Admission. Part 22

He was listening but not looking at her. He was looking past her, back toward the front door, where mail overflowed the open box on the floor and unopened packages were stacked like roadside cairns. She had forgotten about the packages, some of which were for Mark.

"My secretary's on strike," she said mildly.

He gave her a quizzical look.

"And my maid. And, as you already know, my handyman. Actually, I'm a little on strike myself."

"Yes," he said carefully. "I'm trying to gauge how concerned to be."

"Concerned?" Portia said. Her first impulse was offense, but this departed quickly. Instead, she had a sudden, overpowering urge to hurl herself against him and coil her hands in his light hair. She didn't do it, but the restraint cost her.

"Something is wrong," John said. He spoke softly, almost soothingly. "I don't care what your house looks like or if you turn your furnace off for the winter. I don't care how long it takes you to read your mail. I just like to know that you're all right. Are you all right?"

Portia stood looking at him. He had not unb.u.t.toned his coat, which was slowly but perceptibly beginning not to be necessary. There was life, thin life but growing life, in the room. He was beautiful. She had forgotten how beautiful.

"Not really," she heard herself say.

He nodded soberly. "And can I do anything for you?"

Portia shrugged. "Well, you've already fixed the furnace."

"Started the furnace," he corrected. "Please don't imagine I'm one of those guys who can actually fix things."

"Then you're not out to fix me," she observed, and he looked startled.

"No. Are you broken?"

Portia sighed. "Oh, probably," she said, unb.u.t.toning her coat. "Look, I know it's awful, but would you mind if I left you on your own for a few minutes? I just want to clean up a bit."

"You don't have to clean up." He frowned.

"Not the house. I mean me."

"Oh. Of course." He looked embarra.s.sed.

"And when I come down, we'll see about some dinner. I won't be long,"

She dropped her coat on the back of a chair and went upstairs. Everywhere she looked, there was disorder: papers, clothing, towels, everything lying where it had fallen. The bed looked especially alarming, with files stacked along the meridian where Mark had once slept and on her own side, twisted ropes of blankets and quilts. The scene suggested tandem diagnoses of light and heavy sleeper. On the bedside table, the Pollock biography, still unfinished, for the January book group she had naturally not made it to. She couldn't even remember the bit she had managed to read.

The bathtub seemed to be filled with discarded clothing. She bent down to gather it up, armloads of jeans and tops, underpants, bras. They didn't smell, particularly, and for a moment she wondered if these were clothes she had really worn or just things from the drawers and hangers that had somehow migrated here, voyaging en ma.s.se to their winter nesting grounds. But then she found a pair of wool pants, their turned-up cuffs encrusted with dried mud, and remembered the meeting she had worn them to last month, with Clarence and the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and the snowstorm that afternoon through which she'd walked home. Last month, Portia marveled. After a moment's consideration, she carried it all to her closet and threw it in. Very little still hung on the hangers, only the good clothes, the going-out clothes from her faculty spouse life, her visiting high schools life. She could do any of those things right now, she thought, sighing. But underwear, a pair of unworn jeans, a fresh shirt-these might be difficult.

Portia ran the water, washed the tub, and put in the plug. She took off the clothes she wore and threw those, too, into the closet, then stood, naked and shivering, and contemplated the bed. To alter it in any way, she knew, was to acknowledge what might happen, but hadn't they already done that? Had he not taken her hand and walked with her, never asking where they were going, content to be led? Weren't they here now, with a functioning furnace and truly hot bathwater on the rise? She couldn't leave this, not as it was. The bed, more than anything else in the house-more than the loaded answering machine and the abandoned mail and the absent heat-was a blunt exhibition, like an art installation evoking sadness, filth, and celibacy. As the water filled the tub and the steam filled the bathroom, she carefully removed the files and ripped at the sheets. They, too, went into the closet. She put on a fresh set, then messed up the covers a bit so he wouldn't know.

She did not feel actual shame until she slid into the tub, when the hot water slid around her and her surfaces began to give up their evidence of neglect. There were streaks of old grime on her shins, rough skin on her knees, hair everywhere. She had truly not known that things had gotten this bad. She dragged a razor over every pertinent surface and rubbed her back with a wet cloth as far as she could reach. Then, pink and new from the soap and heat, she stood up and turned on the shower, letting more hot water wash everything away. Her hair, neglected for weeks, coiled in a brown rope over her shoulder, scarcely different wet than dry. Probably for the first time in her adult life, Portia lathered, rinsed, and repeated.

She was drying herself with a fairly clean towel when she heard the doorbell and froze, bent over. Rachel, was her immediate, horrified thought. Rachel had said something about stopping by, that afternoon in the office. Or Mark, here with spectacularly bad timing to have the inevitable conversation, in which everything she already knew would be painstakingly articulated. Portia went to the bedroom door and opened it, straining to hear, but the voice speaking to John at the front door was not Rachel's, or Mark's, and the only words she could make out were "Thank you" before the door clicked shut. She went to find clean clothes to put on and was only partially successful: a long-sleeved shirt but no bra, a pair of seemingly pristine jeans from the closet floor but no underpants. The jeans seemed rather large, and she wondered for a moment if they might be Mark's, but they were not Mark's. Barefoot, because the ordeal of finding clean socks felt so utterly beyond her, she went downstairs.

John was in the kitchen, surveying the open cupboards above the sink. On the kitchen table sat a takeout bag from Tiger Noodles. She could smell it from across the room and was instantly ravenous.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey." She was noncommittal.

"I wasn't honestly worried about you until I looked in the fridge," he told her.

"Ah."

"I was looking for something to cook for dinner. I wasn't snooping."

"Sure." She shrugged. "I haven't been doing much cooking."

"Yes," said John. "Or opening the fridge, I suspect."

She looked at the fridge. With its door closed, it looked perfectly normal. There was a gym cla.s.s schedule from the previous summer stuck to the front with a magnet. She had no idea what was inside.

"People don't understand what reading season is like for us," she said with determined nonchalance. "It's a bunker mentality thing. We read, order in, read. Sometimes we change our clothes." Portia laughed, but even to her own ears it sounded forced. "This is perfectly normal."

"Sure." He nodded. "I hope I didn't imply otherwise. I just thought it would be quicker to order in."

She thought: Quicker than what? But she thanked him and retrieved plates and silverware. Compared with other areas of the house, the kitchen was in relatively good shape. There were dishes in the sink, of course, but didn't everyone have dishes in the sink? After a moment's pause, she hoisted open the Sub-Zero's door and found, amid the deeply suspicious perishables and desiccated remnants of former takeout meals, a pair of Corona beers, which she set on the table.

"Thanks," said John. "But I can't."

"You don't like beer?"

"It doesn't like me. I don't drink anymore."

"Oh!" she said, embarra.s.sed. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. It's old news."

Portia put the bottles back in the fridge.

"You can," he told her. He was ladling shrimp Cantonese onto a plate. "It's not a problem for me."

"No, it's fine," she said. "I have seltzer, I think."

He brought the food to the table and sat. "One of the more valuable lessons I learned at Dartmouth. That I couldn't tolerate alcohol. It only took a year of waking up in my own vomit."

"You're precocious." She smiled. "Think how many Dartmouth men spend all four years waking up in their own vomit and never figure that out."

He laughed. "I never enjoyed it, either, that's what's truly strange about it. I didn't like the getting drunk part, or the being drunk part, any more than I liked the aftermath. So I just stopped doing it. I think I was very lucky, actually, because if I'd kept going, I know I would have ended up with a real problem. I kind of nipped it in the bud."

"I suppose it must have curbed your social life in college," she said, beginning to eat.

He shrugged. "What's social about being blitzed? When you're that far gone, it's antisocial by definition, isn't it?"

Portia nodded. "Weren't you in Tom's fraternity? I think you told me that." She said this nonchalantly, but it didn't feel nonchalant. Nothing about Tom was nonchalant, let alone this first tangible connection to him in over a decade. Suddenly, rather belatedly, the notion that John might know real things about Tom occurred to her, followed by the possibility that he was even directly in touch with Tom-e-mail, alumni a.s.sociation get-togethers, fall family weekends at Moosilauke, or just those annoying Christmas letters she was sure his wife inflicted on the world every December.

Portia herself, of course, had the essentials down already. She knew precisely where Tom was and whom he'd married and what he did for a living. She knew that he had donated enough to Dartmouth to merit some sort of alumni award, and that he had finished a half marathon in Wellfleet with a time of 113 minutes, and that the Boston law practice where he had interned as a college student and was now a full partner specializing in medical malpractice had recently merged with a firm in Providence. She knew from the photograph on the Web site of that law firm that his thick blond hair was now less thick and that his hairline was in retreat, but that his brilliant grin and the old raffish tilt of his head were unchanged and not the tiniest portion drained of their potency. She knew that his wife had managed a clothing store in Newton before becoming a full-time mother to their three children, and she knew those children's names: Ivy, Courtney, and Thomas III, known by his fond parents and everyone else (according to the online newsletter of the Dartmouth Cla.s.s of '91) as "Trey." She declined to feel guilty about knowing these things. Every single woman on the planet with Internet access and a modic.u.m of curiosity possessed the vital statistics of every man or woman she had loved, let go, been spurned by, come to loathe, or still longed for. Portia was not going to apologize for this, but she wasn't going to admit it, either.

"Sure. I haven't seen him for ages. But I hear from him."

"Oh?" She chewed her food with what she hoped was a thoughtful expression.

"Well, he manages a newsletter for Psi-U alums. He took all that pretty seriously."

"Yes," she said noncommittally.

"So I get the e-mails. Look," he said, sighing, "I know there's something here."

Portia looked up at him.

"It's a hot spot. I don't need to talk about it, I just don't want to pretend it isn't there, and I don't want to hurt you. From everything I know about Tom, he was probably a supreme a.s.shole to you."

"Me among others," she said, to let him know she didn't consider herself special where Tom was concerned.

"Sure. He was very nice to me, but I wasn't a beautiful girl, which generally took me out of the danger zone."

Portia looked down at her plate, momentarily charmed by the embedded compliment. She was surprised to see that she had already eaten a good deal. It had happened quickly and without making much of an impact.

"You know that expression coup de foudre? French for falling madly in love with someone?"

"Thunderbolt." He nodded. "That was you and Tom?"

"Well, it was me. I can't explain it. I remember, vividly, the exact moment and the exact spot. It was on the Green. For years afterward, whenever I walked over that spot, I would feel something, physically."

He smiled. "Like hungry gra.s.s. In Ireland. You know?"

Portia didn't know.

"Wherever someone died in the Irish famine, if you walk over that spot, over the earth where they died, you feel weakness and hunger. Or so say the bards."

"Yes." She sighed. "Like that. I would be walking across the Green on my way to cla.s.s, or talking with friends. Or even later, when I was supposedly a grown-up, professional woman, on my way to the Hanover Inn to talk to an alumni group, or one of our Ivy League conferences. I'd regress, totally, to that moment." She laughed. "Remember the final scene of Carrie? When the hand shoots out of the earth and tries to pull her down? That was me. Minus the Amy Irving curls, alas."

"And the gore, I hope." He cut the last egg roll and placed half democratically on her plate.

"Oh, there was gore," she said, sounding cryptic. "Lots and lots of gore. But not in the beginning. In the beginning it was..." She faltered. She shouldn't be able to remember how it was, so far back, through the bitter fallout and the long years with Mark, not to mention the more recent history and reverberating presence of John Halsey. Pinned to earth by the long arm of the first man she had loved, so long ago, and never able to quite get upright, let alone truly walk away. It was pathetic, she knew, but it would be more pathetic if she had not made such a facsimile of continuing her life. She sometimes tested herself by conjuring Tom-on her airplane, in her restaurant, sauntering into an information session in Clio Hall with Ivy or Courtney or Thomas-known-as-Trey. He would be frowning at her as he tried to place her features or, worse, skim past her, completely blank. And she would always be shocked and speechless, her pulse rattling and her face shamefully wet. She was never ready for him, never once. She would never be ready.

"Hearts and flowers?" John said after a while. "Every girl's dream?"

She nodded. "Yeah. Except I wasn't supposed to be a girl. I was supposed to be a warrior. I wasn't at Dartmouth to fall in love or find a husband or any of that stuff. I wasn't there to party. I wasn't there to get good grades so I could go to law school. I was supposed to be building a postfeminist utopia on the Hanover Plain, where evolved women and men could create their highest selves in fruitful, nons.e.xist communion."

"Oh, wow." He laughed. "I am completely lost."

"My mother didn't want me to go to Dartmouth. She thought the college was a lost cause, and she hadn't raised me in the highest principles of gender-blind self-actualization to go off to some retro school where the women were fraternity playthings and potential future wives."

"But..." John frowned. "Dartmouth was full of amazing women."

"Which is exactly what I told her. I told her how wrong she was. And even if the men really were back in the dark ages, I told her that preaching to the choir was a waste of my talents. Like Simone at Oberlin or Antioch. What was I supposed to do on a campus where everyone already had a Rosie the Riveter poster and Cris Williamson in the tape deck?"

"Who?" said John.

"My point," she said, "exactly."

She got up and went to the fridge. "I think I will have that beer," she said. "If you truly don't mind."

"I truly don't," he said amiably.

She found the bottle and opened it, then sat down again.

"My mom...," Portia began. "Well, here's the thing. My mother wasn't a mom in the June Cleaver mold. That was fine. She raised me alone, for one thing, and that was also fine. But I wasn't just her child, I was her project. There was a point to me, do you see? I was supposed to make her make sense."

John was trying hard to follow. Portia saw that he couldn't quite. "You mean, she lived through your accomplishments? That's far from unusual."

"Oh, I know. In my work? Absolutely, I see that all the time. But in the case of my mother, it wasn't just that I made up for her having no traditional work. I was the work. I was what happened when you never allowed one speck of s.e.xism or racism or h.o.m.ophobia into the presence of your precious child. I was supposed to be this brave new female, right? I was never supposed to know that there were people who thought I couldn't be president or cure cancer or climb Mount Everest on my hands."

"This is sounding like a Skinner box!" John said. "What did she do, raise you in a cave?"

Portia nodded. "More or less. She raised me in Northampton, Ma.s.sachusetts. The Pioneer Valley. They call it 'the Happy Valley.' Remember Heather Has Two Mommies? We all had two mommies, or we had one mommy and a turkey baster. Heteros.e.xual couples were few and far between in Northampton. Married heteros.e.xual couples were almost unheard of. America was the control. We were the experiment. You see?"

He shrugged.

"And the experiment was not supposed to culminate in Thomas Wheelock Standley, the umpteenth male in his family to attend Dartmouth, captain of the rugby team, president of his fraternity, future attorney, and, incidentally, Mayflower descendant."

"Really?" said John. "I never knew that."

"Well, you didn't date him." She laughed. "Or you would have. It was quite the aphrodisiac for those potential future wives. And, for certain other reasons, for me."

"Okay, now I get it," said John. "This isn't about principles. This is about plain old rebellion. You brought home your mother's version of a h.e.l.l's Angel."

"He was dying to meet my mother. He was convinced she was this big, butch, man-hating d.y.k.e. I told him she wasn't."

"Wasn't what?" said John. "Big? Butch? Man hating?"

"A d.y.k.e. She was actually a failed lesbian, and that was really hard for her to accept. Of course, the women my mother tried to be with knew right away, but she absolutely believed she could will herself into h.o.m.os.e.xuality. Enough tofu, enough Meg Christian."

"Meg-?" John said, looking addled.

"Exactly." Portia drained the last of her beer. "I hope I don't seem ungrateful. Do I seem ungrateful?"

He frowned. "Why? Just because she gave you life? Scrimped and saved? Put aside her own dreams to help you achieve your own?"

"No, that would be Stella Dallas." Portia laughed. "Susannah Nathan was no Stella Dallas." She looked down at her plate. It was wiped clean. How had that happened? "Would you like some coffee? I definitely have some. I don't know about milk."

"Coffee would be nice," he said genially.

She cleared their plates and braved the fridge again to find the coffee, which she finally discovered in the freezer. There was some long abandoned vanilla ice cream, which she likewise removed to use in place of milk, necessity being the mother of invention. She felt, vaguely, good, suspiciously light, which was itself odd, given that she had just put away her most substantial meal in weeks. It might be the beer, of course, or the residual light-headedness from that transformative bath. It might be John.