“Oh no.” The woman laughed, this time without restraint. “No, no. I appreciate it, but I’m not stupid. You don’t hold on to Shaker just ’cause it’s pretty. I sold that”—she pointed at the long table—“to a dealer called Russell, in Westchester. And that”—she gestured across the room, to a rocking chair or a smaller, square table, Sally couldn’t tell—“to a lady up in Boston. There’s not that many people who specialize in Shaker, and they know all the collectors. Shaker’s a very particular commitment. Not something your average Joe would just make up their mind to buy, on the spur of the moment.”
“Because it’s expensive?” Sally asked, feeling like an idiot.
“You could say!” The woman laughed again. “Not something a college student could afford,” she added, almost comfortingly.
This college student could, Sally thought, but she only nodded, and held out her hand.
“My name is Sally,” she said.
Chapter Fifteen
Wonder of Wonders
In which Lewyn Oppenheimer introduces a group of muscular Christians to the Seder ritual
Room 308 in Clara Dickson Hall might have lacked a beer can pyramid or a miasma of cannabis, but apart from that it was pretty typical for the temporary living space of two randomly selected college-aged boys. Jonas, for example, had stuck a poster on the wall during move-in and then forgotten about it as it puckered and drooped and folded forward. Lewyn had brought home a plant on a whim, declined to water it, and failed to notice when it died. They both put their stuff down on the floor when they were finished with it—that was what the floor was for—and neither of them saw the overflow of their shared trash bin as a cue to empty it. It was true that Jonas made his bed every morning—that was a mission thing, he’d once explained—but the sheets on both beds were dingy and slippery, and there was a film of grime over every surface. They lived, in other words, inside a tableau of discarded clothing, candy wrappers, and shoes that were often parted from their mates and bearing spring mud. Back in November, Jonas had met a very pretty girl named Lauren, from Arizona, and though he refrained from overnighting at Kappa Delta, Lauren’s sorority, he came back later and later at night as the winter term wore on, sometimes slipping into the long bed opposite Lewyn’s far nearer to the next day than the day before. When Lewyn woke at his normal time to get himself to art history, Jonas would be there: face to the wall, forearm protruding from the strange long underwear he wore. （For months Lewyn had been under the impression that this sartorial item was an ordinary undershirt, paired with some style of long undershorts favored by people from the rustic lands of the West. The true nature of the thing had been revealed in one of their conversations on Mormonism, ancillary to that first one, in which such topics as evangelism, cosmology, handcarts, and sacred garments had all been touched upon.）
Squalor aside, Lewyn did feel fortunate to be living with Jonas, and on those （increasingly rare） occasions they were both in the room—Jonas cramming for his bovine anatomy midterm, say, and Lewyn drafting an art history paper—they fell easily into their way of being together. After that first magical narrative in the fall it had taken weeks for Lewyn to stop thinking of his roommate as some kind of mystic, an ecstatic possessed of occult knowledge and a personal relationship with angels, but gradually he had managed to draw a kind of curtain around the topic of spirituality in general, and Jonas’s religion in particular, and move on into the quotidian business of cohabitation. He and Jonas might represent different political inclinations, different prospects （both career and celestial）， and opposite ends of the country, but they were both polite people who spoke kindly to each other as a rule, especially in the morning when they were most often in the same place at the same time. Not infrequently, they even went for breakfast together at North Star, where they were sometimes joined by Jonas’s vet school friends and new fraternity brothers.
“Lewyn, my roommate,” Jonas always said. He said it the first time he introduced them, and the fourth.