She listened to him, sipping her water. There was a physical component to all of this passion, she noted: a flush, not to the face, which seemed nearly impassive, 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 unbuttoned 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 God.”
“Thank God,” 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 class.”
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 sadists 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 attitude. Nobody 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 title, 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 shit 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.
“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 institution, and we’re all such greedy shits 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, God 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 glass, 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 button.
“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 button.
“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 concen
trate 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 reassuring himself that each vertebra was where it needed to be. When he reached the strap of her bra, he went discreetly past.
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