A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “Sub for you,” the woman had shrieked. “This isn’t elementary school. These are your classes. Your syllabus. Your students. You need to be there.”

  “I know. But I can’t—they won’t—” At this point, shouting commenced on Gail Bronfman’s end of the line.

  “I’m just going to have to find someone else for the fall. A week before classes begin. What a treat. Thanks. You’ve made my day.” Beth asked, sensibly (she thought), if she could simply begin teaching in the spring semester—if they could simply change the start date of her contract. “We’ll see. Call me when you get to New York” was Gail Bronfman’s response, followed by a loud click and silence.

  She willed her mind away from this conversation—which she’d shared with no one but her advisor—and toward Will, who was also, for now, a secret. She’d rather easily managed not to tell any of her friends that she would be seeing him—in part because she had a suspicion that they would warn her away, and in part because, she realized only now, she didn’t want Dave to know about it, though she knew that was stupid, but she felt some dumb need—what was it?—to maintain the illusion that they might, if they wanted to, pick up exactly where they’d left off, four-odd years ago, at commencement, before he’d told her, in that mumbled, half-angry, Dave way, that he thought when they went off to grad school they should see other people. She didn’t know anything of his “other people”—her friends had been very good about keeping silent on this subject—and nor did he, as far as she knew, know anything about hers, so perhaps they could simply pretend there hadn’t been any—just as there had been no horrible, humid summer, while they waited to leave for their respective programs and spent countless silent hours wandering around the streets outside his parents’ apartment, drinking beer in barely air-conditioned bars, and fumbling awkwardly, gingerly, in his narrow childhood bed, which barely fit in his closet-sized room, Beth on the verge of tears each time they finished, each time she had to put on her clothes and board the subway to Grand Central, then the train back to Scarsdale, then her green Accord through the village and the curving streets back to her parents’ mock Tudor. Dave, she thought. The memory of that terrible summer—when she knew she’d lost him, yet continued to pretend she hadn’t, and he (worse) allowed her to—somehow reminded her, more than had anything else in recent years, of how she had loved him. Will, suddenly, seemed—in his not being Dave—even more alien than previously. Oh my God, she thought, why am I here? What did I just do?

  Just then, Will’s hand dropped heavily to the futon, releasing her wrists. He was, she realized, sleeping. Ripping the loosened cloth off her eyes and mouth, she turned to face him. Weren’t men supposed to fall asleep after orgasm? Had he, somehow, without her knowing it, reached . . . climax? By rubbing against her? She glanced down at his boxer shorts, which were plain white. They appeared clean and dry. Tentatively, she reached a hand out and touched their front. At this, Will started awake, taking hold of her hand. “No touching, Scarsdale.” She must’ve looked stricken, for he released his grip on her, smiled, and pushed her bangs to one side of her forehead. “Beth. Sorry. I just think it’s funny. I always thought Scarsdale was a mythological place. Like Xanadu. Where rich Jews go to die or some such thing.” Beth rolled her eyes. “I mean, dating a Jewish girl from Scarsdale is a bit like dating a WASP from Greenwich, isn’t it?”

  Beth sat up and looked around for her clothing. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really think of things in those terms.” This was absurd, this kind of talk. She’d hated growing up in Scarsdale, hated every second of it, couldn’t wait to get out, and now this, this lecher—this person who was possibly some sort of pervert or, at the very least, an unscrupulous libertine—had decided to nickname her Scarsdale, as though she were some sort of metonym for conventional, conservative, upper-middle-class Jewry. And he clearly knew nothing about Scarsdale, for if he did, he’d know she was nothing—nothing—like the girls there, with their perma-manicures, their carefully highlighted hair, their spots on the soccer team, their stupid, stupid outfits from Great Stuff, their obnoxious accents, their middlebrow aspirations, their cruel cliquishness, and their moronic sorority membership (“Dee Phi Eee! At U Mish!”). These were the girls who had mocked her from, seemingly, birth. And now, eight years after she’d left the place for good, someone was mistaking her for one of them, simply by virtue of . . . what?

  She shot him a slit-eyed glance as she climbed over his body, off the futon, and began to gather her clothes. He watched her, idly. Then, as she made her way by him, toward the bathroom, he grabbed her calf. “Let me go,” she cried, wrenching her leg. But he held on, swinging his legs around so he was sitting, his head level with her stomach, and climbing his hand up her body as he stood, towering over her, she in her bare feet. “Beth, Beth,” he began. “I’m sorry. Don’t be so sensitive. I can be a bit of a cad.” Beth was afraid to speak, certain the tears—her famous, dreaded tears—would begin to flow at the first word. She pulled away from him. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said, voice wavering. “You shouldn’t make generalizations like that. If you knew anything about Scarsdale, you’d know I’m nothing like the girls there.” He smiled without showing his teeth. “Maybe you are in ways you don’t know.” This was too much, too, too much. Her stomach clenched with rage. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she was screaming, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” her voice ragged and shrill. She stormed into the bathroom.

  Slumped against the door, the tears finally came—prickly relief—and she turned quickly to lock the nicked brass handle, trying to quiet herself. In a moment, to her surprise, she felt calm. She would wash her face and leave and never see this person—this monster—again. She splashed water on her cheeks, rubbed herself dry with a plush white towel, peed quietly, and swished yellow Listerine in her mouth. Gingerly, she stepped into her underpants and bra, her breasts still achy, pulled on her blouse, and stepped into her skirt. Glancing tentatively into the mirror, she smoothed her hair with a plastic comb she found on the counter, tucking the front pieces behind her ears. She was ready. She unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out into the front room, her swollen lips pressed together with grim determination. Will was not there, but her boots were neatly lined up by the door, her socks tucked inside. She picked them up, sat down on the couch, and slipped them both on, closing the boots’ long zippers up over the sides of her calves. As she stood to leave, her hand hovering by the doorknob, Will appeared in the bedroom doorway, fully dressed—wool trousers, blue shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, white undershirt peeking out below his collar. Blond hairs curved out over the undershirt’s ribbed neck, filling in the hollow at the base of his throat. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You’re Lil’s friend Beth, aren’t you? We met the other night at the wedding. You were wearing the most stunning dress. I’m sure I’m not the first to remark on it. You were easily the loveliest girl there. All the old codgers were checking you out. I noticed you the minute you walked in, with that ginger-haired girl, what’s her name. Redheads. Never cared for them, myself.” She smiled, against her will. “So,” he said, smiling back at her, “what brings you to the neighborhood?” She sighed inwardly. “Well, I’m thinking about moving here,” she found herself saying, in a voice she knew to be soft, seductive, “so I thought I’d take a look around.” He held out his hand to her. “I see. Well, I happen to be an expert on the area.” Now he had stepped closer and taken her hand. “Perhaps you might allow me to . . .” Now he trailed off, pulling her in close to him, untucking the back of her blouse from her skirt, holding his mouth in close to her neck. “Show you around.”

  Later, much later, they lay in his bed, a futon laid out on the floor like Lil and Tuck’s. Again, he held her from behind, he half dressed, she entirely undressed. Again, he’d refused to let her touch him. She slipped out of his light, sleepy grip and turned to face him, inspecting the blue circles under his eyes, the creases that ran between the folds of his nose and the corners of his mouth. �
��Hey,” she said gently, trying for a joking tone. “Hey, London.” He smiled and yawned. “Miss Bernstein, you know perfectly well I’m from Oxford.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “You want to know why . . . why, all this?” She nodded. “Well. It’s not pretty.” He paused, smiling sarcastically. “I’m impotent.” Again, he spat out the word as though it had quotes around it. She started to protest. “No, no, no. I know what you’re thinking but you need to trust me on this one. I know what I’m talking about, m’dear. There are things you simply don’t know about.” Beth nodded. She had felt him . . . but perhaps there were many forms of impotence, perhaps some men could maintain the initial . . . erection, but couldn’t complete the . . . act. But then why—well . . . hadn’t he been intending to enter her the other way? Perhaps not. Perhaps when he asked if she’d “done this before” he was referring to the blindfold, the gag. Or to sex with strangers, in general.

  “Is it—” she began. “Does it have something to do with your wife?” she asked, knowing, as the words came out of her mouth, that it was the wrong thing to say.

  He laughed, almost a bark. “Yes, yes, it’s quite tragic, actually. My wife cheated on me—a regular slag, as the lads would say. She used me, it seems, as a free ticket to New York, then, once ensconced in this fabled city, threw herself at every man who crossed her path—and now—” A face of exaggerated pain. “I cannot bring myself to commit the act of love with another woman, so scarred am I by her actions. She has displaced the very foundations of my manhood.”

  He was telling the truth, of course, despite his overdramatic tones. She wondered if, perhaps, he had, earlier, wanted to try to make love to her, in the proper way, but was worried that he couldn’t carry through till the end. This, she thought firmly, must be what had happened. She said nothing. “I don’t know how long this will last.” He dropped his tone of mock gaiety. “It’s been three years since the egg and I split up. That’s a long time. It could be forever. But as long as you want to come round here, I’m happy to have you. Though obviously I’m never going to be some sort of boyfriend in the way you’re used to. I’m never going to be Tuck.” Again, she tried to protest, to explain that she didn’t even know Tuck. “I’ve tried that route and it didn’t work. I’m not cut out for that sort of thing, the everyday stuff, the oh-you-look-pretty-today and how-was-work-honey. I just can’t do it. And I don’t go to dinner parties or gallery openings or lectures by visiting professors or any sort of poetry reading or family gathering. I travel frequently for stories and absolutely refuse to call home during my trips. In other words, I simply don’t do obligations anymore. I’m done. And that’s never, ever going to change.” She stared at him, jaw dangling. Was he for real? This speech seemed like something cribbed from a movie. Or, actually, a Martin Amis novel. “Though the other thing, well, it could get better.” She nodded. “Okay,” he said, more a question than a statement.

  “Okay,” she whispered, smiling. “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” He pointed her to a robe of smooth blue flannel, hanging inside his small closet. Tripping on its long hem, she walked, again, through the sitting room to the tiny bathroom.

  In the mirror, she looked closely at her brown eyes. She was, she thought, glad she’d stayed—glad Will had dropped his posturing and summoned her back (with, of course, another bit of posturing, but still)—but felt herself succumbing to vague unease, the causes of which eluded her. If she was honest with herself, she knew what he meant about Scarsdale. He thought, deep down, she wanted to get married—like Lil—to have children and move uptown or, of course, back to Scarsdale. Nothing, she thought gleefully, could be further from the truth. She was in New York, after four years in Milwaukee, all she wanted was to have fun, to do the things her friends had been doing for four years: to date mysterious men, to eat ethnic food in obscure restaurants and drink old-fashioned cocktails in hotel bars, to see foreign films in downtown theaters, to walk down the street anonymously. He was entirely wrong about her, imagining her to be a closeted bourgeois. Well, she would show him, she thought, narrowing her eyes at the mirror, in imitation of a film vamp. There was no way—no way—she would fall in love with him—how could she? His being a perverted know-it-all—but she would return here, to his apartment, until she grew tired of him. While seeing other people, of course. And, of course, he was full of shit, anyway, about not wanting or being able to do everyday things. He had extraordinarily expensive sheets—pale green sateen—for someone who wasn’t “good with things.” Perhaps, she thought with a shiver as she slipped out of his robe and lay down beside him, they’d been a wedding gift.

  three

  Four days after her encounter with Will Chase—for this was how she had started to think of it, as an encounter, rather like happening upon a bear in the woods—Beth arrived at a point of panic. Despite his countercultural pose—his alleged objection to monogamy—she’d expected him to give her a call. But he had not, and now, the following Sunday, she was headed back to the very same restaurant at which she’d dined with him to have breakfast with Emily, whose apartment was, indeed, around the corner, on North Eighth Street, just as Beth had thought.

  On Thursday, when they’d made their plans, Beth had declined to mention that she’d been there already, even as Emily laboriously gave Beth directions, shouting into her cell phone from some busy corner (“You’re near the G, right? You can take the G to the L”). Her brain was already leaping ahead, wondering if she should call Will and tell him that she would be in his neighborhood and could, if he liked, stop by after breakfast. Sam, of course, would be with him, but did that really matter? Beth loved children—though she had very little experience of them—and she had already formed a picture of Sam as a tiny version of Will: large black eyes, a precociously inquisitive manner, blond wavy hair like Little Lord Fauntleroy. It was strange, she thought, that he’d not offered to show her a photo of the boy. Strange, too, that he’d told her very little, really, about himself, even as she blathered on and on. As the days passed—and the phone, just like in some stupid movie, refused to ring—she grew increasingly curious and speculative. Lil, she knew, would have all the information, being an expert extractor of personal histories, but she couldn’t bear the nerve-racking scrutiny that would accompany Lil’s involvement. She knew exactly what Lil would say: that Will pursued Beth rather than Sadie (though, Beth supposed, he might have pursued both) because Beth was more approachable. Lil had a way of saying things—a certain false gentleness to her voice, an overenthusiastic insistence that no, those pants do not make you look fat—that made her true, more unpleasant meaning utterly plain.

  But what she dreaded more was Lil speaking to Will about her, feeding into whatever ideas he had about her as a predictable little bourgeois. “Has she taken you out to her house yet? Oh my God, you have to get her to take you out! It’s huge. Her mother literally could not clean it herself.” Lil being Lil, she didn’t want to know that Beth’s grandfather built the place in the 1920s, when Scarsdale was still a sleepy village and land there not necessarily expensive, and that the structure had started off much smaller, with space for the first Dr. Bernstein’s office added during the Depression. But Lil preferred to perpetuate this fiction of the Bernsteins as part of some sort of Scarsdalian elite, in possession of infinite sums of cash, when, in fact, her family was certainly not among the wealthiest inhabitants of the town. Her mother drove a Volvo, her father a Toyota. They didn’t belong to a country club, nor did they, by rote, spend Christmas on one of the various islands named after saints. But Lil—like Will—seemed transfixed by this weird popular mythology that had lately sprung up around Scarsdale, believing it to be a Jewish version of Cheever country, populated by polo-shirted, bob-nosed, golf-playing all-Americans. In fact, the opposite was true: in Beth’s lifetime, the town had become a haven for the tackily affluent. Women whose wrists sagged under the weight of eighty-carat tennis bracelets. Men who squeezed their bulk behind the wheels of tiny German cars. And their cruel, vap
id children, trained to seek out weakness in their peers. Beth had sought refuge from them as soon as she could, along with the other hippies, Goths, math geeks, violin prodigies, and so on, in the town’s “A school,” where her mother taught. But even this odd institution—with its freaky, depressed student body—struck Lil as vaguely glamorous, peopled with misunderstood millionaires.

  Emily, she knew, would regard the Will situation somewhat more sympathetically. She had done some curious things, sexually speaking, though Beth only had a vague sense of what these things were, as Emily tended to keep the specifics to herself, speaking in goofy euphemisms and referring to her boyfriends in code—“Method Actor,” “Big Law”—to prohibit the group from taking seriously her involvement with them. In college she’d hung around with a group of attractive dilettantes, a subset of the theater crowd, who favored self-consciously risqué gear—velvet hot pants, fishnet stockings, dog collars—and devoted much time to the organization and execution of “sex parties” or “orgy nights,” in their off-campus Victorians, which they painted purple or black and named “Whore House” or “House of the Little Death.” Their academic activities tended to consist of large-scale productions of Grand Guignol plays or public performance art projects involving nudity, like that of Sebastian Beckmann, who’d shaved off all his body hair and spent three days in a glass box in the middle of Tappan Square; or Seth Morris, who’d made a plaster cast of his penis, from which he manufactured a hundred bronze members, and “planted” them in the garden outside the Conservatory; or Emily herself, who, famously, baked a coffin made of bread (using ovens and flour at the group’s co-op, Tank), then ate her way out of it.