Then he would play his guitar. People would start coming into our room. Jerry would stop work and come over. Arthur had a terrific voice. He was serious about his studies, but his music was hard to ignore. I had taken up drums and had managed to bring both my trumpet and the drums to the dorm room. Each night, while Arthur would sing and play the guitar, I would sing with him, play the drums, and deejay as well. Full of ourselves, confident of our prodigious talents, we made a record together. Rock and roll was ours. (Years later, on the occasion of a major birthday of his, I presented Arthur with a copy of that recording.)
Fall in South Harlem. (That’s the location of Columbia, though it was seldom mentioned by real-estate brokers or the university’s recruitment corps.) It was usually still warm and humid. We would open the windows wide so there would be nothing between the room and the sky. Sweat would start on our foreheads. Sometimes the sky would darken and we would know it was about to rain—we could smell it, as if something was issuing from the concrete. At first there would be no other sounds; then we would hear the rain hit the ground, even from our fourth-floor room. It was almost as if the city had paused. We would go to the window to watch the rain, to see people running for cover as if they were being shelled, holding newspapers or books over their heads.
In the winter, snow would bring a deep silence, as though the city was made not of iron and concrete and glass but of something soft and pliable. We often opened the window for fresh air, and heat would billow from our convection units. And then it would start to really snow. Giant clumps would begin piling up on the sidewalks and the window ledges. Arthur would come sit on my desk, maybe not saying anything, just looking out the window, his thin body twisted in order to see.
One day when we were studying the Parthenon, Arthur said, “Sanford, now this is something. This is something I would like to see. I think we should go. We should plan a trip.” He tapped the textbook.
“Well, a trip requires money,” I replied. As a scholarship student, I needed jobs to augment my funds. I worked as a waiter at my fraternity, and at home during the summer I was a truck driver, steering a long flatbed filled with bales of old clothing on the two-lane back roads between Buffalo and Jamestown, New York. I had also worked as a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. I was planning to work as a camp counselor during the coming summer.
“Yes, of course you would need money, Sanford. I realize that. Lots of money. But I can save over the summer. You can save, too. You won’t need much money at camp. You’ll eat for free. Maybe you’ll need walk-around change, but otherwise they take care of everything. And then next year, we can go. What do you think?”
I thought it was unlikely, but who was I to spoil his pleasure? “I think it’s a great idea. I think we should do it,” I said.
“It’s just strange that something could be around so long,” he said, “and we still talk about it thousands of years later. There are so few things like that in the world.” He sounded distant at times like this, his thoughts seeming to drift into him from far outside of himself. “If you’re going to become an architect,” he continued, as though talking to himself, “then you have to consider whether the work you’re going to do will last. It’s the same for artists. There are other professions like that, but not many. Doctors, for example, know their work won’t last because all their patients will eventually die. It’s a noble profession, but still—there’s always that.”
“Hmmm,” I said. It was clear he was having trouble with the idea of what the worth of his life as an architect would be. I could not quite figure out why.
“I’m sure you’ll do something memorable,” I said.
“That’s not it, Sanford,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It’s not that—it’s not about vanity, necessarily. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s about having something that stops time for a bit. We’ll finish this year. You’ll go off to be a camp counselor. Maybe we’ll really go to Europe or Greece or wherever. [We did, though not to Greece.] We’ll graduate. You’ll go to law school. I’ll go to architecture school. We’ll stay in touch, but it’s hard. You’ll get married. You’ll have kids. This is just an example. I’m not blaming you. It’s just to show how fast things go. But who’s to say we’ll stay in touch? Even with our friendship,” he concluded.
I did not understand what he was getting at. His face was reddening. He took this subject seriously—surprisingly so, I thought. “Well, who says we won’t stay in touch, Arthur? That’s crazy. We’ll probably even end up living here. Where else would we live? We’ll hang out all the time. It’ll be great.”
“Do you think so?”
“Of course.”
“Still,” he said, tapping the page showing the Parthenon, “I can’t do something like this.”
“They don’t make them like they used to.”
“Sanford, I’m being serious. I mean, architecture school. Is that what I want to do?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You can do that. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be you, Arthur.”
I think this lifted his spirits some. But not all the way. He was such a different kind of guy. He was genuinely agitated over that picture of the Parthenon. It was not merely a picture to him, as it probably was to many of our classmates. Something like that might have been more than just a picture to me as well, but I was never moved to the
