Admission (10 page)

He suggested the restaurant in the lobby. It was awful, he admitted, but probably no less awful than anywhere else nearby.

“Well,” she said, laughing, “with a recommendation like that… I do have work. I can’t take very much time away.” This was patently
untrue. Of course she had work. There was always work, but that wasn’t the point. Even if, like those literate adulterers
Paolo and Francesca, she read no more today, there would be no difficulty in finishing the folders she’d brought with her.
She was alone here. No one cared what time she went to bed. And in any case, she felt, with every passing instant of this
odd, strained conversation, that a sober, solitary, and above all
early
night was the last thing in the world she wanted.

The restaurant, off to the side of the lobby, was called The Grille. She might have recited the menu from the generic plants
growing atop the booth dividers, the high-quality silk flowers on the tables. To her own surprise, she felt real hunger when
she took her laminated menu from the waitress: prime rib, breast of chicken, Caesar salad.

“Do you eat meat?” she asked him.

He looked up at her and frowned. “I do. But I’m a little hush-hush about it at work. Technically, we don’t have a policy about
it one way or the other, but the students—or I guess the parents—skew heavily in favor of tofu and seitan.”

“I hate that stuff,” she said, reading and rereading the description of the New York strip, which used both the adjectives
succulent
and
luscious
and boasted a misplaced apostrophe (“seared with herb’s”). “I mean, seitan. I don’t mind tofu. But whoever dreamed up seitan
should be force-fed bulgur for the rest of his life.”

John laughed. “I’m not a bulgur fan myself. I remember they gave it to us on Outward Bound when I was a teenager. We’d just
come off these three-day solos, where they’d left us each on our own little island in Penobscot Bay. When it was over, they
picked us up and brought us back to base camp, and they cooked us up a big feast of bulgur. Twenty-five starving kids. I mean,
so
hungry. We hadn’t eaten in days, most of us. Well, a few of the more ingenious ones managed to remember which plants they’d
taught us were all right. But I don’t think any of us could get that bulgur down.”

She smiled. “Well, I hope you don’t mind if I order a steak. Who can resist a dish described not only as luscious, but succulent,
too?”

“Don’t you love those redundancies? Like ‘anonymous stranger.’ And ‘diametrically opposed.’”

“Don’t forget ‘proactive.’ And ‘exact replica.’”

“‘Frozen tundra,’” he said. “Well, we might have to take that one off the list soon. Would you like some wine?”

“Oh… no, thank you. Go ahead, if you like.”

He didn’t like, or said he didn’t.

“Should I have suggested beer?” he asked when the waitress was gone. “After all, you’re a graduate of Dartmouth College, beer
consumption capital of New England.”

“You must mean that sticky stuff on the basement floors of all the fraternities.”

“Yes.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t act superior. I told you, I was in a fraternity. For a while, anyway. I lost interest and
stopped going to the parties, let alone the meetings. I think they even quit coming after me for dues.”

“Why did you join?” she asked.

He shrugged. “The usual reasons. Group of friends. A place to go. I was on the rugby team, and everyone was in the same house.
But I stopped playing rugby, too, after my sophomore year. I had this conversion to my academic work, amazingly enough. I’d
never thought of myself as a student, though of course I’d been in school my whole life. Suddenly, everything sort of snapped
into focus, you know?”

Portia nodded tentatively.

“I was an education major. It wasn’t a big major. There weren’t very many of us, but we talked about teaching incessantly.
We talked theories of education, theories of childhood learning. Waldorf versus Montessori. There were real fights.” He shook
his head. “But the fact was, when they sent us down to intern in the public schools in West Lebanon, most of us couldn’t even
control our classes. It was very deflating. After that, a few of the education majors sneaked off and took the LSATs.”

“But not you,” Portia said.

“No, I still carried the torch. I went off to Groton after I graduated. I was all set to start the Dead Poets Society and
teach them to seize the day and all that. But after two years I just had to claw my way out.”

“Why?” Portia asked. “Did you hate it?”

“No, no. I loved it. I’d gone to a boarding school, so I knew the culture. But from the other side of the divide, I could
see how great the kids were. I loved how they were all excited about going to college and becoming fine, upstanding citizens.
But it was such an easy life, with my little apartment in the fourth-form boys’ dorm, and three meals a day at the cafeteria,
and smart students who went out of their way to appreciate me, if only because they wanted me to write them recommendations.
It was like the poppy field in
The Wizard of Oz
. I just could feel myself getting sleepier and sleepier. I thought, I’m going to drop off any minute and wake up in forty
years with a Groton writing award named after me and some sort of framed declaration on my wall. It’s going to float by me
in a beautiful haze of crew shells and foliage and long shadows on the quad. I have to leave immediately.”

She couldn’t help smiling. The waitress brought them two pallid salads: orange tomato wedges on limp iceberg. She ignored
hers.

“So, what, you went to the opposite end of the spectrum, right? South Central? South Bronx?”

“Even farther. Uganda. I enrolled in the Peace Corps. I was there for two years.”

“Wow,” Portia said, watching him spear his sorry tomato. “Good for you.”

“Oh, don’t say that.” He looked up at her. “I didn’t do it to be good. I just couldn’t stand feeling like a heel. It wasn’t
why I’d become a teacher, Dead Poets Society or not. Of course it’s valid to educate the wealthy. I mean, what’s the alternative?
It would be pretty irresponsible of us not to teach those students. They’re probably going to end up running the show, right?
Better they should be engaged with the past, and the history of ideas. Just because there’s an inequity of education in this
country, that doesn’t mean we should shortchange the privileged. The goal should be to get everyone else up to that level.
I mean, I really believe that. But after Groton I felt as if I had to do two years of penance. And I knew, when I left there,
they’d just replace me with someone exactly like me, who was just as capable of teaching those kids. I wasn’t at all special,
you know? It’s just I felt like I’d been borrowing from the bank for years, and I had to pay it back.”

She listened to him, sipping her water. There was a physical component to all of this passion, she noted: a flush, not to
the face, which seemed nearly impassive, belying the clear emotional investment in what he was saying, but to the neck, the
throat. She watched it appear and spread, around the neck, up to the ears, down into the visible chest through his unbuttoned
collar. She knew this was voyeuristic, improper, but it actually felt clinical, as if she were merely observing some experiment
she’d had a part in setting up and hence maintained an interest in. But what was the nature of her interest?

When her steak was set down, Portia felt a jolt of hunger. She made herself wait until he’d been served.

“You know,” he said a moment later, “you look exactly the same.”

She swallowed uncomfortably, her eyes on her plate. She wanted, suddenly, to be left alone. She needed the protein more than
the company, more than the deep, alluring tension at this table and that thin possibility of something good that it conjured.
“I doubt that,” she said, pointedly cutting another triangle of meat.

“No, you do. I recognized you right away. Your hair is shorter. You dress better. But don’t we all? I mean, we’re not still
going around in down vests, thank God.”

“Thank God,” she echoed, smiling despite herself.

“And you have that… I always noticed it about you, how much there seemed to be going on with you. There was always more. Under
the surface, I mean.”

He seemed to have given the matter a certain amount of thought. That in itself was disturbing, but she didn’t feel threatened.
The only threat, she reflected, seemed to come from herself. Because she had already made up her mind about this. She had
already made out her wish list for this one night in Keene, New Hampshire, for this unknown man from her past, with his long
fingers and thinning hair and beautiful throat. It did not necessarily involve conversation, though she had nothing against
conversation, as long as it revealed nothing about her. Or nothing important.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “I don’t remember you at all.”

“That’s okay,” John said self-effacingly.

“I mean, it’s a little strange. You’re sure you were there,” she said with forced humor.

“Oh, absolutely. I could probably dredge up the Winter Carnival themes, or some outrage by the
Dartmouth Review,
just to prove myself. Look, it’s not complicated. I sort of had a crush on you. I saw you around the campus. I
noticed
you, I mean. But you were taken, and there are rules about that, especially when you know the guy. So I just went along my
way and had lots of meaningless love affairs. You know how it is.”

“Oh sure.” She laughed. It was, it occurred to her, almost immaterial that she liked him. It didn’t matter whether she liked
him or not. But she did, actually, like him.

“And then, you weren’t with him. I don’t know the details. We weren’t close. He didn’t discuss his personal life with me.
But I don’t think you were that blonde who was always tiptoeing down the stairs at two a.m.”

“I was not that blonde,” she confirmed, though with some sarcasm. She hoped it sounded like sarcasm.

“I had this idea you’d just, I don’t know, left. Or transferred, or something.”

“I traveled a bit,” she said. “Junior year. I actually graduated a year later than the rest of my class.”

He nodded. “I had a girlfriend when you came back. Otherwise…”

She looked flatly at him. She wondered if he knew how offputting it was, this image he was conjuring of their unrealized affair.
But then, to her own irritation, she understood that she wasn’t feeling nearly as put off as she ought to be.

“How’s your steak?”

She looked down at her steak. She gave it a fresh appraisal, trying not to hold against it everything she already knew about
it. It didn’t look very appealing. It was nondescript in its steaklike qualities and looking less appetizing by the second.
“I guess I wasn’t as hungry as I thought I was.”

“Or it’s bad,” he suggested.

“No. I mean, it’s sort of par for the course at a chain hotel somewhere in America. I feel like I’ve eaten this same steak
a hundred times already. I used to oversee applications from the Pacific region. Mainly California, but also Hawaii and Alaska,
so I would travel out there all the time. This is my first year covering New England. Princeton seems to really like Best
Western. They always book us here. I don’t know,” she said with a sigh, “maybe Mr. Best Western is an alum. Maybe there’s
a special Tiger rate.”

“Ooh.” John smiled. “It’s all so… corrupt. Just what we’ve always suspected about Ivy League admissions.”

The mood between them shifted on a dime. “But I didn’t mean that,” she said tightly. “The process isn’t at all corrupt. It
may be complex, but not corrupt.”

“I wasn’t being serious.”

“No, really. I know people think there are all these secret codes, or handshake deals in the back room, or we keep a well-thumbed
copy of the
Social Register
in the office, but that isn’t what we’re about. You have no idea how absurd the situation is. Eighteen thousand applications
last year! And the vast majority of them are great—well-prepared academically, interesting kids with plans for the future
and talents they could bring to the community. It’s just an incredibly difficult job.”

“Portia,” he said, a palpable edge of dismay in his voice, “I didn’t mean to suggest anything.”

“But everyone thinks we’re just throwing the names up in the air and admitting the ones who land inside the circle, or we’re
sadists who love to stick it to kids all over the world. I’ve been doing this for sixteen years, and I have to tell you, I’ve
never worked with a single person who enjoyed rejecting applicants. If you ask any admissions officer what they like about
their job, they talk about saying yes, not saying no.”

“Well,” he said, still trying to break the mood, “they’d hardly admit to enjoying saying no.”

“If that were true, it’s something I’d see,” she said crossly. “Believe me, at the tenth hour of the fifth day of the third
week of committee meetings, when people are desperate to get to that last application and make that last decision, there’s
still no joy in saying no. We’re in it because we want to say yes to these kids. They astound us. They have amazing minds
and amazing dreams. The rest of it, the saying no, that’s just what we have to do so we can get to say yes. It’s the worst
part of our job. It’s the
job
part of our job.”

“Okay!” He put up his hands.

“I’m just sick of all the attitude. Nobody wants to talk to
you
. Whoever you are. They couldn’t care less where you come from and what matters to you. All they see is the job title, and
all they care about is what you can do for them. Like my first boss at Dartmouth told me when I was hired, he said, ‘When
people find out you’re an admissions officer, they’ll suddenly become very, very interested in what you do. But they won’t
give a shit about you.’”

“That must be hard,” John said carefully. He had sat forward on his chair and was resting his chin in his hands. He, too,
seemed to have abandoned his meal.

“There are only two ways people talk to you. Mostly it’s this awful pleading, you know, ‘I know the most fantastic kid… ’ or,
‘I
have
the most fantastic kid.… ’ You’re constantly being bombarded, and all you can do is grin and nod and say you hope this wonderful
kid will apply, which you
do
hope. I mean, what do they expect you’ll say? ‘He sounds fantastic! He’s in!’”