Getting In: A Novel (7 page)
Read Getting In: A Novel Online
Authors: Karen Stabiner
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #United States, #College applications, #Admission, #Family Life, #Fiction - General, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #High school seniors, #Universities and colleges
He did not have the energy to fight with her. Some of the other boys, intimidated by the scope of Brad’s conquests, demanded to know the operational secret of his success and bitterly accused him of holding out when he tried to tell them the truth. They settled for honing their foreplay skills—which was fine with the
girls, who, truth be told, were not as eager to lose their virginity as the headlines had their parents believe they were. They were perfectly happy—relieved, actually—to pretend that they had slept with Brad and to spend senior year pretending to get over him, while they devoted their real energies to college applications. Brad resigned himself to ending his Crestview career as an entertaining rumor, and consoled himself with the notion that he probably had kept at least a few of his friends from getting herpes.
Preston Bradley IV: safer than a condom. He doubted that calling himself Gene was going to help.
The world loved Brad to excess, more than he thought any one person deserved, and he was always looking for ways to put a scratch in the veneer of his life. It was the one thing he failed at, again and again. He ate between meals and never gained weight, he rolled through stop signs and waited for a cop who never appeared, he wrote a paper no smarter than Lauren’s and got not just an A minus to her B plus, but an outright A. A dozen girls picked him as the costar of their fictional sex lives because of nothing that had anything to do with him.
He was old money, which in Los Angeles meant wealth that predated the advent of cable television. He was high society, which meant money derived from law or banking or real estate and membership in both a tennis or golf club and a non-Catholic church. And he was impossibly, unarguably handsome, in a way that defied category and appealed equally to girls who had previously defined their type as surfer boy, as metrosexual, as neo-Goth, as whatever type their parents disliked the most. Lauren, who was the only one who knew the truth, told him that some of his fake conquests had devised a ranking list, to see if the female members of the Crestview senior class could think of anyone famous under the age of thirty who was better looking than Brad, and so far the consensus was no. The blue of his eyes was deeper than this ac
tor’s, his wavy black hair more luxurious than that one’s, and on and on, feature by feature, from his cheekbones to his shoulders to the very toes that all of those girls said they had seen, exposed, in bed.
He was a catalog of perfection, which was a terrible burden for a boy to bear. A beautiful girl at least had the support of feminists who encouraged her to develop her brain and sympathized when her looks kept people from taking her seriously. A handsome, wealthy, about-to-be fourth-generation Harvard boy had no such system to help him cope. Brad’s life always rounded up. He could hardly have any complaints.
Final Draft
Preston Bradley
Man has yearned to fly ever since he realized that gravity prevented him from doing so—from doing anything more than envying the birds overhead. Knowing our limitations hasn’t stopped us from trying, though, too often with disastrous results: from Icarus to Brewster McCloud, we get into trouble when we let ourselves think that we can defy the laws of nature.
Air is just not where we’re supposed to be, I guess, which is why I get nervous every time there’s turbulence when I’m flying. As long as the flight is smooth, I can deceive myself into thinking that it’s reasonable for hundreds of people to be hurtling through the air in a metal ship. But as soon as there’s the slightest shudder, or one of those sudden drops, my stomach flips over and my palms start to sweat. I remember what I try so hard to forget, that flying is an unnatural act.
There’s one way to defy our limitations, though, and that’s to rebel against the geometry that’s defined us ever since we decided we needed something better than a cave to live in. For too long we thought we needed the stability of a ninety-degree angle to hold up the buildings we live and work in, and to be fair, if it wasn’t for thou
sands of years of rectangles, Frank Gehry never would have had the nerve to try one of his tangled roofs. But now we know how to make metal and wood ripple, how to make shapes move, and the illusion of motion seems to me to be a pretty exciting step—and a whole lot safer than pasting feathers together with wax.
I saw the bandshell that Gehry designed in Chicago, when I was there with my dad last year, and I say it looks like Mozart’s wig, curled back from the stage like that. It’s not quite flying, but it’s a good start. It feels like it defies gravity.
Although there isn’t a wood shop at my high school—my mom says that went out of fashion with home economics classes, back in the 1960s—I’ve met a cabinetmaker who’s let me spend time in his workshop, figuring out how to make wood bend and turn, and right now I’m trying to make a double helix out of balsa wood. I could say I’ve dreamt all my life of being an architect or an artist, and I imagine that might enhance my status in the applicant pool, but the truth is that I don’t know yet where this is going to take me. Maybe I’ll end up a math teacher who builds little wooden birds on the side, or maybe I’ll build buildings that people make pilgrimages to visit. I might be able to make people feel that they’re lighter than air.
It seems to me that that’s what college is for—to find out how a personal passion might translate itself into an adult life.
Ted poured himself a glass of the Super Tuscan Dan had dropped off when he happened to be driving past school in the middle of the day, a wine intended to ensure that Ted read Katie’s essay first, which he might have done if not for the conspiratorial smile on Dan’s face when he handed over the bottle. It was not re
ally Ted’s job to review college essays. The English teachers offered weekly workshops to help every senior develop at least one serviceable essay, if not two, by the last week in September, so that the ones who needed to take the SAT again could clear their heads in time. But he always read his early-decision candidates’ essays, the prime contenders, the ones who made his reputation. He was not about to leave their fate to a neofeminist literature teacher who saw a connection between having a vagina and having a voice, or to the lumberjack head of the department, a fan of Hemingway and London who mistook short declarative sentences for power. English teachers might know a dangling participle when they saw one. Ted knew what the admissions readers wanted to hear.
Now that Harvard had abandoned its early-decision program, Ted did not need to read Brad’s essay for at least a month, but old habits died hard, and he liked the idea of Brad filing early, regardless, to reinforce his commitment to going there. A good thing he had decided to take a look: Ted was fairly sure that the story of an aspiring math teacher who built little wooden birds was not going to wow the Harvard admissions committee, and, worse, he figured that Brad knew it. What was the best boy at Crestview up to? This batch of essays was supposed to be the final drafts of essays Ted had seen two weeks earlier, which in Brad’s case had been a fairly formal appraisal of Gehry’s architecture and a reflection on the immortality of a great building. All that stood between him and the final draft was ditching the passive tense—what was it with these lawyers’ kids?—and Ted had fully expected to see a more active version of the same essay this time around. Instead, he got two new essays clipped together with a little Post-it note on the front:
Dear Mr. Marshall: Maybe Brewster McCloud is too weird a reference, but the first draft seemed too stiff, and nothing else works as
well. Have you seen it? Thanks for reading two of these. See you Tuesday. Brad.
He reached over to the stack of essays for Brad’s second effort, hoping that it was a new version of the architecture essay, knowing before he read the first line that it was not.
A college’s policy of giving preference to legacy applicants might not seem fair to a deserving candidate who happens to be the first in his or her family even to go to college, but those of us who stand to benefit from it appreciate the powerful lure of being, in my case, the fourth generation to attend Harvard.
It makes me part of the narrative that has defined our family. My great-grandfather went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then to Harvard Law, and he worked for many years at a large Manhattan law firm before moving his family to San Francisco to open his own firm there. My grandfather went to Stanford because he wanted to be near his family, but then continued tradition by attending Harvard Law. My father, who grew up in San Francisco, was eager to experience the East Coast, so he went to both Harvard and Harvard Law before returning to California, where he is an estate lawyer.
The extent of my adolescent rebellion, I guess, is that I may be the first man in my family in years (MR. MAR SHALL, I still have to figure out how many, sorry) not to go to law school. But if I subtract that from the equation, I see that my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are all hardworking, intelligent, well-educated men whose Harvard education gave them a tremendous foundation for what came next.
Maybe I’m going to start the next chapter in the family
legacy: three generations lured to Harvard and the law, and now a new set of legacies who might be drawn to Harvard and then to the arts. I’m very interested in architecture and sculpture. Who knows? Someday my great-grandson might decide to become the seventh generation of my family to attend Harvard because he feels it’s the best possible place for a performance artist to get a great education.
Certainly that’s not a connection that many people make at this moment, but a great university, like the best students, has to be flexible over time. Thirty years ago, no one would have imagined that someday Harvard might have a woman president, and yet here we are, in the midst of an unexpected but very exciting transition. Thirty years ago, no one would have imagined that a single comment from the former president, about women and their skills at math and science, would have erupted into such a public furor, pretty much demanding his eventual resignation. Harvard has come through a difficult moment in its history and been strengthened by it. The idea of this prestigious university as a home to avant-garde artists might seem as unlikely as a woman president—but by the time my great-grandson sends in his application, who’s to say?
That’s what excites me about being the fourth generation at Harvard. Whatever I end up wanting to do, I know I’ll get the best possible education there. I might even surprise everyone and end up a lawyer, after all.
Ted poured himself a second glass of wine and flipped on his brand-new, fifty-inch flat-screen plasma TV, purchased right before school began with last year’s accumulated Best Buy gift cards from grateful graduates’ parents and a portion of the bonus check he had received from an equally indebted head of school. He and
Brad were going to have to have a talk, and fast, for whatever he was doing with these essays, he was not trying to get into Harvard. The first essay was too flaky, and the fact that Ted liked it was Ted’s personal and rather unprofessional shortcoming; when he put his Harvard hat on, it felt light and more than a little goofy. The second essay definitely did not work, and on this one he had to agree with what he anticipated the neofeminist and the lumberjack would say. She would pull on the gold ankh charm she wore on a leather cord around her neck, he would pull on the untrimmed beard that always carried a remnant of his most recent meal, and they would mutter about subtext, about what Brad seemed to be saying underneath what Brad was saying—which was that he did not want to go to Harvard at all.
Ted reached for the binder where he recorded his notes about the essays, having abandoned margin notes a few years earlier after a run-in with a famously bestselling author dad who had taken issue with Ted’s comments. The man had sent his daughter’s essay to his equally famous editor, who was on the board of trustees of the very college the girl in question wanted to attend, and the editor had replied with a two-page, single-spaced critique of Ted’s critique, which boiled down to the conclusion that Ted was an idiot. In truth, the editor found Ted’s comments to be more than reasonable, but the editor had heard rumors of the dad’s possible defection to another publishing house, so he did what was necessary to make his author feel beholden. In self-defense, Ted ordered a Levenger leather portfolio with a lock on it and never again shared written notes with a student.
He wrote Brad’s name at the top of a page, printed
WHAT’S THE AGENDA
? right under it in big block letters, and turned his attention to CNN just long enough to read the tail end of a crawl about the possibility of an Ebola outbreak in some country whose name had already slid by. If it had been
E. coli
he would have waited for the item to lap and reappear, to make sure it had
nothing to do with the burgers at In-N-Out, but Ebola was out of his zip code, a distraction unless it got on a plane and landed in a dorm in Boston or Palo Alto.
In the fall, television was little more than white noise. Ted had no time for anything but admissions. He got his hair cut shorter first semester than he did during the rest of the year, so that he could cancel his standing monthly appointment if a crisis arose without the head of school making nervous jokes about Ted’s Afro. He rarely ventured past the prepared-foods counter at Whole Foods, except to buy precut and prewashed produce and bottled dressing, and he paid extra to have his dry cleaning and laundry delivered. He burned up his Netflix queue and barely remembered what he had seen. Every morning he donned a crisp pair of Ralph Lauren khakis and a starched, striped broadcloth dress shirt, unless one of the Ivies was visiting, in which case he hauled out one of the two equally dark gray Zegna suits that a grateful couple who owned a boutique had purchased for him on one of their buying trips to Florence.
During college application season, Ted was distilled to an efficient essence: He was not black, not male, not forty-five, not short, not slim, not a lapsed Baptist, not a Democrat, though all these things were true. Ted was his results.
The big lesson of Ted’s childhood boiled down to “Don’t,” a command uttered and obeyed long past the point of humiliation, though he never once complained. Ted Marshall grew up at the intersection of urban unrest and geographical misfortune; ten years or ten blocks in either direction and everything would have been different. He paraded in front of the television set, as proud as any baby who had figured out how to get the appendages to do something more than wriggle, while his parents and both sets of grandparents watched the Watts riots that kept them indoors for
a week. He enjoyed a few seasons of dusk basketball after they fled to a tiny apartment in nearby Compton, only to be hustled indoors by his parents once the Bloods and the Crips designated his block as one worth fighting for. His father started walking Ted to and from middle school before and after his postal route, while his grandfathers split the responsibility of escorting his younger sisters. The girls loved the attention, but twelve-year-old Ted was ready to unfasten the latch that held him to his childhood, which mattered not at all to his terrified parents.
They moved again at the end of his sophomore year at Compton High, this time to the barely affordable fringe of Baldwin Hills, a middle-class black suburb where no one, as far as they could tell, cowered in fear. For the first time in his postponed life, Ted was allowed to walk to school alone. It was too late to matter. The students at his new school did not want to make friends with a boy who undoubtedly had a gang past, or at least knew gang members who might come looking for him some night; their parents told them to keep their distance, just as Ted’s parents had instructed him to stay away from two previous neighborhoods’ worth of trouble. His father might as well have continued to walk him to school and back for all the good his new autonomy did him. The only thing Ted could control was homework, which he went at with a vengeance. When he got a scholarship to UCLA, he took a perverse pride in knowing that some of the families that had snubbed him were probably having second thoughts.
His background gave him a certain cachet in college, as long as he was careful about discussing it. Ted could claim to have witnessed crucial moments in Los Angeles’s black history only if he was among people who knew nothing about it, as his first-hand experience involved being marched away, quickly, from whatever was going to make the next day’s headlines. He was smart enough to let people mistake his solemn silence for depth of feeling, though, and he managed to get more than one date with girls who assumed
that there must be a great deal of emotion right underneath the surface. In fact, Ted had seen enough of what happened to people who got caught up in the thick of things—who found themselves the target of a cop or a rival gang, trouble either way—even if his vantage point was the sidelines. He wanted no part of it. He dreamed circumspect and solitary dreams, because any other instincts had long since atrophied.