Admission (47 page)

She was laughing beside him. “Well, gee, if you put it that way. But you can’t imagine what it’s like. They’re angry at you,
all the time. After a while, it just grinds you down.”

“Who’s they? The applicants?”

“Everyone. They all have different agendas, but the one thing they have in common is that they’re angry at you. I mean, me.
Us. And I don’t know if my colleagues feel it the way I do. Sometimes I wish I could just toughen up, you know? Not care so
much.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I still don’t understand.”

Portia sighed. “The applicants are angry because I can’t see how special they are. Their parents are angry because I let in
some other kid with a lower SAT score. The alumni are angry because they got into Princeton, but their brilliant kid got denied.
The faculty’s angry because we took the athlete, not the genius, but the football players know that it’s easier to get in
if you throw the discus, and all the violinists and pianists are pretty sure you have an edge if you play something strange,
like the tuba or the harpsichord. All the New Yorkers believe that everyone applying from South Dakota gets in automatically,
but out there in South Dakota they think they don’t stand a chance at a place like Princeton. The working-class kids are convinced
we’re selling admission to the highest bidder. Simone is angry at us because we’re elitist, but the elite know for sure that
we’re giving their places away to every black or Hispanic kid who applies. Nonlegacy kids are pissed off because they read
somewhere that legacy kids are twice as likely to be admitted. But I’ve watched my boss get up in front of a packed house
at reunions and tell all those loyal alumni that two-thirds of their kids are going to be rejected. Let me tell you, they’re
not thrilled about that. When I go out to visit schools, the kids are mad at me because they know I’m going to dangle this
beautiful thing in front of them and encourage them to apply, and then reject their applications. The college counselors,
the private ones who charge thousands of dollars, they’re furious at us, because we’re furious at them, and if we even smell
them on an application it pisses us off, which makes it hard for them to sell their services to the parents, who are already
angry at us and are now going to be angry at them, too. Should I keep going?”

“No!” he said, putting up his hands. “I get it. I get it.”

“I now have a highly developed defense mechanism,” she observed.

“I can feel it. It’s like the walls of Troy.”

Portia laughed. “I’m sorry. You wouldn’t know it, but I really don’t complain about this.”

“No, I can tell,” he said. “You have that combustible quality.”

She closed her eyes. She had no idea what time it was or whether she should want to sleep. How many hours did they really
have, after all, until he had to pick up Jeremiah and board a train, back to his customary life? After which she would… what?
Return to the office? Clean out the refrigerator? Do her laundry?

“Are you cold?” he asked her. “Should we get a blanket?”

“I can do better than that. I can offer you a real bed. The sheets are even clean.”

“That sounds like the height of luxury. I accept.”

She climbed over him and reached down to pick up her clothes off the floor. John got up beside her. Sweetly, he took her hand
as she led him upstairs. She took Mark’s former side of the bed for herself, on purpose.

“You know,” he whispered, pulling her against him, “I was just thinking, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the word
spinster
spoken out loud. Except in a production of
The Music Man
. I’ve certainly never spoken it myself.”

“It’s a terrifically efficient word. It says so much in two little syllables.”

“Portia, you are not a spinster. Please.”

She sighed.

“Listen,” he said. He had curled around her, one leg between her legs, his mouth at her nape. “I had this radical idea. I
know it’s your bunker season, but could you come down to Wayne with us tomorrow? I promise, I’m not looking for the ride.
I just wondered if you could get away for the day. I mean, it’s Saturday.…”

No,
she started to say automatically. But even as the word formed, she found that she was turning this unexpected idea over and
giving it a hard look. “For how long?” she asked.

“As long as you like. We’re taking Jeremiah and Simone to Penn and Swarthmore, assuming Deborah and Simone are hitting Bryn
Mawr in the morning. I’d like Nelson to have some time with his grandparents. I expect we’ll head back to New Hampshire on
Monday or Tuesday. Come on, come see how we really live on the Main Line.” He grinned. “I’ll ask Mom to throw a tailgate.”

“Don’t tease me,” said Portia. “I’m actually thinking about it.”

“Good.” He kissed her neck softly. “Sleep on it. While I murmur postsomnolent suggestions into your ear.
Come with me to the land of the WASP—
”

“Are you kidding?” She laughed. “Where do you think I live?”

“I would have been down here months ago,” said John. His tone had shifted, downhill, slower. “I would have come to see you.
If you’d answered my letter, or contacted me. I would have been out there on the sidewalk throwing pebbles at that window.”

“Well,” she reminded him, “that was also my… someone else’s window.” But even as she said this, she noted something surprising:
that the thought of Mark and Helen-with-child had not, for the first time, brought its customary stab of pain. She would have
said something to this effect, but before she could think what it was, she had fallen deeply asleep.

I have engaged in a myriad of activities at my school, none more meaningful to me than accompanying the A Cappella choir.

J
eremiah had seen Toni Morrison on Nassau Street, carrying a cup of coffee from Starbucks and a copy of
The New York Times
. He was beside himself, barely earthbound when they met him back at Mathey and extracted him, with difficulty, from the ersatz
Gothic quadrangle. Strapped into the backseat but gripping the headrests in front, he pulled himself forward and talked incessantly
as Portia drove south into Pennsylvania, his head protruding between their heads, his running commentary ricocheting among
topics like a pinball: Luke’s roommate from Maryland, the girl in the philosophy seminar who was “completely, completely”
wrong about the Skeptics, the modern dance group last night, performing to a student quartet,
Beloved,
Professor Friedman’s brown wool pants, which had a big hole in the knee (Portia was not remotely surprised to learn), and
how the morning’s dignified debate about Infinitism versus Foundationalism had descended into a thoroughly simplistic argument
about how we could know if we were conscious beings at all and not just cells in a petri dish being manipulated by some unknown
being. She was starting to feel a little light-headed, listening to him.

“Jeremiah,” John said, laughing, “slow down. I beg you.”

“I stayed and talked to him,” Jeremiah said urgently. “We walked back to his office. He gave me a logic book and a list of
stuff to read.”

And he was off again: the student film they’d shown at
This Is Princeton,
and the Indian dance troupe, Luke’s girlfriend, who was from Taiwan, a chemist, some kind of prodigy, the boy from upstairs
who was writing a novel and taking a class from Joyce Carol Oates, the vegan burger he had eaten for dinner at Mathey, selected
by mistake but actually not terrible. And
Jesus Christ, Toni Morrison!
Right there on the street!

This Is Princeton,
Portia was trying to explain to John, was a sort of university variety show, comprising not only student clubs like the African
drummers, Mexican dancers, a cappella groups (which were legion), improv sketch comics, rappers, ballerinas, spoken-word artists,
and musicians of myriad stripes, but also the occasional faculty member or alum, who might play an instrument or sing. Portia
had always liked it, because it made the applications transform to three-dimensional flesh, and she had more than once, from
her seat in Richardson Auditorium, experienced a jolt of recognition:
So this is the national youth champion banjo player from Alaska
and
That must be the girl who was offered a place in the ABT corps de ballet but wanted to be a doctor instead
. To her, the annual event was a pageant of good decisions, a literal chorus of approval that she (uncharacteristically, but
who would ever know?) felt entitled to take personally. “We should have gone,” she said quietly to John.

“We were busy,” he replied.

They were nearly passing Newtown before Jeremiah finally ran out of steam. Then he sat back and opened the book David had
given him and was heard no more.

They drove south along the highway, beneath loaded winter skies. Portia had not slept particularly well, waking intermittently
on the unaccustomed side of the bed, with the unaccustomed body, breathing, beside her, and lying there for long, elastic
minutes, waiting for exhaustion and anxiety to battle it out. At dawn she had been woken again, this time to his hands running
over her rib cage and a following jolt of desire. She marveled at how he seemed to take, at every point, the better fork in
the road—soft over hard, slow over fast—until she understood that she was telling him everything he needed to know, and then
she marveled at that. He pulled back the blankets and simply looked at her, and she found, to her own surprise, that she loved
being frankly examined by someone who so plainly found her beautiful. They had spent the morning that way, drifting between
sleep and talk and sex, but then, when it was finally time to leave the bed, they were both (as if following the same inner
script) stricken with an almost comical awkwardness. Portia, when she managed to extricate herself, scurried to the bathroom,
locked the door, and washed fiercely in the shower, emerging to find that there were, of course, no clean towels in evidence—no
towels at all. She stuck her dripping head back into the bedroom and discovered him still under the covers, reading her Pollock
biography.

“Um, see any towels?”

He did not. He offered to look in the closet, but there was four feet of dirty laundry in the closet she preferred him not
to know about, so she asked for one of the blankets from the bed. He brought it to her, but not before wrapping it around
his own waist, and when she came out moments later, still wrapped up in it, he was dressed. In the end, she found only a not
terrible pair of brown corduroys and a shirt and sweater left behind by Mark. She looked presentable, if slightly butch. She
had, quite on purpose, no real plan for later, and she was trying hard not to examine her options. Purposely, perversely,
she had brought nothing with her: no change of clothes (as if she knew the whereabouts of clean clothes), no toiletries.

She knew her way around the Main Line, more or less, and had an impression of Wayne, where John had grown up, as a region
straddling the border between horse country and suburbia, with serious affluence on either side. She knew that she was going
to the house John had lived in from the age of four, and where his parents—following the departure of his younger sister and
himself—had continued to live, with a succession of chocolate Labs. He insisted they would be happy to see her, unannounced
though she might be. Not that they were easygoing people, he noted, go-with-the-flow types with extra beds at the ready and
the makings to feed a crowd always on hand.

“My mom is very hospitable, but she’s a planner,” he explained. “You don’t surprise her and expect to be welcomed. But she
already knows she’s getting two adults and three teenagers. Another body won’t throw her. We’re going to bill you as my old
friend from Dartmouth who was kind enough to pull a few strings for Jeremiah.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” she said, her voice dropping. It startled her, how instantly she was on edge. “I can’t be associated
with the phrase
pull a few strings
. I mean, I know I get a little paranoid about this stuff. But it’s important.”

“I meant because you arranged for him to go to a class, that’s all.”

“I know, I know,” she said, feeling pretty stupid by now.

Silence ensued. It was weighted, but just this side of unpleasant.

“I wonder how Simone’s liking Bryn Mawr,” John said finally.

“Simone,” said Portia, relieved by the segue, “is a piece of work.”

“A work in progress,” he chided. “She’s only sixteen.”

“I thought she was a senior, when I visited the school. She really took me on.”

“Yes. She can’t help it, you know. I mean, she has this oppositional temperament, which is innate, and if that weren’t enough,
she’s a little bit like you were in the nurture department. Also brought up to be a warrior. But you know what? I feel like
she’s one of those kids who needs to crash into something before she figures out how not to do it. She’s going to be great,
when the smoke clears. But she’ll bang herself up a lot first.”