There was a space on Witherspoon, miraculous, in front of Small World, but the whiff of satisfaction was short-lived. Even as Portia twisted to unbuckle her seat belt, she caught the shape, and then the eye, of Mark, emerging from the coffee shop, followed by the protruding midsection of a similarly recognizable woman. It was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen or wasn’t there. He looked, to his credit, similarly appalled, but Helen went on, impervious, her brittle little mouth moving, though mercifully silent through the car window. Mark stood frozen, half looking at Portia, half listening to Helen, who waved about one bony hand. A left hand, Portia noted. That wore a glittering ring.
Portia threw herself out of the car and scurried up the street side of the parked cars, annoying drivers. There was slush on the ground and on the stone path crossing in front of Nassau Hall, the very place she had stopped, only two days before, when somebody called her name: before pregnant Helen and frozen Mark, and the night, and the drive, and the dinner party and the story of the train and the unexpected grace of the lovemaking. Before the possibility of Jeremiah, who now that the fact of him was only steps ahead seemed almost material beside her, silently keeping pace with her along the walkway.
She pushed open the door to West College and shed her coat as she took the stairs, wet boots slapping the steps. There were others here, behind their closed or ajar doors, who registered her passing but did not exactly look up. She went first to the pending files on the shelf over her desk, but she knew perfectly well it wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere in her office. It was already gone, in that last group sent to Corinne for a second reading. Portia sat at her desk and stared ahead, at the outdated gym schedule and the Oldest Living Graduate. Also, the poem by Sylvia Plath that Rachel had given her once, years before, as a joke, she supposed.
“The Applicant”
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty.
Portia looked, illogically, at her own hands. Empty? Empty. Then, taken by a new idea, she got to her feet and rushed out into the corridor and downstairs, passing through the small lobby to the office, normally a hive at eight a.m., but not on a Sunday. Martha, though, was at her desk, wielding her signature letter opener—a brass instrument with a sharp point at the business end—against a stack of bulky mailers: CDs and art portfolios from applicants, research papers, novels in progress, unsolicited letters from classmates, congressmen, coaches, friends of the family who had once attended Princeton. Even this late.
Martha looked up and waved. “You’re here early.”
“Not earlier than you. Are we getting mail on Sunday now?”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “I never finished yesterday’s. Do you think they really believe we can read an entire novel? Or are we just supposed to weigh it?”
“I don’t know,” said Portia.
“It kind of gets to me,” said Martha. “Tell me something. Do they really look at this stuff? In creative writing?”
“Of course,” said Portia. “They may not read every word of a five-hundred-page manuscript, but they do look. Usually, a look is enough.”
Martha nodded. “So if one of these is actually hundreds of pages of ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,’ you’d know about it?”
“Yeah,” said Portia. “I don’t think you need to worry about Jack Nicholson coming through the door with an ax.”
“I’m not worried,” Martha said, brandishing her miniature brass sword. “Why do you think I’m never without my letter opener? You okay? You look awful.”
The shift was so abrupt that Portia lost the wherewithal to take offense.
“Do I? I’m sorry.”
“What are you apologizing for?” said Martha, looking actually more concerned. “I told Clarence to hire more readers this year. He said he would, but somewhere between the mouth and the brain… you know what he’s like.”
No, she realized suddenly. She didn’t know what he was like. This thought alarmed her. “I’m not behind,” she said, which she hoped was the point.
“No, I’m not suggesting. And it’s fine for the younger ones. They just drink more of those Bull drinks, with the caffeine. Dylan’s going through them by the case. But for you, and Clarence, and Corinne.”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, relieved. Concerns for her physical state were almost a welcome distraction. That Martha remained so wonderfully ignorant of her actual condition came as an unexpected boon. “In fact, I got away a bit over the weekend. So actually, if anything, I’ve been kind of slacking off.”
Martha, for her part, looked unconvinced. “Well, Portia, I’m sorry to have to say this, but you don’t seem very rested to me. If you take my advice, which of course you won’t, you’ll reconsider spending the day in the office and go home and sleep.”
Portia fought a brief wave of irritation. Martha had worked here for years, since before she herself had joined the office. They had always been at least cordial and at most actually affectionate. Probably, they had had conversations just like this in the past, perhaps many of them. But today, and despite the clear accuracy of Martha’s observations and the suitability of her advice, Portia wanted to hit her, or at least walk away. Instead, and after the briefest possible interlude, she gathered herself, produced a facsimile of a smile, and said: “God, I would love that. But you know, I’m really okay. I’m going to work this morning, then I’ll go home. But this is the deal I made with myself, you know, for taking yesterday off. So,” she went on, attempting to block whatever Martha’s next objection might be, “I’m looking for that batch I left Corinne on Thursday.”
“Thursday… ,” Martha considered.
“It’s just,” she said, utterly unnecessarily, “I wanted to check something.”
“Thursday…” Martha frowned. “She took a lot home with her for the weekend. I don’t know if they were yours or first reads. Want me to call her?”
“No,” Portia said a bit too shortly. “No, it can wait. She’s a quick read.”
Though she wasn’t, really. Not quick enough.
“Anything I can help you with?”
Portia shook her head. She was entertaining a pointless fantasy, in which despite the very conversation that had just taken place, she would walk calmly to her box and find the single folder she wanted to find, miraculously separated from the multitudes of superficially identical folders, and placidly open it to find the reader’s card, marked with her own blue ballpoint print, and now, beside that, with Corinne’s favorite brown felt-tip and tight little script: “Agree with first reader? Disagree?” She often disagreed. She would disagree now, Portia was certain. What would she do when Corinne disagreed?
“If you’re determined to work… ,” Martha said helpfully. She nodded at the table where the ill-conceived brownies, cakes, and vegan power bars had earlier been displayed. It was now a groaning board of files, stacked in uniform heights, bound by rubber bands, decorated by Post-it notes. “This is you,” she said, gesturing at the nearest pile. It was Corinne’s. Ready for second reads. “She left it off before she went home on Friday.”
“Ah. Good,” said Portia with disproportionate heartiness. She scooped up the stack. “Well, if I don’t come out by tomorrow, send the sniffer dogs.”
“I’ll send Jack Nicholson,” said Martha, returning to her mailers.
Portia trudged upstairs with the folders. Her arms ached from them, and her legs and back, and she felt, as she rose and rose, the profound physical impact of her two nights of lost sleep and all that had taken place between them. In her office, she let them drop heavily on the desktop, sat down, and simply stared at them, bleary-eyed and depleted. She thoug
ht of nothing, and then of random, disconnected things: the Edie Sedgwick biography, and Deborah’s curling red hair, and Jeremiah’s long arms, and Rachel’s dog, increasingly arthritic and—even she could tell—addled in mind. She thought of Helen’s convex belly and Mark’s look of great discomfort, and the furnace John had reset so easily, and the tall notched stones she had once seen in Ireland years ago, on vacation with Mark, and realized for the first time that she had stored this particular little memory because the stones—ogham stones, they were called—were so very like the tall stacks of files that filled and marked her life. She remembered the field, but not where in Ireland it was, and their rental car pulled not far enough off the road, so that the drivers of two passing cars, forced to carve a semicircle around it, had sent vaguely hostile grunts in their direction—tourists, obviously. Who else would trudge up an incline, evading scattered sheep shit, to look at rocks some long-gone person had chipped into some lost meaning? The ogham cuts were an ancient, ritualistic language from the Celts, the notches meaning numbers or letters, perhaps a calendar. Like a bar code, it suddenly occurred to her. Or the data of thousands of seventeen-year-olds, compacted to a language of bytes.
She sat up straight in her chair and touched the space bar of her computer. The university screen saver evaporated, and she was offered the usual log-in box. She typed her password and entered the system, evading the ninety-four messages accrued since Friday, wonderfully impervious to everything else, because the distance between not knowing and knowing was contracting and the answer drawing nearer with each stroke of her fingertips. Of course, she might have had this information days ago, luxuriously alone, with the application itself in her very hands, but she hadn’t known to look, and how could that be her fault? She might have done what she was doing now much earlier, the very moment she arrived this morning, saving herself the all too accurate scrutiny of Martha, who now knew there was something very wrong with her. She might have gone home and done it there, from her home computer, in even greater privacy. That none of these possibilities had occurred to her made her irritated and then a little giddy, because she was flying through the system now, and her hands were moving rapidly on the keys, and rapidly through the vast orbit of letters and numbers, and the software that sorted, codified, and clamped them together. She wanted only a few of these letters and numbers.
“Balakian,” she wrote, but in her haste misspelled the name. She typed, “Jeremiah,” and there were many. First names, middle names, even last names. “Balakian, Jeremiah Vartan.” She opened the data file and made herself read by internal metronome and in rigid order: “Name.” “Address.” “School.” She knew this already. “Place of Birth.” She knew this, too. She had seen it before, but it had made no impact. Why, she railed at herself, had it made no impact? “Date of Birth.”
She closed the data file. Then she closed her eyes.
First, are you our sort of a person? She had to wonder if she herself even was a sort of person, and had a sort of person, and if so, what they would be. Dishonest? Obscure? Defined by missing things? But I love him, she thought now, as if this were the most important point to be making. Surely there has never been a question of that. Because he was the single real thing in her life, and it was everything else that felt finally ill defined. And her own life had gathered itself around this empty space, which had finally found itself an occupant, with heft and color and texture. Of course, that occupant was him: the applicant who both was and absolutely was not Jeremiah Vartan Balakian.
PART III
VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO
I don’t remember a time when my father was not living under the cloud of cancer. Diagnosed when I was in kindergarten, he has battled his way through surgeries, radiation therapies, and increasingly experimental chemotherapies. There are times when I feel very privileged, because I know that he is in the care of excellent doctors at a cutting edge cancer center, and I know that no one on earth is getting better treatment than he is today. But I also feel terrible frustration that, despite so much effort and funding, we have still not cracked the problem of a single little cell growing out of control.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A THING FOR JEWISH GIRLS
One October evening, on the precise patch of the Dartmouth College Green that John Halsey would years later compare, in its lasting effect, to Irish hungry grass, Portia Nathan was hit by a rogue lacrosse ball and swiftly knocked out. Afterward, she would regret that the scenario had not been a bit more elegant. All of the right elements were there: innocent girl, athletic (presumably attractive) boy, graceful loss of consciousness segueing to graceful reestablishment of consciousness. It didn’t happen that way. True, the night was clear and crisp, and she was wearing a floaty Indian shirt that had (until that night, when it was more or less destroyed) been one of her favorites, and her hair that fall had never been longer, straighter, shinier. True, she was about to gain the uninterrupted attention of the person she would spend the next several years hoping to attract, and then retain, and then reattract. But the actual event was humiliatingly coarse.
The lacrosse ball did not, for one thing, hit her in some delicate location—the back of the head, perhaps, or the shoulder—but square in the eye. And her unconsciousness ended not with a Sleeping Beauty–like stretch and purr, but with an upright jolt and a hearty spasm of vomit, hitting directly the boy who leaned over her, a dark head in a halo of moonlight.
The Greek chorus of her classmates, who rushed to gather around her, produced involuntary sounds of disgust and then, like the well-brought-up citizens they were, withdrew to a more circumspect distance. Only the boy himself and his two fellow lacrosse players stayed with her, and the girl Portia happened to have been standing beside when the fateful ball made contact. By the time the paramedics arrived, she was more or less upright, sticky with blood, vomit, and the fluid from her wildly painful right eye, which she instinctively kept covered with her hand. The other eye, which mercilessly recorded her attentive audience of fascinated classmates and her own very disagreeable physical disarray (not the least part of which was the fact that she had come to a sitting position with her legs splayed far apart and couldn’t seem to figure out how to bring them together), took refuge in the strangely calming vision of a monogram on the boy’s white shirt—TSW—etched in dignified maroon and only a little spattered with the recent contents of her stomach.
This occasion was—so ironically—the very one that had formed her initial attachment to Dartmouth: the annual building of the class bonfire, an autumn ritual for the freshmen to bond and socialize and display their superiority to all previous classes by making their chimney of railroad ties one tier higher than the year before. The lumber had been dropped off days earlier near the center of the Green, and a small group of planners and worker bees had taken charge of it, mapping out the structure and directing the labor, doing the actual work while others gathered round, chatting and socializing as the tower rose. All week the class had filtered through, climbing the ladder of wood to hoist a tie or two or remaining earthbound to hoist a beer. Groups sat on the grass during the day and shivered in standing groups at night, exchanging that basic information they had been exchanging now, for weeks, and were all growing sick of but somehow still fixated upon: What’s your name? Where are you from? What dorm are you in? Where else did you apply? Portia herself had done her part a few days earlier, when the bonfire was only as high as her head and the freshman girls on her floor had gone as a group. Since then, she had passed through once or twice a day, sometimes at night, amused and a tiny bit proud to find herself within the very tableau that had brought her here in the first place.
It was not, of course, a noble business to throw up in front of an audience, but even so, the reaction was surprisingly visceral. Hypocritical, too, given the drunken desecrations of Fraternity Row and the omnipresent odors in the bathrooms of her all-female dormitory. Even so, Portia and her involuntary emission that night would attain the status of mi
nor legend within their class, and largely because just about everyone got to witness the outcome (the vomit, in other words) while few had witnessed the mitigating fact of the lacrosse ball hitting her in the eye and knocking her out. She would, she suspected even then, adding tears of shame to the other bodily fluids in play, forever be that girl who passed out beside the bonfire and blew chunks over everyone, a cautionary tale, surely, of a young innocent away from home and meeting the scarlet A-for-Alcohol for the first time. She would share her sad lot with the girl who never washed her hair through the fall term, wore shorts through the snow all winter, and disappeared in the spring, never to be seen again, and the first boy to drink himself sick in Fayerweather Hall during Freshman Week, who happily accepted the honorary lifetime nickname of “Boot” as a result (that scarlet A-for-Alcohol having not quite the negative quality for men that it had for women).
Still, the news wasn’t all bleak. Portia had a couple of things going for her that night, first and foremost the darkness (since what man-made illumination there was at the center of the college Green was focused on the rising tower of railroad ties and not on her). Afterward, there wouldn’t be many of the hundred or so witnesses who could have picked her out of a crowd without the helpful additions of tears and vomit. Also fortunate was the fact that Portia had not, until that moment, made much of an impression on her classmates, and therefore few already knew who the effluent-covered freshman actually was. Once the incident had been mined for socialization value (Omigod, that’s so disgusting! So, what’s your name? Where are you from? etc., etc.), the assembled did tend to move on to other topics.
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