Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “It’s a process.” She forced a smile and wrenched the subject away. “Mark,” she said, “that looks so good.”

  He served the rather ordinary fruit tart, and the evening limped along to its end. She heard about Helen’s first American Halloween, at the Friedmans’ on Wilton Street, and her perambulation through the neighborhood with ten-year-old Julia Friedman, who was dressed as a white-faced ghoul in a mask that somehow pumped fake blood over its own cheeks. The parents they met in the darkened streets had been horrified, Helen reported, and covered their young children’s eyes. One had even scolded Helen, mistaking her, Portia supposed, for Julia’s mother, complaining that the dreadful bloody mask was too frightening for the children.

  “Which is absurd,” Helen announced. “Of course, we invented Halloween. In England, it’s meant to be bloody. The fear is the point. This costume parade of cartoon characters and superheroes, I can’t fathom it.”

  Portia practiced her weary smile and feigned interest. She suppressed her dismay when Mark offered, and then made, a second pot of coffee. She was close to Rachel. Sometimes they went for walks along the canal, accompanied by the Friedmans’ portly chocolate Lab, or met at Small World Coffee on Witherspoon Street. She found David adorable in a profoundly glad-I’m-not-married-to-him way. But tonight, after two such wearying, emotionally exhausting days, she could bear little more of them. She wanted them—please, please—to exhale, push back from the table, arise, withdraw, depart. And this woman. Who was this terrible woman?

  “Who was that terrible woman?” she asked Mark, following him into the kitchen with the glasses in her hands. David and Rachel had finally gone, taking Helen away with them. “Apart from a colossal bitch, I mean.”

  “That terrible woman,” Mark said testily, “is one of the most eminent Virginia Woolf scholars in the world.”

  “Don’t you mean Bloomsbury as a whole?” said Portia, setting down the glasses beside the sink.

  “I mean,” said Mark, “that we’re lucky to have her. She brings a good deal of prestige to the department. And the university.”

  “Well, she brought a good deal of bad temper to our house tonight. I didn’t hear her say one pleasant thing all evening. She didn’t even compliment you on your dinner. Which was excellent, by the way.”

  Mark ignored this. He had his back to her. He stood at the sink, running plates under the tap and setting them down into the dishwasher.

  “Mark?”

  His shoulder flinched. This actually made her furious.

  “Mark. Is she… was tonight typical for her, or do I need to give her the benefit of the doubt?”

  He whirled around, his hands almost comically flicking soap onto the floor, but there was nothing comical in his face. It made her want to step back.

  “I thought that was inexcusable, if you want my honest opinion. Going on like that about the university. Like a saleswoman.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You don’t need to peddle to us, Portia. We live here, too. Our paychecks say Princeton, too.”

  “It’s a very nice paycheck,” she reminded him, wondering that she had to remind him.

  “I know it’s a nice paycheck!” he said.

  His voice was quiet, but suffused with anger. She stared numbly at him. She had heard this voice before, but only when he spoke to Marcie, or about Marcie, or to the lawyer on the subject of Marcie. Never to her. She remembered the day they had driven to Newark Airport to pick up Cressida, only to find that she was not on the plane, was not even booked on the plane. He had gone to a corner and called Marcie, swaying in rage like a davening Hasid. And the time, just this past July, when he had gone to London for his visit, only to find that Marcie had decamped to a friend’s house and refused to release Cressida until Mark signed some document promising he would drive only on secondary roads, because she had reason to distrust his ability behind the wheel. For years, forever, Portia had taken the attendance of Mark’s rage. She knew it was there, but what had it to do with her? She had always been the one standing slightly off to one side, watching the white beam of that anger find its target—like the supportive teammate or faithfully recording secretary. This wasn’t right. She stared at him: green eyes, graying hair, poorly shaved jaw. And then the idea came surging up into the space between them, erupting from the blue-painted floorboards, exploding through their kitchen and their house and their conjoined lives: He knew. Somehow, she had no idea how. He’d known all evening. He’d known since before she arrived home. He’d known the instant John Halsey had left her body.

  “Mark?”

  “I bring home a new colleague. A valued colleague. And incidentally, someone I’ve known for a long time. And you treat her like she’s applying to Princeton but hasn’t bothered to read the catalog.”

  Despite herself, Portia nearly laughed. This was, in fact, a fairly succinct description of Helen.

  “I do wonder why she came here, if she’s so down on the place. I mean, if Oxford is so perfect and the students so superior, why on earth did she leave?”

  “Why, I don’t know,” Mark said caustically. “Maybe it has something to do with a higher paycheck and a lighter teaching load. She’s a scholar, Portia. She has work to do.”

  Portia noted the dig—her own work being more toil than vocation, in other words—but chose not to react.

  “Yes, but Mark, she just came in here and started criticizing everything. You have to admit she was far from gracious tonight. And she was thoroughly unpleasant to me.”

  “You were thoroughly unpleasant to her,” he corrected. “I was ashamed of you.”

  Portia looked at him in disbelief. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Then, seemingly with great effort, Mark broke away and turned back to the sink. Painfully, he took up a plate and painfully, deliberately, ran it beneath the water.

  “Mark,” Portia said quietly. “What is this?”

  His shoulders tensed. He gripped the edge of the sink with one hand and leaned slightly forward. The water ran on, bouncing up off the surface of the plate.

  “I think,” he said finally, “I need to go back to the office for a bit.”

  Automatically, she looked up at the kitchen clock. It was half-past ten.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “I just need some time. Everything’s all right.”

  Strangely, she did not feel at all reassured.

  “Could you bear to clean up? I know I said I’d do it.”

  He wasn’t looking at her, though he had turned off the water and stepped back from the sink.

  “All right,” she told him. “I don’t mind. But we’ll have to come back to this at some point.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. He looked horrendously depleted. “I know. But tonight, I can’t. I’ll just be a couple of hours.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He walked past her, moving the air. He went straight to the hallway, picked up his keys from the table, and left. The door behind him failed to click shut. Portia looked after him. She stood for some time, rooted and amazed. There was a subject between them now, as yet unidentified but quite real, and likely not evadable, or at least not without cost. She had grown comfortable here, with Mark, or if not comfortable, then stable, safe from the barbed thing she had done a very long time ago. Now, suddenly, that thing was utterly present, sharp, and terribly sad, demanding attention and redress, and she was as ill prepared now to face it as she had been then, in spite of being so much older and theoretically more capable. Theoretically, Portia thought, astonished. Alone in the house, alone in her life, alone with the aftermath of a bad dinner party and an old, old transgression. What was there to do but follow him to the front door and shut it the rest of the way?

  I have experienced a myriad of challenges in my young life, but I am not sorry for myself, because they have had an important affect on me. I know that I am a better person because of the things I have faced. I try to remember that everyday.

  CHAPTER SEVEN
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  TEAMMATES

  At the age of sixty-eight, Susannah Nathan was still, somehow, a firebrand in the making. Despite committed attachment to a long series of social, political, and creative endeavors, Portia’s mother had never found the vector capable of transforming her into a Gloria Steinem, Alice Waters, Wilma Mankiller, or Twyla Tharp. She could last only a brief time in any setting before becoming convinced that she was needed elsewhere. She had campaigned for women and immigrants, early sex education, and subsidized housing, sanctuary for victims of male violence and of mandatory drug sentencing. She had toiled against consuming the flesh of animals and the slaughter of virgin forests. She had marched and rallied and fund-raised and lent her considerable energies to any number of efforts both local and global, but always as a foot soldier, never a general—forever the woman holding the sign in the background, as some astonishing beacon of energy and inspiration stepped up to the microphone. Outwardly, over the years, very few things had remained constant in Susannah’s life. In fact, there was only one thing that had traveled with her wherever she went. That thing was money, and lots of it.

  Regrettably, for an aspiring revolutionary, she had been born into a family of materialism and privilege, and unlike some of the others, she had never quite had the wherewithal to let it go. Initially, she had stuck to the proven path, commuting to Barnard from her parents’ home in Great Neck and making a real effort to do the great work expected of her, which was to secure a Columbia-educated future physician or attorney and marry him. Even as graduation neared without her having accomplished this basic goal, no one in her family admitted to any apprehension about her. Susie was an excellent student, and her parents were modern people: Didn’t Judaism celebrate the intelligence of women? Why shouldn’t she get another degree? A master’s, or a… teaching thing? (It was good to work with children before you had your own. It showed you what to expect.) The alarm bells failed to ring as Susannah made her application to a university far, far away in California, an about-to-be-roiling university, a university already uncomfortably odd. Ostensibly, she had gone west to study psychology, but her interest, already tenuous, did not survive the realization that graduate work in the field focused less on feelings than on dry assertions tested with live mice. Also, she was not personally courageous. During her first year on that soon-to-be-tumultuous campus, she joined a sorority, the only graduate student in the university to do so. At best, she was fixed in place. At worst, moving backward.

  Then, finally, she got the jolt she was waiting for. That spring, only months before Mario Savio would seize a microphone on Sproul Plaza and declare Berkeley, California, the center of the new universe, Susannah, who was manning a fund-raising stand on Shattuck with some sorority sisters, was noticed by an artist (also dope dealer) from St. Louis, whose street sculptures were arrayed for sale on the pavement. The artist (and dope dealer) had cast aside his own familial trappings and invested his tuition money (originally intended—O irony—for Princeton) in a particularly fecund patch of Northern California, where a hale and potent strain of cannabis grew as cheerfully as the kudzu back home. He beckoned Susannah to his makeshift stall on the pavement. So much for that elusive Jewish physician. So much for psychology.

  He, at least, was entrepreneurial. Many years (and two prison terms) later, he would still be living on the proceeds of that thwarted Princeton tuition and that very prosperous hectare of soil. With him, the following year, Susannah would leave Berkeley and move north to live at peace with nature. With him, a couple of years after that, she would try urban homesteading in Harlem. Without him, when that went south, she herself would head south to attempt life as an emancipated human in a womyn’s collective, in Baltimore. Then north again, first to tidy up odds and ends (and collect the lion’s share of her fortune) in the house her parents had left her in Great Neck, and so to Northampton. Ah, Northampton. Home of the listing Victorian painted some unusual color. Home of the rigorously divided household responsibilities and rotating cooking duties. Home of the Bluestocking, the deconstructing genius scholarship girl, the earth mother therapist who moonlighted with her guitar at the Iron Horse Music Hall, singing, “There’s something about the women in my life…” In Northampton, Susannah picked up a legal mate and produced a daughter, not that those two acts were at all connected, and continued to pass from stand to stand, from purpose to purpose, from partner to decreasingly viable partner, before, at last, migrating north to the eventual destination of not a few of her friends: Vermont. But through every outward change, she held on to her money. And despite the chorus of disapproval, the dressings-down at consciousness raising, the patient counseling of gurus and sisters, not to mention the pointed and powerfully articulated views of the men she sometimes cohabited with, Susannah declined to consider that a problem.

  The money, which had been tied up in trust until Susannah was twenty-five and was hers outright thereafter, came from two sources: first, a maternal grandparent who had been consumed by anxiety all through the summer of 1929 and finally given way to it in early October of that year, fleeing the stock market to the derision of his friends; second, her own father, who had a (not quite aboveboard) knack for knowing where most of the postwar Levittowns on Long Island were going to get built. The fortune these visionary men would leave to Portia’s mother was not of immense proportions, but it was unignorable money. Safety-net money. Property-in-the-community-of-one’s-choice money. It was don’t-have-to-work money, fuck-you-I’m-out-of-here money, and at-least-I-know-my-kid-can-go-to-college money, just the thing for a responsible citizen who needed to make art or wanted to give everything to the poor. But Susannah was not an artist, and though she dutifully raised funds for the poor in their many guises, she never gave away any of her own money. Instead, she put it into quite a sophisticated portfolio, had it managed by a series of extremely smart young men at a white-shoe firm on Water Street, and directed a laudably modest percentage of the interest to be deposited regularly into her checking account, where it mimicked a subsistence wage or welfare stipend.

  She refrained from telling any of this to her daughter, who was accordingly stunned, years later, to happen upon a $20,000 check for her college tuition, printed in an old-world typeface on a pale beige check and from an extremely WASPy-sounding bank in New York Portia had never heard of. It would shame her, later, that she had just assumed she was on financial aid at Dartmouth, like everyone else up there who didn’t come from obvious wealth. When she confronted her mother it all came out, and without shame. So she had some money saved. So what? Was Portia implying that she had led a life of deprivation? Was there some terribly important thing she had been denied? Some crucial possession she had been forced to forgo? Had she suffered terribly?

  Of course, she had not. In fact, Portia had some difficulty articulating the sense of dismay, of… well, almost betrayal, she was feeling. It went without saying that their life, the life of her childhood, had not been one of suffering and deprivation. It hadn’t been luxurious, of course. Their bookshelves were salvaged boards and cinder blocks, like the bookshelves of everyone else they knew (and, for that matter, laden with most of the same books). They ate their own tomatoes, and Susannah bartered baby-sitting for the services of a handyman when the ceiling started to bow. Her mother hit the yard sales and rummage sales for every thread Portia wore, every toy she played with and book she read. Food came in bulk from the Co-Op. Gifts were handwritten cookbooks containing Susannah’s recipe for wheaten bread, her brown rice stir-fry. She also knitted a lot. But while there were utilitarian things around them, things they needed, things to make life simpler or better organized, Susannah seemed thoroughly averse to the idea of acquisition for its own sake and terribly proud of her abstemious character. (Portia had sometimes heard her mother proclaim, with glee, that an entire society of consumers like herself would bring the economy crashing down within days.) She and her mother did not take the kinds of vacations her future classmates at Dartmouth were taking, to winter spo
rt meccas, capitals of culture, white beaches. On holidays, mother and daughter visited friends and Susannah’s former lovers in their mindful communities or off-the-grid last stands. It helped that Portia was not covetous herself. But the oddity of it, the irony of it, was something she had never been able to stop chewing over. After all, it was one thing to have money and something else not to have it. But to have it and, as far as she could tell, ignore it? For all that time? This paradox would preoccupy her for years. If you had money and didn’t want to spend it, why not give some of it away? On the other hand, if you had it and didn’t want to give it away, why not, you know, buy yourself something nice every now and then?

  The year after her daughter started college, Susannah sold the Northampton house—at a loss, of course. (That plumber? Whose services she had bartered for babysitting? He was neither gifted nor licensed, let alone bonded. The resulting mess would require a massive reduction in the sale price.) Then she resigned her chairmanship of the Pioneer Valley Food Co-Op and her membership in the Northampton Fellowship of Reconciliation, found a successor to lead the Pioneer Valley chapters of NARAL and Amnesty, and moved north.

  Vermont, it seemed clear to Portia, was destined to become one great retirement complex for lefty seniors, not to mention an outstanding investment opportunity for the right kind of entrepreneur. (Organic all-you-can-eat buffets? Collectively run and Hemlock Society–endorsed continuing care facilities? Health clubs pulsating to a Jefferson Airplane sound track?) Specifically, Susannah was bound for Hartland, where two of her friends had decamped some years before, pooling their funds to buy, renovate, and generally civilize a hundred-year-old farmhouse on twenty hilltop acres. The friends, both women, were cohabitants but not lovers. One was a weaver, one a schoolteacher-turned-folksinger, both committed vegans and technophobes. Their domestic arrangement, in its eighth year at the time of Susannah’s arrival, had lasted longer than both women’s marriages and was, by any account, a success. Then Susannah moved in.