he hushed her. They spent an hour at the Fogg Art Museum peering at Rembrandt sketches and Byzantine iconic art. Raff was thinking about the sex to come later, but he also promised himself he would study art history when he found time--a commitment he knew would be forgotten by the following day.
The couple devoted two hours to a concert of atonal music. Raff didn't understand it at all, but everyone else seemed to, including JoLane, so he kept silent afterward. They held hands through a lecture at Science Center A entitled "Origin and Phylogeny of the Flowering Plants: A Mystery Solved," by a renowned and incomprehensible botany professor from Peking University. They attended a Free Burma rally, and wondered later what the military junta was doing with the rain forest. Both agonized over the Twin Towers attack but also hoped the people of Afghanistan would not suffer unduly. Together, the two sampled Ethiopian cooking in a small restaurant off Harvard Square, both first time, last time.
They laughed over the Harvardian eccentricities all around them. Visiting professors from the University of Oxford speaking with Oxford accents and publishing in the New York Review of Books, and American professors also speaking with Oxford accents but publishing in the London Review of Books. The forced enthusiasm of the university's official Harvard Gazette for Harvard football. The rareness of Harvard students wearing Harvard insignia on their sweatshirts and jackets, instead preferring, in egregious reverse snobbery, Georgia Tech University and Slippery Rock College.
It bothered Raff a little that no one he met, other than JoLane, had ever heard of Admiral Raphael Semmes, and she only vaguely and dismissively. But this minor insult was soon forgotten in the magical ambience of Harvard Law School. By the end of the first semester, with new friends and the rapidly evolving affair with JoLane, his life was as complete and balanced, he thought, as it might ever be. He even sometimes imagined idly what it would be like to give everything up and become a Harvard bum. Audit courses for free, slip into the back rows for big lectures and events. Crash a few receptions for drinks and hors d'oeuvres, maybe even the Faculty Club when a packed room there was partly filled with students. Live on odd jobs. Have a constant lover, maybe JoLane. Pass on into middle age with a speckled beard and ponytail. Be one of the semiprofessional chess players in Harvard Square ("Play chess with an expert, $5"). Learn enough classic chess moves to knock down the amateurs fast, and have dinner that evening in a good restaurant somewhere around the square. But it was just a fantasy. Raphael Semmes Cody soldiered on.
The interests of Raff and JoLane were broadly overlapping, but a difference in their temperament divided them. It emerged disturbingly on the key issue of environmental activism. JoLane wanted a juggernaut, and she thirsted for a revolution. Her preferred strategy was bombardment with propaganda followed by frontal assault by means of public protest and riot. She could not abide Raff's cautious, law-abiding approach.
JoLane tried to avoid the tension between them. In private conversation it diminished the freedom with which they expressed ideas. They softened some opinions and detoured around a few altogether, including race and economics. Raff worried that their conjugal intimacy was putting an edge on some of their intellectual talk, making sex less spontaneous than it had been when they were near-strangers.
Finally, one evening, when he started to talk about the methods of conflict resolution and litigation, she exploded.
"The developers are too powerful, Raff! You cannot compromise with these people. They've got the money, they've got the politicians, and not only that, they like to say what they're doing is good for the country. And then if nothing else works, they tell you it's God's will. God the Wildlife Manager, no less. How can you deal with that? You can't compete with them, Raff. You can't reason with them. They'll run over you every time. The only thing to do is to go right at them, believe me. I've learned a few things from my father. Passion and guts, Raff, you gotta have them, and you gotta leave some bodies on the field. We haven't got a lot of time either, Raff."
He did not like being pushed like this, as though his manhood were in question. "I think you want me to be a courthouse lawyer, JoLane, and keep Gaia Force members and other hard chargers out of jail. I