“I’m just here to meet Roberto.”
“Rob!” she shouts. The sound dissipates under the onslaught of the techno. “Rob!”
Roberto arrives from the back, dressed in black linen and silver chains. His hair is wet. He strides toward Noah with a broad smile, and engages him in another elaborate handshake. “Noah, how’s it going ? You look awesome.”
“Yeah? Thanks.” Noah is fairly certain that he does not “look awesome.” He is still wearing the work clothes he put on that morning, and has rolled up his shirtsleeves in an attempt to look edgy. One of them has fallen back down.
Roberto leads Noah to his car, which is double-parked in front of a hydrant. He’s “been runnin’ out to check on it like every five minutes, but there haven’t been any fires or nothing.” It is a tiny Datsun that may have once been black but has sun-bleached to silver in broad stripes, giving it the appearance of an elderly metallic zebra. Noah is unsure exactly how old it is, but knows Datsun became Nissan in the early eighties. They fold inside.
“So where to?” Roberto asks. “Downtown? Lotus, maybe? The Coral Room?”
“Uh, I’m not sure about the scene on Wednesday nights, maybe we’d better go to one of your clubs.”
“Oh man, I hoped you were going to show me the life!”
“What about your life?” Noah counters. He wonders: is it just that he balks at the $40 cover charges, or is he is embarrassed at the idea of showing up at one of Dylan’s clubs in a Datsun, with Roberto in tow?
“My scene is like a total South-Central L.A. crossover, kinda lame for New York. Rowdy warehouse parties, sorta like raves but the crowd’s older.”
“Ah,” Noah says knowingly.
As they race over the bridge into Queens, Roberto fishes around the backseat, one hand on the wheel, and retrieves a half-full bottle of gin. He hands it to Noah, who takes dutiful swigs, clenching his throat muscles to mask his tiny retches at each swallow of the warm poison. He wonders: if their lives up until then had been switched—if he had grown up in Latin America, and Roberto in Virginia—then would he be the one driving the bent Datsun, with the warm bottle of gin rolling in the back, and would Roberto be the privileged young man taking sips like a polite foreigner? He wonders at himself momentarily—why is he going anywhere with Roberto? But the question is instantly unimportant. Roberto represents something new. To someone rocketed from farmland into a university full of the nation’s all-stars, the “new thing,” the experience not yet lived, is always an improvement. Here he is, getting to know someone he would never have come across in Virginia or Princeton. Whatever he uncovers, however he might further the frontiers of what he knows, is bound to make him a better person.
They wind through broad empty streets, Roberto expertly navigating the bleak enormity of Queens. He stops before a warehouse in the middle of a deserted block. Music thuds from the building. One window is broken, and from another hangs a makeshift milk-crate basketball hoop. They get out of the car, and Roberto raps on a grate painted “Do Not Block Driveway.” It rises, and they are admitted into a cavernous darkness.
Hundreds of bodies undulate to pulsing music, each outlined in blue neon light.
“It’s a good scene tonight!” Roberto yells. Noah feels the words rather than hears them; the music is too loud. The beat fills his head and multiplies the effects of the gin; the world moves at an odd pace; he is already drunk.
Roberto darts to the bar and starts talking to a girl clad in vinyl. Noah approaches them nervously, as if joining a game of dodgeball. “I’m Noah!” he says, and makes a little cool-guy dance move that he instantly regrets. “No-ah. What’s your name?” he shrieks to another girl.
The girl shakes her head savagely. She either can’t hear him or, he realizes, perhaps doesn’t speak English. She is wearing so much pink gloss that her lips join like two wet sticks of bubble gum, and slide over each other uncontrollably. She is pretty, but looks at Noah with such pliancy that, more than anything else, he is scared for her well-being. Roberto has led his girl to the dance floor, where they gyrate amid the crowd, in full body contact, the girl jerkily waving her hands above her head as though keeping her balance on rough seas. Noah stands by the other girl and sips his drink. What do you do in the city?, his usual cocktail party prompt, seems inappropriate here. He should be talking about indie electronica acts, or piercings. He sips again. The blue liquid seems to find the gin in his stomach a good playmate, and the two heave and frolic together.
After a burst of light-headed inspiration Noah and the girl are on the dance floor, flailing and surging and soon splattered with other people’s sweat. In his intoxication he allows his intellect to surge forward, doesn’t check his pretension: the music, Roberto, the girls surrounding them, all start to take on profound implications, bear layers of meaning and insight. He is suddenly obsessed with the clinging but forlorn manner in which a worn tank top sits on the shoulders of the girl with whom he is dancing. He puts a hand on her shoulder and the room spins slightly around the cotton strap, as though it were the axis at the center of the pivoting club. Emboldened by the alcohol, he fingers the fragile fabric, the loose threads at the seam where some factory worker in Ecuador inserted her stitches, the softened holes of the jersey material. The girl smells like sprints, of saline and sweat and human oil. He tugs gently on her hair and she pulls her head back and stares up at him as they dance. Then she lowers her gaze to his chest and he realizes that she is nervous and at that moment it seems sublime, that they should both be shy and unsure of what to do next. The world continues to pivot, and as his thoughts further fragment he experiences the abstract, disembodied sensation that he will need to throw up soon.
Noah watches the broad triangle of Roberto’s back disappear into the crowd. He and the girl press into the corrugated aluminum wall of the warehouse and alternate watching the crowd and making out. She is smooth and slick in his arms; he is aroused but the weight on top of his head is getting heavier and his eyelids creep toward one another. The party goes dark whenever he blinks, only slowly reappears after he opens his eyes.
He doesn’t know how much time has passed before he next opens his eyes, but he is in Roberto’s car, his face pressed against the polyester felt of the backseat door. The Datsun seems impossibly full of girls, all giggling and yelling. He feels them on all sides, enjoys the pressure of their legs against his. Two different-color arms are draped across his lap. He wants to speak, but that would require him to focus his eyes, and he can’t quite manage it. When the car door opens, a girl separates from the group and she and Noah take turns dragging each other up the stairwell to his waiting bed.
Noah’s next-day appointment with Dylan isn’t until two, but even so, he has difficulty getting up in time. He wakes up alone in his unairconditioned attic apartment with sunlight flooding his bed. It is a hot September afternoon, and although he is red-faced and radiating heat, he isn’t sweating at all: hangover. He creaks out of bed and smacks his dry tongue around his mouth experimentally. The fluids in his brain seem to have a rhythm to them, and jostle when he moves, like a wave pool. Noah quaffs a half gallon of water that he just manages to keep in his stomach, downs a handful of aspirin and a multivitamin, and at the last moment remembers to grab Dylan’s practice test results before he rushes out the door. There is no trace of the girl from the night before, except that the toilet seat is down.
The heated pavement is hot enough to have softened, and seems to stick to Noah’s feet as he passes along it. He is relieved to throw himself into the crisp air of the bus. He pulls out Dylan’s score report: this weekend, after two months of tutoring, he got a 450 out of 800, up a pitiful 30 points from his diagnostic test, still 70 points below the low national average and nowhere near the 650 Dr. Thayer is set on. Dylan is a senior, and so the last test he can take in time for college applications is next week. In the sentence improvement section Dylan has elected to change the sentence
Classical musicians are putting alluring por
traits on their recordings, increasing sales through both musicianship and sex appeal.
to
Increasing sales through musicianship and also through sex appeal, and now putting alluring portraits on their recordings, they are classical musicians.
Noah rests his head against the cool blue plastic of the bus as he watches the 99 stores and bodegas pass by the window and imagines that he is instead off to the breezy tree-lined reservoir behind his house in Virginia, his notebook and a girlfriend in hand.
It is a Sunday, so Dr. Thayer is sure to be away. The doormen call up to the apartment but no one answers. “Ya know,” one of them says, “Dylan’s probably home and just sleeping or watching TV. Doesn’t want to get up.”
The “social/staff” card Dr. Thayer gave him at their first meeting is folded into Noah’s wallet, but he can’t will himself to flash his stenciled iron at the doormen. “Dr. Thayer told me to call her on her cell if he doesn’t answer. I’ll just try her.”
Dr. Thayer doesn’t answer her phone, but her voicemail prompt, in sultry and practiced tones, instructs Noah to leave a message.
Hi, Dr. Thayer, this is Noah. I’m supposed to meet with Dylan at four, and it’s four-fifteen. I know you’re in the Hamptons, but if you get this message and can try reaching Dylan, that would be great. Thanks!
Noah sits on a leather bench to wait. He presses his hands against the marble of the wall, relishes its smooth coldness against his throbbing fingertips. He remembers he was supposed to call his family the night before. Crap. He yawns as he leafs through Dylan’s test. Dylan has elected to replace
The jazz singer was famous because of his father’s enduring popularity.
with
In that his father was popular, and enduring, the jazz singer being famous was due to the fact that his father was also the same way.
On the essay, when prompted to “Agree or Disagree that Dreams Hinder Reality,” Dylan has chosen to argue what Noah loosely deems the negative:
To often we dont allow people to hinder there dreams. Hindering can be the only thing that gives a person hope. When we take that away, with recklessness the dreams, their no longer hindered but killed. In her speeches Harriet Tubman spoke on her own hinderingance and inspires women in America too emanceapate.
Mental note: Model the verb to hinder during the session.
Noah yawns again. The doormen’s phone rings. One of them answers and then nods at Noah. “Go on up.”
The front door of the apartment is open. Noah cautiously wanders through, his arms clasped behind his back like a respectful museum patron’s, until he finds Dylan seated on his bed, eating sesame chicken with a heavy silver fork and watching a baseball game.
“Hey,” Noah says.
Dylan looks at Noah accusingly. “I got totally nailed.”
“What were you doing?”
“I dunno, I was totally here, I dunno what happened. But my mom’s like, ‘DYLAN! You asshole, go get the door.’ ” Dylan is pissed for one more moment but then smiles. “She’s so wack,” he laughs.
Noah puts his bag down on the floor, and his head takes to renewed throbbing.
“You look like hell,” Dylan says.
“Thanks. Thank you.”
“I’m just saying.” Dylan looks at Noah with friendly admiration. “What did you do last night?”
Noah pauses—are teachers allowed to go down this road? “I went to this party with a guy from my neighborhood. It was in some warehouse in Queens, really crazy.”
“Wait, a guy from your neighborhood, like from Harlem?”
“Yeah,” Noah says.
“Cool. What was the party like?”
“You know, they had a bar just sort of thrown together against the wall. Really strong drinks.” Noah pauses. For the moment the drinks are all he can think of. He wonders about the name of the girl he took home.
“What kind of scene?” Dylan asks, leaning forward. He hands Noah the discarded chopsticks.
“Um, mixed. Lots of ages. Pretty chill.” Noah pinches a clot of chicken.
“That’s awesome. I’m so tired of all the petty crap I go to, you know? Every night I’m like, ‘No, I don’t wanna go,’ but I go anyway and it sucks, but I guess it’s fun too.”
“You want to know how you did this weekend?”
“What do you mean, like if everyone at the parties was into me?”
“No, on your test.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess.”
“You got 450 out of 800.”
“Is that good?”
“No, not really.”
Dylan laughs. “I told you I sucked.”
“Aren’t you nervous? The test is in a few weeks.”
Dylan thinks about it for a moment, then begins writing a text message on his phone. “No, I don’t think I am. Should I be?”
“Well, it all depends on how well you do in sports this season, I guess.”
“If I was someone else I would be pissed that I’m going to get into George Washington just ’cuz I can play ball.”
“If I were someone else,” Noah corrects.
“Mmm-hmm,” Dylan says, distracted. He finishes his message. “If you were someone else you’d what?”
Noah can’t help but smile at the small success of the afternoon. Dylan has not only used the word petty but also has used the subjunctive, and put himself in someone else’s shoes to boot.
A girl’s voice carries down the hallway. “Dylan? Did you like see the money Mom left?”
Dylan smiles and smirks in the direction of the voice. “Yeah,” he yells, “but I went out last night. Getting a table cost two hundred and fifty dollars.”
The door opens and Tuscany is standing before them. “You jerk-off! That was for my stupid printing fees.”
“The money in the fruit bowl?”
Tuscany emits a squeaky growl, then adjusts her shredded couture T-shirt.
“Well, whatever, give her a call. I’m sure there’s more somewhere,” Dylan says.
“You give her a call, ass-wipe. You’re the one who spent all my money on your moron friends.”
“I don’t even remember spending any, it just kind of disappeared.” He stares down Tuscany, as if daring her to find a hole in his counterargument.
Tuscany plucks the portable receiver from the fax machine on Dylan’s desk and hurls it at him.
“Jesus,” he says, “does this mega-bitch act turn all your boyfriends on?”
“Call her. Call her. I’m serious, Dylan.”
Dylan toys with the buttons and then, somewhat cowed, dials. Tuscany looks around the room in outrage and then notices Noah. “Oh, hey,” she says.
“Mom? Yeah, it’s Dylan…no, I don’t know where Dad is…but Tuscany’s got like a problem she’s too scared to tell you about. Yeah, she’s outta money.”
“Ooh! I hate you!” Tuscany squeals.
Dylan grins into the phone and runs a hand through his dark hair. “So anyway, she was wondering if there’s any more…I don’t know where it went—” He puts a hand over the receiver and looks pointedly at Tuscany. “She wants to know where it went, trouble— ” he whispers, then returns to his mother. “Actually I think I prob’ly spent it. You should really leave separate piles, it’s fucked that you never do that. Whoa. Whoa! Jesus.” He turns to Noah and Tuscany, a broad smile on his face. “You gotta hear this.”
He clicks on the speakerphone.
“—not just un limited, you can’t just keep on like that, I don’t know why you think you can get away with this, just always asking for more, but it’s rude, Dylan, it’s rude to me, it’s rude to yourself, it’s rude to Tuscany, it’d be rude to your father if he knew about it. You don’t understand how lucky you are that we have enough money for you to go out to these places every night, how impressive that is, how grateful you should be. Put Tuscany on. Tussy, are you on the line?”
“Yes, Mom,” Tuscany says.
“I’m telling you this so that you can get it bef
ore Dylan. There’s some more money in the second master bedroom hallway chandelier.”
“That one!” Dylan yells, punching the bed in mock frustration. “I never thought of that one.”
“Thanks, Mom!” Tuscany calls. She grins flirtatiously at Dylan. “Asshole.” She darts out of the room.
Dylan, a finger over his lips, turns his laptop toward Noah. He has typed: T’s strting a mag for local slutz momz paying.
“That’s so unfair, Mom,” Dylan says into the speakerphone.
“What’s unfair?” A pause. “Why can I hear myself? Am I on speakerphone?”
“Yeah, Noah’s here, I wanted him to hear.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Dylan.” Dr. Thayer hangs up.
Dylan laughs. “She’s hilarious,” he says, as a frat brother might say about a new rush who puked in the bushes.
Noah leafs through his tutoring papers as Dylan picks at a scab on his knee. Today they are to cover verb tense. He isn’t sure that Dylan can even tell him what a verb is, much less a verb tense, but plunges in anyway. “At the party Jamie noticed that she forgot to put socks on,” he prompts.
Dylan scratches his chest. “And?”
“And what’s wrong with the sentence?” Noah writes it out on a spiral notebook and hands it to Dylan.
“At…the…party…Jamie…noticed…that…she…forgot…to…put…socks…on. Nothing’s wrong. It’s bullshit if you’re going to tell me something is wrong with that.”
Glamorous Disasters Page 5
