Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  She loved him, that’s what she was doing. She loved him, thrilled to him, hummed to the music of him. Because his arm around her shoulders was weighted with joy and her body raced and soared under his hands. Because she believed him when he said that she was beautiful, and he said so all the time. Because he had picked her—amazing, amazing, amazing—and every day picked her again and would certainly pick her forever.

  Though he hadn’t actually told her that, of course.

  Portia had a single room in the dormitory all that year but barely used it except to change clothes, drag herself through a series of sinus infections, and fanatically shave her legs (lest a single dark hair mar her perceived loveliness). She lived mainly in Tom’s room at the fraternity, careful never to impose more than the absolutely required personal items and textbooks, careful to maintain, always, the lightness of the visitor. In fact, when she was not with him, she had not even the strength to mimic lightness but craved only the next time and the next talk and the next touch.

  Susannah, she was sure, had never felt a thing like this. Certainly, in a lifetime of far too intimate confessions to her daughter, she had described nothing remotely similar, only the husband of convenience, and the men who were evolved enough to be wonderful lovers and responsible partners, and the genetic providers from the laboratory or the train. Nothing like this. Nothing like this. Which was the reason, Portia told herself, that Susannah was so out of her mind with resentment, wild at the sight of her sated, admired, cherished, and elevated daughter. “Don’t bring him back,” she had even said, that awful winter break, “and don’t come back yourself until you’ve figured out why you have to act this way. I didn’t raise you for the Junior League.”

  So she had taken him away the day before Christmas, and off they had gone down the MassPike, east to the rolling exurbs of Boston and the impeccably groomed home of Tom’s mother, father, brother, and horses. Mrs. Standley—“Caroline. Please.”—was a transplanted southerner who looked as if she were perpetually freezing. She wore her hair in a girlish pigtail, but brutally slicked back and bound by an enamel clasp. She looked emaciated, swallowed by corduroys and L.L.Bean sweaters many sizes too large, and a pair of green Wellington boots like the ones the new English princess had worn on her honeymoon. These were taken out daily for rambles with the dogs or schooling one of the horses over jumps in the field next door, an activity Caroline approached with a grimness that seemed inappropriate for a leisure-time pursuit. She was, to Portia, the picture of hospitality: hand extended at the door, towels folded at the foot of the guest bed. There was even a gift for Portia under the fragrant tree, a silver necklace of irreproachable taste in the box of a jeweler on Main Street—a Main Street clad in seasonal finery and olde tyme American splendor. Tom, who had recovered quickly from their Amherst misadventure, loved being home. He loved introducing her to family friends and the kids he had grown up with, and watching the flicker of confusion on their faces. Where was Portia from? She was from Northampton. Northampton? Lot of strange people in Northampton. Communists and lesbians, wasn’t that right? Portia supposed. What did her parents do? Her mother was an organizer. Oh? What did she organize? (In time, Portia amended this to “volunteer,” a much simpler concept for them to grasp.) And her father? “I was raised by a single mom,” she would say, eyes downcast, hoping against hope that from this display of regret, they would conclude her father was dead. Dead father. Volunteer mother. Tragic but familiar. And noble! And at least the father had been fiscally responsible, so the widow hadn’t had to work.

  But she wasn’t one of them. Clearly. At Christmas Eve services, she betrayed a certain awkwardness, knew none of the hymns, and seemed underdressed. For the Boxing Day party they attended every year, she was loaned an unobjectionable dress by Tom’s mother, but it had been too tight to zip up completely, and she had made the fatal error of wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt over it. Why hadn’t Tom stopped her? She’d brought no gifts for the family and had been forced to forage in town at the last minute, finding only impersonal things with a whiff of desperation about them. Why hadn’t Tom warned her? By the end of their stay she was frantic, trying to make up for her shortcomings or else to distract them with those attributes she did possess: good brain, good grasp of world affairs, good powers of argument. These, however, had no worth in the Standley home, and she left having won over only one family member, Tom’s brother, who had suffered a breakdown in law school and was (in his parents’ euphemism) working independently on a project related to international copyrights until the following fall.

  The decline in her fortunes could be traced in the brittle features of Caroline Standley, who might have met her son’s new girlfriend at the door with a rigorously correct embrace, but whose fear and disappointment built and built over the ensuing days. She was never less than scrupulously polite to Portia and full of terribly interested queries about her life at college and before, but the strain she was under became more and more evident, spreading like a pool of insidious fluid under the very, very taut skin of her face. Portia, growing frantic as the days passed, lingered in bed in the morning, retired early in the evening, and took every opportunity to lead Tom off for walks in the fields or visits to the local haunts of his youth. She generally kept herself out of sight as much as she could, and when she could not she made it her business to seem light, kind, and irreproachable. To this growing strain between his girlfriend and mother, Tom seemed oddly impervious. He touched Portia whenever he wanted, on the forearm, the shoulder, the back of the neck, crossing the invisible lines between neighbors at the dinner table or on the couch or in the car. He padded down the hall to the guest room in the middle of the night for very hushed bouts of lovemaking, then rose early to help his mother exercise the horses, generally behaving as if all were well—which perhaps, to him, was the case. Portia, of course, never said a word to Tom about the silent but acrid force field between herself and Caroline. What good could come of it? Why burden him? Tom’s mother, clearly, had recognized the aberration of this slovenly Jewish girl of dubious parentage for what it was—rebellion, pure and simple—and opted to wait out her son’s bizarre fascination, which surely couldn’t last much longer, an opinion that Portia, very fearfully, shared. (Between the two women, in fact, there was a perfect, if silent, meeting of the minds on this point.)

  Both, however, were wrong, to Portia’s great amazement and Caroline’s infinite distress. Through the winter, and Tom’s ten-week internship at the Boston law firm (he visited often), and the spring, when Portia, putting the nail in the coffin of her theater interests, spent three months working for the Bread and Puppet group up in Glover, Vermont (she visited often), and on into a halcyon summer term, in which their sophomore class reunited, more or less, from wherever (to quote the college’s regretted alma mater) across “the girdled Earth” they’d roamed in their disparate Dartmouth Plans. It was a sweet summer, clear and warm, with the doors of Sanborn Library thrown open onto a dappled Baker Lawn. Portia wandered inside and outside as the afternoons passed, out when she wanted the air, inside when the sun began to withdraw its heat, always nearby when tea was rolled out at four and the business of studying paused, by common agreement. All of her courses were guts, or felt like guts, since who could take seriously the novels of Jean Rhys (Modern British Fiction) or even the thorny notion of theodicy (Judeo-Christianity and the Problem of Evil) when the class was held beneath one of the few surviving elm trees at the edge of the Green? Through the long summer days, her path and Tom’s interwove, like a minuet in an Austen novel, bringing them again and again face-to-face. Whenever the appearance of a couple was indicated, they were there together, someone’s hand in someone else’s: fraternity parties down the Row, the summer formal at the Woodstock Inn, the Summer Carnival variety show in Webster Hall. Sometimes, after dinner, she went with him and others down the hill to the river and out onto the dock where she had once helped hoist her crew shell, to swim in the brilliant Connecticut and sit and laugh wi
th her new friends, who were, of course, Tom’s friends. At night, she and Tom slept in the same bed.

  At first, she nursed a powerful if not wholly rational resentment against her mother for neglecting—in all of the assorted warnings and war cries since (it seemed) the moment of her birth—the fact of romantic love, let alone its legitimacy. For Portia, this was akin to discovering a new sense, which society had perversely elected to suppress, holding it to be—perhaps—downright incendiary in comparison with the unobjectionable touch, taste, smell, feel, and sight. Susannah might never have felt the passion, the gut-twisting adoration, her daughter was then feeling (and how different she might have been, as a mother—as a human being!—if she had), but was that cause to deny to her own child the wondrous thing in which Portia had dwelt, now, for nearly a year? Her relations with her mother were strained for a time, with outright silence following their holiday expulsion from Northampton and lasting several months. But they thawed in June when Susannah announced her imminent and quite surprising move north to Vermont that summer. To keep tabs on me? Portia thought selfishly, but when the air cleared she was actually happy for her mother and helped her sort through the Augean stable their Northampton house had become. With Susannah ensconced in Hartland with her chums, and Portia’s own worldly possessions reduced to a single stack of cartons in the new basement, she felt nearly adult, brave, flush with love, and eager for the fall in Edinburgh and the torrid, wondrous winter and spring to follow, when she would wander around Europe with Tom.

  An adventure that was not to include grimy cafés like the one she found herself in, or—when you came right down to it—things to eat that seemed likely to make her ill.

  She wasted no time in wondering whether she were truly pregnant: She knew that she was. Her body, now that she was paying the slightest attention to it, seemed to be screaming at her from all corners: sore and suddenly pendulous breasts, a sour taste in her mouth, a gag reflex wound up so tight that even a passing breeze made her want to vomit. And the fact—which ought to have been obvious—that she had skipped a period. That she had missed this, above all, appalled her.

  Screaming pain had taken up residence in her head, pounding like an Athena who would never, for her own part, do something as idiotic as falling in love. She sat, masochistically hunched over the nauseating celeriac, eyes full, battling to keep herself from exploding. She found herself thinking of the two very different forms of Parkinson’s disease—one freezing the features, the other causing uncontrollable movement—and how the most unfortunate sufferers had both at the same time. That was how she felt: vibrating, maniacal, but grim and unmoving, too. Suspended in motion, at the apex of misery. I will be here in an hour’s time, she thought dully. And tomorrow. And next week. And in six months. And forever. Never feeling better or getting over it.

  Though he—Tom—was already gone, off on a train somewhere, with Winky or Stinky. Probably raising a glass of red wine to toast the adventure under way. It made her sick.

  This gave her an idea. She went down an alarmingly narrow stairway to the bathroom, tiny and unclean, and efficiently threw up. Then she came back to the table and ordered tea. “Thé,” she said hoarsely. “Por favor.”

  Not right. It would occur to her about two minutes too late.

  When her tea arrived, she downed it, scalding her mouth. Now that felt horrible, too.

  Common sense, of course, should have dictated that it would end this way, give or take a location and what was on the plate. Tom was always going to be heading off with a Winky or a Stinky, bound for the future he—to his credit—had never once told Portia he didn’t want, a future of law firms and the lonely fellowship of Massachusetts Republicans and the tailgate martinis when Dartmouth played Harvard or Brown, the athletic children and beach stickers from the Vineyard on the back of his car. Their time together, she now understood, had been exotica for him, perhaps a defiant gesture that he was so much more than the stock character from the stock prep school novel that he appeared to be, he was a complex man who chose whom to love and cared not a whit for the trappings of American class, which anyway everyone knew did not exist. For a blessed year, he had brandished Portia at fraternity events and family gatherings, daring his friends and relations to sputter their approval for his choice and their admiration for his independent spirit. Here was Portia, child of a self-declared feminist and rabble-rouser, born without a discernible father, rocked in a cradle of hemp, nourished by herbs and yogurt. Here was the product of no family in particular, from no particular place, and anyone who even thought about questioning the wisdom of this pairing would find him selectively deaf and entirely silent, for he was far, far superior to such base notions. His parents and brother and cousins and schoolmates, the people he had known forever and would always know, whose children would play with his children and go to school with his children, who years from now would still be around him and alongside him—Tom owed them nothing. He made his own choices. He was a modern man living a modern life.

  And he had been very understanding to Portia, there, under the colossal destination board at the Gare du Nord. Very solicitous for her well-being. And full of suggestions for what she might do next. Could he buy her a coffee? Take her to speak with the train clerk? His French, he noted proudly, was now nearly fluent. Would he like her to look into flights home for that day? Or the next? Did she need help finding a hotel?

  No. And no. She actually let him pat her on the shoulder. She actually hugged him back when he hugged her warmly. To her horror, she realized that she was declining his aid not because she didn’t need it, but because she seemed intent upon making this nicer for him. The impulse, moreover, felt disturbingly natural, as if she had done it before—many, many times before. Easier for Tom, who seemed impervious to the fact that the woman within his warm embrace was disassembling: synapse from synapse, sinew from sinew, muscle from muscle, held together (she greatly feared) only by those strong encircling arms. Impervious… just as he was to the fact that his mother hated Portia, or that Portia’s mother hated him, and the fact that he had dominated Portia’s social life (did he never wonder why she had made no other friends?) and that they had never once slept in the various dormitory rooms she had been assigned, which were more private than his room on the loud (and smelly) upstairs corridor of his fraternity house, or the fact that, more than halfway through her time at college, she seemed to have formed no real academic purpose and certainly no vision of a gratifying career. He had missed many things, it seemed clear to her now, but by the same token he had never actually been dishonest. There had been, certainly, attestations of love, but love of the moment, not—and this was a fine distinction—lasting love. Certainly there had been no offer of permanence, no talk of marriage or even a vague future together. She must have inferred these things, conjuring them out of sensual happiness and what still felt like clear affection, mindlessly assembling a prospect of shared time, shared contentment. For the first time in her life, she felt brutally stupid.

  And so, in the great tradition of ill-treated women everywhere, she decided to blame herself.

  Astoundingly, both earlier on the echoing floor of the train station and now, who knew how long after in the awful café, what she found herself thinking of most was not his cruelty or even his prior affection, but the outer edges of his body, the planes and depths of him, the variant textures. Scenes and sounds assailed her, rattling through her head without stopping, as if some part of her brain were trying to flush the information and another part barring the door, desperately storing the data where it could not be dislodged. She longed, with an addict’s longing, for numbness, would have given anything for numbness, but was too afraid to be drunk in a foreign country where she was alone, and despite an upbringing that was close to reprobate as far as others were concerned, she had never ingested a drug stronger than marijuana, which in any case had made her only paranoid and very hungry. She was on her own. With her tearing pain and surging nausea. And she hadn’t th
e first idea what to do with herself.

  She paid by putting her largest bill on the table, watching the waiter reject it (too big to make change for—she got that), and substituting another, which was grudgingly taken. With this transaction complete, she gathered her things and left the café, walking back in the direction of the train station, if only because that felt familiar. It was getting dark quickly now, and there was a quickening along the streets, converging on the Gare du Nord. Portia joined in, letting the herd carry her back into the station. She set down her backpack in the middle of the crowd and, like everyone else, looked up at the immense destination board. Around her, people arrived, paused, departed. She peered at the lines of text on the board overhead, trying to figure out which words went together and what they meant. This seemed like more of an intellectual exercise than a practical one, which was just fine, since she wasn’t really thinking about getting on one of the trains.