Admission. Part 6

"Educated guess."

"We really are friends," he offered. "I know it sounds lame."

"Not at all. It's great that you're still on good terms. I'm not on good terms with anyone like that."

Tom, she thought, and she could see he was thinking it, too. But he had learned, evidently, from the last time and didn't say it out loud.

"Are you involved now?" he said instead.

She considered this. The truth, whatever it was, was not her only consideration. There were other, complicating factors, like the past and the future. It was a question she had not given nearly enough thought to for far too long a time, and now, instead of having a settled, concrete sense of what the answer was, where her life was, whom-if anyone-she was tied to, she found she had nothing at all.

"Are you not sure?" he said with false levity.

"I'm involved," she said quickly. "I'm sorry."

"No, no. Don't be sorry. I had no... I don't have an agenda. And it's none of my business."

"I wish...," she said before she could stop herself. She'd meant, it was obvious, that she wished it were. His business. But she didn't, she couldn't. It was all complicated enough without that. And she couldn't really want him badly enough. Not out of the blue like this, with a chance meeting, a jolt from the past, that part of her past she had worked mightily to excise from her sense of self, and a single night in a thoroughly anonymous hotel room. Lives didn't change so suddenly. Her life couldn't change.

"You wish...?" he prompted after a moment.

"No, it's nothing. I get very tangled up sometimes. I feel as if I don't know anything, you know, even after all this time. Sometimes I think I knew more half my lifetime ago. Which begs the question, What have I been doing with the second half? I have these vivid memories of the books I read in high school, and the things I did and thought about. Now I can hardly remember the novels I read for my book club last year or the last real insight I had."

"It is strange," John said, but tentatively. He wasn't necessarily agreeing with her, she understood. He might be having a different sort of life, a better sort of life, she thought, and pitying her.

"I mean, do you remember getting your acceptance letter from Dartmouth? I remember it, in Technicolor. It was just after I turned eighteen, and I actually remember what I was wearing and what my mother and I cooked for dinner that night. Now I'm the one putting the letter in the mail, and I know less than that eighteen-year-old girl. That's not the way it's supposed to work, is it?"

"No," he agreed. "But somehow that's how it always does work. You shouldn't feel embarra.s.sed," he told her, embarra.s.sing her more by knowing she was embarra.s.sed in the first place. "You'd be amazed how often I seem to have this conversation, or some version of it. We're in Dante's forest, you know. Wasn't he thirty-five in The Inferno? We're all like this, wondering if we did the right things, how it would all have been different if we'd turned left instead of right. Besides, we can't expect to understand what the h.e.l.l we're doing," he said, moving up the bed. He lay by her side and propped himself up on an elbow. "You know what Kierkegaard said about living life forwards but understanding it backwards."

"Backwards?" she said, feeling even duller.

" 'Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.' "

"Now that's impressive." She laughed. "Dante and Kierkegaard in one shot. Let's hear it for a liberal arts education."

"Rah," he said, kissing her almost chastely on the cheek. "This is what I tell my students. My male students, anyway. Go to college. It will help you impress women in bed."

"What do you tell your female students?" she said archly.

"I tell them not to give up on the boys. Just let them have a few years to catch up. Some of them will turn out not to be complete idiots."

Portia smiled. "And they believe you?"

"Of course not. They think I'm the worst kind of gender apologist. They know perfectly well the only rational response to a teenage boy is total disgust. These girls recognize a weaker vessel when they see it."

"Except for your Jeremiah, I take it."

"Well, Jeremiah." He shrugged. "Jeremiah is off the charts. In a number of ways. He's not what you might call a socially successful kid. But I doubt Bill Gates had girls lining up for him in high school either. The other students, they certainly keep their distance, but they do respect him. I can see that. It's sort of heartening, actually. Compared to what he went through at his old school, benign neglect from the student body is a fantastic state of affairs. But now," he said sternly, "this really is beyond the pale. Here we are, stark naked in bed together, schoolmaster and college admissions officer, discussing an applicant. That's surely not kosher."

"He's not an applicant yet," she pointed out, knowing he was perfectly right.

"No, but he will be if I have anything to do with it. Princeton would be a paradise for him. Not that you heard me say that," he said, shaking a finger.

"I didn't hear a thing," Portia said.

He leaned over her and kissed her again, this time less chastely and not on her cheek. "You know," he said, "I'm surprised to hear you say your work isn't meaningful."

"I didn't say that," she objected.

"Well, implied it. Or that you felt less qualified to send the acceptance than you did to receive it."

She heard this, somewhat dumbstruck at its accuracy. "It isn't true," she managed to say, though she felt, more than ever, and hearing it put so succinctly, that it was. And also she was getting distracted.

"Good. Because I think your work must be incredibly fulfilling. You can change lives, can't you? I mean, it must be wonderful to take some kid who's fully capable of getting his teeth into a first-cla.s.s education and then giving that to him. You must love doing that."

She nodded. It sounded good.

"All that saying yes you talked about. Downstairs."

"Yes," Portia said, but she wasn't sure what exactly she was saying yes to. John's hand was in the hollow of her belly, and nothing was holding still.

"Besides," she heard him say, "it's not like it's a simple thing. Admissions. Admission. Aren't there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides."

"What?" she asked him indistinctly. She was feeling something, definitely. It was harder to focus.

"Admission. It's what we let in, but it's also what we let out."

"Let out?" said Portia, trying to catch her breath.

"Our secrets," he whispered, enjoying himself. He had kissed her legs apart and was moving between them. "Of course. We admit a stranger to our homes. We admit a lover to our bodies, yes?"

Well, yes, she thought, losing, for the next moment, the train of their conversation.

"But when we admit something, we might also let it out," he said. He seemed, rather maddeningly, not to have stopped thinking. "That's true, isn't it? That we admit our secrets?"

Secrets, Portia thought. She was not inclined to speak. She had no breath to speak.

"I have them. You have them. Well, I think you have them."

She closed her eyes. She had them.

"Can I stay a little longer?" he asked. "I'd like to stay."

He was very close to her, close from chest to calf. It had come back, fast, the specific feel of his skin against her skin.

"Where is your son?" she managed to ask.

"He's playing illicit video games at his friend's house. He's going to spend the night."

She nodded, but it wasn't a nod, really. "Yes, you can stay," she told him. They could both stay, a little longer, at least.

I have always felt that it was my destiny to attend a first rate college or university like your inst.i.tution, and with the help of your inst.i.tution I can achieve all of my potential. I know that I will bring to your inst.i.tution all of my intellectual and extracurricular gifts, and I will add to the life of the campus in a myriad of ways. My aim in life is to use my abilities to make the world a better place, and I am sure that your inst.i.tution can help me accomplish that.

CHAPTER FIVE.

CHICKEN MARBELLA.

Princeton's Office of Admission had both a public and a private face. For the scores of visitors to the university, tremulous high school students with their families (sometimes in tow, sometimes firmly in the lead), there was the impressive Clio Hall, a white marble mausoleum complete with cla.s.sical pillars and Groves of Academe steps, located directly behind Na.s.sau Hall in the heart of the campus. Inside Clio, these visitors registered for their information sessions, picked up their Orange Key tours, helped themselves to gratis coffee, and nervously eyed the compet.i.tion. Portia and her colleagues took turns manning the sessions, but this was an element of her job she had liked less and less as the years went by and the atmosphere grew ever more toxic. A decade earlier, when she'd first arrived at Princeton, she had enjoyed the challenge of responding to whatever might come up: a father's question about the Ultimate Frisbee team, a kid from Mexico City wanting to know if he'd be able to study in China, tongue-in-cheek questions about This Side of Paradise, thoughtful queries about social issues on campus, including the eternal curiosity about the eating clubs and their influence. She had prided herself on not getting stumped, even during those first years when she was learning the material herself, and later, as her affection and respect for the university became genuine, it pleased her to communicate how extraordinary she thought it.

Eventually, though, the sessions became stressful, then oppressive. There was something about how the mothers sat, knees tightly together, mouths painfully tense. The anxiety in the room was free-flowing. And the hostility. The visitors had a way of checking out their designated tour guides, as if trying to guess the pertinent statistics, the hooks or-worse-tricks that had brought him or her to Princeton, as if this unsuspecting student had directly usurped their own son's or daughter's future spot.

Still, no matter how severely the applicants and their families inspected the student guides, it was nothing to the way they sometimes looked at Portia. Who was she, their sharp eyes seemed to ask, to sit in judgment on them or their brilliant children? And when they asked, as they often did, whether she herself had graduated from Princeton, and when they learned that she had not, there was palpable disdain. She couldn't even get in herself! (This sentiment had reached its apotheosis the previous year, when the director of admissions for MIT had been exposed as lacking any college degree at all.) For Portia, the last straw had been a visiting boy from the South with a lock of nutmeg-colored hair dipping over one eye, who had asked with great false solemnity what advantage he might expect from the fact that both parents and both grandfathers had attended Princeton. There was a shudder of distress throughout the crowd. Portia, repelled, made sure that she took down his name, though not for the purpose the student so clearly hoped. After that, she had asked Clarence to give her a little hiatus from the information sessions, and he'd agreed, but only for a while and only because he had two new hires, both newly minted Princeton grads who were still, in some small way, celebrating their own letters of acceptance and too br.i.m.m.i.n.g in goodwill to take anything personally.

Catty-corner from Clio stood West College, the more modest but far more crucial private face of the university's admissions apparatus, where the heavy lifting was actually done. In the fall and winter, hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail arrived here in trucks from the post office, FedEx, and UPS and were hauled into the building, crate by crate. They went first to the sorting stations in the back of the ground floor, where they joined the paper output of a dozen purring fax machines and as many printers, churning out hard copies of e-mail correspondence and the ubiquitous common application. Everything was sifted, inspected, shifted, and dealt, sorted and sorted again by the permanent staff and student employees until they landed-ideally, at least-in appropriate individual folders and there merged to form a cohesive whole in theory greater than the sum of its parts: The Ballad of Johnny Schwartz from Shaker Heights; The Saga of Robert "Bo" Wilson-Santiago from L.A.; The Tale of Betsy Curtis, Manhattan via Exeter; The Broken Narrative of Xiao-Gang "Kyle" Woo, Shanghai by Way of San Diego. And on.

There was concentrated, detail-obsessed attention in this office. When Portia came down, as she often did, to pick up files or avail herself of the confectionery smorgasbord (by tradition, baked goods and other delicacies submitted in misguided support of applications were promptly parted from their senders' identification and set out on a table in the corner, beside the coffee machine), she was quite often reminded of a fairy tale that had fascinated her as a child, in which scores of devoted ants worked without respite on an intermixed mountain of black and white sands, separating them into perfect, segregated hills. There were, of course, occasional errors-Cindy Lin's effusive teacher recommendation landing in Cynthia Liu's application folder, that sort of thing-but nothing irreparable. With so many filaments of information flying around and so many hands stirring the soup, it was surprising how few applications turned up incomplete. (When they did, when a folder lacked its letter of recommendation or a transcript, the student was given an opportunity to resend whatever was missing. In general, applicants to Princeton tended to be as highly detail oriented as the officers evaluating them; if their folders lacked some critical element, they wanted to know about it. They wanted, most fervently, to redress the flaw.) When Portia returned to Princeton late that Friday afternoon, she drove directly to the middle of town, lucked into a s.p.a.ce on Witherspoon, and hauled her laden bag to this warren of activity in West College. She greeted the women in their cubicles, but the truth was that she didn't know half of them by name. There seemed to be a fairly high outflow from this office to administrative posts in every corner of university, the theory being, she supposed, that if one could handle being on the receiving end of an entire country's application panic, one might easily parry a few philosophers or chemists. And after a year or two down here, people were usually quite content to move on to more sedate work environments.

Only Martha Prestcott was eternal. A woman whose figure seemed to spring from a Helen E. Hokinson cartoon-all thrusting bust and linebacker shoulders-she ran this nerve center as a benevolent dictatorship. "Hey there," she hailed Portia. "How's my gorgeous niece?"

"She's terrific," Portia said. Martha's niece, Princeton graduate and math teacher at Northfield, had attended her session that morning. "She said to give you a big hug and remind you that you promised her Pillsbury crescents on Thanksgiving. I a.s.sume this is some kind of secret code, because I know you wouldn't be caught dead serving Pillsbury crescents."

"Oh dear. I forgot about that. I promised her," Martha said with evident regret.

"Are you expecting a big crowd?"

"Well, I'm up to fourteen and it's still three weeks off, so I'm thinking twenty. George usually brings home a few strays."

George Prestcott taught in the Engineering School, where a concentration of international students tended to linger over holidays.

"That's nice."

"Well, it makes a challenge. This one won't eat meat. This one won't eat pork. They've never seen yams and cranberries before."

"Or Pillsbury crescents."

"Oh, they've probably seen those." She laughed. "We know the college diet is largely composed of refined sugars and bread from a cardboard tube."

Portia smiled. She went to the corner and surveyed the offerings. Brownies with orange icing, two tins of cookies, some squares of indeterminate nature. She helped herself to a cleverly decorated cookie in the shape of a P.

"I wouldn't," said Martha. Martha's tenure in Princeton admissions was easily double Portia's own. She had seen-and, given her girth, more than likely tasted-everything. "Hard as diamonds."

"Oh. They look so pretty. And I'm so hungry."

"Try those." Martha pointed. "They came with a note about a vegan cookbook."

"Vegan?" Portia frowned. She looked into the box on the table. It was a s...o...b..x lined with waxed paper. The squares inside looked dark, moist, and dense.

"Her own recipe. For her vegan cookbook in progress. They're called 'Health Bars.' Don't worry," she told Portia, "they arrived this morning. By overnight express."

"I thought you threw the written stuff out," Portia said, lifting a health bar from the box. Fulfilling her expectations, it was weightier than it looked.

"Oh, we do, but I always read them first. There might be some information to transfer to the file. Besides, I feel bad for them. I mean, these kids have gone to the trouble. Somebody should read what they have to say. You know," she said, eyeing Portia, "they're actually better than they look."

Portia inspected the square, supporting it with two hands. She took a cautious bite, filling her mouth with mola.s.ses, honey, and packed dried fruit. She folded the rest into a paper towel. For later, she explained. "Corinne been in today?"

"Sure." Martha nodded. "She was here. Loading up for her trip. What do you need?"

"Oh... whatever you have ready."

Martha nodded. She got up and went to the files, where she pulled about fifty orange dockets identical to the ones Portia was turning in.

"Where's Corinne again?"

Martha considered. "Castilleja, I think. Is that just girls?"

"Uh-huh. Silicon Valley."

"That's the one, then. And a couple of schools in the East Bay. It was rescheduled from that time in May she hurt her back."

"Right." Portia nodded. It gave her some not very laudable satisfaction to think of Corinne Schreiber on a westbound flight on this clear blue autumn Friday. Corinne, who had taken over the Pacific region with a certain poorly suppressed antipathy toward her new a.s.signment-indeed, the entire office had been treated to her ongoing and all too vocal resentment-had coasted for years on the excuse of her young children at home, clinging zealously to her prior geographic area, the Mid-Atlantic. She'd come to Princeton, her alma mater, from a college-counseling job at a private school in D.C., preceded by a decade in the English Department at the same school. The Mid-Atlantic, she'd argued, allowed her to travel to schools and still be home for her kids, a need few of her colleagues (recent college grads, the unmarried, and, like Portia, the childless) could claim. Portia, naturally, had declined to be persuaded by this rationalization after the first couple of years. She felt penalized for her childlessness, for her a.s.serted independence, while she was every bit as old as Corinne and every bit-she was certain-as tired. When Clarence had given her New England, she'd made free to suggest Corinne as her successor.

"Corinne doesn't like to travel," Clarence had remarked. "Because of her kids."

Portia had frowned. But... weren't Corinne's kids both at Andover now? Her oldest was in his third year. Her youngest was starting in September. Or perhaps she was mistaken.

She was not mistaken. The following week, after a high-decibel exchange in Clarence's office, Corinne had become the admissions officer in charge of the Pacific: California, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon. There would be many long flights in her future and many school visits, from sunny San Diego to snowy Nome and all points in between. Portia had offered to share her list of great San Francisco restaurants. The offer was declined.

The Office of Admission, two flights up, was a corridor of small offices with pretty, leafy views. A few of Portia's co-workers preferred to take files home during the most intense reading periods, but most spent their autumn and winter months in these rooms, crawling through their allotted folders and fielding calls from contacts in their regions. At the end of the corridor was Clarence's office, notably a far grander establishment than the smaller rooms Portia and her fellow officers occupied. It had, for example, windows on three sides, a couch, and a small round table, and it came with a nonfunctioning but very dignified fireplace. It also came with an a.s.sistant called Abby, who sat in an alcove just outside Clarence's door, in a cubicle plastered with photos of her Russian grandson. Abby, who had also worked for Martin Quilty, possessed an easygoing nature in combination with organizational skills of military caliber. She had-and this was equally important-a range of phone voices extending from sweet simulated ignorance to cunning brick wall and an uncanny knack of choosing the correct one for whoever was on the line.

Portia carried Martha's fifty files into her office and set them down on top of another stack, this one bound in a rubber band and bearing a note from Corinne. Each application was reviewed by two officers before going to Clarence, committee, or both, and Clarence had requested she serve as second reader on Corinne's folders for this, her first year in the Pacific schools. With the admissions season only just under way, Portia was already irritated by her colleague's idiosyncratic spelling and elusive script, not to mention her evident paranoia about coached applications.

Of course, Corinne was not alone in her antipathy toward paid college consultants and their influence. They all knew perfectly well what was out there, primarily in the cities and wealthier suburbs, but now also, democratically, on the Internet, where consultants of every stripe had hung out their virtual shingles, offering some artificial Rosetta stone for top-tier college admissions. All of them shared her opinion of applicants "reverse engineered" by some self-proclaimed expert. How could any admissions officer know-truly know-whether an applicant had honestly fulfilled the declaration he or she had signed on the application itself-the one that read, "I certify that the essays are entirely my own work"-or whether some other person or persons had advised, revised, or even written their essays for them? It was a laudable but doomed crusade. Yes, it went without saying that students capable of paying up to $30,000 for a consultant to "work with them" on their essays and design their applicant profiles had an unfair advantage, but it was also shortsighted to a.s.sume that any applicant to Princeton had not had his or her essays at least vetted by somebody. The least savvy among them most likely had a parent check the spelling or an English teacher look over the syntax. Even overworked college counselors with hundreds of college-bound seniors might take a moment to skim the essays of an applicant to Princeton, especially if she or he intended to write a recommendation for that student. Trying to detect the sticky fingers of a paid consultant seemed a poor use of time. And time was short enough.

There were mercifully few e-mail messages waiting for her. Some, from applicants in her region, reporting some new honor or panicking about a perceived flaw in their applications, had been forwarded from the central admissions account downstairs. She had e-mail from the college counselors at Boston Latin, Groton, and Putney, wanting to set up phone appointments, and a message from Clarence asking if she'd gotten to the student from Worcester, Ma.s.s., the one the ice hockey coach had been on his case about. She hadn't. She couldn't recall any hockey players at all, so far. This was the only e-mail she returned.

It was near dark by the time she left, that slender interlude when there is no more sunlight and the shadows begin to stretch. Princeton, always beautiful, was somehow at its best just now, with the faintest smell of pine reaching her. She walked alongside Cannon Green, so named for the Revolutionary War cannon buried muzzle down at its center-an ironically pacifist statement for a university that had sent its sons to every American war since. She moved among the students, unable to resist her habitual curiosity about them. Always, she wondered if she might recognize this pet.i.te girl in the oversize Princeton sweatshirt, or this lanky African-American boy with the ponderous backpack, or the blond young man with a swimmer's haircut and shoulders who was laughing into a cell phone, merely from the on-paper selves she might have pored over, one or two or three or four years before. It was an oddity of her work that she might know these young men and women so intimately from the records of their accomplishments, their confessed secrets, their worries and ambitions, and yet when the flesh-and-blood applicants arrived on campus a few months later, they were always strangers. Somehow, the folders turned into these bodies: high-spirited, intense, beauteous, or plain, usually clever but sometimes quite dull. They looked like teenagers walking the campuses of Notre Dame or Texas A&M. They sounded like kids at the mall or on the subway. The special, unique eighteen-year-olds, whose applications had so thrilled Portia and her colleagues, or made them argue pa.s.sionately for admission over wait list, or wait list over rejection, had somehow morphed into these strangely ordinary beings. They chatted and texted away on their cell phones incessantly. They clutched identical Starbucks containers and shouldered identical backpacks. They went to the U-Store and bought their Princeton garb and so completed their transformations into Princeton students, disappearing into orange anonymity. This was not, of course, to take away from their brilliance. They were still brilliant, still gifted, still pa.s.sionate about everything from t.i.tian to nitrogen fixing in soybeans. They still wanted to give back, make things better, cure disease, and alleviate poverty. They were good kids, ambitious kids. But they were so ordinary, too.