“Well, tell him now.”
“Are you serious? You’re right there! You tell him. Why are you being so messed?”
Dr. Thayer just stands there, fixing Tuscany with a look that was probably intended to be fearsome but comes off as simply baffled.
“Noah,” Tuscany says, inflectionless, “my mom wants to talk to you.”
“Thank you,” Dr. Thayer says, spins on her heel, and walks out.
“What a bitch,” Tuscany says after the door closes. “She’s on like a total power trip.”
Noah is unsure of how to respond. Dr. Thayer is behaving strangely, but “a power trip” means exerting control, and is, after all, what parents are supposed to do.
“Is everything okay between you two?” is the most diplomatic response Noah can come up with.
“That’s a stupid question.” Tuscany picks angrily at the furry end of her pencil. “Nothing can be okay with her. She’s a monster.”
There are still ten minutes left in the session, but Noah can’t imagine delving back into standardized tests now. He decides he will just stay ten minutes longer next time, and gathers his things.
Noah has no idea where Dr. Thayer is in the apartment. Even after all the weeks he has worked there the Thayer residence remains labyrinthine, with an almost mythological power to make him lost. He wanders past the kitchen and finally finds Dr. Thayer dressed in a suit and seated on the oversized antique armchair in her bedroom, squinting in the half-light emitted by the shuttered windows.
“Dr. Thayer?” Noah says softly. She doesn’t move.
He repeats his greeting. Her head turns slowly, laboriously, as though the temperature in the room were subzero.
“Come in. Sit down.”
Noah gingerly inclines himself so he rests a minimum of weight on an emerald crushed-silk settee.
“‘Harriet Tubman rememberation,’” Dr. Thayer announces flatly.
A silence floods the room. The marble clock on an armoire ticks loudly.
“Yeah,” Noah finally says sadly. This is his wiliest defense for parent dissatisfaction, reserved only for the most dire situations, his “crazy world” routine: he tacitly commiserates with the disgruntled parent, emphasizes their united front in the face of the world’s cruel onslaughts.
“Did you teach him that?” Dr. Thayer asks. “I’m fairly sure ‘rememberation’ isn’t even a word.” Noah can’t tell if she is angry; her words limp out from within the fog of some narcotic.
“Uh, no, he came up with it himself. I’ve encouraged him to write on Harriet Tubman, but not in quite that way.”
A wide and glassy smile spreads across Dr. Thayer’s face. “It’s kind of funny, really. Do they give points for humor?”
“I imagine they do occasionally, but I don’t generally suggest going for it.”
Dr. Thayer dismissively waves her hand from across a distance. “I’ve thought of so many ways around this test, Noah. But if Dylan isn’t motivated, there’s no point in any of it. You can hand him everything—I hand him everything—but he doesn’t realize what he’s got, what I’ve done for him. It’s like I don’t exist here.”
“Tuscany is doing well,” Noah says, in what he hopes is a guileless tone.
“Tuscany will do fine.” Dr. Thayer yawns. “I’m not concerned.”
“Her test is in a couple of weeks.”
“I know. Dylan’s test results will come at the same time. Do you have a lot riding on this? Personally?”
“Well, obviously the office bases our promotions on score increases, to some extent—”
“Because I have to say, when I first met you I thought, He’s too young, he’ll never be able to do this. I was about to send you back and get another.” She pauses and stares meaningfully at Noah, as if waiting for him to realize the extent of her benevolence. “But the kids seem to like you. Which probably just means you’re being too easy on them, but still.”
Noah smiles blandly at Dr. Thayer.
“But my children don’t see the dark side of Noah, do they?” she presses.
He forces a smile. “What do you mean?”
“Oh yes, let’s keep up appearances: ‘Why, Noah, I have no idea what I meant, silly me!’ ”
Noah stares at her across the darkness, clenching his throat against his rising fear.
“I guess on one level I’m saying thank you,” Dr. Thayer says, shifting her skeleton in the chair. “For being there for them. For seeming so sweet to them.”
“Thanks,” Noah says, feeling a touch of vertigo, as though on the brink of a chasm. “That means a lot to me.”
Dr. Thayer smiles condescendingly, as if amused at some yokel inanity of Noah’s. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m satisfied by this. Were you, for example, going to tell me you were leaving ten minutes early, or just hope I didn’t notice?”
She doesn’t sound angry, merely toying. Noah’s voice quavers when he answers. He forces himself to speak slowly. “Of course. And I have to say, Dr. Thayer, I’ve stayed ten minutes late plenty of other sessions.”
She adopts a puzzled tone, inclines her head. “But I didn’t ask you to stay late those times, did I?”
“Of course not…” He can’t stretch to anything else to say, so he just repeats “of course not” more curtly.
Dr. Thayer pushes her frame erect in the chair. “There you go, Noah, put your foot down.”
“I’m sorry?”
“There’s a real masculine vitality in you, that you’re trying to hide from me. You’ve been pretty scrappy to make it this far, to Manhattan. Assert yourself. Don’t worry about my feelings. This is no case for politeness. Now tell me, frankly this time, how is Dylan’s score going to be?”
Dr. Thayer seems to be training him to defy her. She pulls her hair back to expose her long, smooth neck, and stares at him. “Not well. Not good,” Noah says.
“There. Now tell me: why is that?”
“Too many tutors.” He tries to stare straight into her eyes, but he can’t. Despite the fact that he towers over her, has strength on his side, she makes him primally afraid; she is a gorgon playing with her powers.
She cocks her head even further. “What was that?”
“He’s had too many tutors,” Noah mumbles into the rug.
“Well, disregarding, for the moment, the fact that he needs all these tutors, answer this: you are one of these tutors, no?”
“Yes, of course, but you can hardly fault me for—”
Dr. Thayer makes a motion like an underwater punch. “Yes, lovely, go on!”
“I’m here at your request, it’s hardly my place to deny you a service that you request of me.”
“But you’re still contributing to what you see as a destructive problem. A destructive situation, I should say.”
“There’s no other option now. Without tutors Dylan would be totally unprepared.”
“Now? But there was never any option, Noah,” Dr. Thayer whispers. “This all started in the sixth grade—there was never a time when he was willing to work. He’s always been totally passive, a giant infant. Without tutors Dylan wouldn’t even have been able to stay at Dwight, much less Fieldston. So what’s the better parenting: get Dylan tutors, or watch him fail when I can offer him so much? I can tell you disapprove of all this, Noah—I’m a doctor, understanding what you’re feeling is my occupation —but you need to realize that I’m not ashamed of any of the choices I’ve made here.”
Noah nods, trying to cast himself as the supportive friend, not the misbehaving employee. But he wonders: if Dr. Thayer is so free of regret, why is she telling him all this?
“How does your husband feel about your kids’ scores?”
“My husband ?” Dr. Thayer throws her head back; she is about to say something truly virulent. But then her head nods, as if she has been taken by a fit of narcolepsy. “My husband does not know.”
She stares at Noah. He’s sure it is a trick of the gloom, but her eyes seem to blink one before the oth
er, like a lizard’s.
“How about Tuscany’s magazine?” Noah says briskly. “That’s pretty impressive.”
Dr. Thayer snorts. “Have you read it?”
“Seeing the amount of effort that went in, I’m impressed. None of my other students have done anything like that.”
“Well, you’ve just got a bumper crop of students, don’t you?” She has put on a country bumpkin accent—all that is missing is an “I reckon” at the end. Is she mocking his poverty, his slight southern accent?
“Even the best students won’t work on their own like Tuscany,” Noah says. “For a school project, sure, but not for the sheer pleasure of it.”
There is a pause. Dr. Thayer screws up her face; she looks dissatisfied.
“Has she done something wrong?” Noah asks. Why does she constantly sell her daughter so short?
Dr. Thayer shoots Noah a warning glance. “No…and yes, it seems that she’s dedicated to some things.”
“Yeah, it’s great,” Noah says. His words hang feebly. The very word great seems timid and brittle here, a useless social convention in a chaotic land.
Dr. Thayer leans forward and presses her arms into the cushion of her chair. She looks as if about to pounce. “I believe Dylan told you about this SAT incident at Dwight last year. Nothing that made the papers, of course. No one wants a scandal.”
They’re back to the dark place. Noah’s whole body clenches. He forces his muscles to relax. “Someone took the test for other students, right?”
Dr. Thayer fixes Noah with a slow smile. “Yes, Noah, that’s correct.”
“Whatever happened to the student?”
“Frankly, I don’t care about that. What I do care about is this: you are very familiar with how this process works, no?”
Noah laughs. “Familiar with what process? With taking the SAT for a Dwight student?”
“Yours went to Dalton, I believe.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Interesting phrasing there. Not exactly denying it, are you? Tell me, how did that work out for you? How did the girl’s score come out? Or did you never find out? Maybe the check was just, you know, left on the nightstand, and then you were gone.”
“Who told you this?” Noah asks. He doesn’t much care, but he can think of no better question to cover his guilt.
“I found out about it because I was looking for someone to ‘help out’ Dylan, way back. And your name, funnily enough, came up. See, Noah? We’re both so very evil. Or maybe we just both want to see kids we care about succeed.”
“What are you trying to do?”
Dr. Thayer falls back among her pillows. “I just want to make sure that we’re relating to each other on the correct terms. We’re not so different, you and I. That’s why I chose you.”
Flustered, fighting back panic, and desperate to alter the course of the conversation, Noah makes a mistake—he asks a “student question” of a parent: “Do you have plans tonight?”
Dr. Thayer puts down her book, glances to the bed, and then smiles thinly at Noah. “I do have plans tonight. I have work to do. Do you have plans tonight?”
“Yes,” Noah says quietly.
“Good night, then.”
At the Fifth Avenue stop Noah’s crosstown bus is loaded with commuters, young men and women in business suits, those future executives willing to put in ninety-hour workweeks and return home at ten P.M . Noah stands crowded into their weary mass, listens to their clipped and irritated cell phone conversations. Half the calls seem to be to parents, and the other half to friends or lovers. Some calls complain about rent payments and negligent landlords, and other calls complain about friends’ complaining. Noah is glad that Olena might be home waiting for him.
The subway train that pulls in at 79th Street is almost full. Noah wedges himself between a bushy-haired woman clutching a canvas bag and reading The Prophet and an elderly Asian man whose head bobs as he listens to his iPod. After 96th Street the white occupants of the car begin to trickle out, and minorities trickle on. The train that rackets aboveground at 125th Street is full of brown and black bodies, and Noah.
He exits the subway at 145th Street and tracks up Broadway, his tutoring bag bouncing against his hip. The sidewalk is littered with the detritus of the day’s activities. Wrappers—primarily McDonald’s and KFC, interspersed with a few Chinese takeout Styrofoam containers—combine with broken glass to form a local sort of low-lying scrub vegetation along the sidewalk. One of the local panhandlers has thrown up in the concrete median of Broadway, and he points out the orange splash to Noah as he passes, raising his brown-bagged bottle in a cheer. The local supermarket has closed, but a woman clutching a child has spread a few dusty cans of food on a blanket in front of it, hawking the goods to those who pass. For the moment Noah hates both Fifth Avenue and Harlem, that they can coexist, one so near to the other, and not crash together and equalize.
Noah pauses halfway up the building stairwell. He leans against the cinderblock wall and rubs his temples. Dr. Thayer knows about Monroe.
Monroe Eichler, his first and best student. Confident, aggressive, red curls, and tartan skirts fastened with safety pins. Now at Amherst, presumably. Noah would love to know where she is, how she is doing. He would love to just talk to her, like they used to do. But Mrs. Eichler made it clear that he’s not to make contact at all.
For three hours a week, Wednesday evenings were bliss (one-hundred-minute session with Monroe, one-hundred-minute dinner with Mrs. Eichler and Monroe). Monroe was president of Dalton’s Model United Nations Club, and would excitedly chatter about Argentina’s tenuous position in world politics. She confessed to a guilty fascination with the Fibonacci sequence. She read Russian fantasy and was auditing advanced calculus courses at Columbia. Halfway through the year she was already scoring 2300s on her practice tests.
And then, one week before she was supposed to take the October SAT, her father died. Congestive heart failure, just like Noah’s father. “His heart isn’t pumping out the venous blood,” Monroe had brokenly reported on the phone, in the detached and ironic tone good students take on for teachers. She was sorry, but she would have to cancel the week’s session. As if that were her primary concern. Noah rescheduled his other appointments in order to rush over and spend the day with the family, made calls and performed whatever insignificant errands were necessary. He spent Friday and Saturday night there (he was breaking up with Tabitha at the time and grateful, secondarily, for a place to stay), and shared melancholy and emotional meals with Monroe and her mother. He joined in their unhappiness and yet, at the same time, couldn’t remember ever having felt more content. He felt himself part of their family, an adopted member of their inner circle, as if he were Monroe’s fiancé.
Monroe’s mother, a polished and eloquent analyst for Deutsche Bank, pulled Noah aside on Sunday. She was concerned—Monroe was brilliant but also flighty, and in her melancholy she was hardly able to put the silver away in the correct place—how could she do well on her SAT on Saturday? And the October administration was her last option for her early application to Amherst. Would she be able to get a special postponement? No? What did Noah suggest, then?
Noah worked with Monroe throughout the week. But she was entirely unable to concentrate. Her scores plummeted to 1800s, nothing that would get her into Amherst. She sobbed over missed vocabulary words.
Noah’s reverie about Monroe is broken. He raises his head. Music has begun to crackle from his apartment. He opens the door to Olena and Roberto dancing. The little tape player Hera keeps on the windowsill hums, wafting out a feeble Polish pop tune that sounds like Shakira interpreting a polka. Roberto, his large frame clothed like an eighties rock star, his hair slicked back in vain waves that reach his neck, turns his sister gracefully, and she stands and accepts him with poised generosity, circling her brother with bonny enthusiasm. They are oblivious to Noah, and the scene is so unexpected, so lovely and odd, that Noah is paralyzed in the
doorway, entranced.
Roberto sees Noah and lets his hands drop.
“Hey, what’s up?” he says.
Olena flashes Noah a sardonic smile. “May brothers and sisters never dance in America?”
Noah stammers in response, not because he finds it odd that they were dancing—he thought it charming—but because he is unable to find the words to prove himself not to be the prudish American.
Luckily Roberto, always an abundant source of distraction, starts to rummage through Noah’s bag. He looks at the first page of a vocabulary list as he scratches a finger through his stiffly gelled hair. He hunches over in dazed concentration, as if he were reading a cereal box early in the morning. “I don’t know any of these.”
“Yeah,” Noah says, “it’s hard.”
Roberto passes the list to his sister. “Do you know any of these?”
She squints at the list. She is wearing an old softened T-shirt that falls like gossamer over her breasts, and a patch of fair skin shows through a rip in the shoulder. “Yes, I know these. But I have read a lot, that’s why, Roberto.” She turns to Noah, then continues proudly: “Our family was of some importance back when Albania was communist. We had an English teacher who lived with us, a young guy like you. But then the communists were gone and under the new, capitalist régime we had to give up our teachers. Albania is no longer a good place to live, Noah. Not good.”
“What’s this?” Roberto exclaims. He has tossed a dozen word lists and Invisible Man to one side and has come upon Tuscany’s magazine. “It’s All You. I don’t get it. What does it mean? And why do you have it?”
“It’s my student,” Noah explains curtly. Then he wishes he hadn’t spoken; he doesn’t like the sight of Tuscany’s semi-clothed form beneath Roberto’s broad fingers.
Olena inhales sharply as Roberto lets out a low whistle. “Your student has published a magazine ?” Olena breathes.
“And this,” Roberto says excitedly, holding the magazine out and pointing to the cover. “This is her?”
“Wow,” Olena says amazedly.
“Wow,” Roberto says libidinously.
Glamorous Disasters Page 11
