Admission (11 page)

“Portia,” John said, “we should change the subject.”

“But the other reaction,” she went on, bulldozing past him, “is much, much worse. Because if, sometime in the recent or misty
past, Princeton University has actually rejected some wondrous young person near and dear to them, then you are no friend,
and basic good manners are not called for. Because if this brilliant child, so gifted, so sweet, so in love with learning
for its own sake, has been deemed, by you,
unworthy
to attend Princeton, then that can only mean that you and your equally corrupt peers have allowed some lesser brat to buy
his or her way into our elitist institution, and we’re all such greedy shits that we’re willing to serve up the very principles
of higher education, not to mention the American dream, just so some blue-blooded prep school boy can be the tenth generation
of Princeton men in his family.”

John sat back in his seat, hands folded. He was waiting for her to finish.

“Or let’s say the rejected applicant is, God forbid, the first poor soul in ten generations of Princeton men to be denied
admission. Obviously that proves the university is enslaved by affirmative action, and we feel free to discriminate against
applicants who happen to be white, which is a disgrace for which I am personally responsible, because after all, I only do
this job because I like putting people down, and everyone knows that people who get their kicks out of rejecting other people
are the worst kind of failures themselves.”

She ran out of breath. Literally. And reached for her water glass, wishing fleetingly that she’d asked for that wine. She
was thoroughly ashamed of herself, not because she’d revealed any secret thing about her work—she hadn’t, she told herself
quickly, or nothing important—but because, with that final thought, she’d revealed some potent thing about herself. Which
she now profoundly regretted.

“Well, that’s quite a speech,” John said mildly.

“I’m sorry!” She was feeling the heat in her cheeks. Intense, tear-threatening heat. “I’m sorry. I don’t think you deserved
that. It just kind of builds up, you know?”

“Well, I know now.”

“Look,” she heard herself say, “it was nice of you to call. I’m really sorry, but I think I’d better go upstairs.”

“Portia,” he said. He looked at her. He wasn’t angry. Or even baffled, she saw. Something else, though not quite clear. Or
quite clear, she realized suddenly. Only silent.

“No, I… You know, I have a ton of work upstairs, and I have to be at Northfield at ten, so I probably shouldn’t even have come
down.” She was speaking so quickly, she nearly missed the clipped tones of her own mortification. There was only this race
with herself, to the elevator and then her room. “But it was really nice to see you again.”

“Please don’t do that. Let’s order some coffee. Let’s talk more.”

But I don’t want to talk
, she nearly said. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I need to leave.”

“Wait,” he said. It was a caution, calm and low, but utterly serious. He got deliberately to his feet. He reached slowly,
pointedly, into an inside pocket of his corduroy jacket and took out a wallet, never looking away. He removed two twenties
and put them on the table. Portia’s eye lingered on the bills. There was something vaguely sordid about them, as if the money
were for something else, though that was not logical. But the two of them, they looked as if they were in a rush, didn’t they?
Even though they weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t. So much for her stupid wish list. So much for this pointless, pathetic
distraction. She looked back in the direction of the kitchen. The waitress, at least, was nowhere to be seen.

“Let me walk you to the elevator,” John said.

She let him, and she made herself walk. She was aware of her own footfalls on the smooth, hard floor of the lobby. The woman
at the desk, not the woman who had checked her in, another woman, looked up at them. She wouldn’t know, Portia thought, that
John wasn’t with her. She wouldn’t stop them. No one, she realized suddenly, was going to stop them.

It was night now, and the place seemed oddly inert. Even the Muzak was barely there. She strained to hear it, was suddenly,
disproportionately, afraid of what it meant that she couldn’t hear it, but she could pick up only its faintest imprint, as
if she had suddenly, rapidly, ascended a steep mountain, and her ears were thick, but not so thick that she couldn’t hear
John, who was trying to speak to her.

“Portia,” he said as she stabbed the elevator button.

“It was fun catching up with you,” Portia said, turning back to him but declining to meet his gaze. “It was nice of you to
call.”

“I want to say something to you,” he said quietly.

“I wish I could stay up later, but I have—”

“A lot of work. Yes, I know,” he said quickly, and she was surprised at how angry he didn’t sound. He just seemed to want
to get on, to something else.

Behind her, the elevator door opened with a sound of grinding metal. Portia looked into the beige interior. “So… thanks,” she
managed. “Let me know if there’s anything you need. Your students need,” she added quickly. She stepped into the elevator
and turned around. She made a show of selecting her floor and pressing the button.

“I want you to know something,” he said. She had to listen very closely. “I loved seeing you.” He seemed to be taking part
in an entirely different conversation. She looked at him in mute amazement. “When you forget everything else, I mean, all
of this… discomfort. I want you to remember that. I loved seeing you. I was happy to see you. Portia.”

What happened then happened quickly. She could not have said, later, what order things took, and who bore which responsibilities,
and what might be the reasonable effects of her own step back, or his step forward, the outstretched hand (whose? and to what
purpose—handshake or lifeline?), all to the rhythm of a creaking, labored noise from the sliding elevator door, though by
the time she knew what sound that was he was already inside, and the door had closed, and the two of them were on their way.

I can remember clearly the day my father threw us out. My mother pulled me into the car and locked the door. I was crying
because my father was so angry. He threw something at the car window, and it cracked. My mother was crying very hard. She
didn’t drive very well, because my father had always done the driving in our family, but she managed to drive us away. We
went to visit her sister in New York State, and stayed there for several months. Later, we returned to Maine, but settled
in a different part of the state, where I was able to attend the Yarmouth School on a scholarship. I am extremely grateful
to the school, for allowing me access to this excellent high school environment, which my mother could never have afforded
on her salary. Now, as I look ahead to college, I am thrilled by the intellectual vistas opening to me. Though I may well
emerge, five years from now, as the medical student I imagine myself becoming, I am also open to other possibilities. The
only thing I do know is that I want to use my gifts to give back to my community.

I
n the room, it was more than dark. The garish light from the hallway, light flung geometrically through the opened door—the
flung-open door—disappeared as the door slapped shut behind them. Then darkness again, with every other sense screaming to
fill the void.

Portia felt for the bed. It wasn’t difficult to find. The room was all bed, first behind her and then beneath her. Its cover
felt slippery and tightly stretched. She wanted to be pressed into it. She wanted to feel the heaviness of her own body against
it and the heaviness of his body against her. She wanted a lot of things.

The darkness, that was her doing, too. There had been a moment earlier, as she’d held open the door to leave, to go downstairs,
when her hand had touched the switch and stopped—a long moment in which she had infused this normally mindless gesture with
grave implications. Not a matter of saving the hotel chain some expense or the environment a pinch of its failing resources.
Like those orange applications folders, safely zipped into her suitcase, the switched-off light meant simply that she had
intended not to return alone. Or at least admitted that possibility. And then if—when—if—it did come to happen, this allowed,
likely, intended eventuality, her own preference for darkness would preempt without any awkward discussion:

Can I turn on a light?

No.

I want to see you.

No.

It wasn’t her own body she didn’t want revealed. She was not self-conscious. It was him she didn’t want to see, or not yet.
She just wanted to be able to concentrate on this: the sound of their clothing in contact, the salted taste on her own tongue,
the feel of a mouth at her neck and the hand at the small of her back, pulling her against him in the dark.

Neither of them had said a thing since the lobby, not a thing, not even in the elevator (when he had held her so tightly,
her back pressed so hard against the faux wooded plastic of the wall, that she had wondered if they might actually derail),
and not in the hall (where he had stood next to her, tense like a runner in the blocks, waiting for her to drop the plastic
key card into its slot, then wrenching the door handle himself). There was… not precisely
romance
in the silence, only a plain synchronicity of intent.
What I want is what you want.
But the reasons behind all that wanting—Portia had no idea what they were, neither his nor even her own.

There was hair on his body, long like the hair on his head. She could feel it, slipping between her fingers as she ran her
hands over him. He was thin but soft. She liked that. She liked what she didn’t feel: ridges and ripples and densities of
muscle. She liked the give of him, the concavity of his abdomen, the hollow below his hip bone when he turned on his side,
even the long, inelegant scar that seemed to point to his groin. Of course, she didn’t think any of these things as they happened,
only later, leisurely, somewhat amazed at herself. For now, the impressions tore by like a vivid shifting landscape seen through
a train window, and she knew enough to reach for the joy of them. Her breath came quickly, as if the two of them were competing
for oxygen. Her hand slipped easily beneath the edge of the pants he wore. His hand made a deliberate journey up her back,
as if he were reassuring himself that each vertebra was where it needed to be. When he reached the strap of her bra, he went
discreetly past.

“Can I turn on a light?” he asked suddenly.

“No,” said Portia.

“I want to see you.”

She shook her head and pushed the shirt up over his head. Then, realizing that he couldn’t see that she had shaken her head,
she said, “I don’t want to.”

“What?” He stopped everything. His hands on her back, his mouth at her throat. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No.” She smiled. “Don’t stop. Just… I don’t want to turn the light on.”

“But you’re beautiful,” he said, not understanding.

That’s beside the point,
she nearly said. Instead, she kissed him. Already, she loved kissing him. She loved the roughness of his lips and then the
dark softness inside his mouth. She loved the way his tongue knew how, precisely how, to glide against her own tongue. She
loved the language, first faltering, then fluent, their mouths had devised and how they were congratulating each other for
their cleverness. She tried to remember if she had ever been so deeply kissed. She couldn’t, suddenly, remember if she had
ever been kissed all.

“Let me,” he said, somewhat indistinctly, as if she were preventing him. She nearly tore off her own sweater, she was so impatient.
Every part of her seemed to be caterwauling, selfish, whining. She felt crude and pushy. She wanted to make him do what she
wanted, and he knew exactly what that was, only he wasn’t doing it fast enough, and that was maddening. She found his head
at her abdomen: not high enough, not low enough. His cheek turned against her skin as if the universe attended his wishes.
She moved against him, thinking, Come on.

From outside, the night-splitting noise of a motorcycle, out of nowhere, heading off to somewhere. It was a rude noise, like
something guttural and enraged. It stopped them both. “Born to be wild,” said John. She understood that he was smiling.

She tugged at his shirt.

“We don’t have to rush,” said John.

But we do
, she thought, actually disliking him for that instant.

The bed seemed to tip in the darkness. It felt contrived, controlled, as on a fun-house ride. She nearly rolled away from
him and had to pull herself back, hauling her own weight along his length. Why was he so contained? Wasn’t he the one with
the long-ago crush? Wasn’t lust cumulative? She had the briefest instinct to slap him, but then she felt his hands between
her legs and forgot what she was so angry about.