“Well, that’s simply untrue. I left university”—he hit all four syllables, mocking the American habit of saying “college,” though Beth had no idea what, exactly, made one term more proper than the other—“in 1988, when you were still playing with dolls.” Beth started to protest—she’d been sixteen in 1988!—but he held up his hand and shook his head no. “I could easily have come and gone before you even arrived.”
Beth smiled. “But you didn’t.” She was beginning to feel the effects of her two drinks. “You’re a friend of Tuck’s?” she said. “From Columbia?”
“Pretty much,” he said, rocking back on his heels.
“What’s your field?” she asked, pleased that she’d correctly assessed him.
“I work for the Journal,” he said.
“The Journal,” she repeated slowly, wondering which journal he meant.
“Sorry. The Wall Street Journal.”
“Oh,” she said, growing hot. She’d been wrong. “And here I thought you were some kind of pathetic grad student like Lil and Tuck, scribbling away on”—she searched her mind for a suitably obscure author—“Aphra Behn.”
“Aphra Behn! Lovely! Well, yes, you’re quite right. I was. I was indeed. But I had an epiphany of sorts . . .” He paused, a bitter smile on his wide mouth. “Academia is the biggest racket of all. And if I’m going to be involved in a racket, I may as well make some money, and the world will have to go without my monograph on Defoe. Terribly sad, I know.” Distantly, Beth heard Lil making her toast to Tuck.
“So you’re a reporter?”
“Hmmm.” He drained his glass of champagne and placed it on the table behind them. “Technology. But the business end. Start-ups. You know. I’m interviewing all these CEOs, analyzing the viability of corporate strategies, all that.”
“Oh, interesting,” Beth murmured, slipping a shard of ice under her tongue. She knew nothing about business but that it was boring—though an acceptable profession for men of her parents’ generation, like Sadie’s father, except Sadie’s father was closer in age to Beth’s grandfather, who still worked two days a week, filling cavities and making crowns alongside Beth’s father, at their practice on Popham Road. Interesting people of her own age were writing novels or making films or acting, or perhaps organizing Wal-Mart workers into unions, like Meredith Weiss, who’d signed up with the AFL-CIO after college. Beth would never marry some sort of lawyer or doctor, like her mom and all her mom’s friends, and she knew Sadie and Emily—and, clearly, Lil—wouldn’t either. “It sounds interesting,” she said.
“It is. It really is. This is such a cool time to be immersed in the world of commerce. Everything is changing so quickly, old models being thrown out, new ones being tested. Seventeen-year-olds making billions. And destroying the infrastructure of corporate giants. It’s the only revolution our generation will ever see. And it just happens to be economic.”
“I see,” said Beth, troubled. “And was it you who convinced Tuck to drop out of the program and work for that magazine?”
“Well, it is possible I planted the seed in his head,” he told her, placing his hand on her arm as if to steer her somewhere—but there was nowhere to go; they were locked in on all sides. “And I told him, yes, about the job. And put in a good word for him with the editor. He’s a brilliant writer, Tuck. Really.”
“Really?” said Beth, relieved to hear this.
“Yes, really. And Boom Time is a cool magazine. All eyes are on it, you know?”
Beth nodded, though she didn’t really know anything about it.
“Do you know Ed? Ed Slikowski?”
“Er, no—”
“The editor . . .”
Beth was mystified by this question. How or why on earth would she know the editor of Tuck’s magazine, which she’d never even heard of. “Um, I don’t think so. Did he go to Oberlin?”
Will shook his head, a sly smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Caltech. Then MIT.” He gave her a strange look, his head cocked to one side. “You’ve really not heard of him.”
“No.”
“He’s kind of famous.” Beth didn’t know what to say. It was beginning to strike her that she and her friends had been living in parallel universes these four years. She’d not realized that an editor of a magazine could be famous. “When Boom Time launched, the Times magazine did a cover story on him.”
“Oh,” said Beth. “I guess I’ve, you know, been in Milwaukee.” She could, of course, have subscribed to the Times in Milwaukee, she realized as she said this. “I just got back,” she said dumbly, waiting for him to explain. “So, who is he exactly?”
“He’s one of those wunderkinds.” Will rolled his eyes. “He started this usenet board”—this Beth understood; she was on various pop culture listservs—“on start-ups. A few years ago. He was a grad student at MIT. Artificial intelligence. Did a lot of stuff at the Media Lab. And it became this big thing. These VC guys—”
“Vee cee guys?”
“Venture capital—”
“Oh, right.” Beth had no idea what this meant, but she nodded and smiled.
“He was scooping all the business mags and these VC guys were all over it. They think he’s a visionary. So one of them gave him money to start a magazine.”
“Wow,” said Beth. “Just like that.”
“Just like that.” Will smiled. “Do you want to meet him? He’s over there, talking to your friend Sadie.” Indeed, a third man now stood in Sadie’s thrall, a shiny fringe of black hair falling over eyes that Beth could see, even from this distance, were the palest, coldest blue—wolf eyes. He was thin and wore his beard full, like a seventies rock star or an Amish farmer, and his feet, below a well-cut suit, were clad in Converse One Stars. “In the gray Armani.” Will shoved his hands in the pockets of his pants and let out a guffaw, like a bark. “Boom Time is a heavily financed venture. Even a lowly staff writer like Tuck commands the kind of salary that can pay the rent on”—he waved his hands toward the loft’s high ceiling—“a place big enough to hold a wedding.” Beth nodded and smiled. It hadn’t occurred to her that the rent might be steep. The neighborhood—well, the brief glimpse she’d caught of it—struck her as bleak: low, off-kilter houses covered in vinyl siding or roofing tile, with no sign of people living behind their facades but the glare of the television; cracked, weed-sprouted sidewalks; a profusion of nail salons and dollar stores. At least Queens, from the little she’d seen of it, had trees.
“And where do you live?” she asked, harboring a vague hope that he was her neighbor in Astoria. He seemed the type to scorn the trendy, the voguish.
“In sorry seconds,” he replied, with a smirk, then removed his hands from his pockets and buttoned his drab jacket, as though preparing for departure. “Tuck’s old apartment on Havemeyer,” he told her, with a sigh, running his eyes around the room.
“Havemeyer?” she asked.
“Williamsburg,” he said, with a smile that, she thought, might be construed as condescending. “West of here. Closer to Bedford.”
“Oh,” she said, reluctant to ask what or where Bedford was.
With his chin, he gestured toward Sadie and her circle. “I think one of your friends is going to make a toast.” Indeed, Tal had stepped forward and raised his hand, which held not a glass of champagne but a bottle of beer. Sadie, her eye on him, patted her hands together in a halfhearted clap and whispered in Dave’s ear.
“Our sophomore year, Lil and I worked at WOBC,” began Tal, causing the chatter to cease. He was not handsome, not to Beth at least, with his broad brows and sharp nose, and yet he had grown, in the years since college, very attractive. The tone of his voice, Beth thought, had become somehow more patrician, more precise, over the years. He was an actor and suddenly everything had started happening for him: skits on Conan, a play at Circle in the Square, a screenplay sold (for some dumb teen comedy, but still). “We had a two to five slot.” He grinned. “That’s two to five a.m.”
“I
remember that,” Beth told Will. “Lil and I were roommates that year. She always woke me up coming in.”
“Needless to say, this was the least coveted slot on the schedule,” Tal continued. From across the room, Beth heard Lil’s laugh. “But we loved it, because we got to run around the student union in the middle of the night.”
“Which was actually kind of creepy,” Lil called, sparking a wave of laughter.
“It was,” Tal agreed, with a smile. “But it was also really fun. And we got to do whatever we wanted.” He paused. “Because no one was listening.” More laughter. “We played these obscure public service announcements about checking your kids’ heads for lice and helping old ladies cross the street. And we sang along with Marlene Dietrich. I think our only listeners were Obies pulling all-nighters, total nutcases, and teenagers in Shaker Heights, who thought that listening to WOBC at three in the morning constituted a major act of rebellion.” Titters and claps. “All of them were completely in love with Lil—or Lil’s voice. They’d call in with really bad requests and try to keep her on the phone. If I answered, they’d hang up.” He took a long sip of his beer. “And this is my point, I guess. That now, Tuck is the only person in the world who gets to hear Lil’s voice at three in the morning. And he’s a lucky, lucky man.”
“The luckiest,” Tuck shouted, pulling Lil close to him with one arm.
“Wow,” said Will, with a bit of a grimace.
“He’s right,” said Beth, with a shrug.
“I’m sure,” said Will, but his smile suggested otherwise. “Shall we attempt to get another drink? It seems like the speechifying is over for the time being.”
Slowly, they made their way through the crowd.
“What are you doing in Cincinnati?” he asked as they shuffled, his arm on her elbow.
“Milwaukee,” said Beth. “Popular culture. Like, you know, cultural studies. American studies.”
“Well,” he said, in a manner that was, yes, she was sure now, slightly condescending. “That’s pretty general. You’re doing—or did—a master’s?”
She shook her head and stopped. They had managed to move about six feet. She was too tired to go any farther. “Doctorate. I’m ABD. Writing my dissertation right now. But here. In New York.”
He raised his pale, bushy eyebrows. “On what? Popular culture?” He snorted. “I can’t even imagine.”
“Dark Shadows,” said Beth quickly. She was used to this sort of response. “You probably haven’t heard of it. Though it aired, I guess, in Europe, too.”
“A television show?”
“From the sixties. A soap opera,” she explained. “Which makes it sound bad, but it’s amazing.” She drew in a breath and launched into her prepared speech for those who had not yet been initiated into the cult. “I mean, it’s crazy. It started off as kind of a normal soap, you know, about this rich family in a small town, but then”—she shook her head and flung her freckled hands around, to indicate chaos—“a ghost appears, and then this character turns out to be a phoenix—”
“A phoenix? The mythological bird that rises from the ashes?”
“Yes! This, like, perky blonde woman—it turns out that she’s actually a phoenix! And then—and this is when things get really amazing—this ancient vampire arrives. Barnabas. I know it sounds weird, but the sixties were a really strange time for TV. There were all these shows with supernatural elements. The Addams Family. The Mun—”
“Barnabas the vampire,” Will suddenly cried with delight. “I have an uncle Barnabas up in Skipton who could pass for a vampire. He’s about a thousand years old. Long, yellow nails. Do you think he was the prototype?”
“Could be,” said Beth.
“Brilliant. That sounds absolutely brilliant. I must see it.”
Around them, guests filed into the back room, returning with plates of fried chicken and glowing magenta beets. “Beth,” called Emily, waving from a few feet away. “You want to get something to eat?”
“Sure,” murmured Beth. “Will, nice to meet you. I’m sure I’ll see you later.” She held out her hand to him, again, but he was already walking forward, across the room, toward Sadie.
Holding the bones between their fingertips, the girls ate chicken, chatting with the aunts and an elegant friend of Lil’s mom, her hair in a high chignon, who asked them questions like “Do you girls go to nightclubs?” Lil wandered around the room, stopping briefly at their table. “Lil, it’s perfect!” they told her, before her mother pulled her away to talk to this relative or that one. Soon, the old aunts made their departure, swarming Tuck with thin white check-holders, and the band contingent deposited themselves at Beth and Emily’s table. They were nice, really: three guys with modified shags and two girls, a severe blonde and a stocky brunette, her eyebrows plucked and drawn in with pencil. Both girls wore the kinds of dresses the group favored in college—Atomic Age frocks, with fitted bodices, full skirts, and bold patterns, in drab green or mustard yellow. They all agreed that Lil—her makeup now faded—had never looked more beautiful. “And more herself,” cried Beth.
As they ate the last bit of mashed potato and contemplated the corner of the room reserved for dancing, Tuck grabbed the microphone and announced that it was time to cut the cake. The guests headed, en masse, to the back room, where the cake—enormous and round, with its bright blossoms sprouting off the sides and top—presided, like a pasha, on top of a raised platform. Lil and Tuck were ushered through the crowd and Lil picked up a long silver knife, which Sadie, against her will, recognized as Tiffany’s Shell & Thread pattern, with the little scallop on the end. That’s a nice present, she thought, then shuddered, for her mother, she knew, was thinking the exact same thing. Lil brandished it over her head, like a samurai, then sunk it deep into the cake, extricating a sliver, placing it on a plate, and scooping a bit into Tuck’s mouth.
“I can’t believe they’re doing this,” whispered Dave, dourly, to Beth. It was the first thing he’d said to her all evening. Somehow, she’d ended up next to him in the throng. It was a relief, actually, to get this bit out of the way, the awkward first conversation. Inwardly, she smiled. He had spoken to her first.
“I know,” said Beth, though she wasn’t as bothered by this particular bit of wedding drivel as she’d expected. She knew, also, that Lil’s mom had thrown a fit when Lil suggested cutting the cutely-feeding-each-other-cake bit.
“What’s next?” asked Dave. “Is Tuck going to, like, take off the garter with his teeth?”
“I doubt it.” Beth grabbed a piece of cake from a passing tray. Sliced open, the cake looked even more rich: a layer of deep, eggy vanilla, then chocolate buttercream, then a layer of deep chocolate.
“Isn’t this incredible?” she heard Sadie say, her low voice sharpened by drink. It wasn’t actually—the cake was overly dense and crumbly—but Beth ate it anyway and deposited her little plate on the now bare buffet table.
“You know, I haven’t been avoiding you all night,” Dave said. Beth nodded gaily, attempting to indicate that she hadn’t given a moment’s thought to whether or not he might have been staying out of her way. “I just thought that we, you know, needed to talk. That we would be alone later.” Beth nodded again. Why he would think such a thing was beyond her, but it sent a shudder through her limbs.
“Hey,” she said, without knowing exactly what she planned to tell him. “Why don’t we dance?”
The band had started up a rendition of “They All Laughed.” On the dance floor, they found both Dave’s parents and Sadie’s parents, the former self-consciously attempting a modified hustle, the latter smartly executing a neat fox-trot. They were members of an older generation, the Peregrines, having had Sadie quite late in life, and their clothes and habits spoke of an earlier, more storied era. The group tended to align themselves more with the Peregrines’ generation—with their big band music and their cocktails before dinner—than with the one that followed, the boomers, with their Simon & Garfunkel and their marijuana a
fter dinner. Rose Peregrine, for example, dressed to go shopping, ordered all her groceries in from a small shop around the corner, and visited her hairdresser twice weekly. This evening, she wore a fitted suit in dove gray shantung—the color not far off from that of her hair—with a high stand-up collar, and a thick row of complicated beadwork running down the jacket’s front. But Dave’s mom—in a long, shapeless navy blue shift, white threads springing from her red hair—looked nice, too, Beth thought.
“They’re such dorks,” said Dave, waving at his mother.
“I like them,” said Beth.
“Yeah, well, they like you.” He grinned down at her. “But you’re a dork, too.”
“Right,” said Beth, willing herself to have a sense of humor. She’d spent five minutes with Dave and already he’d stung her. Had she actually been looking forward to seeing him? No, she hadn’t. Actually.
Over his shoulder, she watched Lil’s aunts stream out the front door, blowing kisses and waving royally.
“My mother,” she told Dave, “would love this wedding. The loft. All the candles. The little kids running around.” Her mother believed young people raised during the Bush and Reagan administrations were too conservative and complacent. Rebellion, Beth’s mother believed, was healthy. She’d encouraged Beth to experiment—offering her wine with supper, tokes of the occasional joint, taking her to see Bergman and Bertolucci films when she outgrew Snow White and Bambi. Beth wondered what her mother would have to say about her dancing with Dave. For two years, she’d slyly refrained from commenting on him, but once they’d broken up, she’d blurted, “Oh, honey, he wasn’t for you.”
“Lil didn’t invite them?” Dave asked.
“She did. But they already had tickets to California. It’s Jason’s fall break. His last fall break.” Her brother was a senior at Stanford, studying things she admired but barely comprehended: computers and politics.
“Right.”
A song or two later the room was half empty, the older generations gone home. The band finished their set and stood chatting, ties loosened, with Tuck’s friends from Atlanta. Quietly, the caterers began moving crates of cutlery and dishes out to their truck, and Lil and Tuck sat down at a table, white wine in her hand, whiskey in his. The group slunk into chairs around them, Beth both relieved and disappointed to be out of Dave’s arms, Sadie prying herself away from that awful Will Chase, with his idiotic ideas about the “New Economy” (her father said it was all a load of bunk, none of these websites were going to make any money, not from selling pet food in bulk or books or anything), and his smug, overconfident air. Tuck’s friends—the band guys and their girlfriends; the Southern couple, and the couple with the baby; various Columbians and coworkers in suits, among them Will Chase, his tie loosened, his jacket off; and Ed Slikowski, his long, pale face eager and earnest—gathered around them, sprawling their legs out and draping their elbows on the tables. The photographer, a journalist friend of Tuck’s who was shooting the wedding as his gift to the couple, came by and snapped his camera at them, cracking, “Oh yeah, there’s the album cover. Hot.”
A Fortunate Age Page 4
