“Your turn?” she asked, collapsing in a dorm-issued armchair.
“You don’t have to help.”
“Meet me somewhere then. I’m going to walk through town.”
Outside, the sun lowered and the shadows lengthened and the beauty of the day deepened. She went everywhere, stepped inside every store. Touched dresses, smelled perfurmed oils, smiled broadly at the young women working behind the registers. Here it finally was. People smiled back at her. Young men said hello. Somewhere in her mind was Lions — hollow, bare, too bright to see, each building and familiar house and barn obliterated behind a burst of blinding sun. The very name of the place an echo on empty plain.
A couple hours, one fizzy lemon drink, a pair of sandals and two silk scarves later she found Gordon in his room. It was on the opposite side of campus from her own — oddly far away after living a hundred feet apart from him all her life — in a small, brick building of four floors. Nothing like the massive tower she’d been assigned to. His roommate, an Emerson Perez, had at the last minute arranged to live off campus and left Gordon without any company. This meant he had two narrow rooms to himself; in one, a long, metal-framed twin bed, where he slept, and in the other, John’s old armchair he’d unloaded and set up as if it were the Walkers’ old living room. Next to it, the Naugahyde chair that had come in the dorm room. He hung a spider plant in a pot that Leigh had made as a girl, and given to John on Father’s Day, over which she recalled Georgianna and May exchanging a wink and, on May’s part, a deep laugh. Also on this side of the room Gordon unfolded the brown, orange, and mustard-colored afghan that Georgianna had crocheted herself and which had been on the couch at home. He set up John’s books in half a dozen neat stacks beside his chair, the binoculars from the shop alongside the books.
Leigh stepped into his room and saw all of it.
He sat in the old chair with his hands spread open on its arms and smiled at her across the dimly lit room.
“What do you think?”
“I — don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t look like that,” he said. “Who else’s stuff could I have brought? Come on, Leigh. I don’t have all the tip money saved that you have, for new stuff.”
“I guess.”
“Mom told me to bring whatever I needed.”
“No,” she said. “I know.”
“Sit down.”
“It’s still light. There’s live music downtown. I have to go to the grocery store.”
“Can’t we just sit here together in the quiet for a little? Half an hour?”
So she sat in the dorm chair beside John Walker’s chair and Gordon poured them each a shot of whiskey. She looked across the soccer field outside Gordon’s building at a handful of young men passing a ball and running up and down the field. On the far side, a trio of girls in bright T-shirts walked arm in arm in arm toward a street packed with bicycles and cars. Tricked-out pickup trucks paraded in endless loops. All the lawns were thick and soft.
After they finished their whiskeys she convinced Gordon to drive her to the overbright, overstuffed grocery, but afterward he insisted on going back to his dorm.
“You just want to sit in your room?”
He shrugged. “Tired, I guess.”
“Everything you could possibly want or need is here, Gordon.”
“Need for what?”
~ ~ ~
It seemed to Leigh over the course of the next two days, then three, that Gordon was being perversely obstinate, and she began to feel a vague distaste — an involuntary aversion — to everything in him that reminded her of John Walker or of home: his old shirts, the smell of Lava soap, the slow, careful, almost stupid look on his face when he was introduced to someone, or considering something new before him. The silence when others greeted him cheerfully, asked him how he liked it here, asked him how he was.
“Don’t you think about how people might see you?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“Why? How do I look?”
It wasn’t as though he were ignoring the physical world. He heard and saw things that escaped Leigh’s attention — a long insect snapping its matchstick legs on the screen of a house they passed; a hawk above the soccer field diminished to a pinprick circling in the blue overhead; a whistling that came from a little yellow bird in the tree branches above them, which for Leigh had dissolved into the music of the restaurant speakers. He seemed sharper and older than he’d been in springtime, like a seasoned instrument both highly strung and perfectly tuned. But the effect of all this was disturbing. He was so quiet, and now so thin, and seemed to look not past the people and lights around him, but through them. He looked at Leigh as if he were not quite sure what she was. If the words between them had once been their map to the city on a hill — to the life they were going to make together here, and then later, when they’d graduated — Gordon was erasing each word, one at a time, as if his very existence described a vacancy.
In the next few days he accompanied Leigh around campus and through town, but whenever they met someone, or Leigh struck up a conversation — with a coffee barista, with the hostess at a restaurant where they had lunch — he seemed to retreat within himself. Everything he saw — girls in new blue jeans and bright T-shirts and jackets, the colored front windows of food co-ops and bistros and dress shops — seemed to feed the inclination. Every sentence he spoke terminated in a certain soft and low intonation meant to end the conversation. He’d cross his arms over his chest and look away, only just managing to avoid overt impoliteness. People noticed. They speak solely to her — they seemed not even to see him.
If on the next evening, and the evening after that, anyone had looked in the direction of his room from the athletic field, they would have seen his silhouette sitting behind closed curtains. Outside they laughed and slammed car doors. There was music on the green. It was a radio or it was a concert or it was a small student band. A little farther in the distance, behind a line of trees, it was a crowded bar with swings instead of bar stools. They were on their way to somewhere they could dance, knowing what the day was worth and how much they had to spend and digging in their pockets for every last penny while he sat inside in his chair. Sunlight galloped past his window. The moon rose. The stars marched overhead.
Every afternoon of the first week of classes Leigh found him there, in his room. She began to notice none of his things had moved on his desk — his toothbrush, his backpack, his calculus book — from the day before.
Three weeks into classes, she found him in John’s old chair finishing a Western that was falling apart in his hands, and already on his second whiskey, which, like his father, he took slowly. His unmade bed. His unchanged clothes.
“It’s like you’re not even here, Gordon.”
“I’m right here.”
“It’s like you’re not even trying.”
“Leigh,” he said. “Please. Be patient with me.”
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” she said, and gestured around them. “It’s no help.”
“I should be going out.”
“Yes.”
“Making plans.”
“Yes.”
“Having fun.”
“Yes.”
Her face was flushed and she stood and looked out the window. The girls were gone and the soccer players were gone. The grassy field was a soft navy blue.
“I’m not exactly feeling like myself,” he said. “I guess it’s not what you had in mind.”