Getting In: A Novel

by Karen Stabiner

  The next intrusion on his day, he figured, would be in about ten minutes, when the mom returned with whatever the trustees had had for dessert. She always brought dessert separately, and she always made the same little joke about whether she could clear his plate, and was he ready for the next course.

  Ted made a pilgrimage to Starbucks every afternoon for an Americano and a fifteen-minute breather, and he was headed for the driveway when he noticed Brad’s mother carrying what looked like a chocolate hockey puck, to his left, and Brad buckled on the ground next to Katie, to his right. Instinctively, he stepped in front of Alexandra Bradley, to give her son the chance to make a getaway. He had no reason to assume trouble, but Ted thought it was risky, on principle, to let parents roam the campus unattended.

  “Alexandra,” he said, gesturing at the plate. “Where are you going? My office is back there. I’m ready for dessert.”

  She had a laugh like a chittering mouse.

  “Take this one,” she said.

  “I’m joking,” said Ted, who cared only about delaying her. “Somebody must be waiting for that one. I’ll survive without.”

  She looked genuinely hurt. “Don’t you think it looks good? I think Lauren’s mother made them, I’m not sure, but I think so.”

  “In that case, I’m not joking,” said Ted. “I can go get it myself, though. You needn’t bother.”

  “It’s no bother,” she replied. “Surely you have more important things to do.”

  “Not so much,” said Ted, figuring he needed to stretch the chat for another minute or two. “Early’s over, and regular-admissions people aren’t ready to hear from me. Call them the end of January and they think I’ve got something to be anxious about. So I wait.”

  “The calm before the storm,” said Alexandra.

  “Not in your house,” he said. “Your only disappointment is that they stopped doing early decision.”

  “Indeed,” she lied. The first time she got pregnant, Alexandra had hoped for a girl, despite the fact that the Bradley line was relentlessly male. When the baby turned out to be Roger instead of Priscilla, her body rebelled and refused to conceive again. Secondary infertility, the specialist explained, an allergic reaction to Trey’s sperm that made a second pregnancy almost impossible. In the name of being a good sport—that was what Trey had called it, being a good sport—she had tried two courses of Pergonal and pretended to try two courses more, while she read all the literature about side effects. She pretended to experience enough of them to scare her husband, who reluctantly agreed to abandon his plan for two boys. Ten years later, the allergy wore off, and Alexandra spent nine months hoping again for Priscilla, until Preston IV was born.

  She loved her younger son. She loved her older son, for that matter, though it was easier now that they never spoke, easier to cope with him in theory than it had been in practice. Alexandra had yearned for a girl because a girl would have been a full-time job, while a boy had all those cousins and uncles, who admitted him into their fraternity as soon as he could walk. She did well enough when Brad was in elementary school, when her primary responsibilities involved scheduling, driving, nutritional supervision, and the modulated expression and receipt of affection. Middle school and puberty had tipped the balance toward Trey and his tribe, who had rather absolute notions of what it meant to be a Bradley man, and toward Brad’s new sense of self, which seemed to depend for its health on never being in a car with his mom if there was another way to get from here to there. Alexandra was irrelevant without ever having felt essential, but she felt it would be ungrateful to confess her disappointment, so she kept it to herself.

  Something in the parking lot caught her eye.

  “Look, there’s Brad,” she said. She waved at his departing car even though there was no way her son could see her. “I could’ve said hi.”

  “My bad,” said Ted. “I got in your way.”

  “My bad,” she mimicked, with an admiring smile. “How hard it must be to keep up on all the slang.”

  Ted shrugged. His job successfully completed, he stepped aside to let Brad’s mom deliver her dessert.

  When he got back to his office, Rita handed him a phone message from Fred Ottinger, the father of the best student in the junior class, who turned out to have a simple question: would Ted be interested in doing some outside consulting, for a fee, of course, to help the boy get into Columbia?

  Ted’s surprised silence worked to his advantage, because Fred read it as reluctance and decided on the spot to make his first offer $10,000 instead of $5,000. When Ted took another moment to collect himself, Fred apologized.

  “Look, better yet, let’s start now instead of next fall and make it a flat twenty thousand for eighteen months, now until Joe graduates. I hadn’t thought about the summer months when I said ten thousand.” Fred felt slightly nauseated. He spent his workday rearranging people’s intestines, but his surgeon’s detachment failed him when it came to the eldest of his three children. “Let me buy you lunch Saturday and we’ll work out the details. Have you been to Bocca?”

  “I haven’t,” said Ted, as dumbstruck as a boy in the presence of a naked girl for the first time. Bocca probably held the record for consecutive months when the only available reservation seemed to be at four o’clock, whether for a late lunch or an early dinner. But his initial hesitation, about both consulting and what would surely be a three-figure lunch, had nothing to do with ethics, for what he did on his own time was his own business, and anyone who got the kinds of gifts Ted regularly got had long since made a convenient peace with being bought off. In fact, he found Fred’s offer refreshingly frank. He wanted help with Joe, beyond what he felt he could reasonably expect as just another Crestview parent, and he was prepared to pay for it.

  No, what confounded Ted was his own shortsightedness: why had he not thought of this himself? Private consultants charged anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on the difficulty of the placement, and he had better contacts than they did. As long as this did not encroach on his day job—his day job, now that was funny—he could become a very rich man in a very short time.

  And why limit himself to Crestview families, when there were ten private schools on this side of town? If he averaged $15,000 per student, twenty students without breaking a sweat, he made $300,000 in his first year.

  It was enough to make Ted forget that Fred was still waiting for a reply.

  “Then are we set?”

  “Oh, sure. Great. I was just checking my calendar.”

  “I bet you were. I told my wife, Ted’s got to be in demand, but he knows Joe. He’ll find the time for us.”

  Ted chuckled. “He’s a great kid,” he said.

  “One o’clock then, Saturday, Bocca,” said Fred.

  “Done,” said Ted.

  In a trance, he picked up the portfolio where he kept his college essay notes, and labeled a back page “Consulting.” He multiplied $15,000 by 20, by 40, by 100—he could hire assistants—and subtracted imaginary income tax. It was still very serious money. He quadrupled the amount he contributed annually to his retirement fund and imagined himself, a much younger man than in previous escape fantasies, traveling through Europe, perhaps renting a villa, settling into a vibrant new life, eventually presiding over an empire via teleconference from wherever he preferred to be.

  He started sketching little mock-ups of business cards, as his enduring but unformed and underpaid daydream of being a novelist evaporated, replaced by a firm offer of $20,000 for helping a single kid. Fred Ottinger had shown Ted the way out: he could have a client list of two hundred students and a suite of offices with rooms for private consultations. He might even have the architect design a private entrance and exit, like a psychiatrist’s office, so that families could get help while perpetuating the illusion that they did not need any.

  He heard Alexandra’s voice in the reception area, heard a timid single knock on his door, and a whispered “Dessert, Ted.” He held his breath, knowing that she
would not open his office door unless he answered, not caring if she left the plate with Rita or took it back to the kitchen, unwilling to return to earth quite so soon.

  Brad felt like a buffoon. In a giddy, disoriented moment he had ordered a Black Forest Ice Blended, in which coffee was merely the vehicle for lots of chocolate espresso beans and maraschino cherries, all of it blanketed by a pyramid of whipped cream. Liz was sitting across from him with her chaste chai latte, and he had ordered a clown drink. He poked at it, took a small sip, and grimaced, in the hope that she would find the drink dumb, and not him. So much for the scion of the Bradley family and his inherited social graces.

  “I have no clue how to eat this thing,” he said.

  She smiled.

  He could not recall the last time he had had a conversation with a new person, let alone someone who did not go to Crestview. His friends might talk about joining Doctors Without Borders or studying at the London School of Economics, but they were isolationists when it came to friendship and romance. They rarely ventured outside the Crestview family, and their conversations were studded with incestuous references to what went on at school. Brad was out of his element and wanting to impress, a deadly combination, a minefield. There were probably a dozen things he could say to Liz that would put her off irrevocably, and another dozen that would endear him to her, but he had no idea which was which because he did not really know anything about her, except that he did not know anything about her, which was the allure. It might be safe to talk about celebrities and rehab, or the health-care crisis, or the Middle East, or how about those Lakers, those Dodgers, those eco-terrorists, but there was no way to tell until he opened his mouth and put his foot in it. If this was a preview of life as a college freshman, he might never leave his dorm room.

  “So. Can you believe graduation is so close?” Dumb, pale, vague. He sounded like his grandfather, who began every long-distance phone call with “How’s the weather?” because he could not think of anything else to say.

  Liz took a sip of her latte and waited, and it hit Brad that she was waiting because she assumed, charitably, that he had more to say.

  “You wouldn’t believe the Crestview graduation. Very formal. White caps and gowns, jackets and ties, dresses. No denim. They have a rule, no denim.”

  “Nice,” said Liz, with the little smirk he remembered from the financial aid meeting.

  Brad abandoned the straw and concentrated on folding the whipped cream into the body of the drink with a spoon, which turned it the color of mud. “It’s no big deal,” he said.

  “Right,” she replied. Liz was prepared to like Brad, primarily because he seemed to lack Katie’s snobbishness, but she had her guard up. She expected private school kids to be spoiled unless they convinced her otherwise—and if he turned out to be one of those entitled kids, then at some point he would be condescending about her life and that would be the end of it. Liz was quick to judge and harsh in her assessments; there was too much at stake to waste time. She had to make a concerted effort to be merely curious.

  “Where do you have your graduation?” she asked.

  “Soccer field,” he said. “They cover it, set out chairs, the seniors sit on bleachers. In a tent, so nobody sweats too much. You guys?”

  “Track-and-field field,” she said, “same deal without the tent, and if it rains we go to SaMo Airport, to the hangar where they have the Barneys sale. It’s packed. Kind of like the cows in Hud. Maybe less dust.”

  He smiled, lost and not sure if he minded.

  “Hud,” she said. “Paul Newman’s the rotten son, the cows all have hoof-and-mouth disease, he wants to sell them before anybody finds out, but his father lets the government guy round them up in a big hole in the ground and shoot them. Crowded. Like that.”

  “Haven’t seen it,” said Brad, feeling the need to pretend that he did not care.

  Liz sat up straighter. “My father got me Netflix for my sweet sixteen,” she said. “First I watched the AFI hundred best films, most of them, not the war ones so much, and then I got more movies with anybody I really liked, and musicals.”

  Brad concentrated on flattening his straw wrapper and making a knife crease down its side with his thumbnail. Liz and her movie list, her dad and his map book. He did not know many people who built up extra tasks for themselves like that. In his world, success was defined as the handing off of tasks, not the accumulation of them—the less you did for yourself, the better off you were. He was hardly going to romanticize ironing, for heaven’s sake, but he liked the idea of inventing interesting projects, and for a moment he wished he had built the balsa wood double helix after all.

  He folded the straw wrapper into accordion pleats. “I have this idea for your house,” he said, even though he had none.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your house,” he said, fishing in his backpack for a pad and pen. He drew a rectangle and started filling in walls and doors, and to his surprise, he did have an idea, one he must have been working out since the day he had come by the house with Chloe. His conscious brain might be in an extended coma, anesthetized by uncertainty, but his subconscious was striking out for new territories. He sketched in little boxes to stand for pieces of furniture, and in Liz’s room he drew a shelf and laid in a row of hash marks.

  “Know what those are?”

  “No.”

  “Your DVDs,” he said, triumphant.

  She reached over for his pen and drew little lines to connect the tops and bottoms of adjacent hash marks, turning them into rectangles.

  “Except we rent four at a time,” she said, “so you left too much space. Now they’re my books.” She put down the pen and studied the drawing. “I like it,” she said, choosing not to point out that her parents rented the place and had to get written permission to install the washer and dryer. “I could live here.”

  With a flourish, Brad drew a side view with an exploded roof that wafted two feet above the building.

  “There,” he said. “You can do that. Makes the whole place feel bigger, and you can set in a skylight, get sunlight during the day and install shades to make it dark at night.”

  He kept his eyes on the drawing.

  “Look, you want to go to prom with me?”

  A small breath escaped Liz’s lips, a heh that could turn out to be surprise or the dry first syllable of rejection. Brad could not tell.

  “Prom?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Isn’t it in, I don’t know, May?”

  “Yeah. Couple of weeks before graduation.”

  “It’s January. Why aren’t you taking a Crestview girl?”

  “Look, you can say no.”

  “I didn’t say no. It’s fine, I mean, sure, but…”

  “So you’ll go. ‘It’s fine, I mean, sure’ is your way of saying yes.”

  “Right,” she said. She tapped the drawing with her index finger. “Can I have this?”

  “Sure.”

  She folded it carefully, put it in her purse, and stood up.

  “I have to meet Chloe at five,” she said. “Thanks for the latte.”

  “We’re on then,” said Brad. “For prom. I mean, I’ll see you in between, we could—”

  Liz cut him off. “Yes,” she said. “I said yes. But I have to go. See you.” She was out the door before Brad had gathered up his things.

  Yoonie’s humming began one afternoon after lunch, a thin little scrap of what must have been considered melody in Korea, though to Joy it sounded more like aluminum cans cascading into a recycling truck. She found herself listening too hard, waiting for the notes to resolve themselves in a way that felt familiar to her Western ear, which they obstinately refused to do. Instead, the line of notes embedded itself in her brain, so that at any given moment she was hard pressed to say whether the music was coming from Yoonie or from inside her own head. It got on her nerves.

  Jim Arden had held the last slot on the first Tuesday of the month ever since Joy could reme
mber, testimony to his vanity, his hypochondria, and a misplaced belief that diligent examination prevented, rather than exposed, disease. His collected MRIs, viewed in a single sitting, would require popcorn and a large Coke, but a retinue of specialists was happy to indulge him because he never mentioned insurance and always paid at the end of his visit. He was one of Joy’s easiest patients—Botox across his forehead four times a year, a reassuring look at the same mole she had examined a month earlier, and he went home happy.

  As Yoonie held out the first of six syringes filled with Botox, the humming seemed to get louder, not enough for Jim to notice, but enough for Dr. Joy to glance over at her nurse, who hesitated, the needle in midair.

  “I am so sorry,” Yoonie said, although she had no idea what she was apologizing for. “I thought you were ready for the first injection.”

  She reached forward just as Dr. Joy did, their hands collided, and the needle fell to the ground.

  “Hey, butterfingers,” said Jim. “Should I let you anywhere near my forehead with shakes like that?”

  “It was entirely my fault, and I am very sorry,” said Yoonie, who dove in one continuous arc to retrieve and discard the needle and reach for a replacement, which she handed to Dr. Joy with her other hand. Joy took it with exaggerated caution and held it up, immobile, six inches in front of her patient’s face.

  “If you have any concern, Jim, I’ll refer you to Dr. Josephs and he can handle your treatments.”