The Admissions

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  “Of course I do,” said Nora. Her words sounded like someone had trimmed them with nail scissors right before they left her mouth.

  “I’d been watching you all night.”

  Despite herself, Nora felt a little rupture of pride. “You had?”

  “Of course. It was impossible not to watch you. You were so beautiful, you were like some exotic mermaid. You had all that hair. You were laughing so hard with your friend, swinging around your hair—”

  “Colleen,” said Nora. “My neighbor. I’d never been out with her before. She was hilarious.” She smiled at the memory, and then she remembered she was busy finding out that her husband had lied about something major, so she stopped smiling.

  Gabe reached out for her hand, but she pulled it away. She couldn’t. “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I thought I’d just talk to you that night, have a good time.”

  “Why didn’t you think you would see me again?” Nearly two decades later, ridiculously, Nora was hurt. “Didn’t you want to?”

  “Of course I wanted to. But I didn’t think I would. I thought you were too good for me. You were so pretty, and so confident. I had just moved out here, I was living in that shithole in the Mission, trying to find a job. I was struggling. I couldn’t even afford to buy you a drink. I remember that I was really embarrassed about that. So we were talking, and you misheard me, it was really loud in the bar, and you thought I said Harvard.”

  “I thought you said Harvard? And what did you really say?”

  “I said ‘hard work.’ ”

  “Hard work?”

  “About living on a ranch. You said you thought it would be fun to live on a ranch, and I said it was fun sometimes but it was also a lot of hard work, and you said you had gone to the University of Rhode Island, and you called me Ivy League boy, and that’s when I realized what you thought I said. My buddy had just made that fake diploma for a joke, because he was working on all kinds of shady stuff, who even knows, but it got in my head that it would be fun to play the part, for just one night.”

  Nora chewed hard on her lower lip. She tasted blood.

  “The thing is, Nora, you should have seen the way your eyes lit up when you thought I said Harvard. You said, ‘I think I’ve heard of it,’ really playing it cool, but you were impressed. That had a lot to do with it.”

  Nora held up her hand like a traffic cop. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you dare put this on me.”

  “It was just for one night, just for fun. You have to believe me.”

  “But it wasn’t,” said Nora coldly. “Apparently.” Her glass was empty too. Gabe refilled it from the bottle. She felt the same searing warmth she’d experienced at Arthur’s house but none of the well-being.

  “It turned into more. But I only meant it to be for one night. But I had been applying for jobs all over the place, and something came up at Elpis right after that. Remember, your friend Colleen had a connection there, to one of the founders? She asked for my résumé, she wanted to give it to them. She said they wanted someone with a pedigree. She said Harvard was a draw for them. So then I was in a bind, because I was halfway into it—and I thought, what the hell? Why not? If it could impress you like that…”

  “Don’t.”

  “So I put it on my résumé, I had to, because of Colleen, because she was there that night. I never thought it would go anywhere, Nora. It was just a joke! They called me for an interview, and I aced it. Like I’d never aced anything in my life. I was on fire.”

  “I remember,” said Nora. “We went out for a drink after, to celebrate.”

  “That’s right. The Little Shamrock. In Inner Sunset.”

  “I love that place,” said Nora softly. “Right across from Golden Gate Park.” They hadn’t been there for years. It was a great little bar, not in the least bit trendy, older than old-school, with mismatched plush chairs and stacks of board games all over the place. Home to midafternoon alcoholics. She and Gabe had played a rousing game of backgammon. Gabe beat her.

  “I know why I aced it,” said Gabe. “Because when I walked in there I walked like a Harvard graduate, and I talked like a Harvard graduate. I was unstoppable. I wasn’t faking it! I knew my stuff.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course I did. My whole life isn’t a lie, Nora. Just one thing.”

  “Pretty big thing.”

  Gabe continued with his story without acknowledging the truth of that. “And they hired me. And, well, obviously, I’ve been there ever since.”

  “I just don’t understand how it’s possible, to fake something like that. In an interview, maybe. But to me? In our everyday life? I just don’t see it.”

  Actually she was beginning to see.

  This was why they’d never been to a college reunion for Gabe; in fact, now that Nora thought about it, they’d never even received information about a college reunion. She’d never given it much thought because she herself did not care about such things. She had never been to any of her college reunions.

  That’s why Michael turned against Gabe. Gabe told him what he’d done, back when he first did it. He thought Michael might be impressed with what he’d gotten away with. But he was disgusted. By then Gabe had started working at Elpis, was dating Nora, carving out his life. The lie was in motion, unstoppable.

  “I thought it was because of the high school girlfriend, what was her name? That Michael stopped talking to you.”

  “Lauren. No, it wasn’t because of Lauren.”

  Nora had also moved far away from everyone she went to college with. Sure, maybe when they were younger people talked about college, played the do-you-know-Bob-Smith-he-graduated-one-year-later game at dinner parties. But at some point that all stopped. And it would be easy, if one so chose, to perpetuate a lie. At some point where you went to college was just where you went, a four-year chapter in your ancient history book. It didn’t really matter.

  Except that now, of course, it did.

  “Wait,” she said. “If you lied about that, what else have you lied about? Did you really write your college application essay about the stillborn calf?”

  “Of course I did,” said Gabe. He ran his fingers through his hair and held his glass so that it rested on his knee. Gabe had thick, beautiful hair; he looked, truly, not so different from how he’d looked that night at The Little Shamrock, bent over the backgammon board, elated because his interview at Elpis had gone so well. He still looked good in the cowboy hat he kept on a back shelf of his closet and trotted out every Halloween. “I swear to God, Nora, nothing else. The thing is, yes, I lied to you when I met you, and I lied when I got the job at Elpis. But it doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change anything I’ve done since then.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?” She felt herself yielding, but then she hardened again.

  “No. It doesn’t.” He put the glass on the floor, straightened, and became the Gabe she knew, capable and confident, partner at Elpis Consulting. (Despite herself she was glad to see he had some fight left.) “Some diploma didn’t oversee the last four business turnarounds at Elpis. I did. Didn’t buy us this house.”

  “I bought us at least half this house,” said Nora.

  “True,” he said. “You did.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Believe me, Nora, I’ve thought about this a lot. I think about it all the time. All the time, especially lately, believe me. What that”—he cleared his throat—“decision—”

  “Lie,” she interjected.

  “Fine. What that lie did was open doors for me. The rest of it I did myself. The life we built here, the community we’re in, we did that together.”

  “Bullshit.” That didn’t sound like her voice, but it was.

  He reared back at that as though she’d reached right across the room and struck him. Then he recovered. “And you have to understand—you have to—that that’s why I wanted this so badly for Angela, Harvard.”

  “What do you mean?�
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  “Because I saw for myself what that degree can do for a person. I saw it probably more than people who actually had it, because I knew what it was like on the other end. You know how many times my résumé didn’t get picked up because I went to a state school? Too many times to count.” Gabe slid off the straight-backed chair and sank down until he was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his knees pulled to his chest. He no longer looked capable and confident. He looked old and broken. He covered his face with his hands, and again he began to cry.

  Almost—almost!—Nora felt sorry for him. She handed him a tissue from the box on the desk and he blew his nose. The whole scene would have been comical had Nora not been so irate and bewildered.

  Gabe gulped and wiped at his nose in what Nora thought was a decidedly unmanly way and went on: “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair. She’s so smart. She should have gotten in. I wanted it so badly for her, Nora. So badly. She worked so hard for so long. I wanted her to get in. I wanted all those doors to open for her, the way they did for me.”

  “Well, she didn’t.” Nora crossed her arms over her chest.

  “I know,” said Gabe morosely. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  Nora gazed at the ceiling. In one corner, where the ceiling met the wall, she could see a crack. That, she knew, would be called out in a home inspection if they ever sold this house. It could signify nothing, or it could signify a legitimate problem. Maybe the house (like their life) was going to crumble around them.

  Not everything that caused a life to fall apart measured on the Richter scale.

  There was an officious little voice gearing up in the back of her head. Don’t forget to tell him about your job, said the voice. She ignored it.

  “I still don’t understand, Gabe. How you could keep something like this going for so long. So long!”

  It was easier than he ever would have guessed. Gabe explained how, once he’d fabricated a history for himself, he started to believe it. Taking Angela to the football game when she was small, walking around Cambridge when they went back to New England to see Nora’s family. He began to inhabit the lie. He inhaled it! He felt like he’d gone to Harvard: in his mind, he turned into an honest-to-God Harvard graduate. He chose a freshman dorm for himself (Canaday Hall), and an imaginary roommate (William Bell II, from New Canaan, Connecticut, sort of an asshole, definitely a frat boy in training, but he brought a good stereo so that was a bonus). Gabe started to cry again. “It was just a snowball. I couldn’t stop it. We had this one great kid, and we bought the house, and then we had another, and then another, and what was I going to do? Go tell the HR department so they could fire me and we could lose it all?”

  Then, when it became apparent how bright Angela was, what a future she had ahead of her, well, it seemed like the right thing to do. To groom her for it, to buy her a tiny crimson sweatshirt, to show her what his parents had never been able to or cared to show him, that the world was her oyster. “And then she got obsessed with it, she started talking like it was what she really wanted, and when she outgrew the first sweatshirt she wanted another one. I thought it could be my penance, for lying. To help her, to do everything I could to get her something I never had.”

  “When are you going to tell Angela?”

  Nora watched Gabe’s mouth crumple in a way that made him look one hundred and four years old, like a man in a nursing home who had to be given soft food with a spoon.

  Then quietly he said, “I can’t.” His mouth resolved into its normal self—the strong jaw, Cecily’s jaw—and he shook his head briskly. “No,” he said again. “I can’t.”

  “But she put on her application that her father is an alum! Gabe! She lied on her application. You don’t think they figured that out? You don’t think that has something to do with why she didn’t get in?” Nora’s stomach was all bunched up, and her heart was knocking away inside her rib cage. She hadn’t felt like this since Angela made her run the mother/daughter 5K at the middle school a few years ago. It had been a traumatic experience for Nora, trying to keep up with her fleet-footed daughter, who never broke a sweat, never breathed heavily.

  Gabe cleared his throat. “I took care of it,” he said.

  “You took care of it? What does that mean?” Gabe sounded like he’d just stepped off the set of The Sopranos. All at once he looked like it too: there was something hard and bright and unfamiliar in his eyes. He lowered his voice and said, “I deleted that part. From her application. When I checked it all over for her. Right before she hit Submit.”

  “You what?”

  “I had to.” He shrugged. “I had no choice.”

  “But don’t you think she should know? So she doesn’t loathe herself too much, for not measuring up.”

  The color emptied from Gabe’s face. Now he looked one hundred and thirty. “I can’t tell her,” he said. “What would she think of me?”

  “But you can’t not tell her. If you don’t, I will.”

  “Please don’t. Nora, please.”

  “Then you have to.”

  He rubbed his eyes again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t figure that out right now.”

  Nora remembered Angela in that little sweatshirt, the hood pulled up so that her eyes looked even bigger than usual. Moon eyes. “How come they never checked? At Elpis?”

  “I don’t know. They just didn’t. Sometimes companies do background checks and sometimes they don’t. Back then, they were new, I don’t know. For whatever reason they didn’t, they were just looking for talent, trying to get off the ground. I mean, I first put it on my application for a lark, never dreaming I’d get away with it. After the first interview they called me back for a second, and then a third, and they never mentioned background checks. But now, well, I think I’m going to have to tell them. Do you remember the intern we saw at the Slanted Door? Abby Freeman?”

  “Christ,” she said. Like a locomotive chugging its way toward her from a distant point, here came the understanding. “That’s why you acted so weird around her. She knows.”

  He nodded. “She knows.”

  The words hung between them like a curtain. Gabe closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids with the heels of his hands, the way a tired kid would. “It’s been eating me up inside. It’s all I think about. I have to tell them. I have to hand in my resignation.”

  She couldn’t look at him, but she couldn’t look at the diploma either. She looked instead deep into her glass.

  The voice spoke to Nora again; it was not just bossy but persistent too. You also have something to tell, Nora-Bora.

  She cleared her throat and tipped her glass to her mouth, but it was empty. The bottle next to Gabe was empty too.

  Come on, said the voice. Do it. Tell him.

  “Um,” she said. “You can’t resign, Gabe. You can’t. I lost my job.”

  This time she talked and Gabe listened. Sometimes he shook his head and sometimes he nodded sympathetically. When she got to the part about the circles of dirt on her knees he winced and took her hand. Another time, on another day, she would love him for that.

  But not yet. Right now she was still bewildered.

  “What do we do now?” Gabe said when she was done. His voice sounded like it had been cracked open and cooked on the sidewalk. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nora. It might have been the truest thing she ever said. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Eventually they hobbled back to bed like a couple of old ladies, where, amazingly, annoyingly, Gabe could sleep but Nora couldn’t. That didn’t seem fair to Nora, that she should be the one to lie awake until the wee hours, fuming and worrying. They were like characters in some kind of twisted O. Henry story, where she risked and lost her job to try to save the family, and he tried to save his job but lost the family in the process. Wait, that didn’t make sense. How did The Gift of the Magi go again? She was too tired to think it through. Her eyes, opened into the darkness, burned, but wh
en she closed them they opened right up again.

  For a long time she tried to hate Gabe.

  But as soon as she got the hate loaded up and ready to go little snippets of memory would creep in. This was the man who had danced the Charleston with Maya at her Daisy troop’s daddy/daughter dance even though neither of them knew how. Who had, just now, held her hand and nodded sympathetically when she told him about the Marin dwarf flax. Who had run out and bought a little pink hat and a bottle of champagne the day Angela was born. Who always kissed her mother hello and who did that funny-awkward half-stand anytime a woman at the dinner table in a restaurant left to use the restroom and who never said no to a board game with the children and who always remembered to scrape down the grill and who told her all the time she was just as pretty as she was the day he married her, which couldn’t possibly be true. The man who, just now, had winced when she told him about her mistakes. He’d winced, like it had happened to him!

  How could she hate this man?

  She couldn’t.

  And yet. He wasn’t who she thought he was, this whole time. All these years!

  Was she partly to blame, for being so impressed when she thought Gabe said Harvard, all those years ago?

  Yes, said something inside of her.

  No, said something else.

  It was all so confusing.

  To calm down she imagined herself in the land that Betsy and Tacy had inhabited more than one hundred years ago, where mothers baked a lot and fathers came home early from their jobs at the downtown shoe store or the pharmacy and children freely roamed hillsides after school because there was literally nothing else to do.

  What had ruined that way of life? Nothing much. The automobile. The airplane, the rocket ship, the rocket-propelled grenade. Two world wars. The movies, the television, the iPhone, Google, Wii, 401(k) plans. Terrorism, global warming, property taxes, gluten allergies. Urban sprawl, Instagram, the SAT, childhood obesity, Twitter, parents friending their children on Facebook.