Except for one year, when there’d been a hurricane and the planes wouldn’t fly, this great event had taken place at our Martha’s Vineyard home, with some kind of a catered meal on the beach and a big cake, and at some point of the day or evening our mother would provide a ritual, teary retelling of the whole epic, arduous progeny-making ordeal. So when Lewyn called home in early June to say he’d be staying in Ithaca for the summer, his mother went directly and predictably to the matter of the birthday, and once he’d assured her, she seemed incurious about the rest. He had been ready with a description of the important summer class he’d registered for in his now-likely art history major, but she didn’t ask. Also she didn’t ask where he’d be living, which really would have necessitated a lie or at least an evasion. He noticed these things. He was not especially sensitive when it came to members of his immediate family, and what they might be going through in their own lives, but even Lewyn was forced to note the current in his mother’s voice, so dissonant and so discomforting and so unpleasant to hear that he instinctively closed his mind to it and what it might mean.
Really, the only thing of any importance he was “doing” that summer was being with Rochelle Steiner, because the world had divided into a small circle of time and space within which the two of them abided, outside of which was, simply, everyone and everything else. He did not care about people who were not Rochelle Steiner, and he resented the notion that he should try. Why should he try? For the first time in his entire life he was truly with another person, and this was so cataclysmic, so all-encompassing, that the least the outer world could do was stop reminding him it was there.
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.