Admission (71 page)

“I had a call,” he said. His voice was quiet but packed with bitterness.

Portia looked past him, to the Asher Durand behind his desk. Did he ever look at it? she wondered. She always did whenever
she was here in the office. This would almost certainly be the last time.

“Oh yes?”

“From Richard Bolton, class of ’81. Father of Jesse Bolton. Are you familiar with Jesse Bolton?”

Portia, glumly, nodded.

“I was not. So I asked Martha to pull the file before I called him back.” He flipped open the cover. “Budding journalist.
Writes for
The Boston Globe
. National award from Scripps. Is this coming back?”

She was tempted to tell him that he didn’t have to be a jerk about it.

“I remember this kid. We loved this kid.” Portia looked at her hands.
“We admitted this kid,”
he said through gritted teeth. “And yet…” He held up the file, pointing out, with one of his long, elegant fingers, the “Deny”
box checked in red pen. “Are you ready to explain this to me?”

What good would that do?
she wanted to say.

After a very uncomfortable pause, he went on.

“And so I asked for the admit list. I looked for Bolton, Jesse. No Bolton, Jesse. But I did find Balakian, Jeremiah.”

He held up the other file. “Mr. Balakian has accepted our offer of admission,” he said with barely contained vitriol. “I don’t
remember making him an offer of admission, Portia. Now, I’d like to ask you again. Why did you do this? Why would you throw
away your career and your reputation? And, what’s far more important to me,
our
reputation? On this?”

“He isn’t a ‘this,’” Portia said lamely.

Clarence leaned forward. He was halfway across the desk. For a man of such refined tastes, he had a very muscular build, she
observed. His neck, within the collar of his elegant pink shirt, was defined by muscles and sinews. She took an almost clinical
interest in this and wondered how he had achieved so much definition in such an odd area.

“You,” he rasped at her, “have exposed this office and the university to a completely undeserved scandal. What you have done
is unconscionable. How dare you be so cavalier with this institution? If word were to get out about this, the damage would
be irreparable.”

Portia sat up, newly alert. “Well, I won’t tell anyone,” she said brightly.

“No,” Clarence said tightly. “You won’t. And I won’t either. What you will do is submit your resignation. I don’t care what
excuse you use, but I never want to see you in this building again. I will keep this matter between ourselves. Not for your
sake, I can assure you. But if I ever hear that you’ve gone to work for another admissions department, I will be on the phone
to your dean before they nail your name to the door. Is that understood?”

“Well,” she said, “let me take a moment to think it over.”

Clarence actually banged his fist on the desk. The ink blotter muffled the blow.

“You have no choice. This career is over. I can’t tell you how thoroughly disappointed I am.”

Portia shrugged. She was finding a distinct lack of outrage in all this. And it wasn’t just because none of it was a surprise.
She was ready to go. She was ready for something else. On the spot, she decided she also wanted to live somewhere else.

She got to her feet. “He’s going to Yale,” she said. “Jesse Bolton. The guidance counselor told me. We never had a chance
at him.”

Clarence reacted to this, but then he remembered himself. “That’s not the point,” he said fiercely. “As you know. I only wish
you’d tell me why.”

And she actually considered doing that. It might have surprised him to know how far such an uncomplicated request finally
traveled: ahead to an idea of her own future, behind to the college student she had once been, running a ring about herself
in the names of men he barely knew or had never even heard of: Tom and John and Mark and Jeremiah. How strange that she had
come to be defined by so many men. What would Susannah have to say about that? She could imagine what Susannah would have
to say about that. And no one had ever asked her why before, because no one had ever known there was a why. And she found,
very much to her own surprise, that she did want to talk about it. She did want to tell somebody why she had done this strange
and unchangeable and thoroughly uncharacteristic thing. And there were people who ought to be told, because what she had done—not
just now, but then—had actually hurt those people, and they deserved to know why. But Clarence wasn’t one of them.

“Would it make any difference?” she asked him, looking up. “About the job, I mean.”

“It would not,” Clarence huffed.

“Then I won’t, if you don’t mind. I assume you’ll be standing by the offer.”

“To Balakian? I don’t see how we can rescind it without the whole thing blowing up in our faces.”

Out of common courtesy, Portia tried to banish any outward sign of smugness. “Well, I’ll be going, then,” she said. “I’ve
learned so much working with you, Clarence.”

He glared at her. Apparently, he considered her praise offensive.

“I’m sorry to have disappointed you,” she told him. “I’m going to write you a fantastic letter of resignation.”

He gathered up the two folders on his desk and slapped one—which one?—briskly on top of the other. Then he pointedly looked
away from her.

Portia left the room. She stood for a stunned moment outside his door.

“You heading home?” said Abby. She didn’t look up from her computer screen. There was a new grinning Aleksei on the desktop.

“Yes,” said Portia. “Good-bye.”

“Bye, then.”

Portia turned and walked off down the corridor. Everyone seemed to have gone for the day, infected by the warm spring weather,
taking cover from the vitriol on the phones and in the computer in-boxes. She walked slowly to her office and went inside,
wondering what belonged to her and what did not: yearbooks, manuals, sheaves of printer paper, her sizable collection of what
she’d always called “admissions lit,” books touting surefire strategies to get into college, ways to “package” yourself and
be your own college consultant. Books that hurled ridiculous solutions at a problem they never actually stated: that there
were simply too many qualified applicants for each available spot, and there always would be, and no amount of strategizing,
“brag sheet” construction, or SAT prep was ever going to circumvent that bald little fact. She was fairly sure she owned those
books, but not at all sure she wanted to take them with her into whatever her new life was going to be.

In the end, she could find only a single thing she wanted: the Plath poem Rachel had given her, the one that began, “First,
are you our sort of a person?” She reached across her desk and plucked it from the bulletin board and folded it carefully
and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. Travel light, Portia told herself. She left the building by the front door.

Of course, I was disappointed not to be able to accept an unpaid summer internship at a marketing firm, but after a few weeks
in my not terribly exciting retail job in an outlet mall, I started to realize that I was learning a lot about the very subject
I’d hoped to learn about at my internship. After ten weeks of watching people purchase items they didn’t need and, in some
cases, didn’t even like, I believe I know far more now about human psychology and behavior than I did before I first pinned
on my Land’s End name tag.

M
ark turned up at seven that evening, right on time, and Portia let him in with a smile that felt surprisingly genuine. It
was a comfort that she had decided not to hate Mark. If Portia could have hated him and still done what she was about to do,
then she might have indulged herself, but that wasn’t going to be possible. And in fact, the more she probed her own current
distress, the more she discovered that it was mainly illusory. On the contrary, she felt not terrible. She felt bizarrely
settled, in spite of how precarious her situation actually was. And when this was over, she told herself, she might be permitted
to feel better than she had in many years.

Mark was thin. He looked drawn, and he wore a wedding ring, and Portia found that she had to avert her eyes from it, if only
to retain focus. He gave her an awkward hug, looking fairly surprised to find himself making the gesture. “You look very well,”
he told her.

Portia laughed. “I doubt that. But thanks.”

“You finished for the year?”

“All over but the shouting.”

He looked perplexed.

“You know, the letters go out, the calls come in. ‘How could you reject my son? You took the kid who got a B plus in chemistry
and he got an A minus.’”

“Oh, right.” He shrugged. “I forgot.”

“Most people are fine, but the unhappy people take up most of your time.” She looked directly at him. “Let’s not talk about
work. I talk about work too much. I’ve made some tea.”

He seemed relieved. “I’m really glad you called, Portia.”

“Yes. I’m sorry, I should have done it months ago. I just wasn’t ready.”

The teapot was already on the kitchen table. Portia led the way and poured for them both. She had always shared his taste
in tea: the more English and staid, the better. The day PG Tips had appeared in the tea aisle at McCaffrey’s had been a good
day for their household.

“Thanks,” he said when she passed him the milk.

“I had a baby,” said Portia. Then, amazed at herself, she burst out laughing. It was not happy laughter, particularly.

“You… what?” He stared at her.

“I never said those words out loud. Never once. ‘I had a baby.’ You know, it’s easier the second time.”

“When?” Mark looked stricken. “Before you met me, I’m assuming.”

“Yes. A year before. He was adopted.” Her face was streaming with tears, she was surprised to note. That seemed to have happened
very quickly.

“Portia,” said Mark, “I’m so sorry.” He actually reached for her hand, and she let him take it.

“You know why I never went into therapy?” she said brightly. “Because someone once told me that what happens in therapy is,
they help you figure out who to blame, and then they get you to blame them, and then you feel better. So I thought, Well,
I don’t need that. I already know who to blame.”

“You must have been very confused,” Mark told her.

“Oh, I should have been more confused. If I’d been more confused, I might have made another decision. I might have let someone
actually talk to me about it. I don’t know why I thought I had to do it all by myself.” She wiped her face with the back of
her hand. “I’m quite the chatterbox tonight.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, looking finally, appropriately pained.

“I should have. More than anyone else, I should have told you, because it changed things for us, and you had no idea why.
I’m sure you were telling me you wanted kids, but I pretended not to know. I couldn’t… I didn’t think I could go back there.
I’m so sorry.”

“But… why couldn’t we? You were, what, twenty-one when we got together? It’s not exactly past childbearing age.”

“No, no.” She shook her head. This was the part he wouldn’t understand, she thought, and she took a moment to say it as well
as she could. “It’s…
that
was my child. When I couldn’t even do that, I couldn’t get near it again. I just wanted to get as far away from it as I could.
And you had Cressida, and that was such a terrible thing for you.…”

He looked alarmed. “I love Cressida. I’ve never regretted having her.”

“No, of course. But I always thought, Well, he already has a child.…”

Mark stirred his tea but didn’t drink it. “I should have insisted we talk it through. I should never have let it go.”

They sat in charged silence. Portia looked at her hands.

“Who was the father?” he said quietly.

“Tom Standley. My boyfriend in college.”

Mark nodded. “You’ve mentioned him.”

“I never told him. It was very wrong of me.”

He didn’t disagree with her. “I’m surprised your mother didn’t commandeer the entire situation.”

“She didn’t know. I didn’t tell her, either. I didn’t tell anyone, Mark. It took me all these years to tell you.”

He stared at her. It seemed to be finally sinking in. “Portia,” he said, shaking his head. “This must have been so hard for
you.”

She was crying again, not in a violent way, but steadily, like a pipe that couldn’t be twisted entirely closed. It made her
think of that character in the
Iliad,
with the wound that wouldn’t heal. The stench of it was so unbearable that his compatriots—supposedly his friends—had left
him alone on an island. What tormented her most, she thought, was how many things would have been more or less the same if
she had indeed told her mother, who would indeed have commandeered the situation. Portia could have finished school, taken
her job at the Admissions Office, met Mark, moved to Princeton… everything the same but everything better. And now she would
have a seventeen-year-old son.