Early Decision (16 page)

Blanchard worked his tongue over his teeth and then flashed her a smile.

“But that kid,” she continued, “if I get a chance . . . Let's say he'll let slip to me that he happens to have memorized all the Latinate names of the animals. Suddenly he knows genus and species for a zillion critters in St. Barths. This kid who can't conjugate
être
and
avoir
. There's ability there, because he
cares
. Because it's his and his alone and he
loves
it. If I can help him to understand that he can take that feeling he had underwater and apply it to his life—that there is a whole field of approach to such things, populated by people who treasure them—maybe then he realizes that he's fascinated by marine biology because it actually means devising smarter and finer ways to understand these creatures and what they do and what they need. Now, he could also be interested in maritime law or conservation ethics or underwater photography, I don't know, but you get my point. So this kid will go home and, usually without telling anyone, research marine biology departments, and discover several universities with killer programs that allow him to spend entire semesters in flippers. Suddenly college is there for
him,
not for anyone else—his parents, the annoying college counselor, even me. So that fall he steps it up in his AP bio class and the teacher takes a shine to him, because the teacher is flattered, and that teacher wants to write him his recommendation. And the boy's essay is focused and clear, and the school college counselor, who has sixty kids assigned to her and doesn't know a thing about him, realizes that he's a marine-biologist-in-training and that he's a great science student, which is a good handle, so she writes him a stronger school recommendation. And his list of schools is whittled to the ones where he really wants to go, and in his supplemental essays he's able to write intelligently about what each school offers and why it's a good fit for him.

“Now think of the admissions office: if they're assembling a class of people, not just grades, and they can hear this boy's voice and think, Hey, this kid tells a good story, I'd like to bump into him on the cobbled path out there on his way to the lab, then maybe he'll get in instead of the other kid whose transcript looks exactly the same, whose grades and scores are equivalent, but who wrote about something dull as dirt. Do you see? I mean, who knows? It's all nuance and chance. I can never tell. Maybe these kids would all get in, anyway.”

Gideon Blanchard pursed his lips. “Maybe.”

She didn't think so either.

Gideon Blanchard shoveled bread into his mouth and swept the crumbs to the floor.

“What can I say?” Anne continued. She felt a rush of sincerity and resentment, a dangerous mix. “I'm a hedge. A rich parent's hedge. I'm an SUV instead of a hatchback. Boarding school when the local private is great, private school when the local public is great. Any of it. A multivitamin. The mom who puts her daughter on the pill and says it's to help her cramps.”

Now his eyes were very round. She watched him chew. He worked his jaw decisively.

Well, that must be it. She'd finally said enough to get cashiered. She'd called him rich, which he was, of course, but it wasn't right to say it. She'd announced her distrust in her own methods, pointed out the absurdity of his hiring her, and probably caused him to think his daughter was having lots of underaged sex on contraceptives. Well, fine. So something would happen. Maybe something interesting. Call the cub reporter. If she could just be released from this table, to fetch her coat and get back out into the rain.

Gideon Blanchard gathered up his large white napkin in his large white hands and tented it alongside his plate. He cleared his throat, pushed back his chair, and stood up halfway, leaning over the table toward her. She went to stand, too—she would at least be upright when he put her in her place—but he stilled her by reaching across to take both of her hands in his. He closed them up tightly and sought her eyes and, after taking a visible breath, said emphatically, “I think you do wonderful work.”

He retook his chair and beamed at her. He had a great smile. He aimed it and let it shine and waited for her to soften.

The waiter, approaching with their food, let this moment pass. Anne pulled her shaking hands into her lap.

Blanchard took a knife to his duck. “Don't worry,” he said, slicing around. “I place the highest premium on honesty. You call it like it is. I respect that, I really do.”

Anne saw him considering her. She wondered if he thought she was pretty. As busy as she was, attempting to look sleek and polished, she had not guessed that the subtle proposals she was sensing had nothing to do with romance.

“I want to tell you a story,” said Blanchard.

Anne started buttering a new slice of bread, to have something to do, the way people shovel in popcorn during horror movies.

“You began but did not complete a doctorate, is that right?” he asked.

“It is.”

“Well, I did complete one.” Anne knew—everyone knew—that he had done a Ph.D.; it was in his signature and on the door. “At the University of Chicago, like you. In economics, probably not like you.”

“No, English,” she said.

“Right. Well, I spent my twenties working on a dissertation about employment hierarchies and promotion practices in corporate settings, how to value them, how critical they are to helping workers succeed. Interesting, right?”

“Very.”

“And my dissertation adviser, he'd been there for a thousand years, and he was working on his own thing, which turned out to be a study trying to link falling crime rates in this city with the passage of
Roe v. Wade
.”

Anne didn't touch this.

“In other words, he thought he could demonstrate that about eighteen years after
Roe v. Wade,
crime rates would begin to fall. That the bad kids weren't even being born.”

“Wow.”

“Wow is right. And you see, I had nothing to do with that work—nothing. I'm not all that interested in crime rates, except in as much as I don't get mugged. But once his study was published, everyone who had worked with him became a racist. Instantly. You'd have thought I wore a white hood.”

“I'm sorry,” Anne said. She was fascinated that nobody had ever cast his background against his wife's public image. Maybe they had in law, and didn't care, but she thought some talking heads might have a field day claiming Margaret Blanchard was married to a bigot.

Gideon flagged down the waiter for more wine. Specifically, “a nice big Barolo.”

He continued, “So I had this degree, but I couldn't do anything with it. Anywhere in the field, people knew about that study.”

“Of course.” Anne remembered the academic hothouse, inside of which one obsessed over topics and tropes that basically could not even be explained on the sidewalk outside the seminar room.

“So do you know what I did? I went to law school. I had to do something
in the world
. I had to do something real. I couldn't stay and teach even if I wanted to.”

“I see that.”

“I imagine you can relate?”

“Sort of, yes,” she said. Though God help me, she thought, if feeding off the college frenzy was to be the sum total of the “real” in her own life.

“And the kind of law I practice,” explained Gideon Blanchard, “focuses on minorities—of color or background, you see, ethnic or social, who haven't been given the fair shake owed to them by this country. I do the opposite of what people said I did, what they thought I did. It's a point of pride. It would be anyway, but now it's even more so, you know, that I've come so far without any of that university stuff on my side. In fact, with it all working
against
me.”

“That's really neat,” Anne offered. He beamed.

“So I am thrilled to support your student Cristina. I believe that a college degree may open doors for her that would not otherwise be possible. And I want Sadie to feel confident and excited by the opportunities available to her at Duke. I loved it there, and she will, too. But the thing I just can't get my head around, the thing I get so angry about, is this assumption that these colleges are the arbiters of all things intelligent. Tell me this: Why should they be the ones to pick the next generation of American leaders? Why not, say, judges? Or entrepreneurs, small-business owners, real folks who have made it in the real world? Wouldn't that be more fair to someone like Cristina? Or, much as I hate to say it, Sadie?”

“I understand,” said Anne, feeling herself rise in Sadie's defense, “though I think Sadie—”

“Don't get me wrong,” he interrupted her. “Sadie might not be selected for Harvard, I get that. But she has skills and gifts that will serve her well in this world, believe me. And any self-respecting group of successful adults, actually successful adults, would see that. This whole application process? Now that, I just don't know. What the hell does it matter whether she writes about her dog? What does it matter what she says at all?”

His protest slipped into resentment, and his voice soured. Anne flinched. His idea for reforming college admissions was an odd, almost sweetly capitalist fantasy, and easily expressed over a balloon glass of Tuscan red. And there was some truth in what he said, of course. But also it was crazy. It did matter what these kids wrote; if not for the colleges, then for themselves. “A good essay,” Anne argued, “a good college essay, it becomes a powerful thing for a student. It's personal mythology. It tells them where they've come from, and where they might be headed.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He swallowed, nodded, twirled his nearly empty glass between his fingers. She wondered if he was feeling a bit loaded.

“I'm going to tell you something more,” he continued. “Something I wouldn't say if Margaret were here.”

“Okay.”

“I know that Sadie is going to get into Duke. Of course I know that. I'm not sure Margaret does, but I do. This whole thing is an exercise in irrelevance. But it's good for Sadie to go through this, like everyone else. I see that, too. I think it's important that Sadie be put through her paces, to think that it might not come through. You know, to feel she's earned it.”

“Then why . . .” Anne paused.

“Why hire you? Because I want them to be knocked out. I want them to
want
her. That's why.”

“And you don't think she could do that on her own.”

He set down his glass.

“Now, that's not a fair question,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Anne,” he said, “I love my daughter.”

Anne was quiet.

“Good,” he declared. “Now, you say Sadie's struck out with her essay about the dog. How do you know?”

Anne considered a gentle reply. He noticed her hesitation.

“Do you mind me asking? I hope you don't mind sharing your secrets.”

“Not at all.” No one had ever asked before. Parents just paid her and expected great things.

“All right,” he said. “So how do you know when it's a good essay or a bad one?”

“Oh,” she replied. “That's not the difficult part. You see, kids do this thing.” Anne began to speak naturally as the ideas came to her, thinking in real time. She felt her shoulders relax and noticed how hard she'd been crossing her legs. And it was a relief to talk rather than face slurping her soup. “When they're asked to write in the first person,” she explained, “and for something this important, kids switch into what I call English-teacher mode. Their voice on the page—you can hear it when they read out loud—gets higher, affected, like they're pretending to have an accent from an impressive country they've never been to. They choose a topic that bores them witless. Their sentences run on and on because they mistake length for persuasiveness. They dangle modifiers and bury antecedents. They capitalize like Germans. They use the word ‘extremely' and start sentences with ‘However, comma.' They drop in semicolons everywhere because they think it looks stylized. They're reflexive and jumpy, and they strangle every idea they have so they can hurry on to the next one. Nothing is cumulative. They forget where they started and they forget where they were going, and when they start to feel really disoriented, they'll use an em-dash. If they totally lose it, they add an exclamation point. Somewhere toward the end, it'll occur to them that they should mention college, so there will be a spasm of references to some school or preferred major or ‘the future' or ‘the rest of my life.' If they're feeling poetic, they'll end on the word ‘beyond.' ”

Gideon let his head fall back, showing her his Adam's apple, which for a moment revolted her—like a neck knuckle, jogging up and down—but when she realized he was laughing, hard enough to return to her red-cheeked and puffing, she felt proud, and forgave him. How much older was he? Twenty-five years? Twenty? Maybe men, by that age, just looked knobby like this, and with the visible pores on his nose. Would this happen to Martin? She didn't much care. In fact, she was surprised to find that she didn't want to think about Martin at all. She felt free and a little bit reckless, as though she too had polished off a few glasses of wine.

“That's great,” he said, still sputtering. “Sounds exactly like what a teenager sounds like!”

“No, but that's the thing,” she said, annoyed now at how he'd just insulted Sadie and somehow, it seemed, herself. “It doesn't. They don't. If you get a seventeen-year-old talking about something that really matters to him, just talking, telling the truth, it's the best. They're deadly serious and funny as hell and really original. They have great voices with better rhythm than you or I because they haven't read all the boring crap yet. They don't know how they're supposed to sound, so they sound fabulous. All that melodrama, it has a real keening to it, if you can tap into it. It's wonderful.”