A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Will finished off his drink, with a low rattle of ice, and placed the glass on the shelf behind him, next to a wild-haired troll doll and a worn-looking Raggedy Ann. “Take off your skirt,” he said, gesturing again. What could she say? What reason could she give him? She had started this and she couldn’t stop. She should have said no in the first place. She should have left in a flurry of moral outrage. She should have kissed him and shut him up.

  “I,” she started to say, but the sound didn’t really come out. A muscle in his jaw twitched. He nodded at her, as if to say Go on, now, silly girl. Before she could think better of it, she unhooked the fastenings on her skirt and stepped out of it, bending carefully at the waist and knee. He took that from her as well, folding it neatly, and smirking slightly at the label. “BCBG. That’s hilarious.” She smiled at him blankly. “Do you know what it means?” She shook her head. “Bon chic bon genre. It’s a term for a certain sort of Parisian young person. Kind of like calling someone a hipster or a yuppie or a Sloane Ranger. But there’s no real equivalent in English.” She nodded. The throbbing between her legs continued, and her heart thunked loudly below her breasts, but a certain calm was settling over her. “Take off your bra,” he said, as she’d known he would. This time, she didn’t hesitate. She reached behind her and undid the hooks and eyes, slid the straps off her shoulders, and handed him the bra. Her breasts hung heavily, loosely on her chest. In junior high she’d wanted to have them reduced—the horror of gym class. Without waiting for him to tell her to do so, she stepped out of her underwear—plain, black cotton—and found herself standing naked but for her high boots, like a girl in Playboy, in front of a man she barely knew, a man who, she had an inkling, was not interested in the sort of relationship she was accustomed to, would not even tell her that he loved her, as a manner of courtesy, as had Glyn, the Welshman she’d dated on and off in Milwaukee, who was, honestly, an asshole, as were, she’d found, all men with an overhealthy interest in Star Trek. “Why don’t you come here,” he said now, gesturing toward himself. He’d placed the rest of her clothing over the back of one of the wooden chairs at the table, a small action that she found stupidly reassuring as she crossed the room—taking care not to move too fast and cause her body to ripple unduly—and sat down next to him, a bit too stiffly, unsure of what to do with her arms or her breasts or the small pouch of her stomach, until she busied herself with—at last, thankfully—unzipping her punishing boots and stripping off her thin black socks. As she did so, he stroked her hair—paternally, she couldn’t help thinking now, knowing about Sam—and said, “You’re lovely.”

  “Oh,” she said foolishly, pressing her face into his chest, which smelled of tobacco and laundry detergent and sweat and something else she knew but couldn’t name, all of which was too much for her, and so she turned herself from him and pressed her back against his side, her legs curled on the couch. His feet were still stubbornly set on the wood floor, legs uncrossed now. “Oh,” he said, too, his breath close in her ear, ragged and short, his hands now running lightly over her body, reaching down and unbending her legs, stretching them long on the couch, stroking up the bone of her shin, over her knee, along her thigh, a brief visit between her legs, then up over her stomach, her ribs, and onto her breasts. As his hand—large, alarmingly masculine, a father’s hand, with gold hairs sprouting off its edges—cupped her nipple, she realized, with alarm, that his other hand (Left? Right? She’d lost all sense of orientation) had moved from her hair to her mouth, smelling more strongly of the elusive scent she’d detected earlier, peppermint, a bit antiseptic, vaguely loamy—it came on her slowly—Dr. Bronner’s, the all-purpose liquid soap that she’d used in college. They’d bought it in large bottles at the health food co-op in Harkness. Supposedly, you could dilute it and use it as mouthwash, but she never had—could never figure out the ratio of soap to water—and as this thought slipped and faded into the hills of her mind, she felt her body come unnervingly alive. Her mouth opened and released a moan that seemed to come from someone else, or from somewhere behind her, and released moist particles into the palm of his hand. His other hand still circled her one breast, then, without warning, slipped away from it and scrambled behind him on the futon for something.

  She shifted, stretched one hip down, then the other, and felt her spine release with a small, ladylike pop, along with a decidedly more animalistic throbbing between her legs. Oh God, she thought senselessly. Her head now rested in his lap. Then his hand was leaving her mouth—she’d closed her eyes at some point—and something soft and cushy was being tied around it. She wasn’t sure she wanted this—scarf? gag?—and moved her head from side to side to indicate her ambiguous feelings about the device. But she was unable—or unwilling—to speak and break the spell, for she didn’t want things to end, didn’t want him to stop touching her. It was all fine so long as she kept her eyes closed. As though from a distance—from behind the lens of a camera, perhaps—she saw herself lying naked on the couch, him fully dressed, his slightly scratchy wool trousers against her cheek, and again thought of Playboy. Was that her only pornographic reference model? Yes, she thought, yes it was. As a kid, she’d stolen a copy from her father’s nightstand and hid it under her bed. Her pose now reminded her of the black-and-white comics scattered, New Yorker–style, throughout the magazine, in which large-bosomed girls lay naked, just as she was, their heads lolling in men’s laps.

  No, she didn’t want it to end, so she didn’t say no. Nor did she open her eyes. Instead, she moved her head and moaned slightly, this time consciously, which made him pull the cloth tighter, then reach down and pinch her nipple, forcefully—something she’d always hated, squirmed away from, but which sent a hot shot through her midsection, and caused her to arch her upper back into his hand, which he promptly moved to the scarf, fastening it firmly. She writhed, unsure of what message she was sending by doing so (and equally unsure of what message she wanted to send). Again, he reached back, lifting her head slightly as he did so, this time placing a similar fabric on her forehead, no, down, over her closed eyes, quickly pulling it tight and tying it. She offered no resistance this time, though she felt both more frightened and more excited, almost inconceivably so. But as his touch turned more gentle—removing her head from his lap and placing it carefully on a small, hard pillow—and her mind stopped racing, she became fraught with the foolishness of her immediate situation: she had gone home with a man she barely knew, a man with a wife and child (Where? Who knew? Lil; she would ask her tomorrow), whom he had neglected to mention until moments before instructing her to strip. What kind of person did something like that? What else was he not telling her? Were there bodies beneath his floorboards?

  Here she was: naked, gagged, and blindfolded, like something out of a movie (a porno? She’d never seen one), or something more risqué than Playboy—Hustler, perhaps, or Screw. Of course, this wasn’t a movie, this was real life, her life, and this man—this virtual stranger—could kill her or rape her or, or, do anything with her that he liked. What did she know about him? Nothing, really, but that he was Tuck’s friend and she barely knew Tuck—really, she didn’t know Tuck at all. A warm trickle of something leaked down from inside her, cooling her thigh. Oh God, she thought again, oh God. She felt his hands part her legs, just slightly. She could feel the soft, dense hairs of his thighs rubbing against the back of her own. He was kneeling on the futon, beneath her legs. And he’d removed his pants. His hands, again, moved up her legs, inside her thighs, which were now embarrassingly moist. She moved to close them, making awful “uhhh-unnn” sounds, like a sheep. “No, no,” he said, firmly holding them apart, and placed his hand there, then slid a finger back. What was he doing? His finger, wet, slipped in behind, then another finger.

  Oh God, she thought, not this, she’d never thought of this, never conceived of it as an option, though she’d read about it, of course, most memorably (indelibly, she supposed) in Martin Amis’s London Fields, where the main character—Nicola Six, wh
o really isn’t very much like a real person, but more like a man’s masturbatory fantasy, but that’s kind of the point, she supposed, kind of what the book is about, kind of what all Martin Amis books are about—can’t get enough of it and her doctor, Nicola Six’s doctor, that is, tells her it’s okay, as long as she does it first in the proper place, second in the other place, where one of Will’s fingers now moved gently, as it’s not healthy to do it the opposite way, a girl could wind up with all sorts of infections and things. And then there was Lucy, a strange girl from her grad program (writing her dissertation on BBC adaptations of Austen), with whom she’d made a brief attempt at friendship—a Brit, like Will—and Glyn. One night, two-odd years back, the three of them had gone for drinks at the Gasthaus, and Lucy had started in on the sexual ineptitude of British men. One boyfriend, a cyclist whom she’d otherwise adored, was only capable of doing it . . . this way, “in the arse,” Lucy had said, laughing.

  “Well, clearly he was a fag,” Glyn had said.

  “No,” Lucy shrieked, “he wasn’t! He wasn’t. He just had problems.”

  Glyn shrugged and swilled his Guinness. “What did it feel like?” he asked, trying to pass this off as a casual question. “Did you like it?”

  “Hmmm.” Lucy considered, pushing a bony hand into her blonde, wiry hair. Affecting intense interest in the menu board, Beth had avoided her friends’ eyes and pressed her legs together to stop the throbbing that had started up between them. “It felt a bit like going to the loo, if you know what I mean,” she said. “It felt like there was something inside me that wasn’t supposed to be there, and my body was trying to push it out.” Her thin, serious face broke into a smile. “But I also quite liked it, in a way, doing the taboo thing, you know? It added something.”

  That night, Beth had expected Glyn to want to try it. Instead, he’d fallen dead asleep—no, passed out—on her tattered couch. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. And now here she was, doing the taboo thing, or on the verge of it, not sure if it would be more sordid or less, for the fact of her being in New York, with someone she barely knew. Her mind raced, health center pamphlets flashing before her eyes like a grammar school slide show: AIDS, HIV, herpes, burst blood vessels, intestinal blockage, something in Story of O about being “rent” by this activity, if the man’s . . . organ . . . was too large, rending meaning, she assumed, ripping, though perhaps it was something worse.

  But no, these were just his fingers—for now—and they felt strange, not necessarily painful. She could see what Lucy meant, about having something unnatural inside you. Her muscles contracted. And yet there was also this feeling—she fought against it—of his fingers being too small, too sad, of wanting more. Her body rocked, without her intending it to do so. And she felt his body—large, that smell of peppermint and tobacco and maybe shaving cream—hovering over hers, the corner of a worn T-shirt, a brush of boxer short. “Have you done this before?” he asked. His voice, she realized, was low and extraordinarily pleasant. She would not, she thought, have discovered this if not for the blindfold and the gag. It was true what they say about sensory deprivation—block off one sense and it heightens the others. Like Helen Keller. She shook her head no, rather wildly, fearing he might misunderstand. “I didn’t think so,” he said, moving his fingers more deeply inside her. His other elbow (left? right?) rested on the futon, just next to her ribs. Now he moved this hand to her breast again, clamping down on it. Hot and swollen—prickly, almost as if she were getting her period—from all this touching, her breasts seemed to be acting of their own accord, divorced from their owner.

  He was holding his body off of her, perhaps not wanting to crush her with his weight, but she wanted to feel his weight on top of her, the smell of him, his body obliterating the thoughts and anxieties of her own, shutting down the system. Instead, he shifted her in one smooth motion and lay down next to her, on his side, his mouth at her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. As one, her muscles went limp at this declaration. She had nothing to worry about. Lil or Emily would never worry in a situation like this. They would strip off their clothes and stand boldly before Will, hips tucked back to lengthen their legs, as models did. Sadie, she thought, would never be in a situation like this.

  Then she remembered how they’d met—“Who’s the dark beauty?”—and shuddered. It had been four days since the wedding, four nights. Perhaps Sadie had been here one of those nights. Perhaps Sadie had been in a situation exactly like this. No, she’d seemed utterly uninterested in—annoyed by, even—Will at the bar after the wedding and she’d left early with Tal. “Are they?” Beth had asked Emily. “Who knows,” Emily had told her, with a roll of her eyes. “He follows her around. She won’t talk about it. You know how she is.” Beth did. They all, rather, followed Sadie around. Beth couldn’t blame Will for wanting her, but what bothered her was the thought that he might have treated Sadie differently. Hung on her every word in the restaurant. Been unable to take his eyes from her.

  This line of thought was pointless, she told herself firmly, willing her mind back into the moment. Will, she thought, had admired Sadie, but recognized in Beth a sensual—darkly sensual—nature she’d always suspected lay dormant, unrecognized by her few, inept lovers. Yes, she thought, yes. He was stroking her now, back and front, his breath hot in her ear, and she was, she was going to come, but she couldn’t, shouldn’t, would not with this stranger watching her—and she unable to see him—witnessing whatever contortions and contractions of her body, whatever ugliness she might possess at such a moment. She fought it, willed it away, twisting her hips and shutting her legs. “Stop,” he said firmly, like a schoolteacher, keeping his hand between her legs. “You’re being very, very bad.” Oh God, oh God, this is a terrible cliché, she thought, almost against her will (why, why, why could she not simply experience things, without comment?), from a thousand pornos. She tried to remember the names of the classic ones, Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, which she’d heard about—grad students liked to joke about them, to use puns on the titles in their papers (“Behind the Greek Door: The Frat House as Metaphor in Contemporary American Film”)—but never seen, though pretended she had on numerous occasions, Debbie Does Dallas, Anal Invaders, Electric Blue. The ridiculous titles, the list of them, calmed her and she thrashed her legs against his.

  “You need to stop,” he said. His voice now closer, speaking directly into her ear. “You’re being a very bad girl. If you don’t stop, I shall have to bind your hands.” And at that, at those words, uttered in Will’s crisp Oxbridge accent, her body released in a thousand different directions, waves of hot and cold shooting through her—her low cries spilling, fuzzed, through the scarf. She pushed him, his hands, away from her, off of her—it was unbearable, too much—but he refused to move the front one, holding her against him by the pubic bone, feeling, no doubt, the mortifying waves running through her, her mouth clenched tight so as not to scream. Slowly, she became aware that he was close to her now, his front pressed to her back, and she could feel him, hard, against her. She reached behind her to touch him, thinking this the proper, appropriate thing to do, though part of her wished he would simply leave, but he grabbed her hand and said “No,” again in that firm tone. Then he gathered her other hand into his left one—the arm attached to it cushioning her head—and ran his right along her stomach. “Did you like that?” he asked. She nodded. “You did?” She nodded. “Tell me.” But she didn’t want to speak, not yet. “Yes,” she said, her mouth straining against the thick fabric. “I thought so. You’re a very bad girl, Miss Scarsdale.” Why did this sound dirtier, more appalling—but also somehow more manageable, more expected—coming from an Englishman?

  As her body calmed itself, cooled by a stream of air from the kitchen window, her mind grew rapidly more awake, shaking off the fug of wine and food, so that she felt more alert than she had in days, weeks—bizarrely, grimly awake, her mind jumping from one thing to the next. Should she have danced wit
h Dave at the wedding? Why had they not talked, as he’d said they would? And why was she wasting time worrying about all this—three whole days already—when she needed to get to work on her research? Tomorrow, she must go into the Museum of Television and Radio and get herself set up for the next phase. No, no, tomorrow she needed to call Gail Bronfman, at the New School, and settle things with her job, if she had a job, which she knew she probably didn’t, but she couldn’t quite admit defeat. It was all so humiliating—not just that she’d screwed things up with her credits, but that she’d handled everything wrong. “But I can be there by the first week in October,” she’d told Gail Bronfman (this was how she thought of her, not as “Gail” or “Dr. Bronfman,” but as “Gail Bronfman”). “So, if someone could sub for me for the first few classes—”