“I showed you. I did this.” With her mechanical pencil she made a series of pale gray lines.
“Good,” I said skeptically, staring bewildered at the faint lines. She’d simplified it? Maybe? Is that how square roots worked? Could you do that? Damp pools of sweat formed in my pits. “And then what do you think you do?”
Lupe reclaimed the yellow pad, squinted, and made more pale marks. My gaze wandered to the next room. Sunk into the paisley cushions of the couch, a man. How long had he been there? Hunched over a manila folder, he seemed part of the furniture. The father. Spying on his daughter’s tutor, hearing the bafflement in my voice. Thinking he had paid—what did Ivy Prep charge?—$300 an hour?—so $450 for this failed writer to fail at high school math.
Above his head, an antique clock was stuck at four minutes to three.
Lupe was scowling at the page. Solve it, I prayed. Please, oh Lord, solve it. I felt trapped in some Nietzschean dream of eternal recurrence, doomed to spend eternity here, several hundred feet in the air, shamefaced and sweaty beside a tiny teenage girl.
“I don’t know,” Lupe sighed. “I would think that you could do this,” she indicated a series of 7’s and 9’s with perky square-root signs, like overly exuberant checkmarks, “but the 3 still doesn’t cancel out.”
“Yeah, it definitely looks that way,” I commiserated. On the couch the father coughed and the plastic crinkled.
“You’ve got to,” I stalled. “Yeah, you’ve got to…this is weird.” Lupe regarded me patiently. “This is a weird one. Actually, I think they may have—sometimes, these packets, they’ve got, like, mistakes in them.”
“Oh.”
The father coughed again.
“Yeah, I keep, like, asking my boss to fix them but the thing is, it’s really hard to write a perfect SAT math question. They’re really hard to replicate because they’ve been crowd-tested. So, this one, for instance, it’s way harder than anything you’d ever see on the test. Plus, I think it even has a calculator error in it. It doesn’t simplify. The answer is really messy.”
My pits: drenched. God, it was hot. All that glass like a greenhouse in the summer heat. I pinched my biceps to my side and felt the damp patches cool my ribs.
“Ohhhh,” Lupe hummed, and then, “I think…” The mechanical pencil hovered, darted, struck. A predator drone, that Bic. “Yeah, you do it like this.”
She swiveled the pad around. The question was, in fact, solved. Square root of 2 and square root of 2, forever and ever, amen. “Amazing,” I said. “Fantastic.” I craned to see the green digit of the microwave. Seven minutes gone. Eighty-three to go.
* * *
—
Out, at last, on the gray cool street, I checked my phone and found I already had an email from Griffin. How’d it go? he asked. Think you’re going to rock SAT tutoring?
Hurriedly, before I could feel too embarrassed for him, I wrote back: Yeah! It was great. Lupe’s great. I think I’m going to like tutoring.
Then I was walking west with hope in my heart. About the next apartment, I had a feeling. It was very small and overpriced. It was on a beautiful block, in a beautiful neighborhood. It was foolish and maybe exactly right.
In the week since visiting Lacie, I’d spent every morning refreshing Craigslist and every afternoon and evening trekking along strange side streets, meeting real-estate agents on corners and following them to new or ancient or crumbling studios, listening grimly as they rattled off all the reasons I didn’t know how lucky I was. But I never could get out my checkbook. With fees and first and last and security the total simply to sign my name often hovered near the $8,000 mark, but it wasn’t only the money. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ditmas. I couldn’t stop thinking about how easy it would be.
But Lacie had been flat-out panicked when I had appeared at the farmers’ market, though she had soon tactfully disguised it, and when, a few days later, I had asked her to the movies, she said she had plans. I suggested another night, and then another, but she kept dodging. Finally, awkwardly, I dropped it. She was too busy for me. She certainly wasn’t interested in living with me. And the sooner I gave up that dream, and resolved the pesky question of where to live, the sooner I could return to writing.
There were other reasons to hurry. My cousin was getting progressively less good at hiding her dismay at finding me, every night, still parked on her couch. Next week Griffin had promised me even more tutoring students: “You’re going to be busy!” he had chirped. It was time to find a place. It was time to make it work.
And indeed, this studio, two hundred square feet, with a shower jerry-rigged into the broom closet and the kitchen sink the only sink for ablutions, could work. More than work: it was bright and sun-filled and private, in a gorgeous historic brownstone of chocolaty purple. There was no broker’s fee, no last month’s rent. Right away I told Tony, a stocky Italian sculptor, that I wanted it.
To celebrate, we sat on the steps and shared a beer. He waved off my list of references. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Listen. I don’t do that. I don’t need a guarantor. I don’t need to hear about the size of your bank account or the fancy job you’ve got. Just look me in the eye and tell me that you’re a good person. Tell me you’ll pay the rent on time.”
“I am obsessive about the rent,” I assured him, unable to say, with a straight face, that I was a good person. “I’ve never missed rent in all the years I’ve been renting.” I chuckled. “I’m crazy about rent. Just the thought of missing it makes me nervous.” I scrunched up my shoulders to show how nervous it made me, playing neurotic writer to his primitive, sensualist sculptor; he may have been all brawn and intuition, but I was all brain, all twitchy, live-wire brain. Not a friend, and definitely not a potential lover, some hot young thing he could seduce into bed, no, no, just a type A, beige-dull neurotic.
Another woman appeared: young, pretty, tidy in a pleated skirt. “Excuse me? I’m here to see an apartment?”
“It’s been taken.” Tony winked at me.
Furiously she took me in: my unbrushed hair, my empty beer, my scuffed shoes. “You can’t possibly have had time to check the references of anybody,” she hissed.
Tony sighed and waggled his fingers at her. “Here, here, I’ll take your, your whatchamacallit.”
“My application.” She brandished a silver folder. He flipped it open. Katrina Vosges had gone to RISD and worked in industrial design, where she made a healthy five figures—far healthier than my five figures, which were, anyway, purely speculative, even if I had undergone Ivy Prep’s “comprehensive, rigorous, groundbreaking” training.