“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 lust cumulative? 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 passionate, 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 banality 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 assuming he’s not your biological son,” she faltered.
“No, you assume 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 baf
fled, anyway. You know, had I forgotten I’d had sex 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 assumed 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?”
“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 embarrassed,” he told her, embarrassing her more by knowing she was embarrassed in the first place. “You’d be amazed how of
ten 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 hell 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.”
Admission Page 9
