“I’m really good at memorizing,” Dylan says. “Like for essays. He sends me what I need to write, I remember it, and I spit it out on the exam.”
Dylan seems more reflective than usual and Noah is feeling bolder. “If you had it all to do over,” Noah begins, “would you do it this way? Have all these tutors?”
“Yeah! This is awesome. Who wouldn’t love this? I don’t have to do anything .”
“No, I mean, you seem kind of frustrated that now you can’t work at all without a tutor here. What if we weren’t all here, you know?”
Dylan looks pissed off. Noah is relieved to realize that he is just deep in thought. Finally: “Well, I’d be alone. That’d suck.”
Dylan is right. He would be alone, and that would indeed suck. His parents are largely absent; if the choice is either tutors or solitude, why not opt for tutors? Noah is warmed by the implication: that he’s doing a kid good by being there.
“So what about you, then?” Dylan asks. “Are you a tutor?”
Noah considers how to answer.
“I mean,” Dylan continues, “is this all you do?”
“No. For now. I want to go get my Ph.D. in comparative literature.”
“Oh, okay, cool. I mean, I was thinking, it’d be sad if you went to Princeton and just become a tutor !”
Dylan switches over to a Sex and the City rerun. Noah doesn’t know how to respond: he did go to Princeton, and did become a tutor. He would feel more at home hanging out in front of the old Virginia middle school or drinking in a local diner with his friends, now all mechanics and cops; tutoring in Manhattan suddenly seems an incomprehensible choice to him too. But Princeton came in the way, with its increased expectations and increased debt. Going home stopped being an option long ago.
Noah harbors a vague plan of communicating his worry to Dylan that eventually he won’t have tutors, that he’ll be unable to pass university courses or hold a job. But he realizes there will be tutors in college to help him through, more men like Noah. Dylan’s parents are well connected, so he’s sure to land a low-responsibility glamour job. Dylan is rich, good-looking, hypersocialized. Why is Noah even there? College admissions seem so pale next to Dylan’s easy smile and nonchalant popularity—his wealth and coolness bear more capital than a college degree.
Dylan’s phone rings again, and Noah can tell from Dylan’s barked reply that it’s one of his parents. Dylan hands the phone over. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Noah, hello,” monstrous phone Thayer says. “There’s a file on Dylan’s desktop, Collegeapp. It needs work—his college advisor and I’ve already glanced at it, but I’m not sure what to do. Would you mind taking it home to look over? Just for grammar, of course.”
Noah reads Dylan’s college essay under the fluorescent lights of the M4 bus as it winds through Spanish Harlem. The first paragraph:
When I was fourteen, such a tender age, my teacher called me a “dumb jock.” What struck me, then, was a certain vague profundity behind her offhand manner; a slippery significance I have only recently come to grasp: I was no longer an individual but a thing ; an other.
Noah blinks in the hard light of the bus as he reads the essay. He stares out the window as he glides under the dark steel overpass of 125th Street. Dylan’s essay contains references to contemporary philosophy, to being alienated from one’s own identity. “Slippery significance”? There are semicolons! This essay from the kid who thought “The more things change, the more they stay the same” was nonsense—it’s impossible. Noah wonders who did write it; this essay has an academic pretension beyond Dr. Thayer. She must have known that Noah would realize the essay wasn’t Dylan’s. It’s almost as though she’s trying to give evidence of her own deceitfulness—why? Noah feels a rush of shame. He’s been trying to stay legal. Is she tempting him, teasing him? Does she know what he did for his old student? How will he approach her about all of this?
Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.
Noah has brought his gym clothes, and stops by Harlem Fitness on his way home. Roberto receives him with a bewildering mix of friendliness and street aggression. He puts Noah off guard—how does one respond to a smiling thug?—and Noah finds it difficult to reconcile Roberto’s barrio toughness and his earnest desire that Noah like him. “Get the hell outta my face,” Roberto says to a girl hanger-on wearing hot pants and a chain. “Noah is here!”
“Hey, Rob, good evening,” Noah says. He leans nonchalantly against the desk and promptly knocks a stack of back issues of Muscle & Fitness to the floor.
“Good evening to you, man,” Roberto says. “You should have seen it earlier,” he continues, craning over the counter to watch Noah’s back as he picks magazines up from the industrial carpet. “There was like ten hot bitches here at once. All of them sprung in the ass, you know?”
“Oh yeah?” Noah calls up from the ground.
Roberto crosses around the counter and leans next to Noah. “Yeah, I mean I used to live in L.A., cutting hair? And there were so many hot bitches there, man. But now I’m here ’cuz my mother and sister came here. Supposed to be saving. I’m set up good, workin’ here is just my second job, I’ve found like a good chair at a good cutter on the East Side, so I pull in some mad dough. L.A., though, man, there were hot bitches there. Not like here. They’re too skinny and white. Or like tubby and black.”
“Oh yeah?” Noah repeats. The magazines are old and slick with grease—he finds them nearly impossible to stack. Roberto has picked one up, as if to help, but just holds it slackly in his meaty grip.
“Yeah, I mean there are some hotties here too, especially the Ricans, but shit. L.A. was the place. I got so much pussy there. Badass music, and—oh, sorry, man—”
Noah has returned the magazines to the table, at which point they cascade back to the floor. He returns to the carpet. Roberto bows down next to him again.
“You go out a lot?” Roberto asks.
“Yeah,” Noah lies.
“You like hip-hop?”
“Umm, yeah, totally.” Noah’s mind races as he tries to think of the name of a hip-hop singer; he’s sure to need one soon. All he can think of are folk and country stars.
“I know some totally wasted clubs, I’m at them like all the time. We can cruise over sometime. I’ve got my own rig. You look like you could use a good time, and I think it’s crap that people here don’t like talk to their neighbors, you know? So you should totally come out.”
Noah returns the magazines to the counter and positions himself a few safe feet away from the teetering stack. “Yeah, that’d be fun sometime.”
“I’m goin’ out tonight. I’m goin’ with some hot bitches. You can ride shotgun. It’ll be like us guys in front and the hot bitches in back.”
A little laugh leaks out of Noah.
“What’s funny?” Roberto looks honestly worried.
“No, nothing, it sounds cool.”
“I mean, these aren’t like sex clubs or anything.”
“No, it would be fun.”
“Then come tonight!”
“I’m working.”
“You’re workin’ ? What the hell work you do? We’re leaving at like midnight.”
“Yeah, but I’ll have to work tomorrow too. You know how it goes.”
“Okay, whatever, next time. Just come back here to find me. I’m like never sure what’s goin’ on but maybe you’ll catch somethin’ anyway.”
“Thanks, yeah, we’ll see.”
Noah pauses before he mounts the treadmill. Roberto seems so eager to get to know him, so why did he say no? He doesn’t have plans tonight; what is he going to do with himself? He long ago made it a conscious goal to meet as many people as he could. And Roberto is certainly different from his intellectual Princeton friends. But Noah is afraid he wouldn’t be up to the challenge. Of course Roberto’s friends would like him, right? But maybe they would think him boring: too mediated, too thoughtful. Noah starts the machine and begins running.
>
“Hello?”
“Hey! What’s up? It’s Noah.”
“Oh, hey.”
“How’s it going? What’re you up to?”
“Nothing much, just kind of sitting on the couch.” Noah can hear his brother string out the words, imagines him searching around the room, looking for something to comment on. Kent always sounds depressed on the phone. Maybe he is depressed. Noah tries to muster the effort to break through his brother’s silence, to reach in and draw him out. But Noah is tired of always leading the conversation. He keeps silent and waits for his brother to speak.
“So,” Kent says. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m on the bus back from working out.”
A pause.
“Is Mom around?” Noah continues.
“No, she’s not here.”
“Okay, cool, give a call when she gets in, okay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
As he hangs up Noah wonders how it would feel to move back to Virginia, to live in the little house with his mother and younger brother again. On the bus back from Harlem Fitness, he grips the plastic handle of his gym bag and stares at the dark and dusty emergency bar of the window and feels a surge of fear that he is losing them, that their lives and concerns are disappearing into the distance, that his love for them, the strongest attachment in his life, can fade just as any other bond can fade. Although he can’t imagine life without them, he also finds it hard to envision them.
His brother: sixteen now, a skater, jeans as voluminous as a hoop skirt, pierced ears and sweet smile. The day he left for college, Noah sat at the kitchen table watching his mother pull a dish out of the microwave while Kent was at the sudsy sink, his sweatshirt sleeves bunched at his elbows, his arms half in the suds, Bic pen graffiti running up his arms. His sweatshirt sported a skull and flames and safety pins. At that moment—Noah remembers it so clearly, since it is the time he turned from being Kent’s brother to being Kent’s father—Kent seemed about to retreat into his own body, like he was backing away from some invisible aggressor stalking up through the soap suds.
In one important way, Noah knows, he works for the same reasons as the solitary middle-aged Dominican men who crowd into shared rooms in his Harlem neighborhood: he has headed into the great city to send money back home. Kent’s GPA isn’t much above a 1.2, and unless he starts passing foreign language this year, high school will be a memory. Noah’s mother would never say as much, but if Kent is to pass high school, it will pretty much be up to Noah, and whatever money he can send home.
Noah can remember the nightly homework sessions with his brother, when Noah was a senior in high school and his brother was in third grade. He would corner Kent on the couch, and they would prop a textbook between their thighs. Noah hated those sessions, the moment each evening when his mother would say, “Helping time!” Tired from his own schoolwork and impatient with his brother’s reluctance, Noah would bully Kent through his problems until Kent learned the right answers. Noah softened as the years went by, and sometimes he got past his preoccupation with his own achievement and began to see the hours during college breaks that his mother forced him to spend tutoring his brother as something almost satisfying. But for the most part Noah’s tacit obligations to help “the slow one” weighed on him. Noah sometimes hated Kent, was frustrated by his thanklessness, his lack of drive. Noah would try to help but mostly just watched his brother’s placid sweetness fossilize into stubborn apathy. With the eventual diagnosis of Kent’s dyslexia (in eighth grade! Why hadn’t he realized earlier?), the reason for Kent’s failing academics became clear. His mother tried to help him with homework but found herself even less equipped than Noah to scale Kent’s disability. And being suddenly named Afflicted rather than Slow sapped what remained of Kent’s ambition, pitted his problems as the inevitable consequence of some outside force. He would refuse to do his homework altogether.
Kent doesn’t want to go to a good college. He doesn’t want to go to college at all. And Noah’s tutoring has taught him that some people just aren’t meant for university, and bridle under the expectation. But Kent has to at least pass high school, and it looks like he won’t, not without help. But Noah has his own life, and can’t stomach the idea of going back to the confinement of Virginia. He broke out, and would never seriously consider going back. So help for Kent will have to come from a specialized private high school—financially impossible—or counseling with a learning disability specialist. And that costs two hundred dollars a week. His mother hasn’t said so—she would never say so—but Noah is the star of the family, the one who broke free of Virginia and went away to college. If someone is going to help Kent, it has to be Noah. And the only way to do so is with the kind of money he makes from tutoring. And so he tutors in Manhattan in order to pay another tutor to help his brother. If he makes enough, if he keeps his expenses down and does well enough to get raises, he might even enjoy himself at the same time.
He is lucky to be teaching, to be doing his chosen profession at all. He could do a lot worse than be an SAT tutor. He’s able, by living cheaply, to pay down his debt and send a bit home and go out when he wants to. He’ll get his Ph.D. next year, maybe the year after. But he wonders: Wouldn’t someone whose main plan is to be a “real teacher” care a little more whether his own brother succeeds? He loves his brother, but hates the dull weight of his obligation. As the bus stops and Noah steps onto the dingy Harlem pavement over the squeal of the bus’s pneumatics, he grips the nylon strap of his gym bag over his chest and imagines the day that he will be able to live farther downtown, closer to where the Thayers live.
Dr. Thayer surprises Noah by answering the apartment door at the next meeting. She has returned early from the Hamptons. Noah grips The Essay Said to Be Dylan’s in his hand. The doctor leads him into the kitchen.
It is spare and expensively severe, all tall cabinets and brushed-steel appliances. Tuscany is seated at the counter wearing what looks like a gossamer potato sack and watching the maid scoop flesh out of a melon. She doesn’t look up.
Dr. Thayer leans against the doorway and stares into Noah’s eyes. She appears to have gotten no sun in the Hamptons, nor any sleep.
“Have you read the essay? What do you think?”
“It’s very well written. Excellent choice of topic.”
Tuscany looks up incredulously. “You’re talking about Dylan’s essay?”
Dr. Thayer and Noah stand with their backs to either side of the doorjamb, and as she leans forward he suppresses an urge to trace the topography of brown and pink lines on her face, to satiate his curiosity about what her watery skin would feel like beneath his fingers. “So what would you change?” she asks.
“There are some punctuation errors. Misplaced semicolons, mainly.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she says.
“I don’t think Dylan should even be using semicolons,” Noah ventures.
“Oh, it’s that moron college advisor at school. She suggested changes and just compelled Dylan to make them. She’s such a twit.”
“She’s black,” Tuscany offers.
“So what should we do?” Dr. Thayer asks. “We have to mail out his applications next month.”
“Wait a second, Mom,” Tuscany says. She chews a mouthful of melon, swallows. “Did you write the essay?”
“No, Tuscany ,” Dr. Thayer says. “Of course not.”
Tuscany returns to the fruit bowl. Noah stares blankly at her, loses himself for a moment. She dangles her spoon over her melon absently, unfazed and maybe even bored by her mother’s obvious cover-up.
“Let me talk to Dylan about it,” Noah offers after a moment. “We’ll see if we can come up with something more genuine.”
Dr. Thayer drapes her clawed hand on Noah’s arm. “Thank you,” she mouths.
“So how do you feel about this essay?” Noah asks as he strides into Dylan’s bedroom.
Dylan shrugs.
“Does it feel accurate to you?”
�
�I dunno. I haven’t read it.”
“Who wrote it?”
“My mom. Or maybe my college tutor. She’s kinda dumb, I think. Is it any good?”
“It’s really well written,” Noah says. “But I don’t know, like this…” He points to the second page. “ ‘Labeling can be as dangerous as any form of terrorism; in fact, merely associating oneself with a group is the first and primary act of violence.’ ”
“That makes absolutely no sense,” says Dylan.
“It’s your essay.”
“Well, I dunno. I guess it sounds smart.”
“I want you to take a look at it and then we’ll try to make your own voice come through.”
“No way. I don’t know how to do that.”
And he won’t. The only way they gain ground on the essay portion of the writing test is when Noah finds a paper on Harriet Tubman that Dylan has previously memorized. The ex-slave becomes their crowning achievement. The “most important quality in a leader” is rebelliousness, as in the case of Harriet Tubman. The “national holiday you would create and why” is National Harriet Tubman Day. The “greatest invention of the twentieth century” is the documentary, because it allows us to learn about women like Harriet Tubman. Dylan possesses a true virtuosity at working in Harriet Tubman. He is fluent in the dead black woman; this is his greatest gift. But there is no place for Harriet Tubman in his college essay.
“I just wish I didn’t have to do this shit,” Dylan moans. Then he sits straight up, and in this new pose Noah suddenly doesn’t know him. “There was this kid at my school,” Dylan begins. Noah swivels in his executive chair to better listen. “He’s at Yale now. He got like a 2340 or something when he first took the SAT. But then he took it like each month after.”
Glamorous Disasters Page 3