The ones who admire him for who he is, he knows, are his Princeton friends. But he doesn’t want to be someone who went to Princeton and only carries on relationships with alumni. He came from a backwater, and wouldn’t trade that “underprivileged” childhood for anything. This has been part of his ambition, he realizes (how often his very own feelings are unclear, and reveal themselves only after the fact)—to move to Harlem in order to connect with a world foreign to both his four years at upper-class Princeton and his white-bread home in Virginia. He is always searching for new ground.
But now his Tuscany anecdote is over, the beers have emptied, and Roberto wants to bring his date home, spread her legs, and taste her. Butterfly returns; the quartet fumbles outside; Butterfly splits; Noah leaves soon after, drunkenly picking his way over the cracked sidewalks of 150th Street until he throws himself onto his bed, alone. He could have invited her up; she was pretty enough. But he no longer wants the odd night of passion. Pretty is such a small part of it. Everything is such a small part of it.
By the time Noah has another meeting with Tuscany, he has told the pillow story so many times, has created such a mythology around her, that he is actually nervous to see her again, as nervous as one of his students would be taking the SAT. He can’t taste his lunch: his fast-food meal passes into his gullet without taste. He compulsively pops Altoids all afternoon.
Noah misjudges his commute and arrives an hour early. He wanders up and down 86th Street. And then he sees her.
She is across the street, wearing a light peacoat and a black furry hat. Together with a friend, she stares into the window of Victoria’s Secret. They stand at an odd angle, feet close but bodies apart, like halves of a split arrow—it is apparent that they do not like each other. They check out a pink teddy on a waxy pale mannequin, but are clearly not talking about it. From the looks of her gloved gesticulations, Tuscany is recounting something that recently happened to her, probably involving a boy, or a man. Nervous lest Tuscany should see him and think he is stalking her, Noah ducks over to Lexington and spends the rest of the hour chewing a stale donut in a coffee shop.
When Noah finally arrives at the apartment, he is led to Tuscany’s room by the thuds of hip-hop music emanating down the hallway. She is holding court with two sullen friends. They are fogged in by cigarette smoke.
“Oh, hey,” Tuscany says. She cracks a window open and waves smoke out with a vocabulary list.
“Hey,” Noah says, looking at each girl in turn. They stare back frankly, gauging him, waiting for him to either light up or ask them out already.
“Outta here, guys,” Tuscany declares. “I gotta tute.”
“Tute,” informal conjugation of “to tutor,” Noah intends to tease after the friends leave. But Tuscany yawns and tosses her hair, and at the sight of her swaying hips Noah is overtaken by a sudden burst of nerves. His tongue catapults his breath mint out of his mouth. It lands with a ping on the hardwood floor.
They stare at each other through the smoke.
“Aha!” Noah says jocularly. It is all he can think to say.
“Hey,” Tuscany sniggers. She is uncomfortable and suddenly fifteen again.
Noah puts down his bag, picks up the Altoid, stares at it for a moment, and places it in his pocket. More silence.
“I’m grounded again,” Tuscany says.
“Oh yeah? Why?”
“This man,” she replies. “My mom is crazy.”
“Ah.”
They go over the A words on the vocabulary list. Noah is disheartened: he doesn’t expect his students to know arbiter, but he does expect abduction.
“So do you like this guy?” Noah asks.
“He’s all right. He’s pretty nice. And loaded. But, I dunno. Sometimes I want something more…deep? You know, intellectual?” She stares at Noah.
“Where do you want to go to school?” Noah asks, smiling solidly to enforce the shift in conversation.
“My mom wants me to go to Hampshire Academy. My aunt’s a dean there, and my granddad built a library or something. But I’d have to get like seventy-fifth percentile—”
“You could get seventy-fifth percentile.”
“And then, I just don’t wanna go. It’d be lame. It’s like, how about a party school, someplace easier or something.”
Conventional wisdom would call for Noah to suggest aiming for Hampshire Academy, but he doesn’t. He can’t imagine Tuscany sledding in New Hampshire. Or studying.
The day’s program is analogies. Noah gives her an easy start problem: COOP:CHICKEN. She moans, spits out a few inaudible curses, then ventures a guess. “Um, if you live in a co-op…you can’t own any chickens?”
The third problem is PUEBLO:IGLOO.
“What the hell? I know what an ig loo is, everyone knows that, it’s like a Canadian ice house, but how am I supposed to know what a pueb lo is? What the hell is a pueb lo?”
“You know, you studied it in eighth grade, probably, Native Americans—”
“Oh yeah! Totally. It’s what African Americans live in.”
“No! No, not African Americans, Native Americans.”
“Oh, right, right, sorry.”
They puzzle through the analogy for a few minutes. Finally:
“Okay, I get it,” Tuscany declares. “IGLOO is to Canadian ice house as PUEBLO is to African Americans. But that’s not an answer choice!”
Noah can no longer object. There is too much working against him. There is no difference between Native and African Americans, not for Tuscany, not here. She would expect Harlem to be full of pueblos and powwows.
Noah excuses himself to the bathroom, stares mesmerized into the vortex of the backlit glass sink as he washes his hands. Dr. Thayer is at the door when he comes out. She is dressed up, presumably to go to work, although she could just as easily be going to lunch at Sarabeth’s. Dr. Thayer’s afternoon sessions are lunch dates, coffee in a Madison Avenue apartment, finished off with a prescription for some kid’s Ritalin.
“Noah,” she whispers. “How is she doing? Better than Dylan, at least?” She has reapplied her makeup and glows bronze.
“Jeez! I can totally hear you,” Tuscany yells from behind her door.
“Well, Jesus to you!” Dr. Thayer yells back. “How are you doing?”
“Fine!” comes Tuscany’s voice.
Dr. Thayer turns to Noah. “Is she fine?”
“She has a very rational mind,” Noah replies.
“Well, she has to do better than she did on that diagnostic test.”
“I was totally hung over. I told you that!” comes the voice beyond the door.
“She says ‘hung over’ as if it’s not going to bother me.”
Noah is unsure of what to say: Dr. Thayer is, indeed, unruffled.
“How do you expect me to get better if you don’t let us work?”
They are now all three in Tuscany’s room. “It’s my turn with Noah right now, honey. You’ve had him for forty-five minutes.”
Noah sits next to Tuscany. Her “Party Girl” ashtray smolders between them. They stare at her mother, firmly planted in the doorway. Dr. Thayer is suddenly petulant, terrifying. Tuscany and Noah are both defiant children before her.
“Fuen!” she calls. Fuen arrives with a tea tray.
Tuscany is disgusted. “What are you doing, Mom?”
“I thought you and Noah would enjoy some refreshments. Keep you focused.”
“You’re so weird. ”
“Apparently I’m weird,” Dr. Thayer confirms resignedly.
Noah eyes the tray placed on the wide antique desk. The china is razor-thin and decorated with black swans, and the teacup handles are so small that they can only be pinched, not grasped. Two lonely cookies sit in the middle of the tray.
“You’re being annoying,” Tuscany says.
Weakly: “That’s enough.” Then, instructively, to Noah: “You need to make sure she gets more questions right.”
“That’s what we’re trying,” N
oah responds.
“And you,” Dr. Thayer begins to Tuscany. She pauses. Is she about to cry? “You need to realize that there are other people in this world beyond yourself. You don’t think of me, do you?”
“No,” Tuscany says. Her voice has lost all vitality.
“Work on this,” Dr. Thayer commands them.
Tuscany has had enough of submission. She takes a long, angry drag on her cigarette. “I did all my vocab. Didn’t I do all my vocab, Noah?”
“She did all her vocab,” Noah lies. “Almost all.”
“So. Are you done?” Tuscany asks her mother.
Dr. Thayer looks at Tuscany for a long while, as though sickened by her insolence. “I. Am. Done.”
With an odd, questioning turn of her head, she is gone. She is a different mother than she was around Dylan. She has become aloof, defensive—competitive? With her daughter?
“She sucks,” Tuscany says.
“She cares about you.” Noah has no idea how much this is true.
“Bullshit. She’s just worried about how I’ll make her look. All her clients are my friends’ families—‘it’s such a small world’—and whatever I do reflects on her. She’s told me as much. I think it’s the only reason she cares at all about me.”
“Wow. That’s harsh. Are you sure?”
Tuscany stares at Noah from beneath the prison bars of her lashes. She appears about to say something virulent and deeply felt. But the motions of smoking have pushed her hair forward and she is now more concerned with fondling the white-blond tips. “Whatever. Let’s do some math.”
Noah is concerned: it is the first time a student has steered the meeting toward, rather than away from, the test at hand.
The surface area of a cube, Tuscany learns, is 6 s2. If a man has three dress shirts, five pairs of pants, and two belts, he has thirty outfits. If Carlos delivers twenty-seven pizzas in an hour, he delivers nine in twenty minutes.
“Our maid’s husband is named Carlos,” Tuscany remarks. “Which is weird, because she’s Filipino. She’s illegal.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve never dated anyone who wasn’t white,” Tuscany continues.
“Oh, really?”
“No, I think I should, I mean everyone should.”
Noah takes a deep breath before responding. “Well, I don’t think you should feel obligated, I mean, it would be a little strange to think it was your responsibility.”
“Yeah, you’re totally right. I should face it—I’m just attracted to white guys. That’s who I like. White guys in dress shirts. And sometimes Hispanic guys in dress shirts.”
There is something apologetic in Tuscany’s tone. Noah looks down at his own sweater, sans dress shirt, and then clenches his jaw for having done so. It’s as though fifteen-year-old Tuscany is letting her twenty-five-year-old tutor down easy.
“I could totally see that,” Noah says.
“Yah, I have such a type.”
“How do you meet these guys?”
“I dunno. The same way you meet girls. At a bar, a club.”
“Do they buy you drinks?”
“Sometimes. But then it’s weird, ’cuz it’s like, I don’t want to get a drink from him, but then I have it, and it’s like I’m suddenly tied to this guy who might be gross. So I try and buy my own drinks.”
The runner from Westchester, if sprinting at eight miles an hour, will overtake Laeticia in half an hour. The interior angles of an octagon total 1080 degrees. If, of the twenty women at a party, fourteen are blond and twelve wear high heels, six women are both blond and wear high heels.
I want to spread your legs and taste you.
Tuscany will not be able to meet at the usual time the following week since she has to go to the doctor, so she and Noah plan to meet during one of Tuscany’s free periods, in the Moore-Pike Academy library.
It’s supposed to be a quiet place, and other kids will be trying to study, and you two won’t be able to concentrate, and furthermore I think it’s just inappropriate, don’t you, why don’t you just come later, here, as late as it needs to be, just come here.
The voicemail is from Dr. Thayer.
Noah’s meeting with Tuscany will have to be late indeed, as his seniors are cramming in sessions. The SAT can be taken multiple times and is offered roughly once a month—once students enter senior year, however, only a few administrations are left in order to make application deadlines. Noah’s sessions with juniors, whose SATs are a year away, are comparatively carefree. He meets Cameron on the Upper West Side (she is having a down day; she complains throughout the vocabulary quiz that the lead in the school production of Gypsy went to vapid, vacuous, insipid, inane Maribeth Culbert), then grabs a cab back to the East Side to meet with a new Fieldston student, Rafferty Zeigler. Mrs. Zeigler agreed to Noah’s tutoring Rafferty only after being convinced by Cameron’s parents’ repeated recommendations. Mrs. Zeigler is an anxious type, the breed of wispy-boned, fluttery Park Avenue woman whose apartment encloses her like a birdcage. Rafferty himself is as terse as most other boys his age, gets math concepts easily but doesn’t seem to have ever actually read anything beyond his PlayStation manual. A fairly typical case, though when dealing with such a nervous mother Noah is always aware that dissatisfaction can be quick to bloom.
Noah arrives at 949 Fifth Avenue around ten P.M . Dr. Thayer is at the door when Noah steps off the elevator.
“It’s late,” she hisses.
“I’m sorry, you asked me to come when I could—I have other students.”
“Come in,” Dr. Thayer commands. She has traded in her gray gown for garnet. There are large gold earrings in her ears, instead of the usual pearls. She might have just returned from the theater.
“Sit down,” she instructs, and suddenly Noah is perched on one of the ottomans. Dr. Thayer sits across from him and smiles. Her teeth are stained red with wine. She places a hand on the couch beside her, catching the fabric of her dress with her thumb and pulling it sheer across her firm abdomen.
“Tuscany,” she intones, “has gone to bed.”
“Oh.” In the glowing evening light, Dr. Thayer’s eyes look large and liquid, like Tuscany’s.
“There’s a twenty-four-hour cancellation policy?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Like lawyers.” She smiles, so Noah does as well. “We should fill the time, then,” she continues. “Listen, I’m concerned. I don’t think Tuscany’s going to do well on this. We really want her to go to Hampshire. Can she get into Hampshire?”
I just want to go to a party school.
“You know someone there, right?”
Dr. Thayer laughs. Noah has apparently just been very, very amusing. “Yes, we ‘know someone there.’ ”
“Well, her chances aren’t half bad. I’ve been concentrating on math; I think we’ll make our biggest gains there.”
“You should make sure she knows how to multiply well.”
“Yes. I should.”
Dr. Thayer pulls her teased-out hair back and smiles at Noah, as if apologizing for trying to do his job. “You know, I didn’t have to take the ISEE.”
“No?”
“No.” Dr. Thayer cocks her head and looks at Noah inquisitively, like a bird or a bright child. It is a pose Tuscany frequently adopts: Dr. Thayer is wondering what Noah thinks of her.
The agency will bill them for one hundred minutes. He is here for one hundred minutes.
We should fill the time, then.
“Why,” Noah asks, “didn’t you have to take the ISEE?”
Dr. Thayer leans forward. Her bra is flesh-toned. “I,” she says conspiratorially, “went to a public high school.”
“Really?” Noah is shocked by his own reflexive reaction. He too, after all, went to a public school. And doubtlessly one a lot more “public” than Dr. Thayer’s.
“Yes, really. It’s strange, no? I go to parties, and the host will take my coat and ask where I went to school, and I’ll smile and sa
y, ‘Providence Latin, can I still stay?’ ”
They laugh.
“Can I offer you anything?”
Boys Like Girls Who Look Neat—When in Doubt, Just Don’t Eat.
“No, thank you, I have dinner plans.”
“Oh, am I keeping you?”
“No, of course not.” And she’s not. He doesn’t have dinner plans. He looks at her where she sits, reclined and smiling, on the antique couch. What’s stopping him from staying?
“Can I offer you anything to drink, then?” She flashes her red teeth.
Noah glances at his watch. Ninety minutes left. Six hundred dollars. For a glass of wine with a woman who is, at the very least, fascinating. Noah accepts.
Dr. Thayer leaves him in the gray land of the ottomans. Noah searches his memory of training week for a situation remotely like this. He hasn’t turned up anything before Dr. Thayer returns with two large glasses of wine.
“This is my husband’s stock, we mustn’t tell him.”
Noah sips.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s very good.”
“So what do you do when you’re not tutoring?”
“I fill out grad school apps.”
“Oh, aren’t you a dear! I knew you were planning on being a real professor, I think. Tuscany used to play teacher, back when she was in preschool. Always ahead of herself. Good thing she gave that up.”
Dr. Thayer looks at Noah questioningly, gauging her attractiveness in his eyes. He debates whether he could get up from the ottoman and sit next to her on the couch, what it would feel like to talk to her from inches away, to lay his hand on hers. She has charmed him despite himself. Her gold rings flash in the candlelight—he is lost in the play of warm light as he muses that she could, after all, be the answer to all of his problems. He could just replace her absent husband from time to time, accompany her to the theater. She would take care of Stafford, Perkins, and America’s Bank. He has never dated an older woman—maybe she would be able to hold his interest longer than girls his own age. He senses the exact question Dr. Thayer wants him to ask. He stares directly into her blond-framed brown eyes:
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