Noah sits beneath a tree. His mind turns in a soon-familiar loop—fear over the repercussions of what he has done, pride at the moral path he has taken, doubts whether he has been that moral after all, fear over the repercussions of what he has done, pride…He lies flat on the soft, wet grass and falls asleep.
He is awakened by the buzz of a nearby power edger. He bolts upright, a leaf and a pair of rotten acorns bouncing off his body. He looks at his watch—the SAT has been over for an hour. Dylan left without him. He stands unsteadily, ducks past the Hispanic gardener, and makes his way back to the Datsun.
There is no easy way to find out how Dylan did on the test. Dylan will answer the phone for neither Noah nor Roberto. Calling Dr. Thayer is out of the question. And there is no way to find out from the rest of his students, because Noah doesn’t have any more students. He got a call from Nicholas early Monday morning: an anonymous parent claimed that Noah requested payment under the table, and that he was trying to start his own company. Noah wouldn’t be receiving any more students. One of Dr. Thayer’s parting shots, her specialty.
That message was paired with another:
Hey, Noah? This is Cameron. Hey! Remember me? You tutored me for the SAT for a while? Anyway, we got this crazy letter from your company, and it sounds like you’re really sick or something, and I wanted to make sure you’re okay. Also, they gave me this other tutor, and it’s like this old woman, and she’s got like bad breath? And she’s just so boring, it sucks, and anyway, I’m taking the math IIC in June, and wondered if you could come for a few sessions anyway, even if your company says you’re dead or something. So give me a call, ’kay? See ya.
Noah meets with Cameron the same day. Dr. Thayer’s $80,000 is still in his bank account, but he hasn’t had the nerve to spend any of it; his bills are overdue and he could really use the money from a tutoring session. Besides, he is excited to see Cameron again. She is amazed to find out that Noah isn’t sick at all.
“But look at this.” She points to the letter she received from the agency: “ Unfortunately, for reasons out of anyone’s control, Noah will no longer be able to continue his tutoring duties. We would be happy to provide you with tutoring coverage during his period of absence. ‘Period of absence’? What the hell? It sounds like you have leukemia or something.”
“I guess it doesn’t make the company look too good that a tutor got fired.”
“But why would they? You’re like really good.” Cameron has always been moody, as various and obvious in her feelings as any high school theater star should be. Today she is quiet and earnest.
“A lot of you guys freaked one another out,” Noah says. “It happens. And I guess I was a bit equivocal about the whole thing anyway.”
“Equivocal. ‘With ambivalent feelings,’ right? I’m sorry about the freaking out too. We’re crazy stressed about this shit. And there was that call from Dylan’s mom, just checking to see that we were happy with you. It made us all kinda nervous. I guess we got all Crucible on you.”
“Dr. Thayer called you?”
Cameron nods. “Yep, she talked to my mom. Anyway, if you want I could like write a letter saying how all my friends think you’re really good, and we don’t care if you secretly think tutoring is crap, because we do too. Would that help?”
“Definitely not. And I don’t think I want the job. It’s not that big of a deal. I’m kind of happier this way.”
“So I’m like your last student ever?”
“You’re it.”
Cameron sits back. “Wow. That’s so cool. I’ll do you proud.”
Noah shrugs. “Make yourself proud. I’m already proud. You’re going to do fantastically.”
Cameron smiles shyly at the crumbs caught in the gnarled and polished wood of her table.
“Hey,” Noah says, “have you heard anything about either of the Thayer kids?”
“Dylan Thayer? No, I have no clue. He’s like off the radar screen, doesn’t hang out with high school kids anymore.”
“What about Tuscany?”
“Oh right, that’s his bitchy sister, right? No, I haven’t heard anything. She liked dropped off the earth too.”
They cover subject-verb agreement and parallel sentence structures. Cameron has to be at her a capella group practice, so they pack up early. As Cameron opens her giant handbag, Noah sees a glint of shiny paper inside, with a sheen that he recognizes. “Hey,” he says, “what’s that?”
“This?” Cameron extracts a magazine. “Some magazine they distributed at school. It’s not too bad. Everyone’s reading it. Someone around here made it, I guess.”
“Can I look?”
Noah opens the cover of It’s All You (an amateur photo of a Central Park tree before the Fifth Avenue skyline) to the table of contents. Only two of the articles, this time, are by Tuscany Thayer:
I. Rushing Rivers and Rushing Heads: The Pleasures of Outdoor Sports, pg. 5
II. Getting In: Managing Boarding School Admissions, pg. 24
Noah flips to the second article. It shows a picture of Tuscany in a library, wearing a tight tank top and rhine-stoned eyeglasses, and peering over a book that she just might be holding upside down. At the bottom are biographical credits: In the fall the author will be attending Hampshire Academy.
She did it. She got in.
The development head of the Dance Theater of Harlem arranges to meet Noah in the downtown office of a foundation he works at during the week. Noah turns the corner and pauses on the wide avenue—he has been here before. Then as he scans the street he glimpses a familiar curved velvet rope. The office is up the block from Pangaea. Or what used to be Pangaea; the club has closed and been replaced.
Noah pauses in front of the old Pangaea door. He remembers the milling beautiful of his night at the club. Clutching his legal pad, wearing a floppy hat over his flat hair, Noah feels like he did in elementary school: nerdy and ignored. He smiles as he surveys the two doors to the club. He also feels the same righteousness he felt in elementary school, the conviction born of his mother’s consolations and his teachers’ exultations that the geeky individual will be the one to come out satisfied, the one to live a life that is more than mere participation.
Not every dork, he knows, is a latent success story. And the sophisticated Manhattan kids like the Thayers know this from the start. It is a safer gamble simply to become popular and do whatever it takes to remain popular. In the upper ranks, the ability to make yourself liked is more important than the ability to analyze sonnets or lead a community service project. But perhaps, Noah thinks, his triumphant geek and Dylan’s eternal cool kid can coexist.
It is, he realizes, a Wednesday, Rich Bitch Wednesday. Noah pulls his hat tighter over his head and enters the office building.
The June SAT arrives. Noah and Olena have been studying in the mornings, with Olena taking practice tests in the afternoons while Noah teaches his SAT class, and somehow they feel prepared. Noah drives Olena along with his six student dancers to the test site in the Dance Theater van, watches Olena disappear into the crowd of Horace Manners, surrounded by a ring of black and Hispanic kids. They are a foreign body, an odd parcel sent into the elite mass, jubilant and nervous live versions of the minorities of the reading comprehension passages. Noah spends another three and a half hours wandering Horace Mann High School as they take the test. When Olena bounces into the van afterward she is quiet for a moment, tentatively asks Noah about a few troublesome questions, and then a victorious smile spreads across her face: she thinks she has nailed it. Noah’s students chatter with her about troublesome questions as they ride back to Manhattan. Noah and Olena check her score on the Internet ten days later. A 2120.
“Maybe,” Olena says excitedly, “maybe I can go to Dartmouth!”
“You’d be next to Tuscany,” Noah observes. “You could tutor her.”
They won’t know for a year where Olena will get in. Until then she is happy to concentrate on her applications. Although Olena can’t yet qu
it her job at the dry cleaners Noah brings in enough money to pay his rent to Hera and his own student loans. His own Ph.D. applications lie to one side. He’s not excited about them, not anymore, and his teaching keeps him distracted.
The summer passes, but still neither Noah nor Roberto can reach Dylan.
When the fall SAT crunch begins, Noah expands his SAT course and adds a section of Upper East Side kids, tutoring a few of Cameron’s friends who didn’t score well enough in the spring. He meets with five Fieldston students in a spacious living room, circled together on an Oriental rug a few blocks down from the Thayer apartment. After class Noah must walk down Fifth Avenue to his bus stop, and so once a week he passes beneath the green canopy of their entrance. He looks up at the windows—they are still shuttered tightly enough to reveal nothing of what is inside. Each time he passes the building the sting of his tangled memories of the Thayers fades. He is no longer struck by a tumult of conflicted feelings, doesn’t suffer a minute’s depression after passing. By October he is able to walk by without thinking of them at all. Instead his thoughts remain on the grant applications to expand his nonprofit, or the prospect of hiring another teacher, or the crisp quality of the air, or Olena, or whatever random musings come naturally to his freed mind.
But then, one late autumn evening, he sees Dr. Thayer. He has just entered her block, is two awnings down. She stands on the corner, clutching a briefcase, as firm and angular a figure as the street post next to her. She waits for the doorman to hail a cab; her finger stabs the air impatiently. When she sees Noah she reflexively pivots toward him, and suddenly it looks like she is hailing him instead of a taxi. She drops her hand to her side.
Noah strides down the rest of the block. She waits for him patiently, resignedly.
He stands in front of her and she in front of him. Like Olena, she is able to communicate wordlessly with him. He infers that she wants to tell him something, and that at the same time she wishes she were anywhere but there.
A doorman, seeing Noah and Dr. Thayer face each other down, steps around them and into the street. He squints down the length of Fifth, his expression inscrutable under his captain’s cap.
“How are you?” Noah asks.
Dr. Thayer nods in response. The move is polite and public, but tells Noah that were she to use words, they would be cutting.
“I heard that Tuscany is going to Hampshire Academy,” Noah says. “Please congratulate her for me.” The formal manner he now has to adopt with Dr. Thayer frustrates him. Seeing her is like seeing a lover months after a breakup—it is what cannot be said that is hardest to take.
“She’s thrilled,” Dr. Thayer rasps. And then, with a cough: “Thank you.”
“She did it herself, she deserves the credit.” A furious depression wells inside him. These platitudes are killing him.
“She’s taken plenty of credit, I think, not to worry,” Dr. Thayer says. A weak smile plays on her gray features.
They stare at each other for a moment, polite and nonsensical grins on their faces. “And Dylan?” Noah asks.
“Dylan,” Dr. Thayer says. A passing cloud seems to darken her features, but then Noah realizes they are under the awning; it is instead some internal light that has faded. “Dylan won’t be attending college this fall.”
Noah wraps his sweating hands around the strap of his messenger bag. “No?”
“No!” Dr. Thayer exclaims with sudden, horrifying lightheartedness. “Your little scheme didn’t work. How wild, that I should have known best. Oh yes, he took this test on his own! But he failed on his own, Noah. And we have only you to thank for it. And it’s not as though we can sue you for our eighty thousand, you fucking little criminal.”
Dr. Thayer stops, openmouthed. She is about to continue, but she clamps her mouth shut. She has been maintaining her artificial smile as she spoke, which causes a line of spit to fall out of the corner of her mouth. She wipes it daintily with the edge of her designer sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” Noah says. “But he had to do it on his own.”
“Who do you think you are?” Dr. Thayer says. There is flame in her voice; the smile has dropped. “You are an employee, Noah, not a family member, not a friend. A worker. It’s not your place to play God. I’m so mad I could—” She cuts herself off again, snaps her mouth closed.
“Where is he now?” Noah asks softly. He sees, behind Dr. Thayer, that the doorman has succeeded in hailing a cab. Its turn signal on, the taxi waits for traffic to clear before sailing over.
“Oh, he’d thank you, I’m sure! We just got him his own apartment downtown. He’s taking the year off to ‘relax.’ I’ve washed my hands of it.”
Dr. Thayer stares at him. Noah stares coolly back. Guilt and anger swirl in his head, the coolness and fire of the feelings canceling each other out. “Your cab’s here,” he says.
She steps back toward the curb. “Thank you,” she says, as curtly as she would to the doorman himself.
“Goodbye,” Noah says.
Dr. Thayer steps into the cab, slams the door. The light has turned red, and so the cab just idles in front of the building. Noah begins to walk downtown toward his bus stop. As he reaches the next block the cab races past. Noah can feel the hot exhaust of its passing, wonders where Dr. Thayer is going. He is out of her life, so he will never know.
So Dylan is living on his own, has finally dropped his parents’ aspirations and officially become what he was all along: a dissipated young man. Not happy but not depressed, sheltered from ambition and thus also from discontent. Smooth and intentionless. Noah feels a chill kernel of guilt for what he has done, but knows this is only a tiny amount compared to what he would feel had he actually taken the test for Dylan. He made the right choice. The grim, unhappy, unendearing right choice.
Noah pauses on the next corner, turns around. It isn’t far to get back to the Thayers’ building. He enters the lobby, flashes the staff card Dr. Thayer gave him so many months ago, and then he is riding up in the sleek elevator. The door, as always, opens directly onto the apartment. The front door is unlocked, he is sure, but he stands before it as before a fortress wall. He can’t will himself to turn the heavy knob, to see the familiar gleaming foyer, to gaze up the stairwell leading to Dylan’s and Tuscany’s rooms. He runs a hand down the smooth white surface of the door, the antique silver knocker.
He opens the flap of his messenger bag, extracts a stiff envelope. He doesn’t hold it in his hands, doesn’t dare; as soon as it is out of the bag he slides it under the door. Inside: one check for $80,000, made out from Noah’s bank account to one Dr. Susan Thayer. The fortune, heavy in his hands for months, has been returned to its owner.
Noah just stands and breathes in the narrow vestibule for a moment, fills his lungs with the circulated, air-conditioned air that has been passing for years through all the apartments of 949 Fifth Avenue. Then, with a concerted effort, he turns his back and calls the elevator.
He rides down to the gleaming lobby, then walks past the bored and staring doormen into gloomy Fifth Avenue to catch the bus home to Harlem, where he will teach. It’s what his mother always encouraged him to do.
Acknowledgments
I owe a great deal to my best teachers: Mrs. Anselo for being there when I wasn’t quite ready for first grade, Mr. Polack for being there when I was too ready for fifth. And later on, Margery Shoaff and Camille Lizarribar for demonstrating that insight is always a worthy goal.
My kind friends who read drafts, I will continue to put upon you. Caroline Hagood, you were my big break, baby. Thanks to my editors: Rob Weisbach for picking up Glamorous Disasters , and Amanda Murray for keeping it aloft. I am most indebted to my agent, Richard Pine, for always knowing just what to do.
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Glamorous Disasters Page 31
