Glamorous Disasters Read online

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Eliot Schrefer

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Melissa Isriprashad

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schrefer, Eliot.

  Glamorous disasters / Eliot Schrefer

  p. cm.

  1. Tutors and tutoring—Fiction. 2. SAT (Educational test)—Fiction. 3. High school students—Fiction. 4. Rich people—Fiction. 5. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3619.C463G58 2006

  813’.6—dc22 2005056325

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3188-3

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-3188-2

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  for my mother and brother,

  foundations both

  Chapter

  1

  Dr. Thayer will pay $395 an hour for Noah’s services. Only the classiest prostitute could charge as much and, to any doorman glimpsing Noah stepping out of his taxi, Noah might indeed seem a well-kept callboy. Though brandless, his cobalt shirt is pressed as flat as paper, and the flesh exposed at his throat is Hamptons-tan. Diesel sunglasses dangle from a buttonhole. He has carefully chosen his pants: pin-striped dark linen, to denote a youthful vitality bobbing beneath a surface respect for decorum. His headphones are both inconspicuous and expensive. The guise is complete.

  Noah pauses in front of a Fifth Avenue building, appearing dumbstruck that there should exist an environment so ideally suited to him. But he is neither favored son returned from the Hamptons nor callboy. He is an SAT tutor, paid those $395 to ensure that Thayer Junior attends the same Ivy League school as Thayer Senior. He has made himself appear as one of his students—attractive, complacent, glassy-eyed—and he will work at them stealthily, from within their world. They don’t stand a chance to resist him.

  When Noah feels tired—and tonight is such a night—he mouths, Three hundred ninety-five dollars, throughout his commute. Dr. Thayer called to ask him to come a half hour early; the family would pay the cab fare. And so, when Noah flagged the solitary yellow car arrowing between the gray brick buildings of Harlem, his meter started running along with the cabby’s: twenty-five minutes’ travel time added to a hundred-minute session, plus the fare itself, will run the Thayer family $835.

  The doormen snap to attention when Noah appears behind the etched glass of the entrance, but then they slouch when the better interior lights reveal Noah’s youth, his $30 sandals, the headphones in his ears. The doormen are white, of course, but not White—Noah listens for the trace of an Irish or Russian accent, reads the bleariness of a Brooklyn commute into their late-night eyes. They regard Noah warily, as if girding themselves to cast him back outside. The biggest snobs of any building, the doormen.

  “I’m here for Dylan Thayer,” Noah says.

  A doorman nods in reluctant civility, picks up the handset, and dials. His console is gold and velvet blue, like a presidential lectern. Nine-four-nine Fifth Avenue is, like its Park Avenue neighbors, an essentially ugly structure with the artless lines of a Monopoly hotel, but the interior is done up in fleur-de-lis and chinoiserie . The doorman glances at Noah.

  “Noah,” he says.

  “‘Noah’ is on his way up, Dr. Thayer…You’re welcome.” He hangs up and turns a key. “Eleven F.”

  Noah crosses to the mahogany doors of the elevator. He feels the doorman’s gaze on his back, and wishes he were wearing loafers, that he looked more like someone who would live here. But at least the whole doorman interchange has earned him $30. He is $81,000 in debt. Or, after today’s session, $80,700. The doors open.

  Eleven F is the only button that will light. This is to prevent Noah from infiltrating any other apartment. The elevator is fast, but even so the ride up grosses $5.

  The F in 11F stands for the front half of the floor: the doors open directly into the foyer of the apartment. A woman slides over the partially opened secondary door, frail hand extended. A pair of gold bracelets tinkles.

  “Susan Thayer,” she says.

  Noah takes the bony hand and rattles it once.

  “A pleasure, Dr. Thayer.” One key to the first meeting is to get the titles right—if he’s talking to a mother and she works, “Doctor” is a likely choice.

  “Come in.” She opens the door and floats into a mirrored vestibule.

  She could be the mother of any of Noah’s students: her hair is highlighted and lowlighted and then carelessly pulled back, as if to belie the weekly appointments required to maintain it. Equine eyes and dark eyebrows prove the dishonesty of the sun-streaked hair. A string of pearls rides her emaciated shoulders, rests in the gorges between her clavicles.

  She smiles sweetly as her eyes dart over Noah’s form. Dr. Thayer has been monstrous in her initial phone conversations, obliquely accusing Noah of overcharging her and disliking her son, whom he has not yet met. But in person she gives every appearance of fighting back the impulse to hug him. The Fifth Avenue hostess urge is hardwired.

  “I wanted to be sure to be home the first time you met Dylan because, if not, who knows what could happen?” She throws her arms into the air and laughs, and Noah laughs too, mainly because she looks like a whirligig. He can’t decide whether her joke is cautionary or just nonsensical and suddenly it comes back to him, strong, that he should be in front of a classroom instead.

  “Well, I’m excited to meet Dylan,” Noah says jovially. He knows he is rushing this particular phase of the introductory ritual. He should take a few more moments to make the mother feel desired, but the responsibility of the money ticking away propels him. Noah grew up in a town with street names like Countryside Lane and State Road 40, not Park or Madison or even anything ending in Avenue. While a $200 chitchat on the stairs is nothing to the Thayers, to him it is unconscionable: the scale of money looms here, is too large to be comprehended, like geologic time to a human life span.

  She gestures at a door upstairs. “He’s in his bedroom.”

  Noah starts up, swinging around the flare of a shabby-chic banister and ascending into a darkened second-floor hallway. He wonders why Dr. Thayer isn’t leading him up.

  “Noah,” Dr. Thayer calls after him. Noah stops and looks down. He can see her hard breasts where her shirt pouches around her narrow shoulders, and dutifully concentrates on the banister, even though the idea of Dr. Thayer’s being exposed vaguely excites him.

  “Look, I know there are problems here,” she continues. “He just hasn’t learned this stuff. I don’t know why.”

  It is a familiar first-meeting move. The guilt deflection: my child may be stupid, but that doesn’t make me any less intelligent.

  “The test is teachable,” Noah declaims from the landing. He can’t remember if he has already given her this speech on the phone. “All it measures is how well one takes it. In some ways students from the best high schools are at a disadvantage, because they are taught to think abstractly, to voice opinions and argue nuance. The kid in the public school in Arkansas has been taking multiple-choice tests his whole life. Standardized tests are the first resort of low-income school districts, and the last resort of high-income ones.”

  The closing bit (Arkansas!) always gets a wor
ld-weary nod from parents. Dr. Thayer peers up and smiles as if they were best friends just reunited and meeting for coffee. Despite the disingenuousness of the gesture, Noah is charmed. He finds himself wishing that he and Dr. Thayer were at a coffee shop somewhere. “That’s very interesting, but it’s not really the issue here. You’ll see,” Dr. Thayer says.

  And with that, Noah reaches Dylan’s door. It is as white and silver as the restroom door of an expensive restaurant. There is no construction-paper “Keep Out!” sign. Noah knocks and simultaneously glides the door open. The good tutor is polite, but need not ask to enter.

  Dylan’s bedroom is actually a suite of rooms. Noah passes through a spare and obviously unused study complete with antique globe and rolltop desk, then a marble bathroom, and finally reaches the bedroom. Tightly shaded windows dominate two walls. Dylan is slouched over an Empire desk, clacking into a laptop. His back is to Noah.

  “Hey,” Noah says.

  “What’s up,” Dylan says, without turning around. Noah stands in the doorway. He breezily walks in. If he wants to get perfect 10’s on his evaluations he has to prove from the start that he is cool. Perfect 10’s will get him a raise. Perfect 10’s will help his brother pass high school. If he doesn’t gain each kid’s admiration from the start, all that is sunk.

  He has forgotten that Dylan is captain of the lacrosse team, but is reminded by the fact that Dylan doesn’t turn around. Team captains don’t do such things as acknowledge newcomers, of course, since their image is based on the burden of already knowing too many people. Noah became a cool teenager only late, and is a cool twenty-five-year-old through constant effort. And yet here he is, tutoring the kid who beat him up in high school.

  “So what’s up?” Noah asks. Do cool kids say “What’s up” to a “What’s up”?

  Dylan swivels. A bright white T-shirt, still creased from the package, stretches across his chest. His hair looks like he has just taken a nap, or has been licked by a goat. His eyes are glassy and widely spaced. He is the breed of seventeen-year-old who turns the heads of adult women.

  The first-meeting monologue is all about pretending that the friendship has already begun. Never ask, What are your interests? Rather, So what have you been up to today? Oh, really? What else? Did you drive? When do you get your license? Noah and Dylan’s $200 getting-to-know-you half hour passes, and Noah learns that Dylan likes to sleep when he has spare time, has a quiz on The House of Mirth the next day, prefers the club Pangaea to Lotus on Wednesday nights, thinks lacrosse is “okay,” and goes to school at Dwight. Dwight, one of Noah’s students once informed him, stands for Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.

  “How did you choose Dwight?” Noah asks.

  “They made me transfer from Fieldston.”

  Dylan goes to the bathroom, which costs $35. After he returns, grunts, and throws himself on the bed, Noah asks him why they made him transfer.

  “Whatever, it’s not on my record,” is the crafty response. Not that Dylan seems generally clever—he scored 420 out of 800 on the writing portion of his SAT, which Dr. Thayer (the monstrous phone Thayer, not the smashing hostess Thayer) informed Noah would need to become at least a 650 for the lacrosse recruiter at Penn to be satisfied. A 650 would put Dylan among the nation’s brightest students. Or at least among the nation’s bright students.

  Noah swivels in his leather chair and faces Dylan, who is reclining on his bed and massaging a foot, the sweaty fragrance of which carries across the vaulted bedroom. “Dylan,” he says, his tone carefully nonteacher, “we have two months, man, until your test. That’s eight sessions. We’re going to talk about the essay today, and then focus on grammar. Then you take a practice test each weekend.” At the mention of weekly practice tests Dylan suddenly looks glassy and cross, like a miffed sultan. Noah barrels onward:

  “So! How would you respond to this prompt?” Noah asks. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

  Dylan’s eyes drift over Noah’s long frame. Noah can see the blunt calculation in Dylan’s head—is this guy worth trying for? After another introspective moment Dylan laughs. “You messed up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Say it again.”

  Noah does.

  Dylan snorts. “Yeah, that makes no sense.”

  Noah’s usual stratagem is now to impress the student by reciting the original French. This is quickly abandoned. “Okay,” Noah says, “let’s work your resistance into the essay.”

  Dylan eyes Noah warily. “That’s fucked up. If something changes, then it’s different.”

  “Right, but it becomes the same thing as everything else at some point, right?” Noah falters. Suddenly the quote makes no sense to him either. Dr. Thayer’s admonition that too much abstract thinking is “not really the issue here” taunts him.

  “Whatever,” Dylan says. “I don’t care about all of this shit, I just need my score to go up.”

  Noah gives a manly chuckle and pretends there was irony in Dylan’s voice. Will Dylan’s score go up much? Based on his diagnostic test results, probably not: he capitalized neither proper names nor the beginnings of sentences, and spelled introduction with an e.

  When the session is over, Noah deploys a “Later, man” ( later: I’m chill, I don’t need to waste the energy on a proper goodbye. man: I like you, but not that way) and exits down the hallway. It’s too late in the evening for maids and personal assistants, so no one is waiting to see him out. But on his way down the stairs Noah passes a dull glow from Dr. Thayer’s open bedroom door. She is ensconced in the opulent gloom, cradled in a voluminous satin duvet, reading a copy of The House of Mirth. Her gaze flickers to Noah. She shoots him one long-lashed, meaningful look, and then returns to her book: he has allowed himself to leave six minutes early, which puts him at a $40 deficit.

  Noah had thought his new job would make him extremely wealthy, that he would become, in some small way, of the same class as the rest of Fifth Avenue. Three hundred ninety-five an hour: what a treat for a guy whose friends from high school are mostly earning minimum wage or trading WIC checks. On the subway ride home from his job interview he had computed what $395 an hour would earn him, were he to work forty hours a week: $822,000 a year.

  He missed his stop and had to backtrack half an hour to get home.

  On that walk he realized that his actual income wasn’t going to be nearly as high. First, he only actually receives one-fourth of the $395; the agency keeps the rest. Second, he would be lucky to get six students, which would make for significantly fewer than forty hours a week. Third, there was the matter of taxes. He drafted a budget on the back of a receipt when he returned home:

  Monthly Budget (STICK TO!):

  Income:

  Salary

  (if get up to six students—call office twice a week, beg if necess.) $3354

  Interest from savings 2.65

  Total: $3356.65

  Deficits:

  Federal Tax $412.50

  NY City Tax 68.75

  NY State Tax 137.50

  Social Security 275

  Medicare 61.30

  Rent 760

  Utilities 55

  Subway Pass 70

  Health Ins. 375

  Dental Ins. 10

  Cell phone

  (required by office—get on group plan?) 45

  Stafford loan

  (if get on 20-year payment plan) 355.61

  Perkins loan

  (ditto) 301.50

  America’s Bank Loan 600.72

  Total deficits: $3527.88

  Monthly savings: $–171.23

  Consider: Nix H. Ins.? Would result in $200 surplus a month! Woo-hoo!

  Ditto dental.

  Second job?

  Add’l expense: food.

  When Noah signed promissory notes at Princeton the amounts of his loans seemed so small, fractions of the university’s endowment; school was free. But now the numbers aren’t some insignificant eddies of money within a l
arger pot of billions of dollars. They are his alone. The triplets, Perkins, Stafford, and America’s Bank: $25,000, $16,000, and $40,000. These kinds of numbers belong to the Thayers, not to him. He has pushed too hard in trying to compensate for his impoverished beginnings, to propel himself into the upper class.

  The money comes out of his bank account on the fifteenth of every month. Having automatic withdrawal is like having a parasite, a tapeworm passively feeding off whatever sustenance Noah brings in. He makes a trip to buy furniture at Ikea, and in that cavern, all blond wood, chilled air, and high ceilings (a microcosm of Sweden, Noah imagines), he fingers his credit card gingerly, as if to prevent further hemorrhage in the plastic. He is eager to browse, to choose between the round red kettle and the sleek aluminum one, but at the cash registers he is smiling and forlorn, hollowed out, wistful that shopping in this fairyland should inevitably conclude with a return, not to a house in the woods, but to a sixth-floor tenement room. In New York there is no escape from money. There are prices everywhere, no end of costs to meet or flee.

  Noah can think of a number of reasons for Dylan to have been unhappy at Fieldston. Foremost among them is that all of Noah’s students from that school have been both artsy and intelligent. He meets with a favorite Fieldston student the next day: Cameron Leinzler, who is playing Audrey in the school production of Little Shop of Horrors, obsesses about food and boys, and shoots glances at the mirror throughout their sessions. Even though she scored fantastically well on her diagnostic test, it is not odd that she has a private tutor. Most of the students in the Upper East and Upper West Sides have one. Tutors are to Manhattan teenagers, Noah is beginning to realize, as ponies are to ten-year-old girls.

  “Dylan??!!” Cameron squeals. “You teach Dylan Thayer ??!!”

  Noah nods.

  “He’s so hot, but a total asshole. My friends were totally in love with him, but I don’t like him.”

  “Why don’t you like him?”

  “Well, he hooked up with all of them, but it was like his timing was off, you know? They all sorta overlapped.”