Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Jeremiah agreed instantly, though he couldn’t have known what it was. Portia, who did know, was delighted. Someone would be back to collect him in the morning, she said. After metaphysics and epistemology. Then they left.

  Now it was fully dark. Portia held her jacket at the throat and did not look at him. They took a few steps along the pathway and stopped on the same dime.

  “I think,” said Portia, “we did that rather well.”

  He took her hand.

  My grandmother rolls out the dough, using a long wooden rolling pin, so faded from the imprint of her hands that the paint on the handles is barely visible. She pauses to dip her hands in the flour bowl by her elbow, then gently sprinkles flour over the perfectly flat dough as she prepares to cut out her special Italian Christmas Cookies, favorites of our family since I can recall. She checks to make sure that I am paying close attention. After all, she chides me, long after she is gone, I will one day need to recreate this exact combination of flour and water, egg and sugar, for my own child or grandchild, keeping alive this link between a girl who had barely attended school, who shared a bed with two sisters in a house without running water in a remote village in southern Italy, and her violin playing, robotics obsessed, college-bound granddaughter in Los Angeles, and on to descendents she will never know. This may be our private family tradition, but it is comes from an American story.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CONTENT TO BE LED

  Oh dear,” he said. He was still standing behind her on the porch, though she had unlocked the door and opened it and even stepped inside. It had not occurred to her to worry about the house, and now she looked around, wary and bewildered, to see what she must have forgotten: trash? shed underwear? palpable signs of extreme loneliness and abandonment?

  There was a floor lamp in the living room that she had left on all day, apparently, so the electricity was working. Light made a house look homey, didn’t it? Perhaps it had been longer than all day, Portia thought, trying to remember the last time she had sat in the living room and what she might have been doing there.

  “Portia,” said John, who had stepped, unheard, into the room, “I think your heat might be out.”

  She raised her head, as if she were some animal testing the air.

  “You’re absolutely right,” she agreed with him. She was trying for growing realization but hit outrage instead, as if she were ready to murder whichever vile spirit had stolen in and shut off the furnace. “You know, I thought it was a little cold this morning, but I was running out to work. It must have happened in the night.”

  “Can I look at your furnace? Would you mind?”

  He was almost comically gracious, and she nearly smiled. “Would you?” she asked. “I could call the oil company.”

  “Well, it might be necessary. In the basement?”

  She showed him the door and turned on the light for him. She had not thought to look at the furnace herself.

  Thirty seconds later, there was a deep rumble from below her feet and a whirring sound, and the slight vibration of the floorboards came rushing back to her, so thoroughly familiar that she wondered how she had not noticed it was gone all these weeks. The vibration meant warm air and hot water, which meant comfort. Suddenly, what she wanted most in the world was a bath.

  “There’s enough oil,” said John, emerging from the dark corner where the furnace was ensconced. “I don’t know why it went out, but it just needed to be restarted. Has it happened before?” he asked.

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “And you think it went out in the night?”

  She shifted uncomfortably, unsure of how assailable that claim might be. Would he be able to tell? From its condition? The temperature of the house? She thought of brutal parents in the emergency room, insisting the baby had only fallen from his playpen, plagiarists who swore they’d written the essay themselves. Would he know? Could he prove it?

  “I really… I’m not sure. I’ve been at the office so much. It might have happened yesterday. Or before.”

  He was listening but not looking at her. He was looking past her, back toward the front door, where mail overflowed the open box on the floor and unopened packages were stacked like roadside cairns. She had forgotten about the packages, some of which were for Mark.

  “My secretary’s on strike,” she said mildly.

  He gave her a quizzical look.

  “And my maid. And, as you already know, my handyman. Actually, I’m a little on strike myself.”

  “Yes,” he said carefully. “I’m trying to gauge how concerned to be.”

  “Concerned?” Portia said. Her first impulse was offense, but this departed quickly. Instead, she had a sudden, overpowering urge to hurl herself against him and coil her hands in his light hair. She didn’t do it, but the restraint cost her.

  “Something is wrong,” John said. He spoke softly, almost soothingly. “I don’t care what your house looks like or if you turn your furnace off for the winter. I don’t care how long it takes you to read your mail. I just like to know that you’re all right. Are you all right?”

  Portia stood looking at him. He had not unbuttoned his coat, which was slowly but perceptibly beginning not to be necessary. There was life, thin life but growing life, in the room. He was beautiful. She had forgotten how beautiful.

  “Not really,” she heard herself say.

  He nodded soberly. “And can I do anything for you?”

  Portia shrugged. “Well, you’ve already fixed the furnace.”

  “Started the furnace,” he corrected. “Please don’t imagine I’m one of those guys who can actually fix things.”

  “Then you’re not out to fix me,” she observed, and he looked startled.

  “No. Are you broken?”

  Portia sighed. “Oh, probably,” she said, unbuttoning her coat. “Look, I know it’s awful, but would you mind if I left you on your own for a few minutes? I just want to clean up a bit.”

  “You don’t have to clean up.” He frowned.

  “Not the house. I mean me.”

  “Oh. Of course.” He looked embarrassed.

  “And when I come down, we’ll see about some dinner. I won’t be long,”

  She dropped her coat on the back of a chair and went upstairs. Everywhere she looked, there was disorder: papers, clothing, towels, everything lying where it had fallen. The bed looked especially alarming, with files stacked along the meridian where Mark had once slept and on her own side, twisted ropes of blankets and quilts. The scene suggested tandem diagnoses of light and heavy sleeper. On the bedside table, the Pollock biography, still unfinished, for the January book group she had naturally not made it to. She couldn’t even remember the bit she had managed to read.

  The bathtub seemed to be filled with discarded clothing. She bent down to gather it up, armloads of jeans and tops, underpants, bras. They didn’t smell, particularly, and for a moment she wondered if these were clothes she had really worn or just things from the drawers and hangers that had somehow migrated here, voyaging en masse to their winter nesting grounds. But then she found a pair of wool pants, their turned-up cuffs encrusted with dried mud, and remembered the meeting she had worn them to last month, with Clarence and the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and the snowstorm that afternoon through which she’d walked home. Last month, Portia marveled. After a moment’s consideration, she carried it all to her closet and threw it in. Very little still hung on the hangers, only the good clothes, the going-out clothes from her faculty spouse life, her visiting high schools life. She could do any of those things right now, she thought, sighing. But underwear, a pair of unworn jeans, a fresh shirt—these might be difficult.

  Portia ran the water, washed the tub, and put in the plug. She took off the clothes she wore and threw those, too, into the closet, then stood, naked and shivering, and contemplated the bed. To alter it in any way, she knew, was to acknowledge what might happen, but hadn’t they already done that? Had he not taken
her hand and walked with her, never asking where they were going, content to be led? Weren’t they here now, with a functioning furnace and truly hot bathwater on the rise? She couldn’t leave this, not as it was. The bed, more than anything else in the house—more than the loaded answering machine and the abandoned mail and the absent heat—was a blunt exhibition, like an art installation evoking sadness, filth, and celibacy. As the water filled the tub and the steam filled the bathroom, she carefully removed the files and ripped at the sheets. They, too, went into the closet. She put on a fresh set, then messed up the covers a bit so he wouldn’t know.

  She did not feel actual shame until she slid into the tub, when the hot water slid around her and her surfaces began to give up their evidence of neglect. There were streaks of old grime on her shins, rough skin on her knees, hair everywhere. She had truly not known that things had gotten this bad. She dragged a razor over every pertinent surface and rubbed her back with a wet cloth as far as she could reach. Then, pink and new from the soap and heat, she stood up and turned on the shower, letting more hot water wash everything away. Her hair, neglected for weeks, coiled in a brown rope over her shoulder, scarcely different wet than dry. Probably for the first time in her adult life, Portia lathered, rinsed, and repeated.

  She was drying herself with a fairly clean towel when she heard the doorbell and froze, bent over. Rachel, was her immediate, horrified thought. Rachel had said something about stopping by, that afternoon in the office. Or Mark, here with spectacularly bad timing to have the inevitable conversation, in which everything she already knew would be painstakingly articulated. Portia went to the bedroom door and opened it, straining to hear, but the voice speaking to John at the front door was not Rachel’s, or Mark’s, and the only words she could make out were “Thank you” before the door clicked shut. She went to find clean clothes to put on and was only partially successful: a long-sleeved shirt but no bra, a pair of seemingly pristine jeans from the closet floor but no underpants. The jeans seemed rather large, and she wondered for a moment if they might be Mark’s, but they were not Mark’s. Barefoot, because the ordeal of finding clean socks felt so utterly beyond her, she went downstairs.

  John was in the kitchen, surveying the open cupboards above the sink. On the kitchen table sat a takeout bag from Tiger Noodles. She could smell it from across the room and was instantly ravenous.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” She was noncommittal.

  “I wasn’t honestly worried about you until I looked in the fridge,” he told her.

  “Ah.”

  “I was looking for something to cook for dinner. I wasn’t snooping.”

  “Sure.” She shrugged. “I haven’t been doing much cooking.”

  “Yes,” said John. “Or opening the fridge, I suspect.”

  She looked at the fridge. With its door closed, it looked perfectly normal. There was a gym class schedule from the previous summer stuck to the front with a magnet. She had no idea what was inside.

  “People don’t understand what reading season is like for us,” she said with determined nonchalance. “It’s a bunker mentality thing. We read, order in, read. Sometimes we change our clothes.” Portia laughed, but even to her own ears it sounded forced. “This is perfectly normal.”

  “Sure.” He nodded. “I hope I didn’t imply otherwise. I just thought it would be quicker to order in.”

  She thought: Quicker than what? But she thanked him and retrieved plates and silverware. Compared with other areas of the house, the kitchen was in relatively good shape. There were dishes in the sink, of course, but didn’t everyone have dishes in the sink? After a moment’s pause, she hoisted open the Sub-Zero’s door and found, amid the deeply suspicious perishables and desiccated remnants of former takeout meals, a pair of Corona beers, which she set on the table.

  “Thanks,” said John. “But I can’t.”

  “You don’t like beer?”

  “It doesn’t like me. I don’t drink anymore.”

  “Oh!” she said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s old news.”

  Portia put the bottles back in the fridge.

  “You can,” he told her. He was ladling shrimp Cantonese onto a plate. “It’s not a problem for me.”

  “No, it’s fine,” she said. “I have seltzer, I think.”

  He brought the food to the table and sat. “One of the more valuable lessons I learned at Dartmouth. That I couldn’t tolerate alcohol. It only took a year of waking up in my own vomit.”

  “You’re precocious.” She smiled. “Think how many Dartmouth men spend all four years waking up in their own vomit and never figure that out.”

  He laughed. “I never enjoyed it, either, that’s what’s truly strange about it. I didn’t like the getting drunk part, or the being drunk part, any more than I liked the aftermath. So I just stopped doing it. I think I was very lucky, actually, because if I’d kept going, I know I would have ended up with a real problem. I kind of nipped it in the bud.”

  “I suppose it must have curbed your social life in college,” she said, beginning to eat.

  He shrugged. “What’s social about being blitzed? When you’re that far gone, it’s antisocial by definition, isn’t it?”

  Portia nodded. “Weren’t you in Tom’s fraternity? I think you told me that.” She said this nonchalantly, but it didn’t feel nonchalant. Nothing about Tom was nonchalant, let alone this first tangible connection to him in over a decade. Suddenly, rather belatedly, the notion that John might know real things about Tom occurred to her, followed by the possibility that he was even directly in touch with Tom—e-mail, alumni association get-togethers, fall family weekends at Moosilauke, or just those annoying Christmas letters she was sure his wife inflicted on the world every December.

  Portia herself, of course, had the essentials down already. She knew precisely where Tom was and whom he’d married and what he did for a living. She knew that he had donated enough to Dartmouth to merit some sort of alumni award, and that he had finished a half marathon in Wellfleet with a time of 113 minutes, and that the Boston law practice where he had interned as a college student and was now a full partner specializing in medical malpractice had recently merged with a firm in Providence. She knew from the photograph on the Web site of that law firm that his thick blond hair was now less thick and that his hairline was in retreat, but that his brilliant grin and the old raffish tilt of his head were unchanged and not the tiniest portion drained of their potency. She knew that his wife had managed a clothing store in Newton before becoming a full-time mother to their three children, and she knew those children’s names: Ivy, Courtney, and Thomas III, known by his fond parents and everyone else (according to the online newsletter of the Dartmouth Class of ’91) as “Trey.” She declined to feel guilty about knowing these things. Every single woman on the planet with Internet access and a modicum of curiosity possessed the vital statistics of every man or woman she had loved, let go, been spurned by, come to loathe, or still longed for. Portia was not going to apologize for this, but she wasn’t going to admit it, either.

  “Sure. I haven’t seen him for ages. But I hear from him.”

  “Oh?” She chewed her food with what she hoped was a thoughtful expression.

  “Well, he manages a newsletter for Psi-U alums. He took all that pretty seriously.”

  “Yes,” she said noncommittally.

  “So I get the e-mails. Look,” he said, sighing, “I know there’s something here.”

  Portia looked up at him.

  “It’s a hot spot. I don’t need to talk about it, I just don’t want to pretend it isn’t there, and I don’t want to hurt you. From everything I know about Tom, he was probably a supreme asshole to you.”

  “Me among others,” she said, to let him know she didn’t consider herself special where Tom was concerned.

  “Sure. He was very nice to me, but I wasn’t a beautiful girl, which generally took me out of the
danger zone.”

  Portia looked down at her plate, momentarily charmed by the embedded compliment. She was surprised to see that she had already eaten a good deal. It had happened quickly and without making much of an impact.

  “You know that expression coup de foudre? French for falling madly in love with someone?”

  “Thunderbolt.” He nodded. “That was you and Tom?”

  “Well, it was me. I can’t explain it. I remember, vividly, the exact moment and the exact spot. It was on the Green. For years afterward, whenever I walked over that spot, I would feel something, physically.”

  He smiled. “Like hungry grass. In Ireland. You know?”

  Portia didn’t know.

  “Wherever someone died in the Irish famine, if you walk over that spot, over the earth where they died, you feel weakness and hunger. Or so say the bards.”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “Like that. I would be walking across the Green on my way to class, or talking with friends. Or even later, when I was supposedly a grown-up, professional woman, on my way to the Hanover Inn to talk to an alumni group, or one of our Ivy League conferences. I’d regress, totally, to that moment.” She laughed. “Remember the final scene of Carrie? When the hand shoots out of the earth and tries to pull her down? That was me. Minus the Amy Irving curls, alas.”

  “And the gore, I hope.” He cut the last egg roll and placed half democratically on her plate.

  “Oh, there was gore,” she said, sounding cryptic. “Lots and lots of gore. But not in the beginning. In the beginning it was…” She faltered. She shouldn’t be able to remember how it was, so far back, through the bitter fallout and the long years with Mark, not to mention the more recent history and reverberating presence of John Halsey. Pinned to earth by the long arm of the first man she had loved, so long ago, and never able to quite get upright, let alone truly walk away. It was pathetic, she knew, but it would be more pathetic if she had not made such a facsimile of continuing her life. She sometimes tested herself by conjuring Tom—on her airplane, in her restaurant, sauntering into an information session in Clio Hall with Ivy or Courtney or Thomas-known-as-Trey. He would be frowning at her as he tried to place her features or, worse, skim past her, completely blank. And she would always be shocked and speechless, her pulse rattling and her face shamefully wet. She was never ready for him, never once. She would never be ready.