A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Oh my God, what is wrong with me, she thought, stomping up the stairs to the apartment and snapping open the deadbolt. He’s such an asshole. And, yet, a part of her—she saw it now—thrilled to think of the hold he still had on her, that there was some vast repository of feeling within her, largely untapped during her four years in Milwaukee, when she’d spent unthinkable amounts of time alone. Hands shaking, she ripped off her jeans and sweater and bra and shrugged on an old blue T-shirt and a pair of faded flannel pajama bottoms, pulled directly out of her suitcase, and slipped back between the cool, rumpled sheets. Since her arrival in New York, she’d been sleeping endlessly, ten, eleven hours a night. Oversleeping, she’d read, was a sign of depression, but she didn’t feel depressed. Still, she could see herself through her mother’s eyes, lolling around in bed all day, unable to summon the energy even to make herself breakfast. “I’m not depressed,” she said aloud, “I’m just hungry.” And for the second time that day, she tossed back the covers, pulled on her clothes, and threaded her arms into her old suede jacket, her new cigarettes still buried, thrillingly, in the ripped left-hand pocket. Lucky Strikes, she thought, vaguely disgusted with herself, her index finger tracing the packet’s slick edge. That was Dave, too, of course. Heart lurching, she clopped down the stairs again and strode out into the bright sun, and quickly walked two blocks south to the Twin Donut, where she bought a paper cup of watery coffee, a copy of the Times, and a chocolate cruller. Thus armed, she returned, again, to her building, smiling cheerily at the old ladies taking up their posts on the sidewalk as she pulled open the heavy glass door. This was what normal people did in the morning: Read the paper. Ate doughnuts. But she was not, she reminded herself, a normal person. She was alone. Jobless. Friendless. Abandoned. In Queens.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, she thought, running up the stairs, though she knew she shouldn’t, not without her inhaler in hand. Fuck Will. Fuck Dave. Fuck Emily for telling me all that about Will. Fuck Sadie for being so fucking judgmental. And fuck fucking Gail Bronfman. A thought rose, skittishly, to the surface of her brain, slowly taking shape as she sat down at the kitchen table, her breath coming in sharp, jagged bursts, and peeled the plastic wrap off her cigarette pack. She was, she thought, incapable of trusting her instincts. She’d disliked Will when she first began talking to him—though, of course, she found him attractive—but out of politeness she’d ignored her initial impression and given him a chance. And she’d been right, hadn’t she? Yes, he was a cad and an asshole. He’d been wronged by his wife, sure, but that didn’t give him the right to be such a freak with Beth; that didn’t make it okay that he hadn’t called her. And besides, Sadie was right, he’d chosen to marry someone he barely knew, someone clearly untrustworthy and unstable. What did that say? That Beth should have steered clear of him from the start.

  But the weird thing was: the same held true for her other friends, her best friends. She’d been skeptical of them—each and every one—at first. Only Sadie had she loved from the start: her large green eyes, the thick French notebooks in which she’d jotted thoughtfully throughout Haskell’s Intro to Jewish Studies. Lil had struck her as gawky and overloquacious. Tal, quiet and remote. Emily, silly and way too cool. Dave she’d hated for the first year she knew him. During their two English classes together—101 (Approaches to Literature) and 200 (Introduction to Drama)—he was one of those guys who had to argue every point, thinking himself hilarious and brilliant. The worst of it was that others actually bought his act: he had a little following, who backed him up when he began harping on relativism and laughed at his acid jokes, tipping back on their chairs, knees against the seminar table.

  It was at the end of that year, her freshman year, that he walked up to her one day, as she sat on Wilder Bowl with Sadie and Lil, the three of them reading fresh copies of Below the Belt—the editor was handing them out to everyone on the Bowl—and said, “You hate me, don’t you?”

  “Um,” said Beth, unconvincingly. “No.”

  “Beth, meet Dave, a classic narcissist,” said Sadie. “He believes we’re sitting here talking about how much we hate him. When in fact we’ve never even uttered his name aloud.”

  Dave smirked. “Beth and I know each other. We’re in Goldstein’s Intro to Drama together. She hates me. I can tell. She gives me nasty glances every time I open my mouth. But hey—that’s fine. I’m hatable.”

  Lil rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Beth doesn’t hate you. Beth doesn’t hate anyone.” Beth felt her blood hop and jump, anger slitting along her spine. People always said that about her: Beth is so nice. Beth loves everyone. Beth whistles cheerfully to the birds who land on her windowsill each morning.

  “Um, I hate lots of people,” she’d said, surprising herself. “You’re right.” She nodded at Dave. “You kind of drive me crazy in class.” Dave laughed—a loud squawk—and plopped down next to her.

  “Aha!” he said. “My plan has worked!”

  That night, she found herself in his room, listening, alternatively, to Xenakis and Public Enemy, fiercely debating the merits of Long Day’s Journey into Night (“boring melodrama,” Dave insisted, no matter how passionately Beth attempted to explain why melodrama could be good sometimes). She spent much of the following year in a variation of that situation: sitting around Dave’s room listening to music and arguing or driving off in his dented brown Tercel, Sadie and Lil sometimes in tow (Emily and Tal always in rehearsal), in search of the Lorain Dairy Queen or the art theater in Cleveland. The others deferred to Beth—letting her sit in the front, always, where she and Dave might speak softly to each other. Other men avoided her, for she seemed to bear Dave’s imprint. He was always, in some way, around her: picking her up from class, meeting her for dinner at Tank (though he himself ate at Keep that year), reading at a table in the snack bar at the exact time she liked to pick up her mail. But he was not, most definitely, her boyfriend. He never even flirted with her in the way he did with Lil or Sadie.

  Moreover, much of his time—when not at work, or practicing—was taken up with anxious attachments to other women, women Beth and the others regarded with suspicion, all of them tiny and dolllike, with sleek dark hair and upscale Bohemian wardrobes: tattered jeans, halters made from sari fabric, low-heeled suede boots. Often they wore studs, microscopic diamonds or small flowers, of a vaguely South Asian style, in their little noses, which, Beth knew (and Lil, the expert, confirmed), had become more little by way of the surgeon’s knife. And generally they were tan in the manner of girls from the wealthier parts of Long Island or, of course, Beth’s despised hometown: a glossy, rich Caribbean brown. There was a sameness to these girls, a moneyed handsomeness enhanced by a deep-felt security in their own beauty. Dave, mercifully, rarely spoke of these women and when he did, he complained: Claudia had a Long Island accent, Alex was too clingy (“She can’t sleep alone”), Whitney was too bossy and, to his horror, cheated on him with a scruffy-headed Kurt Cobain type, the lead singer of a popular campus band with which Dave occasionally played (“Whitney,” Lil scoffed, “her name is Whitney, Dave”).

  Three days after returning to school for their junior year, he appeared outside the house Sadie, Emily, Lil, and Beth had rented, on the little road behind the art museum. They hadn’t yet hung curtains—or, the sheets of theatrical fabric, stolen from Hall Auditorium’s costume shop, that would eventually serve as curtains—and Beth, unpacking books in her second-floor room, saw him gazing up in her direction and knew that something had changed, not just in him but in herself. The next day, as they walked home from the gym after registration, it began to rain and they ducked under a tree, where, somehow, he managed to pull her close to him and, after much fumbling with cheeks and noses, kiss her, a sensation at once deeply, perfectly right, and strangely, frighteningly, utterly wrong. He had, he told her late that night, as they lay in her bed, wanted to kiss her from the moment he saw her sitting in the lounge of Talcott—a turreted, Victorian dorm—reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh while waiting for their
English class to begin. “You looked like Holly Hobbie,” he told her. “Um, is that a compliment?” she asked, laughing. “Of course,” he said, too quickly. “You have those beautiful, full lips”—his voice quavered uncomfortably on this compliment—“and your freckles . . .” She wanted to believe him—about everything—but she wasn’t sure she did. A niggling voice told her that he’d settled for her.

  A year later, Dave left his battered journal—an old black sketchbook—open on her desk and she peeked inside. “There’s something too pliant and languorous about her,” he explained, with the aid, Beth thought, of a thesaurus. “There’s something that bothers me about her. It’s as though she’s too vulnerable. Too soft. With those plump cheeks, like a kid. And yet, I wonder if this is what attracted me to her in the first place.” Reading his misgivings gave her a strange sense of relief. She’d been right all along—she wasn’t crazy. For some reason, after she and Dave became boyfriend and girlfriend—rather than simply friends—she had lost her ability to question him, to call him on his bullshit, to engage him in any sort of real discussion. She became increasingly afraid of him, she realized now, sipping her too-sweet coffee, or afraid of losing him. Why? And how had she never realized this before, in all the hours she’d spent dissecting their romance?

  She placed a cigarette in her mouth, fumbling a bit with the pack (how did you get one out, they were packed in so tightly), lit it from the stove, and inhaled deeply. A pleasant little hum started up between her ears. She exhaled, giggling slightly. She hadn’t coughed, like a priss in a teen movie, like her friends would have expected. No, like Dave would have expected. He’d loved to see her as a bumbling, frail child. And she’d played into that, hadn’t she? She had, in a way, become that person—too soft, too vulnerable—so as not to disappoint him.

  After the cigarette, the coffee, the cruller, Beth’s panic subsided and was replaced by a dull, faraway ache behind her eyes and a restless twitch in her fingers. When the phone rang, her heart leapt and she jumped up to answer it, then thought better of it and slumped down in her chair again. Her parents had returned from California the night before and it was most likely her mother, asking when they might expect her for a visit. She missed her mother and was looking forward to sitting down and talking to her—in theory. Just now, the gulf between them seemed too, too wide. How could she tell her about Will? About her lost job? Her wrecked finances? The mess she’d seemingly made of everything. The mere thought of going home increased the throbbing in her head: she couldn’t bear to picture the train, the quaint train station, the sloping lawns scattered now with rust-colored leaves, the ice cream shop in Scarsdale Village. The phone rang twice more and she heard her own voice—annoyingly breathy and a tad nasal—say, “Hi, this is Beth. I’m not home—” then ran into the next room and held her thumb to the volume button until she was left in a silence so welcome that she began, giddily, to laugh.

  four

  In December, Tuck lost his job at Boom Time. He was certain, Lil said, to find a similar job, and quick, at a similar magazine, like Fast Company or Bubble Economy, or Salon or Slate or Feed, or a portal like Yahoo! or Google, which was where the real money was, or even at an ad agency or branding firm or something.

  “Could Tuck really do that?” asked Beth. It was difficult to imagine anyone she knew working in advertising, a soulless, ethically dodgy industry, which she’d taught her students in Milwaukee to dissect.

  “Totally. The new companies operate on a different business model,” Lil told her, missing the point. They were shivering their way through bowls of crab bisque at the Grey Dog, with Sadie and Emily, on the first Saturday of the New Year. “They’re not looking for MBAs or whatever. They just want smart people who have new, exciting ideas.” Her friends nodded dutifully, their cheeks still reddened with cold. “I mean, I’m not excited that he was fired, but I guess, it’s like: if you’re going to be fired once in your life, this is probably the time.”

  “You’re so right,” said Beth, leaning in toward Lil. “Will keeps wondering if he should go to a dot-com.”

  “Would he do that?” asked Sadie, blotting her nose with an oversized handkerchief. “He seems so entrenched in the Journal.” Sadie’s mother disliked the Journal’s politics—despite appearances, she was a staunch Democrat—and sniffed disapprovingly when she caught James Peregrine reading it.

  Beth shrugged. “His friend Ben just got a job at this new site, Law.com, and he’s making like a zillion dollars.”

  “What is it? A magazine?”

  Again, Beth shrugged. “I’m not sure. They haven’t launched yet. Apparently, Ben has, like, nothing to do. He writes freelance pieces all day.” She blew, halfheartedly, on a spoonful of soup. “It’s just so weird. Jason tells us the most crazy stories about Stanford—”

  “That’s where the guys who started Yahoo! are from, right?” interrupted Lil. “Weren’t they Stanford students?”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” said Beth, “but Jason says there are so many start-ups that there aren’t enough people to staff them. So they’re recruiting freshmen. So, like, these eighteen-year-old guys are dropping out of school and making these huge salaries. Jason says they come back to campus for parties, and they’re, like, driving Maseratis.”

  Emily gave a low laugh. “Can you imagine?” she said. “Weren’t we all, like, eating ramen when we were eighteen?”

  “Beans and rice,” Lil corrected. “At Fairchild.”

  “Oh, right,” said Emily, cocking her head to one side. “That’s now. That I’m eating ramen. I can’t afford beans and rice.”

  “Me, either,” said Beth. She was still waiting to hear from Gail Bronfman—as well as the Gail Bronfmans of NYU, Hunter, Brooklyn College, and Baruch—about teaching in the spring semester, which was starting soon, so soon that she was sure nothing would come through and she would have to—well, she didn’t know. Work as an SAT tutor. Copyedit. Temp. Ask her parents for money. Or, as Will kept suggesting, write for magazines. She’d just, with an introduction from him, sent on a brief section of her dissertation, on the annual Dark Shadows conference in Pasadena, to an editor at Salon—and to her shock had received a brief, kind note saying they’d like to run it. She’d been debating the right time to tell her friends. If she mentioned it before the piece was thoroughly, truly, completely published, she worried she might jinx the whole affair, causing it to disappear into thin air. Now, with this bad news about Tuck, she thought she might not tell them at all. For she knew Lil. Lil would take it as an affront: Beth infringing on Tuck’s territory.

  “Well, so are we,” said Lil. “I kind of love ramen, actually. Though it’s so bad for you.”

  “Maybe Tuck’s next job will be better,” suggested Emily.

  A too-bright smile appeared on Lil’s face. “I was thinking the exact same thing! Salon would be great, wouldn’t it? He’s perfect for them.”

  Her friends nodded. “Yes, definitely,” Beth agreed. No, she would say nothing about her piece. “I can’t believe they fired him right before Christmas. They could have waited until after the holidays, at least. It just seems so cruel.”

  “I know! It was awful.” Lil had barely touched her soup. “Everyone else in the world was buying presents and, like, flying to the Bahamas, and we were afraid to buy coffee.”

  “That sucks,” agreed Emily.

  “I know,” cried Lil, pushing a heavy lock of hair behind her ear. “The worst thing, though, was that we were completely paralyzed, because all the magazines pretty much shut down between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Nobody does any hiring.”

  Sadie, who had remained quiet all this time, neatly sipping her soup from the side of her spoon, now sighed heavily. “Of course,” she said, in such a way that it wasn’t clear whether she meant of course no one does any hiring around the holidays, what kind of fool would think otherwise, or of course Lil and Tuck had been dealt a wretched hand by fate, or of course Tuck believed himself to have been dealt a wretched hand by fate, wh
en in fact he had clearly, obviously, of course, brought about his own bad fortune by being an egotistical ass.

  Lil chose to believe the first. She nodded seriously at Sadie. “So there was no way he could even begin looking until last week. I think it was driving him crazy, feeling like there was nothing he could do.”

  All of this was, of course, exactly what Tuck had told her, a week or so prior, when she’d timidly asked how the job search was going. “Lil, come on,” he’d said. “They’ll think I’m an idiot if I send out my résumé now.” He was lying on their couch—a low velvet thing they’d purchased at Ugly Luggage for $350—reading Wired, its lurid orange and silver spine glaring at her. Eighteen months earlier, when she’d first met him, Tuck had carried around battered volumes of poetry—Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Randall Jarrell—in an old army surplus bag. Now he professed himself incapable of focusing on the minutiae of verse. He read magazines and watched television.