WHEN I WAS in college in Eugene I had a girlfriend named Nora Vardon. We had fallen together sort of accidentally, I talked to her first at a vending machine where we were both buying coffee, and things progressed in the usual slow ways, we went out one cold night to look at the blurry stars, and that led to some kissing, and from there we started the customary excavation of our families, revealing, not quite competitively, how crazy they both were, she with a raft of depressives and schizophrenics and me with a bunch of drunks, mainly the men on my father’s side. She had an open, genial, feline face, with big cheeks and dark eyes, and a big, soft body that was round in parts and that was covered, for three months out of the year, with the big textured bruises left by lacrosse balls. She was very pretty, really, and I counted myself lucky to be around her. I was skinny and out of necessity got cheap haircuts, so I wasn’t much to look at, and I tended to be secretive, I suppose you could put it that way, although I had nothing to be secretive about, being only twenty and unadventurous.
But Nora and I hit it off. She was studying botany, for which the college had a sort of reputation, and spent her hours in the long white greenhouses at the edge of campus. The heat affected her well. Her hair, brown and a little wavy, would become affixed to her cheeks, and as she worked at the potting tables her dark eyes would take on a comfortable, meditative languor there amid the odor of the soil and the dense humid air and the metallic smell of water dripping from the galvanized piping. To find Nora there I would have come from the library’s back door and out across a section of newly planted pines, which were staked to the earth as though they might otherwise pull up their roots and walk away. The sky in winter was usually sealed with a dense marine overcast, but inside the greenhouses the light was bright, brilliant, and contained. “My ride is here,” Nora would say to no one, as I came down the concrete walkway—or, “My Orlando,” with the accent purposely wrong, on the last syllable, and her mouth would make its charming little O, and I’d give her a kiss, and it would be enough to make me happy.
Nora and I had friends, most of them Nora’s, actually, and we did the usual collegiate things, mostly just drinking, sitting around talking until late: black Emory from Philadelphia, fat Harold the townie, tall flaxen Winnie from Texas, the sad red-haired poet Matt Grange. I worked with Matt three mornings a week in the alumni office, answering phones. Matt would sit at his desk, composing his lines and crumpling them up and throwing them away, and I would sit at my desk across the room from him, doing nothing, and every now and then a perfect peace would come over me, for no reason I could find, and even just sitting and typing under the fluorescent lights—with the rain clouds gathering beyond the tall windows—seemed a civilized and decent thing to do, maybe for the rest of my life. At the time I didn’t have much idea of what I wanted, in the larger sense, but it didn’t worry me. I thought I might like to work for a newspaper one day, maybe in Eugene, or maybe in Seattle, where I came from, but there was plenty of time, I thought, and plenty of time after that too. I wasn’t headed anywhere on any fast track, that was plain even then, and I didn’t have any kind of natural flair, but I had Nora, and it felt to me like a fair exchange. I was romantic, in the silly way of young men. The rest of my life, I imagined at the time, would be only a collection of details—addings-on—corollaries—to the central fact of Nora Vardon.
Eventually it came time to visit Nora’s parents, Jack and Annette Vardon, who lived a few hundred miles north in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mr. Vardon turned out to have a friendly oblong head and a mustache, and he worked—I was never quite sure about this—as an engineering manager, or a consultant engineer, maybe as a consultant to other engineering managers, at any rate he went off every day in his beige raincoat and came back at night and seemed to make a good living at his business, whatever it was. We didn’t see much of him. Mrs. Vardon stayed at home and played tennis in the backyard, and had given Nora her dark eyes and round girlish cheeks. “Orlando,” said Annette, on the back porch where we ate, “what an interesting name that is.” The day was unusual, almost warm, though it was only the middle of March.
“They wanted me to be different,” I said.
“You’re not Spanish?”
“No,” I said. “German, mostly.”
“We named Nora after her Spanish great-grandmother.” Nora’s mother wore a little white dress that showed her knobby knees. “Believe it or not, my mother always wanted to be Jewish. In fact she always said she was Jewish, but everyone knew she wasn’t. But she wanted to be.”
“Be Jewish?” I asked, for clarity.
“Oh, God knows why. She thought it had some cachet, I suppose. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, if you ask me, in terms of what you have to face in this world.”
“Sure.”
“Now, I admire the Jews,” said Annette.
“Mom.”
“I do. I guess everyone does these days. If you don’t, you’re an anti-Semite. But I suppose in admiring them I’m doing something wrong.”
“You’re making them exotic,” said Nora. “You’re othering them.”
“Well, I guess I don’t know what you mean. And they are exotic. They are. To me, they are. I don’t know any, really, except Elly Bergman, and she doesn’t count, she’s not really anything. Which not knowing any is a failing on my part. But they’re a very healthy people. Doctors. And they’re a sad people, which I like. I like sad people. It’s the way people should be. If everyone was sad, we wouldn’t have all these problems.” She cast her arms wide. “Don’t tell me we need all these problems.”
While visiting her parents Nora and I slept in separate bedrooms: me in her older brother George’s room (he was living in an apartment a mile or so away and had taken all his things with him, so the room had a neutral, underinhabited feeling) and Nora in her old childhood bedroom with the posters and so forth. Nora wouldn’t sneak in to see me at night, and I didn’t exactly want to take the initiative and go next door, but during the long days, with the father gone and the mother off somewhere with friends, we made up for it in George’s room. Not in hers, Nora insisted, because that would be too weird. And then afterward we’d laze around naked with the light through the windows, listening to the garbage trucks churn through the neighborhood. “I can’t believe she said those things,” said Nora. “You know, she’s always had a thing about Jewish people. I think she’s afraid she’s secretly somehow one of them. That her mother was right. That wouldn’t bother you, would it?”
“Your mom’s cute,” I said. “She looks like you.”
“Like me?” She considered this. “Maybe me on a very bad day.”
We were going to be there for about a week, and on the second day, George, the brother, came around to do laundry and to eat. George was thin and dried-out, like a kind of cowboy, and his long fingers fiddled, fiddled, and touched his hair, and pulled his turtleneck sweater up over his chin. Nora loved him and grew sly and contentious with him around. “Mom says you still don’t have a decent job,” she said.
“Oh, but I do. I’m fully employed, soaking the rich.” He rolled his eyes at their parents in the next room. “You know how that goes.”
“No,” she said, “I’m working for my money.”
“Sure. You just get the check in the mail. I’ve got to manage the little dollies. Manage, manage, manage. They require,” he said, turning to me, “manipulation.”