Admission (15 page)

It was strange, she thought now, easing into the driveway. The house she had grown up in had been a control center for clubs
and causes and campaigns, where the masses were fed and plans hatched. Back then she had indulged in an idea of home, a home
with frills and decoration, but even after all this time, their house had a
for now
feeling about it. The furniture, good enough
for now
. The colors, likable enough
for now
. As if it were not worth taking action against the generic ceiling fixture in the hallway, which a previous tenant had left
in place of an original (probably gorgeous) item. As if there were some not yet articulated thing that had to happen before
the living room got its truly intended blue and the right sleigh bed was even looked for, let alone found. Only every time
she got close to wondering what that event might be, she found herself so thoroughly exhausted that she quickly made herself
stop and think about something else.

There was a wonderful smell inside when Portia unlocked the front door, a smell that nonetheless carried with it some vague
anxiety she wasn’t inclined to identify. She heard the loud suck of their refrigerator unsealing and the almost immediate
slap as it was shut again. Mark cooking, NPR from Philadelphia, a little on the loud side (he being a little on the deaf side).
She put down her bag beside his briefcase. She put down her purse on the hall table. She didn’t call out right away. The smell
was rich and sweet: like fruit, but heavier. Chicken Marbella, she thought, snapping to attention. Chicken Marbella, the signature
dish of an entire decade (namely, the 1980s), the dish you were more likely than not to be served at any dinner party given
by any member of the bourgeoisie, or in any academic enclave from sea to shining sea, was nonetheless Mark’s dish of choice
when company was expected, because it was simple (after the first forty or so preparations), and because one could forgo the
recipe and throw everything into the same casserole with abandon, and because most of the work could be done the day before.
They never ate chicken Marbella when they were at home, alone. With dread, she stepped gingerly into the living room. All
was worryingly tidy. A fire was laid. And beyond, through the open doorway, clean glassware twinkled from the dining table.
Five places, but asymmetrical, as if one had been lately inserted and the others not yet adjusted to make this number seem
intended, not accidental. This was more troubling than she could say.

Four places at the table… that, she realized, would have had a strangely familiar tone to it: two guests for dinner, obviously,
on the night of her return, and Mark saying he would take care of everything, though she couldn’t, just now, think who those
two guests might be, and even if she could, what did it mean that there were five places? A stray-and-waif? A guest of their
guests? The unmistakable pop of a cork from the kitchen. Red wine, opened to breathe. Clos Du Val most probably, twin of the
bottle poured over the chicken an hour or earlier. Cousin to every bottle Mark had ever bought to serve with every preparation
of chicken Marbella he, or she, had ever prepared, for far too many of the dinner parties they had ever given. And she was
so tired. She turned and went back to the doorway and picked up her bag. She fought a brief, almost giddy urge to go back
out to her car, to a motel on Route 1 with a queen-size bed and a remote control. Beside her purse there was a slip of paper
she only now noticed, actually the back of a Wild Oats receipt, white with that pink stripe along the side that means: Replace
the roll. It said, in his terse British print: “Your mother rang.”

I would appreciate the opportunity to clarify a situation that occurred in the spring of 9th grade, when I was suspended for
one week for alcohol offenses. This incident occurred at a time when my family was undergoing a difficult period, and, to
put it bluntly, I had made some poor choices in the friends I was spending time with. One of these friends had an alcohol
abuse problem, but I take responsibility for participating in his abuse. I have regretted this incident many times since it
happened, but it also helped to make me the person I am today. I certainly hope that this single youthful mistake will not
adversely affect my application.

Y
our mother rang,” Mark said. He came out of the kitchen wearing a green Whole Foods apron and holding out his hands, which
were wet and stuck with tiny bits of mesclun.

“Hi,” said Portia.

“Mwa.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Was it dreadful?”

“What? No, not at all. It’s the best time to be in New England.”

“Oh yes.”

His hair smelled of oregano. He was an enthusiastic and untidy cook, who left no utensil unturned in the kitchen. In vain
had she once attempted to understand how a zester featured in a meal of shepherd’s pie and green salad, but with time she
had learned not to argue with the results.

“Chicken Marbella?”

“I know. It’s too boring. But there was a meeting all this afternoon. I knew I wouldn’t have time for anything else.”

“No, it’s fine. Everyone loves chicken Marbella.” She looked past him at the table. “Who’s our fifth?”

It was a calculated end run, this question. The third might reveal the first two, without her having to admit she’d forgotten.

“Rachel rang to ask if she could bring our new hire. It’s fortunate, actually. I’ve been feeling bad about it. We’re in November
and I haven’t lifted a finger. And she’s my countrywoman.”

“Oh.” Portia frowned. “From Oxford, right? Virginia Woolf?”

“Yes.” He turned and observed the table. “All of Bloomsbury, actually. Can you fix it up a bit? You’re good at that.”

“Yes, but…” He looked at her. “Do I have time for a bath? What time are they coming?”

“Seven. You have time. And ring your mother.”

He went back to the kitchen, and she watched him: white shirt untucked, shoeless, hands aloft. He had, for all his heft, an
almost irritating boyishness, no doubt to do with the soft English skin and overendowment of thick curling hair, once dark
brown but now at least graying. She hung up her coat and went to the table. The table was dirty, so she removed the place
settings, went to the cleaning closet, and came back with a rag. After she’d finished wiping the dust, she put everything
back, straightening the place mats and placing the plates and glasses. One of the glasses was a flat tumbler, not a wineglass.
She took it into the kitchen.

“Are we short a wineglass?”

“What?” He had the chicken Marbella on the stovetop and was stirring it with a wooden spoon.

“This is a water.” She opened the cupboard and took out another wineglass.

“Right. Oh, I had an e-mail from Cressida. She says she wants to go to university in the States.”

“Hey, that’s great,” Portia said, putting the water glass back on the shelf. “What does her mother say?”

“I doubt she’s told her. She won’t, if she has any wit, not till she has one foot on the airplane. Can you imagine Marcie
letting her come here?”

“She’ll have to follow,” Portia said.

He laughed. “Yes. Of course.”

“And move into the dorm.”

“My God.”

“It smells good,” she told him. “Just give me half an hour.”

She went back to the table and replaced the glass, then took her bag upstairs. The fact that she now remembered what was supposed
to be happening tonight, and when they had discussed it (only a couple of days earlier, at the beginning of the week), and
what they had said about it (about David, Rachel’s husband, who—being a philosopher—had idiosyncratic social skills), and
how Mark had talked her into a dinner party on the night of her return (he would cook
and
clean up, he promised), was little comfort to her. She ran her bath and placed the new folders she had taken from the office
on her bedside table. Had it been an ordinary trip, she might simply have made the transition: traveling saleswoman to hostess,
perhaps even via the kitchen. She would have been tired, of course, but not so fundamentally worn out and… yes, actually, bereft.
The bereft was new. And the guilt, of course. She was just now taking the measure of that guilt.

Drifting up the stairs, she recognized the theme music for National Public Radio’s
Marketplace
. She ran her bath and climbed into the tub, fighting an urge to submerge herself entirely: the ritual purification for unclean
women—that is to say, all women. Like most atheist Jews, Portia had never actually visited a
mikvah,
but she had always been curious. It just sounded so clean. Like a spa of soul-scouring proportions. Clean interested her.
Did you have to believe for it to work, or did it work the way acupuncture worked, whether or not you accepted that currents
of energy ran through your body? And what if it really did function as an absolution, the watery equivalent of assigned penance
in the confessional? Then she could wash away the residue of the fingerprints of John Halsey, along with what they had meant
and how they had felt, things that were still so vivid there was nothing left to the imagination, and the unmistakable but
impermissible and thoroughly troubling wish not to never see him again. Clean slate, she told herself, washing. I’m home.
I’m involved. As I said, she thought, somewhat defensively.

In sixteen years, this hadn’t happened. For either of them, she was certain, though there had always been another woman in
their lives: Cressida, the daughter who was only twenty months old when she and Mark had met. Two other women, if you counted
Marcie, Cressida’s mother, though Portia had never actually met Marcie. Mark hadn’t deserved the punishing stress of an enraged
ex-girlfriend and the occasionally litigated afterlife of that long-ago relationship, not to mention the longing he felt for
a daughter he never saw enough of. He was a good person. He was too good to deserve what she had done. She washed herself
again. She wished she could not remember—so clearly, so pointedly—the heat of John Halsey’s skin.

By the time she was ready,
Marketplace
had been supplanted by jazz and a plate of Camembert was in place on the coffee table. Portia put on the porch light when
she came downstairs and lit the fire Mark had set. They were practiced hosts. They had spent the first years working out the
kinks and now enjoyed a small reputation, very localized, among their friends. Dependable food: comfortable, not flashy. Dependable
cast of characters: articulate, opinionated, usually affable, usually university affiliated. No fireworks. It didn’t sound
particularly exciting, but despite their reputation, she had found, academic folk liked peace and quiet when they went out
for dinner. Princeton, like many another university town, had a certain reputation for domestic Sturm und Drang. Before moving
here, in fact, she and Mark had both consumed Rebecca Goldstein’s
The Mind-Body Problem
(which skewered the Philosophy Department) and Eileen Simpson’s
Poets in Their Youth
(booze and bad behavior among the Princeton scribes), in addition to the oft-cited
My Kitchen Wars
(bed hopping in the English Department); but things seemed positively sedate by the time they turned up in the mid-1990s.
The bad old times, still fondly recalled by long-in-the-tooth professors, had given way to Gymboree and SAT prep, ubiquitous
soccer, and benefits for the local hospital. People were too tired to sleep around, it seemed. Or so tanked up on antidepressants
that they no longer felt the itch.

“You sit,” Mark said, taking a glass from the table, pouring her some wine, and bringing it to her. “I said I’d do everything.”

“I know. It’s so nice of you. I feel like a guest in my own house.”

“I can’t get used to these short trips. I keep thinking you’re going away for a week or two.”

“Yes, I know. But this is so much better. Those West Coast trips just took it out of me. And I used to miss a lot while I
was gone. I’d come back and some crisis had happened in the office. And I’d be going, ‘What? What?’”

“Sounds ideal.” He laughed shortly. “I wouldn’t mind missing some of the crises.”

Mark had taken over as interim chair the previous spring, when the august, longtime head of the English Department had been
diagnosed with terminal cancer and abruptly retired. His tenure was supposed to be temporary, but there was a definite move
afoot to draft him for something at least semipermanent. He was good at the sort of benevolent dictatorship required, it turned
out, his light touch with the considerable egos involved matched by the sort of firm control the celebrated former chair had
abdicated. The only undertow had to do with Mark’s own scholarship, including a second book that was supposed to have been
finished last year and now seemed even further from that goal than before the upheaval. He hadn’t talked much about it in
some time, since coming back from his Oxford sabbatical, actually, and Portia sometimes wondered if he had taken to this administrative
work so eagerly because it buffered him from his colleagues’ expectations or from—and this was, of course, far worse—their
lowering expectations. Hired on the promise of his first book on Shelley, he’d been working on a long study of American and
English Romanticism ever since. These days, consumed by the running of the department and the management of certain high-strung
academics and scores of high-strung Princeton students, he didn’t talk much about it.