Admission. Part 29

"Those pathetic drones," said someone, a Thespian from-he had earlier noted-Meryl Streep's New Jersey hometown. "Trotting off down the Row with their plastic cups, ready to waste the next four years on beer pong."

"At least it gets them out of the way," said someone else, a girl who practically lived at Sanborn, the English Department library, surrounded by her journals and poems in progress. "I'd rather they barfed on one another instead of on me."

This comment produced no spark of recognition in Tom Standley, to Portia's relief.

"Well, I rushed a fraternity," he said instead, not smugly so much as perplexed. "I'm excited, actually."

They all looked at him in mild shock, as if he were a newly declared atheist at Bible study. This changed the entire chemistry in the room.

"Yeah?" said Rebecca. "Which one?"

Again, with no sense at all of its significance, he named the WASPiest, wealthiest, and most thoroughly Republican house on campus.

"Ugh," said one of the girls, extravagantly repelled.

"All those Dartmouth Review guys are in there," said another, as if this were likely to dissuade him.

"Yeah," said Tom. "But you know, they don't push it on you. They're good guys."

"Hitler was very fond of his dog, I believe," Daniel said in a treacly voice. "And of course, he was an artist, too."

"Daniel," Rebecca scolded.

"I look at it like this," said Tom. "The next couple of years, we're all going to be running around like crazy. I'm going to France sometime. Next year or junior year. And I want to do an internship at this law firm in Boston. I keep thinking, when I come back here, half my friends are going to be away off campus. And it'll be nice to have a smaller group of guys to hang out with. You know, not as impersonal as a dorm."

Unfortunately for the a.s.sembled, this was a difficult argument to dismiss out of hand. Many of the campus's social woes stemmed from the scheme known as the Dartmouth Plan, which required students to spend a portion of their time off campus, studying, working, or interning, shuttling back and forth from Hanover like a continually shuffled deck of cards. Portia and her cla.s.smates were newly immersed in this reality, having returned from Christmas break only weeks earlier to find replacement casts of dorm mates. The fact that rush took place at precisely this point in the year was not, she supposed, arbitrary, and while Daniel and the others continued to a.s.sail the conformist in their midst, she suspected she was not the only one who empathized with his sentiments. She sat silently, in any case, measuring in millimeters the distance between her hand and his, while they a.s.serted their moral and intellectual superiority.

"I already know half the guys in the frat," Tom said. "I went to school with some of them, and I played lacrosse against a bunch of the others. I went to camp in Vermont with two of them." He shrugged. "It's like moving off campus with your friends, only the house is a frat house."

"What's your last name again?" said Daniel.

"Standley," Tom said affably.

"Oh. Well," said Daniel.

"Thomas W. Standley," Rebecca chortled. "Ask him what the W stands for."

"Nah," said Tom, grinning. "It's not a big deal."

"No, no," Rebecca said. "Of course not."

"What?" said one of the Latinists. "Winthrop? Wigglesworth?"

"Wharton?" said Daniel.

"Winslow?" said a girl.

"Wheelock!" Rebecca crowed, unable to contain herself.

There was a stunned silence.

"As in...?" said the girl, meaning the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, sent north from Yale two centuries earlier to educate (that is, convert) the Indians of New Hampshire, founder of Moor's Indian Charity School (later Dartmouth College) in Dresden (later Hanover), New Hampshire.

"Wow," said Daniel. "No kidding?"

"No, actually," Tom said. "Not Eleazar. His cousin, also named Wheelock, but far less distinguished. Hey," he said, "did you choose your middle name?"

"What, Irwin?" Rebecca laughed. "What makes you think he didn't?"

The party, having soured irrevocably, broke up soon after, though Tom seemed not to take offense. He gave Rebecca a big hug, waved affably at the boys, and turned a luminous face to Portia, who still had not spoken in his presence. After he was gone, she helped Rebecca rinse the gla.s.ses in the chilly kitchenette at the end of the corridor, then went to Sanborn to stare pointlessly at her notes for a paper on The Winter's Tale. Five months after arriving on campus, she felt, for the first time, that there was a cohesion to the experience, more than just a jerking along to cla.s.s, parties, activities in which she could not find traction. Already, just in her first term, she had tasted and spat out too many potential selves, learning only what she was not and did not want, but never what she was or did. As an exercise in least resistance, she had tried out for the soccer team, only to discover, among her potential teammates, women who cared pa.s.sionately about the sport, which-she simultaneously discovered-she did not, nor ever had. Someone on her floor had suggested she come along to crew tryouts, and that she had loved for the river at dawn and the rhythm of the boat and the magic of the balance and glide, which were so much more difficult to attain than they appeared, until she noted the broad, muscular back of the team G.o.ddess, a senior girl trying for the Olympics, and superficially decided that she had no desire to look like that. Afterward, she had cast herself as a playwright and a literary type, though already these selves were beginning to chafe. But now, brilliantly, suddenly, Portia had the rushing, thrilling sense that her life was migrating into order, forming around a point, starting to make, if not actual sense, then at least a point of embarkation. She had fallen in love, and that was the fact of her.

Portia had graduated high school a virgin, despite Susannah's best efforts to instill in her a joyful ownership of her s.e.xuality. This comprised frank and open conversation from an early age, an a.r.s.enal of what-a-girl-should-know information on matters of contraception, disease, and the somewhat more elemental emotional composition of heteros.e.xual teenage boys. It also featured a series of concerned interventions as Portia's high school years began to pa.s.s without her having begun (or, at any rate, told her mother she'd begun) her wondrous personal s.e.xual journey. Portia, who by then had years of experience deflecting Susannah's interest, did not find it hard to fend off her mother on this matter, but she was becoming concerned herself. To be a virgin in high school wasn't, even in the omnis.e.xual milieu of the Pioneer Valley, such a social black spot. But leaving for college that way seemed downright negligent, sort of like going off without being able to write a critical paper or operate a washer-dryer. She chose well-a fellow counselor at the summer camp UMa.s.s ran for soccer players-and had a reasonably good experience. At the end of August the boy decamped to Reed, which was comfortably far away, and they petered out after only a letter or two.

But this was what the entire exercise had been for, thought Portia that night, uselessly shuffling the pages of her sorry Winter's Tale paper. She was ready for it, she crowed to herself, her heart pounding. She had made herself ready. And while she had never before had cause to see herself as a pa.s.sionate woman, it was wondrous, shimmering, to find that she actually was. Obviously, she was! Every nerve ending seemed to be singing, every synapse firing simultaneously. She had an object and a clear goal, and from that night, all that mattered was to summon him.

Wistful leaves fluttered over me as I sat overlooking the azure Pacific ocean and pondered the great gift I had been given the first time I was inspired to write a poem. In fourth grade I wrote my first poem, and ever since I have journaled everyday, filling countless journals with my stories and verses. My goal is to one day publish a book of my writings, and last spring I took a step toward that goal when my poem "Vortex" was selected for publication by the League of American Poets for an anthology of the best poetry by American teens.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

THE LOW DOOR IN THE WALL.

Nearly a year of this would follow, a year in which Portia could do nothing without looking first for Tom (at the student center, and the library, and for one precious term in the immense geology cla.s.s she had taken to fulfill a science requirement), and then, if he was miraculously, luminously, present, choosing carefully where and how to position herself, always weighing the angle at which his gaze might fall on her. If it ever fell. Which it never seemed to do. A year in which she could not bring herself to actually approach him, but attended every party at Tom's socially una.s.sailable fraternity (where, nonetheless, the beer was just as stale as it was everywhere else on Fraternity Row, the furniture just as shabby, the bas.e.m.e.nt floor just as sticky, the boys just as single-minded, and the drinking games on continual loop in the bar just as inane). A year of lying-awake torment in which imagined touching alternated with imagined conversation, invented smells and tastes, and great insights, reached with the catalyst of his undoubted brilliance. But nothing actually happened, and none of this brought her any closer to Tom than the outer periphery of his...o...b..t, which was itself many light-years from the source of her designated light.

It might have been easier to bear had he remained as high-minded (read: celibate) as she, but this appeared not to be the case. Whenever Tom was not surrounded by his fraternity-brothers-slash-rugby-teammates (despite the incident that had, in her view, brought them together, he had actually abandoned lacrosse for the even less restrictive mores of the rugby team), he was in the unwelcome company of girls. And far from those Jewish girls of his supposed preference, these girls always seemed to be blond, stick-figured specimens, clad in Fair Isle sweaters and white turtlenecks with patterns of tiny frogs or hearts or strawberries. Indeed, there was such a sameness to them that only a very, very close observer (like Portia) could detect the small discrepancies that meant there was not, in fact, one particular well-groomed and springy female in Tom's life, but multiple, sequential girlfriends. They were uniformly pale, straight of spine, short, and giggly, but one had blond hair to her shoulders, another to her chin, another to a clavicle protruding from anorexia, and a fourth was short enough to fit comfortably-wrenchingly-beneath Tom's sinewy arm.

Portia might have been raised in the nurturing bubble of the Happy Valley, fed on the I-have-a-dream-of-a-common-language utterances of poets and sages, but she knew right away what she was dealing with here. She was not quite a dolt who supposed there was no such thing as cla.s.s in America, but the few WASPs she had actually contended with were those who had-like her mother-renounced privilege and resolved to tend their own gardens, whether on or off the commune. Amherst and Northampton and the even more hippie-infested hill towns to the north and west were one great muddle of altered surnames and handmade musical instruments, reused plastic bags from the Co-Op, and clothing made on someone's loom. For her, students of other races and nationalities did not offer the much vaunted collegiate experience of "diversity"; for her, diversity came personified by a boy with whales imprinted on his salmon-colored slacks and a girl with a hairband carefully, precisely holding back her rigorously straight blond hair. People like Tom and the little girls under his arm were exotic fauna to her. How had they evolved? What did they eat? Why did they dress like that? And how could she be more... well, like them?

Individually, she had found, the females of the species were affable, sweet, fun, and rigorously polite when you mixed with them in the cla.s.sroom or the dorm. In groups of two or more, however, they seemed to undergo a metamorphosis, shifting into a dialect she could grasp only the edges of, and becoming mysteriously intertwined, like a grove of slender, rustling aspen trees with a single root system underground. Even so, and not unreasonably, Portia tried cultivating friendships with some of these girls and, when that failed, with some of the boys, but she never seemed to pa.s.s through their collective membrane of well-mannered exclusion. She fell in with them as they walked out of cla.s.s and nonchalantly sat at their tables in Thayer, from which (unlike those queen bees of the seventh grade) they were far too polite to exclude her. She collected their names-Peyton, Avery, Perry, Winkie-but they never seemed to take in hers. At the very nadir of her subjugation, she went down the street to Campion's, which carried ample stock of anything a Dartmouth preppy might require, and spent good money on a turtleneck adorned with little shamrocks. (Portia's roommate, an intense Chinese pianist, would memorably say of this item: "Oh? Are we Irish now?") Sitting at their tables, wearing their clothes, falling into step beside them... these things did not bring her joy. They made her feel, instead, bizarrely earthy, hairy, vaguely unclean, and in her shamrock-imprinted turtleneck, which (in spite of her skeptical roommate) she had begun to wear constantly, just a tiny bit ridiculous.

Also gargantuan.

In the real world, she wasn't fat, but she did have substance: thighs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s, wide shoulders and hips, and long, skinny feet. Her body was Susannah's body, made for fieldwork on the Russian steppes and lots of childbearing (because you had to a.s.sume the Cossacks were going to kill a few). The little blond girls-she towered above them. The sleeveless Lilly Pulitzer dresses she tried on at Campion's were always tight across the back. She had to suck in her breath to b.u.t.ton the high-wasted khaki pants she'd ordered from L.L.Bean, and that stupid turtleneck stretched so much across her chest that the shamrocks looked distorted.

Susannah, of course, considered dieting to be the fruit of the poisoned tree that was male chauvinist society. Portia, who was, after all, an athlete for most of her adolescence, had never seen the point of restricting her food intake, but then again, she'd never had to size herself up against girls who could have shopped in the boys' department. Now, she embarked upon the usual sorry voyage of self-loathing and well-meaning starvation, getting a late start on calories versus carbs, Tarnower versus Atkins. She had been raised too well to resort to finger-pointing-down-the-throat finger-pointing-which was the second most popular leisure-time activity in her all-women's dormitory (the first being late night gorging on peanut b.u.t.ter and Mallomars), but she was out for bones: hips, knees, even the jutting clavicle of that anorexic girl who obviously had the strength of character to starve herself. Which Portia did not. At least, not for more than a day or two, after which she would succ.u.mb to a base urge to feed herself.

Still, she beat on. Tom was her green light, her low door in the wall. (She was actually encouraged, rather than deterred, by Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which she read that freshman spring in her course on British fiction with no self-awareness whatsoever.) She could never get close enough, or lovely enough, or interesting enough, to catch his attention. And nothing else had caught her own.

Since quitting the crew team, Portia had not had a regular crowd and in time had drifted from Rebecca and her salon of thinkers and artists. Her roommate, with whom she'd been randomly paired, was an odd, driven girl, increasingly obscure as the months pa.s.sed and by the end of the spring term barely speaking to Portia or anyone else. (Two years on, she would be expelled for plagiarizing a paper on Rosie the Riveter, evaporate from the roster of alumni, and never be heard from again.) All through the bitter New Hampshire winter, Portia battled serial sinus infections. When spring came and the campus softened into mud, she declared a halfhearted major in art history, then switched (hardly more enthusiastically) to English, organizing her projected Dartmouth Plan around a study abroad program in Edinburgh, the fall of her junior year. She finished out the semester with indifferent grades and returned that summer to the soccer camp (out of shape from her own abandonment of the game, not to mention her loss of muscle from erratic nourishment, but at least relieved that her beau of the previous summer had stayed on the West Coast), and so endured what would be her final months under Susannah's roof. At the time, it did not occur to her that she was depressed, and had been for a while, but later she would wonder at Susannah's obtuseness on the matter. Susannah, whose microattentions had been the burden of her life, who had borne down on her relentlessly to discover what she was thinking, what she was feeling, what concerned and obsessed and riled and devastated her, had seemed to achieve this long desired distance just at the moment a bit of attention might have served them both. Portia would spend many evenings that summer on the fetid living room couch, watching Ben Johnson first win and then lose his gold medal at Seoul and listening to her mother rage beside her as Bush wiped the floor with Dukakis; and years later, these-rather than the very worrying state of her emotions, not to speak of her grades, plans, and actual (rather than imaginary) relationships-were her clearest memories of those months.

And then, astoundingly, like a lacrosse ball out of the darkness, it all changed again.

On an afternoon in late October, Thomas Wheelock Standley came and sat next to her in the student center, taking the empty seat so quietly that she had no time to react. There was no obvious reason for this. The place was far from full, and she had commandeered a choice table at a window overlooking the Green, complete with its view of the new freshmen struggling to build their own bonfire. There was, unfurled before her on the table, a copy of the Dartmouth, containing a pa.s.sionate but inelegantly written editorial objecting to the Dartmouth Review's most recent outrage, and this Portia had been reading, dully, feeling the familiar mixture of accord and resignation she always felt when the subject came up. The struggle between the two publications had become slightly epic, one hoisting a totem of Woodward and Bernstein, the other a totem of William F. Buckley (a substantial contributor, as it happened), and clashing at every opportunity. Ideologically, the thing was a no-brainer. The Review had patronized blacks and women on campus, infiltrated the gay and lesbian student a.s.sociation with a hidden tape recorder (and published transcripts), and staged a lobster feast in response to a campuswide fast sponsored by the Third World a.s.sociation. They were, without question, a repellent lot. But they seemed, like any other cla.s.s of vermin, ineradicable, and she had seen enough of her mother's various agitations to question the point of protest.

When he began to speak to her, she failed at first to truly process the words. It seemed to her that this must be only another of the countless imaginary conversations they had had, on subjects too numerous to count, and this one simply following on from the last or the one before. He asked about the editorial, and gave his opinion of the bonfire being a.s.sembled outside, and asked what cla.s.ses she was taking this term.

Portia gaped. For one thing, she looked not terribly well and was wearing not her khaki-and-shamrock ensemble of the previous spring, but old jeans and a purple Amherst sweatshirt that had not seen the inside of a washing machine in some time. Her hair, likewise neglected, fell in heavy waves down her back, curling in places when it wanted to curl, and she had, she realized, and with horror, been actually chewing the thumbnail of her left hand when he sat down, and possibly for a minute or so after.

"I'm sorry," she said at last, when there was a break in the conversation, "but do we know each other?"

"Of course!" he said brightly. "Remember, at Rebecca's? Last winter?"

She nodded, thoroughly numb.

"I'm Tom," he said. "Remember?"

Portia eventually indicated that she did.

"And you're Portia," he added. "You're Jewish, right?"

She stared at him, turning this question in her addled brain.

Jewish was a door that opened onto many rooms. Jewish, meaning of the faith, worshipping that long-ago G.o.d of the desert who had singled you-or at least your ancestor-out for special treatment (how "special" could itself be endlessly debated). Portia was a stalwart atheist, believing no more in the baffling desert G.o.d than the equally baffling G.o.ds of Joseph Smith or Mother Ann Lee. Or Jewish, meaning of the tribe, marked and endlessly victimized, blown across the planet for generations but inextricably tied to one another and their shared past, like the Celts or the Mongols or the Africans. But here, too, she felt unqualified to stake much of a claim, given that she was, as far as she knew, only half Jewish (albeit the half that counted) and had no idea what the other half was and whether it might actually cancel out Susannah's half. She had sometimes explained that she had not been "raised" Jewish, could not speak Hebrew or dance the hora, had never read from the Torah or Talmud or attended synagogue or-G.o.d forbid!-been bat mitzvahed. Her religious upbringing was limited to the bra.s.s menorah Susannah had produced one year when she was small, lit two nights running, and abandoned (for years!) on the mantelpiece in the living room, and also to Susannah's brief flirtation with Feminist Seders, a women-only Pa.s.sover a.s.sembly with an orange on the seder plate and a Haggadah full of solidarity with oppressed women across the globe. But that, too, had abated after a year or two.

She looked at him carefully. She had not been this close to him for many months, not since that day in February in Rebecca's crowded cinder-block room, except for the one giddy morning last spring when she had taken the seat behind him in geology and was able to spend the entire cla.s.s period examining the geological strata of his blond hair. He has this thing for Jewish girls, she remembered, then, dredging the extraordinary phrase from her memory, shaking it off, holding it up to the light, then letting it fill her with the strangest happiness. He seemed not at all concerned to be waiting this long for an answer.

"Yes," she told him, smiling. "Yes, I am."

I would like to share with you something about my current medical situation. Last month, I consulted with my doctor because of a digestive problem. He performed tests and I was given a diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). There is no cure for IBS, and I do not know what the future will hold for me, but I am determined to face this challenge with the same determination I have faced every other challenge in my life.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

THE DESTINATION BOARD.

A little over a year later, in a grubby cafe not far from the Gare du Nord, with a plate of highly suspect celeriac before her and a very heavy backpack at her feet and a heart-not to put too fine a point on it-newly rent to howling shreds, Portia realized that she was pregnant.

The celeriac was not something she had ordered on purpose. She wasn't entirely sure what it was, for one thing, and-speaking no French-was not in a position to ask. But of the various cold items in bowls on the counter, it actually looked the least dangerous, if not the most appetizing, and she was too bereft to walk any farther, so she went inside the cafe and nodded and pointed at the bowl, thinking vaguely that it might be a kind of pasta and unlikely to hurt her stomach, which had been bothering her. But then the small plate of the stuff materialized before her, and she was able to give it a good look and a good sniff. A thin tendril of nausea began to waft up from the plate and coil around her throat, and Portia, who without entirely realizing it had already begun to cry, suddenly understood-irrevocably, precisely, horribly-just what that nausea meant.

She was not supposed to be alone in the cafe, in Paris, on the eve of the Christmas holiday. She was supposed to be with Tom, toasting the end of the term and the start of their great, defiantly unstructured European adventure, antic.i.p.ated for giddy months, refined by postcard (from Edinburgh to the small town near Toulouse where Tom had spent the fall, and back). They had met only once during that time, in London, for a weekend of well-worn tourist exercises and a room in a Bloomsbury hotel. The hotel was called the Ivanhoe, but the garish mural in the bas.e.m.e.nt bar portrayed an Antarctic scene, with penguins and sleds. ("Wrong Scott," the manager had said mirthlessly when asked.) When she thought of the weekend later, especially in the queasy misery of that unlovely Paris cafe, she thought only-with sharp, wounding jolts of pain-of the elation that had wound through it and of one moment in particular: walking through Berkeley Square on the damp Sat.u.r.day afternoon, destination Knightsbridge, especially Harrods, especially the food hall where Tom's mother had once taken him to tea when he was very young and his father was working at the London office of Morgan Stanley. Tom had made a fetish of this memory, as he had of certain iconic moments in his life: the note his father had left hidden beneath his pillow on the day he left for boarding school, the jumping trophy won at a horse show and then taken away when another rider objected to the height of his pony (half a hand too tall, it turned out), the southern gothic horror show of a family reunion (South Carolina, his mother's side), when the weekend was crashed by self-termed relations who had not really been invited. And tea at Harrods with his mother and brother, stirring pebbles of hard sugar into their cups. Taking her there seemed to Portia like an act of union, even an end run around the mother in question, who had been far from welcoming in the flesh. And walking there across the city, into the building darkness, with Portia's waving hair (which he loved) escaping from its enclosures (in the way that he loved), and feeling still the physical p.r.i.c.kle of his hands on her body, and pa.s.sing through Berkeley Square, Tom had started to sing, not unreasonably and not-it had to be said-particularly well, that old song about nightingales in Berkeley Square, and she had thought: This can only be the sweetest moment of my life.

Had it happened that day? That afternoon? Later that night, after the play they had gone to with good intentions but then left in the intermission, because, all things considered, they would rather be back at the Ivanhoe, back in bed? Or the next morning, before he had left for the ferry and she for King's Cross and Edinburgh, for the interminable final weeks of their separation? She hadn't felt anything physical. She had been far more attuned to her general antic.i.p.ation for their reunion and the effort of late-in-the-day scholarship to redeem her (thus far) undistinguished schoolwork. But nothing of the body. Nothing... clinical. Moving a fork through those repellent white, soupy strings of celeriac, she could not remember when she had last had her period. Then she could not remember when she had last thought about it.

Tom had come to Paris, as planned. And the train station, as planned. But he had left her there to go be with some other woman, and that had certainly not been planned, at least not by her. The woman, who apparently waited discreetly outside (in a cafe probably far more picturesque than the one she herself was sitting in), was a Dartmouth soph.o.m.ore from his language program, with a name Portia had immediately repressed, so that even years later she found herself making it up with the aid of an imaginary WASP rhyming dictionary: Twinky? Blinky? Stinky? This person would prove to be athletic and flat and as.e.xual and blond, not-in other words-outwardly distinguishable from the women who had preceded Portia's tenure in Tom's life (minus, of course, the Jewish girls), but-cruelly-she would be the one he married.

Yet Rebecca had also been far from mistaken about the Jewish girls.

From the moment he'd sat beside her in the student center and nonchalantly reminded her of who he was and where they'd met to that final night in the Wrong Scott hotel, Tom had thrown himself headlong into her a.s.sorted relative abundances: flesh and hair, emotion, eccentricity. He had adored the extravagance of Susannah, who was a screamer, a gesturer, a sensualist, whose disapproval (even) had pa.s.sion and extravagance. He had adored Susannah so much that he had been impervious to the fact that Susannah had not adored him back, not the littlest bit. Portia, fearing the worst-expecting the worst-had first taken him home over the winter break, for three days of brittle tension that culminated in an outburst even Tom could absolutely not miss, in which her mother had dragged her from the dinner table (Tom had been explaining that his work covering sports for the Dartmouth Review was not political-it was sports, after all!), secured her behind the insubstantial door of the sitting room, and demanded to know what the f.u.c.k she thought she was doing with this reactionary, boorish, chauvinistic son of privilege.

She loved him, that's what she was doing. She loved him, thrilled to him, hummed to the music of him. Because his arm around her shoulders was weighted with joy and her body raced and soared under his hands. Because she believed him when he said that she was beautiful, and he said so all the time. Because he had picked her-amazing, amazing, amazing-and every day picked her again and would certainly pick her forever.

Though he hadn't actually told her that, of course.

Portia had a single room in the dormitory all that year but barely used it except to change clothes, drag herself through a series of sinus infections, and fanatically shave her legs (lest a single dark hair mar her perceived loveliness). She lived mainly in Tom's room at the fraternity, careful never to impose more than the absolutely required personal items and textbooks, careful to maintain, always, the lightness of the visitor. In fact, when she was not with him, she had not even the strength to mimic lightness but craved only the next time and the next talk and the next touch.

Susannah, she was sure, had never felt a thing like this. Certainly, in a lifetime of far too intimate confessions to her daughter, she had described nothing remotely similar, only the husband of convenience, and the men who were evolved enough to be wonderful lovers and responsible partners, and the genetic providers from the laboratory or the train. Nothing like this. Nothing like this. Which was the reason, Portia told herself, that Susannah was so out of her mind with resentment, wild at the sight of her sated, admired, cherished, and elevated daughter. "Don't bring him back," she had even said, that awful winter break, "and don't come back yourself until you've figured out why you have to act this way. I didn't raise you for the Junior League."

So she had taken him away the day before Christmas, and off they had gone down the Ma.s.sPike, east to the rolling exurbs of Boston and the impeccably groomed home of Tom's mother, father, brother, and horses. Mrs. Standley-"Caroline. Please."-was a transplanted southerner who looked as if she were perpetually freezing. She wore her hair in a girlish pigtail, but brutally slicked back and bound by an enamel clasp. She looked emaciated, swallowed by corduroys and L.L.Bean sweaters many sizes too large, and a pair of green Wellington boots like the ones the new English princess had worn on her honeymoon. These were taken out daily for rambles with the dogs or schooling one of the horses over jumps in the field next door, an activity Caroline approached with a grimness that seemed inappropriate for a leisure-time pursuit. She was, to Portia, the picture of hospitality: hand extended at the door, towels folded at the foot of the guest bed. There was even a gift for Portia under the fragrant tree, a silver necklace of irreproachable taste in the box of a jeweler on Main Street-a Main Street clad in seasonal finery and olde tyme American splendor. Tom, who had recovered quickly from their Amherst misadventure, loved being home. He loved introducing her to family friends and the kids he had grown up with, and watching the flicker of confusion on their faces. Where was Portia from? She was from Northampton. Northampton? Lot of strange people in Northampton. Communists and lesbians, wasn't that right? Portia supposed. What did her parents do? Her mother was an organizer. Oh? What did she organize? (In time, Portia amended this to "volunteer," a much simpler concept for them to grasp.) And her father? "I was raised by a single mom," she would say, eyes downcast, hoping against hope that from this display of regret, they would conclude her father was dead. Dead father. Volunteer mother. Tragic but familiar. And n.o.ble! And at least the father had been fiscally responsible, so the widow hadn't had to work.

But she wasn't one of them. Clearly. At Christmas Eve services, she betrayed a certain awkwardness, knew none of the hymns, and seemed underdressed. For the Boxing Day party they attended every year, she was loaned an un.o.bjectionable dress by Tom's mother, but it had been too tight to zip up completely, and she had made the fatal error of wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt over it. Why hadn't Tom stopped her? She'd brought no gifts for the family and had been forced to forage in town at the last minute, finding only impersonal things with a whiff of desperation about them. Why hadn't Tom warned her? By the end of their stay she was frantic, trying to make up for her shortcomings or else to distract them with those attributes she did possess: good brain, good grasp of world affairs, good powers of argument. These, however, had no worth in the Standley home, and she left having won over only one family member, Tom's brother, who had suffered a breakdown in law school and was (in his parents' euphemism) working independently on a project related to international copyrights until the following fall.

The decline in her fortunes could be traced in the brittle features of Caroline Standley, who might have met her son's new girlfriend at the door with a rigorously correct embrace, but whose fear and disappointment built and built over the ensuing days. She was never less than scrupulously polite to Portia and full of terribly interested queries about her life at college and before, but the strain she was under became more and more evident, spreading like a pool of insidious fluid under the very, very taut skin of her face. Portia, growing frantic as the days pa.s.sed, lingered in bed in the morning, retired early in the evening, and took every opportunity to lead Tom off for walks in the fields or visits to the local haunts of his youth. She generally kept herself out of sight as much as she could, and when she could not she made it her business to seem light, kind, and irreproachable. To this growing strain between his girlfriend and mother, Tom seemed oddly impervious. He touched Portia whenever he wanted, on the forearm, the shoulder, the back of the neck, crossing the invisible lines between neighbors at the dinner table or on the couch or in the car. He padded down the hall to the guest room in the middle of the night for very hushed bouts of lovemaking, then rose early to help his mother exercise the horses, generally behaving as if all were well-which perhaps, to him, was the case. Portia, of course, never said a word to Tom about the silent but acrid force field between herself and Caroline. What good could come of it? Why burden him? Tom's mother, clearly, had recognized the aberration of this slovenly Jewish girl of dubious parentage for what it was-rebellion, pure and simple-and opted to wait out her son's bizarre fascination, which surely couldn't last much longer, an opinion that Portia, very fearfully, shared. (Between the two women, in fact, there was a perfect, if silent, meeting of the minds on this point.) Both, however, were wrong, to Portia's great amazement and Caroline's infinite distress. Through the winter, and Tom's ten-week internship at the Boston law firm (he visited often), and the spring, when Portia, putting the nail in the coffin of her theater interests, spent three months working for the Bread and Puppet group up in Glover, Vermont (she visited often), and on into a halcyon summer term, in which their soph.o.m.ore cla.s.s reunited, more or less, from wherever (to quote the college's regretted alma mater) across "the girdled Earth" they'd roamed in their disparate Dartmouth Plans. It was a sweet summer, clear and warm, with the doors of Sanborn Library thrown open onto a dappled Baker Lawn. Portia wandered inside and outside as the afternoons pa.s.sed, out when she wanted the air, inside when the sun began to withdraw its heat, always nearby when tea was rolled out at four and the business of studying paused, by common agreement. All of her courses were guts, or felt like guts, since who could take seriously the novels of Jean Rhys (Modern British Fiction) or even the th.o.r.n.y notion of theodicy (Judeo-Christianity and the Problem of Evil) when the cla.s.s was held beneath one of the few surviving elm trees at the edge of the Green? Through the long summer days, her path and Tom's interwove, like a minuet in an Austen novel, bringing them again and again face-to-face. Whenever the appearance of a couple was indicated, they were there together, someone's hand in someone else's: fraternity parties down the Row, the summer formal at the Woodstock Inn, the Summer Carnival variety show in Webster Hall. Sometimes, after dinner, she went with him and others down the hill to the river and out onto the dock where she had once helped hoist her crew sh.e.l.l, to swim in the brilliant Connecticut and sit and laugh with her new friends, who were, of course, Tom's friends. At night, she and Tom slept in the same bed.

At first, she nursed a powerful if not wholly rational resentment against her mother for neglecting-in all of the a.s.sorted warnings and war cries since (it seemed) the moment of her birth-the fact of romantic love, let alone its legitimacy. For Portia, this was akin to discovering a new sense, which society had perversely elected to suppress, holding it to be--perhaps-downright incendiary in comparison with the un.o.bjectionable touch, taste, smell, feel, and sight. Susannah might never have felt the pa.s.sion, the gut-twisting adoration, her daughter was then feeling (and how different she might have been, as a mother-as a human being!-if she had), but was that cause to deny to her own child the wondrous thing in which Portia had dwelt, now, for nearly a year? Her relations with her mother were strained for a time, with outright silence following their holiday expulsion from Northampton and lasting several months. But they thawed in June when Susannah announced her imminent and quite surprising move north to Vermont that summer. To keep tabs on me? Portia thought selfishly, but when the air cleared she was actually happy for her mother and helped her sort through the Augean stable their Northampton house had become. With Susannah ensconced in Hartland with her chums, and Portia's own worldly possessions reduced to a single stack of cartons in the new bas.e.m.e.nt, she felt nearly adult, brave, flush with love, and eager for the fall in Edinburgh and the torrid, wondrous winter and spring to follow, when she would wander around Europe with Tom.

An adventure that was not to include grimy cafes like the one she found herself in, or-when you came right down to it-things to eat that seemed likely to make her ill.

She wasted no time in wondering whether she were truly pregnant: She knew that she was. Her body, now that she was paying the slightest attention to it, seemed to be screaming at her from all corners: sore and suddenly pendulous b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a sour taste in her mouth, a gag reflex wound up so tight that even a pa.s.sing breeze made her want to vomit. And the fact-which ought to have been obvious-that she had skipped a period. That she had missed this, above all, appalled her.

Screaming pain had taken up residence in her head, pounding like an Athena who would never, for her own part, do something as idiotic as falling in love. She sat, m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tically hunched over the nauseating celeriac, eyes full, battling to keep herself from exploding. She found herself thinking of the two very different forms of Parkinson's disease-one freezing the features, the other causing uncontrollable movement-and how the most unfortunate sufferers had both at the same time. That was how she felt: vibrating, maniacal, but grim and unmoving, too. Suspended in motion, at the apex of misery. I will be here in an hour's time, she thought dully. And tomorrow. And next week. And in six months. And forever. Never feeling better or getting over it.

Though he-Tom-was already gone, off on a train somewhere, with Winky or Stinky. Probably raising a gla.s.s of red wine to toast the adventure under way. It made her sick.

This gave her an idea. She went down an alarmingly narrow stairway to the bathroom, tiny and unclean, and efficiently threw up. Then she came back to the table and ordered tea. "The," she said hoa.r.s.ely. "Por favor."

Not right. It would occur to her about two minutes too late.

When her tea arrived, she downed it, scalding her mouth. Now that felt horrible, too.

Common sense, of course, should have dictated that it would end this way, give or take a location and what was on the plate. Tom was always going to be heading off with a Winky or a Stinky, bound for the future he-to his credit-had never once told Portia he didn't want, a future of law firms and the lonely fellowship of Ma.s.sachusetts Republicans and the tailgate martinis when Dartmouth played Harvard or Brown, the athletic children and beach stickers from the Vineyard on the back of his car. Their time together, she now understood, had been exotica for him, perhaps a defiant gesture that he was so much more than the stock character from the stock prep school novel that he appeared to be, he was a complex man who chose whom to love and cared not a whit for the trappings of American cla.s.s, which anyway everyone knew did not exist. For a blessed year, he had brandished Portia at fraternity events and family gatherings, daring his friends and relations to sputter their approval for his choice and their admiration for his independent spirit. Here was Portia, child of a self-declared feminist and rabble-rouser, born without a discernible father, rocked in a cradle of hemp, nourished by herbs and yogurt. Here was the product of no family in particular, from no particular place, and anyone who even thought about questioning the wisdom of this pairing would find him selectively deaf and entirely silent, for he was far, far superior to such base notions. His parents and brother and cousins and schoolmates, the people he had known forever and would always know, whose children would play with his children and go to school with his children, who years from now would still be around him and alongside him-Tom owed them nothing. He made his own choices. He was a modern man living a modern life.

And he had been very understanding to Portia, there, under the colossal destination board at the Gare du Nord. Very solicitous for her well-being. And full of suggestions for what she might do next. Could he buy her a coffee? Take her to speak with the train clerk? His French, he noted proudly, was now nearly fluent. Would he like her to look into flights home for that day? Or the next? Did she need help finding a hotel?

No. And no. She actually let him pat her on the shoulder. She actually hugged him back when he hugged her warmly. To her horror, she realized that she was declining his aid not because she didn't need it, but because she seemed intent upon making this nicer for him. The impulse, moreover, felt disturbingly natural, as if she had done it before-many, many times before. Easier for Tom, who seemed impervious to the fact that the woman within his warm embrace was disa.s.sembling: synapse from synapse, sinew from sinew, muscle from muscle, held together (she greatly feared) only by those strong encircling arms. Impervious... just as he was to the fact that his mother hated Portia, or that Portia's mother hated him, and the fact that he had dominated Portia's social life (did he never wonder why she had made no other friends?) and that they had never once slept in the various dormitory rooms she had been a.s.signed, which were more private than his room on the loud (and smelly) upstairs corridor of his fraternity house, or the fact that, more than halfway through her time at college, she seemed to have formed no real academic purpose and certainly no vision of a gratifying career. He had missed many things, it seemed clear to her now, but by the same token he had never actually been dishonest. There had been, certainly, attestations of love, but love of the moment, not-and this was a fine distinction-lasting love. Certainly there had been no offer of permanence, no talk of marriage or even a vague future together. She must have inferred these things, conjuring them out of sensual happiness and what still felt like clear affection, mindlessly a.s.sembling a prospect of shared time, shared contentment. For the first time in her life, she felt brutally stupid.

And so, in the great tradition of ill-treated women everywhere, she decided to blame herself.