Glamorous Disasters

by Eliot Schrefer

  “I’m glad to hear that Tuscany enjoyed herself.”

  “But you see, there is something somewhat more grave to come out of all this. I’m afraid Agnès is no longer with us.”

  “Oh,” Noah says. “She’s not?” He speaks slowly, trying to decide which tone to adopt, mournful or cheerful. Speaking with Dr. Thayer is all about planning his state of being, rather than actually feeling—if he said what he was actually thinking, he’d start yelling and not stop.

  “I saw this coming a long way down the road,” Dr. Thayer says. “It’s not as though it’s strictly your fault. But planning this trip did a number on her. She’s stopped returning my phone calls. And even if she did, at this point it’s too late. Terminated, disengaged.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Mournful it is.

  “Yes!” Dr. Thayer starts laughing again. Noah cringes. “I’m sure she’d have some choice words for you. But as I said, it’s not strictly your fault. I’m just not sure what to do at this point.”

  “It must be hard to find someone last-minute, huh?”

  “Oh, there are agencies, it’s not a big deal, but thanks for the false sympathy.” She laughs again, like a raven’s cry. “But I have some other ideas percolating. I’ll have to see if they’ll work out, then I’ll get back to you.”

  “Uh, okay,” Noah says, mystified.

  “Good night, Noah. See you on Monday.”

  Noah shuts off his phone and takes a deep breath. Aside from Dr. Thayer’s unsettlingly aggressive laughter, the call went well. He feels regret for Agnès, and thinks of calling her. But he doesn’t have her number, or even her last name. Like all the employees of the Thayer household, they float through with partial identities, unable to locate one another in real life.

  He dials Mr. Thayer’s number. A chirpy secretary answers.

  “Oh, hi,” Noah says. “I assumed I would get voicemail.” It is nine P.M .

  “No, we’re always available. Tell me what I can do for you.”

  “I was hoping to talk to Mr. Thayer, please.”

  “He’s in a meeting. Name, please?”

  “Noah.”

  “One moment.”

  Noah is put on hold. Then a man’s voice: “Noah, hello. This is Dale Thayer. What can I do for you?”

  “You asked me to call you.”

  “I did? Oh yes! Noah, I wanted to discuss a proposition with you. Would you be available to come by Monday afternoon?”

  Noah thinks of his loans, still somewhere around $50,000. A proposition from a billionaire sounds nice indeed. “Yes, of course. What time would work well for you?”

  “Let’s say two-thirty.”

  “Where should I meet you?”

  “Umm…” He hears a muted rustle from Mr. Thayer’s end, then from a distance: “Darlene, which office will I be in Monday?” then, loudly into the receiver: “Five-twenty-one Fifth Avenue, twenty-sixth floor. See you at two-thirty. Bring your tutoring materials.”

  Tuscany and Noah meet in Tuscany’s bedroom on Monday.

  “Mom’s getting the dining room redone,” Tuscany says. “We’re having like some big party for some business of Dad’s and she wants to get the walls done. The party’s not for like two months, but whatever.”

  Tuscany sits on her bed, which means Noah gets to sit in the executive chair, instead of the tiny embroidered teddy bear throne. Tuscany is wearing a mustard shirt that has only one shoulder; its color and shape serve to highlight and outline the khaki stripes of her bruise. The wound adorns her throat like a corsage. The official subject at hand is hydrogen bonding, but it is, of course, really the trip.

  “And that Olena girl,” Tuscany says. “Where did you find her? She was so like serious, and weird.”

  “I think she’s pretty great,” Noah says defensively.

  “Yeah,” Tuscany says slyly. “I could tell.”

  Noah coughs. Tuscany laughs. “It’s okay,” she says. “You like her. Big deal. She’s like your age and everything.” She smirks derisively. “With hair like hers, she’d be lucky to have you.” She smacks her gum a few times, stares at a molecule diagram in the textbook, and then pulls a box from behind the “When in Doubt, Just Don’t Eat” pillow. She bounces with excitement. “I was going to wait until our morning session was over, but I can’t. So here you go.”

  It is a stiff cardboard Façonnier box. Noah opens it and gently folds the tissue paper aside. Inside, pressed to be nearly as stiff as the box itself, is a button-down shirt.

  A pink oxford. The fabric is sail-thick, as if made from the very stuff of yachts. The sleeves can be rolled up when watching a regatta or worn down for cocktails on the lawn. Now Noah has one.

  “Put it on! Put it on!” Tuscany squeals.

  “It’s so nice,” Noah says, folding it neatly back in the box. He is not the pink oxford type.

  “Put it on! It’ll look so good.”

  Tuscany’s mouth is wide open, her hands clasped. Her eyes gleam. For Noah to wear this shirt would really thrill her. Noah, clutching the box like a shield, excuses himself to Tuscany’s glowing frosted-glass bathroom.

  The bathroom mirror fills a whole wall, and when Noah takes off his shirt he is disoriented to see himself shirtless in the Thayer apartment. His tanned skin doesn’t belong against the brocaded fleur-de-lis walls, and the muscles of his upper arm, enlarged since he began his afternoon workouts, look too virile next to the Provençal soaps and embroidered toilet seat cover. He pulls the shirt across his naked torso. It feels rough against his skin, each thick thread of the fabric announcing itself as it slides over his form. He wears the shirt open, and looks for a moment in the mirror. It is even more strange and overwhelming to see himself half dressed in this environment. His thoughts leap to horrible places: the tingle he would feel had it been Dr. Thayer who just undid the buttons of his shirt, or the ignoble bliss he would feel should he have ducked into the bathroom after having slept with Tuscany. Noah hurriedly does up the buttons. His fingers tremble against the embroidered holes. He strides back into Tuscany’s room without looking again into the mirror.

  “No, Noah,” Tuscany says. “You have to do it like this.” She bounces off the bed and approaches him. He involuntarily leaves his hand on the doorknob, paralyzed by the conflict of desire and fear within him. She takes his arm. He watches as her little fingers work against the marbleized buttons of the sleeve. She undoes it and rolls the fabric once, then twice, so that it rests in a sloppy cuff halfway up Noah’s forearm. She then lets that arm fall and moves to the other. She tucks her blond hair behind her head and then undoes the button, her lips slightly parted as she works. She folds the second cuff once, then twice, until it is roughly as high as the other. She stands back, puts one hand to her bruise and the other to her hip as she appraises him. She shakes her head and squints, her downy eyelashes locking. “It’s not right yet. Hold on, sit down.” She points to her bed. Noah obeys, sits with his hands clasped in his lap.

  Noah watches in the mirror on the wall as Tuscany kneels on the bed beside him, reaches up her hands, and scratches through his hair, rubbing his scalp and mussing his hair. It no longer shoots up vertically, but falls in tufts over his forehead. She pats the hair forward, so that it hangs sleekly and messily over his eyes. He now looks like a prep school kid at summer camp. She looks with him in the mirror, and makes a professionally optimistic face, like a beautician. “That’s better.”

  She stands in front of Noah, and he can tell she isn’t wearing a bra. “And one last thing.” She leans forward. Her lips are inches away from Noah’s; he can smell the fruit smoothie she had for breakfast: papaya or mango. She is focused on the base of his throat. Her fingers fumble with the button on his chest, skate across his pectorals. The button is undone. Tuscany lingers at Noah’s chest for a moment, as if testing, waiting to see what he will do. Her hair smells light and fresh, of tree oil. Noah is tempted to embrace her. It would be so easy, to fold her smallness against him, just to hold her. He puts his arm do
wn so it is almost around her. He senses her slender carriage, the lean and warm muscles of her back. But he removes the arm immediately. The last thing she needs is another grown man “holding her.” Noah is sickened at himself, at his own desire. Tuscany stands back. Her face is collected. “Get up,” she commands.

  Noah stands, and together they look in the mirror. The transformation is complete. Noah looks like he could be one of Dylan’s friends, or Dylan himself. The shirt sits neatly over his shoulders, exaggerates the new triangularity of Noah’s form. The forearms that poke from the shirt have tanned in the southern French sun. The ends of the shirt fall in neatly curved lines below Noah’s waist. The heavy fabric rustles loudly when he moves.

  “Wow,” Noah says, “well chosen.”

  “Thanks. Mom and I wanted to thank you for taking me on that trip. Well, I picked it out and everything, but she wants credit too. You look really good.”

  Noah looks at Tuscany. The last time he felt this drawn to a student he wound up offering to take the SAT for her. He can’t let this attraction grow any further. It is a fleeting, wasteful version of his more solid feelings for Olena. He could never be drawn to Tuscany in any real way. He is not Roberto: knowledge of the consequences of his actions restricts how Noah feels. Tuscany stares back at him, then reaches for her cigarette and scans the room for a lighter. Noah decides they will work at the kitchen table that morning, for the official reason that they are making molecular models and Tuscany’s desk “isn’t big enough.” Tuscany raises an eyebrow, immediately seeing through the deception. But she seems relieved when they move to the comparative safety of downstairs.

  Noah is glad to hear the clock chime two. He stuffs his old shirt in his bag, says a quick goodbye to Tuscany, and hops into the subway. He buys a hot dog from a corner vendor (there was no Agnès to fetch his lunch today, and he didn’t want to trouble Fuen), and races into the elevator of Mr. Thayer’s building. He is guided deferentially down a chrome-and-wallpaper hallway into Mr. Thayer’s office. He is still wearing the pink oxford.

  Mr. Thayer is on the phone, his feet up on the desk. He smiles to Noah, rolls his eyes toward whoever is on the phone, and gestures him to a seat. Noah waits in the chair, staring at the reflective glass of the building across the street and listening to the man-prattle of Mr. Thayer: all of his sentences seem to contain the words leverage and commodity. Finally Mr. Thayer hangs up the phone and reaches over to shake Noah’s hand.

  “Noah. Thanks for coming.”

  “Of course.” Noah is tempted to add a sir. He censors it out just in time.

  “Listen, I wanted to talk to you about a few things. And don’t worry, none of them have anything to do with Dylan and Tuscany!” Mr. Thayer laughs loudly, a business-lunch laugh; Noah waits for him to offer a cigar.

  “One thing you’ll notice about me, Noah, is that I get to the point. And the point, in this case, is this…” He pauses. It seems he has yet to come up with the point. Then: “I’ve started a few companies in my time. Some have bombed, others have taken off. And the thing is, a bomb costs you a million, maybe, but a success can net billions. So if you have one success for every thousand bombs, then you’re still in money. Look at my history: for every Northern Airlines or Car and Girl Magazine, there’s a Calvi Fashion or a Fish and Girl Magazine. ” Mr. Thayer sits back, gauging the effect of his words on Noah. This is a pearl of business advice that Mr. Thayer has obviously cultured over the years, a conversational tidbit that he throws out when he hasn’t decided what he really wants to say.

  Unfortunately, these names mean nothing to Noah. “Yeah, I guess bombs are okay,” Noah says. He feels incredibly stupid. Perhaps, he suspects, this has been Mr. Thayer’s intention.

  “Yes. I started in newspapers, did an airline, and now I’m in discount apparel. Looks like crap, but pays well. Though, with labor markets these days, who knows. Anyway, I saw the family expense statement for a few months ago, I think it was August—were you working for us in August?”

  “Some of August.”

  “Let’s say September, then. And I see that your agency bills three hundred ninety-five a session.”

  “An hour.”

  “Right! That’s the thing—it’s more like, what, five-ninety-five for a ninety-minute session?”

  “Six hundred and sixty.” Whoops. That number slipped out far too quickly.

  “And once you’ve learned the material, it’s not as though you even need to do any lesson preparation!”

  “That’s right.” Noah feels grudgingly proud now. It does seem like a hell of a business model.

  “But you, of course, earn only a fraction of what is billed.”

  “Correct.”

  Mr. Thayer plucks a stress ball from his desktop and squeezes it absently as he reclines in his chair. “And why haven’t you thought of just going out on your own?”

  “Well, my company trained me, and I feel loyalty to them, and they get my students for me, so I don’t have to worry about running out of work…let’s see, um, there’s also this clause in my contract that I can’t work on my own.”

  Mr. Thayer looks up sharply. “There is?”

  Noah nods.

  “Do me a favor, would you Noah, fax me a copy of that contract later today?”

  “Umm, I—”

  “Right on, Noah, don’t agree to anything yet, sorry, I forgot to make my proposal first. Here it is. I’m willing to take whatever your yearly salary is and triple it. Or I don’t know your salary, let’s not be reckless, but let’s say this: I could offer at least a hundred and fifty K for a year of your consulting. You’re a smart kid, and you know this stuff enough to make even my children good at it. I want to start an agency that will compete with yours. But the only hitch is, I don’t know how to tutor. You would be the content side of things, and I’d take care of all the business.”

  “Wow.” There is nothing more to say. Noah would have been just as dumbfounded had Mr. Thayer stood up and done a triple back flip.

  “This is all assuming it works with your contract. But I suspect they just forbid you from teaching for a certain time after working for them, and say nothing about doing business consulting. And even if they did—from my wife’s accounts your office seems crafty, I wouldn’t be surprised—I don’t think it would be enforceable. Send the contract. I’ll have a lawyer look it over.”

  “Okay,” Noah says. After all, it’s just faxing a contract. It’s not as though he’s agreed to anything yet. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He could buy his mom a new car. He could spend the summer far away from Fifth Avenue. He could convince his brother to enroll in a specialized school. He could throw a lavish party.

  Mr. Thayer grins at Noah from across the desk. “Send it tonight, okay, Noah? And I’ll give you a call when I hear back.”

  Rafferty Zeigler. Outside of the hundred minutes a week that Noah is actually with him, Noah has come to disregard him. Sullen and forgettable Rafferty, with the panicky mother. Noah dreads their appointment—Rafferty’s score has gone down. Sunday is looking to be one hell of a day. On his way to Rafferty’s apartment, Noah opens his tutoring notebook to the Fieldston page:

  Starting Score: Latest Practice Test:

  Cameron Leinzler: M650, V660, W670 M760, V760, W730

  Rafferty Zeigler: M680, V520, W540 M620, V520, W550

  Garret Flannery: M700, V520, W490 M750, V650, W600

  Eliza Lipton: M480, V480, W510 M530, V520, W550

  Sonoma Levin: M480, V590, W540 10th grade: not yet testing

  It is a mess of numbers, seemingly meaningless and inconsequential, but Noah immediately sees the seeds of a crisis, a set of scores that makes him dread the coming of four P.M . Rafferty hasn’t seen his score go up after five months of tutoring. In fact, he has gone down. The Zeiglers have spent $17,000 for a fifty-point decline in Rafferty’s score. They live on York Avenue: they must earn less than $400,000 a year, are really slumming by Upper East Side standards—for them, $17,000 is a signi
ficant amount. Mrs. Zeigler will be beside herself, Noah knows. Fieldston is a very competitive school, and all the kids gossip about their practice tests. This is so bad for Rafferty’s self-esteem, she will say. And she will be right—Rafferty, always reserved, has been plunging the depths of sullenness, showing less and less of his already underwhelming enthusiasm. Noah spends his morning sessions wishing that no one tutored, that he wouldn’t have to go see Rafferty dejected and his mother hysterical.

  “This is so bad for Rafferty’s self-esteem,” Mrs. Zeigler says. She was waiting in the hallway to ambush Noah, sprang at him from the shadows of the recessed doorway. The walls have been torn apart to fix water damage from a broken pipe, and as a result the hallway is like a Roman grotto, all damp air and scored cement.

  “A lot of the students work on plateaus,” Noah says. “They’ll hold steady for a few tests, and then start to go up.”

  “Yes, but he didn’t hold steady, right? He went down.” She whisks her hands through her hair a half dozen times.

  “There’s deviation between tests. Or sometimes the initial diagnostic test is artificially high. Those are the hardest cases.”

  Mrs. Zeigler hugs her tiny designer T-shirt close to her ribs. “These kids are so competitive,” she says mournfully. “They’re always talking about their scores. Is there any way you could say something…like that his test was lost this time? He’s been down all this week, and he has a science project due tomorrow. I’d hate for him to go into a funk.”

  Noah shifts his bag to the other shoulder. He can see a vein in Mrs. Zeigler’s neck pulsing, see the silk of her shirt tremble with the rapid pounding of her heart. “I don’t think I should do that. We’ll go over what went wrong, don’t worry.”

  Mrs. Zeigler puts a tremulous hand in front of her mouth and nods slowly. She waves Noah into the apartment with a resigned flick of her wrist. Someone seeing her pose might assume Noah has just suggested finally cutting off Rafferty’s life support.