“I hear you’re going to Mount Oak,” Noah says as they pack up their books.
“Yeah,” Tuscany says mournfully. “I bet it sucks there.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Noah says. But his words come slowly: from what he’s heard, it does “suck there.”
Tuscany picks up on Noah’s ambivalence. “I should be going somewhere better, huh?” Tuscany says.
Noah pauses. “Do you still have your school application forms?”
Tuscany nods solemnly. They’re in her bedroom. She gets up and waits for Noah to follow. He asks her why she doesn’t just bring them downstairs.
Ever since Noah stopped working with Dylan, he’s heard nothing but stories about him from Roberto: Dylan danced with some middle-aged woman at a club in the Hamptons, and she kept grabbing his butt and buying everyone drinks. Dylan stopped the car service and peed behind a tollbooth on the Jersey turnpike. Dylan bought both his girlfriends the same ring, and then they ran into each other at Bungalow 8. So when Noah enters Dylan’s room, it feels like he has never left. Dylan, however, seems to have trouble remembering who Noah is. He glances up blearily from his bed.
“We worked on what, like that writing test, right?”
“Yes. The writing section of the SAT.”
“I bombed.”
“Yup.”
“But still, you’re so much better than that asshole my mom bought from the Princeton Review. He was like all”—Dylan lowers his voice into bass range as he shoots a sponge basketball into a hoop behind the door—“ ‘Dylan, you didn’t do your homework. How are you going to improve if you don’t do your homework, the test is in a month?’ and I’m like Jesus, fuck off, you know? You’re not like a teacher, dude, so don’t get all severe. You can’t assign homework, it’s not like I’m getting a grade here!”
Dylan glances over and grins, proud of his rhetorical skills. Noah is tempted to admonish him, but he’s happy to be considered the better tutor, even if it is just because he didn’t make Dylan do any work.
Dylan reclines on his bed. A half dozen glasses at his bedside are coated with the residue of chocolate protein shakes. He bounces with repressed energy, and the cover falls away from his ankle. Noah notices that it’s in a splint.
“What happened?” Noah asks, pointing to it.
Dylan looks at Noah slyly. “My mom thinks it’s from basketball. Hilarious.”
“What is it from?”
“Oh God. It was this totally wack night. I think it was like a few nights ago. There was this crazy private party at this club, right? And I go with a couple friends, Siggy and this guy Roberto.”
“I know Roberto,” Noah says, smirking at the understatement. He did, after all, introduce the two of them. It burns him, briefly, that Roberto has so seamlessly infiltrated Dylan’s circle, while Noah is still an employee.
“Okay. Anyway, Roberto, he’s like Italian and he starts talking to this guy who’s like wearing big shades and this fly polyester suit, like he just made a movie or something. Anyway, the guy owns this apartment in the Meatpacking District. The apartment was the bomb. We went there after the club? He had like four plasma screens put together. So we watch a game. Siggy and I are like totally set, watching basketball on TiVo at like four A.M ., but Rob wasn’t into it, so he wandered around. I think it might have been the drugs the guy had. I stuck to coke, but Roberto mixed it up with like these light green pills, and I was feeling fine, but Rob was feeling like antsy. So anyway, Rob wanders off, and I guess the guy is in the other room, the one that Roberto wanders into.”
Dylan pauses to make another shot at the hoop. He misses. The ball rolls near Noah and he returns it to Dylan. He tries again, scores.
“Umm…” Dylan says, scratching his chest.
“The guy was in the other room?”
“Right! Umm…” He continues scratching.
“With Roberto?”
“Oh yeah, okay. Right. So he’s in the other room with Roberto, and then after a few minutes the door slams open and Roberto is looking all wild and crazy, like he’s been nailed with a Taser or something. He’s like, ‘Guys, we’re leaving.’ And Roberto’s a big guy, so it was trippy as shit to see him freaked out. So Siggy and I are like, but dude, what are you talking about, it’s awesome here, but we were kind of quiet about it ’cuz he was buggin’ so hard. And so anyway, the guy comes out after Roberto, still wearing his suit, and his fly shirt all like unbuttoned. He’s all tan and suave, looked like some guy in a Tanqueray commercial, you know? And he’s like, Jesus, chill man, it’s cool, it’s cool. And Roberto heads towards the door, and the guy just stands there, smiling, like Rob’s being a total moron. Rob tries the door and it won’t open. You know, it’s the solid kind, like my bedroom door, that needs a key to open, no matter what side you’re on. And I guess the dude had the key. So the three of us, me, Rob, and Siggy, are standing next to the front door, like idiots, and the guy’s standing in the living room. The game’s still going on, I can hear it. It was the Knicks, so I was still like halfway listening, ’cuz there were like ten minutes left, even though I already knew the Knicks won ’cuz the Clippers suck. And Roberto brushes past the guy and like opens a window! Siggy and I just look at each other and say, ‘Shit, what the fuck? We’re on like the sixteenth floor.’ ”
Dylan picks up one of the protein shake glasses and stares in for a moment. He holds it up to his mouth, but nothing dribbles in. “Mom!” he yells. “I’m thirsty!”
He turns back to Noah. “Shit, that was dumb. I better hurry, ’cuz my mom totally can’t know about this. So anyway Roberto opens a window. And now the guy’s like really mad, and he goes over to Roberto and like grabs his arm. Now this is where it’s the bomb”—Dylan leans forward excitedly—“Roberto turns around and gives the guy this huge punch. I mean, like Roberto’s gigantic and weird-looking and sorta like a video game character anyway, and it totally looked like a secret move from Mortal Kombat. And the polyester dude flies. He hits the table in the living room, and his head just sits on the corner, like he’s propped against it, and there’s some blood coming from it. Not a lot, like the dude wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t feeling too good either. Passed out. Roberto comes back from the window and stands over the guy, we all do, like the three of us. And then suddenly Siggy turns all girly and is totally blubbering. So he’s useless, but Rob is totally in charge and says we gotta find the key! I say it’s prob’ly in the dude’s pocket, but Rob says no way I’m touching that faggot. That’s when I figured out what prob’ly happened in that other room. But I’m like, whatever, dude, we need to get out, so I look through the guy’s pockets. Even the back ones, but since the guy was like totally passed out I didn’t have to worry about him mis…mis…misconstruing me. But anyway, there’s no key !”
The bedroom door opens. Dr. Thayer appears, wearing a bathrobe, her face slick with cold cream, carrying a bottle of Pepsi and a glass. “Oh, Noah. I forgot you would be here. I would have brought you a glass. How is the lesson going?”
“The lesson,” Noah says carefully, “is going well.”
Dylan snorts. Dr. Thayer looks from one to the other of them resignedly, and then, suddenly, she metamorphoses into a maternal figure. Her face glows with benevolent energy as she strokes Dylan’s hair, arranges it into sweet pageboy lines. “Both of you know how important this is, right?”
Noah and Dylan nod. Noah’s jaw hangs open as he observes the complicated maneuver going on before him. He has known Dr. Thayer long enough to identify her stratagems—she’s decided to give solicitousness a shot. She’s trying to win Dylan over, keep him as the primary man in her life. She cups his face in her hand, gives him the same earnest, goofy, and lovingly admonitory face young mothers give to infants who gargle their food. Dylan looks at her inscrutably, and for a moment it seems that he might give a sign of the love that she is so desperate for.
Then Dylan bursts out in a laugh.
“Oh, this is funny, is it?” Dr. Thayer says. She looks like
she is about to spit at them as she slams the glass down and turns to leave. “Jesus. It’s like I’m the only one who gives a crap here.”
“You got it,” Dylan says, pointing his finger at his mother like a gun. The door closes.
Noah smiles at Dylan, but the smile turns into a grimace at the corners. He knows he should be more worried about Dylan’s score, about getting to work. But he can’t muster the feeling. Dylan will never be happy studying, and Noah’s honestly not concerned whether he gets into college or not. Whether Dylan spends the next four years straight partying or partying while nominally in classes seems arbitrary. “So what happens next?” Noah asks.
“I was at the point where I went through the guy’s pockets, right?”
“Ye—”
“So there’s no key! And Siggy’s like, ‘We’re stuck here! We’re stuck here!’ all high-pitched, and Rob looks like he’s about to hit him too. But instead he walks to the window he opened. I walk over too. Siggy just hangs back in front of the plasma screens. It’s really cold in front of the window, even though it’s April there’s like a lot of wind, ’cuz we’re way up. And there’s a fire escape out there. Roberto steps on it to test it, and he like knocks over a hookah pipe on the ledge, but it holds his weight, so I know it will hold mine. And then Rob just starts going down. I’m like, ‘You’re not serious.’ We’re like hundreds of feet in the air, in front of all of Chelsea Piers, and the steps are really small. But he’s just going down. I look back. Siggy is just staring at me. I’m like, ‘Come on!’ and he nods, but he doesn’t move. I think he was sorta buggin’, maybe he just took the green pills too. So I climb the fire escape. Once I start it’s actually kind of easy. I kept looking for cops or people on their balconies or somethin’, but there was like no one, I guess Chelsea people are all lightweights and in bed by then. But there’s no bottom floor to the fire escape. So I’m like dangling above the street, and Roberto is below me waiting to catch me, and I drop, but I was a moron and kind of jumped as I dropped, like threw myself forward a little, and I missed Rob and hit the curb, and so my ankle is all sprained. We got in a cab, and I woke up my mom, and we went to the hospital, which is, you know, just a couple blocks over, on Park.” Dylan sits back, elated.
“And you told your mom you sprained it playing basketball downtown at four A.M .?”
“Uh, yeah! She’s dumb as shit sometimes.”
A tightness has been growing in Noah’s chest as Dylan told the story. What is it? The coke Dylan took? He’s guilty not to be working on the test, but that’s not it…what is it? Is he jealous not to have been there? Surely he doesn’t wish he had been there? But he can’t tell. And then he realizes the missing piece of the story, and the unhappy feeling in his chest blooms. “What about Siggy?”
“Siggy? Siggy’s a wuss. I haven’t talked to him since. That was like two nights ago.”
“I mean, did he climb down the fire escape?”
Dylan shrugs. “Beats me. My ankle was like really blue, so Roberto and I got in the cab and took me home.”
“Roberto didn’t wait for him? And you didn’t call to make sure he was okay?”
“No. I don’t think Roberto likes him, anyway. I told you—Siggy was being a total moron.”
“You just up and left him in the apartment? Jesus Christ, Dylan!”
“Siggy’s a grown-up kid. And the guy was not moving. I’m sure Siggy just went down the fire escape too.”
“But why didn’t you call him to make sure he was okay?” Noah persists. His sense of horror grows—Dylan abandoned his friend without a twinge of regret. Noah has condescended to Dylan for so long, has seen him as some amusing exaggeration, a caricature. But as he watches Dylan smile, he can’t get it out of his head—he is truly awful. And so, it seems, is Roberto.
“Listen, morality policeman. Siggy was the one being totally lame. I’m not going to call him. ”
“But—”
“Dude. Stop. Why are you being such a hard-ass?”
“Wow,” Noah says. He cannot stop himself. “That is truly awful. You don’t know what that guy was about. Anything could have happened to Siggy.”
“No, Noah. It was funny. Siggy was being such a total scrawny wimp, totally girly. If you were there, you’d see. It was so funny.”
Noah’s hands shake. If he were in Dylan’s room as anything but an employee, he could leave. But just to get up and go would be to leave his job as well. He is paid to be there. Like a prostitute with an unpleasant trick, he has to see it through. He pulls out the worksheet on basic math strategies and stares at it. He has worked it through hundreds of times, but he can’t make the problems come into focus. The numbers jumble against one another. He takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says. “Number one—”
“Uh-uh,” Dylan says. “Be cool. No worksheets. Don’t start being like that other guy my mom bought.”
He wants to continue to push Dylan, to make him see the wrongness of what he has done. But he knows from his dealings with his own brother that he can’t push too much at once. He has to drop it, for now. Noah’s voice wavers. He is too upset for the words to come out right. “Number one. If Jonah draws a rectangle and then reduces its width by ten percent and increases its length by ten percent, by what percentage does the total area decrease?”
He looks up at Dylan. He is leaning against the headboard of his bed, his head stuck at an awkward angle. He scratches beneath his splint and stares at Noah coldly.
“How would you start?” Noah asks.
“Why the fuck are you doing this?” Dylan asks. Now he is scared for Siggy. His eyes dart about with the fear that he has done wrong. “Be cool.”
“Try drawing it. Pretend you’re Jonah.”
“I don’t want to pretend I’m fucking Jonah. Stop it.” And then Noah hears Dylan say, almost inaudibly, “Asshole.”
“What was that?” Noah asks. The words are shrill, powerless in Dylan’s world. Protestations are doom for cool kids. Noah stares angrily at his fist.
“Nothing,” Dylan mutters. “You know what, I don’t want to do tutoring today.”
“I don’t care,” Noah says. “You’re going to do this problem.”
“Like hell I am,” Dylan says. His words are cold, entirely passionless; there is no fury behind them.
“Do you want to go to George Washington?”
“I don’t know. I don’t fucking care.”
“Well, leave yourself the frickin’ option, at least!” Noah yells. “You’re going to have to work really hard to satisfy the admissions committee. We have three weeks. You can make it easy, or you can make it hard.”
“‘Frickin’.’ That’s so lame. You sound like a frickin’ camp counselor.” A hint of a smile plays at the edge of Dylan’s features.
“I am a frickin’ camp counselor!” Noah says. The words are furious, and sound ridiculous as soon as they’re in the air. He stares into Dylan’s cool gaze. And then Dylan laughs, hard. Suddenly Noah is laughing too.
“Dude,” Dylan says. “Why don’t you just give up on me? Just go home.”
“Let’s see a frickin’ rectangle. We have three weeks.” Noah hands Dylan a pad.
And slowly, with angry and sloppy strokes, Dylan starts to draw.
Chapter
10
Noah’s progress with Dylan that day is slow. They will compute a problem together, Dylan seeming to lead the way, and then when Noah asks Dylan to describe what they just did he refuses and turns on the basketball game. The problem, Noah realizes, is massive insecurity. Whether Dylan is intelligent or not is moot. Since he knows that he failed years ago when he last attempted anything on his own, he simply will not try. Getting him to reason is like leading an animal into water. He can be dragged, but no amount of coaxing will get him to wade in on his own.
By the time he finishes with Dylan, Noah is yawning and irritable. He is glad to leave the Thayer household, that cavernous twilit opulence, and transfer himself instead to Cameron Leinzler’
s Pier 1 West Side tackiness. He tries to perk up as he rides the elevator. Most of his students are not like Dylan, he reminds himself. They respect him and learn with him.
But his session with Cameron is hardly reassuring: she seems as irritable as Noah. She begins by complaining about her mountains of homework. And then, after Noah corrects her definition of dissemble, she utters the words every tutor dreads: “Are you sure?” The whole tutoring industry is based on “sure.” The SAT is an unknowable, terrifying beast. If the student doesn’t have complete trust in her master, the quest is lost.
“Of course I’m sure,” Noah laughs.
“I really think it means ‘to take apart,’ ” Cameron says. Her vocabulary quiz skates across the table as she jabs it with her pencil.
“Well, it doesn’t,” Noah says. The words come out harshly. Cameron looks up at him in surprise. Her eyes are inky black in the dim light of her dining room. “It means to not be what you seem,” Noah says, more gently.
Cameron looks down at the words scrawled on her quiz and stares at them for a few moments. “You just used a split infinitive. And I talked to my boyfriend—I talked to Rafferty today,” she says.
“Oh yeah?” Noah asks jovially. “How is he doing?”
“He’s really scared. He keeps going like, ‘My score’s not going up, my score’s not going up.’ ”
“It will go up. He shouldn’t worry.”
Cameron’s eyes narrow. “But you don’t know for sure it will, do you? So you really can’t say that.”
“Tutoring’s a mysterious process,” Noah says. “But it works. You can trust me.”
“Because it’s not like my score is that great either.”
“You’ve gone up 270 points. That’s pretty awesome, actually.”
“Yeah, but it’s still just a 2150. Not like 2350.”
“You started at 1880. You have to keep that in mind. Going up to 2350 is a big leap.”
“Huh,” Cameron says, opening up her workbook. “You don’t sound too confident anymore. It’s like suddenly everything might be coming apart.”
Glamorous Disasters Page 24