered about at the tables, mainly with open books. A few looked over, but saw that the weeping woman with her face in her hands wasn’t alone, and went back to whatever they were doing.

“We all had an awful fight. Lewyn, apparently, had told Harrison I was a lesbian, and Harrison just announced it to everyone.”

“Bastard!” I said, horrified. “Both of them.”

“Yes. And then Dad actually told me it was okay, but I was so furious at everyone, and so embarrassed. That’s when I told him I knew about Stella. It was the last night of his life, and I basically left him with: you’re a terrible father. And that was our nineteenth birthday, all of us screaming and stomping off. You were crying, too,” she recalled. “For what it’s worth.”

“Well, at least I got to participate in one important family event.”

Sally sighed. “And that was that. Because the next day, as we all know, Dad got on a plane and died, and we were all, just, frozen right where we were. Where we still are, I guess.”

I took my sister’s hand, and thought: Yes. But not for much longer.





Chapter Thirty





A Bit of a Bastard


In which Harrison Oppenheimer explains what negotiation is for




I want it on record that I declined my brother’s invitation to join him inside the Fox News affiliate on Forty-Eighth Street. I found Harrison’s car and driver parked outside and got into the back to wait for him there, but then, succumbing to temptation (and the luxury of the limo’s waiting television), I tuned in to watch him do his thing.

The topic at hand was a class-action lawsuit alleging discrimination by college admissions officers, specifically at Harvard. The effort, mounted by Asian applicants, had been predictably co-opted by groups far more concerned with keeping Black and brown people out than with letting Asian people (one member of the panel actually used the word “Oriental”) in, and the only other person of color at the table—apart from Harrison’s eternally present friend, Eli Absalom Stone—could do little more than beat back increasingly personal assaults. Harrison himself asked an attorney named Shaunta Owens whether she was aware that the average SAT score of accepted African American applicants in her own UPenn class (1983) had been a full hundred points lower than that of white applicants, and when she answered yes he plowed on unforgivingly. “And are you not deeply chagrined by this fact? How do you expect your own accomplishments to be fairly viewed through the scrim of obvious pandering to political correctness? When somebody looks at you and sees entitlement on the basis of ethnicity—”

“Someone like yourself,” interjected Shaunta Owens, whom Fox was identifying as “Commentator.”

“Someone like any person capable of understanding that when you let a person of statistical inferiority in over a person of statistical superiority you are insulting them, insulting the person who has been declined in their favor, and insulting the integrity of the entire process. I feel insulted on your behalf, and I’m amazed you do not.”

“I’m certainly insulted by your tone,” said Shaunta Owens. She looked, to me, as if she was ready to overturn the table.

“If I may,” said Eli Absalom Stone, who was seated between my brother and this person, Shaunta Owens. “Throughout my life as a scholar and writer, I have considered myself to be far more burdened by the perception of unearned advantages given to me because of my ethnicity than by my ethnicity itself. Before I applied for anything—college admission, or a scholarship, or a job—I went to some lengths to avoid any personal uncertainty about my accomplishments by ensuring that my credentials were not only on par with the statistical averages of their successful applicants, but actually with their upper strata.”

Here, Fox helpfully flashed the pertinent facts below Eli Absalom Stone’s navy-blue bow tie: “Graduate of Harvard University and Rhodes Scholar.”

“If they hadn’t been, I would not have applied. End of story. I was not willing to trade my own integrity for a leg up I in no way deserved. And it gives me a great deal of distress, Ms. Owens, to think that so many of us seem willing to trade their integrity for what I can only see as a form of Jim Crow treatment. However it may present itself.”

“I’m very comfortable with my accomplishments, thank you, Mr. Stone,” said a barely-keeping-it-together Shaunta Owens.

None of this was surprising, by any means. I was about to switch it off when my brother spoke again.

“Justice Thomas has written that these ‘special consideration’ programs brand minorities with a badge of inferiority and may give them cause to feel that they are entitled to preferences in all corners of society. Any institutional preference is also, de facto, institutional discrimination inspired by prejudice, and that is unacceptable in whatever form it appears. I’m sure you can agree with that, Ms. Owens.”

“And besides!” said the Fox News host, a woman of extreme blondness with a Borax smile. “You’d have to be crazy to think there’s anti-Asian discrimination at any of these top-tier places. I took my twins on a college tour last spring break, I’m telling you, every other person we saw was Asian. I mean, everywhere!”

Jesus Christ, I thought.

“I’m sorry, miss?” said the driver, through the intercom.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I said it aloud.”

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