Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  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, Mass., 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 petite 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 passionately 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 passionate about everything from Titian 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.

  She drove home along Nassau Street, the bag of new files on the seat beside her and the window down. Now only minutes from her house, she let herself feel, entirely feel, the stress and fatigue of the last couple of days—two flights, three school visits, and a night in which surfeit of emotion had met lack of sleep. And sex. And, not least—though she was only, shamefully, getting to this part now—the fact of her own transgression. The weight of it all exhausted her, and there was little she craved more than a hot bath and an early night, to bed with her files, at least, if not early to sleep. She didn’t know what was in the house to eat or what Mark’s plans were, but she didn’t want any distractions from the plan or, needless to say, any discouragement. Turning onto her street, with the towering cherry tree in her front yard already visible at the end of the block, she allowed herself the first hit of relief.

  This was their second home in Princeton, the first being a nondescript ranch at the north end of town, not far from the shopping center: a sterile place, irredeemably ugly. They had moved here five years before, to this neighborhood known as the Tree Streets for its arboreal street names—Maple, Pine, Linden—but also as the Gourmet Ghetto because of its concentration of good places to buy food and dine out. In Princeton, sadly, this was saying a good deal. On their arrival, the town had been a culinary wasteland, with a single dull supermarket and only one other shop of note: an excellent fishmonger. The wonderful Princeton purveyors she had read about in Betty Fussell’s gastronomic memoir, My Kitchen Wars—like the butcher who gamely ground pork and veal for clever, frustrated housewives in thrall to Julia Child—seemed to have perished, and all good restaurants, if any had existed, had evidently fled along with them. But some small transformation seemed to have taken hold, much of it in this cluster at the end of her own street: a natural foods market was now open and a fish restaurant, a good coffee shop, a decent Chinese. These establishments kept Princeton hours, it was true, but Princeton hours were themselves an improvement over Hanover, New Hampshire, hours. So she wasn’t unhappy. At least, not about food.

  The house was a product of the town’s 1920s building boom, and it had a grace that had grown rarer with each passing decade of Princeton construction. Few twenty-first-century tenants, like few twentieth-century tenants, had had the wit to leave well enough alone, but this house had somehow managed to survive with what the magazines so annoyingly referred to as “good bones.” Still, and in spite of the fact that she had postponed caring about things like how nice her house looked until she actually lived in such a house, Portia could not seem to work up much enthusiasm for it. She ceded the decorations to Mark, choosing only the deep green couch and the living room rug, which even she now acknowledged clashed uncomfortably with the walls. Mainly, she kept it clean. Mark couldn’t. He was a tidier, but dirt… dirt was beyond his abilities. He seemed not to understand the science of removing it. Worse, he seemed not to notice its existence, which frankly baffled her. Once—following an experiment in which she had left a pile of swept dust in the center of the living room floor for six days, ten days, two weeks, watching to see when he would, first, notice it and then, hopefully, take action to remove it—they had had a terrible quarrel. It was the night of their party, the party they usually had in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, mainly for his colleagues in the English Department, but also for academics visiting from overseas (“strays and waifs,” he called them), and Mark had spent the day dutifully making the house ready, ferrying glasses from the basement, placing the chairs, setting up the bar, all the while stepping carefully around the pile of dust on the floor. He didn’t see it. Or he didn’t register it. Or he didn’t mind it. And as the hours ticked closer to the hour of the party, her nerves frayed. Around five, she lost it and started screaming. By five twenty-five, she was thoroughly depleted and not remotely in the mood for their now imminent party, but she had at least come round to his stated view on the matter: that her resentment was displaced, excessive, not logical. After all, if she was so very troubled by the dirt on the floor, why hadn’t she removed it herself? Why did she not remove it now? What was the point in being angry about it? And if it was true, as she claimed, that there were certain things, certain difficulties, he simply failed to note, then weren’t there some synapses in her own domestic perceptions? That porch fixture bulb he’d asked her to replace the day he’d left for a semester’s sabbatical in Oxford the previous year, only to find it encrusted by cobwebs and every bit as dark on the day of his return? The fact that she had done not one thing to implement her own aspirations for the “garden,” as she rather pathetically persisted in thinking of their uncultivated front and backyards, had in fact done nothing for them at all beyond the overpriced mums she dutifully stuck in each fall and the pansies from the supermarket she dutifully stuck in each spring? Her gardening aspirations had outlasted her shelter magazine phase by a few years, but while she had gotten as far as charts and diagrams for the intended plantings, nothing had come of them. She had made nothing come of them. Nothing grew.

  It was strange, she thought now, easing into the driveway. The house she had grown up in had been a control center for clubs and causes and campaigns, where the masses were fed and plans hatched. Back then she had indulged in an idea of home, a home with frills and decoration, but even after all this time,
their house had a for now feeling about it. The furniture, good enough for now. The colors, likable enough for now. As if it were not worth taking action against the generic ceiling fixture in the hallway, which a previous tenant had left in place of an original (probably gorgeous) item. As if there were some not yet articulated thing that had to happen before the living room got its truly intended blue and the right sleigh bed was even looked for, let alone found. Only every time she got close to wondering what that event might be, she found herself so thoroughly exhausted that she quickly made herself stop and think about something else.

  There was a wonderful smell inside when Portia unlocked the front door, a smell that nonetheless carried with it some vague anxiety she wasn’t inclined to identify. She heard the loud suck of their refrigerator unsealing and the almost immediate slap as it was shut again. Mark cooking, NPR from Philadelphia, a little on the loud side (he being a little on the deaf side). She put down her bag beside his briefcase. She put down her purse on the hall table. She didn’t call out right away. The smell was rich and sweet: like fruit, but heavier. Chicken Marbella, she thought, snapping to attention. Chicken Marbella, the signature dish of an entire decade (namely, the 1980s), the dish you were more likely than not to be served at any dinner party given by any member of the bourgeoisie, or in any academic enclave from sea to shining sea, was nonetheless Mark’s dish of choice when company was expected, because it was simple (after the first forty or so preparations), and because one could forgo the recipe and throw everything into the same casserole with abandon, and because most of the work could be done the day before. They never ate chicken Marbella when they were at home, alone. With dread, she stepped gingerly into the living room. All was worryingly tidy. A fire was laid. And beyond, through the open doorway, clean glassware twinkled from the dining table. Five places, but asymmetrical, as if one had been lately inserted and the others not yet adjusted to make this number seem intended, not accidental. This was more troubling than she could say.

  Four places at the table… that, she realized, would have had a strangely familiar tone to it: two guests for dinner, obviously, on the night of her return, and Mark saying he would take care of everything, though she couldn’t, just now, think who those two guests might be, and even if she could, what did it mean that there were five places? A stray-and-waif? A guest of their guests? The unmistakable pop of a cork from the kitchen. Red wine, opened to breathe. Clos Du Val most probably, twin of the bottle poured over the chicken an hour or earlier. Cousin to every bottle Mark had ever bought to serve with every preparation of chicken Marbella he, or she, had ever prepared, for far too many of the dinner parties they had ever given. And she was so tired. She turned and went back to the doorway and picked up her bag. She fought a brief, almost giddy urge to go back out to her car, to a motel on Route 1 with a queen-size bed and a remote control. Beside her purse there was a slip of paper she only now noticed, actually the back of a Wild Oats receipt, white with that pink stripe along the side that means: Replace the roll. It said, in his terse British print: “Your mother rang.”

  I would appreciate the opportunity to clarify a situation that occurred in the spring of 9th grade, when I was suspended for one week for alcohol offenses. This incident occurred at a time when my family was undergoing a difficult period, and, to put it bluntly, I had made some poor choices in the friends I was spending time with. One of these friends had an alcohol abuse problem, but I take responsibility for participating in his abuse. I have regretted this incident many times since it happened, but it also helped to make me the person I am today. I certainly hope that this single youthful mistake will not adversely affect my application.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ACADEMIC FOLK

  Your mother rang,” Mark said. He came out of the kitchen wearing a green Whole Foods apron and holding out his hands, which were wet and stuck with tiny bits of mesclun.

  “Hi,” said Portia.

  “Mwa.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Was it dreadful?”

  “What? No, not at all. It’s the best time to be in New England.”

  “Oh yes.”

  His hair smelled of oregano. He was an enthusiastic and untidy cook, who left no utensil unturned in the kitchen. In vain had she once attempted to understand how a zester featured in a meal of shepherd’s pie and green salad, but with time she had learned not to argue with the results.

  “Chicken Marbella?”

  “I know. It’s too boring. But there was a meeting all this afternoon. I knew I wouldn’t have time for anything else.”

  “No, it’s fine. Everyone loves chicken Marbella.” She looked past him at the table. “Who’s our fifth?”

  It was a calculated end run, this question. The third might reveal the first two, without her having to admit she’d forgotten.

  “Rachel rang to ask if she could bring our new hire. It’s fortunate, actually. I’ve been feeling bad about it. We’re in November and I haven’t lifted a finger. And she’s my countrywoman.”

  “Oh.” Portia frowned. “From Oxford, right? Virginia Woolf?”

  “Yes.” He turned and observed the table. “All of Bloomsbury, actually. Can you fix it up a bit? You’re good at that.”

  “Yes, but…” He looked at her. “Do I have time for a bath? What time are they coming?”

  “Seven. You have time. And ring your mother.”

  He went back to the kitchen, and she watched him: white shirt untucked, shoeless, hands aloft. He had, for all his heft, an almost irritating boyishness, no doubt to do with the soft English skin and overendowment of thick curling hair, once dark brown but now at least graying. She hung up her coat and went to the table. The table was dirty, so she removed the place settings, went to the cleaning closet, and came back with a rag. After she’d finished wiping the dust, she put everything back, straightening the place mats and placing the plates and glasses. One of the glasses was a flat tumbler, not a wineglass. She took it into the kitchen.

  “Are we short a wineglass?”

  “What?” He had the chicken Marbella on the stovetop and was stirring it with a wooden spoon.

  “This is a water.” She opened the cupboard and took out another wineglass.

  “Right. Oh, I had an e-mail from Cressida. She says she wants to go to university in the States.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” Portia said, putting the water glass back on the shelf. “What does her mother say?”

  “I doubt she’s told her. She won’t, if she has any wit, not till she has one foot on the airplane. Can you imagine Marcie letting her come here?”

  “She’ll have to follow,” Portia said.

  He laughed. “Yes. Of course.”

  “And move into the dorm.”

  “My God.”

  “It smells good,” she told him. “Just give me half an hour.”

  She went back to the table and replaced the glass, then took her bag upstairs. The fact that she now remembered what was supposed to be happening tonight, and when they had discussed it (only a couple of days earlier, at the beginning of the week), and what they had said about it (about David, Rachel’s husband, who—being a philosopher—had idiosyncratic social skills), and how Mark had talked her into a dinner party on the night of her return (he would cook and clean up, he promised), was little comfort to her. She ran her bath and placed the new folders she had taken from the office on her bedside table. Had it been an ordinary trip, she might simply have made the transition: traveling saleswoman to hostess, perhaps even via the kitchen. She would have been tired, of course, but not so fundamentally worn out and… yes, actually, bereft. The bereft was new. And the guilt, of course. She was just now taking the measure of that guilt.

  Drifting up the stairs, she recognized the theme music for National Public Radio’s Marketplace. She ran her bath and climbed into the tub, fighting an urge to submerge herself entirely: the ritual purification for unclean women—that is to say, all women. Like most atheist Jews, Portia had never actually vis
ited a mikvah, but she had always been curious. It just sounded so clean. Like a spa of soul-scouring proportions. Clean interested her. Did you have to believe for it to work, or did it work the way acupuncture worked, whether or not you accepted that currents of energy ran through your body? And what if it really did function as an absolution, the watery equivalent of assigned penance in the confessional? Then she could wash away the residue of the fingerprints of John Halsey, along with what they had meant and how they had felt, things that were still so vivid there was nothing left to the imagination, and the unmistakable but impermissible and thoroughly troubling wish not to never see him again. Clean slate, she told herself, washing. I’m home. I’m involved. As I said, she thought, somewhat defensively.

  In sixteen years, this hadn’t happened. For either of them, she was certain, though there had always been another woman in their lives: Cressida, the daughter who was only twenty months old when she and Mark had met. Two other women, if you counted Marcie, Cressida’s mother, though Portia had never actually met Marcie. Mark hadn’t deserved the punishing stress of an enraged ex-girlfriend and the occasionally litigated afterlife of that long-ago relationship, not to mention the longing he felt for a daughter he never saw enough of. He was a good person. He was too good to deserve what she had done. She washed herself again. She wished she could not remember—so clearly, so pointedly—the heat of John Halsey’s skin.

  By the time she was ready, Marketplace had been supplanted by jazz and a plate of Camembert was in place on the coffee table. Portia put on the porch light when she came downstairs and lit the fire Mark had set. They were practiced hosts. They had spent the first years working out the kinks and now enjoyed a small reputation, very localized, among their friends. Dependable food: comfortable, not flashy. Dependable cast of characters: articulate, opinionated, usually affable, usually university affiliated. No fireworks. It didn’t sound particularly exciting, but despite their reputation, she had found, academic folk liked peace and quiet when they went out for dinner. Princeton, like many another university town, had a certain reputation for domestic Sturm und Drang. Before moving here, in fact, she and Mark had both consumed Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem (which skewered the Philosophy Department) and Eileen Simpson’s Poets in Their Youth (booze and bad behavior among the Princeton scribes), in addition to the oft-cited My Kitchen Wars (bed hopping in the English Department); but things seemed positively sedate by the time they turned up in the mid-1990s. The bad old times, still fondly recalled by long-in-the-tooth professors, had given way to Gymboree and SAT prep, ubiquitous soccer, and benefits for the local hospital. People were too tired to sleep around, it seemed. Or so tanked up on antidepressants that they no longer felt the itch.