Down the hall, by contrast, two roommates were about to begin an appalling fall, with first one and then the other coming out, and first one and then the other falling in love with the other, and then one but not the other falling out of love with the other. By late September they were in a state of constant erotic fervor and not attending classes. By late October they were not speaking. The previous week, one had apparently spent the night with an ice hockey teammate and the other set fire to his roommate’s bed, necessitating the 2:00 A.M. evacuation of the dorm into an already frigid Ithaca night. Now, one of them remained in Clara Dickson and the other was at Cayuga Medical Center, bound for a behavioral services facility back home in Illinois.
The two-year hiatus in Jonas’s education came to light after a fairly routine conversation about the looming 2000 election, in which Lewyn planned to cast his first presidential vote for Gore and Jonas planned to cast his first presidential vote for Bush. Each had responsibly ordered an absentee ballot, which arrived two weeks before Election Day.
“Well, that’s a relief,” Jonas said, tossing his onto the bed and cracking a soda from Lewyn’s refrigerator. “For the midterms I didn’t get it till a month after it was due. Not that it would have made much of a difference in Utah.”
Lewyn looked up from his computer. He was clawing his way through the Roman chapters of Janson’s History of Art. “You voted in the midterms?” It did not occur to him that Jonas could be older. What occurred to him was: Are the rules different in Utah?
“Well, I tried. I was in England, on my mission.”
My mission. The two words, separately, were innocuous, but together they clack-clack-clacked into something bigger.
Religion, in fact, was another thing that had not come up between them. He and Jonas might be living in close quarters, but they seldom overlapped beyond their room and the occasional trip to the dining hall. Jonas’s academic life was entirely confined to the Agricultural Quad, and Lewyn, unsurprisingly, was drifting: a bit of aimless flotsam in a sea of Cornellian drive. When he had nothing to do and nowhere specific to be, he had taken to hiding himself under the dome of Sibley Hall, where the art history library was housed, but only because he was reluctant to go back to the room and be alone there. It probably shouldn’t have struck him as strange that the word “mission” hadn’t yet passed between them.
“So,” Lewyn managed, “where did you go on your … mission?”
“Newcastle and Northumberland. The wettest, coldest place you never want to be.”
Lewyn nodded, as if this was something he agreed with, or had ever considered.
“What was it like? I mean, what did you have to do?”
Jonas started to grin. “You want the short answer? Or the nonbeliever-is-opening-the-door-so-step-through-it-and-connect answer?”
Shit, Lewyn thought.
“I’m Jewish, you know,” he said, instead of answering the question.
Jonas was slitting open the ballot. He did not seem terrifically invested in the conversation. “Yeah, I figured,” he said, without taking his eyes off the page.
I figured? Lewyn went a little cold as an alternate narrative began to impose itself on the past weeks: Church missionary bides his time while planning conversion assault on Jewish roommate.
“Well. Oppenheimer?”
Well, Lewyn? he wanted to say. Their names had been ridiculously de-Semitized, although each of the triplets had been named, in the Jewish tradition, for a dead relative: Sally for Sarai Braunsberg, Salo’s maternal grandmother, Harrison for Salo’s paternal grandfather （who, like his father, was named Hermann）， and Lewyn himself for Lou, his mother’s grandfather.
“Do you know anything about the Oppenheimer family?” he heard himself ask. It landed horribly wrong: on one hand, with undeniable snobbery—Don’t you know who we are?—on the other, with the appalling prospect of a lecture to come.