A Person of Interest Read Online Free Page B

religion would survive her marriage to Gaither, by whose faith she was completely unmoved.
    Lee’s own decade of marriage to Aileen never satisfactorily revealed to him why she’d married Gaither, or why Gaither had married Aileen.
    “It was something to do that summer,” Aileen once said, opaquely. In any case, when Aileen’s marriage to Gaither came apart, it did so like a garment that had been pinned by the seamstress and then never sewn. The rupture was ugly and loud, but afterward, in Lee’s estimation, the two halves were just as they’d been before joined; neither took so much as a thread of the other into the next phase of life.
    For the duration of his friendship with Gaither, Lee didn’t like to think it was based on their age; once the friendship was over, he liked A P E R S O N O F I N T E R E S T 17
    to think it had no basis beyond that. The other eight students in their year in the Ph.D. program—all men, all white and American-born except Lee—had seemed to Lee like lesser versions of their paragon, a mathematical prodigy if social oddball named Donald Whitehead. Like Whitehead, these eight all were goldenly handsome and brooding in the Byronic vein; all wore their hair distractedly untrimmed, their tweed jackets unmended, their ancient leather loafers unrepaired. All of them were young, well-bred, unapologetic introverts whose lack of cordiality and warmth was admired by professors and women alike as evidence of their genius; although Whitehead, as the acknowledged apotheosis of these qualities, tended to take them too far. Whitehead’s dishabille left the realm of the romantic to verge on the incompetent.
    Whitehead’s social disconnection from fellow students sometimes seemed less a proudly elected condition than an exile he was helpless to alter; his lesser, Byronic peers did socialize with each other, if in remote, haughty ways. Whitehead, Lee believed, was always left to himself. All of the ways in which Whitehead was distinct from his clutch of blond shadows both stoked Lee’s desire to befriend him—
    only him—and led Lee to realize that this was impossible. Whitehead silently handed Lee class notes a few times on request and as silently—though Lee felt graciously, on what basis he couldn’t have said—received them again with Lee’s thanks, when he had copied them down. But the relationship did not progress, as it did not progress between Whitehead and anyone, and so Lee found himself pairing with Gaither, the other outcast.
    Gaither made the first overtures, and here again there was much that Lee sought to revise once the friendship was over. Lee was canny enough to realize that Gaither’s early, easy interest in him, Gaither’s falling into step with him outside of class, the uncondescending manner in which Gaither filled in missing words, early on, when Lee’s English still faltered, arose from a mixture of genuine kindness and the other strong motive of Gaither’s religion. Lee was clear-eyed about his nonlofty status, enough aware that the depth of his loneliness exerted a force that repelled, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it. Lee modeled himself on the Byronic octet, not without some success; his ink-dark, almost mirrorlike hair grew to fall in a cowlick that hid his forehead; he found a battered calf briefcase, like a WASPy, 18 S U S A N C H O I
    neglected heirloom, in a secondhand store. He knew that the younger departmental secretaries saw him as an exotic prince of the Far East, a Yul Brynner with hair, and he would feel them staring after his tweed-covered back—the secondhand store again—as he left the offi ce. But Gaither, perhaps because he was older, saw through to Lee’s yearning; or was yearning, himself, for a friend; or was intent on a mission. Lee was aware of all three possibilities and stressed the second while the friendship endured and the third when it ended. Lee’s mother, in the late and unhappiest years of her life, had been