A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Emily still saw some of these people in New York—most had traded their fishnets and capes for jobs in graphic design or script supervision, but a few performed in burlesque shows at the Slipper Room or worked as strippers (ironically, of course)—and had made the acquaintance of any number of equally flamboyant types: actors and directors and other theatrical folk. She seemed to date an awful lot of men. Though where she met these men was a mystery, Lil said, since she spent much of her time hanging around with men who most definitely and exclusively preferred other men.

  But Emily was, actually, intensely sensible—she was the only one of their friends who actually balanced her checkbook—with a puritanical streak that emerged at unexpected moments, sending all but Tal into shamed fits of petulance. Beth could imagine Emily’s response to Will. “This sounds like bad news. The wife? The kid?” Beth’s stomach clenched. She knew it sounded like bad news.

  On Friday, as her lunch with Emily drew near, she woke with the intention of making the dreaded phone call to Gail Bronfman and straightening out the situation with the New School, if indeed it could be straightened out. The longer she waited, she knew, the less likely it was that they could use her, if not for her original position, then for something else—adjunct, she supposed—or, at the very least, for a January opening, if by chance there was one. She secretly hoped that the woman would crow with delight upon hearing Beth’s voice. “Oh, no, we simply couldn’t find anyone as great as you, so we held your classes until you arrived.” Or “Oh, Beth, I’m so glad you called. The person we hired to replace you simply won’t do. We’ve had to let her go. Can you take over next week?”

  But she knew that this would be unlikely. After that disastrous conversation, back in August, her perpetually helpful, overly avuncular advisor, Dr. Ham (as he was known, being saddled with the name of Hamburger, a source of much amusement to him), had tried to smooth things over for her. He and Gail were friends from grad school, which was how Beth had landed the job in the first place. There was no reason, he thought, that Beth couldn’t show up a few weeks late for the fall semester. A week later, he’d called her back to his office, beetlish brows twitching with displeasure. “Listen, kid, she’s not backing down on this. She says she’s already hired someone else.”

  Beth felt the familiar sting of tears. “Hired someone else just for the fall?” she asked. “Or for the whole year?”

  Dr. Ham smiled. “I’m not sure. It was hard to hear, what with all the yelling.”

  Her face must have belied her feelings—it always did—because Dr. Ham stood up and raised his hands in the air, like a preacher. “For God’s sake, don’t worry about Gail frigging Bronfman,” he barked. “You met her. She’s four feet tall. You could take her.” Beth forced a smile, for Dr. Ham’s sake. He’d received tenure in the glorious early days of cultural studies and didn’t quite understand how hard it was out there. “Just go in to see her when you get to New York, like she said. Suck up a little. Ask if you can help her with research. Talk to her about Barnabas. She’s way into vampires; I think she did a paper on Blacula a few years ago at the PCA—”

  “She did,” Beth said. “It was pretty good. Kind of reductive.”

  “There you go!” enthused Dr. Ham. “Just give her that Beth Bernstein charm.”

  But Beth did not feel charm to be her province. And perhaps the only thing she feared, at this particular moment, more than Gail Bronfman—who, despite her lack of height, had the sort of brisk, overcaffeinated conversational style that reduced Beth’s normally low voice to a whisper—was confrontation itself. And so, on Friday morning, she decided that before she called the woman, she should make a complete to-do list, so as to feel a bit more in control of her time, and after completing said list, she was relieved to see that there were any number of tasks that she could, and should, tick off before picking up the phone, errands that absolutely needed to be run before the weekend, such as having her hair trimmed, and picking up some new clothing, and getting a facial. Quickly, she took the train to Soho, where these processes depleted both her savings and the rest of her day, but were, she thought, necessary to her psychological welfare. If she didn’t call Will, she decided, fate would reward her, by sending him across her path on Sunday. She would be crossing the street, dressed in a brown poplin shirtdress she’d seen in the window of a large, glassy store on Broadway, and look so ravishing—skin glowing, hair shining—that he would instantly regret not calling and invite her over for supper with Sam.

  When Sunday morning finally arrived, Beth arose ragged and tired, having barely slept the night before, and dressed carefully, in threadbare jeans and a close-fitting black sweater, the only bits of her Milwaukee wardrobe that now seemed even vaguely acceptable (the brown shirtdress, if purchased, would have finished her savings), and took the two trains to Williamsburg, emerging from the station’s darkness into an impossibly gorgeous, sunny day. If only, she thought, it had been like this for Lil’s wedding. She found Emily seated on a bench outside the place, swinging her legs, her mouth plugged by a blue lollipop. “The hostess just came out and gave us these,” she said, pointing to the lurid candy. “There’s a wait. But they’ll bring us coffee if we want.”

  “Oh, good,” said Beth, sitting down beside her.

  “Yeh, if I don’t have some coffee I’m going to die. I got home at, like, four last night.”

  “Oh no,” cried Beth. “You should have called. We could have met later. I feel terrible. You must be exhaus—”

  “No, no, no,” said Emily, shaking her head. Her red hair needed, Beth thought, a washing: it frizzed out around her small head, struggling to escape from the microscopic, rhinestone-crusted barrettes that held a few strands back from her forehead. “I’ve got rehearsal at noon. I had to get up anyway. And I wanted to see you. I can’t believe you’ve been here a week already. Things are just crazy.”

  “I know.”

  “This show is killing me. I think the director is losing his mind. He wants us there, like, twenty-four hours a day. We’re all exhausted.”

  “Is he allowed to do that? Aren’t there, like, union rules?”

  “It’s a non-Equity show. We’re getting paid shit. And he can do whatever he wants. If Equity finds out, I’m dead.”

  “Ohhhhhh,” said Beth, nodding with what she hoped appeared to be understanding. She knew that Emily had “made Equity” last year and that this was a big deal, that Emily’s career should be taking off (for this was how Emily had explained it). She wasn’t quite sure if it actually was or not—with Tal, she could see him on TV—but Emily always seemed to be in rehearsal. They had barely spoken in the last year or so.

  “What play is it?” she asked.

  “It’s actually amazing. I shouldn’t complain. I think it’s going to be big—or something’s going to happen with it. It’s, you know, an ensemble thing about people, friends, in the East Village. Sort of satirical. The writing is just amazing.”

  “That sounds great,” said Beth, truthfully.

  Emily waved her hand, as if to dismiss her previous enthusiasm. “It’s okay.” She did, indeed, look very, very tired, the thin flesh under her bluish eyes—really a strange, unearthly shade of aqua—tinged gray with lack of sleep, worry lines tracing a faint script across her forehead. “Anyway,” she said breathlessly. “How’s the place? Do you hate Queens? Did you have any trouble getting here?”

  Beth opened her mouth, then closed it. “Actually, I was here the other night,” she confessed, with a twisted smile. “For dinner.” Emily frowned, as though she couldn’t believe Beth could find her way to the neighborhood without explicit directions from Emily herself.

  “You were in Williamsburg?”

  Beth nodded, folding her mouth down into an ashamed grimace.

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I was on a ‘date,’” she said, smiling, for some reason, with embarrassment. She and her friends didn’t go out on dates. “With that guy from the wedding.”

>   Emily widened her eyes. “Beth, holy shit. That really hot guy? The blond guy? What’s his name? I didn’t talk to him at all.”

  “Will,” said Beth. “Will Chase. You think he’s, um, hot?” She heard herself pronouncing this word with quotes around it.

  “That was Will Chase,” cried Emily, pulling the lollipop out of her mouth with a childish pop. “Wow. Wow. That’s not how I pictured him.”

  “You’ve heard about him?” asked Beth, her heart thunking. This was not the reaction she’d expected. But then, of course Emily had heard about Will. He was a close friend of Lil and Tuck’s.

  “I think Lil was kind of into him before she met Tuck,” Emily was saying.

  “What?” Beth’s heart now seemed to have dislodged itself from its surrounding tissue and begun jumping, freely, around the inside of her rib cage. “Really?”

  Emily nodded. “She makes him out to be kind of a romantic figure.”

  “How so?” asked Beth.

  “Well, I’m sure you know.”

  Beth shook her head. “I don’t know that much about him.”

  And so Emily explained: He’d been a journalist in London, it seemed, before coming to the States to do his Ph.D. He was, Emily thought, a bit of a hotshot at some British paper or other, writing unusually harsh and learned book reviews or, possibly, interviewing terrorists. “Something like that,” Emily said. “I think maybe he was trying to write—or wrote?—a novel or something. There was some trouble—maybe no one wanted to publish it? Or maybe someone did and it got really bad reviews?” The difference between these two scenarios was so huge, Beth couldn’t believe that Emily didn’t recall which it was. It had to be the former. If Will had published a novel, surely he’d have mentioned it. “And he went to Stanford,” Emily was saying, “on a Fulbright, I think, to do comp lit. Maybe not a Fulbright. Some big-deal fellowship—”

  “He was at Stanford!” Beth cried. Her brother was a senior at this exact school. “Recently? When Jason was there? Not that they’d have met.” She busied herself with unpeeling her lollipop, in an attempt to slow the thoughts dashing around inside her head. Stanford. She’d been at Stanford—on the actual campus, in the main library—four or five times in the last few years. She could have walked right by him. “Who did he study with there? I know a few people in English—”

  “I don’t know,” interrupted Emily, who was wearied, Beth knew, by her friends’ infatuation with academia. Emily’s mother was a professor, and there was nothing terribly exciting about it, she often reminded Beth and Lil. Lots of committee meetings. “But I guess he hated Stanford. You know. He’s from London.” Beth thought it would be inelegant to correct her. He was, of course, from Oxford. She knew this much, at least. “And it’s Palo Alto. Everyone is, like, blond and jogging and they think he’s insane for smoking or whatever.” Beth nodded. On her visits she always wound up feeling pale and enervated in comparison to those around her, including her hale, athletic brother. “Anyway, he starts hanging at this particular bar.”

  A pretty waitress, her bare arms tattooed with small Hebrew script, handed them chipped mugs of coffee and set a pitcher of cream on the asphalt in front of Beth. “Here you go,” she said. “It should just be a few minutes.”

  Emily peered sadly into the creamer. “I bet this isn’t skim milk,” she said.

  “No,” confirmed Beth. “It’s half-and-half.” She sloshed some into her coffee and passed the pitcher to Emily, who made a face and set it back down on the ground so quickly it nearly toppled. “So,” said Beth.

  Emily swallowed some coffee and sighed. “So,” she said. “He gets to know this cute bartender, who you know has her eye on him. Here’s this guy, he looks like a fucking J. Crew model—”

  “He doesn’t,” Beth protested weakly.

  “He does,” said Emily, in a tone that made it clear this wasn’t necessarily a positive attribute. “So they become, like, friends and he tells her that he’s always dreamed of living in New York—like every other person in the world—and that he has this idea that maybe he’ll apply to transfer to Columbia.”

  “But if he was here on a Fulbright,” Beth prodded, “then how could he? It doesn’t work that way. You have a host institution—”

  Just then, the waitress poked her head out. “Emily?” she called. “We’re ready for you.” The girls picked up their cups and followed her—Beth shaky with anticipation and utterly without appetite—inside to a small table by the front window.

  “So what happened,” asked Beth as soon as they were alone again, her heart threatening to jump out of her mouth. What had happened? What could possibly have happened?

  “Well,” said Emily. “The bartender was like, ‘Let’s go.’”

  “Let’s go where?” asked Beth.

  “To New York.”

  “Wait,” said Beth, slowly. “She said, ‘Let’s go to New York,’ meaning ‘Let’s go to New York together.’”

  “Yup,” said Emily.

  “But they barely knew each other.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Beth. “What happened?”

  “He married her. And dropped out of Stanford.”

  Beth stared at Emily in amazement. Nobody would do that. Nobody would drop out of one of the top Ph.D. programs in the country—so what if it was in some dull California suburb? So what if you didn’t love it?—to move to New York with someone he barely knew.

  “You’re kidding,” she said finally. “He dropped out of Stanford.”

  Before Emily could answer, a series of short bleeps issued forth from the brown corduroy coat Beth remembered from college; they’d purchased it, together, at Mini-Mart, marveling over its full fur collar. “That’s Sadie,” she said, fumbling for the source of the noise. “Shit,” she muttered, “where the fu—oh,” and drew, finally, a shiny, oblong wand from her right-hand pocket, its keypad glowing blue. “Sades,” she said. “We’re at Oznot’s.” Uncomfortably, Beth looked around, certain Emily was breaking some unwritten code of deportment, but no, no one was paying them any attention at all. Two tables down, in fact, a couple sat, facing each other, talking away into their own separate phones. “Okay, cool. We’ll see you then. Cool deal.” She held the thing up to Beth. “Sadie’s coming,” she said.

  “Cool,” said Beth, though she didn’t quite want Sadie to intrude upon them just yet. For a moment, they sat in silence, contemplating their coffee. “So,” said Beth quietly, in an effort to hide the urgency with which she needed to hear the end of Will’s story. Why hadn’t he told her any of this? And she, telling him everything. Why had she been so open, so transparent?

  “So, right, okay,” began Emily, leaning in toward Beth. “They come to New York and she’s decided she’s married a millionaire, not, like, some grad student living on a fellowship.”

  “But why?” asked Beth. “She knew he was a grad student.”

  “Because it turned out she was poor. Like really poor. Not, you know, middle-class pretend poor. She was from, like, East Palo Alto. So to her all the Stanford kids seemed rich.”

  “They are.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So she burned through all his money,” said Beth stonily. She suddenly had an idea where this was going, though she wished, somehow, that she didn’t, that she’d never mentioned any of it, that she’d kept Will all to herself for a little while longer, that she’d let him tell her all this, in his own way, his own time. She felt, somehow, dirty.

  Emily nodded. “Yeah. And then some. She took out all these credit cards in his name. Racked up like a zillion dollars in debt. He couldn’t even make the minimum payments. Had to declare bankruptcy.”

  “Oh my God,” whispered Beth. This was more than she’d imagined, and different. “He said she was a slut. I thought she cheated on him.”

  “Well.” Emily sighed. “I guess. She did that, too.”

  Silently, the waitress slid their food in front of them, Beth’s eggs staring, wooz
ily, up at her. Why had she chosen these lurid, viscous things? She felt an urge to order the waitress, Garbo-style, to take them away, get them out of her sight. Emily, she was dismayed to see, had already tucked into her pale, glossy omelet.

  “That looks good,” Beth said dully.

  “Egg whites,” she said. “You can have some.”

  Beth shook her head, concentrating her attention on her toast, which was thin and spread with a foamy layer of butter. This she could eat, taking small, deliberate, symmetrical bites. How, why, had this woman treated Will so horribly? And yet, how—why—had Will had a child with her?

  “It’s crazy, right,” Emily said finally, examining her own slice of toast, “about Sadie and Tal.”

  “What?” asked Beth, trying to extract herself from the increasingly furious loop in her brain—shifting restlessly from sympathy to blame—and return herself to Emily.

  “After the wedding. They—” Emily smiled.

  Beth suddenly understood Emily’s meaning. “Oh my God!” she cried, as a pang shot through her, which she quickly identified as jealousy. Not that she had wanted Tal, other than in the way they all had, vaguely, in college, at one point or another. Though there had been a period, sophomore year, when she and Tal had spent all their time together. The others were all off on their own—Dave dating some annoying girl from Great Neck, Sadie taking too many credits and studying round the clock, Lil frantically in love with a lanky philosophy major—and she and Tal were left with each other. She’d run lights on the student production of True West—he’d played Austin—and they’d walked home together each night from Little Theater, tracing the edge of Tappan Square, sometimes parting ways at Keep, where she shared a room with Lil, sometimes going further to East, where he’d wrangled a grim, cinder-block single, and where they ate pretzels and listened to Bob Mould. She’d even slept on his extra mattress some nights, when she knew Lil and her boyfriend had overtaken their room, and she had wondered, hadn’t she, what would happen if Tal were to kiss her, half expecting him to simply because she was there, half dismayed that he didn’t, if only because it would have proved her desirability, half relieved that they could remain uncomplicated friends. But that time had passed quickly. And the following fall, she and Dave, well, became she and Dave. But she had always thought that she and Tal had an understanding. They were the quiet ones, the good ones. Tal would be wonderful and generous to Sadie. No one, she thought sickly, would ever love her like that. Dave hadn’t, Will wouldn’t.