A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Moments later, Tuck stepped heavily on the glass, grabbed Lil around the waist, and kissed her roughly, lifting her up off the ground. “Mazel tov,” shouted Dr. Roth in his loud, rheumy voice. And the crowd began clapping and shouting. Quickly, the moment passed, and a flock of old ladies began moving slowly down the aisles, holding one another’s arms and peering around them through thick, oversized lenses. These were Lil’s elderly aunts—her great-aunts, really, but since neither of her parents had siblings, she called them her aunts. There were twelve or fourteen or twenty of them, and they all had thrilling Jazz Age names like Fritzi and Ruby and Ella and Minna, and had so long outlived their husbands that, Lil said, it was hard to remember they’d ever had them. Lil herself was named after one—the youngest on the Roth side and Dr. Roth’s favorite, who’d died tragically in a boating accident somewhere in the Catskills, when Dr. Roth was a teen. Her mother had wanted to name her Jessica.

  Outside, a cool evening wind tossed around the first fallen leaves. The air smelled faintly of wood smoke, from the fireplace of some nearby brownstone, Sadie knew. A fleet of town cars ordered by Dr. Roth—Lil had thought everyone could just take the subway—stood at the curb, waiting to ferry guests to Williamsburg. The conventional part of the wedding was over. The unconventional would now begin: instead of a sit-down dinner, with carefully contrived seating charts, guests would sit wherever they liked and eat the fried chicken, ribs, sautéed greens, pickled beets, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and corn bread laid out on long tables in the back bedroom. “It’s all served room temperature, like a picnic,” Lil had told them that afternoon, ignoring Rose and Elaine’s shared sigh.

  The trees along Fifth formed a dark outline against the darkening sky, and the synagogue’s doorman guided the guests into the polished, snub-nosed cars, which glided off down the avenue, streetlights stringing a long chain behind them. Beth, Emily, and Sadie walked through the synagogue’s oversized doors, Dave and Tal close on their heels. They breathed in the smoky air and turned to one another, smiling.

  “That was beautiful, wasn’t it?” said Beth brightly, reluctantly pulling her old brown raincoat over her thin dress, a maroon satin she’d purchased at Milwaukee’s one good shop, Dave maddeningly in mind. A week before, she thought it beautiful, perfect, magical, but the moment she zipped it up, at Sadie’s, she saw that it was wrong, horribly wrong—nothing like the sleek, fitted things the other girls wore—with its childish row of buttons down the front, its prim little collar, its empire waist and tie at the back, the sort of style they’d worn in college, over engineer boots and tights.

  “You did good,” said Emily, elbowing Beth. “Not a dry eye in the house.”

  “We better get down there,” Beth said, flushing with embarrassment and flinging her hand south, in what she thought to be the general direction of Brooklyn.

  “Definitely,” said Sadie.

  But, it seemed, there were no more town cars left. Dr. Roth hadn’t ordered quite enough, or perhaps there were more guests than he’d accounted for.

  “It’s those friends of Tuck’s,” said Sadie, shaking her head. She had, in the end, worn her hair down. “They just showed up!”

  “What?” asked Beth. “They weren’t invited?”

  “No,” Emily told her, eyebrows raised. “You didn’t hear about this?”

  “They’re a band,” Sadie explained. “I can’t remember what they’re called, and they’re in town for the weekend, staying with that couple, Tuck’s friends from Atlanta—”

  “Not the people with the baby,” clarified Emily. “The others. The woman has a Southern accent—”

  “And she told them that they should just come along.”

  “Does Tuck even know them?” marveled Beth.

  Emily nodded. “They were friends in high school.”

  “Oh,” said Beth. This didn’t seem so terrible. Though, she supposed, to Rose Peregrine it was more terrible than terrible. From time to time Sadie vehemently agreed with her mother, to her friends’ surprise.

  “They just showed up,” she said now, shrugging her shoulders furiously into her shiny mass of curls. “With their girlfriends. You saw those girls, right, in the fifties dresses?”

  “Crazy,” said Emily, smiling at Beth.

  “It is,” said Sadie, settling her mouth in an angry line.

  “Hey,” said Tal, touching his long fingers to Sadie’s arm. “I’ll get us a cab.”

  “We’ll need two.”

  “Then I’ll get us two.”

  “Okay.” Sadie appeared chastened, cowed. She looked up at Tal through her lashes. “Thank you.”

  “What band?” Dave asked.

  Sadie looked at him and sighed.

  “What?” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of exaggerated innocence. “There are a lot of good bands coming out of Atlanta right now.” But Sadie already had her arm stretched up and out into the night sky, her face eclipsed by the yellow lights of an oncoming cab.

  The Times and the Voice and Time Out and New York had all declared Lil and Tuck’s neighborhood—a section of Williamsburg east of the BQE and generally referred to as Graham Avenue, for the L stop that serviced it—the next spot for artists and writers, which meant, of course, that it would really be the next spot for whoever could afford the newly inflated rents and newly opened bistros. But Lil and Tuck’s block—a treeless stretch of Bushwick Avenue, punctuated with twisted subway grates—radiated a forcible menace after dark. “Isn’t that a gang tag?” asked Tal, pointing at a swath of graffiti on the steel gate of a bait shop.

  They stood on the curb, poised to enter the loft, from which emanated a few tentative strains of Coltrane, a hundred chatting voices, and the faint odor of cigarette smoke.

  “Crips,” confirmed Dave. Since moving back to Brooklyn a few months earlier, Dave had come to consider himself an aficionado of street culture, to the amusement of his friends.

  “Yes, Dave, the Crips operate all the bait-and-tackle shops in Greater Brooklyn,” murmured Sadie, furtively running lipstick over her mouth without the aid of a mirror.

  “Um, I’m sorry,” said Dave, “but aren’t you the person who visited this borough for the first time at some point during our junior year of college. And aren’t you the person who had to ask Emily for directions to Prospect Park—”

  Emily held up her hands like a conductor. “Enough, peoples. We’re going in.”

  Inside, they found themselves packed into a throng of ancients: the white-headed aunts, innumerable thin, tan ladies in dramatic evening gowns (leopard-print chiffon, yellow sari silk shot through with gold) and slim-cut suits, a half dozen corpulent, balding men possessed of a vaguely mafiosi demeanor, scads of professorial types in bow ties and wire glasses (“Columbia people,” whispered Sadie knowingly, though Emily, who was from the South, suspected they were Tuck’s Atlanta relatives). As they pushed their way back to the bar—set up in Lil and Tuck’s second bedroom, a luxury afforded by Tuck’s new job—the crowd grew progressively younger: First, baby boomers, the women in rough-weave shifts. Then, Tuck’s thirtyish friends: the baby people, drinking Perrier; the band guys, in threadbare suits and skinny ties, and their girls, hair cut in retro bobs; a troupe of handsome preppy types, indistinguishable from one another in their dark suits and pale blue shirts. And finally, their own friends, the corollary members of their little group, like Maya Decker, who’d flown in from Houston, where she was dancing with a big modern company, and Abe Hausman, who was back at Oberlin, strangely, on some new philosophy postdoc, and Robin Wilde, Lil’s freshman-year roommate, whom they all found a little quiet and dull (“but sweet,” Beth was always quick to add).

  “Hello, hello,” they said to these people, “oh my God, how are you?” and grabbed drinks from passing trays: glasses of Lillet and orange, which the girls thought fabulously original and such a Lil thing to do, forcing a hundred-odd guests to drink an obscure and archaic aperitif that no one but Lil—or, they supposed, Sadie,
from whom she’d probably cribbed the idea—would think to order. They were tremendously interested in cocktails, having gone off beer in the years since college, and they were learning how to make proper sidecars and Manhattans and French 77s, they told Maya and Abe gaily. Dave had become a master martini maker, his technique cribbed from an oft-watched episode of M*A*S*H in which Hawkeye explains how to obtain the proper dryness. “You’ve got to really stuff the shaker with ice,” said Dave. He was disturbed to be talking about such idiotic things with people he hadn’t seen in years, and as a result, he found himself taking an increasingly emphatic tone. “You pour the vermouth over the ice, then you pour it out through the strainer, so the ice cubes are just coated with vermouth. And then you add the gin. Ideally Bombay Sapphire.” Sadie made a face. “Gin. Bleh. Vodka’s much cleaner.” Maya Decker nodded gravely.

  They made their way into the main part of the loft, now lit by the glow of hundreds of tiny candles—votives clustered on the table, around the “French bouquets,” which looked wild and lovely in the dim, rustic room, with its oak-planked floor. Beth sat down at a central table, with Sadie and Emily, and rested her hot forehead on Emily’s bare, freckled shoulder. “I think they’re about to do the toast,” she said wearily. “The waiters are coming around with champagne.”

  “Or something that looks like champagne,” said Dave, coming up behind the girls, “but most definitely is not.”

  “Dave, shut up,” said Sadie, not unkindly, as Tuck stood on a chair and tinked a fork against his flute. The room quieted and the girls rose and moved, with the other guests, toward the open space at the center of the room. “This,” said Tuck, clearing his throat, “is the happiest day of my life, as most of you realize. And so I want to start things off by making a toast to my wife, Lillian Roth-Hayes . . .”

  This was the first chance that Beth had, really, to examine Tuck. She could tell from his speech that he was kind and intelligent, if a bit self-absorbed. But he was also well-spoken and well built, though short, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. His face, she thought, was crudely striking, his eyes so big and sad, like a silent film star’s. Like, she thought, Buster Keaton.

  “Tuck was born to wear a suit,” said Emily.

  “I suppose,” sighed Sadie. “I’m going to get a refill.”

  “He usually wears glasses, doesn’t he?” Emily frowned and squinted.

  “I don’t know,” said Beth absently, watching Sadie make her way across the crowded room, her long curls vibrating against her shoulders. She wore a simple dress of slate-blue taffeta, with a fitted bodice and a square neck.

  “She hates him,” said Emily, jutting her head in Sadie’s direction.

  “Hmmm,” murmured Beth uncomfortably. This was not the time, she thought, to fill her in on everyone’s feeling about Tuck, who was now recounting how he and Lil had first met, a story that, Beth was surprised to discover, she hadn’t heard from Lil. “We should probably listen,” she told Emily, and turned toward Tuck, who still held his hand in the air, his jacket raffishly unbuttoned, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “I was standing on the steps of Low Library,” he said, “when the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen came up to me and asked if I could direct her to the business school. And I thought, ‘Well, I guess I’ll never see her again.’” Flicks of laughter rose from the crowd. “MBA students don’t tend to date scruffy poetry scholars. So you can imagine my surprise when, a few hours later, this gorgeous creature walks into my Yeats seminar.” Lil, at Tuck’s side, smiled and shrugged, embarrassed and pleased, her face flushed from champagne. “Turns out, she already knew something it took me two years to discover. The business school cafeteria sells the only decent coffee on campus. And she was a scruffy poetry scholar like me.”

  From the crowd came shouts and claps and calls of “Woo-hoo” and “Here here” and “Mazel tov,” and Tuck thrust his arm higher, above his head, and shouted, “But we clean up pretty well, don’t we?” causing the volume of clapping to surge and the clinking of glasses to commence. “To Lillian Roth-Hayes,” he cried, slipping his arm around her waist and tossing back his champagne. Lil’s grin had grown so large it looked, to Beth, almost painful. She’d never seen Lil this happy.

  Emily smiled. “That was sweet,” she said.

  “It was,” said Beth, dipping her head closer to Emily’s, which smelled, wonderfully, of peppermint. Like Sadie, she wore a close-fitting dress—from the sixties, Beth thought—and the vivid blue-green of the satin contrasted sharply with her red hair. “You like him, don’t you?”

  Emily shrugged. “I do,” she said. “Though I really don’t know him. But I think I get it.”

  “Yeah,” said Beth. “I think I do, too.”

  Lillian’s father had started speaking, though the chatter threatened to overtake his husky voice. Across the room, Sadie had reached an impasse by the threshold to the second bedroom. She stood under a small orange light fixture, talking to Tal, who bent his tall frame over to whisper in her ear, causing her to laugh prettily, throwing her head back and raising her thin shoulders. Her dress, Beth thought, was perfect. “Who’s the dark beauty?” a voice whispered in Beth’s ear, an unmistakably English voice. Beth whipped around. One of the Columbia guys stood behind her, smiling sardonically. He appeared to be somewhat older than she and wore his hair in an odd, archaic style, parted deeply on the side, so it fell across his expansive, bulbous forehead in thick clumps. His suit—unlike that of his cohorts—was an olive green color, which Beth thought rather ugly. His face, however, was quite handsome, in a manner so common and dull that Beth generally discounted it: dark eyes, square jaw, ruddy skin, the protuberant sort of nose that looked good on certain men. With his jacket unbuttoned and his hands slouched in his pockets, he had the louche, disaffected air of the corrupt second son on a Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of an Edwardian novel. The skin around his eyes was white with fatigue. A grad student’s eyes, she thought. “Which one?” she asked, though she knew which one. “The woman over there? In blue?” She gestured toward Sadie. The man nodded. “Sadie Peregrine,” she told him. “She’s Lil’s friend from school. Have you not met her?”

  “I think I have, actually, but not when she’s been wearing a dress,” said the man, giving Beth a long, appraising glance, then turning his eyes back to Sadie, who was talking rapidly at Tal, her hands flying in all directions. “Women should always wear dresses.”

  “Yes,” said Beth, feeling the blood rush to her face. “And they shouldn’t own property or vote.”

  “Exactly,” said the man. “You read my mind.” He sipped silently at his drink, raising his eyebrows with pleasure. “And you don’t like her, Sadie Peregrine.”

  “No!” cried Beth. “Oh my God, no! Why would you say that? She’s one of my best friends.” She paused, feeling that she was rambling, though she hadn’t said much at all, really.

  “I see,” the man said, annoyingly, as though he was trying to make her feel she was blathering. “So then you know which of those fools is her boyfriend.”

  Dave, she saw, had joined Sadie and Tal. “Oh, neither,” she said, laughing. “Those are our friends Dave and Tal. From Oberlin. We all, you know, went to Oberlin together.”

  “Dave and Tal,” the man said ruminatively. “From Oberlin. Of course.” What this meant, she had no idea, but it led her to a horrible thought: Sadie and Dave. No, she thought, impossible.

  “I’m Will,” the man said finally. “Will Chase.” He put out his hand to Beth and she shook it lightly.

  “Another William,” she said.

  He stared blankly.

  “Like Tuck. Tuck’s real name—”

  “Oh, right. Yes, of course.” He sipped loudly at his drink and ran his eyes around the room. “And you, it seems, are part of the Oberlin mafia.”

  Beth laughed. “I guess. Except I didn’t know there was an Oberlin mafia.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. The city’s overrun with your kind. It’s a well-known fact. Schemin
g Oberlin grads dominate the publishing industry, hold all the important positions in the more humanistic subjects at major universities, and so on.” Beth smiled. This was sort of true. “Oh, and you must know this,” he went on, “they control the waste disposal industry.”

  “I thought the waste disposal industry was all, you know, Harvard men,” said Beth, sipping at the dregs of her drink. She was thirsty, but the journey back to the bar for water seemed far too long, too arduous.

  “Oh, no. Don’t be naive. It’s Oberlin, all the way.”

  “Really?” said Beth, warily allowing herself to smile. British men, from her experience, were better at chitchat than their American counterparts, but ultimately unable (or unwilling) to drop the witticisms in favor of real conversation. She had dated a Welshman in Milwaukee who’d proved a cruel companion in the end. And yet she sometimes still thought of him with longing. “How would you know? You’re clearly not one, or I’d know you.”