“He’s dead. My mother lives in Virginia.”
Neither Hera nor Olena offers the typical condolences. “Why do you not live with your mother?” Hera presses. “If you stayed with her until you married, you would never be alone, no?”
“She lives in a little rural town. There’s nothing for me in Virginia.” Not true, he mentally amends. There are his old friends. His brother and mother. But at the same time he can’t escape the conviction that returning home would be stepping down.
She leans forward, heaving her massive bosom to rest on the table, and takes Noah’s hands in her own. “You carry a lot on you. Ambition, strength, yes, but you seem also…afraid. Forgive me, I come from an open culture, more than yours, you could say. Titania and I often spoke like this after dinner, in front of the fire. I hope I am not being disrespectful.”
“What do you really want?” Olena asks Noah, momentarily letting her hand as well rest on Noah’s forearm. The feeling of her fingers on the hairs of his arm lingers. But despite the pleasant sensation it makes Noah want to cringe, the banality of being another twentysomething who doesn’t know what he wants. He removes his hands from Hera’s.
“I want to be a teacher. Not the way I am now. A schoolroom teacher,” he says.
Olena looks puzzled. “Are there still such things?”
“Do you want to be in love?” Hera asks, undeterred.
“Ma!”
“Sure, of course, that would be great too.” Noah smiles shyly and swallows a gob of pie. Hera rises to get them glasses of water. Why is the world so preoccupied with falling in love?
“She doesn’t mean to probe,” Olena says while Hera is away, “but we both do enjoy the talking about things, big things. I get tired of this American obsession with talking only about minutiae all the time.”
Noah nods. He is becoming drawn to Olena’s manner of speaking—it is as though she has read thousands of books but has seldom spoken before; her language has more breadth than fluency. Roberto prattles easily, like a child; Olena weighs her language down, trips over her own intelligence.
Hera emerges; she has apparently overheard her daughter. “Who do you talk about your day with, Noah?”
“Umm, I guess it changes, one person one day, another the next.”
“Mmm-hmm. You have considered to live with someone else?”
Noah laughs. “I did, once. But no girl has asked me since.”
“You could to live here,” Hera says.
“Live here!”
“Well, Roberto would enjoy your company, and I’m sure Titania does. You would be good influence on them both. I would make you meals, you would pay less rent, our building is not falling apart, why not?”
Noah’s Princeton loans’ going into repayment flickers through his mind—the tapeworm in his bank account has gotten bigger. A room here would be cheaper. And despite the addition of spaghetti sauce the meat pies are good, and carry within them a spiritual warmth not to be found in soup cans. He wouldn’t eat every meal out of a bowl, here! And his home life would certainly be livelier, and perhaps he would pay off his loans faster if Hera were around to scold him. He imagines reading next to Olena on the couch.
But being roommates with Roberto, who is fun and dynamic but tells his dates that he wants to spread their legs and taste them? And Noah’s mother was already nervous when he announced that he was moving into Harlem—what would she say if he told her he was moving in with the Albanian immigrant family in the tenement up the street?
“That’s quite an offer!” Noah says.
“We would love to have you with us,” Hera urges. Olena nods.
Noah says he will think about it, but there is a sudden formality in his tone that makes it clear to all of them that his answer is no.
But Noah returns home to the sound of running water. The warped planks of his floor glisten with moisture, and a small brook runs down the center of the room, culminating in a puddle beneath Noah’s bed. He plucks his laptop from the mattress and secures it on top of the bookcase before opening the door to his bathroom. A brackish pond has formed. The corroded pipe streams a steady arc of brown water into the bathtub, which it has filled until the glistening surface expels sheets of foul water over the bathroom floor. The air is heavy, moist, brown-green, and permeated with the odor of dilute sewage—like rotten potting soil or concentrated body odor. Those old watermarks on his walls suddenly make more sense.
After standing ankle-deep in the fetid water and expelling a stream of curses, Noah takes almost no time to throw a few belongings into his suitcase and lug it outside. He takes a moment to collect himself and then makes a panicky call to Roberto on his cell phone. Roberto and Olena arrive shortly after, panting, and help Noah drag his furniture over the few blocks to his new home.
Chapter
4
Noah pulls a worn chair to the table and eats another of Hera’s pies for consolation while Roberto lugs his suitcase up the stairs. He can glimpse the room he will share with Roberto: his cot is neatly made with a soft and threadbare comforter, his laptop case centered at the foot. Olena has donated her bedside table, on which she has placed a cloudy glass vase containing a number of drooping but colorful carnations. It is a simple display of both squalor and goodwill, and Noah wonders if the tears wetting the corners of his eyes are from gratitude or frustration.
Roberto is bouncing on the mattress of his bed. “Check this out, man! Our new digs!”
Noah wanders into Roberto’s room—his room—and puts his tutoring bag down next to his cot. From his vantage point he has a view of half a worn dresser, a construction site just visible through the cloudy window, and a ripped poster of Anna Kournikova. “Cool,” he says.
Roberto starts doing chin-ups from the doorframe. Noah watches his feet lower and rise as he speaks. “This is going to be awesome. I’ve always wanted like a little brother to share a room with.”
Tabitha used to snore all night long, and pressed the snooze button from six to nine each morning. Noah is a little leery of going back to sharing a room. He lumbers back into the living room. Olena gives his arm a little rub, as if to warm it. “Thank you,” he says wetly.
Olena laughs and drapes her arm over Noah’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Noah, you’re going to be okay. This is going to be fun.”
Noah nods.
“Stupid asshole slumlord,” she adds.
Noah breaks into a little grin.
Noah opens the Thayer apartment door to Dylan’s declaration that “that looks stupid.” Noah glances around the corner. Dylan sits on a leather stool in the middle of the kitchen’s chrome simplicity, his lower half wrapped as tightly as a wound in a plush white towel. An olive-skinned man takes quick snips at Dylan’s thick hair. Heedless of the flashing scissors, Dylan raises his hand to his crown after each cut, perfecting his hairstyle in the mirrored surface of the fridge.
“Hi, Dylan,” Noah says.
For a moment Dylan just stares blankly, seems not to recognize him. Then he smiles. “Hey.”
“How did the test go yesterday? It was the real thing this time.”
“Pretty good, I think.”
“Pretty good?”
“Yeah, I dunno, it always seems impossible, and this time was as impossible as always. Not like more impossible. So I guess that means it was pretty good.”
“What was the essay on?”
“Essay…” Dylan glazes over as he processes. Then his eyes widen. The hairdresser retracts his scissors just in time as Dylan whips his head around to look at Noah. “Oh my God! The essay!”
“What’s the matter?” Noah asks. For a horrible moment he is convinced that Dylan forgot to do it.
Dylan slams his hands down on his toweled thighs, scattering hair clippings. “You would have been so proud of me, Noah!”
“Why?”
“It was so hard to find a way to make it about Harriet Tubman.”
“What was the question?”
Dylan sits up.
The hairdresser twitches once in fear as, unnoticed by Dylan, a large chunk of hair is severed from Dylan’s head.
“Here it is, and I’m not shitting you: ‘Some say the twentieth century was a century of increased communication. The twenty-first century will be a century of blank. Fill in the blank and explain.’”
“And you wrote about Harriet Tubman?” Noah asks. He feels slightly sick.
Dylan nods proudly. “Yeah! First of all, I realized their trick. The twentieth century is all the years that begin with one-nine, not two-zero. They almost got me there.”
Noah gives Dylan a little thumbs-up.
“So,” Dylan continues, “here’s how I filled in the blank: the twenty-first century will be the century of—get this—Harriet Tubman rememberation.”
“Harriet Tubman rememberation ?”
“Yup. So I wrote about how like, since the beginning of time, blah blah, we have always waited for the moment to rememberate Harriet Tubman, who emancipated all the slaves—”
“Led a number of slaves to freedom, you mean.”
“Right, that, and now the moment has come—I think I actually wrote ‘the moment is upon us,’ how cool is that—to finally achieve the human forever goal of praising Harriet Tubman for the rebellious leader she always was being!”
Noah blinks.
“Was that awesome, or what?” Dylan asks.
“Yeah, sounds great.”
“Just wait’ll we get the score!”
Noah nods. “Ten days, Dylan, we’ve got ten days until it comes.” The words sound like a stay of execution.
“Your brother’s getting his hair cut in the kitchen,” Noah says as he enters Tuscany’s room. He has found that one of the easiest ways to make conversation with teenagers is to say something stupid and nonintimidating and then let them run with it.
“Yeah, how lame is that?” Tuscany asks. She is reclined on her pillows, plucking frayed threads of gold from a tassel of her bedspread. She’s wearing denim shorts that have been cut so high that the white cotton pocket hangs to midthigh. “He’s so lazy he won’t even go somewhere to get his hair cut. Mom has to get the guy to come here. But then it’s weird, because Dylan doesn’t care enough to go get his hair cut but when the guy comes here it’s like all life in this apartment stops, like Dylan’s downstairs being knighted or something.” Tuscany smiles, a numbly amazed expression on her face: she is proud of her simile.
“Does this guy do your hair, too?”
“Cristos? No way. He would have to bring like fifty pounds of stuff.”
“How’d your homework go?”
Tuscany swings her narrow legs together and runs her hands down them. She stares at their tan softness for a moment, then remembers why she began moving, hops into her desk chair, and pulls out her homework. “Not bad, take a look.”
Noah glances over it. Tuscany is a hard worker, especially compared to her brother; Noah can’t recall ever seeing Dylan’s handwriting. Tuscany has nailed her percents worksheet, and although she has missed most of the distance problems, she displays a surprising penchant for right triangles. Noah gives her a vocabulary quiz. The word lists he provides are more in the genre of cheat sheets than glossaries: the agency tabulated the frequency of words that reappear in all the standardized tests of the last ten years, and because terms and entire problems repeat from administration to administration, the vocabulary lists are essentially forecasters of the exact words that will appear on the exam. Tuscany knows quagmire, embolden, and nonentity, but misses circumlocution, laconic, and domicile .
“Domicile?” Noah repeats.
“Umm, hold on,” Tuscany says, pressing her fingers into her blond hair and scowling. She points to a small mountain of index cards. “I did my work, I know this…is it a type of apartment?”
“Sort of.” Seeing Tuscany’s crestfallen expression, Noah adds “Or yes, yes, that’s fine.”
Tuscany sits back and slaps Noah a high five. The acrylic of her nails glides against his callused fingertips. “Cool!”
“So, not bad! We’ll get you into boarding school, no problem.”
“Thank God. I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“Why do you want to leave so much?” Noah asks. He noticed something odd about Tuscany’s room during their last session—while most girls her age paper their mirrors with snapshots of themselves and their friends, Tuscany’s mirrors are bare.
“It sucks around here,” Tuscany says. “I just want to get out, you know?”
“Is everyone just too shallow?” Noah asks.
Tuscany looks taken aback; no one has posed her a question like this before. “Yeah, that’s it! It’s like no one really cares, you know? They’re jealous. Or maybe just mean.”
Seeing Tuscany, weightless and friendless, depressed and yet probably planning her next date with an older man, leaves Noah with a desolating concern for her. He looks at her with as much sympathy and empathy as he feels he can express without seeming improper. She is, after all, a hot girl in tiny shorts. It is his job to look at her as little as possible. He learned that the hard way. Even so, it takes resolve to keep his gaze averted.
“The rest of the world isn’t like this, you know,” Noah says.
“What’s that mean?” Tuscany asks.
Noah isn’t sure where he wants to go with this. Tuscany’s rarefied, privileged environment is no harder than the rest of America—it just isn’t any easier. “There are completely different worlds than this. If you feel isolated here, it says more about where you are than who you are.”
Tuscany stares out her window, tapping her fingers on the protective glass of her desk. Her mouth squirms, forms the beginnings of sentences, but eventually she just sighs, squeezes her thigh to gauge its leanness, and pulls out a cigarette. “So, what’re we doing next?” she asks brightly.
“No more analogies,” Noah announces.
“Yay!” Tuscany flashes an unclouded smile, so happy and unencumbered that Noah can see the allure she holds for her stressed businessmen boyfriends.
“It’s time for reading comprehension.”
Tuscany grimaces as she lights up. They take turns reading aloud a passage comparing the Hopi class system to that of the Maya. Tuscany is wearing a tiny pink “Wild Grrls” T-shirt and twists a strand of white-blond hair around a finger: hearing her voice complex rhetoric amazes Noah. He is fascinated that the human brain can do it, exist on twenty-first-century Fifth Avenue and comprehend ancient hierarchies.
Tuscany finishes, leans back, and pushes the test booklet away like a plate of unfinished food.
“Did you get it?”
“It was so boring, but I got it.”
And she does get it. The only question she misses asks her to compare gradated and tiered class structures. Tuscany breaks into a bright peal of laughter upon reading it. “Yeah, I don’t think so. What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Noah teaches Tuscany to paraphrase difficult sections, to focus on the first and last four lines of the passage. Tuscany punctuates Noah’s lesson with observations about how much finals will suck and how bloated she feels. She politely returns her attention to the passage when Noah asks her to, but in the middle of a section about the Mayan jungle she glances sagaciously at her fingernails and observes that guzzling ice water burns calories.
“Time for a break,” Noah says. “Want to run around the room screaming?”
Tuscany titters. “No.”
“Oh!” Noah remembers. “Tell me about this magazine you’re starting!”
“It’s called It’s All You. It’s a fashion magazine, only it’s directed at like girls around here. We don’t have anything for us, you know?”
Noah grins. “Right. Because Glamour and Vogue are full of trailer park girls.”
“What?”
“When does the first issue come out?”
“It already came out like a few months ago!” Tuscany says, beaming. She opens a drawer full of glossy magazines, extracts
one, and hands it to Noah. Spread across the front cover is a glamour shot of Tuscany—not a booth-in-the-mall, girl-in-feather-boa photo, but one that could have been ripped from the cover of Vanity Fair. Tuscany reclines in a yellow sundress on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum—her skin has been airbrushed the color of toasted marshmallows, and her eyes have been doctored a cerulean blue.
“Isn’t it awesome?” Tuscany asks. “Take a look. I have to go to the bathroom.”
Tuscany leaves, and Noah begins a $150 perusal of It’s All You. Tuscany is also centered on the second page, sporting a tutu and spouting a blurb outlining The Ballet-SoHo Mega Style Crossover. There are five articles listed in the table of contents, all followed with the byline of Tuscany Thayer. Tuscany offers to show the reader
I. The Hot Skinny on Tanning, pg. 3
II. The Low Brow Low Down: What Looking at Black Girls Tells You About Being Sexy, pg. 6
III. Hewitt Hos and Nightingale Nymphos: The Sluttiest Manhattan Schools Exposed, pg. 8
IV. The 18.5–22.5 Zone: What Your Body Fat Percentage Says About You, pg. 11
and, finally, inexplicably (and perhaps cut-and-pasted from Martha Stewart Living ):
V. Five Summer Soufflés to Tempt His Soul, pg. 13
“So whaddya think?” Tuscany asks on returning, flouncing onto the bed.
“You’re a star. This must have taken so much work.”
“Yeah. But it was like a labor of love.”
“So how do you distribute it?”
“How do I what?”
“Who gets a copy?”
“You know, whoever wants. I’ve still got a bunch left.” She points to a half dozen unopened cartons beneath her desk. “No one seems to really want one. You can keep that copy if you want.”
“Uh, thanks,” Noah says, wedging it in his messenger bag between vocabulary lists and Invisible Man.
Dr. Thayer appears in the doorway. “Did you tell Noah what I asked you to tell him, Tuscany?”
Tuscany groans. “No.”
Glamorous Disasters Page 10