Glamorous Disasters Read online

  They navigate into the safer terrain of reading comprehension. Cameron snaps her head up in the middle of a treatise on Gregor Mendel.

  “You know he’s a total druggie,” she says.

  Noah figured as much.

  “He’s like what the rest of the world imagines we are, you know?”

  “In what way?”

  “Screwed up. Totally warped.”

  “And why don’t you like him?”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me why your friends don’t like him.”

  “Oh. Dylan thinks I’m annoying. He just wasn’t ever any nice to me. I guess that’s it. Um…because ‘predictable traits are inherited by subsequent generations.’ ”

  “Good.”

  “You know,” Cameron says. She smiles and avoids Noah’s eyes; she is tattling. He can see the flush of blood in her plump cheeks, the twisting corners of her smile. She might be in love with him. “He got kicked out because his mom wrote his essays for him.”

  To get to Dylan’s building, Noah takes the subway through Harlem to 79th Street, and then boards a crosstown bus from the ironic affluence of the Upper West Side to the less reflective wealth of the Upper East Side. Dylan’s doormen are a little warmer this time, and the one who opens the door even flickers a smile. Perhaps, since Noah has now entered twice without carrying dry cleaning, he has gained in status.

  Dr. Thayer answers the door in an outfit that hasn’t declared itself as either an evening gown or a high-end bathrobe. The tanned hand that grips the robe closed glints gold and silver.

  “Hello, Noah,” she pronounces. “How did last week go?”

  Noah detects a desire for straight talk in the doctor’s voice and tries to match it. “Well, there’s certainly plenty of work to be done…”

  “You’ve got a month left—as long as he gets a 650!” she calls out far too loudly, as if to browbeat her exclamation into a joke. The toned flesh on her stick arms shakes as she pinwheels through a broken laugh. Surely she realizes that a 650 isn’t going to happen. A 500 would be a stretch.

  “I’ll try!” Noah responds, with a wink in his voice: Ha-ha, we’re in on the same joke!

  Noah adds a touch of a pimp roll to his walk as he mounts the stairs. Dylan and he are friends, Noah decides, and Noah will be that cool tutor kids swap rumors about at parties. The tutoring hierarchy replicates high school—raises are based on student evaluations, and the cooler, better-looking tutors get better evaluations. Noah’s and Dylan’s thought patterns are probably fairly similar: Am I hot? Am I cool? Do they like me? In Dylan’s case coolness is an end in itself. But in Noah’s case, coolness means financial solvency.

  “Oh, before I forget,” Dr. Thayer calls after a calculated moment. She has followed him upstairs without his realizing. “Take this card. It tells the doormen that you’re allowed in here, in case Dylan doesn’t answer the phone and I’m out.”

  Noah glances at the scrap of heavy paper. There are two printed boxes below his handwritten name: “social” (a stencil of a martini glass) or “staff” (a stencil of an iron). He has been marked “staff.”

  “I didn’t know what to put!” Dr. Thayer laughs. Noah laughs too.

  Dr. Thayer floats back into her bedroom and Noah crosses through Dylan’s suite. He collects himself before the doorway, runs a hand through his hair.

  “What’s up?” he asks as he saunters in.

  But Dylan isn’t there.

  Puzzled, Noah sits on Dylan’s bed and surveys the room. The duvet is coarse white linen. Dylan’s backpack, draped with a pair of discarded boxers, lies next to the bed. Noah scans the bookshelf. The books range in difficulty level from Maxim to the first Harry Potter. The closet door is open, and reveals only overstuffed dry-cleaning bags. Noah imagines his Dominican neighbors ironing Dylan’s underwear.

  He realizes that he has already allowed $65 of empty time to slip by. He should be doing something. But what?

  A teenage waif flits into the room. “I’m Tuscany,” she whispers. “You’re from the agency?” From the agency. As if he were a model, escort, or actor. Granted, the tutor’s job is to be all three. She allows her long fingers to graze the duvet and adds: “Dylan’s on his way. He told me to tell you not to tell her that he’s not here. You should do what you want, though.”

  She stares at Noah blearily for a moment, and then vanishes.

  Now Noah has just bought himself complicity. He is unsure of where his allegiances are supposed to lie in such a situation. He stares intently at the window shade and imagines scenarios and excuses, hopes he won’t get fired.

  Then he hears a door slam below, followed by Dylan’s baritone grumblings amid Dr. Thayer’s higher-pitched squeals. Dylan thumps up the stairs and then splashes onto the bed. He smells like lacrosse.

  “I’m in deep shit,” Dylan says.

  “I met your girlfriend,” Noah says.

  “That’s my sister! She’s fifteen. You’re fucked up.” Dylan slaps his pillow with pleasure—Noah has somehow blundered his way into a cool-kid joke. Score.

  “What happened?” Noah asks.

  “I had to go downtown to buy something from a friend before tonight. It wasn’t supposed to take so fuckin’ long.”

  “I can imagine what kind of something you had to buy,” Noah says. He intended to sound like a hip friend, but the words come shrilly, as if ejaculated by an inappropriate governess.

  “Whatever, it’s not like I’m that different from her or anything.”

  “Her,” meaning Tuscany? “Her,” meaning Dr. Thayer? “Not different,” meaning we’re all druggies? Noah pulls out his tutoring books.

  “I mean, Tuscany and me used to go into my mom’s office and her bedroom all the time and steal her shit.” Dylan smiles crookedly. “She has all this crazy shit.”

  Dylan is only seventeen, Tuscany is even younger, and the lengthy expanse of time implied in the way Dylan says “used to” makes Noah shift in his seat.

  “She’s a pediatrician,” Dylan says by way of explanation.

  Of course. Dylan was raised by a child doctor.

  That night when Noah returns home, while deliberating between a dinner of Progresso Lentil or Campbell’s Black Bean, he notices a flyer beneath his door advertising Harlem Fitness, The Homeboy’s Home for Being Jacked, for only $15 a month.

  None of his students’ parents know that he lives in Harlem. Living above 96th Street is, like gambling debt or an alcoholic father, a secret one simply doesn’t reveal. He used to live nearer to Fifth Avenue: after Noah graduated from college he moved in with his girlfriend on First, only blocks away from the Thayer apartment. He didn’t have his tutoring job yet, and would set himself up to write his Ph.D. application essays in a corner of her bedroom while she was in law school classes. Tabitha would return home after spending the day in the library and find Noah in his boxers, eating her cereal and watching sitcom reruns. She kicked him out after a few weeks, but not before she landed him a job at the agency that had tutored her for the law school entrance exam. They have remained friends, and whenever Noah visits Tab’s apartment he sees that the only impact of his moving out is fewer crumbs at the bottom of the toaster, and that the toilet paper supply declines at half rate.

  The question for Noah had been where to move. Tabitha led him to a “totally reasonable, totally hot” apartment her real estate broker father found off Gramercy Park. Noah loved the apartment but discovered that, factoring in his loan payments, the monthly rent was two thousand dollars too many. He turned to the Village Voice instead. Most apartments he found were in the Bronx, a few were in Harlem (“Columbia University is making that area totally hip”), and one was a room in a houseboat off the coast of Hoboken. And so Noah moved to Harlem.

  This is the chip on his shoulder, Noah knows, his big insecurity: he could be part of the elite world he works for, if only he had wealth. But he grew up poor and introverted, and neither is of any benefit in Manhattan.

  Noah’s f
ather, a trucker away for months at a time, died shortly after Noah’s younger brother was born, and the modest insurance settlement permitted his mother’s freedom from labor even as it set a strict $1,500-a-month boundary around her boys’ existence. The money gave her, Noah’s mother later told him, a sense of omnipotence, that she was landed gentry, unmoored from practical necessity and concerned only with location and lifestyle. For a woman obsessed with nineteenth century literature (“I would have been an academic,” she once said, “if I finished high school. But I missed those first steps”), her situation seemed enviable—she was a Pip, an Isabel Archer. To the rest of the world she was slightly above destitute, a step above trailer trash. She moved to a rural Virginia town that had one excellent public school, bought a tract house (“a cottage,” she always called it, though it had arrived from Alabama wrapped in plastic, its aluminum sides creaking), and purchased a small plot for it that backed onto the county reservoir. The reservoir was bounded by swaths of forest that circled the glowing pool of water like eyelashes, and which lent a dreamy, fantastic quality to Noah’s childhood.

  Noah’s mother entered on a quest of self-improvement, which for her meant extended time reading, swimming in the reservoir, writing strong and candid letters for local environmental causes, and making sure her sons grew up to share her focus on helping others, on getting beyond just their own satisfaction.

  As a child Noah happily followed his mother on her walks through the woods, made handicrafts out of paper towel tubes kept in tubs beneath the sink, and embarked on parallel reading projects of his own, stretching from Peter Rabbit through The Wind in the Willows and culminating in the two weeks he had chicken pox in second grade and read all fourteen Oz books in a row, one for each day. At age ten he went through a spell of reading only “serious, adult” books, and after contemplating The Drama of the Gifted Child solemnly asked his mother if he might not have learned too well how to please her and never developed desires of his own.

  And indeed, it wasn’t until late that he had any rebellion: at age sixteen the scrap to get his hair cut at the strip mall instead of at the card table out back, at seventeen the fight to work at the grocery store after school, and finally, during the combative summer of 1999, the successful push for a television. Kent sat in the background, quietly reaping the benefits of Noah’s struggles.

  In middle school Noah had a tendency to start conversations with such prompts as “Did you know Alaska was purchased for nineteen cents a square mile?” and found himself friendless on the weekends. But by high school alternative had become cool, and he cultivated a certain mystique around his quirkiness. It helped that he also grew tall, and broad and narrow in the suitable places. Girls started to follow him home after school, and he’d read them poems he’d composed, with titles like “Tortured Roses” and “The Violent Thrusts of Rainstorms.” Then he started to throw parties while his mother was away at Sierra Club conferences, and skyrocketed to outright popularity. Poetry fell to the wayside, replaced by Rolling Rock. He became (and he knew it at the time, enjoyed the hot splash of his villainy) something of a jerk, bouncing between girls, ignoring his outcast brother except for their tutoring sessions, and rejecting the few kids who had stuck by him during his trivia phase. During college, his first and second selves converged, he liked to think, into a cool guy who remembered what it was to struggle.

  Regardless, he reminds himself, he has graduated now, and no longer has the luxury of thinking about himself in such terms. Twenty-five-year-olds who are shouldering $81,000 in debt and trying to send money home don’t try to define themselves. They just are. They fight.

  Wealthy Manhattan is scentless year-round (even the tended daffodils in the Park Avenue median seem otherworldly, like holograms), but the smell of the asphalt in Harlem at the peak of summer is akin to cat food: a combination of dried spit, secretions from distended garbage bags, and a softening accumulation of smog. The apartment Noah eventually found was a small dingy ( Trendy! he reminds himself, dirt is in! ) room in the attic of a Harlem tenement building.

  The front door suggests a museum entrance—thick beaten wood, a medieval portico. The skeleton of the neighborhood is fascinating, articulate and worn architecture, ornate entranceways, and exposed brick. But it is also swaddled in neon signs, and the wide sidewalks are covered with litter and greasy puddles.

  The wooden planks of Noah’s apartment floor have blackened and warped over the decades and taken on the dry and gnarled appearance of witches’ staves. The molding around the tin ceiling has turned a pumpkin color, except where an undercoat of iridescent blue peeks through. The rest of the walls have recently been painted in a glossy white that beams like new copy paper. The paint is thin, however, and doesn’t mask a bizarre water stain that circles the walls just below the ceiling. It appears as if the room has only recently been drained of seawater.

  During the summer the apartment is roasting hot and, square and virtually unfurnished, gives the same impression as the inside of a microwave oven. Noah throws off his shirt as he reads the Harlem Fitness flyer. It lands on his bed, though the collar reaches the edge of the kitchen table; a sleeve rests on the lip of the grayed porcelain bathtub. The apartment is very small. Noah reads the flyer sitting on the edge of the tub.

  A dream surges in Noah’s head: most days he doesn’t work until four P.M .—he can spend all day at the gym! He will be broad, really impressive. He will box in the mornings, lift weights with the local boys all afternoon, gallantly stride on the treadmill for a few hours, shower, and then go teach. Getting his body nearer Dylan’s movie-hero proportions can only help him win his students’ admiration. It’s worth the money, and he can afford the gym fees if he switches to generic granola.

  Harlem Fitness is found up a dozen rusty, mossy steps from the Dominican bodega on the corner of 145th Street and Broadway. The rubber-coated stairs seem to have melted in the afternoon sun. Noah’s sneakers make sucking sounds as he hauls himself up. As the door thuds closed he can still hear the street altercations conducted in Spanish and the excited cries of children tossing a ball. Noah ascends through bacterial, close air, through the humidity of years of workouts. He creaks the interior door open to the hums and thumps of treadmills, to grunts as musclemen swing weights above their heads.

  A large-framed and dark-eyed man reclines at the front desk, bouncing a plastic pen against his biceps and toying with the sound system. The music is bluntly mixed electronica from a few years previous, all Cher and pounding beats, the breed of techno one might hear issuing from a gay bar in Kansas.

  “Whaddup?” the man asks.

  “Hi, I just wanted to enroll,” Noah says.

  “Oh yeah? Come over here.”

  The man stares at Noah’s eyes. Noah smiles back dumbly, fighting a sudden attack of nerves. Enroll? Surely there’s a less fussy verb. He wishes he hadn’t worn his “Division of Princeton Athletics” track pants, hadn’t streaked his hair red a few months before. The guys here all wear wife-beaters, and their hair products seem attributable more to Crisco than Kiehl’s.

  “You can pay by like cash, or whatever.”

  “Is credit card possible?”

  “Yeah, I think.” The guy rummages below the desk and pulls out a dusty card reader that looks like an old Star Wars toy.

  “Look at you,” the guy mutters derisively, staring down at the contraption but pointing his finger at Noah.

  “What?” Noah asks. He quails, suddenly very aware that he is one of the few white people in his neighborhood.

  But when the man looks up he is grinning. “Look at you! Spiky hair, vintage tee, cool sneakers, it’s like this is fuckin’ Park Slope.”

  Noah laughs in spite of himself. “Yeah, I know, I’ve never felt so pasty.”

  The man encloses Noah’s hand in his and at the same time a play of air in the gym forces over a blast of sweat vapor. “I’m Roberto. They like call me Rob, but not in that holdin’-up-a-bank way.”

  “I’m No
ah. But not in that two-animals-at-a-time way.”

  The skin of Roberto’s face is tan, dry, and draws tightly across his face as he laughs; even though he speaks like a local eighteen-year-old, Noah guesses he is in his thirties. While his neck is massive, it seems barely able to support the broad planes of his face. His shiny square forehead and gelled hair reflect an impossible amount of light.

  “Welcome to Harlem, Mr. White Man.”

  Noah doesn’t see Dr. Thayer at all over the next three weeks. And neither, apparently, does Dylan.

  “She’s in the Hamptons with my dad,” Dylan explains. They sit perched on his bed, workbooks open on their laps, a basketball game on mute. Noah hasn’t considered that Dylan even had a father. “She calls all the time, like once a day sometimes. She leaves money stashed in all these crazy places, and when I run out I call her and she tells me where to find more.”

  He pulls a wad of bills out of his pocket. On top is a fifty. “This was below the bathroom sink. She doesn’t know I found it yet, so I’m going to Bungalow 8 after we finish tonight. There’s some party Justin Timberlake’s throwing. Crazy.”

  Noah and Dylan watch the MTV Video Music Awards and discuss dangling modifiers during the commercials. Dylan’s interest in pop music seems more a duty than a pleasure. He had a ticket to the awards show but didn’t use it because he didn’t want to go alone. Noah, though he feigns indifference, would have given anything to say that he had gone. This is their equation, their dovetailing strengths and weaknesses: Dylan is effortlessly cool, and Noah is effortlessly smart. Each gift is the other’s limitation.

  Dylan passes the session sending instant messages on his laptop and text messages on his phone, making a few calls that end with “I’m with my tutor, gotta go,” and are followed by another call, and every so often answering a grammar question Noah throws out.

  The laptop dings. “Check this out,” Dylan says.

  He pivots his laptop so that Noah can see. He scrolls through a list of potential interview questions and answers e-mailed by Dylan’s college admissions tutor (he has seven tutors in all—one for each academic subject and now Noah). In bold: What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself? Then: “tenacious—I have excelled in academics even as I mastered the playing field.” The list goes on for pages.