When it happened to her, she drank nothing. She had done that much for him.
And he was brilliant. Eccentric, of course, but brilliant. Where had that come from? Not Tom, surely, who was smart in a plodding, capable way. Not from her. Susannah was bright but scattered, Tom’s parents had been so closed off to her that she had no sense of what they thought, let alone how. The person she had always thought of as I’m OK—You’re OK couldn’t have had that much to contribute to Jeremiah, could he? Unless… what if he had been some sociologist or critic, preparing a blistering lecture on pop psychology for the idiot masses? For the first time in days, Portia felt her face contract in a strained approximation of a smile. Was it not the height of narcissism to suggest that of the hundreds of thousands of vapid Americans who read that very book that very year, her biological father was the only one to read it for the purposes of scholarly vivisection?
Perhaps she was getting a little better.
To test this theory, Portia sat up in bed, clutching her own knees, which, she observed, were still clad in the jeans she had worn to Pennsylvania. They were slack with wear, undeniably grimy, and it occurred to her that it must be strange that she was wearing them at all, and also strange that she hadn’t noticed the strangeness before. This is how depressed people behave, she suddenly thought, taking a mental step back to scrutinize the cross-legged person in the center of her slovenly nest. But the thought of being depressed made her smile again. She had never thought of herself as a depressive person. Depressive people rent their garments and howled in grief and took to their beds… well, like this. But had she ever felt, actually, depressed? She was a contained person, that was all. Even-keeled. Perhaps a little judgmental, but who could fault her for that? She judged for a living, didn’t she, and it was ingrained, and she was a responsible representative of whatever it was she represented. She wasn’t like Mark, who had had low periods, usually related to Cressida and the spiteful whims of his ex. Or her mother—Portia could see now that those last years in Northampton, Susannah had not been her habitual steamroller self, that something had left her household and her life when Portia departed for college, a slowly deflating balloon where the familiar person had once been. Susannah had indeed been depressed, Portia supposed. Maybe for a long time. Maybe until that phone call only a few months earlier and her crazy idea about taking in this mother and baby and just possibly starting the whole thing over again. I’m not like that, Portia thought fiercely, even as a fresh reminder of grief came rolling through her. She meant, she wasn’t like that in life—her real, actual life. She wasn’t a whiner or a self-flagellant or given to dramatic plunges like… well, again, like this one. The tearful thing she might be now, the thing made up of useless limbs and a brain that refused to make thoughts—it wasn’t really her. It wasn’t going to be her—please, please—for much longer, let alone forever.
She decided, in a very clinical way—as you might prescribe a course of supplements for some detected deficiency—to think of the last time she had felt happy, and she found, to ever growing distress, that she was feeling her way further and further back. Past the years with Mark and the various contentments therein, and the walks with Rachel, and the visits home to Susannah, always careful not to show her hand, holding back, always holding back, and the pleasure of doing her job well, and how she liked her house, or would surely like her house when it transmogrified, at some unknowable point in the future, into a home. She thought of endorphin highs, the heady combinations of good talk and good food at the tables of their friends—tables, she could not help but notice, that she had not seen since Mark’s departure. She thought of how good it felt when they—when the admissions officers from the Ivy League and the other most selective colleges—had their meetings, nominally to build the fences that kept things neighborly, but somehow also to fan their mutual flame: find the great kids, the ones who dreamed and toiled and took nothing for granted, and bring them here, and give them what they need, and watch them change the world. Mark, when she had brought him along to one of these conferences (only once, and many years before), had shaken his head as they drove back to Hanover and said, “You’re all such do-gooders.”
And she had laughed, unsure of whether to take offense or be flattered. This was not news to her, of course. The newest admissions officers spoke only of what they dreamed of unearthing in some inner-city school or depressed, abandoned town. The older guard grew filmy eyed recounting the young doctors and engineers and novelists whose Cornell or Yale education had changed—no, made—their lives. That this rosy-hued altruism existed in direct contrast with the public face of the Ivy League admissions officer—which was something akin to the Witch in Snow White or the pompous and dismissive Professor Charles Kingsfield of The Paper Chase—only added to the perverse satisfaction of the matter. Portia actually knew several colleagues who had indeed chosen college admissions instead of the Peace Corps or VISTA or, more recently, Teach for America (itself a product of Princeton, or at least one Princeton student’s senior thesis). Make the world better: her mother’s never actually articulated life philosophy. And Portia had done that, she had, though Susannah herself had never gleaned or at least never acknowledged the connection. She had been stuck, eternally stuck, on the notion that Portia toiled in service to elitism and exclusivity, that her work was to preserve some antiquated ideal of American success as the exclusive property of already privileged white men. Susannah had been addled by the undeniable wealth of first Dartmouth and then Princeton, as if it were shameful for an educational institution to have too much money. She had convinced herself that her daughter, raised so carefully to make everything right with the world, was in thrall to some imagined power trip of saying no and no and no and no, over and over again, all the while unclipping the velvet rope to motion inside the sons and daughters of suburban stockbrokers and generous alumni. At first, Portia had done her best to persuade her mother that admissions work was part of the solution, not a shoring up of the system itself. She’d explained to Susannah that elite universities were hot spots of social mobility, that admission to a Dartmouth or a Princeton could provide in four years what might have required generations a century before, and that the beneficiaries of these shining opportunities had every intention of aiding their communities, using their intellectual abilities to fix the problems that affected everyone, and serving as role models for others who followed. Where, exactly, was the problem in all this? But Susannah had clung to her own barricades, and after the first few years, Portia had surrendered: Fine, fine. I’m a maidservant to the patriarchy, a hapless flunky for the myopic American aristocracy, fanning the flames of its elitist institutions so that future slacker generations can raise their kids in a gated community or play a round at the Maidstone Club, just as they’ve been doing since the first Pilgrim bottom landed smack on Plymouth Rock.
And yet. And yet. It might just possibly be time to cede the moral high ground, Portia thought dimly, observing the white knuckles of her oddly bony hands, which were indeed offputtingly spectral. I have been as stubborn as she was. And besides, there wasn’t much to be proud of in the scene she currently set: woman alone, in the middle of her bed, in the middle of the day, in the middle of her life. Or perhaps not quite alone, as someone was apparently downstairs, alternately knocking at the front door and pushing the doorbell, which had long emitted a weakened chime.
Portia looked resentfully in this general direction.
Alone, moreover, had not been thrust upon her, but chosen—she saw this now so clearly, she wondered that it had never occurred to her before—within her relationship with Mark and beyond, in the people she had firmly pushed away, beginning with her own child and following on with friends, colleagues, and now with the man who had miraculously emerged, long past the time she deserved love, offering what felt astoundingly like love. All of that energy, she shook her head, spent keeping people out, just so that she could maintain this enviable solitude.
The person downstair
s seemed disinclined to leave. The doorbell rang again, and the knocking continued. They must be thick, she thought irritably. She had half a mind to leave her bed and go downstairs and tell them, whoever they were, how thick they were, or if not thick, then rude, because wasn’t this a clarion-clear no? And did they not understand the meaning of no?
Then, to her great surprise, she heard a key roll in the lock and the door swing open.
“Portia?… Portia?” The voice was shrill and laced with fear.
It was Rachel.
“I’m upstairs,” said Portia, but the sound barely emerged.
“Portia?”
“Here!” she managed, like child answering attendance.
“I’m coming up.”
A moment later she appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, anger rapidly replacing relief. “I’ve been calling for days,” said Rachel. “Portia, do you have any idea how worried I was?”
Obviously no, thought Portia, but it seemed rude to say this.
“We’re starting committee,” she said, suddenly realizing that this was, in fact, the case. But when? Tomorrow? Today? Had she already missed a meeting?
“Oh, bullshit. Look at yourself. You look like fucking Howard Hughes.”
Despite herself, Portia laughed. “Thanks.”
“And this house.”
“I’ve gotten a little behind in my cleaning routine.”
Rachel glared at her.
“You have a key to my house,” Portia observed.
“No. But I know where you hide your spare. And I was worried enough to use it. Clarence Porter called me this morning.”
She was suddenly very, very alert. “Oh?”
“He wanted to know if I’d heard from you. He said you weren’t responding to e-mails and calls. Are you trying to get fired?”
Was she? Portia thought. And the answer surprised her: Not yet.
“No, I just… I’ve been down with the flu. As you see,” she said, sounding slightly accusatory. “And I went to Pennsylvania.”
Rachel stared at her. She was well dressed for a rescue mission: neat black pantsuit, leather boots with a modest heel. She looked as if she were going to an office or coming from an office, if it was that day of the week and that time of the day. What time was it? What day was it?
She was about to ask what day it was when it came to her that she really could not do that and maintain the illusion of well-being.
“I’ve been sleeping,” she said instead.
“Portia, I don’t know how much of this you’ve heard. I know you’re upset. You don’t have to do this alone, you know. You have friends.”
What? She frowned. There was a “this”? “I’m not sure,” she said carefully.
“Of course you do. My relationship with Mark will never be the same, but I do have to deal with him. And I have to deal with Helen, which kills me, because she’s a royal bitch. And I think they’ve both behaved terribly, but you know? It’s done. And you couldn’t possibly want him back.”
“Back?” Portia stared at her. “I don’t want him back.”
Rachel sat on the edge of the bed. “Good. I know I’m not supposed to be glad about the wedding, but I am. I was dreading it.”
This statement was so baffling that Portia found she had to replay it in her brain before responding, but to no avail.
“I thought you didn’t like them,” she told Rachel. “Why are you glad about the wedding?”
“Canceling the wedding,” said Rachel, twisting a long lock of curling brown hair around her finger. “I thought I was going to have to put Sea-Bands on my wrists, like when I was pregnant, to keep from getting nauseous in the church.”
“Rachel,” said Portia, almost unkindly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rachel eyed her. “No?”
“No.”
“Which part?” she asked.
“Which part?” said Portia, completely lost.
“You knew they were getting married, right?”
Did she? Portia thought distractedly. She supposed she did. Though she hadn’t known about an actual wedding. Who would tell her?
“I guess.”
“It was supposed to be last weekend. Saturday morning,” said Rachel. “In the chapel, reception at Prospect. But Gordon Sternberg died.”
“He did?” said Portia.
“I guess you missed that, too. They found him on the street in Philadelphia. One of the great scholars of his generation. Author of fourteen major works of criticism on English literature. In a doorway in Kensington, holding a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey. It’s incredible. I mean, how did it happen? He supervised my dissertation, you know.”
“Yes, of course,” said Portia. “I’m very sorry.”
She waved her thin hand vaguely in the air. “No. I don’t deserve condolences. None of us do. Gordon went down in flames, and we couldn’t help him, but we should all have kept trying. And Mark—you know, they called him Thursday night to come down and identify the body. I guess he just felt it wasn’t right to go ahead with a wedding. Gordon actually had his funeral there, when the wedding was supposed to take place. At the chapel.”
Portia nodded. On Saturday morning, when Mark, unbeknownst to her, was to have been married, and Gordon Sternberg, unbeknownst to her, had instead been eulogized, she had been driving south with her lover and her son. Isn’t it crazy? she thought. That I have a lover? That I have a son? She almost asked this out loud.
“That was good of Mark,” she said instead. “To cancel. It was the right thing to do.”
“I know,” Rachel said gruffly. “Though I’m still too angry at him to want to think well of him.”
“Don’t be angry,” Portia heard herself say. “I don’t think things were really right between us. I kept things from him. I shouldn’t have. I’m responsible, too.”
Rachel said nothing, and Portia was forced to look up at her. She rested on her hip, braced by one hand on the mattress. She was waiting for Portia to say more. What things had she kept from him? for example. What things weren’t right? But Portia, having given so much away, felt suddenly very, very exhausted.
“They’re still getting married, though,” she observed. “I assume?”
“Yes. Sure. They went down to Trenton yesterday morning and did it there. Thank goodness I wasn’t invited to that. Nobody was, I think. Just as well. I get that they need to do it. Legally, for immigration and the baby. But if it’s any comfort to you, I don’t think he’s particularly happy.”
“That’s not a comfort,” said Portia, laughing awkwardly. She was trying to absorb the fact that Mark was married. Finally married. He had not married Marcie, the mother of Cressida, the woman who had spent the past sixteen years punishing him—perhaps for that very thing. He had not married Portia. He had married Helen.
But the clerk’s office in Trenton would not have been open on a Sunday, which meant that yesterday must have been a Monday. Which meant that she had been here, in this bed, for nearly three days. No wonder the office was coming for her.
“What did Clarence say?” she asked Rachel.
“Only had I been in touch with you, because you hadn’t come into the office and you weren’t answering the home phone. So then I got scared because you weren’t answering my calls, either. I thought maybe you were really down about the wedding. So I came rushing over here as soon as my class was over.”
Class, thought Portia. The mystery of her friend’s professional attire was laid to rest. It meant that while she had lain here, life had continued, work had continued, weddings and funerals had taken place. Only she had stood still.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I have to go in to work,” she said sharply.
“But you’re sick,” said Rachel, reaching for her shoulder.
“But I’m going to be fine,” said Portia, because she was.
My biggest inspiration is my little cousin Sandra, who is afflicted with Down Syndrome. Sandra has a sun
ny disposition and loves to be silly. When I babysit for her, we can spend hours making cookies or playing Old Maid, and she is wonderful company. But sometimes I look at her not as a loving cousin but as a future biology major and physician. In my life as a doctor, I will work to find a cure for Down Syndrome, so that other children will not be held back the way she has been. If I can’t find a way to use my talents to give back to my community, then I will feel that I have failed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SHORT STORIES
Admission Page 47
