Admission. Part 28

"First thing last fall, I had my cla.s.s write thousand-word autobiographies. Jeremiah's... Jesus, it was brilliant," he said sleepily, at her ear. "It started, 'Once there was and was not, a boy named Jeremiah Vartan Balakian.' Which is the traditional opening of an Armenian story. I mean, the 'Once there was and was not.' I could have given him an A just for the first sentence. But it was very tender, actually. When he discovered he was adopted, he felt such relief. He forgave his parents immediately. Not for adopting him, of course. For just having no idea what to do with him. And it explains so much about the way he grew up. Socially." He yawned again. "You're staying, right?"

"I don't know," said Portia, who didn't.

"But you need to sleep."

"Yes," agreed Portia, who suddenly, and to her own surprise, was already drifting in that direction: suffused with heat, increasingly addled. She felt as if her hands were holding so tightly to a rope slicked with something wet, something slippery, like algae or long strands of seaweed moving in a current, so that she was constantly slipping and slipping, but her hands were throbbing and tight in spite of this. And it was warm underwater, and she wanted to let go, but every time she was nearly there some urgent spasm made her grip the rope anew, and it would start again. The wine and the heat and the breath at the nape of her neck, which was also hot, and she began to feel the general goodness of things, quite apart from the nagging pain in her fingers, clutching, and that she might as well give up on that, too, except that there was something, something, warm and amorphous in this otherwise pleasant underwater place that was not good. And that something kept disturbing her, irritating her, reminding her of something she could not quite place but knew was not good and not going away.

And this went on, who knew how long? But when she woke it was in an acrid, jerking way, clawing for air. She thought: Now I know exactly what it feels like to choke to death, or be willfully choked, which even in that distant way she recognized as illogical, because she would hardly choke herself, and John, she could feel, had turned in sleep behind her and curled away from her, spine to spine. And still, she hurtled awake with one hand protectively at her own throat and the other over her eyes, as if the notion of looking into the darkness were something she wished to protect herself from, too, though when she did open her eyes, it was so black in the room that there was nothing to see. Nothing to need protecting from, she thought erratically. Except... something.

Portia sat up. John moved behind her, and she automatically pulled back the quilt around him, so he wouldn't wake from cold. She did not want him to be awake with her just now. She perched, stiff and tense, at the edge of the bed, her aching hands on her knees, staring into the darkness, willing the obscure thing to come to light, and fearing that, and willing it again, if only to be done with the fear of not knowing what it was. It was, whatever it was, a thing of substantial proportions, of unignorable heft. It was something she had not known before she'd slept, but something she would, once she discovered it, never be able to not know again. And it was so close, so almost actual.

She got to her feet, feeling the strain in her calves and shoulders. She picked up her bag from a chair in the corner, declining to consider what this meant, and stepped out into the bas.e.m.e.nt corridor. There was a small bathroom down the hall, and she went in and turned on the switch and stared at herself in the garish fluorescent light, while a green-hued, terrified woman stared back: dark brown hair, blue circles under each brown eye. It was not a very lovely face, because it was Susannah's face, with its strong nose and wide, high cheekbones and thick wavy hair, and she had never thought of Susannah as lovely. For years, growing up especially, she had examined herself this way, looking not for similarities but for differences, an element or trait that could not be a.s.signed to her mother but had to be some wild card entry of her unknown father: the man on the train, the man of the unknown embarkation and the unknown destination, to whom she was-whatever her mother thought-as closely linked as to Susannah. She had never found it. On the contrary, and against her will, she had grown physically more and more like Susannah, as if to prove her mother's argument that the man had been no more than a means to an end, a catalyst without any contribution of its own. So she had stopped looking, and she had put the idea of him away with other things she could not bear to think of.

Upstairs she went, quietly, so quietly that she could not even hear herself. Through the bas.e.m.e.nt door and up the grand staircase, lined by the promised hunting prints, footfalls disappearing into the carpeted runner. On one end of the landing, a formidable door that seemed to promise a master suite. On the other, a longer corridor with doors on either side, close together. She went to the first of these, holding her breath as she turned the k.n.o.b, pushing the door inside. Two beds on a faded pink carpet, two bodies under two pink coverlets: Deborah and Simone. Portia stepped back. She was in control of each finger, the angle of her head and neck, but not of herself. She closed the door.

The next door was to a bathroom, with an automatic light that flickered horribly overhead when she nudged it open. She was amazed that no one had stopped her yet.

The next door opened to sleeping boys. Nelson, in the bottom bunk, snoring gently into his pillow, one arm flung overboard so the knuckles brushed the bare wooden floor. She was not yet ready to look up. Later, she would not be able to say how long it had taken her to look up.

She understood what it was to have a blank for a parent. Did that mean she understood precisely half of what it was like for Jeremiah, who had been transplanted into foreign soil, roots excised from the earth and swaddled into an antiseptic ball? One-half of a mystery was still a mystery. She knew, looking at him, that she could not have defended her certainty in any convincing way. But she was: riveted, calm, flushed with horror, and utterly certain.

Afterward, driving back, she would think very carefully, very clinically, about how long she had spent in the room, looking and looking at the boy in the top bunk. Of course, she did not like to think what would have happened if he had woken up, or if Deborah or Simone had needed the bathroom. There was no possible justification, no rational explanation to alleviate the vision of herself, her middle-aged, acerbic, strange, and hysterical self, standing in a nighttime room of sleeping teenage boys who barely knew her, and whom she barely knew, looking and-after the first few minutes, when she began to be certain of what she was seeing-weeping. Later, driving north on 95, crossing the Delaware back to New Jersey, she let them appear before her, one by one, and conjured the disgust and loathing on their incredulous faces: Mrs. Halsey, Mr. Halsey, Deborah, Simone, Nelson... John. "I don't understand," John would say, aghast at her. "Why were you there? What were you doing?"

Why am I here? she thought. And what-exactly what-am I doing? All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time.

The boys breathed and breathed. They were beautiful: Nelson with his obsidian skin shining in the light from the hallway. Jeremiah's black curls against the pillow, one sinewy arm thrown up over his head. She had a terrible idea that she might not be able to leave this spot, that the first sleepy risers would find her here, rooted, frozen, staring into the room, floundering for some shred of an explanation. It was the horror of this scenario that finally extracted her, breaking the suction of her feet to the carpeted floor, ripping away her gaze. There was a window at the end of the hallway, admitting-she noted with dismay-the first shards of morning light. Portia turned and walked quickly away from it, and down the stairs, and out the front door. She got into her car, scrambled fearfully for the key in her purse (terrified that she might have to go back to the bas.e.m.e.nt room, where John still slept) and finally found it, then slapped it into the ignition. The car, starting up, seemed the loudest thing in the universe.

She drove away down the lane and then, by instinct, to wider and wider roads, aiming vaguely east into the dawn and then vaguely north, until she hit the unmistakable artery of Route 95 and understood that she was no longer driving away but going home. Of course, the going home did not seem tolerable, either, except... it came to her slowly... for the one sliver of relief that she might possibly find there, one tiny fact that might dismantle the wonderful, dreadful conviction she had conjured in that hallway. For that slim chance, she thought, it was worth going back. Already she had a craving to find it and so relieve herself, to once again not know what she was sure that she knew, and go back to feeling the nothing she had felt for seventeen years. How soft and quiet that familiar nothing was, and how she craved it again.

Across the Delaware, she found herself slowed by roadwork ahead, surrounded by drivers who clearly neither expected nor accepted traffic on a Sunday morning. For herself, Portia was surprised to discover that she was not impatient. Now that she understood what she needed to find out, and how she was going to do that, the frantic part of her circ.u.mstances was tamped, and a kind of grim resolve had taken its place. What she needed to know, she would certainly know in due course, whether in ten minutes or two hours, and there would be either relief or the greatest dismay. She could wait for that. The cars inched north to her exit. And when she exited, the road was clear into Princeton.

There was a s.p.a.ce on Witherspoon, miraculous, in front of Small World, but the whiff of satisfaction was short-lived. Even as Portia twisted to unbuckle her seat belt, she caught the shape, and then the eye, of Mark, emerging from the coffee shop, followed by the protruding midsection of a similarly recognizable woman. It was too late to pretend she hadn't seen or wasn't there. He looked, to his credit, similarly appalled, but Helen went on, impervious, her brittle little mouth moving, though mercifully silent through the car window. Mark stood frozen, half looking at Portia, half listening to Helen, who waved about one bony hand. A left hand, Portia noted. That wore a glittering ring.

Portia threw herself out of the car and scurried up the street side of the parked cars, annoying drivers. There was slush on the ground and on the stone path crossing in front of Na.s.sau Hall, the very place she had stopped, only two days before, when somebody called her name: before pregnant Helen and frozen Mark, and the night, and the drive, and the dinner party and the story of the train and the unexpected grace of the lovemaking. Before the possibility of Jeremiah, who now that the fact of him was only steps ahead seemed almost material beside her, silently keeping pace with her along the walkway.

She pushed open the door to West College and shed her coat as she took the stairs, wet boots slapping the steps. There were others here, behind their closed or ajar doors, who registered her pa.s.sing but did not exactly look up. She went first to the pending files on the shelf over her desk, but she knew perfectly well it wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere in her office. It was already gone, in that last group sent to Corinne for a second reading. Portia sat at her desk and stared ahead, at the outdated gym schedule and the Oldest Living Graduate. Also, the poem by Sylvia Plath that Rachel had given her once, years before, as a joke, she supposed.

"The Applicant"

First, are you our sort of a person?

Do you wear A gla.s.s eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber b.r.e.a.s.t.s or a rubber crotch, St.i.tches to show something's missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty.

Portia looked, illogically, at her own hands. Empty? Empty. Then, taken by a new idea, she got to her feet and rushed out into the corridor and downstairs, pa.s.sing through the small lobby to the office, normally a hive at eight a.m., but not on a Sunday. Martha, though, was at her desk, wielding her signature letter opener-a bra.s.s instrument with a sharp point at the business end-against a stack of bulky mailers: CDs and art portfolios from applicants, research papers, novels in progress, unsolicited letters from cla.s.smates, congressmen, coaches, friends of the family who had once attended Princeton. Even this late.

Martha looked up and waved. "You're here early."

"Not earlier than you. Are we getting mail on Sunday now?"

"Oh." She shook her head. "I never finished yesterday's. Do you think they really believe we can read an entire novel? Or are we just supposed to weigh it?"

"I don't know," said Portia.

"It kind of gets to me," said Martha. "Tell me something. Do they really look at this stuff? In creative writing?"

"Of course," said Portia. "They may not read every word of a five-hundred-page ma.n.u.script, but they do look. Usually, a look is enough."

Martha nodded. "So if one of these is actually hundreds of pages of 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,' you'd know about it?"

"Yeah," said Portia. "I don't think you need to worry about Jack Nicholson coming through the door with an ax."

"I'm not worried," Martha said, brandishing her miniature bra.s.s sword. "Why do you think I'm never without my letter opener? You okay? You look awful."

The shift was so abrupt that Portia lost the wherewithal to take offense.

"Do I? I'm sorry."

"What are you apologizing for?" said Martha, looking actually more concerned. "I told Clarence to hire more readers this year. He said he would, but somewhere between the mouth and the brain... you know what he's like."

No, she realized suddenly. She didn't know what he was like. This thought alarmed her. "I'm not behind," she said, which she hoped was the point.

"No, I'm not suggesting. And it's fine for the younger ones. They just drink more of those Bull drinks, with the caffeine. Dylan's going through them by the case. But for you, and Clarence, and Corinne."

"Oh, I'm fine," she said, relieved. Concerns for her physical state were almost a welcome distraction. That Martha remained so wonderfully ignorant of her actual condition came as an unexpected boon. "In fact, I got away a bit over the weekend. So actually, if anything, I've been kind of slacking off."

Martha, for her part, looked unconvinced. "Well, Portia, I'm sorry to have to say this, but you don't seem very rested to me. If you take my advice, which of course you won't, you'll reconsider spending the day in the office and go home and sleep."

Portia fought a brief wave of irritation. Martha had worked here for years, since before she herself had joined the office. They had always been at least cordial and at most actually affectionate. Probably, they had had conversations just like this in the past, perhaps many of them. But today, and despite the clear accuracy of Martha's observations and the suitability of her advice, Portia wanted to hit her, or at least walk away. Instead, and after the briefest possible interlude, she gathered herself, produced a facsimile of a smile, and said: "G.o.d, I would love that. But you know, I'm really okay. I'm going to work this morning, then I'll go home. But this is the deal I made with myself, you know, for taking yesterday off. So," she went on, attempting to block whatever Martha's next objection might be, "I'm looking for that batch I left Corinne on Thursday."

"Thursday...," Martha considered.

"It's just," she said, utterly unnecessarily, "I wanted to check something."

"Thursday..." Martha frowned. "She took a lot home with her for the weekend. I don't know if they were yours or first reads. Want me to call her?"

"No," Portia said a bit too shortly. "No, it can wait. She's a quick read."

Though she wasn't, really. Not quick enough.

"Anything I can help you with?"

Portia shook her head. She was entertaining a pointless fantasy, in which despite the very conversation that had just taken place, she would walk calmly to her box and find the single folder she wanted to find, miraculously separated from the mult.i.tudes of superficially identical folders, and placidly open it to find the reader's card, marked with her own blue ballpoint print, and now, beside that, with Corinne's favorite brown felt-tip and tight little script: "Agree with first reader? Disagree?" She often disagreed. She would disagree now, Portia was certain. What would she do when Corinne disagreed?

"If you're determined to work...," Martha said helpfully. She nodded at the table where the ill-conceived brownies, cakes, and vegan power bars had earlier been displayed. It was now a groaning board of files, stacked in uniform heights, bound by rubber bands, decorated by Post-it notes. "This is you," she said, gesturing at the nearest pile. It was Corinne's. Ready for second reads. "She left it off before she went home on Friday."

"Ah. Good," said Portia with disproportionate heartiness. She scooped up the stack. "Well, if I don't come out by tomorrow, send the sniffer dogs."

"I'll send Jack Nicholson," said Martha, returning to her mailers.

Portia trudged upstairs with the folders. Her arms ached from them, and her legs and back, and she felt, as she rose and rose, the profound physical impact of her two nights of lost sleep and all that had taken place between them. In her office, she let them drop heavily on the desktop, sat down, and simply stared at them, bleary-eyed and depleted. She thought of nothing, and then of random, disconnected things: the Edie Sedgwick biography, and Deborah's curling red hair, and Jeremiah's long arms, and Rachel's dog, increasingly arthritic and-even she could tell-addled in mind. She thought of Helen's convex belly and Mark's look of great discomfort, and the furnace John had reset so easily, and the tall notched stones she had once seen in Ireland years ago, on vacation with Mark, and realized for the first time that she had stored this particular little memory because the stones-ogham stones, they were called-were so very like the tall stacks of files that filled and marked her life. She remembered the field, but not where in Ireland it was, and their rental car pulled not far enough off the road, so that the drivers of two pa.s.sing cars, forced to carve a semicircle around it, had sent vaguely hostile grunts in their direction-tourists, obviously. Who else would trudge up an incline, evading scattered sheep s.h.i.t, to look at rocks some long-gone person had chipped into some lost meaning? The ogham cuts were an ancient, ritualistic language from the Celts, the notches meaning numbers or letters, perhaps a calendar. Like a bar code, it suddenly occurred to her. Or the data of thousands of seventeen-year-olds, compacted to a language of bytes.

She sat up straight in her chair and touched the s.p.a.ce bar of her computer. The university screen saver evaporated, and she was offered the usual log-in box. She typed her pa.s.sword and entered the system, evading the ninety-four messages accrued since Friday, wonderfully impervious to everything else, because the distance between not knowing and knowing was contracting and the answer drawing nearer with each stroke of her fingertips. Of course, she might have had this information days ago, luxuriously alone, with the application itself in her very hands, but she hadn't known to look, and how could that be her fault? She might have done what she was doing now much earlier, the very moment she arrived this morning, saving herself the all too accurate scrutiny of Martha, who now knew there was something very wrong with her. She might have gone home and done it there, from her home computer, in even greater privacy. That none of these possibilities had occurred to her made her irritated and then a little giddy, because she was flying through the system now, and her hands were moving rapidly on the keys, and rapidly through the vast orbit of letters and numbers, and the software that sorted, codified, and clamped them together. She wanted only a few of these letters and numbers.

"Balakian," she wrote, but in her haste misspelled the name. She typed, "Jeremiah," and there were many. First names, middle names, even last names. "Balakian, Jeremiah Vartan." She opened the data file and made herself read by internal metronome and in rigid order: "Name." "Address." "School." She knew this already. "Place of Birth." She knew this, too. She had seen it before, but it had made no impact. Why, she railed at herself, had it made no impact? "Date of Birth."

She closed the data file. Then she closed her eyes.

First, are you our sort of a person? She had to wonder if she herself even was a sort of person, and had a sort of person, and if so, what they would be. Dishonest? Obscure? Defined by missing things? But I love him, she thought now, as if this were the most important point to be making. Surely there has never been a question of that. Because he was the single real thing in her life, and it was everything else that felt finally ill defined. And her own life had gathered itself around this empty s.p.a.ce, which had finally found itself an occupant, with heft and color and texture. Of course, that occupant was him: the applicant who both was and absolutely was not Jeremiah Vartan Balakian.

PART.

III.

VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO.

I don't remember a time when my father was not living under the cloud of cancer. Diagnosed when I was in kindergarten, he has battled his way through surgeries, radiation therapies, and increasingly experimental chemotherapies. There are times when I feel very privileged, because I know that he is in the care of excellent doctors at a cutting edge cancer center, and I know that no one on earth is getting better treatment than he is today. But I also feel terrible frustration that, despite so much effort and funding, we have still not cracked the problem of a single little cell growing out of control.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

A THING FOR JEWISH GIRLS.

One October evening, on the precise patch of the Dartmouth College Green that John Halsey would years later compare, in its lasting effect, to Irish hungry gra.s.s, Portia Nathan was. .h.i.t by a rogue lacrosse ball and swiftly knocked out. Afterward, she would regret that the scenario had not been a bit more elegant. All of the right elements were there: innocent girl, athletic (presumably attractive) boy, graceful loss of consciousness segueing to graceful reestablishment of consciousness. It didn't happen that way. True, the night was clear and crisp, and she was wearing a floaty Indian shirt that had (until that night, when it was more or less destroyed) been one of her favorites, and her hair that fall had never been longer, straighter, shinier. True, she was about to gain the uninterrupted attention of the person she would spend the next several years hoping to attract, and then retain, and then reattract. But the actual event was humiliatingly coa.r.s.e.

The lacrosse ball did not, for one thing, hit her in some delicate location-the back of the head, perhaps, or the shoulder-but square in the eye. And her unconsciousness ended not with a Sleeping Beautylike stretch and purr, but with an upright jolt and a hearty spasm of vomit, hitting directly the boy who leaned over her, a dark head in a halo of moonlight.

The Greek chorus of her cla.s.smates, who rushed to gather around her, produced involuntary sounds of disgust and then, like the well-brought-up citizens they were, withdrew to a more circ.u.mspect distance. Only the boy himself and his two fellow lacrosse players stayed with her, and the girl Portia happened to have been standing beside when the fateful ball made contact. By the time the paramedics arrived, she was more or less upright, sticky with blood, vomit, and the fluid from her wildly painful right eye, which she instinctively kept covered with her hand. The other eye, which mercilessly recorded her attentive audience of fascinated cla.s.smates and her own very disagreeable physical disarray (not the least part of which was the fact that she had come to a sitting position with her legs splayed far apart and couldn't seem to figure out how to bring them together), took refuge in the strangely calming vision of a monogram on the boy's white shirt-TSW-etched in dignified maroon and only a little spattered with the recent contents of her stomach.

This occasion was-so ironically-the very one that had formed her initial attachment to Dartmouth: the annual building of the cla.s.s bonfire, an autumn ritual for the freshmen to bond and socialize and display their superiority to all previous cla.s.ses by making their chimney of railroad ties one tier higher than the year before. The lumber had been dropped off days earlier near the center of the Green, and a small group of planners and worker bees had taken charge of it, mapping out the structure and directing the labor, doing the actual work while others gathered round, chatting and socializing as the tower rose. All week the cla.s.s had filtered through, climbing the ladder of wood to hoist a tie or two or remaining earthbound to hoist a beer. Groups sat on the gra.s.s during the day and shivered in standing groups at night, exchanging that basic information they had been exchanging now, for weeks, and were all growing sick of but somehow still fixated upon: What's your name? Where are you from? What dorm are you in? Where else did you apply? Portia herself had done her part a few days earlier, when the bonfire was only as high as her head and the freshman girls on her floor had gone as a group. Since then, she had pa.s.sed through once or twice a day, sometimes at night, amused and a tiny bit proud to find herself within the very tableau that had brought her here in the first place.

It was not, of course, a n.o.ble business to throw up in front of an audience, but even so, the reaction was surprisingly visceral. Hypocritical, too, given the drunken desecrations of Fraternity Row and the omnipresent odors in the bathrooms of her all-female dormitory. Even so, Portia and her involuntary emission that night would attain the status of minor legend within their cla.s.s, and largely because just about everyone got to witness the outcome (the vomit, in other words) while few had witnessed the mitigating fact of the lacrosse ball hitting her in the eye and knocking her out. She would, she suspected even then, adding tears of shame to the other bodily fluids in play, forever be that girl who pa.s.sed out beside the bonfire and blew chunks over everyone, a cautionary tale, surely, of a young innocent away from home and meeting the scarlet A-for-Alcohol for the first time. She would share her sad lot with the girl who never washed her hair through the fall term, wore shorts through the snow all winter, and disappeared in the spring, never to be seen again, and the first boy to drink himself sick in Fayerweather Hall during Freshman Week, who happily accepted the honorary lifetime nickname of "Boot" as a result (that scarlet A-for-Alcohol having not quite the negative quality for men that it had for women).

Still, the news wasn't all bleak. Portia had a couple of things going for her that night, first and foremost the darkness (since what man-made illumination there was at the center of the college Green was focused on the rising tower of railroad ties and not on her). Afterward, there wouldn't be many of the hundred or so witnesses who could have picked her out of a crowd without the helpful additions of tears and vomit. Also fortunate was the fact that Portia had not, until that moment, made much of an impression on her cla.s.smates, and therefore few already knew who the effluent-covered freshman actually was. Once the incident had been mined for socialization value (OmiG.o.d, that's so disgusting! So, what's your name? Where are you from? etc., etc.), the a.s.sembled did tend to move on to other topics.

The paramedics brought her to d.i.c.k's House, the campus infirmary, and only when they left her there in the care of the nurses did she realize that the cloth she had for some time been holding against her eye was actually the once white shirt of the boy who had stood over her. How it had come into her hand was a mystery, but there was no doubt of what it was, not with its monogram-TSW-disconcertingly pristine. She groggily refused to give it up to the nurses.

The eye was not seriously damaged, thankfully. With a patch, a single st.i.tch in her right brow, and an astoundingly effective a.n.a.lgesic, she floated away from all remaining pain and mortification and woke up many hours later to bright sunlight, still clutching the shirt.

Over the following week, her eye healed, her bruise faded, her single st.i.tch dissolved, and on the eve of homecoming the bonfire went up in its usual conflagration, sealing the unity of their cla.s.s for all time. She washed the shirt, intending (hoping!) to return it to its owner, and it was only when the fabric had been finally fully liberated from its stains and then ironed in the damp little laundry room in the bas.e.m.e.nt that she realized she did not know to whom it belonged. That boy, its owner-so real to her in his solid silhouette-had no actual name and no clear face, and as the fall progressed and the accident slipped mercifully into the past, Portia was increasingly reluctant to bring it up.

Unfortunately, as her chances for resolution waned, her eagerness only seemed to build. She looked for the shape of him constantly as she moved around the campus, scrutinizing boys as she brushed past them in the hallways of cla.s.sroom buildings, and at the dining room tables in Thayer, and at parties in dormitory rooms and the sticky bas.e.m.e.nts of fraternities. And always as she crossed the Green, as if she might most likely find him here, at the scene of the crime. She tried to remember the specific backlit outlines of his shoulders and head, and strained to recall whether he had spoken, and if so, what he had said. Obviously, he had removed his shirt-this shirt-and given it to her. How had she managed to miss this very interesting transaction and all the information that might have come with it? Because there was little information to be had. He was tall and broad, with hair more flat than thick and curling. There had been a shirt beneath the shirt with the monogram, but it had been too dark to see the collar or the pattern. Mostly, she remembered the lacrosse stick, and she even went along to one of the home games that fall (Dartmouth versus Princeton, as it happened), to try to pick him out among the hurling players. But he could have been any of half a dozen or so, or none of them, and she went home feeling slightly sullied from the whole thing.

She was (and how Susannah would have raged at this, if she'd known) very much like a reverse Cinderella looking for her prince, with only the clue of the monogram to fit his symbolic foot. In fact, it occurred to her more than once that the monogram itself was taking the brunt of her fixation, that the ident.i.ty of the man who had hit her-maybe-and felt bad enough about that to remove and pa.s.s along to her his clothing, was actually no more and no less than a monogram, and so it was the monogram, and not the man it belonged to, that truly held her.

Unfortunately, given the circ.u.mstances, Portia had had little experience with monograms. Susannah had not seen fit to monogram a single sheet, towel, washcloth, napkin, picture frame, slipper, item of stationery, or article of clothing. Susannah's friends and their children also lived monogram-free lives, so Portia had no way of knowing that a monogram reading say, T S W-with its central S ever so slightly larger than the T and W that flanked it-represented a person whose initials were actually T W S. And so, when Portia had the bright idea to consult her freshman book, the directory of her cla.s.s, she had looked long and hard at every boy with a last name starting in W and a first name starting in T. There she discovered Teddy Washington of Columbia, South Carolina (a reedy African-American who had coincidentally been on Portia's freshman trip), and Theo Westerboerk of the Netherlands (stout and already balding), and Travis Wall of Hanover, New Hampshire (son of a math professor), none of them remotely like the former owner of the monogram. To be even more thorough, she found and searched the freshman books of the soph.o.m.ore, junior, and senior cla.s.ses, but the dozen or so TWs that emerged from those were likewise wrong.

By winter, Portia had let this particular preoccupation recede. She was happy with her cla.s.ses that term and attempting to write a play for the annual student one-act compet.i.tion (she never finished this), and she had taken up with the astounding Marrow siblings, who had evidently brought with them to college the boisterous intellectual ambience of their family's apartment on the Upper West Side. The freshman cla.s.s had three sets of twins, two of them disconcertingly identical, and Rebecca and Daniel Marrow. The Marrows were, individually and collectively, extraordinary. Rebecca (already a novelist) and Daniel (a Westinghouse finalist for his work on staphylococcus) had followed their brother Jonathan (chess champion) to Dartmouth. (Another super-high-achieving brother, Benjamin, was cooling his heels elsewhere in the Ivy League.) Rebecca was a force of nature, a flower of Ashken.a.z.i frizz in a sea of limp WASP coiffure, a vintage double-breasted men's herringbone tweed in a crowd of down jackets and vests. Only a few months into their college career, Rebecca had established herself as the nexus of creative people on campus. At her self-termed salons, salmon (shipped, from Zabar's, by Mom) was served on black bread and sprinkled with red onion, and wine was dispensed from bottles with French labels and actual corks. Most of the poets and writers dropped by at least once (the more sensitive flowers among them put off by the din), as well as the Latinists and the theater crowd, and all seemed more than relieved to have found one another, even in a charmless cinder-block room with a view of an access road. Portia had blundered into the scene, falsely declaring (falsely believing) that she would be doing something theatrical at some point in her Dartmouth career.

One Sunday afternoon in February, as the campus nursed a collective hangover from the exertions of fraternity and sorority rush, Rebecca announced that she had invited Tom Standley, from her seven a.m. French drill, over for coffee, and would Portia please come, too, because she didn't want him thinking that she, you know, liked him, and he kind of had this thing for Jewish girls.

What did that mean? Portia had asked, a little alarmed.

It meant that he had already taken two home to Mom, who was apparently quite the anti-Semite, which was apparently quite the point.

Rebecca, who knew every Israelite on campus, including faculty and staff, and seemed to a.s.sume that Portia did as well, was acquainted with both of these girls from Shabbat dinners at the student center. One, she reported, had gone to visit the Standley family over Christmas break and returned to campus reeling, half with the hilarity of it, half in horror. The parents, she reported, had been under the impression that her surname-Applebaum-was Appleton, and all had been well until all had been revealed.

"Obviously, he told them that was her name," Portia said to Rebecca, defending the Jewish honor of this unknown girl.

"Ya think?" Rebecca laughed. "But like I said, he's a sweet guy. I just don't want him getting the wrong idea."

That this would be accomplished by shoving another Jewish girl in his face was a notion that did not occur to her until later, but by then, of course, she was well over the cliff and unlikely to think rationally about much of anything.

When he arrived, knocking on the open door and cradling a tired cactus by way of a hostess gift, she recognized him right away, the blank outline filled in, and the colors, shading, texture, voice, in a brilliant, almost violent moment. By the time he crossed the threshold, he had been transformed from that dark, backlit body to something complex and whole, a fully a.s.sembled eighteen-year-old male who could hit a stranger with a lacrosse ball and then strip off his own expensive shirt to wipe away the various aftereffects, a careless person who had taken care of her. That he did not experience the same rush of recognition was actually a boon, Portia felt, because she needed time to recover from the fact of him, appearing, entering, taking the armchair behind her after giving Rebecca a generous embrace. In just that tiny pa.s.sage of time, she had found herself cataclysmically in love, a state she was surprised to recognize so easily, given that she had never inhabited it before. The ground untrustworthy, the surface of her skin burning for contact, she needed all available restraint to keep from saying things, touching things, simply flinging herself against him.

By then, others had arrived: theater types, who erroneously (as it would turn out) considered Portia one of their tribe. Conversation was puttering along, lubricated by wine and a certain jovial superiority, which stemmed from the a.s.sumption that all present had shunned the absurd and anti-intellectual ritual of fraternity rush.