Admission (13 page)

“Backwards?” she said, feeling even duller.

“‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’”

“Now that’s impressive.” She laughed. “Dante and Kierkegaard in one shot. Let’s hear it for a liberal arts education.”

“Rah,” he said, kissing her almost chastely on the cheek. “This is what I tell my students. My male students, anyway. Go to
college. It will help you impress women in bed.”

“What do you tell your female students?” she said archly.

“I tell them not to give up on the boys. Just let them have a few years to catch up. Some of them will turn out not to be
complete idiots.”

Portia smiled. “And they believe you?”

“Of course not. They think I’m the worst kind of gender apologist. They know perfectly well the only rational response to
a teenage boy is total disgust. These girls recognize a weaker vessel when they see it.”

“Except for your Jeremiah, I take it.”

“Well, Jeremiah.” He shrugged. “Jeremiah is off the charts. In a number of ways. He’s not what you might call a socially successful
kid. But I doubt Bill Gates had girls lining up for him in high school either. The other students, they certainly keep their
distance, but they do respect him. I can see that. It’s sort of heartening, actually. Compared to what he went through at
his old school, benign neglect from the student body is a fantastic state of affairs. But now,” he said sternly, “this really
is beyond the pale. Here we are, stark naked in bed together, schoolmaster and college admissions officer, discussing an applicant.
That’s surely not kosher.”

“He’s not an applicant yet,” she pointed out, knowing he was perfectly right.

“No, but he will be if I have anything to do with it. Princeton would be a paradise for him. Not that you heard me say that,”
he said, shaking a finger.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Portia said.

He leaned over her and kissed her again, this time less chastely and not on her cheek. “You know,” he said, “I’m surprised
to hear you say your work isn’t meaningful.”

“I didn’t say that,” she objected.

“Well, implied it. Or that you felt less qualified to send the acceptance than you did to receive it.”

She heard this, somewhat dumbstruck at its accuracy. “It isn’t true,” she managed to say, though she felt, more than ever,
and hearing it put so succinctly, that it was. And also she was getting distracted.

“Good. Because I think your work must be incredibly fulfilling. You can change lives, can’t you? I mean, it must be wonderful
to take some kid who’s fully capable of getting his teeth into a first-class education and then giving that to him. You must
love doing that.”

She nodded. It sounded good.

“All that saying
yes
you talked about. Downstairs.”

“Yes,” Portia said, but she wasn’t sure what exactly she was saying yes to. John’s hand was in the hollow of her belly, and
nothing was holding still.

“Besides,” she heard him say, “it’s not like it’s a simple thing. Admissions.
Admission.
Aren’t there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides.”

“What?” she asked him indistinctly. She was feeling something, definitely. It was harder to focus.

“Admission. It’s what we let in, but it’s also what we let out.”

“Let out?” said Portia, trying to catch her breath.

“Our secrets,” he whispered, enjoying himself. He had kissed her legs apart and was moving between them. “Of course. We admit
a stranger to our homes. We admit a lover to our bodies, yes?”

Well, yes, she thought, losing, for the next moment, the train of their conversation.

“But when we admit something, we might also let it out,” he said. He seemed, rather maddeningly, not to have stopped thinking.
“That’s true, isn’t it? That we admit our secrets?”

Secrets, Portia thought. She was not inclined to speak. She had no breath to speak.

“I have them. You have them. Well, I think you have them.”

She closed her eyes. She had them.

“Can I stay a little longer?” he asked. “I’d like to stay.”

He was very close to her, close from chest to calf. It had come back, fast, the specific feel of his skin against her skin.

“Where is your son?” she managed to ask.

“He’s playing illicit video games at his friend’s house. He’s going to spend the night.”

She nodded, but it wasn’t a nod, really. “Yes, you can stay,” she told him. They could both stay, a little longer, at least.

I have always felt that it was my destiny to attend a first rate college or university like your institution, and with the
help of your institution I can achieve all of my potential. I know that I will bring to your institution all of my intellectual
and extracurricular gifts, and I will add to the life of the campus in a myriad of ways. My aim in life is to use my abilities
to make the world a better place, and I am sure that your institution can help me accomplish that.

P
rinceton’s Office of Admission had both a public and a private face. For the scores of visitors to the university, tremulous
high school students with their families (sometimes in tow, sometimes firmly in the lead), there was the impressive Clio Hall,
a white marble mausoleum complete with classical pillars and Groves of Academe steps, located directly behind Nassau Hall
in the heart of the campus. Inside Clio, these visitors registered for their information sessions, picked up their Orange
Key tours, helped themselves to gratis coffee, and nervously eyed the competition. Portia and her colleagues took turns manning
the sessions, but this was an element of her job she had liked less and less as the years went by and the atmosphere grew
ever more toxic. A decade earlier, when she’d first arrived at Princeton, she had enjoyed the challenge of responding to whatever
might come up: a father’s question about the Ultimate Frisbee team, a kid from Mexico City wanting to know if he’d be able
to study in China, tongue-in-cheek questions about
This Side of Paradise,
thoughtful queries about social issues on campus, including the eternal curiosity about the eating clubs and their influence.
She had prided herself on not getting stumped, even during those first years when she was learning the material herself, and
later, as her affection and respect for the university became genuine, it pleased her to communicate how extraordinary she
thought it.

Eventually, though, the sessions became stressful, then oppressive. There was something about how the mothers sat, knees tightly
together, mouths painfully tense. The anxiety in the room was free-flowing. And the hostility. The visitors had a way of checking
out their designated tour guides, as if trying to guess the pertinent statistics, the hooks or—worse—tricks that had brought
him or her to Princeton, as if this unsuspecting student had directly usurped their own son’s or daughter’s future spot.

Still, no matter how severely the applicants and their families inspected the student guides, it was nothing to the way they
sometimes looked at Portia.
Who was she,
their sharp eyes seemed to ask,
to sit in judgment on them or their brilliant children?
And when they asked, as they often did, whether she herself had graduated from Princeton, and when they learned that she
had not, there was palpable disdain.
She couldn’t even get in herself!
(This sentiment had reached its apotheosis the previous year, when the director of admissions for MIT had been exposed as
lacking any college degree at all.) For Portia, the last straw had been a visiting boy from the South with a lock of nutmeg-colored
hair dipping over one eye, who had asked with great false solemnity what advantage he might expect from the fact that both
parents and both grandfathers had attended Princeton. There was a shudder of distress throughout the crowd. Portia, repelled,
made sure that she took down his name, though not for the purpose the student so clearly hoped. After that, she had asked
Clarence to give her a little hiatus from the information sessions, and he’d agreed, but only for a while and only because
he had two new hires, both newly minted Princeton grads who were still, in some small way, celebrating their own letters of
acceptance and too brimming in goodwill to take anything personally.

Catty-corner from Clio stood West College, the more modest but far more crucial private face of the university’s admissions
apparatus, where the heavy lifting was actually done. In the fall and winter, hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail arrived
here in trucks from the post office, FedEx, and UPS and were hauled into the building, crate by crate. They went first to
the sorting stations in the back of the ground floor, where they joined the paper output of a dozen purring fax machines and
as many printers, churning out hard copies of e-mail correspondence and the ubiquitous common application. Everything was
sifted, inspected, shifted, and dealt, sorted and sorted again by the permanent staff and student employees until they landed—ideally,
at least—in appropriate individual folders and there merged to form a cohesive whole in theory greater than the sum of its
parts:
The Ballad of Johnny Schwartz from Shaker Heights; The Saga of Robert “Bo” Wilson-Santiago from L.A.; The Tale of Betsy Curtis,
Manhattan via Exeter; The Broken Narrative of Xiao-Gang “Kyle” Woo, Shanghai by Way of San Diego.
And on.

There was concentrated, detail-obsessed attention in this office. When Portia came down, as she often did, to pick up files
or avail herself of the confectionery smorgasbord (by tradition, baked goods and other delicacies submitted in misguided support
of applications were promptly parted from their senders’ identification and set out on a table in the corner, beside the coffee
machine), she was quite often reminded of a fairy tale that had fascinated her as a child, in which scores of devoted ants
worked without respite on an intermixed mountain of black and white sands, separating them into perfect, segregated hills.
There were, of course, occasional errors—Cindy Lin’s effusive teacher recommendation landing in Cynthia Liu’s application
folder, that sort of thing—but nothing irreparable. With so many filaments of information flying around and so many hands
stirring the soup, it was surprising how few applications turned up incomplete. (When they did, when a folder lacked its letter
of recommendation or a transcript, the student was given an opportunity to resend whatever was missing. In general, applicants
to Princeton tended to be as highly detail oriented as the officers evaluating them; if their folders lacked some critical
element, they wanted to know about it. They wanted, most fervently, to redress the flaw.)

When Portia returned to Princeton late that Friday afternoon, she drove directly to the middle of town, lucked into a space
on Witherspoon, and hauled her laden bag to this warren of activity in West College. She greeted the women in their cubicles,
but the truth was that she didn’t know half of them by name. There seemed to be a fairly high outflow from this office to
administrative posts in every corner of university, the theory being, she supposed, that if one could handle being on the
receiving end of an entire country’s application panic, one might easily parry a few philosophers or chemists. And after a
year or two down here, people were usually quite content to move on to more sedate work environments.

Only Martha Prestcott was eternal. A woman whose figure seemed to spring from a Helen E. Hokinson cartoon—all thrusting bust
and linebacker shoulders—she ran this nerve center as a benevolent dictatorship. “Hey there,” she hailed Portia. “How’s my
gorgeous niece?”

“She’s terrific,” Portia said. Martha’s niece, Princeton graduate and math teacher at Northfield, had attended her session
that morning. “She said to give you a big hug and remind you that you promised her Pillsbury crescents on Thanksgiving. I
assume this is some kind of secret code, because I know you wouldn’t be caught dead serving Pillsbury crescents.”

“Oh dear. I forgot about that. I promised her,” Martha said with evident regret.

“Are you expecting a big crowd?”

“Well, I’m up to fourteen and it’s still three weeks off, so I’m thinking twenty. George usually brings home a few strays.”

George Prestcott taught in the Engineering School, where a concentration of international students tended to linger over holidays.

“That’s nice.”

“Well, it makes a challenge. This one won’t eat meat. This one won’t eat pork. They’ve never seen yams and cranberries before.”

“Or Pillsbury crescents.”

“Oh, they’ve probably seen those.” She laughed. “We know the college diet is largely composed of refined sugars and bread
from a cardboard tube.”

Portia smiled. She went to the corner and surveyed the offerings. Brownies with orange icing, two tins of cookies, some squares
of indeterminate nature. She helped herself to a cleverly decorated cookie in the shape of a P.