“That’s insane,” Noah says. The SAT is composed of three 800-point sections—a 2340 is an almost perfect score.
“Wait, you don’t know any of it. He took it for other people.”
“How?” Noah forces his voice to remain under control.
“It’s so easy. He just got a fake ID with his picture and some other kid’s name, then he’d take the test for them, and the kid’d give him a shitload.”
“How much?” Noah says. He says it quickly, sounds too eager, but Dylan seems not to notice.
“I dunno. A lot. So, he gets caught, ’cuz he takes the May test, and our principal is there, and she’s like, ‘Dude. You already got into Yale, why are you taking the SAT again?’ So he got busted.”
“Crazy.”
“And the wildest thing? Get this—I was next! My mom had already written out the check! I would have been totally screwed.”
Noah knows he should be outraged, but all he can think of is Dr. Thayer’s firm angularity, the touch of her cool fingers on his arm.
“Isn’t that crazy?” Dylan asks. “And now the check’s just like sitting there.”
Dr. Thayer appears in the doorway. Noah’s breath catches; he suddenly has difficulty remembering where he is.
“What check?” she asks, her tone expressionless. The boys are silent. Noah studiously concentrates on the inner seam of his pants. “Noah,” she says. “I need to talk to you before you go. Whenever you finish here.”
“Get out of my room, Mom!”
“This isn’t about you, Dylan. Unbelievable, I know.”
“God! Get out of here!”
“Don’t take that tone with me,” Dr. Thayer says. There is no warning in her voice; this dialogue is for Noah’s benefit. She leaves.
“Close the door!” Dylan yells. The door closes. He tosses a pillow at it. “Ugh, she’s so annoying!”
“How’s the practice test going to go tomorrow? Are you going to get us our 650?” Noah asks distractedly. Dylan’s last four practice writing sections have been: 500, 440, 460, and 440.
“It’s going to suck. It’s too early in the morning.”
For the first time, Noah is truly annoyed with Dylan. “It’s at two P.M . The actual SAT will be at 8:30 A.M .”
Dylan, without taking his gaze off his laptop screen, waves a hand in the air. “Whatever.”
The digital clock flashes 9:40. Noah already has his messenger bag over his shoulder. “Good luck, man,” he says.
“’Bye.”
Dr. Thayer is lying on her bed in a supine but stiff position, like a convalescent queen. Tuscany lingers in the shadows of the heavily curtained windows. Her eyes are large and wet.
“How is he doing?” Dr. Thayer asks as Noah steps into the doorway.
“Mom!” Tuscany wails.
“We’ll finish this discussion later,” Dr. Thayer says.
Tuscany bolts from the room, brushing past Noah. The door to the hallway bathroom slams.
“I’m hoping the pressure of the real thing will galvanize him,” Noah says. He deploys an SAT word to shore up his defenses.
“He’s not going to get our 650 on the writing portion, is he?”
“He might get close.”
“There’s a chance he won’t need it after all,” Dr. Thayer sighs. “We’ve got an in at the Sports Management Program at George Washington. Dylan’s father’s college roommate does their finances. I would prefer George Washington anyway. Dylan wants to stay in a big city. I think he’s right in that. I can’t imagine him anywhere else, frankly.”
A hallway light turns off, and in the deepening gloom Dr. Thayer looks ill. She squints beneath the glare of her bedside lamp. “I have to do it all.” Her voice catches. “He has no motivation.”
“He’s going to be okay,” Noah says. His words sound pale, he knows. He is nervous and unsure of their truth.
“He would fail out without all of you tutors.”
Noah shifts his weight. He thinks of his brother, and for a moment it seems impossible that anyone should get into college without an entourage. Dr. Thayer’s eyes gleam at Noah across the room. She is baiting him, waiting for him to propose something. He isn’t sure whether she wants him to kiss her or to offer to take the test for Dylan. He can’t think of what to say.
“I just don’t know what to do to make him work,” Dr. Thayer finishes.
She is fishing for the hard truth, a confirmation that Dylan is totally hopeless. But Noah can’t give it. Dylan is depressed and ruined but also pleasant, free of bitterness. His life has a smooth glide to it; it is effortless. This will be Noah’s job, to preserve a numb ruin that cannot be undone.
“We keep doing what we’re doing, I guess,” Noah says.
Dr. Thayer frowns and drums her fingertips on her breastbone. “There must be some other way for him to pass this test. Can you think of anything?”
“This test can be mastered,” Noah says firmly.
Dr. Thayer shakes her head dully, as if to clear it. She smiles warmly into her bedsheets, and Noah can see on her lips the radiance that is lost inside her, the charisma she must have once had, that is now clouded by depression. She shifts her gaze to Noah and he is momentarily struck dumb. There is a question on her lips that is trapped somewhere. Pipes roar when Tuscany flushes the toilet.
“I’ll see you next week?” Noah asks.
Dr. Thayer nods and picks up her novel.
Noah turns and slowly walks down the stairs. Was she going to ask him to take the test for Dylan? His heart races. The words how much, on the tip of his tongue throughout the conversation, now have nowhere to go.
Chapter
2
Every Wednesday Noah buys the same groceries: one gallon of milk, a box of granola, oatmeal, toilet paper, seven cans of soup, and a bunch of bananas. The weekly totals vary from $24.50 to $24.75, depending on the size of the bananas. But now that he is a soon-to-be-jacked gym-goer, he figures he should shake up his diet. Near 130th Street, in one of the more menacing areas of Harlem, stands Fairway, a famous and fortresslike gourmet grocery store to which his students’ parents take taxi safaris. These sallies are cloak-and-dagger: yellow cars intrepidly approach; couture couples scurry across the ten feet of Harlem asphalt, buy their groceries in the sanctuary inside, scurry back, and the cars retreat. Noah’s approach, conversely, involves a brisk walk down Riverside Drive. He passes the Ralph Ellison monument surrounded by bleary-eyed homeless, and then follows Broadway to where the subway tracks surface at 135th Street. With the clacking rush of a train passing over rusty rails sounding to one side, Noah works his way between deserted and forgotten warehouses, along shattered windows papered with peeling posters for films that came out years before.
It is on such a street that Noah runs into Roberto. Since Roberto is wearing matching denim jacket and pants in late August, he is soaked in sweat. It is an odd sensation to feel underdressed on a Harlem street, but Noah feels insignificant in his T-shirt and ripped khaki shorts before Roberto’s collected denim bulk. Should he say something? Noah is unsure if Roberto’s all-welcoming manner is only maintained while he’s on the job. But as soon as Roberto spots him, Noah’s hand is lost in his.
“Noah, what you up to, man?”
“Oh, nothing, just buying food.”
“That’s cool.”
They withdraw their hands and stare at each other, blinking in the sun, as if both struck dumb by their lack of common ground.
“What are you up to?” Noah asks.
“I’m off to work. You know. But tonight you wanna hang?”
“Yes.” After his cautious refusal the week before, Noah is invigorated just by assenting; it is like plunging into a cold and bottomless lake.
“Awesome. I got a car, but I never wanna pay for parking so I’m always moving it, you know? Forget where it is right now. But why don’t you just meet me when I get off work? I’ll be on Ninety-first and Lex at like ten. We can go to one of the clubs you like.”
“Right.”
“Where do you like?” Roberto prompts.
Excited to have gotten to know a neighbor, Noah is reluctant to give up his in-the-know ruse just yet. Dylan will be his inspiration. “Lotus. Pangaea sometimes.”
“Oh yeah? Wow. You’re in some high circles, man.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Noah says, then adds “man” for good measure.
“No, this is real fly. I’ve been wantin’ to change my scene, you know?”
“Cool,” Noah says. The ruse has gone too far—he is suddenly nervous; his stomach tightens.
“Tonight, then!” Roberto draws his fist back as if to punch Noah. Noah dodges involuntarily, but Roberto only leads him through a complicated street handshake. Noah allows himself to be bullied through the steps like an incompetent dance partner, and misses Roberto’s brown fist entirely when he tries to give it a manly swat at the end.
Tabitha’s apartment is near Roberto’s hair salon. Her parents (wealthy New Yorkers themselves, though of the Westchester variety) set her up in Yorkville, at the edge of the bubble of money in the Upper East Side, the border of the splash from the impact of billions of dollars flooding Fifth Avenue. Rents are lower here because Yorkville is farther from the subway and, although the occupants are similarly white and more or less well-to-do, many of them have to climb stairs to get to their apartments.
Tab’s studio has been subdivided and partitioned into a two-bedroom apartment on the scale of a large dollhouse. She studies and sleeps on opposites sides of a temporary aluminum wall. The door opens right at the center of the partition, so when Noah enters he sees a riot of law books on one side, a metal beam in the middle, and Tabitha groggily rising from her bed on the other. Tab is wearing thick glasses that telescope her eyes, giving her face the aspect of a mole.
“Hey, babe,” she says. She scratches beneath her T-shirt. Seeing her rise from the bed, lovely and laid back, gives Noah a pang of regret at not having fought for their relationship. He is tempted to sit beside her on the rumpled sheets—but after a year together they have managed to smoothly transition to a friendship, and he doesn’t want to mess that up. She points to her eyeglasses. “Sorry, I’m starting torts reading. No time for contacts. Haven’t had time to shower or anything for days, really.”
Noah fixes her with a slow look and smiles.
“Um,” Tab says, “that’s pretty gross, huh? Oversharing. So what’s up? Quit your job yet?”
“No,” Noah says, jabbing his finger into her rib. “I didn’t. Did you?”
“Hey, don’t get all snarky. I’m just an idealistic student, or something. You’re the one with the shady gig.”
“What?” Noah allows his hand to remain on her lean torso, then removes it. “Bullshit. You had a tutor when you were in high school.”
“Which doesn’t exactly disprove my point. Who said I wasn’t shady?” Tab says as she wades through dirty laundry to the kitchen.
“I do have huge issues with it,” Noah calls. “But can I put my bag down before we go there?” Noah takes a seat at the foot of Tab’s unmade bed, next to a teetering stack of law books with a rainbow of highlighters wedged between their pages. He hears the fridge suck open, and a beer comes flying at him from the kitchen area. He twists off the cap and takes a swig of foam while Tab approaches and sits next to him.
“Okay, important stuff first,” Tabitha says. “I talked to my mom this morning. And it turns out the guy chairing the NYU American Studies Admissions Committee this year is an old friend of hers, and they take on tons of comp lit students.”
“Really?” Noah asks, leaning forward. As he kneels in front of Tab, their knees touch. A remembered charge passes between them, and he pulls back an inch. “Wow.” Tabitha’s mother has always had an anthropological fascination for Noah, for the kid from rural Virginia who managed to make it to Princeton. She has a tendency to say, “Good for you,” whenever Noah recounts anything he has done that involves money, down to going out to dinner. Tabitha’s mother is third-generation Scarsdale.
“Only problem,” Tab says, “is that the deadline has passed. She says you’ve got to get on this shit. Start applying. Or next year’ll slip away too.”
“Why is she so intent on this? Iwill apply. Just when I’ve paid down my debt. When my brother’s taken care of.”
“Let your brother take care of himself. You think you’re doing him good, but you’re just teaching him to depend on other people. Let yourself focus on yourself, you know? Indulge. Maybe it’s this tutoring job,” Tab says. “It’s like sapping your karma.”
“It’s not like it takes that much time. It’s just that I get mad sometimes seeing all that wasted wealth, I don’t know…”
“It’s just total bankruptcy of academic values.”
Noah pauses before responding. Tabitha is relentlessly antagonistic, which added sexual chemistry to their relationship, but he often has to concentrate in order to tolerate her. He is rattled: he hates that she can make him question his convictions. “I don’t know about ‘total,’ but yeah. This test is not meant to be prepared for. And yet it’s the most important exam these kids will ever take, so their parents find a way. And it works. Going up three, four hundred points after a year of tutoring is huge. Who’s Princeton going to take, some kid from a small town with an 1800, or the Manhattan kid with the 2200?”
“Neither,” Tab snorts. “Twenty-two hundred. Please. Like either’d stand a chance. Try Michigan or Georgetown. But it’s not as bad as you say, anyway. Princeton’s only going to take, maybe, a hundred students from Manhattan. Your students are only competing against one another.”
“But now it’s obligatory,” Noah says. “They all have to do it. I’m just filling two hours a week of these students’ lives with crappy little rules that they’ll never use again. They don’t have time for their homework because they spend a hundred minutes with me learning strategies for a one-shot test. I just prime them to get unnaturally high scores for a short time. It’s like I’m doping sprinters.”
“So what? So you’re not the cheerful little schoolmarm in the little red house,” Tab says. “So you’re not a professor yet, but a businessman. I don’t accuse my banker or consultant friends, ‘Money is the reason you’re doing this, isn’t it?’ It’s assumed—so get over it. You get paid absurdly well for a job that also gives you tons of crazy stories about people everyone loves to hate. Boohoo.”
“Jesus,” Noah says. “It’s really sad too, Tab. This Dylan kid, I’m like basically his dad.”
“You’re no one’s dad,” Tab says. “You look eighteen. Try cousin.”
“Whatever it is,” Noah continues, “I’m his company. I’m all he’s got. And that’s a responsibility.”
“Oh, he loves your company,” Tabitha says, winking. She runs a hand down Noah’s back.
Noah turns resolutely to her, tries to project to Tabitha how earnest he’s feeling. He downs a swig of beer. “I’m a faker.”
Tab lets her hand slip under Noah’s shirt and play over his lower back. “You’re not a faker, you’re a player. And it’s hot. ” Noah can’t resist the curve of her ass: his hand reaches into the back of her sweats.
“Tab…” Noah says after a moment. His resistance is halfhearted; his words get lost in the smokiness of Tabitha’s hair.
She holds her hair back in one hand as he runs his hand around the length of the waistband of her pants so it rests at the front. His knuckles press into her abdomen. She talks into the base of his neck. “The real problem here is that you’re just basically a servant, and that’s what gets you riled up. This isn’t about pity for Dylan,” Tab says.
Noah gives Tab’s head a long look, concentrates on the coolness of his beer beneath his fingers of one hand as his other hand slips farther into her pants. The reason he lost interest in her comes instantly to mind. She never knows when not to be honest. He shouldn’t let this go any further, but…he’s been lonely, and it’s hard to turn down p
hysical contact. If she wants to let him, he’ll go ahead…“What I’m trying to say, here,” Noah says, “is that I don’t want Dylan to succeed. Because if he gets into school, that’s one more spot that won’t go to a kid who has had to fight to get opportunities, who has motivation and passion.”
“So basically, you mean one less spot for you, ” Tab says. Noah has untied the thick drawstring of her pants.
“Yes. I guess I do. Tutoring Dylan prevents another me from getting into school.”
“This is great!” Tab says. “You’re tutoring a kid that you secretly want to fail, and you’re jealous of him too!”
Noah pauses, then nods and smiles. He stands still as Tabitha yanks his shirt over his head. Sex, for them, has always been about losing control, stopping thinking and just following the other’s orders. Giving in was what brought him and Tabitha to bed again and again throughout college: two self-directed, ambitious kids allow the hand in their pants to take charge of pushing them forward. “I see what you mean by calling it creepy.”
Tab takes off her glasses, leans her head against Noah’s stomach, and wraps an arm snugly around his waist. She murmurs into the hints of hair at the top of his jeans, periodically cocking her head to look into his eyes. “Noah,” she says. “Lawyers don’t have to want their clients to win. Plastic surgeons don’t have to want their patients to have fake boobs. Even academics don’t have to want their theses about arsenic poisoning to be true. But they do it anyway, because it’s their job, and they’re good at it. Go out there, do the best you can. Just don’t start liking these people. I see the gleam in your eyes, but you don’t really want to become them. Go into these students’ lives, learn what you can. Just remember to come back out.”
And with that, Tab drops Noah’s pants to his ankles.
Noah double-checks the address he scrawled down, because at 91st and Lexington he sees only what appears to be a nightclub, a midnight-purple doorway trembling to a pounding electronic beat. But the neon sign above reads “Space Hair,” and when he opens the door he reveals a line of men cutting women’s hair. The men are dressed as if in a downtown dance club, wearing platform shoes and stretch shirts. A couple of them dangle cigarettes from one hand as they cut with the other, all the time carrying on a furious conversation. The music is impossibly loud, and bright animations sparkle from TV screens. The women being attended to are brittle and blond, five Dr. Thayers of varying appearances of youth. A girl with spiked hair and dozens of leather accessories gives Noah a blank, appraising look. “Can I help you?”
Glamorous Disasters Page 4