Admission. Part 20

"We were hoping to see you," he said. "I wrote to say we were coming."

"Wrote...," she considered.

"I got your address. Through the alumni directory."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I'm a little behind on my mail." She glanced at the tour guide, trying not to make eye contact with anyone else. "Please don't let me hold you up. It's too cold to stand outside."

"Actually," he said affably, "I was just about to finish up. 'Course, you're all welcome to come back to Clio for a cup of coffee, and to pick up an application and one of our brochures if you like. Or it's all online, of course. I have a rehearsal I need to get to now, but if anyone has any more questions and you don't mind walking over to 185 Na.s.sau, feel free to come along. Take care, folks, and I apologize for the weather."

He moved off, and several families instantly fell in behind him, one mother with a regretful glance back at Portia, who she plainly felt was a much better mark. The rest dispersed: to Na.s.sau Street or back to Clio, presumably for the promised coffee and applications or to take the cla.s.sic tourist photo beside the enormous bronze tigers next door. Portia was left standing with a new, much smaller group: John and Deborah and the children, Nelson, Jeremiah, and-now she saw, sulking off to the side-that very disagreeable girl who had been all over her about why one should even bother going to college. Simone. She hadn't seen an application from Simone, she was fairly sure. They all, with the exception of Nelson (who gazed longingly off in the direction of the Na.s.sau Street Foot Locker), stood looking awkwardly at one another, waiting for someone to say something, to address the many permutations of discomfort among them, but the only emissions were frosty breath. Portia was painfully aware of how terrible she looked-ill rested, ill dressed, fundamentally out of sorts-while the likely Deborah Rosengarten stood tall and composed, well appointed in a hat that covered her ears, a serious parka, and warm scarves wound around her neck, willfully oblivious to the fact that she was supposed to be the stranger here. John, she could not look at. Jeremiah, too, she was having difficulty looking at. A blast of still more frigid air blew through their little congregation.

"Welcome to Princeton," she said feebly.

h.e.l.lo admissions officer! I'm sure you are tired from reading all these essays! Take a break, have some coffee. I'll be right here when you get back.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

SMALL WORLD.

She brought them to Small World. She couldn't think of anything else to do, and in the awkwardness, not to speak of the cold, what persisted was a systemic craving for caffeine.

Portia led them off toward Na.s.sau Street, and they fell in around her, as if she had only replaced the tour guide, with Jeremiah at her side and Nelson a half step behind, his teeth chattering audibly. The girl hung back, and the parents behind her. Portia had no idea what she could say to any of them.

It was not pleasant to remember Princeton before Small World. There had been a Greek luncheonette in this storefront on Witherspoon, and the Annex, if you were really desperate, but the town, like the rest of pre-Starbucks America, hadn't known from cappuccino. Small World, a homegrown enterprise, had been greeted by an instantaneous and devoted clientele and returned the favor by expanding its floor s.p.a.ce (not too much), menu (not too much), and palette of coffee permutations (never enough). A decade on, the place was aptly named, a true crossroad for nearly every stratum of local society: moms fresh from school dropoff, students, faculty, the relaxed, dressed-down men who'd made so much money in their corporate lives that they could now run mysterious empires from downtown Princeton. The talk was a mixture of university dross, heady cerebral of every stripe, local fund-raising, and local boards, with scattered scribblers trying to write their novels and the town's few social misfits, who sometimes took a berth and stayed for hours, nursing an herbal tea. Portia had been an early patron, but it was Mark-deprived, along with the rest of the British race, of any coffee that did not derive from dehydrated crystals-who was the true convert. For nearly a decade, he had begun his working day here with a steaming latte and a parade of colleagues, stopping briefly at his table in the window to sort some departmental difficulty or simply vent. Often he came back later in the day for another cup, or to meet with students, or simply to be in a place where he was sure to be disturbed. It was-it had been-after home and his office in McCosh, the next place she would always have looked for him.

There was nothing to suggest he would not be at Small World at three in the afternoon, so she approached with her worrying ducklings behind, and somewhat breathless, though that might have come from any of several aspects of her predicament. Nelson informed her that he did not like coffee. There was hot chocolate, she told him. There were desserts. He seemed placated. Jeremiah was talking about a painting in the art museum, a Peaceable Kingdom. Had she seen it?

"Peaceable..."

"Yeah. You know, lion lies down with the lamb?"

She didn't know. She nodded.

"And it's right next to this great big blue Marilyn. It's the wildest thing."

"Blue marlon?" she asked, picturing a great mounted fish, as in someone's Florida room, circa 1955.

"Blue Marilyn. Monroe. By Warhol. Warhol was demented, but a genius. He would have loved seeing his Marilyn hanging right next to this Quaker utopia, don't you think? I mean, Marilyn Monroe was his utopia."

"Oh yes," she told him. "I forgot you were interested in pop art."

He had stepped in front of her to take the door, an uncharacteristic move, even she recognized. He looked at her intently.

"Last fall," she told him. "You were reading about Edie Sedgwick."

"Yes!" he said. He seemed disproportionally happy. "You remember."

Unexpectedly charmed, she stepped past him into the cafe. With her peripheral vision, even as she went to the counter and took a place at the end of the line, she was sweeping the corners, the walls, the tables. He wasn't here. He wasn't in one of the window tables he liked to read at or one of the tables in the back, hunched forward in conference. He wasn't with her. Portia was so relieved, she nearly forgot the myriad other reasons she had to be distressed.

Nelson wanted hot chocolate. Simone wanted espresso. John, who insisted on paying for everyone, stood with her in line while Deborah took the kids to one of the big tables in the back. The tension between them built, it seemed, exponentially. She noted and tried to ignore a building urge to bolt. She wondered if it would be different without the others, if just the two of them had run into each other somehow, un.o.bserved. She decided it would be different but still bad. This was so much worse.

He opened his wallet and paid. The drinks began to land on the stone countertop in front of her. She couldn't seem to look at him.

"Hey," said John, so quietly that she felt herself lean closer. "Is it my imagination? Or is this just miserably awkward?"

Despite herself, she laughed. "Why, yes. Now that you mention it."

"I did write."

"I believe you." And she supposed she did, given the state of the mail at her house. She wondered idly if his letter might be in the cardboard box she'd taken to throwing her letters in, or on the floor beside it, where the mail was spilling over.

"I wanted to see you. I feel as if-"

She made him stop just by glancing at him.

Simone came. She took the tray. Portia was still waiting for her coffee and idly hoping it would never arrive.

"Look, I want to make sure you understand this. I know I said it before, but... appearances to the contrary, we're not-"

"You and Deborah," she said, to show she was keeping up.

"We're not a couple. We were. Years ago. We're not. We're friends. And I know"-he was talking softly but faster, to get this in-"you're with someone. I'm not unclear about things."

"I'm not, actually."

"Not... unclear?" he asked.

"Not with someone. The man I was with is with someone." Oddly, she chuckled, as if this had just occurred to her. "And that someone is with someone. With child. Actually."

He looked at her with pain in his eyes. Real pain, she thought, rather surprised to see it. But then she remembered that she ought not to be looking at him. She took her latte, which had indeed arrived, and walked to the back of the cafe, summoning what remained of her professional deportment as she went.

"It's really nice to meet you," she told Deborah right away as she sat down. "I missed you that day at your school."

"Oh, I'm so, so sorry. It was completely ridiculous. I went over to Putney for a meeting. We're trying to get a progressive schools network started, and my co-director teaches at Putney, and it was a last minute reschedule. Of course, I'm halfway there when I remember you're coming that afternoon, but we're in deepest Vermont, you know? No signal. Nada."

"It was fine," said Portia, loosening her grip on the slightest portion of her lingering resentment. "Your staff was great."

"I know, they're spectacular. Actually, though, I don't think of them as my staff. We're trying to make an equal sharing of administrative duties and responsibilities work. It's challenging. We've been attempting to rotate the chair."

"But she can't get rid of it," John said, sitting beside Portia.

"I'm trying. One of our colleagues had it for about a week, but she had to go on bed rest for a high-risk pregnancy. Then we had one woman who held the position for about a month last spring, and that really tested our resolve."

"What do you mean?" Portia said.

John, beside her, laughed and drank his coffee.

"Well, she called a meeting over an ongoing issue. Important issue, but not, you know, critical. Not enough for an all-day thing on a Sat.u.r.day, I can a.s.sure you."

"What-" Portia began, but John answered her.

"Forms of address. Yes, really. Should the students call us by our first names? Or Mr. and Ms.? That's it. I was ready to agree to whatever would get me out of the meeting."

"Which was not helpful," said Deborah. "But anyway, she's chairing this meeting, our acting head, and she says that we're going to go around in alphabetical order and say how we feel about this very important matter."

"Please note," John said, "the use of the verb feel."

"Okay," Portia said, actually diverted and not, she discovered, unhappy to be.

"So off we go, with Adams. Arnberg. Calder. Cisneros. Davidov. Et cetera. It's fine for him," she said, smirking at John. "He's an H. I'm an R. I'm telling you, it just dragged on and on. But this is what killed us."

Portia, noting the "us," looked at them both.

"Whenever anyone forgot themselves and said, 'I think...,' she would point to the ceiling and say, 'No thinking! Today is all about feeling.' "

"Wait," said Simone, grasping this opportunity to diss an authority figure, even a nominal authority figure. "Who is this? Are you talking about Shanta?"

"Formerly known as Linda Denise," said John. "Shanta is her spirit name."

"It means 'Peace,' " Jeremiah said affably.

"Is it her?" Simone insisted. "Because, Mom, I always said she was, like, the worst teacher. 'Cause once-I told you this!-we were supposed to be talking about 'Intimations of Immortality' and we, like, had to correct her in the middle of the discussion, because she thought the poem was 'Imitations of Immorality.' Remember?"

"Simone," Deborah said sharply, "you absolutely did not tell me that. And may I point out that you are hardly conveying to Portia the very serious intellectual environment we are striving to create at our school!"

"No, it's okay," Portia heard herself say, but she was laughing, which was such a surprising thing that she immediately stopped doing it.

"Well, it was her. Shanta, nee Linda Denise Flitterman. Who teaches English. Very capably," she said, glaring at her daughter.

"So I guess the first namers won?" said Portia. "If Simone isn't referring to her teacher as Ms. Flitterman."

"Oh. Well, consensus was reached, yes. By the time we reached the K's, we were begging for a vote."

"And shortly after," said John, "the chair rotated back to Deborah, and we chained her to it."

"My motto, as regards meetings, is: Brevity above all."

"Nasty, brutish, and short, in other words," John said, and Deborah, to Portia's unexpected dismay, swatted him.

"I am expecting to be declared 'president for life' at any moment." She laughed, this time at Portia, and Portia was even more distressed to find that she rather liked this woman, who did seem for all the world like the very significant other of the man to her right, on whom she had no claim at all but whose left leg, she now noted, was in definite contact with her own. How long had it been there?

"I'm sorry?" Portia said. She was only now realizing that they were all looking at her: five pairs of eyes. Had she said something? Or not said something when she was supposed to?

"I said, how long have you been here? It's noisy in this place, isn't it?"

"Nearly ten years," Portia said with relief. "I worked at Dartmouth before that. In admissions."

"Oh, that's right." Deborah nodded, stirring her coffee. "I forgot that. You went to Dartmouth with John."

"Well, yes and no. We were there at the same time, but-"

"She doesn't remember me," said John with a laugh. "She's too polite to say so. You see how unmemorable I was?" This last was directed to Nelson, who grinned predictably. "What a loser."

"Yeah!" his son said with palpable delight.

"I would have remembered you," said Portia, "if we'd met."

"Oh, we met," he said disconcertingly. To Deborah he said, "I knew an old flame of Portia's. She was far, far too good for him."

Portia seemed to be missing her breath. She hoped he would stop talking of his own volition.

"Isn't that always the case," said Deborah. She turned to her daughter. "They grow up eventually. Men. They get better."

"They suck," said Simone.

Once again, Portia heard herself laugh aloud. "Tell me," she said to the girl, "what changed your mind about applying to college? You seemed to feel the whole thing was a patriarchal conspiracy the last time I saw you."

Simone, unmistakably, blushed an unusual color: persimmon, magenta. But only fleetingly.

"Simone?" her mother prodded.

"It's not for everyone," she said, shrugging.

But? thought Portia.

"But?" said Deborah.

"I just don't think it's in the best interest of me as an individual to help perpetuate this bogus tradition of sitting at the feet of learned white men, getting trashed, cheering for the football team, and then collecting a piece of paper," she said with more than a hint of her former hostility.

"Simone..." Her mother sighed. "I don't think many American colleges are still operating on the feet-of-learned-men principle."

"I wouldn't want to get anywhere near the feet of some of the learned men around here," said Portia, and she felt-rather than heard-John laugh.

"No, but... I'm just saying, you can maybe figure out a way to take what you need from the experience without partic.i.p.ating in the bulls.h.i.t, you know? Maybe you can even f.u.c.k with the system from within. Wouldn't kill some of these people to learn how racist they are."

"And that's your job?" said John, but gently.