A Perfect Divorce [antikvár]

ONE im Greenley was crying. The word spread through the classrooms, the corridors, and by evening nearly all of the 125 seniors at The Bantrey School and a substantial number of parents knew that Kim Greenley, a B-plus student, whose rendition on Music Night of "When I Marry Mister Snow" had received a standing ovation, whose father was an orthopedist and whose mother was an administrator at Lenox Hill Hospital—how bona fide can parents be—Kim Greenley, of the sweet, round face and blue eyes, a little chubby perhaps, but why should that matter, Kim Greenley, with a boyfriend at Cornell, which placed her off limits to the boys and nonthreatening to the girls, bright, likable with serious credentials, left the office of the college advisor for the crucial beginning-of-senior-year college assessment meeting, crying. Her parents solemnly followed her, the father biting his bottom lip, the mother grim and looking close to tears herself. Outside the advisor's door they paused for a few words between themselves along the lines of how could this possibly happen, as Kim moved on, shaken. The next group waited on an oak bench, Karen and Rob Burrows and Tommy, their seventeen-year-old son. Tommy had known Kim since kindergarten and rushed over to her before she descended the stairs out of the building, wanting to offer solace, something; her parents had momentarily abandoned her. She looked at him through wet eyes, her world collapsing. "Tommy, he said I'll never get into Brown." The Burrows family was on deck to see the college advisor with this bleak foreshadowing, like the Lenny Bruce routine of the comic who bombs at the London Palladium, the comic just about to go on and the female singer on stage ahead of him asks the audience for a moment of silence for the