Admission (18 page)

“What do you mean?” Helen asked, accepting—though it seemed rather reluctantly—a tiny additional portion of chicken from Mark.

“That’s what David’s crowd were all like when they were teenagers. They hated having to take classes in stuff they couldn’t
care less about. They just wanted to be left alone so they could learn. They sat there in their fetid little rooms reading
book after book and refusing to bathe.”

“That’s completely untrue,” David informed the table. “I had excellent personal hygiene. I still have excellent personal hygiene.”

“No comment!” Rachel laughed. “So”—she turned back to Portia—“you liked this kid.”

“Well, he was very memorable. But we’ll have to wait for the application. He didn’t strike me as someone who’d given much
thought to attending college, let alone applying to college. To say that’s extremely unusual in our applicant pool is a vast
understatement. If he can pull it together, and of course if the test scores support what his teacher told me, then yes, I
would try to get him admitted. I don’t suppose we’ll get much from a transcript. It sounds as if the public school he attended
was about to fail him.”

“I failed French in tenth grade,” David announced proudly. “Actually, I failed it in eleventh grade, too. And band. I failed
band.”

“It hasn’t held you back,” Mark observed.

“Actually,” Rachel reported proudly, “his high school wanted to suspend him.”

“They did suspend me,” David corrected her. “In my junior year. I kept cutting classes so I could take the train into the
city and sneak into philosophy lectures at Columbia. No one ever stopped me.”

“Why would they?” his wife said dryly. “He looked exactly like the other philosophers. He even sat the exams. Even though
he wasn’t enrolled!”

“One exam.” David grinned. “Advanced epistemology. This guy was so amazing, who taught it. I never spoke to him, of course.
I mean, I wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“But you audited the class and actually took the exam?” Mark asked. “Did you take it anonymously? What did you write on the
exam booklet?”

He had written his name and address, David explained, because he lacked a student ID and campus mailbox, the requested information.
He hadn’t really thought about it. A week later, his blue booklet had turned up in the mail at home, with a red A and an indelicate
query scrawled beneath it: “Who the fuck are you?”

“So naturally he decided to go to Columbia,” his wife concluded.

“Do you think those F’s would have kept me out of Princeton?” David asked Portia.

“Back in the eighties? They might have. Hey, you failed band! But that was the bad old days. Isn’t it lucky the university’s
in the hands of such qualified admissions officers today?”

Mark got up to make coffee. Portia reached for the wine. She was nearly enjoying herself now, though the advent of coffee,
which meant the beginning of the end of the dinner party, certainly cheered her, too.

“What makes you qualified?” Helen said abruptly. When Portia turned to look at her, she said, “I’m just curious. Again, I’m
a stranger in a strange land. I really haven’t the foggiest.”

“I beg your pardon?” Portia said.

“You said ‘qualified.’ I wondered. What does that mean? How does one train to become an admissions officer? Is it a degree
course?”

From the kitchen, there was a brief sputter of grinding. Then the tap, tap of coffee grounds emptying into the coffeemaker.

“No. There isn’t any set degree. In fact, admissions officers come from a variety of backgrounds.”

“Such as?” Helen asked.

“Many come from college advising. In other words, they’ve counseled high school students on applying to college. Some are
teachers. Some people just begin working in an admissions office—for example, in some clerical capacity. Then they move into
the actual admissions work.”

“So you’re not qualified, exactly. It’s more of a seniority track.”

There was now official discomfort at the table. Rachel seemed to be looking past Portia entirely, her gaze vaguely on the
wall of bookshelves at the far end of the room. Even David, not the most sensitive follower of human interchange, was looking
at Helen in an openly perplexed way. When Mark came to the table, he sat down quickly and looked worried.

“I suppose.” Portia nodded carefully. “We don’t have formal preparation. Admissions work is something people just find they’re
good at. Or they don’t. Or they may be good at it, but they discover it’s very difficult for them emotionally. It does affect
you. You’re very aware of what’s out there, and the stress these kids are under. And they’re very deserving. You want to say
yes to them all, but you can’t. People either make their peace with that or they need to do something else.”

“And you’ve made your peace with it, then.” It wasn’t a question. It was a judgment. Helen sat back in her chair, looking
diverted. Portia let the wisp of earlier distaste come flooding through her. This, after diligent good manners, was actually
a relief. She said nothing but allowed herself to feel the pleasure of pure, almost gleeful loathing. It had been a long time
since she had hated anyone so fully and with such little cost to herself. She was even able to laugh as she answered the question
that was not a question.

“It’s a process.” She forced a smile and wrenched the subject away. “Mark,” she said, “that looks so good.”

He served the rather ordinary fruit tart, and the evening limped along to its end. She heard about Helen’s first American
Halloween, at the Friedmans’ on Wilton Street, and her perambulation through the neighborhood with ten-year-old Julia Friedman,
who was dressed as a white-faced ghoul in a mask that somehow pumped fake blood over its own cheeks. The parents they met
in the darkened streets had been horrified, Helen reported, and covered their young children’s eyes. One had even scolded
Helen, mistaking her, Portia supposed, for Julia’s mother, complaining that the dreadful bloody mask was too frightening for
the children.

“Which is absurd,” Helen announced. “Of course, we invented Halloween. In England, it’s meant to be bloody. The fear is the
point. This costume parade of cartoon characters and superheroes, I can’t fathom it.”

Portia practiced her weary smile and feigned interest. She suppressed her dismay when Mark offered, and then made, a second
pot of coffee. She was close to Rachel. Sometimes they went for walks along the canal, accompanied by the Friedmans’ portly
chocolate Lab, or met at Small World Coffee on Witherspoon Street. She found David adorable in a profoundly glad-I’m-not-married-to-him
way. But tonight, after two such wearying, emotionally exhausting days, she could bear little more of them. She wanted them—
please, please
—to exhale, push back from the table, arise, withdraw, depart. And this woman. Who was this terrible woman?

“Who was that terrible woman?” she asked Mark, following him into the kitchen with the glasses in her hands. David and Rachel
had finally gone, taking Helen away with them. “Apart from a colossal bitch, I mean.”

“That terrible woman,” Mark said testily, “is one of the most eminent Virginia Woolf scholars in the world.”

“Don’t you mean Bloomsbury as a whole?” said Portia, setting down the glasses beside the sink.

“I mean,” said Mark, “that we’re lucky to have her. She brings a good deal of prestige to the department. And the university.”

“Well, she brought a good deal of bad temper to our house tonight. I didn’t hear her say one pleasant thing all evening. She
didn’t even compliment you on your dinner. Which was excellent, by the way.”

Mark ignored this. He had his back to her. He stood at the sink, running plates under the tap and setting them down into the
dishwasher.

“Mark?”

His shoulder flinched. This actually made her furious.

“Mark. Is she… was tonight typical for her, or do I need to give her the benefit of the doubt?”

He whirled around, his hands almost comically flicking soap onto the floor, but there was nothing comical in his face. It
made her want to step back.

“I thought that was inexcusable, if you want my honest opinion. Going on like that about the university. Like a saleswoman.”

“I don’t—”

“You don’t need to peddle to us, Portia. We live here, too. Our paychecks say Princeton, too.”

“It’s a very nice paycheck,” she reminded him, wondering that she had to remind him.

“I know it’s a nice paycheck!” he said.

His voice was quiet, but suffused with anger. She stared numbly at him. She had heard this voice before, but only when he
spoke to Marcie, or about Marcie, or to the lawyer on the subject of Marcie. Never to her. She remembered the day they had
driven to Newark Airport to pick up Cressida, only to find that she was not on the plane, was not even booked on the plane.
He had gone to a corner and called Marcie, swaying in rage like a davening Hasid. And the time, just this past July, when
he had gone to London for his visit, only to find that Marcie had decamped to a friend’s house and refused to release Cressida
until Mark signed some document promising he would drive only on secondary roads, because she had reason to distrust his ability
behind the wheel. For years, forever, Portia had taken the attendance of Mark’s rage. She knew it was there, but what had
it to do with her? She had always been the one standing slightly off to one side, watching the white beam of that anger find
its target—like the supportive teammate or faithfully recording secretary. This wasn’t right. She stared at him: green eyes,
graying hair, poorly shaved jaw. And then the idea came surging up into the space between them, erupting from the blue-painted
floorboards, exploding through their kitchen and their house and their conjoined lives:
He knew
. Somehow, she had no idea how. He’d known all evening. He’d known since before she arrived home. He’d known the instant John
Halsey had left her body.

“Mark?”

“I bring home a new colleague. A valued colleague. And incidentally, someone I’ve known for a long time. And you treat her
like she’s applying to Princeton but hasn’t bothered to read the catalog.”

Despite herself, Portia nearly laughed. This was, in fact, a fairly succinct description of Helen.

“I do wonder why she came here, if she’s so down on the place. I mean, if Oxford is so perfect and the students so superior,
why on earth did she leave?”

“Why, I don’t know,” Mark said caustically. “Maybe it has something to do with a higher paycheck and a lighter teaching load.
She’s a scholar, Portia. She has work to do.”

Portia noted the dig—her own work being more toil than vocation, in other words—but chose not to react.

“Yes, but Mark, she just came in here and started criticizing everything. You have to admit she was far from gracious tonight.
And she was thoroughly unpleasant to me.”

“
You
were thoroughly unpleasant to
her,
” he corrected. “I was ashamed of you.”

Portia looked at him in disbelief. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Then, seemingly with great effort, Mark broke
away and turned back to the sink. Painfully, he took up a plate and painfully, deliberately, ran it beneath the water.

“Mark,” Portia said quietly. “What is this?”

His shoulders tensed. He gripped the edge of the sink with one hand and leaned slightly forward. The water ran on, bouncing
up off the surface of the plate.

“I think,” he said finally, “I need to go back to the office for a bit.”

Automatically, she looked up at the kitchen clock. It was half-past ten.

“Now?” she asked.

“I just need some time. Everything’s all right.”

Strangely, she did not feel at all reassured.

“Could you bear to clean up? I know I said I’d do it.”

He wasn’t looking at her, though he had turned off the water and stepped back from the sink.

“All right,” she told him. “I don’t mind. But we’ll have to come back to this at some point.”

“Yes.” He nodded. He looked horrendously depleted. “I know. But tonight, I can’t. I’ll just be a couple of hours.”

“Okay,” she said.

He walked past her, moving the air. He went straight to the hallway, picked up his keys from the table, and left. The door
behind him failed to click shut. Portia looked after him. She stood for some time, rooted and amazed. There was a subject
between them now, as yet unidentified but quite real, and likely not evadable, or at least not without cost. She had grown
comfortable here, with Mark, or if not comfortable, then stable, safe from the barbed thing she had done a very long time
ago. Now, suddenly, that thing was utterly present, sharp, and terribly sad, demanding attention and redress, and she was
as ill prepared now to face it as she had been then, in spite of being so much older and theoretically more capable. Theoretically,
Portia thought, astonished. Alone in the house, alone in her life, alone with the aftermath of a bad dinner party and an old,
old transgression. What was there to do but follow him to the front door and shut it the rest of the way?

I have experienced a myriad of challenges in my young life, but I am not sorry for myself, because they have had an important
affect on me. I know that I am a better person because of the things I have faced. I try to remember that everyday.