Admission (57 page)

Had it happened that day? That afternoon? Later that night, after the play they had gone to with good intentions but then
left in the intermission, because, all things considered, they would rather be back at the Ivanhoe, back in bed? Or the next
morning, before he had left for the ferry and she for King’s Cross and Edinburgh, for the interminable final weeks of their
separation? She hadn’t felt anything physical. She had been far more attuned to her general anticipation for their reunion
and the effort of late-in-the-day scholarship to redeem her (thus far) undistinguished schoolwork. But nothing of the body.
Nothing… clinical. Moving a fork through those repellent white, soupy strings of celeriac, she could not remember when she
had last had her period. Then she could not remember when she had last thought about it.

Tom had come to Paris, as planned. And the train station, as planned. But he had left her there to go be with some other woman,
and that had certainly not been planned, at least not by her. The woman, who apparently waited discreetly outside (in a café
probably far more picturesque than the one she herself was sitting in), was a Dartmouth sophomore from his language program,
with a name Portia had immediately repressed, so that even years later she found herself making it up with the aid of an imaginary
WASP rhyming dictionary: Twinky? Blinky? Stinky?
This person would prove to be athletic and flat and asexual and blond, not—in other words—outwardly distinguishable from
the women who had preceded Portia’s tenure in Tom’s life (minus, of course, the Jewish girls), but—cruelly—she would be the
one he married.

Yet Rebecca had also been far from mistaken about the Jewish girls.

From the moment he’d sat beside her in the student center and nonchalantly reminded her of who he was and where they’d met
to that final night in the Wrong Scott hotel, Tom had thrown himself headlong into her assorted relative abundances: flesh
and hair, emotion, eccentricity. He had adored the extravagance of Susannah, who was a screamer, a gesturer, a sensualist,
whose disapproval (even) had passion and extravagance. He had adored Susannah so much that he had been impervious to the fact
that Susannah had not adored him back, not the littlest bit. Portia, fearing the worst—expecting the worst—had first taken
him home over the winter break, for three days of brittle tension that culminated in an outburst even Tom could absolutely
not miss, in which her mother had dragged her from the dinner table (Tom had been explaining that his work covering sports
for the
Dartmouth Review
was not political—it was sports, after all!), secured her behind the insubstantial door of the sitting room, and demanded
to know what the
fuck
she thought she was doing with this reactionary, boorish, chauvinistic son of privilege.

She loved him, that’s what she was doing. She loved him, thrilled to him, hummed to the music of him. Because his arm around
her shoulders was weighted with joy and her body raced and soared under his hands. Because she believed him when he said that
she was beautiful, and he said so all the time. Because he had picked her—amazing, amazing, amazing—and every day picked her
again and would certainly pick her forever.

Though he hadn’t actually told her that, of course.

Portia had a single room in the dormitory all that year but barely used it except to change clothes, drag herself through
a series of sinus infections, and fanatically shave her legs (lest a single dark hair mar her perceived loveliness). She lived
mainly in Tom’s room at the fraternity, careful never to impose more than the absolutely required personal items and textbooks,
careful to maintain, always, the lightness of the visitor. In fact, when she was not with him, she had not even the strength
to mimic lightness but craved only the next time and the next talk and the next touch.

Susannah, she was sure, had never felt a thing like this. Certainly, in a lifetime of far too intimate confessions to her
daughter, she had described nothing remotely similar, only the husband of convenience, and the men who were evolved enough
to be wonderful lovers and responsible partners, and the genetic providers from the laboratory or the train. Nothing like
this. Nothing like this. Which was the reason, Portia told herself, that Susannah was so out of her mind with resentment,
wild at the sight of her sated, admired, cherished, and elevated daughter. “Don’t bring him back,” she had even said, that
awful winter break, “and don’t come back yourself until you’ve figured out why you have to act this way. I didn’t raise you
for the Junior League.”

So she had taken him away the day before Christmas, and off they had gone down the MassPike, east to the rolling exurbs of
Boston and the impeccably groomed home of Tom’s mother, father, brother, and horses. Mrs. Standley—“Caroline.
Please
.”—was a transplanted southerner who looked as if she were perpetually freezing. She wore her hair in a girlish pigtail, but
brutally slicked back and bound by an enamel clasp. She looked emaciated, swallowed by corduroys and L.L.Bean sweaters many
sizes too large, and a pair of green Wellington boots like the ones the new English princess had worn on her honeymoon. These
were taken out daily for rambles with the dogs or schooling one of the horses over jumps in the field next door, an activity
Caroline approached with a grimness that seemed inappropriate for a leisure-time pursuit. She was, to Portia, the picture
of hospitality: hand extended at the door, towels folded at the foot of the guest bed. There was even a gift for Portia under
the fragrant tree, a silver necklace of irreproachable taste in the box of a jeweler on Main Street—a Main Street clad in
seasonal finery and olde tyme American splendor. Tom, who had recovered quickly from their Amherst misadventure, loved being
home. He loved introducing her to family friends and the kids he had grown up with, and watching the flicker of confusion
on their faces.
Where was Portia from?
She was from Northampton.
Northampton? Lot of strange people in Northampton. Communists and lesbians, wasn’t that right?
Portia supposed.
What did her parents do?
Her mother was an organizer.
Oh? What did she organize?
(In time, Portia amended this to “volunteer,” a much simpler concept for them to grasp.)
And her father?
“I was raised by a single mom,” she would say, eyes downcast, hoping against hope that from this display of regret, they
would conclude her father was dead. Dead father. Volunteer mother. Tragic but familiar. And noble! And at least the father
had been fiscally responsible, so the widow hadn’t had to work.

But she wasn’t one of them. Clearly. At Christmas Eve services, she betrayed a certain awkwardness, knew none of the hymns,
and seemed underdressed. For the Boxing Day party they attended every year, she was loaned an unobjectionable dress by Tom’s
mother, but it had been too tight to zip up completely, and she had made the fatal error of wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt
over it. Why hadn’t Tom stopped her? She’d brought no gifts for the family and had been forced to forage in town at the last
minute, finding only impersonal things with a whiff of desperation about them. Why hadn’t Tom warned her? By the end of their
stay she was frantic, trying to make up for her shortcomings or else to distract them with those attributes she did possess:
good brain, good grasp of world affairs, good powers of argument. These, however, had no worth in the Standley home, and she
left having won over only one family member, Tom’s brother, who had suffered a breakdown in law school and was (in his parents’
euphemism) working independently on a project related to international copyrights until the following fall.

The decline in her fortunes could be traced in the brittle features of Caroline Standley, who might have met her son’s new
girlfriend at the door with a rigorously correct embrace, but whose fear and disappointment built and built over the ensuing
days. She was never less than scrupulously polite to Portia and full of terribly interested queries about her life at college
and before, but the strain she was under became more and more evident, spreading like a pool of insidious fluid under the
very, very taut skin of her face. Portia, growing frantic as the days passed, lingered in bed in the morning, retired early
in the evening, and took every opportunity to lead Tom off for walks in the fields or visits to the local haunts of his youth.
She generally kept herself out of sight as much as she could, and when she could not she made it her business to seem light,
kind, and irreproachable. To this growing strain between his girlfriend and mother, Tom seemed oddly impervious. He touched
Portia whenever he wanted, on the forearm, the shoulder, the back of the neck, crossing the invisible lines between neighbors
at the dinner table or on the couch or in the car. He padded down the hall to the guest room in the middle of the night for
very hushed bouts of lovemaking, then rose early to help his mother exercise the horses, generally behaving as if all were
well—which perhaps, to him, was the case. Portia, of course, never said a word to Tom about the silent but acrid force field
between herself and Caroline. What good could come of it? Why burden him? Tom’s mother, clearly, had recognized the aberration
of this slovenly Jewish girl of dubious parentage for what it was—rebellion, pure and simple—and opted to wait out her son’s
bizarre fascination, which surely couldn’t last much longer, an opinion that Portia, very fearfully, shared. (Between the
two women, in fact, there was a perfect, if silent, meeting of the minds on this point.)

Both, however, were wrong, to Portia’s great amazement and Caroline’s infinite distress. Through the winter, and Tom’s ten-week
internship at the Boston law firm (he visited often), and the spring, when Portia, putting the nail in the coffin of her theater
interests, spent three months working for the Bread and Puppet group up in Glover, Vermont (she visited often), and on into
a halcyon summer term, in which their sophomore class reunited, more or less, from wherever (to quote the college’s regretted
alma mater) across “the girdled Earth” they’d roamed in their disparate Dartmouth Plans. It was a sweet summer, clear and
warm, with the doors of Sanborn Library thrown open onto a dappled Baker Lawn. Portia wandered inside and outside as the afternoons
passed, out when she wanted the air, inside when the sun began to withdraw its heat, always nearby when tea was rolled out
at four and the business of studying paused, by common agreement. All of her courses were guts, or felt like guts, since who
could take seriously the novels of Jean Rhys (Modern British Fiction) or even the thorny notion of theodicy (Judeo-Christianity
and the Problem of Evil) when the class was held beneath one of the few surviving elm trees at the edge of the Green? Through
the long summer days, her path and Tom’s interwove, like a minuet in an Austen novel, bringing them again and again face-to-face.
Whenever the appearance of a couple was indicated, they were there together, someone’s hand in someone else’s: fraternity
parties down the Row, the summer formal at the Woodstock Inn, the Summer Carnival variety show in Webster Hall. Sometimes,
after dinner, she went with him and others down the hill to the river and out onto the dock where she had once helped hoist
her crew shell, to swim in the brilliant Connecticut and sit and laugh with her new friends, who were, of course, Tom’s friends.
At night, she and Tom slept in the same bed.

At first, she nursed a powerful if not wholly rational resentment against her mother for neglecting—in all of the assorted
warnings and war cries since (it seemed) the moment of her birth—the fact of romantic love, let alone its legitimacy. For
Portia, this was akin to discovering a new sense, which society had perversely elected to suppress, holding it to be—perhaps—downright
incendiary in comparison with the unobjectionable touch, taste, smell, feel, and sight. Susannah might never have felt the
passion, the gut-twisting adoration, her daughter was then feeling (and how different she might have been, as a mother—as
a human being!—if she had), but was that cause to deny to her own child the wondrous thing in which Portia had dwelt, now,
for nearly a year? Her relations with her mother were strained for a time, with outright silence following their holiday expulsion
from Northampton and lasting several months. But they thawed in June when Susannah announced her imminent and quite surprising
move north to Vermont that summer. To keep tabs on me? Portia thought selfishly, but when the air cleared she was actually
happy for her mother and helped her sort through the Augean stable their Northampton house had become. With Susannah ensconced
in Hartland with her chums, and Portia’s own worldly possessions reduced to a single stack of cartons in the new basement,
she felt nearly adult, brave, flush with love, and eager for the fall in Edinburgh and the torrid, wondrous winter and spring
to follow, when she would wander around Europe with Tom.

An adventure that was not to include grimy cafés like the one she found herself in, or—when you came right down to it—things
to eat that seemed likely to make her ill.

She wasted no time in wondering whether she were truly pregnant: She knew that she was. Her body, now that she was paying
the slightest attention to it, seemed to be screaming at her from all corners: sore and suddenly pendulous breasts, a sour
taste in her mouth, a gag reflex wound up so tight that even a passing breeze made her want to vomit. And the fact—which ought
to have been obvious—that she had skipped a period. That she had missed this, above all, appalled her.

Screaming pain had taken up residence in her head, pounding like an Athena who would never, for her own part, do something
as idiotic as falling in love. She sat, masochistically hunched over the nauseating celeriac, eyes full, battling to keep
herself from exploding. She found herself thinking of the two very different forms of Parkinson’s disease—one freezing the
features, the other causing uncontrollable movement—and how the most unfortunate sufferers had both at the same time. That
was how she felt: vibrating, maniacal, but grim and unmoving, too. Suspended in motion, at the apex of misery. I will be here
in an hour’s time, she thought dully. And tomorrow. And next week. And in six months. And forever. Never feeling better or
getting over it.