Obviously, they weren’t married. They had talked about it once or twice, then let the subject drift away without resolution. It seemed clear that neither needed the ceremony, but at the same time, there was a wealth of documentation between them. They shared ownership of the house and the checking account and served as primary beneficiaries of each other’s wills and life insurance policies. They had been more responsible, she had sometimes thought, than many of the married couples she’d known, in which one or both partners had such anxiety or control issues about money that they couldn’t meld accounts or titles, couples in which his paycheck went to him and hers to her, in which he held title to the condo while she kept the weekend place in her name. She and Mark had shaken their heads about these couples, over their shared breakfast at their shared table. They had felt superior to the husbands and wives they knew who seemed not even to like each other. She had always liked Mark. She had not, of course, always wanted to tell him everything, and she’d supposed that was all right. Was it not all right? Had he not, as she’d assumed, told everything to her, or at least everything important? He had an ex and a child and complicated relationships with both. He had a sister he did not like, who had a husband he did not like even more. He had a sense of frailty about his body (which, when they’d first met, had been a very English body, thin chested, gangly… scrawny, she supposed, though she had always found it comfortingly awkward), an atonal voice, teeth that had not benefited from fluoride, in the water or anywhere else. He had a secret appetite for whodunits and became irritated if the mysteries were too obscure or too obvious. He had a tender loyalty to the sound track of his youth, a truly shameful parade of Top of the Pops offenses: Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, Bananarama. Even, God forbid, Wham! She had been known to come home to these affronts, opening their door to George Michael, informing her (at his most repellent) that he wanted her sex. Mark kept this stash of small embarrassments by the CD player in the kitchen.
They were gone. She discovered this after she had stopped looking for things that were gone, things she thought he might have taken with him, that she could be angry or bereft not to find in their places, but those things were all where she had left them: the watercolor of dunes they’d bought the summer they rented a cottage in Wellfleet, the huge and heavy copper stockpot he’d found at the Lambertville flea market, an insane bargain at ten bucks, even the 1820 edition of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which Mark had bought from an Oxford bookseller with the windfall from some student prize. Portia was amazed to find this last item in its place. And when she did find it, on the bookshelf in their bedroom, she sat on the bed, stunned by an intense feeling of relief.
Past the anger at his betrayal, the humiliation of knowing he was already—or would soon be—squiring a visibly pregnant Englishwoman around campus, the as yet unexplored jealousy she had desperately been holding off, it was only at this moment clear to her that she wanted him not to have left, or at any rate to be coming back now that he had made his point. (His point? Portia thought. That he was finding her lacking in some way? That he wanted another child? Perhaps, as Clarence Porter had so succinctly put it, that she required a little “shaking up”?) She doubted very much that this would happen. Mark was nothing if not decisive. Every decision they had ever made—from their moving in together, to accepting jobs at Princeton, to far less significant things like whom to invite for dinner or what movie to see—had been made deliberately and not revisited. He wasn’t leaving her, in other words. He had already left.
Portia, not surprisingly, soon discovered that she did not much like being home. The house, despite its eerie absence of absent things, was not a comfortable place, and there was nothing compelling her to be here. She had no wish to stay and face the obvious tasks: doing laundry, making shopping lists, clearing a path to the front door through settled, heavy snow. The number of messages glowing in red on the answering machine could not yet be faced, and she wondered if it wasn’t possible to just start over with a new machine and a new number. (Surely the phone company was well versed in domestic upheaval. Surely the abandoned were eternally lined up at Verizon and Sprint, claiming they could never start fresh without seven altogether different digits, or at least the same digits in a different order.) Failing this, she could simply toss both and decline to replace them.
Standing in the dull silence of her foyer, Portia understood that she had no clear idea of what to do with herself, except to get away from this place. Methodically, she considered and rejected other places to be, including the gym, the supermarket at the end of her street, any public space downtown. At any of these, Mark and Helen might be lurking, ready to display their happiness and gestational glow. With each locale, indeed, came a jolt of distress, like a shot of black ink through the system, feathering out to each extremity before fading. It was the return of pain, its forces rested and restored during her short distraction and ready with a reconsidered battle plan. Considering her new circumstances, there seemed to be only one place she could retreat to, and realizing this, Portia duly began her retreat, locking the front door behind her and picking her way over the hard snow, back to her car. She had been home less than half an hour. She had been able to stand being home for only half an hour. She had the sense, suddenly, of running before a wave.
Moments later, she was cruising downtown for a parking spot. The town was wide open, and she pulled in opposite Nassau Hall, telling herself that it was really a rational, laudable thing to go to work late in the afternoon on a day when the rest of the campus was still and stony silent. This time of year, after all, was not a vacation for her. The application deadline had only just come and gone, and so had commenced reading season, a tunnel of stress and weighty decisions, ringing phones, an e-mail in-box that filled at a rate of four messages per minute: students terrified they had mistyped their Social Security numbers, guidance counselors duty bound to report that the applicant (along with the rest of the football team) had just been given a citation for disorderly conduct, and always—always—parents. Parents! Susannah had been entirely uninvolved in Portia’s own college search. She remembered one heated discussion about applying to Smith—reactionary playground for future Republican wives or hotbed of radical lesbianism?—but apart from that, it had more or less been her own show. Had Susannah read her essays, checked for spelling errors? Had she offered to hunt down friends or cousins of her own friends or cousins with connections to the various admissions offices (misguided though that surely would have been, even back then)? Had she, God forbid, herself called up the offices, demanding to speak to whoever was in charge about the brilliance and promise of her daughter?
Compared with the parents Portia was dealing with now, Susannah looked like a saint.
Portia hauled her bags of folders through the FitzRandolph Gate. Nassau Hall, Princeton University’s nerve center and, for a few heady months in 1777, home to the infant U.S. government, looked majestic in the failing light, with its great preening tigers and fluttering ivy, and behind it the campus unfurled, stalwart buildings linked by deserted walkways. Looking up at West College, she saw no lights at all: not Clarence’s corner office (he and his partner were in New Haven with friends), not Dylan’s (visiting his parents in Houston), not Corinne’s (with the kids on some island). That she was here after nightfall was not in itself unusual. In January, February, and March, as the intense period of reading gave way to the still more intense period of committee meetings, all of them frequently worked late into the night, percolating along in a fittingly collegial rhythm. She had sometimes, certainly, been the last one out the door, intent on making it through western Oregon or the Archbishop Mitty School or the imperious baseball coach’s most urgent requests before allowing herself to head for home. But coming in like this, alone, in the darkness, to an empty building—in all these years, it was a first. The unbroken line of dark windows was definitely disconcerting, but at the same time she felt some relief. There would be no one up there to question her.
&nbs
p; She opened the door with her own key and went first to the administrative warren in the back of the building, passing the abandoned receptionist’s desk. She turned on the lights as she went, bathing the nondescript corridor in harsh fluorescent illumination that picked up every ding and mark on the walls, passing the silent photocopier in its alcove. Against one wall, two of the fax machines were lit and humming, neatly depositing pages and pages into their trays. In the cubicles, screen savers pulsed and danced. The smorgasbord of ill-judged baked goods had been cleared away, only a spattering of crumbs left behind. On Martha’s desk, a phone purred forlornly, five times, six times, then went silent. It was all, in fact, very silent.
She hoisted her bags onto the counter below the staff mailboxes and began to lift out handfuls of files. There were a few she’d flagged to remove at this point, and she went hunting for them now, quickly locating the fluorescent pink Post-it notes on their covers. These were folders she had questions about for one reason or another, small items she might already have dealt with if Susannah were not such a Luddite, who refused to own a computer. Because she was, however, and because she did not, and because Portia had declined to drive into Hanover to undertake this sensitive business on some public terminal in Baker Library, she had merely flagged the files to come back to.
One of these was a boy from a private day school near Boston, whose guidance counselor—a woman Portia had met when she’d visited the school last spring—had declined to answer two notable questions on the secondary school report: “Has the applicant ever been found responsible for a disciplinary violation at your school, whether related to academic misconduct or behavioral misconduct, that resulted in the applicant’s probation, suspension, removal, dismissal, or expulsion from your institution? To your knowledge, has the applicant ever been convicted of a misdemeanor, felony, or other crime?” Almost always, the answer to these questions was no. Sometimes it was yes, and sometimes that was not in itself the kiss of death. There were kids who’d made mistakes and grown from them. There were victims of excessive “zero tolerance” school rules, suspended for carrying a loaded water pistol or pointing a finger and declaring, “Bang.” There was even the occasional Jean Valjean crime of necessity. (She had never forgotten the boy from Oregon who had shoplifted liver for his family. Liver! If only he had been a stronger student.) But she could not remember a single instance in which the guidance counselor had declined to answer the questions. It could, of course, be an oversight—a typo. But at this school? With tuition upward of twenty-five grand a year and a student parking lot crowded with Lexus coupés and BMWs? Portia suspected not.
Another worrying application was from a Rhode Island girl whose complex, mellifluous essay was somewhat at odds with her low English grades and poor score on the writing section of the SAT, not to mention the fact that the favorite book listed in the “Few Details” section was Pride and Priviledge by “Jane Austin.” Portia, accordingly, wanted to check the girl’s tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer against their data bank of essays for sale. (These were gleaned mainly from Internet sources—where they were billed as teaching tools and slathered with disclaimers—but supplemented by an Iowa entrepreneur with an essayist-for-hire business. This unpleasant individual had decided to publish his expertise in book form and closed up shop by mailing his entire backlist of custom essays to every college his clients had ever attended, plus People magazine.) Of course, the Rhode Island girl might simply have risen to the challenge of her essay, taking her time, thinking through her points, and checking her sentences carefully to avoid grammatical errors, but there was something in the ease of the language that worried Portia. Correctness, after all, was achievable with sweat, but in her experience it was nearly impossible to drill grace into prose.
There was also a boy from Boston Latin who had furnished a list of Princeton philosophers he wanted to work with and an essay of such dense philosophical prose that Portia had had no idea what he was talking about. (In fact, she could have sworn, when she’d read it at Susannah’s kitchen table days earlier, that it had something to do with zombies. What next? she’d thought. Mummies and vampires?) She had decided to send the essay to David and ask him to sort it out. Philosophers seemed to have a knack for recognizing their own kind as well as the impostors in their midst.
Finally, there was the Connecticut boy whose long list of school government offices, dramatic roles, community service projects, and baseball positions had ended with the words “National Judo Champion.” It might, of course, be true, but in Portia’s previous dealings with bona fide national judo champions (and not a few had indeed applied to Princeton), this accomplishment did tend to be noted in recommendations and to require enough practice time to preclude student government, drama, and varsity baseball. National judo champions also had a tendency to write about being national judo champions. They solicited their coaches for references and supplied newspaper reports attesting to the fact that they were… well… national judo champions. It would easily be settled by Google, Portia thought, finding the file at the very bottom of the stack and setting it aside. Why anyone would bother to lie in the age of Google was baffling.
“We are trusting skeptics,” her first dean of admissions had told her years before. “We believe what they tell us, but they’d better be telling us the truth.” This was Harrold McHenry, the soon-to-be former Dean of Admissions at Dartmouth, who had hauled her aboard the profession in the spring of her final Dartmouth year. Harrold’s sense of fair play—fair play he sweetly assumed everyone else likewise embraced—had been one of his most endearing qualities. He had a horror of the so-called new rules of admissions, the outsmarting and end runs and decoding now rampant out there, the snake-oil salesmen promising to package and sell your kid to his or her school of choice. For as long as he could (and longer, perhaps, than he should have), Harrold stubbornly regarded each application as an open, invigorating conversation between his staff and the applicant, in which there could be no dissembling on either side. He expected total candor from each applicant and maintained that expectation even after little wildfires of scandal broke through the industry in the 1990s—kids getting other kids to take their SATs for them, applicants who wrote their own recommendations, people pretending to be Rothschilds and ranch hands. These events had been personally wounding to Harrold, but he had stayed the course, doing his best to ride the new waves, trying to maintain his personal honor code.
There was something a little haunting about this terribly ordinary room, Portia decided. She tried, for a moment, to see it not as the generic office it absolutely was, but as the epicenter of so much fervent speculation, by students, teachers, counselors, and parents. To them, this utilitarian space was the holding pen where their child and all his or her antagonists were gathered, vetted, directed, shunted into narrower and narrower corridors leading to smaller and smaller vestibules, where they were commanded to wait in mute distress, face-to-face with their most closely matched fellow aspirants: wrestlers here, legacies there, Pakistanis to the right, woodwinds, novelists, witheringly brilliant mathematicians, faculty kids, staff kids, movie star kids, movie stars, ordinary decent kids, good debaters, great debaters, boys who wanted to be Brian Greene, girls who wanted to be Stephen Sondheim, or Meg Whitman, or Quentin Tarantino. There was, for instance, one tiny chamber in which the diver from Wisconsin sat knee to bandaged knee with the diver from Maine, the lounge where the girls from MIT’s Women’s Technology Program were briefly, uncomfortably, reunited, the claustrophobic cubicle where the classically trained soprano from Florida eyed the classically trained soprano from Los Angeles and the classically trained soprano from Cleveland. That it didn’t actually work like this was not even relevant, because Portia understood the symbolic power of this place, banal as it was. That power was even greater, she suspected, than the symbolic power of their individual offices upstairs, the conference rooms, even Clarence’s comfortable lair with its nonworking fireplace and Asher Durand.
She had been
inside the machine for so long that she sometimes forgot how this—this applying to college thing—had looked from the outside, but it did come back, vividly back, when she tried to remember. It had been like watching a mass of seemingly identical sheep cram themselves into a great black building with no windows, knocking against one another, stepping on one another’s hooves and over their panicked bodies when they fell. At the other end of the building, only a thin line of sheep trickled out into bountiful fields. And who were these sheep, which looked to all intents and purposes exactly like every sheep who had crowded in? What made them special? Why should they get the meadow when those others were barred? What happened inside that box was a mystery, a secret shielded from the light. She remembered how the class ahead of her in high school had been sorted, with the most cerebral Latin geek shut out from every college he’d applied to while the class’s drug dealer of choice had his pick of Harvard and Brown, how the valedictorian who was also the student body president retreated in humiliation to his safety school while the dull-as-dishwater football player trotted off to Cornell. Who were these people in the admissions offices of Swarthmore and Williams, and what could they have been thinking when they accepted Camilla Weldon, Portia’s soccer teammate and the most superficial girl she had ever met, but passed over Jordana Miles, who wrote her own column in the school newspaper and had actually published three short articles in Seventeen magazine? But there was perhaps no mystery as baffling as that of her own admission to Dartmouth.
She had been a worried high school senior lacking in… well, anything special, really. A pretty good student, pretty good soccer player, pretty good writer, and all around nice person, Portia knew exactly what would happen to her own college application if it arrived, through some warp of time and space, in this room today. With her strong GPA and merely quite good scores, busy athletic schedule, and character-building volunteer efforts, Portia Nathan’s application would have left this room with a fatal designation of Academic 3/Non-Academic 4, meaning that in the real world her scholastic skills were solid, but in Princeton’s supercharged applicant pool they were unremarkable, and that although she had been busy within her school community, she had not been a leader within that community (NonAc 3) or distinguished herself at the state level (NonAc 2), let alone accomplished something on a national or international scale (NonAc 1). NonAc 1’s, of course, were rather thin on the ground, even in Princeton’s applicant pool. They were Olympic athletes, authors of legitimately published books, Siemens prizewinners, working film or Broadway actors, International Tchaikovsky Competition violinists, and, yes, national judo champions, and they tended to be easy admits, provided they were strong students, which they usually were. But Portia’s application would have landed in the great moving tide of similar applications: great kids, smart kids, hardworking kids who would certainly do great at whatever college they ended up going to, which almost certainly wasn’t going to be Princeton.
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