Not surprisingly, she thought the book needed “one last” push, that the stakes of the book needed clarifying. “This depiction of female friendship, it troubles me,” she explained. “There’s so much jealousy in the book. And the best friend. I still don’t have a sense of Lacie.”
All my sweaty parts went clammy. Even knowing it was coming, it was strange to hear Lacie’s name on Portia’s lips. I told myself firmly that the Lacie in my manuscript had nothing to do with the stylish thirty-year-old graphic designer I had just met, that they were separate, one fictional, one real.
Yet listening to Portia talk about character, the need for more details, I flashed back to Lacie’s espadrilles, trying to decide whether they would make sense in a story set in 1999. Or was there something in her head tilt, or the way she touched her hair? The important thing was to convey her charisma. Her allure.
After I had thanked Portia profusely for these thoughts, she clicked off on her tiny heels to a back room and returned with three bound galleys, saying, offhandedly, “People are pretty hyped about these. I’ll get a letter off to you next week. I just wanted to share these initial thoughts, but really, Rose. I couldn’t be more excited.”
Ten minutes after the appointment for which I had waited two hours had begun, it was done.
No matter. I burst out onto the street, buzzing. The city glinted with promise. All I had to do was throw in some telling details, get Lacie down, and I’d be launched.
* * *
—
But first, the tutoring interview. By slinging around the name Harvard I had quickly landed interviews at four companies, but from the beginning I had had my eye on Ivy Prep Consulting, the most expensive and exclusive “academic and test preparation firm” on the Upper East Side. Wild rumors flew about them: their top tutors made a thousand dollars an hour, they regularly flew on private jets with the families, the College Board itself sought their consultation. Half their tutors, it seemed, had graduated summa cum laude; all of them, the website bragged, ranked in the 99th percentile for every test they tutored.
Reading this, I decided to doctor my SAT scores, carefully inserting into my cover letter, “While I don’t precisely recall my SATs from more than a decade ago, I believe I scored somewhere in the high 700s for both math and reading,” knowing full well that I did not break 700 on the math, knowing, too, that I could say whatever I wanted, that my lie would not only be believed, but that it would confirm the whole set of assumptions already operating around me, that I came so fully outfitted in the trappings of success—Harvard, Iowa—that embellishment to cover any gaps was practically obligatory.
Then, interview scheduled, address received, I nearly blew it: 9:07 the morning after meeting Lacie found me racing from my cousin’s living room to bathroom, from bathroom to front hall to couch, not quite late, but becoming increasingly dependent, with each passing minute, on the good karma of the F train, and then 9:57 found me run-walking, and then flat-out sprinting, down Eighty-Fifth Street toward Third Avenue, having spent the previous train ride staring straight ahead, my gut churning, too full of self-recriminations to read or even think about what I might say to Griffin Chin, founder and director of Ivy Prep, Harvard-trained lawyer, and “educational consultant” who regularly appeared on Bloomberg TV.
Griffin’s office, in a residential building, had probably formerly housed a family of four. The living room had the black leather and glass-topped table of an executive suite. SAT prep books filled the kitchenette. When I arrived he ushered me to what must have once been the dining-room table and offered me a Poland Spring from the full-size refrigerator.
I was three minutes late—a negligible amount, especially in New York, where everyone is at the mercy of trains and traffic—but I could see he had noticed. “Rose.” He squared his legal pad perpendicular to the table’s edge. “Thank you so much for coming in. Now, as I said on the phone,” though he had not said this on the phone, “you’re very qualified. People in the office are very into you. So let’s think of this not so much as an interview as a chance to get to know each other better.”
I nodded and subtly wiggled my shoulders, trying to make my cheap Pashmina slide down my back. What do I look like? I am a girl, a girl who can look many different ways. When I want I can put on a nice professional, demure dress, and brush my hair so it is soft and luxuriant and smooth, and wear my grandmother’s pearl earrings and a tiny gold watch; I can look utterly familiar, utterly unremarkable, except, perhaps, for my stained teeth. I am slender, with a long pale face that blushes easily, and strawberry-blond hair from which I pluck the occasional strand of gray. When I was young I looked much more unusual because I didn’t give a fuck. I thought that’s what you did if you didn’t want to get trapped. Now I had convinced myself that freedom lay on the other side.
Reverentially Griffin spoke of the top “independent” schools, ticking them off on his fingers—Brearley, Dalton, Horace Mann—and then mentioned, for the second time, that his daughter was off to Yale next week (“How wonderful!” I exclaimed, though with less enthusiasm than before).
There was something funny going on with his teeth too. They diminished in a diagonal that culminated in pale pink gum. The back of his hair flipped out in a ducktail that couldn’t have been intentional. His suit was expensive, his grooming impeccable, yet still his body’s strangeness asserted itself.
He became serious. “Rose,” he said, “there is no cynicism in what we do, absolutely none, because then everything would fall apart. And I believe the student is absolutely at the center of what I do. I don’t care who’s paying the bill. The student is my sacred trust.”
I tried to imagine him coming home to his wife, unbuttoning his shirt, making a crass remark about money. That part of him was so utterly hidden that I suspected it must be large. Nonetheless, I was careful when he asked why I wanted to tutor. Not for the money; certainly, no!
“Well, kids are great.” I shook my head, still stunned by their greatness. “I mean, kids are kids, right? It doesn’t matter if their parents are on financial aid or are really, really rich, kids are always just—sweet.” Even I was unconvinced by myself. I added hesitantly, “Of course, you know, if they’re entitled, that’s a little hard.”
“Entitled.” He shook his head, genuinely grieved. “Now, that’s a word I just hate to hear. It’s so sad when you see it in the kids.”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
“It’s one thing when you’ve been alive for forty, fifty years, when you’ve made enough money to support your family for ten generations, okay, fine. Be entitled. But when you haven’t done anything, and you expect things?” He shook his head again.
But did he mean—he did, didn’t he?—that the adult residents of the Upper East Side, the bankers, the entertainment lawyers, the venture capitalists and heads of PR firms—deserved their ludicrous, indeed historically anomalous, wealth? I was just absorbing this when he added, “Well, as I said, the people in the office are very high on you, and I think we might just have a few kids for you.