“I’ve asked Agnès to prepare the dining room for you two to work in. I think it would be very improper, don’t you, for you to spend all your time in Tuscany’s bedroom?”
She shoots Noah an accusing look. He chokes down a number of indignant responses, then nods and leaves.
He hates her for a moment, with a tempestuous all-consuming rage; a bit, he admonishes himself, like a small child. And just like a small child, he is powerless against her. So he bucks up and starts down the hall. Dining rooms, Noah reasons, are rarely upstairs. So he walks down the dark stairwell and wanders the wide painting-lined hallway on the first floor. He comes upon two rooms that look like offices, both strewn with paper and receipts. The next room has a wide polished wooden table decorated by a pair of silver candelabras. Portraits of old men line the walls, and an antique serving table dominates one corner. This might as well be a dining room, although Noah can’t envision anyone eating here, can’t picture a glob of mashed potatoes striking the thick gloss of the table. He can only see the room as part of a museum house, tourists peering over a velvet rope and then moving on. He sits at a high-backed chair whose cushions are a green fleur-de-lis brocade.
A few stacks of papers are scattered on the table, apparently overflow from the pair of offices next door. Noah glances at them as he pulls out his books. One is a legal-sized ream, bound with a giant binder clip. On the front are laser-printed gray and white columns, titled
Income and Expenses, December
Incomes:
Westfield Money Market, transaction: $40,001.09
Blue Chip Mutuals, Shift: $53,344.76
Dividends of Blaker Trust: $3,905.50
Property appreciation,
Wilmington, DE, est.: $24,000.00
The list continues for pages and pages. Listening for the sound of approaching footsteps, Noah timorously and noncommittally lifts the corner of the report. He flips through the statement. Each entry is a holding company, a gift-in-kind, a transferred donation, or just a random sequence of letters and numbers, until:
Total Income, 12/01–12/31: $747,842.42
Noah closes the stack of paper and pushes it away. Suddenly he feels significantly less contrite about his own $225 an hour.
He hears, from far away in the apartment, the strains of a conversation. “Where?” Tuscany is saying.
“The dine-ing rooom. Dine-ing roooom!” It is a woman’s voice, the aspirated syllables unmistakably Parisian.
“Aargh. I can’t understand you! Speak better,” Tuscany says.
“The. Dine. Ing. Rooom.”
“Which one is that?”
“It is after the three’d door in the hallway after the kitchen.”
“Oh! The one with the big table?”
“Yes, that rooom.”
“Okay, okay! We just never called it the ‘dining room.’ ”
“What do you call eet, then?”
“Just let it go, Agnès,” Tuscany says imperiously. She pronounces the name with a passable French accent.
The pair is at the door. Tuscany is wearing a clubbing shirt emblazoned with a sequined martini glass, the neckline dipping to the tops of her breasts. She saunters into the room and places her school materials, namely a glitter pen, on the table. She throws herself back in her chair and thrusts her hands into her lap, as if exasperated at the world’s lack of compassion for her.
Agnès stands in the doorway. She is plump, with braided straw-colored hair and rosy cheeks, and the bonny but wary aspect of every heroine of European fairy tales. She can’t be much older than Noah. “Hello,” she says haltingly, “I am Agnès.”
“Je m’appelle Noah,” Noah says. “Enchanté.”
Agnès bursts into a grand smile. “Vous parlez français, alors! Bien, je vous laisse ici. Si vous avez besoin de quelque chose, n’hésitez pas à m’appeler!”
After Agnès leaves, Tuscany leans to Noah and says in a whisper: “She’s incredibly stupid. She barely knows how to talk.”
“Actually, Tuscany, she speaks pretty well in French. English is, after all, her second language.”
“Yeah, you two loved your little show-off moment, huh?”
Tuscany adjusts the strap of her shirt and looks at Noah passionately, as though she has just accused him of messing around with another woman. He is unused to Tuscany’s being unruly, and he is unsure of what to say. And when he thinks about it, Tuscany is right—he supposes that he was showing off. But the first job of a teacher is to illustrate his command of the subject, right? Stop thinking, Noah reprimands himself, you’re just showing doubt. And stop looking at the slender fingers playing with the bra strap, the butterfly wings of her breastbone.
“We’d best start with French, then,” Noah says. It is the material he is most unsure of, and figures he should take it out first.
“Right. What do you have there?” Tuscany has pulled one of Noah’s textbooks from the pile and flips through it, lips parted, toying with her hair, as if scanning the latest Cosmopolitan. “‘Confucian Ethics’? What are those?”
“It’s one of our textbooks.”
“That doesn’t look like any textbook I’ve ever had.”
“They’re all from college.”
“Princeton textbooks? Wow. I don’t think that’s going to happen. They’ll be like hard.”
“No, not really. Nothing you can’t handle.” Tuscany blushes. “I want to give you a chance to get beyond what you did in high school, where we can do some real abstract thinking, study more than just rules and words and dates and explore why things happen, and what knowledge means for you as a human being.”
Tuscany—eyes wide—removes the pen cap she was chewing from her mouth and sets it neatly on the table. She nods solemnly. Noah isn’t sure if she’s being serious or flirtatious. She has picked up her mother’s knack for rapidly vacillating between over-sexed and reproachful.
“You must be tired of test crap, huh?”
“No, I don’t mind it. I’m looking forward to this, though.”
Tuscany places both hands on the table, open-palmed, as if she were a mod guru on a mountain. “Showtime! Fill me up. Make me smart. I’m ready.”
They conjugate a few verbs. “Anyway,” Noah says, “I planned a full French lesson to do today, but that was before I knew you had a French au pair.”
“Personal assistant. Mom says au pairs are outdated.”
“She might be the best one to work on French with, so—”
“I told you, she’s stupid —”
“I’m going to check in with your mom about doing your French with Agnès, so you can get a good accent. Elle parle comme une parisienne. I’ve got a Virginian accent, if anything.”
“But I told you!” Tuscany wails. “She’s awful. I bet she can’t even speak French. You’re not listening to me! No one ever listens to me! Ahh!”
“I am listening to you, Tuscany. What’s going on here? Why are you being so contrary?”
“Ooh!” Tuscany says, throwing her voice into an odd pitch that might have been intended to simulate a British accent, “Look at me! I’m so smart! I went to Princeton! ‘You are being so contraaary, Tussscany.’ ”
“Do you mind telling me what’s going on?” It both amuses and horrifies Noah to be portrayed as putting on airs in this Fifth Avenue apartment.
“Do you miiind…giving me a spot of tea?” Tuscany cackles.
The door to the dining room opens. Agnès stands beyond. Her massive braids have been tied back by a piece of fabric, and she wipes her hands on her dress. “I forgot in telling you,” she says in English. “Dr. Thayer asked me to get food for you in the day, in the morning, now, and at lunch, then, and a snack in afternoon. I am ready for you to request. What do you like?”
Tuscany orders a tofu salad and diet lemonade from two different restaurants. Noah bites his lip. The employee hierarchy of the Thayer household is delineating itself, and he is uncomfortable to have both Fuen and Agnès at his service. “Oh, nothing, I�
��ll be fine.”
“What are you talking about?” Tuscany says. “Get food!”
Noah considers. Free food. From a place that offers nutrition! “Can I get a tuna sandwich? With vegetables?” Noah asks. “And a V-8?”
Agnès backs out of the doorway.
“I think,” Tuscany says, smiling, “now you can see that she actually is stupid.”
“That’s really mean. Imagine if you were in France. It wouldn’t be easy, right?”
Tuscany shrugs, then thinks of something of obvious interest: her face lights. “Agnès didn’t used to be so big. She used to be like sorta skinny. Then she got to America and she just blimped out, you know? So she gets this belly, and at one point, this was like a couple months ago, Dylan and I talk about it and come up with this plan and then we go to Mom and he’s like, ‘Uh, do you know that Agnès has this boyfriend down in the East Village?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, and she’s gettin’ kind of large.’ Preggers! Don’t look at me that way, we really thought she was—we didn’t know that she just got all obese.”
“So what did your mom say?” Noah asks apprehensively. Agnès is hardly fat—he can only imagine what Tuscany would say about Hera.
“Well, she called Agnès into her room, and she asked her ! Just straight up, ‘Have you gotten pregnant?’ Dylan and I were outside the door. And of course Agnès says no, of course not, only it’s like, ‘Nooo, of couuurse not!’ ’cuz she’s French, and Dylan and I are like rolling on the floor laughing.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It was so funny. You would have laughed.”
“That’s really bad. I’m serious.”
“It was like really funny. If you were there, you’d get it. I guess you had to be there.”
“Think how that made her feel.”
Tuscany catches Noah’s expression. “What’s up? Do you suddenly think you’re supposed to be my morality teacher too? It’s funny ! Laugh!”
Tuscany’s eyebrows knit closer than Noah has ever seen them, and there is a distance behind her eyes. He is losing her. His students will only do their work if they want him to like them. If he isn’t careful, Tuscany will no longer want to impress him, and he will have lost control.
“You’re terrible,” Noah says. He layers a jovial tone over the reproach, so she might find it a compliment.
“Yeah.” Tuscany smiles. “So, can we do something fun now?”
History is the only subject for which Noah was able to obtain Tuscany’s former textbook. He slides the book out of the pile. He took an instant dislike to the text as soon as he glanced through—it is arranged not by geography or time period but by theme; Tuscany’s current unit is on trade routes throughout time. Noah is tempted to reminisce about the simpler textbooks of yore, but suppresses the urge. Worst thing to do would be to come off as a curmudgeon. His students like him for his youth, not despite it.
“You know, we had a lot of girls here before Agnès,” Tuscany says.
Noah glances at his watch—Tuscany’s education can afford a few more moments of chatting, if it means that Tuscany will become excited again. “Yeah, what were they like?” he asks.
“Well, first there was Claude, who I don’t really remember ’cuz I was too little, but Dylan hated her, and she left after like a month. Then there was Brigitte, she was nice I guess, she used to take Dylan and me to the park where she would meet her boyfriend. He was cool, it was fun, but then I got mad at Brigitte one day for messing up what I wanted—I hate coffee ice cream—and then I let slip to Mom about the boyfriend, so then Brigitte had to go. But the total worst one we had was Pascale. I mean, she would be like a total Nazi about getting us to bed, and if I hadn’t finished my bath within like half an hour she would get all mad and say shit like, ‘I want to go hooome, Tuscany, please feenish sooon,’ like that was fair, I mean, Mom was paying her, right? But she was tough, and I think Mom liked her ’cuz she was older than the others, and wouldn’t take much shit. But Dylan and I would find ways to get back at her, we’d like put salt in the sugar dispenser when she was baking stuff, or once Dylan dunked her loofah sponge in the toilet, this is back when he was like fifteen, that was so nasty. And then one time Mom and Dad were having like an anniversary dinner, so Pascale had to take us to dinner. She was such a freak, she was always like about to have a nervous wreck—”
“Breakdown,” Noah corrects numbly.
“—and Dylan and I were laughing about something or other, I don’t remember what, and my foot just taps, I mean taps, so soft, hers under the table. And suddenly she stands up saying shit like, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore, you two are monsters, good luck with the rest of your lives’—and this is in the middle of a restaurant in like Gramercy—and Dylan and I just look at each other like, What the fuck? and she leaves and doesn’t come back. Then Mom finds Agnès, who as I said we thought was pregnant.”
“Wow,” Noah says. “Now let’s talk about the Turkish invasions! Yea, Turkish invasions!”
“Isn’t that the craziest shit you’ve ever heard?”
There are a few possibilities for why Tuscany is misbehaving—for one thing, she is getting more comfortable with him. But beyond that, this might be how Tuscany behaves in school. This must be her Moore-Pike Academy (and short-lived Choate) persona: the girl who wears low-cut shirts, seems not to care about academics, draws focus to herself whenever she can.
“It is crazy,” Noah admits.
Tuscany pulls her hair around the side of her head and pets it. “Okay,” she says, “I’m ready to work. We were studying trade routes in the Middle Ages when I left.”
Noah gulps. What does he know about medieval trade routes? “So what can you tell me?” he asks.
“Um, I don’t know.” She pulls a wadded piece of paper out of her back pocket. It takes a few seconds to extract the steam-pressed sheet from the skin-tight denim.
Noah peeks at the review questions printed at the end of the chapter. “So,” he prompts Tuscany, “if you were to draw maps of both the major trade routes in the fourteenth century and the spread of the bubonic plague during the same era, do you think the maps would overlap? Why or why not?”
“Hey,” Tuscany responds. “Do you like Lindsay Lohan? Don’t you think she’s so hot?”
Agnès, as if sensing the most opportune time for her reemergence, arrives with the late morning meal, and a box of Petit Écolier cookies. “I have also purchased some cookies. Would you care for some?”
Noah and Tuscany demur. Agnès exits with the cookies, not before glancing meaningfully at their meals. Tuscany looks at Noah with one eyebrow arched impossibly high: Cookies? Noah is unable to repress a laugh. Teenagers are cruel, and carry that cruelness like an aura, darkening those around them.
They finish early enough for Tuscany to get to the Connecticut house in time for her four o’clock riding lesson. Dr. Thayer comes into the dining room and orders Tuscany to her room. Tuscany lingers, toying with a filigreed statue of a groom in the center of the table.
“Now, Tuscany. The car service is downstairs. Go get your gear.”
Tuscany contorts in order to look through the wide space between her mother’s elbow and torso, pretending Dr. Thayer is merely an inanimate obstruction between her and her tutor. “Goodbye, Noah,” she says.
“Same time tomorrow,” Noah says.
“Yah, see you then.”
Tuscany ducks around her mother and leaves. Dr. Thayer licks a finger and idly presses it into a smudge on the glossy table. “Hmm,” she says slowly. “How was she?”
“She’s fairly willing to work. Since we don’t know what the curriculum is wherever she’ll end up, I’m concentrating on more general study skills, reasoning abilities.”
Dr. Thayer looks up. A gray smile puckers her features. “Reasoning abilities?”
What can he say to a parent who is selling her child short? “Umm, yes.”
Dr. Thayer eases into a chair next to Noah. She places both hands on the table,
rolls her fingers over one another. Her knuckles catch on the rings as they rise and fall. “It wasn’t her lack of ‘reasoning abilities’ that got her tossed out of Choate.”
Noah, distinctly remembering Dr. Thayer’s not wanting to speak of Tuscany’s being kicked out, simply leans forward and looks at the doctor.
“This has been a hell of a week, Noah,” Dr. Thayer says. “I’ve been up to the school at least three times. Meetings with disciplinary committees, heads of the school, trustees that are friends of friends, everyone we could find. She got the short end of the stick here. Of course, there was a boy involved, but because Tuscany was new and he wasn’t, it was easiest to place all the blame on her, make her an example without disrupting the social networks of the school.”
“Can she go back next semester?” Noah asks softly.
“She got expelled, Noah. We’re not going to try to send her back there.”
Noah bites his lip, but he cannot resist. “What happened?”
Dr. Thayer raises her hands up to the flickering light of the Murano glass chandelier, as if praying to it for strength. “She e-mailed a picture of herself to a boy she liked, some guy she already knew in Manhattan, a picture she shouldn’t have sent, on a school computer. Then they looked at her room, and found drugs I’m sure all the kids there are doing. Adderall, Nembutal, Dexedrine.”
Not pot or coke, not drugs one gets from a pusher. These are prescription drugs. Pediatrician drugs.
“They accused her of selling to the other kids on the hall. I have trouble believing that, don’t you?”
Tuscany as drug dealer does seem unlikely. Though certainly not impossible. “Do they know where she got the drugs?” Noah asks.
Dr. Thayer looks at Noah shrewdly. “I get deliveries at home; I know the implication, that Tuscany got the drugs from my supplies. Is that what you’re asking, if I think those drugs were my own?”
“No, I wasn’t implying anything.”
“Do you know what kind of impact it would have on my practice if a scandal like that came out? Do you think people around here don’t talk ?”
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