Admission (12 page)

There was, when they were finally naked, a sort of exhalation between them, a kind of mutual calming or resetting of the metronome.
She found herself slowing down, touching with new care: his chest, his nape, which was oddly sharp, the twin depressions at
the base of his spine. Their limbs tangled together; she lost track. Rib cage jutted rib cage. His mouth was no longer too
high, no longer too low. How insightful he was, she thought, after all, how sly to pretend all that ignorance when he was
this clever, this passionate, all along. She wondered who else must be in the room making all that noise. Only an unfurled
pant leg still caught her by the ankle, like a Peter Pan shadow, but Portia didn’t kick it away. She liked the feeling of
being tethered, of this one filament tying her to whatever propriety she’d jettisoned, a chance of finding her way back. She
would need to find her way back when this was over, when John Halsey was no longer making love to her in a nondescript hotel
room in Keene, New Hampshire, an act that somehow banished all banality from the setting. She could, and did, forget herself,
and where she was, and who she was, and the myriad reasons she ought to have resisted. But for the time she held him—and she
did hold him, both as he moved inside her and after, still and damp and curled against her—the points of contact they made
seemed more compelling than anything else she could summon to mind. At rest, he breathed heavily into her hair. He said her
name, once, then seemed to think better of it and settled for touch. One hand came to rest on her hip; the other reached deep
into the hair behind her ear. Both were so inexpressibly tender that Portia felt suddenly, alarmingly, in danger of tears.

“Tell me about Nelson,” she said, to save herself.

“Nelson?”

Now that it was fully night, the white lights of the parking lot found the edges of the curtains, making them both bluish
at the edges, just visible.

“He’s not… I’m assuming he’s not your biological son,” she faltered.

“No, you assume correctly. I adopted him at six weeks.”

“In Africa?” she guessed. “While you were in the Peace Corps?”

“Well, yes and no.” He sighed. “I was there for two years, mainly in Kampala. The school I taught in was part of a Catholic
compound in the city, run by a priest named Father Josiah. Fantastic man. He’d gone to university in Italy, and he’d lived
in Europe and the States before going home to Uganda. He was insane about backgammon. We must have played a thousand games
of backgammon. He didn’t have the slightest interest in converting me, but he was extremely interested in beating me at backgammon.”
John laughed.

“Did you play for stakes?” she asked.

“No. Nothing like that. But we had wonderful conversations. I got more of an education from him than I got anywhere else.
Very brilliant, decent guy. Very stoic. You know, the communities we worked with, everyone had HIV. The kids in the school
had it. The parents were just withering and dying. First the men would die, and they’d infected their wives, so then the wives
would die, and that left all the kids to be raised by their grandmothers. And the kids, of course, were infected
in utero
. You’d just watch them get listless and skinny.”

“It must have been very hard,” she said, feeling the inadequacy of that.

“It’s more like a learned skill. You talk to Peace Corps folks, only the details change. Otherwise, there’s this complete
uniformity of experience. It’s like emotional hazing. You trot on over, thinking you’re going to fix everything. Or, even
if you won’t admit to thinking that, you at least want to fix
something
. Then, when you get there, you find yourself under this hammer that just tap, tap, taps you into the ground. The problems
are so relentless, not only can you not fix them, you can’t really fix any part of them. And people just lose it. They sign
on for the Peace Corps because they think of themselves as problem solvers, and here they’ve come to the ends of the earth
and they can’t do anything—I mean, not anything substantial—about what they’re seeing. And this is on top of all the other
stuff, like the deprivations and the isolation, not to mention the microbes. So you quickly get to a crisis point, where you
either go back to wherever you came from or you undergo a third world readjustment. Actually, correction might be a better
word. It’s sort of bizarrely freeing. You get to this point where it’s okay that you can’t fix it. You just don’t want to
make it any worse than it was before. Making it a tiny bit better is now your most ambitious desire.”

“And you got to that place, I take it.” She rolled onto her side and found that she could see him, more or less. He had his
arms up over his head and was lying flat. The hollow below his rib cage rose and fell. She found that long, ragged scar on
his abdomen and traced its curious length with a fingertip.

“Yeah. It wasn’t that hard for me, actually. Probably because of this priest. He basically told me there was no point in falling
apart. I’d just be wasting time. His time.” John laughed. “And he was a busy man. He had a clinic to run, and the school,
and an orphanage, and a food program. He ran a literacy program and a sponsorship program. And of course, there was all that
backgammon he needed me to play.” He shook his head.

Portia smiled. “So that’s where you adopted Nelson? You brought him home with you?”

“Not exactly. I finished up my two years in Africa and then I went traveling. Mostly in Europe. And then I came back to the
States. I’d left Uganda, let’s see… about eight months earlier. Father Josiah wrote to me at my parents’ address. He was very
cunning about it. He didn’t say anything about coming back. He just wanted to let me know that my son had been born. The baby
was in the orphanage and he was very healthy. You’d think I would have been angry. Or baffled, anyway. You know, had I forgotten
I’d had sex with some woman before I left? But that wasn’t what he meant. He meant that I was supposed to take care of this
particular child. This was my child. And I remember, the whole thing was so calm. You know, there I was in the living room
of my parents’ house outside of Philadelphia. They’d kept the letter for me—I was away, visiting some friends in the Midwest,
and now I was back and I was supposed to be looking for a teaching job. So it was already a month old. I remember sitting
there on my mother’s very proper chintz-covered sofa, looking out the French doors at the backyard. And my mom was out there,
weeding the peonies. And there was not a moment of uncertainty, that’s what was so bizarre. No Should I? Shouldn’t I? Of course
I was going back to get this baby. He was my son. I mean, already. And he was born, and he was healthy. You know, he was
waiting
for me. Actually, the only thing I was stressing out about was how to tell my parents their first grandson wasn’t going to
have the family chin.”

Portia laughed, a bit uneasily.

“It sort of makes you wonder what this biological thing
is,
you know? People make such a fuss about having their own genetic children. I’d never really thought about it before Nelson.
I guess I just assumed I’d have biological children. But even sitting there, half the world away, without even laying eyes
on him, he was already mine. Just because someone had told me so. Just like that. I didn’t even have a snapshot.”

“And you felt the same way when you got back to Uganda and met him?”

“Yes. Absolutely. I picked him up out of the basket, and I didn’t put him down for the next three years, basically.”

They lay without talking for a few minutes. Cars
whoosh
ed and groaned up the road outside the hotel. Once, a flap-flap of footsteps sounded down the hall outside.

“Does he ever ask about his biological parents?” Portia said.

“Actually, no. I’ve always wondered about that. I’ve always wondered why he wasn’t more curious. He’s never asked me to take
him back, to find a cousin or an aunt or a sibling. Somebody. He never seemed interested. And I never suggested it. Maybe
I’m afraid of it, I don’t know.”

“You shouldn’t be. I’m sure you’re a wonderful father.”

“Thank you,” he said. He sounded actually moved. “We all make it up as we go along. I’m sure the biological dads are just
as clueless.”

“I guess.” She smiled. “Though my mom always acted as if she knew what she was doing.”

“Well, that’s what matters. It’s what experienced teachers always tell new teachers: ‘Act like you know what you’re talking
about.’ We all do it. Then, one day, we magically realize that we do, actually, know what we’re talking about.”

In the darkness, she nodded, not for him but for herself. Maybe everything was like that, she thought. She remembered the
first years along her own odd career trajectory, fudging statistics when asked, trying to act as if she understood the strange
and unwieldy behemoth that was college admissions, reading its runes to glean some semblance of logic when there was little
logic. Whim and art, she would tell herself, as if that made up for not knowing what she was doing. And then one day she realized
that she did, in fact, know what she was doing. She just didn’t really know why.

John was quiet for another moment, then he got up to use the bathroom, and when he turned on the light, Portia saw him for
an instant in the open doorway. He was beautiful. She hadn’t really understood until that moment how fluidly the parts she
had felt with her hands and mouth were joined, how unified and lovely. He was muscular but not padded and, even in the garish
bathroom light, a kind of lemony pale, a shade both false and appealing. She felt a quick pulse of longing—informed longing,
she told herself, because she knew now what he looked like and what he felt like and what he could do to her. She waited for
him to finish.

When he came back, he sat at the foot of the bed and looked at her. He had left the door to the bathroom open a bit, and the
light cut into the room in a thin wedge. “You know,” he said, “I feel as if there’s some basic information we haven’t covered
here.”

“I’m of age, thanks,” she said, smiling.

“Yes. I mean, no, I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Of sound mind. Of sound body.”

“Very sound. Clearly. I was thinking… you know, I wanted to tell you that I don’t do this. I wouldn’t say never. But what I
did tonight, coming to the hotel like this. I’ve never done it before.”

“I thought you were just coming to take me to dinner,” she said coyly.

“I was! I really was.”

“But hoping for something else.”

“I don’t know.…” He gave up on this thought and regrouped. “I don’t know anything about your situation. I don’t know… for example,
I don’t know if you’re involved with anyone.”

“Are you involved?” she asked.

“No. I was for a long time, but we’ve separated. It’s complicated, because we work together, and we’re close friends. And
we’ve helped to raise each other’s children. But no, not involved any longer.”

“The famous Deborah Rosengarten?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “How did you know that?”

“Educated guess.”

“We really are friends,” he offered. “I know it sounds lame.”

“Not at all. It’s great that you’re still on good terms. I’m not on good terms with anyone like that.”

Tom, she thought, and she could see he was thinking it, too. But he had learned, evidently, from the last time and didn’t
say it out loud.

“Are you involved now?” he said instead.

She considered this. The truth, whatever it was, was not her only consideration. There were other, complicating factors, like
the past and the future. It was a question she had not given nearly enough thought to for far too long a time, and now, instead
of having a settled, concrete sense of what the answer was, where her life was, whom—if anyone—she was tied to, she found
she had nothing at all.

“Are you not sure?” he said with false levity.

“I’m involved,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“No, no. Don’t be sorry. I had no… I don’t have an
agenda
. And it’s none of my business.”

“I wish… ,” she said before she could stop herself. She’d meant, it was obvious, that she wished it were. His business. But
she didn’t, she couldn’t. It was all complicated enough without that. And she couldn’t really want him badly enough. Not out
of the blue like this, with a chance meeting, a jolt from the past, that part of her past she had worked mightily to excise
from her sense of self, and a single night in a thoroughly anonymous hotel room. Lives didn’t change so suddenly. Her life
couldn’t change.

“You wish… ?” he prompted after a moment.

“No, it’s nothing. I get very tangled up sometimes. I feel as if I don’t know anything, you know, even after all this time.
Sometimes I think I knew more half my lifetime ago. Which begs the question, What have I been doing with the second half?
I have these vivid memories of the books I read in high school, and the things I did and thought about. Now I can hardly remember
the novels I read for my book club last year or the last real insight I had.”

“It is strange,” John said, but tentatively. He wasn’t necessarily agreeing with her, she understood. He might be having a
different sort of life, a better sort of life, she thought, and pitying her.

“I mean, do you remember getting your acceptance letter from Dartmouth? I remember it, in Technicolor. It was just after I
turned eighteen, and I actually remember what I was wearing and what my mother and I cooked for dinner that night. Now I’m
the one putting the letter in the mail, and I know less than that eighteen-year-old girl. That’s not the way it’s supposed
to work, is it?”

“No,” he agreed. “But somehow that’s how it always does work. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed,” he told her, embarrassing her
more by knowing she was embarrassed in the first place. “You’d be amazed how often I seem to have this conversation, or some
version of it. We’re in Dante’s forest, you know. Wasn’t he thirty-five in
The Inferno
? We’re all like this, wondering if we did the right things, how it would all have been different if we’d turned left instead
of right. Besides, we can’t expect to understand what the hell we’re doing,” he said, moving up the bed. He lay by her side
and propped himself up on an elbow. “You know what Kierkegaard said about living life forwards but understanding it backwards.”