Glamorous Disasters

by Eliot Schrefer

  “Oh! You did not get a perfect score!” Olena taps the side of her coffee mug for emphasis. “I will get a 2400.”

  Noah smiles. “Not leaving us much room for error, are you?”

  “Enough talk. Start teaching.”

  They cover some overarching math strategies. Noah gives her a set of worksheets to complete and a list of four hundred words to memorize, then bids her goodbye and starts his morning commute to his number one paying customer.

  “It’s only five days!” Tuscany says. “Five days until I go! Thank God, it’s colossally boring here.” She has stacked her books on an antique dining room chair and placed her bare legs on the mound, so her narrow thighs stand in front of her face like bars. She blows air over her toenail polish.

  Noah yawns. Olena is in the middle of her practice test, Noah imagines. He envisions her with headphones on, lean arms akimbo as she massages her temples, processing a paragraph about the formation of nebulae.

  “You said I could bring like friends, right? ’Cuz Octavia’s on spring break too. She’s from camp, we don’t hang in the city much ’cuz she’s from Connecticut. I checked with Mom and she said sure, why not, bring Octavia! Agnès’s already like bought the tickets.”

  “Agnès said ok? Can this girl hike?”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “It’s a hiking trip. You’re going to cross mountains.”

  “You didn’t ask me if I could hike. But don’t worry, she does Pilates.”

  When Agnès delivers their breakfast and lunch she moves wordlessly, like a surly servant. Although she has never snapped at him, Noah has always detected a moodiness around Agnès, the possibility for bursts of fury. After he finishes with Tuscany he immediately goes to search for her. He finds her hunched over Dr. Thayer’s desk, barricaded behind piles of paper like a révolutionnaire. Her back is to him.

  “Hi, Agnès,” Noah says cautiously. “Have you gotten all your supplies?”

  “Yes, the trip,” Agnès says, not turning around. “I have gotten supplies, yes.” She pauses and points to the piles of paperwork. “Somehow Dr. Thayer expects me to manage all of this while I am on a mountaintop in France. Perhaps you know how I will do this?” Her head cocks to one side, angrily, expectantly.

  “I’m sure Dr. Thayer understands that you’ll be away for a week, so you can’t possibly do all this as well, right?”

  Agnés turns in profile and shoots Noah a withering look. “Noah. Please.”

  “Do you want me to talk to her?” Noah asks.

  The cheek visible to Noah stiffens in anger. “No. What I want is to not go on this odieux trip.”

  Noah shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I’m sorry I roped you into this.”

  Agnès turns to face Noah fully. She is pale and quivering, and with her white skin and shock of red lipstick she has the coloring of a plucked wildflower. Noah is taken aback by her furious beauty. “I am sorry you did as well,” she says in French. “I thought it might have been fun before, but Dr. Thayer has not relented in my work, I don’t know how I will even get through this day without her yelling at me—I did not go to Princeton, Noah, she is not so nice with me—and I have no desire to spend five nights in a tent with”—her voice drops to a whisper—“Tuscany and her putain friend Octavia!”

  Noah just stands in the doorway, his arms crossed, speechless. Agnès looks about to get out of her chair and strike him.

  “This job is hard enough,” she continues, “without our turning on each other. That was a really low thing to do. Why didn’t you just let me do my job, and you yours? In fact, I have work to do now, why don’t you just go play cool to some other asshole for two hundred twenty-five dollars an hour? I’ve got some accounts to figure out by twelve.”

  “Whoa, Agnès,” Noah says softly. “Désolé.” He intended it in a general sense, but he immediately regrets that the word sounds like consolation for her lower wage.

  “You’re sorry. Oh, how généreux. Thank you, Noah. I don’t need your pity.”

  “I didn’t mean that, maybe it was my French.”

  “Noah, I am with mauvaise humeur. You should leave.” Agnès swivels back to the piles of paper. Noah stands there and stares at the back of her head for a few moments, trying to think of what to say. Her straw hair quivers.

  She turns her head, just far enough to squint at him out of the corner of her eye. “Go away, Noah. And if that sounds rude, perhaps it’s my French.”

  The next day, Agnès has called in sick. And the next. “Strep throat,” Tuscany reports derisively. “Yah, right,” she continues, eyes dancing with the slim shred of gossip to have wandered into her cloistered life, “maybe her boyfriend actually did get her preggers this time. What’s gonna happen if she like gives birth on the trip, huh? What’s gonna happen? ” Her eyes dart about maniacally.

  The flight to Marseille leaves in two days.

  “I don’t understand,” Olena says, holding up a reading comprehension passage that she has annotated and highlighted in three colors. “If they want to know which answer choice, if accurate, would ‘detract least’ from the author’s argument, do I want the good answer choice, or the bad one?”

  This question trips up kids whose parents are Columbia literature professors, never mind recent Albanian immigrants. Noah ponders how to explain it. But his thoughts are on Tuscany and what Agnès’s absence means for the Marseille trip. He seems to spend his sessions with Tuscany thinking about Olena, and his sessions with Olena thinking about Tuscany. If only he had more time between the two. As it stands, he has to race through Harlem to make it to the Upper East Side in time, and his brain is slow to catch up with his person.

  “You are not concentrating today,” Olena chastises, tapping Noah on the arm.

  “Oh, please,” Noah says, pouring another cup of coffee. “Give me a break. Let’s see. Tell me what the passage’s about.”

  “The hierarchical differences between certain means for—”

  “Stop being smart. I’ve told you, reading comprehension doesn’t reward brilliance. Imagine yourself a perfect reader with no intellectual capacity. Don’t analyze, just do plot summary. Two words, what is the passage about?”

  “Colors of flowers.”

  “Good. Now which answer choice has nothing whatsoever to do with flower colors, either for or against?”

  “Okay, okay, Mr. Clever American. I see it. This choice about geology is the one for me.”

  “Good.”

  Olena has nailed her vocabulary today, everything from soporific to disrobe. She has shown true disdain for the test, but is intellectually intrigued by the challenge of it, as if she has decided that the SAT is actually a thirty-five-page crossword puzzle.

  “The verbal sections have this very American sense of inclusion,” she notes. “Every test, there is a passage about Native Americans or perhaps the Harlem Renaissance. Then there is one science passage, preferably about the accomplishments of a woman. I have also noticed a ridiculous amount of memoir by Chinese immigrants.”

  Noah nods.

  Olena scoffs. “Obviously the verbal part is written by boys like you, smart and guilty white persons. But the math! Those nerds have not caught on. Like this question: ‘Carlos is delivering pizzas. If he can deliver nine pizzas in an hour, how many can he deliver in forty minutes?’ Yes, Carlos is delivering pizzas, but in the same section Ingrid rides her horse to tennis lessons and walks back and wonders about her average speed. Who is the equestrian, who is delivering pizzas? This is a very American test, I think. All the conscious things are so careful, and all the subconscious things prove what the conscious tries to hide.”

  Noah agrees entirely. But it is too early in the morning for insightful commentary. He stares dazedly at the delicate curves of Olena’s breasts beneath her threadbare shirt, and then snaps his gaze into his coffee.

  “Perhaps my English didn’t make sense,” Olena says, waiting for him to react.

  “N
o, you made perfect sense. I’m just a little sleepy.”

  “The SAT is crap. That’s my message.”

  Noah perks up. “No way, it’s essential. Before the SAT only kids from elite high schools stood a chance of getting into good colleges—Harvard had no way to evaluate a kid from Oklahoma. His high school was so different from Exeter that there was no way to know if his grades were accurate. The SAT changed all that. I couldn’t have gone to Princeton without it.”

  “I am thinking you like it mainly because you did well on it. With a 1620 on 2400 you might be less thrilled.”

  Touché. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “I am not going to do well.”

  “We’ll be able to work intensively while Tuscany’s away. You’re going to be fine.”

  A rumbling sound comes from Noah’s bedroom. Roberto thumps to the floor and enters the living room, scratching beneath his boxer shorts. “What the hell?” he says. “You guys are doin’ this like so fuckin’ early.”

  “This is my future, Rob,” Olena says. She spits the words at him.

  Roberto makes a mocking cooing noise and then approaches Olena, gives her a brotherly squeeze. “She’s like totally brilliant, huh, Noah?”

  “Yeah,” Noah says. “Your sister’s pretty damn smart.”

  “Boys, boys,” Olena says, pretending to struggle against Roberto’s arms. Then she submits. “Okay, I guess you’re right, I am pretty damn smart.” She turns her head pointedly to Roberto. Her nose bumps his biceps. “Smart enough not to hang out with rich assholes who treat me like a zoo exhibit.”

  Roberto freezes, then releases her, shrugging his frame toward the ceiling. “Whatever. Dylan and his buds and me had like a really killer time last night. I’m having fun. I’ll leave you to be all ‘smart’ about it.”

  “He plays dumb,” Olena says to Noah, “but he’s got a master plan somewhere inside all that underarm odor.”

  Noah has no doubt that Roberto has a “master plan,” that both he and Olena do. Noah has noticed that Roberto has stopped asking him to go out now that he’s entered Dylan’s circle. Roberto has already advanced into a tenuous position in Dylan’s league, just as Olena hopes for the high society of the Ivy League. Roberto and Olena are taking separate paths—one social, one academic—to scale the same society. Noah just wonders which of Hera’s children will succeed.

  Noah arrives at the Thayer household to discover that Agnès is still AWOL. Tuscany is gleeful at the heightening intrigue. “What’re we going to do, huh, Noah? The trip’s tomorrow. Tomorrow! And Agnès is like dying in bed. Or else driving around the Hamptons with her boyfriend. I think that’s probably it, don’t you? I mean, she’s totally not sick.”

  Like a caged bird, Tuscany has turned manic and fluttery since she began spending her days at home. She sits on the dining room table in the middle of her piles of textbooks, running her hands over her feet.

  “I have no idea,” Noah says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “I’m still going to go, right? The trips not like canceled?”

  “I hope the trip’s not canceled. I need to talk to your mom, though. Is she home?”

  “She’s off visiting clients or something. You should like call her cell phone,” Tuscany says, nodding sagely.

  Noah leaves Dr. Thayer a message, and doesn’t receive a response until the early evening. The voicemail graphic of his cell phone is lit when he leaves the gym. The glowing envelope seems disingenuously genteel, as though Dr. Thayer has just messengered a sealed letter. He punches in his password as he jogs up Riverside.

  The first message is from a Thayer—Mr. Thayer. Noah stops in his tracks.

  Hello, is this Noah? There wasn’t a beep. Regardless, this is Dale Thayer; we met last week. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about something, a little business proposition. I’ve just learned what extortionate rates your agency charges and, well, I imagine I would run things a little better. I wanted to discuss possibilities with you.

  Mr. Thayer wants to start his own tutoring agency? Noah has no time to think about the implications before the second message begins:

  Noah, hi, this is Dr. Thayer. I got your message about Agnès and yes, I’m concerned. I’ve given her a few calls throughout the day and, well, they haven’t been returned. I suspect I’ll have to call it off. I’m afraid this simply won’t work. So do give me a call.

  Noah sprints past his apartment, up a few blocks, and then back down again. This will take some thought. He vows to keep running until he comes up with something.

  “Olena,” he asks breathlessly when he enters the apartment. Sweat drips from his shirt and begins to pool on the floor. “How’s your French?”

  “Parfait, courant. Et pourquoi?”

  Noah tells Dr. Thayer that he has a friend who is from Europe, with perfect French, and lets the doctor assume a Princeton connection. Dr. Thayer jumps on the opportunity—the reality of Tuscany’s hanging around for ten days instead of being far away and out of her hair has apparently made Dr. Thayer willing to hear alternatives.

  “Noah,” she says into the phone, “I’m sure this girl is very sweet. But I don’t know her. And who’s going to make sure Tuscany continues her studies?”

  “Olena’s very responsible, Dr. Thayer.”

  “I’m sure she is. But I’d like you to go as well.”

  “Me!”

  “Of course.”

  Noah’s thoughts race—France with Tuscany and Olena? But then again, Olena was excited about being paid for the time abroad but reluctant to give up her time tutoring. They would be able to work together during any down time in France. It seems both improper and completely reasonable for him to go.

  “I guess I can move my appointments. Okay. Why not?”

  Suddenly Dr. Thayer is laughing.

  “What is it?” Noah asks.

  “It’s just funny because you’re not, well, a teacher. You’re just a young man, hardly older than Tuscany. I can only imagine all the trouble you’ll get into. And with her friend there as well! She can be a very difficult child, wicked.”

  Noah is frustrated by Dr. Thayer’s tone. She did, after all, ask him to go. “I think she’ll be fine.”

  Noah calls Air France and has Agnès’s ticket canceled and reissued.

  Two days later the four of them are in Marseille.

  The trip…well, the trip.

  On the return flight Noah snuggles against a dozing Olena. They are seated in coach, while Tuscany and Octavia giggle and luxuriate in first class. Noah is happy at the division, glad that the velvet curtain prevents him from taking any responsibility for what Tuscany and Octavia might be up to.

  Which, considering the ordeal they have undergone, is probably just sleeping.

  Justifiably feeling her role on the trip to be vague, Olena made herself official recorder. She declared that she would involve herself in taking pictures of the girls, ostensibly for the Thayer photo album, an object Noah is fairly sure does not exist.

  Noah kisses Olena on the top of the head, powers on the digital camera display, and scans through the pictures.

  1. Tuscany and Octavia stand at the departures curb of JFK Airport, arm in arm. Taxi driver is engaged in the extensive process of unloading Octavia’s luggage.

  The blur at the left of the frame is Noah, who flung open the door of the driver’s black Mercedes SUV and dashed inside in order to find out about alternative flights, since they are two hours late. Said lateness arose mostly from the styling of Octavia’s hair. Her hair is, admittedly, stunning. Octavia and Tuscany pose like demigoddesses of international departure.

  2. Tuscany and Octavia now stand before massive window at Air France departure gate. Stance is identical to previous picture—must have been rehearsed and ingrained in memory the night before. Photo might have been intended to capture girls alongside plane, but Octavia has shifted position and voluminous hair now obscures aircraft.

  Octavia Carotenuto, originally of Milan but pre
sently of Greenwich, Connecticut, is the stepchild of an influential but generally despised Italian politician. She and Tuscany seem to complement one another—Tuscany the slender teacup, Octavia the considerably larger saucer. She has the squarish, rugby-player build Noah generally ascribes to a certain type of lesbian, but Octavia carries her solidness with such a voluptuous sense of sexual possibility that her large muscles and flat chest seem fully intentional, like this season’s hot look.

  3. On plane. Girls hang over seat backs, with toothy and pouty grins, and give wild thumbs-up signs. Nearby French businessmen keep eyes firmly closed.

  The very photo seems to carry a sense of the girls’ volume. Their iPods hum with a sort of demonic energy, the girls’ open smiles hint at the peals of laughter they emit as they explore the possibilities of the cabin. The nearby passengers all sit at forty-five-degree inclinations, angling away from the girls. Noah’s mental note: crop out miniature bottle of wine on Tuscany’s tray table.

  4. Marseille Airport baggage claim. Octavia lies atop piles of her luggage, unceremoniously asleep, her body jumbled, looking as if dropped there from the ceiling. Tuscany is posed beside her, headphones still in her ears, body clenched and torso extended, as if a mermaid posing on a wave-swept promontory. Note gaggle of French boys staring from corner.

  Noah’s backpack took its own route to Marseille, via Milan. It will be four hours before it arrives. Not pictured: he and Olena work on a practice SAT on the carpet of the arrivals lobby.

  5. Final dinner before six-day overnight trip begins. Le Roi de Couscous in Marseille: Noah’s arm is visible at edge of frame as he energetically lifts a spoonful of meat, cauliflower, and broth to his mouth. Tuscany and Octavia stare mournfully into their bowls.