“Well, you have to consider that—”
“Oh, wait, I think I know. Jamie’s actually a guy?”
“No.”
“Okay…Jamie’s not really at the party, right? She’s like somewhere else.”
“No.”
“Oh. Maybe, you have to say that Jamie is like being forgetful, before you say that she forgets something? So that it makes more sense? Like ‘Jamie, forgetful, forgot to put socks on’?” To the end, Dylan is a resourceful kid.
“No, you have to put one of the verbs in the past perfect,” Noah says. “You remember, we called it the ‘really-past.’ Which action happens first? Would you say ‘had noticed,’ or rather ‘had forgotten’?”
“Who’s hotter, Ashlee or Jessica?”
“Dylan, man, come on—”
“I know who you’re going to say. Ashlee.”
“No way. Jessica.”
“Cool. Totally. Beyoncé or Ashanti?”
“Beyoncé, clearly. Now, what if Beyoncé had forgotten her socks at a party?”
“You never give up.”
“That’s my job.”
Dylan lies face down on his bed. His voice is muffled by his duvet. “Yeah, why do you do this? This must be totally boring for you, always doing the same stuff with every kid.”
“You’re right, the material’s always the same, but you guys are all different, you know? So that’s what makes it interesting. I’m going be a professor. Helping you guys is enough for me.” Noah kicks off his shoes and rests his feet on Dylan’s bed, hoping to mask his uncertainty with a display of comfort. Is that really why he wants to be a professor?
“You’re like a scientist, just studying all of us. That’s what gets you off.”
That doesn’t feel too good. Particularly since Tab has already basically told him the same thing.
“I wouldn’t do it if I was you—whoa, if I were you,” Dylan says. “There must be something better to do.”
“Umm, no, not really, unless I want to go into business and work a hundred hours a week.”
“Yeah, like my dad.”
Once again, Noah has forgotten that Dylan has a father. But the fathers are absent in most of the families he tutors—only the rare millionaire is also a family man.
“You could go to grad school,” Dylan tries.
Dylan is giving him career advice. “I’m applying to grad school,” Noah says. “But I have loans, man.” Noah holds his tongue. He feels oddly comfortable around Dylan, and almost told him about Kent.
“Right, those,” Dylan says. “Forgot.” He spears a piece of sesame chicken and then lets it drop into the Styrofoam container. He clicks over to the Chinese delivery website. “It’s gotta be fresh,” he explains.
When Noah returns from teaching he realizes he has left the overhead light on in his apartment. For some reason that idea, that the solitary bulb has been needlessly shining in his empty apartment all day, induces a wave of loneliness. He props himself up against the counter and stares at his dirty cereal bowls, washes one and then puts it back into the sink, lies on his new couch. He stares at the blue-brown floral print of his exposed mattress. There is no history to anything in the room. An emptiness stretches between everything. Noah pulls out his phone and dials.
“Hey, Noah, Mom’s not here.”
“It’s okay, what’s up?”
“Not much. Just kind of sitting around.” Kent offers nothing for Noah to talk to him about, and Noah knows he will only hold further attempts at conversation against him. He can imagine Kent complaining to his friends that his brother acts like he’s his “fuckin’ father.”
“How was school?” Noah persists.
“Pretty good.”
A pause. Noah just listens to the static of the Virginia–New York connection. Finally his brother speaks. “I met with that counselor for the first time on Monday. She’s pretty cool.”
“Oh yeah? Why?”
“She says it’s not my fault. That I just learn differently. Like I’m a well that’s perfectly fine, it’s just missing a bucket.”
“You’re just missing a bucket?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Well, that sounds good.”
“Yeah, maybe all this’ll work.” Kent takes on a distant, practiced tone, as if puzzling over how to light kindling.
“Talk to you later, okay?” Noah says.
Noah closes his phone and sits on his unmade bed. The sheet has pulled away from a corner and his knee rests against the bare coarseness of the mattress. He’s angry at his brother and he doesn’t know why. It is four P.M . on a Sunday—his friends are all either getting ahead at work or finishing up lazy brunches. He could read over his applications but he can’t summon the will today. Studying literature seems like an inconsequential intellectual game. It takes Noah an inordinate amount of effort to pull on his workout pants and head out the door.
Noah decides to devote his thirty minutes on the treadmill to figuring out how to further his teaching career. He seems to remember having it all figured out in the past, but now he can’t remember what his strategies for success were. His application essays all read like hollow gamesmanship now, scholarly sleight of hand. He was so excited about going back to school before; he would gush to his friends about again being part of the security of an institution. And there was always the looming, secret reason: professors are esteemed, part of the upper class. Since he had no inheritance coming to him and no desire for business, teaching at a university seemed the best way to make it into a more genteel world. But now all his energy is devoted to coping with Dylan, Cameron, and the rest. That very genteel world he craves to enter has made him a governess.
As he stares into the mirror in front of the treadmill, the drawstring of his CK athletic pants bobbing as he sprints, he realizes that he has redeveloped a preoccupation with coolness that he thought he had abandoned in high school. Perhaps it has come from hanging around teenagers all the time. He constantly thinks of social capital, wonders who has the most access to what. In his adolescence, coolness had seemed like a foolish goal—it was myopic, didn’t offer anything beyond the rewards of being liked. Even as he became popular he saw it as an end in itself, and a delusory one at that. But here in Manhattan, a world through which live supermodels wander, and where those one sees on the streets are tackling not the intimations of success but rather the pinnacles of it, coolness becomes a valid objective. Investment bankers aren’t ex-nerds—they are ex-partiers. The high schoolers here who are cool don’t eventually show up fat and sunburned at the class reunion. These cool kids attend fundraisers, start magazines, date the children of their parents’ influential friends. They are making connections, becoming urbane, adept at making people like them and also adept at seeing the Manhattan truth around them—that for those with the desire to further themselves, success is being cool. Dylan has mastered coolness, and for all of his knowledge about the SATs, Noah still has to work at it, and is jealous. Yes, he admits to himself as he mops his brow, he is jealous.
Noah speeds the machine up to 8.4 miles per hour and races along for a few seconds before the power goes out. One moment he is staring into the greasy mirrored wall of the gym, and the next the sudden stop of the treadmill has thrown him to the ground, flat on his face and struggling against a rush of pressure in his head. The lights have gone out, and around him Noah hears the moans of similarly incapacitated weighty Hispanic men. They all stand, groggily stare at one another in the fettered sunlight filtering through the dirty windows on Broadway, and file out of the building.
Roberto is in front of the door, massive and agitated, ineffectually guiding men into the street. “Noah, man, isn’t this wild? How you feeling? You were so gone last night. It’s amazing you didn’t piss yourself.”
“Was hoping the workout would purge the hangover. Didn’t really work. What happened?”
“Dunno. I think the power’s gone out. Did you see that bitch I was dancing with last night? So fucking hot.”
“So what do we do?”
“I’m going out with her again. You could go out with yours again. We’ll like all get our bang goin’.”
The sun pounds against Noah’s head. He can’t process “Bang goin’ ”; it sounds like a phrase from an Asian language. “No, I meant what should we do about the power outage?”
“Oh, go home, I guess. You’re near Riverside, right? We’ll walk together.”
They pass along Broadway, through a milling crowd of children playing stickball with a steel pipe, vendors selling sliced mangoes out of grocery carts, quartets of old men playing dominoes on card tables, bodega owners hawking melting ice cream. The power outage has imbued the street with a festive energy, as though an important parade is about to begin. Noah feels a sudden and intense affection for his neighborhood, its willingness to make anything out of the ordinary into a cause for revelry.
Noah and Roberto have been chatting outside Noah’s building for a few moments when Roberto says, “Hey, you got any candles? It’s going to be dark soon. You’ll be like dark, too.”
Noah doesn’t own any candles. Already he is aware of the darkening rectangles of the apartment windows in contrast to the street glowing in the waning afternoon light, the groups of young men collecting outside—unknown, some of them disapproving. He feels a shiver of trepidation. He lingers on his doorstep, fingers his keys, imagines holing up alone in a corner of his apartment, watching the sky turn black.
“Do you have any candles?” he asks Roberto.
Roberto lives in a dilapidated brownstone a few blocks away. The buildings on either side of his are boarded up with graffitied plywood and hunch over the street like sullen gargoyles. Roberto jiggles the doorknob and then pounds on the door. “Mom!”
A series of thumps issue through the brownstone’s thick door, and Noah can trace the progress of someone very heavy passing from the top floor to the bottom. The door swings open to a woman large enough to obscure the hallway behind her. Her housedress barely contains her spherical body. She grips the doorframe as if for balance; her corpulence is probably new to her—she bobs like a tethered balloon, and her features are still those of a very thin woman, sharp, almost crustacean.
“Mom, hey, this is Noah. A friend of mine.”
“No-ah,” the woman says. “I am He-ra. I am Roberto’s mother.”
“Oh, hello,” Noah says.
Roberto says something to Hera in rapid Spanish. She responds, in tones variously furious and saccharine. Suddenly Hera steps back from the doorway and the three of them pass up a stairwell lit only by stray afternoon light. Dust bunnies and McDonald’s wrappers glimmer from the corners. Noah trails Hera and Roberto silently, like a younger brother. They maintain an unbroken string of foreign exclamations. Hera swings open the door. She strikes her knuckles against the wall when she expansively sweeps Noah and her son inside. “Welcome. Please come in,” she says.
Noah thanks her, and they pass into a shabbily furnished but very neat living room. Roberto disappears into the bathroom as Hera guides Noah to a frayed dusty-pink armchair. She lights a candle that illuminates a yellowed paper perched on the arm of the chair, its headlines in an eastern European script. “Oh!” says Noah, despite himself.
“Yes?” says Hera.
Noah points to the paper. “I assumed you were Hispanic,” he laughs.
Hera looks stricken and raises a tremulous fist before her mouth. “Hispanic? I and Roberto?”
“Uh, yeah, I just figured, with the neighborhood and everything?” Noah can’t quite determine why he feels like such an asshole.
“But our names! Roberto. No Hispanic should have this name. And Hera.” At the mention of her own name, as if invoking the fearsome power of the goddess herself, Hera seems about to fly into a rage; her cheeks heave; she draws herself up to full height.
“Your names are very nice.”
“I chose them so carefully. They have roots! Real classics.”
Roberto surfaces from the bathroom and sees his brewing mother. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Hera barks.
Noah smiles obliquely.
“Now it is my turn,” Hera declares, and enters the bathroom. The door slams.
“My mom is like a total nut,” Roberto says, wiping his hands on a towel slung over the top of a door. “You have no idea. She’s like totally nuts. Olena talks to her, but I refuse.”
“You’ve all lived together for a while?”
“Yah, we’re saving money for my sister to go to school, and it’s cheaper to live together in like one place, you know?” He looks Noah up and down and then nods approvingly as he throws himself on the couch. “You’d like her. Her name is Olena, even though Mom’s gonna tell you it’s Titania. You want a drink or something?”
“No thanks,” Noah says, momentarily distracted by the ridiculous vision of a female Roberto.
“She never goes out. My mom. It’s like she’s completely unsocial. She just sits at home and plays cards with my sister whenever she’s home. Which is like never, ’cuz Olena works all day.”
“What does she do?”
“My sister? I dunno, waiting tables and stuff. I think she’s working at a dry cleaner right now.”
Noah reclines in his seat. Roberto proceeds to recount his day, which involved a lunch date with a girl who turned out to be (the epithet alternates throughout the telling) a bitch/snob, and then a full-body wax (“Man, I know it sounds swishy, but it’s totally necessary for me, I’m furry like an animal, and I’m goin’ on this beach trip with a hot bitch on Saturday”). The bathroom door finally opens and Hera emerges. A great cloud of perfumed air rolls over the room as she closes the door. She has done up her hair, and has splashed such bright circles of rouge and eye shadow that her face gives the impression of a painter’s palette. She casts Noah an overly gracious smile, a caricature of Dr. Thayer’s sophisticated hospitality.
“Noah,” she declaims, wiping her hands on the ample material of her housedress. “What will you have to drink?”
Noah’s three demurrals are refused, and Hera finally succeeds in pressing a tumbler of half-melted ice into his grip, which Roberto then fills to the brim with a grain alcohol from a ceramic jug rummaged out from beneath the sink. Noah’s stomach, still testy from the abuse of the night before, lurches as he takes a sip. He holds the glass far away from his body.
“Do you like it?” Hera asks, eyes wide.
“Yes, very much,” Noah lies. “Where is it from?”
“Italy,” Hera says.
“Albania,” Roberto says, his voice overlapping his mother’s. He turns to Noah. “We are from Albania. Came here via Italy.”
“Oh, Roberto ,” Hera sniffs. “We are prac-tic-ally Italians.”
“My name isn’t really Roberto,” Roberto says. There is a naughty, charged smile on his face; he is baiting his mother, playing at something illicit.
“His name is prac-tic-ally Roberto,” Hera amends.
“And her name isn’t really Hera.”
This is not too surprising to Noah.
“Why do you try to hurt your gentle mother?” Hera asks Roberto. “In America, we might as well be Italians.”
To this Roberto simply turns away from his mother and sips his drink, hiding his face behind his glass.
“You are one of Roberto’s friends?” Hera asks hopefully. “You are much better than these others, these dark-skinned men and these women with too many earrings.”
Noah glances up quickly at Roberto, but he doesn’t protest. In fact, he nods almost imperceptibly.
“All the time I am saying to him, I am saying, ‘Roberto, why don’t you spend your time with people of class, of culture ?’ Here in New York, those people are white! We don’t choose this, it is true. So I wonder why he doesn’t have more white friends.” A pause. “You seem very nice. What do you work at?”
“Oh, I tutor for a college entrance exam on the Upper East Side.”
“Rober
to does work in the Upper East Side too,” Hera says proudly.
“I know,” Noah says, nodding slightly to acknowledge that, yes, this is indeed very impressive.
“Your job sounds very interesting,” Hera says. “You must have rich clients. Are they raised well? Have money? Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, that is where the truly great live, not”—she gestures out the window disdainfully—“here.”
“My students are wealthy, yeah,” Noah says evasively.
“Yes,” Hera says dreamily. She lays a hand on Roberto’s muscular leg. “I have given up on my Roberto ever getting us that. But Titania—you should meet her, No-ah. So bright. Beautiful. A jewel.”
Hera stares at Noah with bright eyes, concentrating all of her descriptive power. “Titania is lovely. We will be sure that you meet her one day, you will see…”
He takes another sip and is surprised to find that he has finished the glass, that his body accepted the cupful of toxin. Hera pours him another tumblerful.
The electricity returns just before midnight. A fringed lampshade leaps into glow above their heads, and they cheer its reentrance like an engagement announcement, sloshing their drinks together and yelling.
When Noah returns home, three new messages are waiting on the cell phone he left charging on his bed:
Noah, hi! This is Dr. Thayer, Dylan’s mother. Call me, please. Have a request for you.
Noah. This is Dr. Thayer, Dylan’s mother. Bad news. Call me as soon as you get this.
Noah. Call me now. Thank you. [A pause.] This is Dr. Thayer, Dylan’s mother.
Noah hesitates: it is almost midnight. But he remembers that Dr. Thayer is always up and reading when he leaves Dylan late, recalls her indented, sleep-circled eyes. She’ll be awake. He opens his address book and sifts through the Thayer numbers: office, office fax, home fax, Dylan/Tuscany/Dr. Thayer’s cell, Dylan/Tuscany/Dr. Thayer’s home lines.
“Hello?” she answers, her voice both husky and sharp, like a talking raven.
“Dr. Thayer? Hi, this is Noah, I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“Yes. Noah. I wasn’t sure if you’d bother to call me tonight.”
Glamorous Disasters Page 6