Admission. Part 4

When the call came, she was sitting at the round table in the corner of her room, with the heavy floral curtain mostly drawn. There was a grievously overpackaged application unfurled before her on the table and some tasteless tea from the in-room carafe, cooling rapidly in its plastic cup.

That would be him, she knew right away. Anyone else would have called her cell. Anything else could have waited.

The ring was shrill, almost metallic in this anonymous room. She sat up in her chair and placed her palm flat on the cool plastic of the laminate tabletop, her fingers splayed beside the plastic cup, listening to its irritating chirp. Oddly, she was thinking mostly of the applicant, this rigorously organized, prepped, and groomed seventeen-year-old. There was a rule, instilled in her early on-back at Dartmouth, actually-that you didn't start a folder if you couldn't finish it. Applicatus interruptus, one of her old colleagues had called it, and he'd been right, because it always happened when you came back to the essay or the recommendation, after the call or the trip to the bathroom or the Girl Scout at the door, that the person you'd been conjuring out of the words and numbers seemed to have slipped away, leaving behind a muddle of the previous application, and the kid from earlier that day with the sort of similar name, or the one who also had a mom who worked as an electrical engineer but who wanted to be a journalist-not, like this one, a pediatrician.

The phone continued to ring. She looked across to the table between her two queen-size beds where it was shrilling, bleating, and blinking, then down at the essay before her, instinctively finding the sentence she had just read: "... I realized that pediatric surgery would best combine my love of children and science, and my profound need to give back to my community." She could ignore the call, and who was making it, and what that meant.

She felt for her sad plastic cup of tea, only to find she didn't want any. Already, she was fighting the urge to know if she had remembered his voice right-not deep, not steady, and with a vein of uncertain intimacy. And besides, she had already forgotten whether the girl from Sudbury, Ma.s.s., wanted to be a pediatrician or a surgeon or a journalist, and whether she was a girl at all. So what would it matter, now? Then it occurred to her that he had to know she was here. Who would let the phone ring so long in an empty hotel room? This changed everything. She charged up, knocking the table as she crossed the room.

"h.e.l.lo," she said.

"Portia?" Whether from the recent or-less likely, but, she supposed, possible-deeper past, she confirmed the familiarity of his voice.

"Yes?" she pretended.

"This is John Halsey. I'm not sure I told you my surname."

"Halsey," she said aloud, stalling. In fact, it wasn't a familiar name. But then, it hadn't been a familiar face.

"From the Quest School. From earlier."

Portia nodded, as if he could see that. "Yes," she said.

"Look, I just feel badly. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I know I upset you, and I'm very sorry. I probably shouldn't be doing this." He gave a forced laugh. "I mean, I'm probably breaking some sort of college admissions protocol."

That's very possible, she thought. "It's fine," she said neutrally.

"I remembered where you said you were staying. I thought... well, I hoped I could..."

He seemed to hit a wall and stopped, waiting for her to rescue him. She waited, too, but she didn't help. "Have you had dinner?" he finally said.

It was past seven. She had not had dinner. She hadn't wanted it. She didn't particularly want it now.

"No," she said.

"Well, can I take you somewhere? We don't have much here, but there are one or two places you might not find on your own."

Entirely unannounced, the tiniest lick of hunger popped to life inside her. She ignored it.

"Or for a drink, if you'd prefer that." He was sounding frankly uneasy now. "Or Brewbakers, if you'd like some coffee."

"Only cappuccino in town," she heard herself say, instantly regretting even this concession.

"That's right!" He sounded so eager, so grateful to her for remembering.

Then more hunger. Two little matches, alight, joining forces.

She didn't want coffee. She wanted to ask him what he remembered about her. She wanted him to go away, but first to put his hands on her, if he could do that very carefully, without p.i.s.sing her off. "Where are you?" she asked him.

"Downstairs."

She listened for a long moment. There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and m.u.f.fled beats. Or was that her own breath? she wondered.

"I don't want coffee," Portia told him. "Give me a few minutes."

She hung up the phone. She was wearing what she'd worn earlier, but only the top half of it, only the cashmere sweater, and underwear. Her tweed skirt was flung across the foot of one of the beds, the crumpled stockings beside them, the brown boots kicked off on the floor. She had only a change of clothes for tomorrow, a pair of green khakis, formal enough to represent Princeton but laid-back enough to connect with Northfield students. She didn't want to put the skirt back on again.

It was hard to resist the urge to rush. She was not late, she was not keeping him waiting, he was not a date. She refused to look at herself in the mirror, to fix anything about herself. She pulled on her boots again, closed the application (journalist, Sudbury, girl), and placed it on top of the unread pile, resigned to starting it again when she came back. Then she looked at the folders.

They were not to be seen. They were secret, private. To leave them out like this, when there was the smallest chance of someone seeing them-someone not disinterested seeing them-would be negligent. But to put them away was to concede the possibility of another person here, in her hotel room, which was worse than negligent. Which was calculated. She stood, looking at this sad tableau: roughed-up plastic table, orange files, some thick, some thin, in two stacks, abandoned cup, crumpled bit of hygienic cellophane. You are not to do this, she heard herself think.

Then she opened her suitcase and zipped the files inside. And left.

He-John Halsey-was in the lobby, perched on the arm of a chair covered in murky green fabric. He had his hands, his fists, actually (she could see them clenching and unclenching, even across the room), in the pockets of his brown corduroy jacket. He stood up as she reached him and extended one of those unfolding hands. "I'm sorry to surprise you like that."

I wasn't surprised, she almost said.

"No, it's all right," Portia told him. She was looking at him, gathering information, testing her earlier impressions: earnest young schoolmaster adrift among New Age flocks. No, that wasn't right, she could see that now. He had a kind of calm beneath the current fl.u.s.ter. And a beautiful throat, indifferently shaved. He dressed to please himself, because no one else cared in the slightest, and what pleased him were these still very crisp chinos and this still very white b.u.t.ton-down shirt. He hadn't changed his clothes, a fact that rea.s.sured her, though she wasn't sure why. On the other hand, she couldn't understand how he could manage to look so clean at the end of a day. A day that had, at the very least, included an outdoor cla.s.s on a working farm. "It's very friendly of you to call."

"I'm sure I'm breaking some kind of rule. Taking the admissions officer out to dinner, I mean. I suppose people try to b.u.t.ter you up."

She burst out laughing. This was, of course, such a vast understatement that it could only register as ridiculous. She had been b.u.t.tered up by any number of acquaintances, alumni, college advisers, endless parents, of course, often with attendant flattery, invitations, offers, not to mention those desperadoes, the applicants themselves. b.u.t.tering up, as John had called it, was thoroughly understandable, but it was never a good idea and somewhat akin to slipping the cop a fifty: dubious upside, cataclysmic downside. But then, he had said it so cluelessly, it was strangely beguiling. "Well, that does happen, yes."

He suggested the restaurant in the lobby. It was awful, he admitted, but probably no less awful than anywhere else nearby.

"Well," she said, laughing, "with a recommendation like that... I do have work. I can't take very much time away." This was patently untrue. Of course she had work. There was always work, but that wasn't the point. Even if, like those literate adulterers Paolo and Francesca, she read no more today, there would be no difficulty in finishing the folders she'd brought with her. She was alone here. No one cared what time she went to bed. And in any case, she felt, with every pa.s.sing instant of this odd, strained conversation, that a sober, solitary, and above all early night was the last thing in the world she wanted.

The restaurant, off to the side of the lobby, was called The Grille. She might have recited the menu from the generic plants growing atop the booth dividers, the high-quality silk flowers on the tables. To her own surprise, she felt real hunger when she took her laminated menu from the waitress: prime rib, breast of chicken, Caesar salad.

"Do you eat meat?" she asked him.

He looked up at her and frowned. "I do. But I'm a little hush-hush about it at work. Technically, we don't have a policy about it one way or the other, but the students-or I guess the parents-skew heavily in favor of tofu and seitan."

"I hate that stuff," she said, reading and rereading the description of the New York strip, which used both the adjectives succulent and luscious and boasted a misplaced apostrophe ("seared with herb's"). "I mean, seitan. I don't mind tofu. But whoever dreamed up seitan should be force-fed bulgur for the rest of his life."

John laughed. "I'm not a bulgur fan myself. I remember they gave it to us on Outward Bound when I was a teenager. We'd just come off these three-day solos, where they'd left us each on our own little island in Pen.o.bscot Bay. When it was over, they picked us up and brought us back to base camp, and they cooked us up a big feast of bulgur. Twenty-five starving kids. I mean, so hungry. We hadn't eaten in days, most of us. Well, a few of the more ingenious ones managed to remember which plants they'd taught us were all right. But I don't think any of us could get that bulgur down."

She smiled. "Well, I hope you don't mind if I order a steak. Who can resist a dish described not only as luscious, but succulent, too?"

"Don't you love those redundancies? Like 'anonymous stranger.' And 'diametrically opposed.' "

"Don't forget 'proactive.' And 'exact replica.' "

" 'Frozen tundra,' " he said. "Well, we might have to take that one off the list soon. Would you like some wine?"

"Oh... no, thank you. Go ahead, if you like."

He didn't like, or said he didn't.

"Should I have suggested beer?" he asked when the waitress was gone. "After all, you're a graduate of Dartmouth College, beer consumption capital of New England."

"You must mean that sticky stuff on the bas.e.m.e.nt floors of all the fraternities."

"Yes." He laughed. "I shouldn't act superior. I told you, I was in a fraternity. For a while, anyway. I lost interest and stopped going to the parties, let alone the meetings. I think they even quit coming after me for dues."

"Why did you join?" she asked.

He shrugged. "The usual reasons. Group of friends. A place to go. I was on the rugby team, and everyone was in the same house. But I stopped playing rugby, too, after my soph.o.m.ore year. I had this conversion to my academic work, amazingly enough. I'd never thought of myself as a student, though of course I'd been in school my whole life. Suddenly, everything sort of snapped into focus, you know?"

Portia nodded tentatively.

"I was an education major. It wasn't a big major. There weren't very many of us, but we talked about teaching incessantly. We talked theories of education, theories of childhood learning. Waldorf versus Montessori. There were real fights." He shook his head. "But the fact was, when they sent us down to intern in the public schools in West Lebanon, most of us couldn't even control our cla.s.ses. It was very deflating. After that, a few of the education majors sneaked off and took the LSATs."

"But not you," Portia said.

"No, I still carried the torch. I went off to Groton after I graduated. I was all set to start the Dead Poets Society and teach them to seize the day and all that. But after two years I just had to claw my way out."

"Why?" Portia asked. "Did you hate it?"

"No, no. I loved it. I'd gone to a boarding school, so I knew the culture. But from the other side of the divide, I could see how great the kids were. I loved how they were all excited about going to college and becoming fine, upstanding citizens. But it was such an easy life, with my little apartment in the fourth-form boys' dorm, and three meals a day at the cafeteria, and smart students who went out of their way to appreciate me, if only because they wanted me to write them recommendations. It was like the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz. I just could feel myself getting sleepier and sleepier. I thought, I'm going to drop off any minute and wake up in forty years with a Groton writing award named after me and some sort of framed declaration on my wall. It's going to float by me in a beautiful haze of crew sh.e.l.ls and foliage and long shadows on the quad. I have to leave immediately."

She couldn't help smiling. The waitress brought them two pallid salads: orange tomato wedges on limp iceberg. She ignored hers.

"So, what, you went to the opposite end of the spectrum, right? South Central? South Bronx?"

"Even farther. Uganda. I enrolled in the Peace Corps. I was there for two years."

"Wow," Portia said, watching him spear his sorry tomato. "Good for you."

"Oh, don't say that." He looked up at her. "I didn't do it to be good. I just couldn't stand feeling like a heel. It wasn't why I'd become a teacher, Dead Poets Society or not. Of course it's valid to educate the wealthy. I mean, what's the alternative? It would be pretty irresponsible of us not to teach those students. They're probably going to end up running the show, right? Better they should be engaged with the past, and the history of ideas. Just because there's an inequity of education in this country, that doesn't mean we should shortchange the privileged. The goal should be to get everyone else up to that level. I mean, I really believe that. But after Groton I felt as if I had to do two years of penance. And I knew, when I left there, they'd just replace me with someone exactly like me, who was just as capable of teaching those kids. I wasn't at all special, you know? It's just I felt like I'd been borrowing from the bank for years, and I had to pay it back."

She listened to him, sipping her water. There was a physical component to all of this pa.s.sion, she noted: a flush, not to the face, which seemed nearly impa.s.sive, belying the clear emotional investment in what he was saying, but to the neck, the throat. She watched it appear and spread, around the neck, up to the ears, down into the visible chest through his unb.u.t.toned collar. She knew this was voyeuristic, improper, but it actually felt clinical, as if she were merely observing some experiment she'd had a part in setting up and hence maintained an interest in. But what was the nature of her interest?

When her steak was set down, Portia felt a jolt of hunger. She made herself wait until he'd been served.

"You know," he said a moment later, "you look exactly the same."

She swallowed uncomfortably, her eyes on her plate. She wanted, suddenly, to be left alone. She needed the protein more than the company, more than the deep, alluring tension at this table and that thin possibility of something good that it conjured. "I doubt that," she said, pointedly cutting another triangle of meat.

"No, you do. I recognized you right away. Your hair is shorter. You dress better. But don't we all? I mean, we're not still going around in down vests, thank G.o.d."

"Thank G.o.d," she echoed, smiling despite herself.

"And you have that... I always noticed it about you, how much there seemed to be going on with you. There was always more. Under the surface, I mean."

He seemed to have given the matter a certain amount of thought. That in itself was disturbing, but she didn't feel threatened. The only threat, she reflected, seemed to come from herself. Because she had already made up her mind about this. She had already made out her wish list for this one night in Keene, New Hampshire, for this unknown man from her past, with his long fingers and thinning hair and beautiful throat. It did not necessarily involve conversation, though she had nothing against conversation, as long as it revealed nothing about her. Or nothing important.

"I have to tell you," she said, "I don't remember you at all."

"That's okay," John said self-effacingly.

"I mean, it's a little strange. You're sure you were there," she said with forced humor.

"Oh, absolutely. I could probably dredge up the Winter Carnival themes, or some outrage by the Dartmouth Review, just to prove myself. Look, it's not complicated. I sort of had a crush on you. I saw you around the campus. I noticed you, I mean. But you were taken, and there are rules about that, especially when you know the guy. So I just went along my way and had lots of meaningless love affairs. You know how it is."

"Oh sure." She laughed. It was, it occurred to her, almost immaterial that she liked him. It didn't matter whether she liked him or not. But she did, actually, like him.

"And then, you weren't with him. I don't know the details. We weren't close. He didn't discuss his personal life with me. But I don't think you were that blonde who was always tiptoeing down the stairs at two a.m."

"I was not that blonde," she confirmed, though with some sarcasm. She hoped it sounded like sarcasm.

"I had this idea you'd just, I don't know, left. Or transferred, or something."

"I traveled a bit," she said. "Junior year. I actually graduated a year later than the rest of my cla.s.s."

He nodded. "I had a girlfriend when you came back. Otherwise..."

She looked flatly at him. She wondered if he knew how offputting it was, this image he was conjuring of their unrealized affair. But then, to her own irritation, she understood that she wasn't feeling nearly as put off as she ought to be.

"How's your steak?"

She looked down at her steak. She gave it a fresh appraisal, trying not to hold against it everything she already knew about it. It didn't look very appealing. It was nondescript in its steaklike qualities and looking less appetizing by the second. "I guess I wasn't as hungry as I thought I was."

"Or it's bad," he suggested.

"No. I mean, it's sort of par for the course at a chain hotel somewhere in America. I feel like I've eaten this same steak a hundred times already. I used to oversee applications from the Pacific region. Mainly California, but also Hawaii and Alaska, so I would travel out there all the time. This is my first year covering New England. Princeton seems to really like Best Western. They always book us here. I don't know," she said with a sigh, "maybe Mr. Best Western is an alum. Maybe there's a special Tiger rate."

"Ooh." John smiled. "It's all so... corrupt. Just what we've always suspected about Ivy League admissions."

The mood between them shifted on a dime. "But I didn't mean that," she said tightly. "The process isn't at all corrupt. It may be complex, but not corrupt."

"I wasn't being serious."

"No, really. I know people think there are all these secret codes, or handshake deals in the back room, or we keep a well-thumbed copy of the Social Register in the office, but that isn't what we're about. You have no idea how absurd the situation is. Eighteen thousand applications last year! And the vast majority of them are great-well-prepared academically, interesting kids with plans for the future and talents they could bring to the community. It's just an incredibly difficult job."

"Portia," he said, a palpable edge of dismay in his voice, "I didn't mean to suggest anything."

"But everyone thinks we're just throwing the names up in the air and admitting the ones who land inside the circle, or we're s.a.d.i.s.ts who love to stick it to kids all over the world. I've been doing this for sixteen years, and I have to tell you, I've never worked with a single person who enjoyed rejecting applicants. If you ask any admissions officer what they like about their job, they talk about saying yes, not saying no."

"Well," he said, still trying to break the mood, "they'd hardly admit to enjoying saying no."

"If that were true, it's something I'd see," she said crossly. "Believe me, at the tenth hour of the fifth day of the third week of committee meetings, when people are desperate to get to that last application and make that last decision, there's still no joy in saying no. We're in it because we want to say yes to these kids. They astound us. They have amazing minds and amazing dreams. The rest of it, the saying no, that's just what we have to do so we can get to say yes. It's the worst part of our job. It's the job part of our job."

"Okay!" He put up his hands.

"I'm just sick of all the att.i.tude. n.o.body wants to talk to you. Whoever you are. They couldn't care less where you come from and what matters to you. All they see is the job t.i.tle, and all they care about is what you can do for them. Like my first boss at Dartmouth told me when I was hired, he said, 'When people find out you're an admissions officer, they'll suddenly become very, very interested in what you do. But they won't give a s.h.i.t about you.' "

"That must be hard," John said carefully. He had sat forward on his chair and was resting his chin in his hands. He, too, seemed to have abandoned his meal.