With John, she thought, reflexively shaking her head at the oddity of this preposition. Two months ago, she’d been intractably partnered with another man. Two days ago, she’d been adrift in a freezing house with an untended fridge and, to put it kindly, distracted personal hygiene. She resisted the notion of rescue. She was not particularly interested in rescue. Since the age of twenty she had supported herself, financially, emotionally. It was one of the few things she was actually proud of, though she understood it had come at some cost. Like, she thought, the cost of being with another person. Surely she was not really capable of being with anyone, even this passionate, tender, settled man, at once so solid and so miraculously permeable. She also doubted very much that she deserved him.
Simone and her mother drifted upstairs, not far behind John’s parents, who said a brisk good night in the living room doorway, each clutching a matching black mug of tea. John took Nelson up, but Jeremiah lingered to swiftly demolish Portia at chess one last time. He had grown almost mellow by the end of the day, a different animal from the wired Toni Morrison fan in the car that morning, and she felt as if she were getting perhaps her first good look at him here, bent over the chess board, chewing the soft part of his thumb but not, oddly, the nail. She wanted suddenly to last a little longer in the game, not really to prolong it or even to salve her ego, but to get more time with this Jeremiah. His hair, in the light from matching chinoiserie lamps, glowed black in glossy, looping curls. That was an Armenian thing, she supposed. Where the almost feminine mouth, pale skin, and extra-long arms came from had to be closer to home: mom or dad, or grandparents. He was closing in on her king, tightening the vise, wrapping things up. She resisted where she could, but it was pointless to do more than cast distractions in his path. Besides, her attention was not on the board. And there were things she wished she could talk to him about that were ethically out of bounds.
Why had he stayed so long in a school that must have frustrated and disappointed him on a daily basis? Was there not one teacher he could have gone to for help, one mentor willing to take up a brilliant misfit? Why had his parents not done what they could to see him accommodated academically? Deerfield and Northfield were not far from Keene, and a school like St. Paul’s might have found scholarship money for a brilliant New Hampshire student. Why had he not looked ahead to college, at least, as a goal? Why, overall, did he not seem more… well, ambitious? Surely it was not enough to sit reading forever. Surely he felt some compulsion to get up and do something with what he’d learned or add to the body of learning in some way. There were plenty of applicants to places like Princeton who wanted no more than that: a chance to add to the sum total of what was known. And that was fine. But nowhere in Jeremiah’s application had he indicated such a wish. What did he want? From the university? From himself?
In a few more moves, he had her king pinned behind a useless pawn. She declined to play again and was just thinking how she might bring up some of these questions when he looked up at her, disarmingly frank, and with no trace of awkwardness at all said that he wanted to thank her very, very much for what she’d done for him.
“What have I done?” Portia said.
“Well, a few things, actually. Finding a way for me to stay on campus last night. I can’t tell you how fantastic it was. And being able to go to Professor Friedman’s class. Thank you for setting that up for me. I’m not sure why you did it, to tell you the truth.”
Why she had done it was hardly something she intended to share with Jeremiah.
“It’s my pleasure.”
“And, also for coming to my school. I mean, John and Deborah were both talking to me about college. I never thought about that before. I just thought I’d get a job, you know, and sort of keep on going by myself. I knew there was a job for me where my parents work. But after you came I asked John if I could go to Princeton. He made me apply to a lot of places. We know it’s a long shot.”
Less long by the minute, Portia thought.
“I think college is absolutely the right place for you,” she told him. “I think you’d get to meet people more like you. Kids who felt like they never really got with the program in high school. A lot of those kids meet up at places like Princeton. Or wherever you go.”
“You mean”—he smiled, showing white, slightly protruding teeth—“the geeks all unite.”
“Everybody unites,” she said, smiling, too. “The geeks, the theater kids, the poets, the military history enthusiasts. That whole first semester, it’s ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’ all over campus. It’s kind of fun.”
“Yeah,” said Jeremiah. “Like a big dating service for nerds.”
She laughed.
And then Jeremiah got to his feet and went away up the stairs, and she stayed behind, resetting the chess pieces. By the time John came down, having settled his son and student in the bunk beds still ensconced in his childhood room, she had figured out what to say in order to make plausible her departure. I wish I could stay, she would tell him. Even though I haven’t taken a day off for weeks. Yes, even though today was Saturday and tomorrow is Sunday. And then she would hug him and kiss him and tell him that she would call soon, and she would ask him to thank his parents and Deborah and even his sister. And then she would leave and let whatever was going to happen, whatever was already happening, keep on happening, only more slowly.
But when he came into the room, he hugged her and kissed her. And she forgot the perfectly reasonable things she was going to say to him. She went downstairs with him and let him pull her down next to him on the inelegant guest bed, where he curled around her.
“I should go,” she said, though she was feeling slightly less urgency about the idea than she had felt upstairs.
“Yes, so you said. Are you cold? I’m cold.”
She was cold. He reached down to the foot of the bed and pulled a heavy quilt over them both. “That’s better.” They were both still fully clothed.
“Personally,” said John, “I think you should stay. I think you should stay here in this extremely uncomfortable bed, with me, and go back first thing in the morning. What’s the point of going now?”
She thought about it. She supposed there must be a point.
“And I’m going to be very cold down here without you.”
“Selfish,” she murmured.
“Did Jeremiah speak to you?” John said, shifting against her under the quilt. “I know he wanted to. He’s so grateful for what you did.”
“It’s my job,” Portia said carefully.
“Yes, of course. But to him, you’re someone who doesn’t see him as a discipline problem or an underachiever. He’s still not used to adults who recognize his gifts. It’s as if his whole life has jumped the track in the last year. He was on his way to living one kind of life story. Now he has a whole new life story to think about.”
“Well,” she said, sighing, “that’s a nice metaphor. And fitting, for an Armenian. Storytelling’s a big thing in the culture, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” John said yawning audibly. “But of course he’s not really an Armenian.”
She frowned. “Jeremiah Vartan Balakian is not Armenian?” she said. “On what planet?”
“Yes, sure. But he’s adopted,” John said. “You know that.”
She shook her head, which was as good as saying no, she had no idea.
“First thing last fall, I had my class write thousand-word autobiographies. Jeremiah’s… Jesus, it was brilliant,” he said sleepily, at her ear. “It started, ‘Once there was and was not, a boy named Jeremiah Vartan Balakian.’ Which is the traditional opening of an Armenian story. I mean, the ‘Once there was and was not.’ I could have given him an A just for the first sentence. But it was very tender, actually. When he discovered he was adopted, he felt such relief. He forgave his parents immediately. Not for adopting him, of course. For just having no idea what to do with him. And it explains so much about the way he grew up. Socially.” He yawned again. “You’re s
taying, right?”
“I don’t know,” said Portia, who didn’t.
“But you need to sleep.”
“Yes,” agreed Portia, who suddenly, and to her own surprise, was already drifting in that direction: suffused with heat, increasingly addled. She felt as if her hands were holding so tightly to a rope slicked with something wet, something slippery, like algae or long strands of seaweed moving in a current, so that she was constantly slipping and slipping, but her hands were throbbing and tight in spite of this. And it was warm underwater, and she wanted to let go, but every time she was nearly there some urgent spasm made her grip the rope anew, and it would start again. The wine and the heat and the breath at the nape of her neck, which was also hot, and she began to feel the general goodness of things, quite apart from the nagging pain in her fingers, clutching, and that she might as well give up on that, too, except that there was something, something, warm and amorphous in this otherwise pleasant underwater place that was not good. And that something kept disturbing her, irritating her, reminding her of something she could not quite place but knew was not good and not going away.
And this went on, who knew how long? But when she woke it was in an acrid, jerking way, clawing for air. She thought: Now I know exactly what it feels like to choke to death, or be willfully choked, which even in that distant way she recognized as illogical, because she would hardly choke herself, and John, she could feel, had turned in sleep behind her and curled away from her, spine to spine. And still, she hurtled awake with one hand protectively at her own throat and the other over her eyes, as if the notion of looking into the darkness were something she wished to protect herself from, too, though when she did open her eyes, it was so black in the room that there was nothing to see. Nothing to need protecting from, she thought erratically. Except… something.
Portia sat up. John moved behind her, and she automatically pulled back the quilt around him, so he wouldn’t wake from cold. She did not want him to be awake with her just now. She perched, stiff and tense, at the edge of the bed, her aching hands on her knees, staring into the darkness, willing the obscure thing to come to light, and fearing that, and willing it again, if only to be done with the fear of not knowing what it was. It was, whatever it was, a thing of substantial proportions, of unignorable heft. It was something she had not known before she’d slept, but something she would, once she discovered it, never be able to not know again. And it was so close, so almost actual.
She got to her feet, feeling the strain in her calves and shoulders. She picked up her bag from a chair in the corner, declining to consider what this meant, and stepped out into the basement corridor. There was a small bathroom down the hall, and she went in and turned on the switch and stared at herself in the garish fluorescent light, while a green-hued, terrified woman stared back: dark brown hair, blue circles under each brown eye. It was not a very lovely face, because it was Susannah’s face, with its strong nose and wide, high cheekbones and thick wavy hair, and she had never thought of Susannah as lovely. For years, growing up especially, she had examined herself this way, looking not for similarities but for differences, an element or trait that could not be assigned to her mother but had to be some wild card entry of her unknown father: the man on the train, the man of the unknown embarkation and the unknown destination, to whom she was—whatever her mother thought—as closely linked as to Susannah. She had never found it. On the contrary, and against her will, she had grown physically more and more like Susannah, as if to prove her mother’s argument that the man had been no more than a means to an end, a catalyst without any contribution of its own. So she had stopped looking, and she had put the idea of him away with other things she could not bear to think of.
Upstairs she went, quietly, so quietly that she could not even hear herself. Through the basement door and up the grand staircase, lined by the promised hunting prints, footfalls disappearing into the carpeted runner. On one end of the landing, a formidable door that seemed to promise a master suite. On the other, a longer corridor with doors on either side, close together. She went to the first of these, holding her breath as she turned the knob, pushing the door inside. Two beds on a faded pink carpet, two bodies under two pink coverlets: Deborah and Simone. Portia stepped back. She was in control of each finger, the angle of her head and neck, but not of herself. She closed the door.
The next door was to a bathroom, with an automatic light that flickered horribly overhead when she nudged it open. She was amazed that no one had stopped her yet.
The next door opened to sleeping boys. Nelson, in the bottom bunk, snoring gently into his pillow, one arm flung overboard so the knuckles brushed the bare wooden floor. She was not yet ready to look up. Later, she would not be able to say how long it had taken her to look up.
She understood what it was to have a blank for a parent. Did that mean she understood precisely half of what it was like for Jeremiah, who had been transplanted into foreign soil, roots excised from the earth and swaddled into an antiseptic ball? One-half of a mystery was still a mystery. She knew, looking at him, that she could not have defended her certainty in any convincing way. But she was: riveted, calm, flushed with horror, and utterly certain.
Afterward, driving back, she would think very carefully, very clinically, about how long she had spent in the room, looking and looking at the boy in the top bunk. Of course, she did not like to think what would have happened if he had woken up, or if Deborah or Simone had needed the bathroom. There was no possible justification, no rational explanation to alleviate the vision of herself, her middle-aged, acerbic, strange, and hysterical self, standing in a nighttime room of sleeping teenage boys who barely knew her, and whom she barely knew, looking and—after the first few minutes, when she began to be certain of what she was seeing—weeping. Later, driving north on 95, crossing the Delaware back to New Jersey, she let them appear before her, one by one, and conjured the disgust and loathing on their incredulous faces: Mrs. Halsey, Mr. Halsey, Deborah, Simone, Nelson… John. “I don’t understand,” John would say, aghast at her. “Why were you there? What were you doing?”
Why am I here? she thought. And what—exactly what—am I doing? All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time.
The boys breathed and breathed. They were beautiful: Nelson with his obsidian skin shining in the light from the hallway. Jeremiah’s black curls against the pillow, one sinewy arm thrown up over his head. She had a terrible idea that she might not be able to leave this spot, that the first sleepy risers would find her here, rooted, frozen, staring into the room, floundering for some shred of an explanation. It was the horror of this scenario that finally extracted her, breaking the suction of her feet to the carpeted floor, ripping away her gaze. There was a window at the end of the hallway, admitting—she noted with dismay—the first shards of morning light. Portia turned and walked quickly away from it, and down the stairs, and out the front door. She got into her car, scrambled fearfully for the key in her purse (terrified that she might have to go back to the basement room, where John still slept) and finally found it, then slapped it into the ignition. The car, starting up, seemed the loudest thing in the universe.
She drove away down the lane and then, by instinct, to wider and wider roads, aiming vaguely east into the dawn and then vaguely north, until she hit the unmistakable artery of Route 95 and understood that she was no longer driving away but going home. Of course, the going home did not seem tolerable, either, except… it came to her slowly… for the one sliver of re
lief that she might possibly find there, one tiny fact that might dismantle the wonderful, dreadful conviction she had conjured in that hallway. For that slim chance, she thought, it was worth going back. Already she had a craving to find it and so relieve herself, to once again not know what she was sure that she knew, and go back to feeling the nothing she had felt for seventeen years. How soft and quiet that familiar nothing was, and how she craved it again.
Across the Delaware, she found herself slowed by roadwork ahead, surrounded by drivers who clearly neither expected nor accepted traffic on a Sunday morning. For herself, Portia was surprised to discover that she was not impatient. Now that she understood what she needed to find out, and how she was going to do that, the frantic part of her circumstances was tamped, and a kind of grim resolve had taken its place. What she needed to know, she would certainly know in due course, whether in ten minutes or two hours, and there would be either relief or the greatest dismay. She could wait for that. The cars inched north to her exit. And when she exited, the road was clear into Princeton.
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