Glamorous Disasters

by Eliot Schrefer

  “Is this the time you normally arrive?” Noah asks.

  Dylan picks up three imported beers and a mixed drink and drops three twenties on the bar. “You wanna meet my gang?” he asks as he turns around.

  Noah turns with him. Three men circle them. Two are long-haired and handsome, leering and bored, what Noah has come to identify as the bad element of Upper East Side twentysomething aristocracy; the other is an eyebrow-pierced Asian kid about Dylan’s age. “Guys, this is my tutor, Noah.”

  The guys nod as they accept their drinks. Noah gives his name to each in turn. They all say “Hey” back.

  “That’s so awesome,” the Asian kid says to Dylan. “My tutor would never come to a club. This is so cool.”

  “God,” one of the aristocrats says, “back when I took the SATs our tutors were all like forty-five and wearing sweater vests. Not club kids at Pangaea.”

  “Yeah,” the other aristocrat affirms.

  They haven’t offered their names, and they speak to one another around Noah. He realizes that he has been cast by the group as an exhibit, not a peer. Noah latches on to an easy way to alter the dynamic. Roberto is nearby; Noah slaps the back of his hand against his arm. “Hey, guys,” Noah announces. “I want you to meet my friend Roberto.”

  Roberto turns around, takes in the sight of the four well-heeled men. “Hey,” he says, “what’s goin’ on?”

  The guys look at Roberto doubtfully. Noah can sense what they’re evaluating: the cheap scent of Roberto’s cologne, his dropped consonant, the brandlessness of his clothing. Not in malicious judgment, necessarily, but because evaluation is the pleasure of being at Pangaea.

  Roberto holds his open hand in front of the group. It is a ruse, Noah realizes, a means to force the men to recognize him: not even the haughtiest person could let someone’s hand just lie outstretched in front of him. Roberto is larger than they by half, and the arm he has placed in the center of the group is thickly muscled. The men have no choice but to give it a clasp, one by one losing their puny hands inside Roberto’s. And by this move Roberto turns the tide. He proves his confidence by initiating the handshake, and he simultaneously establishes his physical superiority. Dylan and his friends jostle one another, searching for ways to engage Roberto.

  “So how do you know Noah?” the Asian kid asks.

  “Yeah,” an aristocrat says. “How do you know Noah?”

  “Noah? Noah and I are from the same ’hood. We’re like bros.” Roberto puts an arm around Noah’s shoulders.

  “Yeah, Noah lives in Harlem,” Dylan says proudly.

  “Wow,” the guys mumble.

  “But you guys aren’t even black ,” says one of the aristocrats.

  “Do you come to Pangaea a lot?” the other aristocrat asks.

  “No, man,” Roberto says, “but we figured we should check it out. There are some hot scenes in Harlem, there’s enough happening there that’s really down. But we thought, shit, we should check out some other spots too.”

  Noah is impressed. He knows there is no real nightlife scene in Harlem, at least not any that Roberto is interested in—he has heard him complain to that effect. But now Roberto has taken the doubt implied in the question ( Are you worthy of this place? ) and reversed it. The guys are now afraid that it is they who are missing out.

  “Really?” says the Asian kid. “Like where?”

  “No one place,” Roberto says. “You have to be hooked in, find out what’s hot. So, are there any celebs here tonight?”

  Dylan looks around the room. “No, not yet. It’s way too early anyway, it’s like embarrassing to be here before one.”

  “I guess that makes us all embarrassed, then,” Noah says. Roberto laughs, and therefore the other guys follow.

  Shockingly, thrillingly, the six dissimilar young men engage in conversation. They talk about traffic delays getting there, and all agree that the West Side Highway is the best way to go (never mind that the guys directed their cabdrivers that way, and Roberto and Noah cruised the highway at forty-five miles per hour in the sputtering Datsun). They identify in minute detail which of the girls in the club might be worth talking to. Dylan sets his eyes on a group of black girls in high heels holding bright green drinks.

  “They’re like out of this world,” he says. “Like not black, like African Americans, but black like daughters of kings from Africa, you know?”

  Noah coughs.

  Dylan then declares his mission that night will be to find a date for Noah.

  “What about the one with the red hair and tiny skirt?”

  “I don’t think so, Dylan, man.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you’re into like philosophers.”

  Roberto bursts out laughing and gives Dylan a high five. “See any philosophers around with hot asses?” he asks.

  “Yeah, Noah,” the Asian kid asks. “See anyone you like?” Then, to Dylan: “Your tutor’s the man. We’re totally going to find him a babe.”

  Noah looks around. There are a few girls who interest him—one with long arms, the hollow of her neck glistening as she stands by the bathroom door; another making liquid dance moves beneath a red banner. But he’s not about to air his preferences before his student. He wonders what moral code he has bestowed on himself tonight that allows him to share drinks with Dylan, but not to discuss girls.

  “I don’t know, guys,” Noah says. “No one, really.”

  “Hey, Dylan,” Roberto asks, “where’s your sister tonight?”

  “My sister? She’s like fifteen. She’s at home.”

  “Come on, Dylan,” an aristocrat says. “You know she’s here all the time.”

  “Yeah,” says the other aristocrat to the first. “Here with you !”

  “That had better not happen ever again, asshole,” Dylan says darkly. “Don’t ever let me hear about you touching her.”

  “Dylan, Dylan.” The aristocrat overenunciates, bathing the group in beer vapor. “Don’t you remember? Maybe you were too coked up. She was touching me. ”

  Dylan scowls, but there is little fury behind it. Whatever happened between the aristocrat and Tuscany must have occurred months previously. Or else Dylan has just taken too many depressants.

  “Dude,” says the Asian kid, laughing. “That’s so fucked. That’s like statutory.”

  “It’s cool that you protect your sister,” Roberto says to Dylan.

  The conversation is getting too bizarre for Noah. He turns away and scans the room. There is a queasiness in his stomach; suddenly he hates the club. When he turns back, the group has shifted position. The aristocrats have closed ranks around Roberto, and Noah is standing at the bar with the Asian kid.

  “That’s so fucked,” the Asian kid says. “The way they talk about Tuscany.”

  “Yeah, I just couldn’t take it,” Noah says.

  “You teach her, right? It must be totally weird for you to hear shit like that.”

  Noah ponders that; it would feel totally weird, he decides, if he hadn’t had half a dozen vodka tonics. As it stands, it’s irritating more than anything else.

  “She really needs help,” the Asian kid continues. “See that guy in the business suit over there?” The Asian kid points out a man who might be thirty-five, one hand against his belly and the other holding an unlit cigar. “She was with him for a while. And you’ve probably noticed that she like doesn’t eat? The problem is that she’s way too hot.”

  “I’m sorry?” Noah says, surreptitiously spitting an ice cube back into his drink.

  “She’s too hot. Ugly girls can grow up in Manhattan fine. But the hot ones, the really gorgeous ones, get eaten alive before they even turn eighteen. Tuscany knows what attention she can get if she’s hot, so she doesn’t eat. And then she comes to places like this and all these guys are forcing drinks and drugs on her, and all the other girls are bitches and won’t talk to her because she’s so pretty, so all she can do is hang out with these guys. It’s totally messed.”

  Noah nods. He feel
s horribly irresponsible, now, for his own moments of attraction, and for not having done more to help her.

  “What were you tutoring her for, the SAT already?”

  “No, no, the ISEE. She wanted to go to boarding school.”

  “Oh right, I forgot, she got busted for sending naked pictures to some guy and having like forty bajillion tabs of Xanax.”

  The Asian kid stares at his drink, trying to glimpse his reflection in the curved glass. He gives the silver spike in his eyebrow an experimental half turn.

  Noah is the adult here. He looks at Dylan’s friends, laughing and slapping Roberto on the back. Guys like that will mess her up. Manhattan will mess her up. Tuscany’s mom isn’t going to help her—it’s up to him. Noah excuses himself to the bathroom, pisses in the steel fountain. He stares in the mirror as well-dressed and preoccupied guys jostle him on either side. He checks out his outfit and hair for a moment, but he doesn’t actually see himself. All his thoughts are on Tuscany. She has luxury of which the rest of the world dreams, would be the envy of teen girls across America, and yet is barely staying above water. She’s besieged on all sides. And what has he been doing to help, meanwhile? He knows that he has been self-absorbed, that he has focused on making money for himself and his family. But that has been okay, right? He’s twenty-five; his big job is to figure his own life out. But now there’s Tuscany, bright and plummeting, warped and under assault by men with millions of dollars. He wants to help her, but distrusts his own impulse. But he has to do something.

  Noah stands and jokes around with the guys for an hour more but leaves early. He tells Roberto that he’ll just take a cab, not to worry (not that, he suspects, Roberto would). He ducks around a gaggle of girls at the front of the bar and hails a cab, guiding the driver toward Harlem. As he slides on the slippery vinyl fabric, staring out the smudgy window at the diffuse city lights, Noah drunkenly comes up with a plan to save Tuscany.

  Chapter

  7

  March brings Spring Trip season to Moore-Pike Academy, during which groups of rich girls wander the globe under the protective tutelage of their professors, get some grit under their fingernails, and wash it back out before returning home. Each year, one trip ends up infamous. These notorious episodes in the history of Moore-Pike include the ’00 trip to Los Angeles in which Ariel Pernstein spotted a man jerking off outside her hotel room and Professor Ganz stood in front of the window until he finished, the ’01 trip to Valparaiso during which Victoria Roberts got tequila-induced alcohol poisoning but convinced Señora Mendez that she had simply eaten lettuce from a street vendor, the ’02 trip when Brittany Lyon broke her ankle and was carried up a mountain by a sherpa, ’03’s trip to the Red Sea in which Ariana Burns got her hair caught in her snorkeling mask and slammed into a reef, breaking off a fluorescent chunk of coral and requiring a dozen stitches, and finally the ’04 capstone, when Talia Illich-Murphy smoked in the airplane bathroom over the Pacific and got so nervous that she flushed the toilet while she was sitting on it, the resulting suction causing her to adhere to the seat until the plane landed in Seoul.

  Tuscany excitedly narrates these stories to Noah, placing special emphasis on each girl’s name. The key part to note is, clearly, to whom each disaster happened. While Talia Illich-Murphy was causing a ruckus on Korean Airlines, Tuscany moans, she was stuck in D.C. at the stupid National Air and Space Museum.

  “The girls are going on the trips next week, right?” Noah asks as they eat their midafternoon snack of imported olives. Or rather, as Noah eats their midafternoon snack and Tuscany sucks on an olive pit.

  “Yeah,” Tuscany says.

  “There’s no way you could still go?” Noah asks.

  “Uh, hello ? I’m not a student there anymore.”

  “Okay, okay, I know. But it just seems like such a good opportunity.”

  “No, they’re really boring, usually. The teacher like thinks they need to make a big lesson out of everything, like, you know, This rock is called tufa, a volcanic blah blah. Yawn.”

  “But if you could, you’d go?”

  Tuscany pulls the pit out of her mouth and inspects the wet green felt before continuing. “Oh, yeah, totally. I had so much fun last year. We snuck out to this D.C. club. Everyone there was like, Whoa, who are these girls , ’cuz we went like buck wild. We got back at like four A.M ., and we had to be up at seven-thirty to see some Indian reservation. I like fell asleep and drooled while we listened to some old guy with feathers on his head tell some story about Pocahontas. It was hilarious.”

  “Hey, is your mom around today?”

  “Beats me.”

  Noah finds Dr. Thayer in the kitchen standing by the counter in a silk shift, picking through a china dish of raspberries. She hums softly to herself and plucks out the choicest berries with violent pecking motions. She looks up as Noah enters. Her hair has been freshly highlighted, so it appears that the sun has just risen on her head.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Thayer says.

  “Good afternoon,” Noah says. It is three P.M .

  “Mmm,” she says, glancing dazedly at the kitchen clock, apparently bemused to discover another paradox in the world. “How is Tuscany?” she asks.

  “Tuscany’s doing well. She was shocked today to realize that she won’t be taking any tests.”

  “You’re not testing her?”

  “Well, no. I can tell if she’s learned the material or not. You only really need tests for distinguishing students in groups.”

  “Oh! Isn’t that funny?” Dr. Thayer squishes a raspberry between her fingers, flicks the wet red mess into the sink.

  “Listen, Dr. Thayer, I had a thought.”

  Dr. Thayer stands erect, as if posing for a statue, holding the dish of raspberries aloft like a torch.

  “As you probably remember, all the girls from Moore-Pike take spring break trips. I was thinking that maybe Tuscany could really benefit from going on one. Part of schooling is the benefit of interacting with peers, right? And Tuscany is here by herself a lot of the time, unless she’s out at clubs, and I thought it might be healthy if she got out for a while, spent some time outside of Manhattan.”

  Dr. Thayer looks at Noah from a void, across some narcotic. “Tuscany doesn’t go to Moore-Pike Academy anymore.”

  “I know. But there’s no reason she couldn’t still have a spring break anyway, take a trip somewhere.”

  Dr. Thayer has been scowling, but her expression lightens a shade. “It would be good if she got out of here for a bit…but what are you suggesting, that you jet off with Tuscany somewhere?”

  Noah is irked by Dr. Thayer’s insinuations, that this is all some gambit to get Tuscany alone. But getting angry now won’t help Tuscany. He forces a smile to stretch across his face. “No, of course not. I’m not proposing that I lead it. You could take her, or a female chaperone.”

  Dr. Thayer chuckles. Her face is reflected in the stainless steel Míele appliances, and it seems that the whole kitchen is full of her sharp laughing face. “Spring break with Tuscany and all of her friends. Oh, you have big plans for me, don’t you?”

  “Maybe you could hire someone, send her off with an established program? I just think that it’s really important that she get out of Manhattan for a while.”

  “She’s not your daughter, Noah. I know what kind of trouble she’d get into.”

  “Well, what I was thinking was this: what if the trip were a hiking trip, away from big cities, just nature and camping and sleeping under the stars?”

  Her expression hardens as she peers at Noah. “And you think Tuscany would go for that?” she asks.

  The way Dr. Thayer phrases it, it does seem unlikely that Tuscany would pitch a tent. Or pee outdoors. But Noah presses on. “I think she would. She doesn’t have too many options.”

  “It’s true. It’s either that or stay here. She’d be practically forced into going.” She breaks into a fit of laughter; she is pleased with the idea of Tuscany being out of her hair for t
wo weeks. “Where would you suggest she go? Not Central Park, I trust?”

  “No, I think abroad would be a good idea. We’ve been studying French; maybe she could go to France.”

  “Hiking through the Louvre! Sharing a tent in the Jardin des Tuileries!”

  “France is famous for its forests, Dr. Thayer. There are plenty of trails and parks once you get outside of Paris.”

  “I know, Noah, lighten up a little. I know.”

  Dr. Thayer pats her hair and stands against the brushed-steel fridge, holding the bowl of raspberries in her hand. She flashes Noah suddenly warm eyes, the look of a girl waiting to be asked to dance. Her mercurial mood disorients him, baffles him. Noah shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Finally Dr. Thayer shakes her head. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t send her off into the woods with someone I don’t even know.” Her mouth opens wide, as if about to laugh, but no sound comes out. “I just couldn’t. She’d see it as a reward, and what’s she to be rewarded for?” Dr. Thayer’s tone frustrates him: Sign off, it says, she’s not worth it.

  “Okay,” Noah says. He bites his tongue. He wants this trip to work out so much—what else can he do for Tuscany? He is furious. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  “Oh, Noah!” Dr. Thayer says softly after a moment. “You really wanted to see this happen, didn’t you?”

  Noah nods. “It’s okay, though. Just do let me know.”

  Dr. Thayer looks at him with an unreadable expression, some ineffable mixture of scorn and compassion. She picks a seed out from between her magenta-stained teeth.

  It is Friday, so Noah is due for his paycheck. He finds Agnès in Dr. Thayer’s office, trying to sift through a broad binder stuffed with receipts and financial statements. “Oh, hello, Noah,” she says in French as he arrives. “I am just trying to sort finances here. This is, I’m afraid, the part of the job I’m least good at.”

  “You seem to be doing fine,” Noah says, or hopes he says, in French. It might have been more like seeming fine to be you doing, because Agnès blinks twice before responding.