Glamorous Disasters

by Eliot Schrefer

  “Of course I would. You sound preoccupied. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but Dylan hasn’t been doing well at all on this thing. I just saw the pile of score reports in his desk drawer—I don’t know if it was his idea to hide them from me, or if you came up with that brilliant idea together—but he’s doing horribly.”

  “I’ve walked you through his test results each week, I know they’re low, but—”

  “The test is Saturday, Noah, not next month, not next May, but Saturday. What are you going to tell me when it turns out that I’ve spent $15,000 to have Dylan’s score stay crappy ? His whole future is riding on this. I know you’re trying your best, I’m sure you’re trying your best, but you’re young, you don’t have experience with cases like Dylan. He needs to be motivated. ”

  “He does need motivation,” Noah says, trying to keep the dryness out of his voice.

  “So what? It’s his fault? You’re what, basically telling me that Dylan is unteachable?”

  “No, of course I’m not—”

  “Because you wouldn’t be the first. Everyone’s given up on this kid. Sometimes I think they’re right.” She pauses. Noah listens to her breathe into the phone. “I hope you don’t think I’m blaming you, Noah.”

  Noah lies on his unmade bed, finding tired comfort in the softness of the worn sheets. How different this conversation might be, he thinks, if Dr. Thayer could see where he was as she spoke, could know the tremendous rift between their apartments, their beds. She probably imagines him, at worst, in a Tribeca loft.

  “…I just think, well, I’ve done everything, and still nothing helps,” Dr. Thayer is saying. Of course her concerns come back to her. For a moment Noah is furious that she is unable to focus on her children. But then his heart quakes a moment when he realizes that, otherwise, no one in the world would think of her well-being. Although she has millions of dollars and a phalanx of staff, she is still the classic single mom, like Noah’s: fixated on helping her offspring, and no one with whom to discuss her own troubles. All the concern she sends toward her children dissipates, is absorbed and never returned. And then she spends her afternoons with her clients, taking on the woes of her friends’ children without ever releasing her own troubles. But what can he do to help her? And what does she want him to do to help her?

  “This test is hard for Dylan, yes, but he should do fine whatever he gets. He’s got a lot of support.” Noah crinkles his nose at some ineffable irony in the last bit.

  “Well, that brings me to my request. He’s had two SAT tutors before you, and unlike them at least you’ve stayed around. I want him to know I’ve done everything I can for him, that’s why we’ve kept you around this far. You stick with him, you give him a sense that we’re both there for him. I want each of my children to feel that. Which is why I want you to help out Tuscany.”

  “Tuscany!” Noah had been afraid Dr. Thayer was going to ask him to come over for a drink, or to take the SAT for Dylan. And he wasn’t about to go back to that dark spot in his history.

  “Yes. She’s applying to boarding school this year and needs to take that test, what is it called, the ISEE, to get in. It’s three months away, so that means we’ll need how many sessions a week, three?”

  Three sessions a week. That means unheard-of luxury: that means health insurance. Noah will start on Monday.

  Chapter

  3

  Tuscany Thayer, fifteen, attends Moore-Pike Girls Academy. Among the teenage men of Noah’s acquaintance her school is known as Whore-Like Girls Academy. The doormen snort when Noah announces whom he has come to see.

  “We have orders. No boys for Ms. Thayer without Dr. Thayer present.”

  “I tutor Dylan as well,” Noah says, incredulous.

  “Right. Head on up.”

  In the elevator Noah crosses his arms, plants his hands in his armpits. He removes them, inspects his dress shirt for wrinkles. Roberto has arranged a double date for that night.

  Noah turns off his phone and has reached Tuscany’s floor by the time the power-down graphic flickers off. The door swings open to reveal a mass of gray silk. Dr. Thayer has one hand hitched on the door; she wears an evening gown and slightly parted lips, as if a photographer has just called out, now, you’re a tigress!

  “Hello, Noah,” she purrs. “Welcome.”

  Noah, momentarily speechless, rustles the manicured leaf of her hand.

  “Come in, come in,” she says with faux urgency, as if Noah were standing in a blizzard. “Poor thing,” she tuts inexplicably.

  In the few days since Noah has last been there, the apartment has been redecorated. The front hall is impossibly dark, silver candlesticks and a chandelier providing only meager, flickering illumination. The tile floor, glossy black and white, stretches in all directions. Giant ottomans, upholstered in a gray silk that matches the hue of Dr. Thayer’s gown to an astonishing exactness, populate the adjoining living room.

  Noah blinks, twice.

  “H-how are you,” he stammers.

  “Look what we did! It’s our winter changeover,” Dr. Thayer replies, gesturing expansively.

  “How are you?” Noah repeats.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t answer the phone at first…” Dr. Thayer starts.

  Noah waits. Dr. Thayer smiles politely. There is no second half to the sentence.

  “That’s okay. How has your day been?” Noah’s pulse is racing: there is something uncanny here. Usually he talks to a Fifth Avenue parent about their primary common experience, namely being stuck in taxis, then maneuvers the conversation rapidly and prodigiously to authors or philosophers, at which point the parent grows bored and releases him. But Dr. Thayer wants to Talk.

  “Oh, it has been !” She laughs lightly, carefully tossing her hair. She has more vitality today than she has ever expressed before. She is decaying and gorgeous, like Snow White’s Evil Queen if she had tanned and smoked a pack a day. “I’ve been taking it easy today. Canceled my Westchester sessions—I do some pediatrics psych consulting, did I tell you?—because I’m going out with my husband tonight. We’re going to see Love on Broadway, have you been?”

  Noah hasn’t been.

  “Oh, it should be good, I think. I still get starstruck to see those movie men on the stage.” She makes an ostensibly sexy shimmy that is jerky and forced, painful-looking. “Bang. Get me going even after all these years.”

  “Any plans after? Are you making a whole evening out of it?” Noah swallows.

  “Oh yes, we have reservations before and after. Two dinners.” She makes an I’m-bloated gesture.

  “Where is Tuscany?” he asks.

  Dr. Thayer is taken aback. “Oh, Tuscany? Good luck with her!”

  And, with a swift rustle of silk, Dr. Thayer is gone.

  This is unexpected. Noah takes a step forward and stops. He pivots. On one side looms the brilliant white and silver kitchen. The maid, Fuen, is scrubbing the spotless wall. From the set of her face Noah has always assumed that she either doesn’t speak English or pretends not to in order to avoid being subjected to guests who might ask her for service. On the other side is the wide, ottoman-overrun living room. Noah wanders in, among and through the monumental furniture. The silk tassels of the ottomans swish as he passes.

  Noah starts down a long, obscure hallway, daunted but also feeling intrepid: he is wandering alone in an unknown land; it is as though he should be brandishing a torch or a sword. As he stalks down the hallway it comes to him that the doormen’s reservations about letting him up aren’t that bizarre—his questing for Tuscany could easily seem a seduction. A lean, large-framed man with the wholesome polar-fleece aesthetic of a summer camp counselor raps softly on the bedroom door of a fifteen-year-old beauty…

  Noah hears a polyphonic cell phone ring. He raps his knuckles on the partially opened door. It opens fully to reveal Tuscany. “Oh, hey.”

  She wears tiny purple pants that don’t quite make it to the top of her expo
sed hipbones. Her hair is moussed out into a grand arc that curves over her off-the-shoulder sweatshirt. She beckons Noah into her room. They stand in the center. She plays with a strand of hair, twirls it around an orange, fake-baked finger.

  Tuscany sits in an executive chair. Noah is left with a quaint embroidered wicker throne that would comfortably seat a teddy bear. He folds himself into it, smiles, and tries to think of something interesting to say as he pulls out his materials. But his mind is full of the fact that the Josh Hartnett poster over Tuscany’s desk has been set back into an ornately gilt eighteenth century frame.

  “So, you go to Moore-Pike Academy?” he tries.

  “Yeah.” She is collected but nervous.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yeah. It’s cool. We get out pretty early in the day.”

  “You probably wish there were boys there, huh?”

  She looks at Noah, startled. Her eyes are wide and very blue. Her eyelashes have been mascaraed into spider legs. Her lips slacken into a slight, breathless grin. There is a glimmer of conspiracy in her gaze.

  “Girls’ schools totally suck,” she announces.

  “It’s a good school, though,” Noah says.

  “For dykes.”

  They begin by discussing how to memorize vocabulary (“I totally suck at vocab,” Tuscany warns). Noah then teaches her about “plugging in numbers,” a strategy that replaces even the most complex algebra on a standardized test with rote arithmetic. Tuscany is very excited by this technique.

  “I can’t believe they let this happen!” she exclaims. “It’s like cheating.”

  There is no answer to that. It is like cheating, and it explains why the scores of Noah’s students are three hundred and fifty points higher after tutoring.

  Noah glances about the room. An alcoved queen bed occupies half of the floor. Swaths of fabric float over it and attach to the ceiling. It is a regal poop, Cleopatra’s perfumed barge. Tuscany has covered the bed with pillows—raw silk, corduroy, some embroidered and sporting maxims such as “Keep on Shopping.” Tuscany’s teak desk has been pushed against the opposite wall. It is huge, fashionably worn, and could have served as the centerpiece of a museum collection if it didn’t have an iMac on it.

  Tuscany is staring at him. He has lost himself in his thoughts. “Tutoring is relationship-building,” he remembers hearing during training; “spend at least a fifth of your time chatting about the student’s life.” The mathematical precision of that rule always seemed creepy to him before, but now he finds himself falling back on it. These hundred minutes are about Tuscany, not him.

  “You’re the coolest kid in your class, huh?” Noah asks. He asks this of roughly half his students. They dance around the question until eventually agreeing with him.

  “Not the coolest, ” Tuscany generously concedes. “I don’t hang around with school friends much.”

  “Whom do you hang around?”

  Tuscany smiles slyly. “I’m grounded.”

  “Why are you grounded?”

  “I had boys over when my mom was away. I don’t get it. She knows I’m a teenager. She knows I’m supposed to party. What does she expect?”

  “Is that why the doormen wouldn’t let me up?”

  “They wouldn’t?” she hoots. “That’s so funny. They thought you were like my boyfriend in disguise or something.”

  Noah nods and smiles nervously.

  “My boyfriend is so much older than you.”

  “How old do you think I am?” Noah asks after a moment.

  “I don’t know, like twenty.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Oh, you’re closer to his age, then.” She sighs. “My mom thinks I should hang out with guys my own age.”

  “She’s probably right,” Noah says.

  “I know, of course, I’m not stupid. But guys my age are just so dumb.”

  “Did anything happen at your party? When you had those guys over?” Noah asks.

  “I don’t get what you mean. What do you want to know?”

  Noah shrugs. What does he want to know? He was just trying to make conversation, though it has certainly taken an unexpected turn. How to segue to the volume of a cube…

  “I can get anyone past the doormen.” For a moment Tuscany is staring at Noah. He feels appraised.

  “I didn’t party much in high school,” Noah confides. “I was a complete nerd.”

  “Oh, please, I can’t believe that. You were totally a cool kid.”

  Tuscany’s cell phone tinkles out Vivaldi’s “Spring.” She shoots a hand out and presses a button. “Sorry.”

  “Nice ring,” Noah says.

  “Yah, it’s springtime something. I downloaded it.”

  The phone rings once more. “Ugh. I should just turn it off.”

  Tuscany opens a drawer in her desk and rummages through. She withdraws a cigarette and places it between her lips. “You want one?” she offers, the cigarette bobbing in her mouth.

  Noah shakes his head. “Your mom lets you smoke in here?”

  “Are you kidding? She knows I’d be eating if I wasn’t smoking.”

  Tuscany pulls out an ashtray that reads “Party Girl” and is decorated by the kind of roughly sketched and impossibly slender women that appear on the covers of novels about Manhattan. She takes a pensive, almost Socratic pose, holding her cigarette far from her body. The filter is slick with pink lip gloss. “She’s going to have to let me go to the gym tonight, I’ve been eating like a cow. I don’t know when she thinks I’m going to do my homework.”

  Noah now makes Tuscany determine the average height of a certain baseball team. He then asks her what the reciprocal of the smallest prime number is. He stares about her room as she puzzles through the question. One pillow is centered on the bed, flanked by “I Stop for Visa” and “The Princess of Everything.” This largest pillow is embroidered in a simple “Home Sweet Home” style. Tuscany purrs a number, but Noah misses her answer. The pillow on the center of Tuscany’s bed reads: “Boys Like Girls Who Look Neat—When in Doubt, Just Don’t Eat!”

  Noah spends the early evening at a coffee shop, making guilty and uproarious calls on his cell phone. In the space of one week the pillow becomes a legend among Noah’s circle. The forced, awkward rhyme takes on the dimensions of a couplet from a Greek epic. His friends Tim and Justin think it’s a travesty; Tab thinks it’s hilarious and wants to order one. His mother is saddened and his brother is titillated. Hera wonders how Dr. Thayer allowed the pillow into her house, while Roberto suggests that maybe Dr. Thayer bought the pillow.

  Roberto voices this suspicion while they are on their double date. They are seated in the darkest corner a fluorescently lit Puerto Rican restaurant can provide. Roberto has arranged to meet up with a girl he met at the Queens warehouse rave, and she has agreed to bring along her friend. Noah couldn’t invite the girl he took home: he was embarrassed to be unable to recall her name. Roberto’s Warehouse Girl has smirked throughout the meal, leaning forward over jelly-braceleted arms, gulping beer like soda through her crooked smile. Every time she responds to Noah, her eyes are on Roberto. Her friend was apparently at the rave as well, though Noah can’t recollect her face among the drunken images of the evening. A butterfly tattoo stretches across the nape of her neck.

  “That poor pillow girl,” moans Butterfly.

  “Whatever, I’m not exactly sympathetic,” says Warehouse Girl, who has a nose ring. “Little rich girl.”

  “I just think it’s hella funny,” Roberto says, after calling to the waitress for more plátanos. “Noah’s got like the maddest job. I tell everyone I know about it.”

  Noah can’t get the smile off his face (he rarely tells a story that can command a table; it is a thrilling success), but he feels a wave of cool melancholy behind the hot splash of pleasure. Tuscany makes him genuinely sad, but now she has become an anecdote. He finds it hard to attach emotions to the comedy piece she’s become.

  “Those people’re totall
y fucked up,” Warehouse Girl says. “It just makes you glad that you’re not part of it all, you know?”

  “I don’t know,” says Butterfly. She doesn’t look up when she speaks, and wears a voluminous Yankees sweatshirt.

  “She’s just a kid. It’s not as though she asked for this. I feel bad even talking about it.” Butterfly has worked her chair a formidable distance back from the table, her legs crossed, looking not only unhappy to be there but also not quite alive.

  “You couldn’t make this shit up, it’s that fucked,” Roberto proclaims. He dominates the airspace of the table with his arms, as though he might be dating all three of them. His hair is carefully oiled and gelled and falls back from his face like a swashbuckler’s. Noah wonders if he has let his curiosity about Roberto take him too far, if he is now friends with someone he doesn’t actually like.

  Roberto runs a finger over Warehouse Girl’s arm, traces small circles into the pit of her elbow. Noah looks to Butterfly, technically his date: her elbows appear to be covered by a long-sleeve T-shirt, a windbreaker, and a sweatshirt.

  Warehouse Girl stares meaningfully into Roberto’s eyes as she stabs a piece of perníl. “Is she a babe, this girl?” she asks.

  “Umm, I guess,” Noah says. He seems to have lost his charisma somewhere. “I think she expects me to drool over her.”

  “And do you? Drool? Wanna like spank her?” Roberto asks. Butterfly has begun to peel the label off her beer bottle, stares at it intently, as if hoping to banish the rest of them by dint of her concentration. “’Cuz she sounds totally fuckworthy. Her mom, too.”

  Butterfly rises and goes to the bathroom. She still has her sweatshirt on; there is nothing of her left at the table. Noah watches Roberto and Warehouse Girl giggle over the Tuscany anecdote. Roberto leans forward, suavely holding back his greasy locks to prevent them from sliding into the rice and beans. “Just wait until I get you home,” he whispers to Warehouse Girl in a voice that is just loud enough for Noah to hear. “I wanna spread your legs and taste you.”

  He looks at Noah proudly— Look at who I’m gonna be doing tonight! —and Noah stares into the wood of the table in an embarrassed rage. He is furious at Roberto for being so blunt and predatory, furious at Warehouse Girl for accepting it and apparently enjoying it. And he’s furious, Noah realizes, that Butterfly finds him so unengaging, has an instant aversion to dating him because—aha, is this the key?—he is white and college-educated. The topics he likes to talk about hold no currency here. He has served as the table’s anchor; everyone listens to him, and is charmed. But they are fascinated by Tuscany, not him. He is transparent, an intermediary, useful only as a means to hear about the facile and ridiculous family that employs him. He has neither the glib immediacy of the Harlem streets nor the cultivated rarity of Fifth Avenue.