Glamorous Disasters

by Eliot Schrefer

  “Thank you,” she says in English. “How much this week?”

  “Umm…twenty-six hours at two twenty-five. Whatever that comes out to.”

  Agnès whistles. “A lot. Let’s see…five thousand eight hundred fifty. How does you spell your name?”

  Noah tells her. She fills out the check, looks at Noah. “You must do great things, to make such much.”

  It is a tremendous amount of money. If it weren’t for his huge loan payments and the money he still owes his brother’s counselor, he’d be veritably wealthy. Even so, the thought of his wages makes him want to go skipping through the streets. “I’m trying to do greater things,” Noah says. He has to talk to someone about this. “I’m trying to save Tuscany.” His words hang in the air, sound ridiculously self-important, preposterous, as though he imagines himself a general rescuing a lost convoy.

  “Save Tuscany?” Agnès asks, confused.

  Noah decides to stick with slow French: “I’m trying to get her out of Manhattan for a while. She’s on the road to ruin here, she needs to see the rest of the world.” Of course, he knows he has said something more like: Tuscany must Manhattan leave. She is weird here, will be less weird elsewhere.

  “Ah,” Agnès says. “That’s a good idea, to take her away.”

  Noah thanks her and walks down the hallway toward the front door. He is in the vestibule when realization hits. Agnès. Trip to France. Should he ask Agnès, or go straight to Dr. Thayer?

  He finds Dr. Thayer still in the kitchen, numbly staring out the window.

  “One thought,” Noah says. His voice echoes. “What if Agnès took her? That way Tuscany would have someone to practice French with too.”

  Dr. Thayer slowly turns. Whether through drugs or rumination, she has come to a new, more open state of mind in the last few minutes. She nods, smiling, touched by something Noah has done. “I’ll consider it. Ask me again on Monday.”

  Noah comes home to Roberto doing pull-ups from the living room overhead lamp. “Hey, you know who I’m going out with tonight?” Roberto asks. His pull-ups are slowing, and he emits a loud grunt each time he reaches the groaning fixture. “Siggy! From Wednesday night. He’s got some party he’s havin’ out at his phatty-phat pad in the Hamptons. I’ve never been out there, man, it should be awesome. You wanna come?”

  Noah is irked by the oddity of it, being invited to the Hamptons by Roberto. “I’ve got plans with friends tonight. I’m going to see a play.”

  “Oh, okay, that’s cool. It’s funny, I told Siggy how to get here and he was all nervous about driving into Harlem, he was like, ‘I’ll call you before I get there so you can come outside.’ I’m like, ‘Settle down, dude, it may be Harlem, but you’re not gonna get killed.’ ”

  Which one is Siggy? “Siggy’s the one that…?” Noah starts to ask, then trails off. He can’t think of a distinguishing characteristic beyond “rich” or “asshole.”

  “You know, drinkin’ Grey Goose. He bought the table for us. Oh, you weren’t there for that part. He’s cool, though, he’s cool.”

  “Is Dylan going to be there?”

  “Shit, I dunno. That would be awesome, though. Kid’s hilarious.”

  “Yeah, be careful around him, you know? He is my student, after all.”

  Roberto heaves himself onto his bed and turns to gauge Noah. “What you think I’m gonna do, like corrupt him or something?”

  “No, I just feel responsible.”

  “Don’t worry man, He’s like a big kid. Already been corrupted. Done more shit than I done. You should worry for me.”

  On Monday morning Noah makes all his train connections easily, and so gets off the crosstown bus early. He strolls along the forested edge of Central Park, enjoys the clear sunshine streaming onto the wide street. He crosses to Madison, buys a muffin and coffee, and sits on the stoop of a brownstone. A gregarious Old English sheepdog accosts him, and as Noah fends off its friendly assault he spies Agnès making her way down the block. She is hurriedly applying a shock of bright red lipstick as she walks, and pauses every few paces to check her progress in a compact.

  “Agnès,” Noah calls as she nears. The dog, scorned, huffs back to its owner.

  “Oh, Noah.” There is an iciness to her tone.

  “Are you off to the Thayers’?” Detecting Agnès’s distance, Noah has added an extra burst of pleasantness to his words. He can imagine her later complaining to her French friends about the artificial sweetness of Americans.

  “Yes,” Agnès says.

  “I am too, I’ll walk with you.” Noah stands and joins her as they pick their way between tourists and sharp rectangular shopping bags clutched by the women parading between boutiques.

  “So,” Agnès says slowly, keeping her eyes focused ahead, “I understand that I am going hiking with Tuscany.”

  Crap.

  “Dr. Thayer told you that? That you’re taking her?”

  “Yes. I have never been hiked, Noah. I have never spend the night in woods. I’m not sure I do like to spend the night in woods.”

  “I just suggested it to her as an option. I didn’t think that she would decide without consulting you.”

  “I am her employee, Noah. That is what bosses do, no? To decide.”

  “Don’t you think it might be fun? She’ll pay you, you’ll get a guide, it’s a chance to travel.”

  “I’m sorry, I just usually stay in hotels, that’s all.” Agnès says sharply. For a second she seems furious, then the force of Noah’s smiling resolve breaks through and she bursts into a laugh. “Yes, it might be fun,” she concedes. “But the reason I said it would be such a good idea on Friday was because I thought someone else would take Tuscany away. Not that I would go! She is not kind to me. I did not think I would have to share a tent with her in the wilderness.”

  “If she’s not nice to you, then perhaps alone in the woods is exactly where you want her.”

  Agnès laughs again. “A good point. But oh, Noah, que ce pourrait devenir un désastre. ”

  “I’m just hoping to show her that there’s a world beyond all of this.” He points down Madison Avenue.

  “In ten days? Good courage to us.”

  Agnès continues to perfect her lipstick as they walk. “You care for her a great deal, hmm?”

  He looks at her sharply. “I just figure teaching her is more than showing her how to bubble in letters.”

  Agnès sidesteps a nanny pushing a stroller. “ ‘To bubble letters’ is safer than teaching them, I believe. But carry on anyway. Dr. Thayer says I am to purchase the plane fare today. I leave for Marseille in two weeks.”

  “I’m going camping ?” Tuscany exclaims.

  “Yeah, how cool is that?”

  Tuscany looks unconvinced. “I guess it’s cool. What does it involve?”

  Noah describes his own camping experiences, in the forest around his Virginia house and on the Sierra Club trips he attended with his mother. He introduces Tuscany to the realities of foam-core sleeping pads, water-purifying pills, mosquitoes.

  “I guess that’ll be all right,” Tuscany says, with an evident show of courage. “What do I wear, though?”

  They go to Tuscany’s bedroom and look through her clothes. Tuscany owns no fleece or wool, or even cotton. The majority of her shirts sit on only one shoulder, and her pants all require thong underwear. Despite having two full large closets, it becomes clear that Tuscany will need to buy more clothes.

  This sells her on the trip.

  “Awesome. Wait’ll I tell Mom she has to loan me one of her credit cards.”

  Noah focuses the day’s French lesson on Marseille. They learn the lyrics to “La Marseillaise,” outline the city’s history of sackings by French kings and foreign armies. Tuscany spies a picture of Les Calanques, the fjords that the Mediterranean has forged east of Marseille.

  “Those are pretty. I think I should go there.”

  And so the trip is formed.

  That night, after back-to-back session
s with a sadistically enthusiastic twin brother and sister, Noah is ready for a drink. He calls up Tabitha and they share a bottle of wine on the roof of her apartment building, singing songs to the night sky until a May-December gay couple across the street hurls open a pair of windows and shouts at them to fuck off. Noah and Tab are momentarily white-faced and then howl with laughter at their own immaturity. Once inside, they open another bottle, lie on the floor, and watch television.

  “Um,” Tabitha says after a long moment.

  “Um?” He turns and finds her staring at him. “Um?”

  “I don’t know, man,” she says, looking up at him with playful eyes. “I think you’re lost.”

  Noah sits back, deflated. “Good thing I’m a cocky bastard, or that could have hurt. What does that mean, lost?”

  “I don’t think you have a direction. Do you know why you’re doing what you’re doing?”

  “You know what? We’re going to stop talking about this, right now.”

  “See? We’re getting somewhere. I’ve hit a nerve.”

  “I’ll do what I want. I’m a teacher, that’s who I am, it’s what I want to do, I want to help people learn, and no, tutoring’s not perfect for me, but it’s only for a year or two, till I’ve paid down some debt, okay?”

  Tab slaps her leg, mocking his outrage. “Really, Noah,” she says, running a hand over the top of his bare foot. “I don’t buy it. Your ambitions are a lot more selfish than you’re admitting to yourself. You want to be a professor because you get summers off and people will listen to you at dinner parties. Because it makes you classy. It’s not for the good of the world. You’re going to be teaching survey courses to kids who don’t want to be there. Are you ready for that? I don’t think so. You’ve got it easy now, you know? Don’t forget that.”

  Noah takes a moment. “You’re right. I’m incredibly lucky. But that’s not enough. There’s a lot more out there than my own satisfaction.”

  Tabitha shakes her head as she takes a large gulp of wine. “You’re so full of crap. Yes, teachers are great. Sure, I’m glad I had good teachers.” Tabitha is really getting into it. She sits forward. Her eyes sparkle. “But you’re not the heal-the-world type. You’re out for comfort and prestige. And that’s fine. But wanting to be a teacher, I don’t know, it seems like you just don’t really know why you want it.”

  “So you’re what, complaining that I don’t think about myself enough?”

  “Oh, you’re no altruist. You just want to help others because you can’t figure out your own shit. Your own bizarre little paradox.”

  Noah leans back. He hates her and at the same time couldn’t be more turned on. He wants to boil over into her, splash her with his heat. “And you’re mean as all fuck.”

  Tabitha leans back against her body pillow, exposing the middle of her lean body, from the top of her panties to her rib cage. “This is going to hurt, but you have to hear it. What I’m telling you is why, Noah, you’ve never had a stable relationship.”

  “You’re saying what, that I’m too self-absorbed?”

  “Yes. And not at all. You’re like every other extraordinary person—a mix of complete selfishness and complete selflessness. So beyond yourself and yet trapped in your own head. None of this” —she gestures to her room and, presumably, the rest of New York—“can compare to whatever larger questions are raging in your head. Sure, a girlfriend doesn’t have anything to do with class structures, with philosophy. But she can make you feel good. She can support you, and you can feel good supporting her. I could have done both, if you had let yourself value me enough. But you didn’t.”

  When Tabitha would get him backed into a corner while they were dating, they would end up having sex. He’s unsure what to do now; a hot emotion rises in him that finds no release. Although he’s aroused by Tabitha’s body splayed before him, he’s also too annoyed to touch her and he senses that to do so would be an obscure betrayal of his growing crush on Olena.

  “You know, Tab, you’re smart, but you need to let it go. You’re basically asking me to settle, and I won’t. The right relationship, the right girl, will be large enough so that it affects how I see the world. It’ll involve more than me and more than her.”

  Tab strokes his leg, tugs the soft black hairs of his calves between her fingers. “Okay, okay, settle down.” They talk for a while longer, but eventually Tab begins to doze against her pillow. The sexual charge is gone, and Noah is left sullen and cranky. He lets himself out.

  When Noah wakes up the next morning the apartment is empty, but he is thinking of Olena. Hera roped her into going shopping that morning; he imagines Olena lounging bored outside a discount department store while her mother browses inside. She might be smoking and scrutinizing her new countrymen as they promenade before her. The image makes him smile. Hera has left bread and fig jam on the table, and Noah makes himself breakfast. He wanders through the apartment as he eats, carries a chunk of dark peasant loaf from room to room. He stands in the doorway of Olena’s room, glances at the Modernist poster on the wall. He steps inside. The top drawer of Olena’s clothes trunk lies open. Noah glances over the contents, careful to catch the crumbs from his bread in his palm. The clothes are minimal—worn T-shirts and a few pairs of jeans. Cradled within them are a cured Albanian sausage and a cheap leather belt with a gleaming yellow buckle. A few plastic razors and a bundle of tampons lie next to an old pair of sneakers. The rest of the trunk is devoted to books. On the top are novels by Tolkien and Forster, the former translated into French. Noah carefully turns them with his bare foot as he rips off another morsel of bread. Beneath lies a cluster of mismatched yellowed hardcover books probably published in the seventies or eighties— Tests of Logic and Intelligence, English Grammar for the Student, Test Your Level: English, New Recruitment Tests: Skills and Strategies. Noah picks up and flips through the last one. It is a catchall standardized test manual, giving examples of convoluted reading comprehension questions and math problems far more difficult than the SAT’s, such as finding the volume of an inflating sphere. Someone, presumably Olena, has heavily annotated the book, writing marginalia in three different colors, alternating Albanian and English: “Confirm: Velocity of train acceleration constant?” and “Past tense of passage indicates narrative distance from subject matter.” Both good points, but evidence of thinking that will be useless on the SAT: she is being too abstract, too advanced. The test assumes a less rigorous level of thinking—when it says that Train A travels from Stamford to Ironville at thirty-five miles per hour, the student is to assume the train mystically starts moving at thirty-five miles per hour, that it doesn’t start at a standstill and then speed up. Olena, assuming the test to be harder than it is, has used calculus to try to derive a likely acceleration rate for the train. Noah has heard about cases like Olena’s from other tutors but has never before had one himself—the “far too bright” student, the one who gets the right answers too easily and so bullies herself into the wrong ones.

  Beneath the Skills and Strategies book lies an actual SAT. At the edges the booklet has gone as brown as burnt pastry. Noah opens it gingerly and sees the date imprinted inside: 1971. Somehow the test found its way to Tiranë and Olena has administered it to herself repeatedly—the paper where the arithmetic of each question is supposed to be worked is soft and thin. She has solved each problem again and again, neatly erasing her computations each time. The reading passages are peppered with allusions to other texts Olena has read. She has written second and third definitions alongside the vocabulary words in the analogies section. Next to RAINBOW:COLOR she has printed: Must refer to 2nd definition of color: “to shade with meaning,” not simply “hue”?

  The test has no answer key, and so Olena has worked herself into a frenzy of self-doubt. Answers are marked and then erased and then marked again. Noah scans one math and one verbal section. She has gotten all the hard math problems right. But she went through contortions to make the medium problems harder than they are, and thus m
anaged to miss many of them. Her verbal sections are weaker: she knows most of the words, but seems able to find ways to make even the most improbable answer choices work. She has filled the blank of:

  The professor asked the class to work more _____ in preparing for the coming test, as scores on the last exam had been abysmal.

  diligently

  conservatively

  lackadaisically

  historically

  belatedly

  with “historically,” writing in the margin: If the latest exam results were remarkably low, results in the past have typically been higher: the professor therefore wants the students to perform as they used to—that is, historically. Better than clear wrong choice, “diligently”—much too obvious.

  Noah arranges Olena’s drawer as he found it and sits down at the living room table. He stares out the window at the sunny morning, watches a group of kids chatter as they lean against the wall of an abandoned building. He thinks about Olena, first about her sulky, sexy demeanor, then about the slope of her back, then what he would advise her were she his student. The SAT is a fairly accurate test—that is, geniuses tend to score very well, and less intelligent students score poorly. There are exceptions, however: while students with Noah’s style of thinking (brash and instinctual) tend to do very well, students like Olena, who may be just as intelligent, tend to think more profoundly, in a more nuanced manner, come to answers by circular means, identify the correct choice by deliberating its position within the broader world. These more spacious thinkers tend to do poorly. Their test books are filled with furious scribbles, their bubble sheets show the scars of multiple erasures. They may finish only half a section before time is called.

  When these students are wealthy—that is, for all of Noah’s students—the problem isn’t too grave. Such students go through a battery of psychological tests with an M.D. that cost thousands of dollars, and then secure the school’s recommendation that the student receive extra time. Roughly half of Noah’s students receive extra time. Nationwide the proportion is two percent. Between receiving extra time and intensive tutoring, such students can pull through with scores that reflect their intellect. But less wealthy abstract thinkers, without access to similar resources, take the test with regular time and only ever see half the questions. These particular geniuses wind up attending less prestigious schools, or don’t attend college at all. Olena looks to fall in this category. Her math score is satisfactory—something like a 610, could be much higher if she realizes her overthinking, but her verbal score is around a 450 or 460. He has no idea about the writing section, since the practice tests she took were old SATs that didn’t yet include an essay or grammar questions. Between the math and verbal she might eke out an 1100 or 1600, above the national average but nothing that will get her into a very selective school.