Harrison was looking over at him. This was unsafe driving.
“Yo, watch the road,” said Lewyn.
“And how does your girlfriend know?”
He sounded skeptical, but of which element—the revelation about Sally or the fact of Lewyn’s girlfriend—it was hard to say.
“That, I decline to answer,” said Lewyn, settling into this wholly unfamiliar perch: the upper hand.
“Well, how do you know it’s true, then, Lewyn?” said Harrison. He seemed to be reaching for his customary smugness, but he couldn’t quite get there.
“We both know it’s true, Harrison,” he said.
He loved this. He was admiring the words even as he said them. Then he started admiring the words he didn’t say: You mean you never figured that out? And you, The Smart One? Maybe not quite as smart as you think you are …
“I can’t say I’ve given Sally’s sexuality much thought, to be honest.”
“Clearly.”
They turned off the road onto the long, shared driveway, passing the Alberts’， the McConaughys’， the Lowells’， and the Abernathys’。 The Abernathys were long gone, but none of them had ever laid eyes on the new owners, Houstonians who had vastly overpaid for their overblown “cottage” but were never there.
“Not that it matters,” Harrison tried one last time before the final turn to the house.
“Obviously,” Lewyn parried. “Except, you know, to our sister.”
And maybe, it occurred to him, to our parents. He wondered if Johanna and Salo knew about Sally. True, they hadn’t had the advantage of intimacy with their daughter’s roommate or known the strange and wondrous pleasure of Rochelle Steiner’s sweet head close by on a shared pillow, slipping into sleep but still speaking, confiding, connecting. But perhaps they’d noticed something Lewyn and his brother had been too obtuse or uninterested to see. Salo, so fixated on his solo navigation through life, and Johanna, frantically absorbed in her Potemkin family—they were probably as clueless on the matter of Sally’s inner life as her brothers had been, though it did seem to Lewyn that they must care more about Sally and her prospects for happiness than he and Harrison did, and perhaps be paying closer attention. A mite closer attention.
All summer he’d been dreading the enforced fiction of these days in early September, as much as he dreaded the inescapable assembly of the Oppenheimers itself. He would gladly have skipped the observance of his own nineteenth birthday, and he knew Harrison resented having to leave that all-male bastion in the forest he went to. Sally might be marginally more sentimental about their milestone, but then again she’d apparently passed up an entire Vineyard summer to stay in Ithaca and do whatever weird thing she was doing with the owner of this elderly automobile. He’d struggled with how to explain his impending absence to Rochelle, considering and rejecting a sick relative （too much concerned interest） or a reunion of high school friends. （What friends? He’d never mentioned anyone in particular.） He despised having to lie to her, which was another way of saying he despised having already lied to her, and having continued to lie to her every single moment of every day, as they rose together and ate together and walked together and studied together and ate together again and, finally, lay down beside each other in their pushed-together beds, with Rochelle’s stalwart fan blowing over their pale bodies. Liar, liar, the whir sometimes seemed to coo, after she had fallen asleep in her distinctive position, hands together in prayer and trapped between her knees. Liar, liar, liar.
At last, he had hewed as close to the truth as he dared and told her that his family went on a retreat at this time of year, and it was something he couldn’t get out of or bring a guest to. He wasn’t sure what was being planned, only that he would have to leave Ithaca for a few days, and he couldn’t wait to get it over with and come back. He hoped she wasn’t upset with him for going away.