Admission. Part 5

"There are only two ways people talk to you. Mostly it's this awful pleading, you know, 'I know the most fantastic kid...' or, 'I have the most fantastic kid....' You're constantly being bombarded, and all you can do is grin and nod and say you hope this wonderful kid will apply, which you do hope. I mean, what do they expect you'll say? 'He sounds fantastic! He's in!' "

"Portia," John said, "we should change the subject."

"But the other reaction," she went on, bulldozing past him, "is much, much worse. Because if, sometime in the recent or misty past, Princeton University has actually rejected some wondrous young person near and dear to them, then you are no friend, and basic good manners are not called for. Because if this brilliant child, so gifted, so sweet, so in love with learning for its own sake, has been deemed, by you, unworthy to attend Princeton, then that can only mean that you and your equally corrupt peers have allowed some lesser brat to buy his or her way into our elitist inst.i.tution, and we're all such greedy s.h.i.ts that we're willing to serve up the very principles of higher education, not to mention the American dream, just so some blue-blooded prep school boy can be the tenth generation of Princeton men in his family."

John sat back in his seat, hands folded. He was waiting for her to finish.

"Or let's say the rejected applicant is, G.o.d forbid, the first poor soul in ten generations of Princeton men to be denied admission. Obviously that proves the university is enslaved by affirmative action, and we feel free to discriminate against applicants who happen to be white, which is a disgrace for which I am personally responsible, because after all, I only do this job because I like putting people down, and everyone knows that people who get their kicks out of rejecting other people are the worst kind of failures themselves."

She ran out of breath. Literally. And reached for her water gla.s.s, wishing fleetingly that she'd asked for that wine. She was thoroughly ashamed of herself, not because she'd revealed any secret thing about her work-she hadn't, she told herself quickly, or nothing important-but because, with that final thought, she'd revealed some potent thing about herself. Which she now profoundly regretted.

"Well, that's quite a speech," John said mildly.

"I'm sorry!" She was feeling the heat in her cheeks. Intense, tear-threatening heat. "I'm sorry. I don't think you deserved that. It just kind of builds up, you know?"

"Well, I know now."

"Look," she heard herself say, "it was nice of you to call. I'm really sorry, but I think I'd better go upstairs."

"Portia," he said. He looked at her. He wasn't angry. Or even baffled, she saw. Something else, though not quite clear. Or quite clear, she realized suddenly. Only silent.

"No, I... You know, I have a ton of work upstairs, and I have to be at Northfield at ten, so I probably shouldn't even have come down." She was speaking so quickly, she nearly missed the clipped tones of her own mortification. There was only this race with herself, to the elevator and then her room. "But it was really nice to see you again."

"Please don't do that. Let's order some coffee. Let's talk more."

But I don't want to talk, she nearly said. "I can't. I'm sorry. I need to leave."

"Wait," he said. It was a caution, calm and low, but utterly serious. He got deliberately to his feet. He reached slowly, pointedly, into an inside pocket of his corduroy jacket and took out a wallet, never looking away. He removed two twenties and put them on the table. Portia's eye lingered on the bills. There was something vaguely sordid about them, as if the money were for something else, though that was not logical. But the two of them, they looked as if they were in a rush, didn't they? Even though they weren't going anywhere. They weren't. So much for her stupid wish list. So much for this pointless, pathetic distraction. She looked back in the direction of the kitchen. The waitress, at least, was nowhere to be seen.

"Let me walk you to the elevator," John said.

She let him, and she made herself walk. She was aware of her own footfalls on the smooth, hard floor of the lobby. The woman at the desk, not the woman who had checked her in, another woman, looked up at them. She wouldn't know, Portia thought, that John wasn't with her. She wouldn't stop them. No one, she realized suddenly, was going to stop them.

It was night now, and the place seemed oddly inert. Even the Muzak was barely there. She strained to hear it, was suddenly, disproportionately, afraid of what it meant that she couldn't hear it, but she could pick up only its faintest imprint, as if she had suddenly, rapidly, ascended a steep mountain, and her ears were thick, but not so thick that she couldn't hear John, who was trying to speak to her.

"Portia," he said as she stabbed the elevator b.u.t.ton.

"It was fun catching up with you," Portia said, turning back to him but declining to meet his gaze. "It was nice of you to call."

"I want to say something to you," he said quietly.

"I wish I could stay up later, but I have-"

"A lot of work. Yes, I know," he said quickly, and she was surprised at how angry he didn't sound. He just seemed to want to get on, to something else.

Behind her, the elevator door opened with a sound of grinding metal. Portia looked into the beige interior. "So... thanks," she managed. "Let me know if there's anything you need. Your students need," she added quickly. She stepped into the elevator and turned around. She made a show of selecting her floor and pressing the b.u.t.ton.

"I want you to know something," he said. She had to listen very closely. "I loved seeing you." He seemed to be taking part in an entirely different conversation. She looked at him in mute amazement. "When you forget everything else, I mean, all of this... discomfort. I want you to remember that. I loved seeing you. I was happy to see you. Portia."

What happened then happened quickly. She could not have said, later, what order things took, and who bore which responsibilities, and what might be the reasonable effects of her own step back, or his step forward, the outstretched hand (whose? and to what purpose-handshake or lifeline?), all to the rhythm of a creaking, labored noise from the sliding elevator door, though by the time she knew what sound that was he was already inside, and the door had closed, and the two of them were on their way.

I can remember clearly the day my father threw us out. My mother pulled me into the car and locked the door. I was crying because my father was so angry. He threw something at the car window, and it cracked. My mother was crying very hard. She didn't drive very well, because my father had always done the driving in our family, but she managed to drive us away. We went to visit her sister in New York State, and stayed there for several months. Later, we returned to Maine, but settled in a different part of the state, where I was able to attend the Yarmouth School on a scholarship. I am extremely grateful to the school, for allowing me access to this excellent high school environment, which my mother could never have afforded on her salary. Now, as I look ahead to college, I am thrilled by the intellectual vistas opening to me. Though I may well emerge, five years from now, as the medical student I imagine myself becoming, I am also open to other possibilities. The only thing I do know is that I want to use my gifts to give back to my community.

CHAPTER FOUR.

WHAT WE LET OUT.

In the room, it was more than dark. The garish light from the hallway, light flung geometrically through the opened door-the flung-open door-disappeared as the door slapped shut behind them. Then darkness again, with every other sense screaming to fill the void.

Portia felt for the bed. It wasn't difficult to find. The room was all bed, first behind her and then beneath her. Its cover felt slippery and tightly stretched. She wanted to be pressed into it. She wanted to feel the heaviness of her own body against it and the heaviness of his body against her. She wanted a lot of things.

The darkness, that was her doing, too. There had been a moment earlier, as she'd held open the door to leave, to go downstairs, when her hand had touched the switch and stopped-a long moment in which she had infused this normally mindless gesture with grave implications. Not a matter of saving the hotel chain some expense or the environment a pinch of its failing resources. Like those orange applications folders, safely zipped into her suitcase, the switched-off light meant simply that she had intended not to return alone. Or at least admitted that possibility. And then if-when-if-it did come to happen, this allowed, likely, intended eventuality, her own preference for darkness would preempt without any awkward discussion: Can I turn on a light?

No.

I want to see you.

No.

It wasn't her own body she didn't want revealed. She was not self-conscious. It was him she didn't want to see, or not yet. She just wanted to be able to concentrate on this: the sound of their clothing in contact, the salted taste on her own tongue, the feel of a mouth at her neck and the hand at the small of her back, pulling her against him in the dark.

Neither of them had said a thing since the lobby, not a thing, not even in the elevator (when he had held her so tightly, her back pressed so hard against the faux wooded plastic of the wall, that she had wondered if they might actually derail), and not in the hall (where he had stood next to her, tense like a runner in the blocks, waiting for her to drop the plastic key card into its slot, then wrenching the door handle himself). There was... not precisely romance in the silence, only a plain synchronicity of intent. What I want is what you want. But the reasons behind all that wanting-Portia had no idea what they were, neither his nor even her own.

There was hair on his body, long like the hair on his head. She could feel it, slipping between her fingers as she ran her hands over him. He was thin but soft. She liked that. She liked what she didn't feel: ridges and ripples and densities of muscle. She liked the give of him, the concavity of his abdomen, the hollow below his hip bone when he turned on his side, even the long, inelegant scar that seemed to point to his groin. Of course, she didn't think any of these things as they happened, only later, leisurely, somewhat amazed at herself. For now, the impressions tore by like a vivid shifting landscape seen through a train window, and she knew enough to reach for the joy of them. Her breath came quickly, as if the two of them were competing for oxygen. Her hand slipped easily beneath the edge of the pants he wore. His hand made a deliberate journey up her back, as if he were rea.s.suring himself that each vertebra was where it needed to be. When he reached the strap of her bra, he went discreetly past.

"Can I turn on a light?" he asked suddenly.

"No," said Portia.

"I want to see you."

She shook her head and pushed the shirt up over his head. Then, realizing that he couldn't see that she had shaken her head, she said, "I don't want to."

"What?" He stopped everything. His hands on her back, his mouth at her throat. "Do you want me to stop?"

"No." She smiled. "Don't stop. Just... I don't want to turn the light on."

"But you're beautiful," he said, not understanding.

That's beside the point, she nearly said. Instead, she kissed him. Already, she loved kissing him. She loved the roughness of his lips and then the dark softness inside his mouth. She loved the way his tongue knew how, precisely how, to glide against her own tongue. She loved the language, first faltering, then fluent, their mouths had devised and how they were congratulating each other for their cleverness. She tried to remember if she had ever been so deeply kissed. She couldn't, suddenly, remember if she had ever been kissed all.

"Let me," he said, somewhat indistinctly, as if she were preventing him. She nearly tore off her own sweater, she was so impatient. Every part of her seemed to be caterwauling, selfish, whining. She felt crude and pushy. She wanted to make him do what she wanted, and he knew exactly what that was, only he wasn't doing it fast enough, and that was maddening. She found his head at her abdomen: not high enough, not low enough. His cheek turned against her skin as if the universe attended his wishes. She moved against him, thinking, Come on.

From outside, the night-splitting noise of a motorcycle, out of nowhere, heading off to somewhere. It was a rude noise, like something guttural and enraged. It stopped them both. "Born to be wild," said John. She understood that he was smiling.

She tugged at his shirt.

"We don't have to rush," said John.

But we do, she thought, actually disliking him for that instant.

The bed seemed to tip in the darkness. It felt contrived, controlled, as on a fun-house ride. She nearly rolled away from him and had to pull herself back, hauling her own weight along his length. Why was he so contained? Wasn't he the one with the long-ago crush? Wasn't l.u.s.t c.u.mulative? She had the briefest instinct to slap him, but then she felt his hands between her legs and forgot what she was so angry about.

There was, when they were finally naked, a sort of exhalation between them, a kind of mutual calming or resetting of the metronome. She found herself slowing down, touching with new care: his chest, his nape, which was oddly sharp, the twin depressions at the base of his spine. Their limbs tangled together; she lost track. Rib cage jutted rib cage. His mouth was no longer too high, no longer too low. How insightful he was, she thought, after all, how sly to pretend all that ignorance when he was this clever, this pa.s.sionate, all along. She wondered who else must be in the room making all that noise. Only an unfurled pant leg still caught her by the ankle, like a Peter Pan shadow, but Portia didn't kick it away. She liked the feeling of being tethered, of this one filament tying her to whatever propriety she'd jettisoned, a chance of finding her way back. She would need to find her way back when this was over, when John Halsey was no longer making love to her in a nondescript hotel room in Keene, New Hampshire, an act that somehow banished all ba.n.a.lity from the setting. She could, and did, forget herself, and where she was, and who she was, and the myriad reasons she ought to have resisted. But for the time she held him-and she did hold him, both as he moved inside her and after, still and damp and curled against her-the points of contact they made seemed more compelling than anything else she could summon to mind. At rest, he breathed heavily into her hair. He said her name, once, then seemed to think better of it and settled for touch. One hand came to rest on her hip; the other reached deep into the hair behind her ear. Both were so inexpressibly tender that Portia felt suddenly, alarmingly, in danger of tears.

"Tell me about Nelson," she said, to save herself.

"Nelson?"

Now that it was fully night, the white lights of the parking lot found the edges of the curtains, making them both bluish at the edges, just visible.

"He's not... I'm a.s.suming he's not your biological son," she faltered.

"No, you a.s.sume correctly. I adopted him at six weeks."

"In Africa?" she guessed. "While you were in the Peace Corps?"

"Well, yes and no." He sighed. "I was there for two years, mainly in Kampala. The school I taught in was part of a Catholic compound in the city, run by a priest named Father Josiah. Fantastic man. He'd gone to university in Italy, and he'd lived in Europe and the States before going home to Uganda. He was insane about backgammon. We must have played a thousand games of backgammon. He didn't have the slightest interest in converting me, but he was extremely interested in beating me at backgammon." John laughed.

"Did you play for stakes?" she asked.

"No. Nothing like that. But we had wonderful conversations. I got more of an education from him than I got anywhere else. Very brilliant, decent guy. Very stoic. You know, the communities we worked with, everyone had HIV. The kids in the school had it. The parents were just withering and dying. First the men would die, and they'd infected their wives, so then the wives would die, and that left all the kids to be raised by their grandmothers. And the kids, of course, were infected in utero. You'd just watch them get listless and skinny."

"It must have been very hard," she said, feeling the inadequacy of that.

"It's more like a learned skill. You talk to Peace Corps folks, only the details change. Otherwise, there's this complete uniformity of experience. It's like emotional hazing. You trot on over, thinking you're going to fix everything. Or, even if you won't admit to thinking that, you at least want to fix something. Then, when you get there, you find yourself under this hammer that just tap, tap, taps you into the ground. The problems are so relentless, not only can you not fix them, you can't really fix any part of them. And people just lose it. They sign on for the Peace Corps because they think of themselves as problem solvers, and here they've come to the ends of the earth and they can't do anything-I mean, not anything substantial-about what they're seeing. And this is on top of all the other stuff, like the deprivations and the isolation, not to mention the microbes. So you quickly get to a crisis point, where you either go back to wherever you came from or you undergo a third world readjustment. Actually, correction might be a better word. It's sort of bizarrely freeing. You get to this point where it's okay that you can't fix it. You just don't want to make it any worse than it was before. Making it a tiny bit better is now your most ambitious desire."

"And you got to that place, I take it." She rolled onto her side and found that she could see him, more or less. He had his arms up over his head and was lying flat. The hollow below his rib cage rose and fell. She found that long, ragged scar on his abdomen and traced its curious length with a fingertip.

"Yeah. It wasn't that hard for me, actually. Probably because of this priest. He basically told me there was no point in falling apart. I'd just be wasting time. His time." John laughed. "And he was a busy man. He had a clinic to run, and the school, and an orphanage, and a food program. He ran a literacy program and a sponsorship program. And of course, there was all that backgammon he needed me to play." He shook his head.

Portia smiled. "So that's where you adopted Nelson? You brought him home with you?"

"Not exactly. I finished up my two years in Africa and then I went traveling. Mostly in Europe. And then I came back to the States. I'd left Uganda, let's see... about eight months earlier. Father Josiah wrote to me at my parents' address. He was very cunning about it. He didn't say anything about coming back. He just wanted to let me know that my son had been born. The baby was in the orphanage and he was very healthy. You'd think I would have been angry. Or baffled, anyway. You know, had I forgotten I'd had s.e.x with some woman before I left? But that wasn't what he meant. He meant that I was supposed to take care of this particular child. This was my child. And I remember, the whole thing was so calm. You know, there I was in the living room of my parents' house outside of Philadelphia. They'd kept the letter for me-I was away, visiting some friends in the Midwest, and now I was back and I was supposed to be looking for a teaching job. So it was already a month old. I remember sitting there on my mother's very proper chintz-covered sofa, looking out the French doors at the backyard. And my mom was out there, weeding the peonies. And there was not a moment of uncertainty, that's what was so bizarre. No Should I? Shouldn't I? Of course I was going back to get this baby. He was my son. I mean, already. And he was born, and he was healthy. You know, he was waiting for me. Actually, the only thing I was stressing out about was how to tell my parents their first grandson wasn't going to have the family chin."

Portia laughed, a bit uneasily.

"It sort of makes you wonder what this biological thing is, you know? People make such a fuss about having their own genetic children. I'd never really thought about it before Nelson. I guess I just a.s.sumed I'd have biological children. But even sitting there, half the world away, without even laying eyes on him, he was already mine. Just because someone had told me so. Just like that. I didn't even have a snapshot."

"And you felt the same way when you got back to Uganda and met him?"

"Yes. Absolutely. I picked him up out of the basket, and I didn't put him down for the next three years, basically."

They lay without talking for a few minutes. Cars whooshed and groaned up the road outside the hotel. Once, a flap-flap of footsteps sounded down the hall outside.

"Does he ever ask about his biological parents?" Portia said.

"Actually, no. I've always wondered about that. I've always wondered why he wasn't more curious. He's never asked me to take him back, to find a cousin or an aunt or a sibling. Somebody. He never seemed interested. And I never suggested it. Maybe I'm afraid of it, I don't know."

"You shouldn't be. I'm sure you're a wonderful father."

"Thank you," he said. He sounded actually moved. "We all make it up as we go along. I'm sure the biological dads are just as clueless."

"I guess." She smiled. "Though my mom always acted as if she knew what she was doing."

"Well, that's what matters. It's what experienced teachers always tell new teachers: 'Act like you know what you're talking about.' We all do it. Then, one day, we magically realize that we do, actually, know what we're talking about."

In the darkness, she nodded, not for him but for herself. Maybe everything was like that, she thought. She remembered the first years along her own odd career trajectory, fudging statistics when asked, trying to act as if she understood the strange and unwieldy behemoth that was college admissions, reading its runes to glean some semblance of logic when there was little logic. Whim and art, she would tell herself, as if that made up for not knowing what she was doing. And then one day she realized that she did, in fact, know what she was doing. She just didn't really know why.

John was quiet for another moment, then he got up to use the bathroom, and when he turned on the light, Portia saw him for an instant in the open doorway. He was beautiful. She hadn't really understood until that moment how fluidly the parts she had felt with her hands and mouth were joined, how unified and lovely. He was muscular but not padded and, even in the garish bathroom light, a kind of lemony pale, a shade both false and appealing. She felt a quick pulse of longing-informed longing, she told herself, because she knew now what he looked like and what he felt like and what he could do to her. She waited for him to finish.

When he came back, he sat at the foot of the bed and looked at her. He had left the door to the bathroom open a bit, and the light cut into the room in a thin wedge. "You know," he said, "I feel as if there's some basic information we haven't covered here."

"I'm of age, thanks," she said, smiling.

"Yes. I mean, no, I wasn't thinking that."

"Of sound mind. Of sound body."

"Very sound. Clearly. I was thinking... you know, I wanted to tell you that I don't do this. I wouldn't say never. But what I did tonight, coming to the hotel like this. I've never done it before."

"I thought you were just coming to take me to dinner," she said coyly.

"I was! I really was."

"But hoping for something else."

"I don't know...." He gave up on this thought and regrouped. "I don't know anything about your situation. I don't know... for example, I don't know if you're involved with anyone."

"Are you involved?" she asked.

"No. I was for a long time, but we've separated. It's complicated, because we work together, and we're close friends. And we've helped to raise each other's children. But no, not involved any longer."

"The famous Deborah Rosengarten?" she asked.

He looked surprised. "How did you know that?"