A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “It’s my job,” he told her when she commented on this change in his habits, over Thanksgiving weekend, which they’d spent alone at their apartment, eating a miniature turkey Lil had carefully roasted according to instructions in The Silver Palate Cookbook. They couldn’t afford to fly to L.A. or Atlanta—the wedding and rent had eaten up all their cash. “I’m writing about mass culture, about popular culture, not poetry, Lil. I need to know what’s going on.” Yes, Lil said, she understood that his job necessitated a certain immersion in the more banal aspects of contemporary life—though of course he seemed no longer to consider such things banal—but did he always have to be “working”? Couldn’t he read poetry on the weekends? “Lil,” he said, sighing brusquely. “I know it’s hard for you to understand. Since you were, you know, born in a bookstore.” He cracked a smile—that gorgeous, rare smile of his, which she couldn’t resist returning—and ran his hand proprietarily over her hair, a thrilling feeling. “But once you leave academia, it just starts to seem pretty irrelevant. It’s hard to get lost in a novel when you know it’s all a lie and what’s going on in the real world—the stuff I’m writing about for the magazine—is so exciting. And poetry is like . . .” He raised his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “No one actually reads poetry. We just fool ourselves into thinking it’s important.”

  “It is important!” cried Lil. Over the summer, she’d worked at the poetry organization down in Soho, answering phones. And hundreds of people had called each and every day with questions about matters related to poetry. Tuck didn’t understand that poetry could save a person’s life, had saved her life, because she wasn’t born in a bookstore. She was from L.A. Her parents sat in front of the television each night and talked about the price of gas. She wouldn’t have made it through middle school without Frank O’Hara, high school without Plath. “Tuck, it is. How can you say that?”

  “Lil, it’s not. Business is important. Money is important. Jobs. Economics. People’s day-to-day concerns. Poetry is a luxury.”

  Lil felt certain he was wrong, but couldn’t articulate why and, thus, left the matter alone, eyeing Tuck nervously when he snapped on the television and tuned the channel to some moronic sitcom, which, only a short time earlier, he and Will Chase would have declared a vicious assault on art. Perhaps she was born in a bookstore, at least in the sense that she’d learned much about life from novels. But so had Beth and Sadie. And, for that matter, Will Chase, who’d done the whole Svengali thing: married some idiot, thinking he’d turn her into an intellectual. That’s the big difference, she thought, between novels—or movies—and life. In real life, people don’t actually change.

  “So what happened,” Sadie asked her. “I thought Ed loved Tuck.”

  “He did,” Beth confirmed. She and Will regularly got together with Ed, which put her in the uncomfortable position of possibly knowing more about the situation at Boom Time than did Lil and Tuck. “He does. He didn’t fire Tuck. He’s horrified by the whole thing.”

  “Ed has no control anymore,” Lil explained, resting her cheek on her fist. “You know. They said everything would be the same.” She turned to Emily. “The First Media people.”

  “I know,” said Emily.

  “But it wasn’t.” The girls nodded, lips pursed, eyes wide with concern. They’d heard about this in the fall. How the suits at First Media—or “Worst Media,” as the Boom Time staff took to calling them—after insisting that they wanted to maintain the magazine’s “voice” and “magic,” had fired Ed’s young section editors and replaced them with warhorses from the trades, tabloids, and glossies, who had, in turn, done away with the magazine’s structure and practices, under dictate from First Media’s balding CEO. The new regime required employees to arrive by nine clad in “business casual” attire (no jeans, flip-flops, sneakers, Hawaiian-print shirts, or T-shirts with logos or writing on them; no hats, unless necessary for the practice of one’s religion). No longer could Tuck roll in at eleven, send out for coffee and breakfast, chat with Ed for half an hour (in lieu of a staff meeting), and get to work around noon. Nor could his friend Jonathan, who had a baby and a house in Nyack, arrive at eight and leave at four, to give his wife a bit of a break (even if he’d won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Gulf War). Nor could any of them, Ed included, while away an hour in the chill-out room, tossing around story ideas while reclining on plush bean bags, sipping slushies, or playing a round or two of Ms. Pac-Man or Frogger. First Media had moved the magazine from their loft at Broadway and Houston into the company’s anonymous corporate headquarters—acid green burlap cubicles, industrial carpeting—at Forty-first and Third.

  “Maybe it’s not such a bad thing,” Beth suggested. “He was really unhappy, wasn’t he?”

  “He was,” Lil admitted. And he wasn’t alone. Jonathan, whom Tuck worshipped, had taken a job at the culture desk of the Times. Others left for Boom Time’s imitators, none of which had been taken over by larger corporations (yet). Ed locked himself in his small new office all day, allegedly reading copy and writing an eternally unfinished piece about web-based film distribution, but really, Tuck suspected, succumbing, in his own odd way, to despair: obsessively posting to tech listservs and typing screeds for his old usenet board and playing some creepy fantasy game involving orcs and elves. “He could barely get out of bed in the morning, in the end. I sort of knew this was going to happen. He was late—like, an hour late—every day. I told you, right, about the ID cards.” The “Slikowskers”—as the original staffers had taken to calling themselves—had so much trouble getting to work on time that the company had installed a swipe card system. In order to get in—or out—of their offices, they had to swipe their IDs. Hours were tallied each week, with particular emphasis on lunch breaks, which could be no more than a half hour. Which was kind of absurd, seeing as under Ed’s regime, they’d happily worked twelve-hour days.

  “Yeah, it was completely fascist,” said Emily. “Remember in school they tried to do that to the dorm cleaners? There was a huge protest.”

  “I think they did it anyway,” said Sadie, picking up one of the small, hard rolls that had accompanied their soup. They loved this café—with its purposefully unhip New England clam-shack decor—and had recently decided that they also loved its neighborhood, the tiny streets south and west of Sixth Avenue—Bedford, Carmine, Downing. “Is that why he was fired? Because he was late?”

  Lil shook her head. “He got something wrong in a piece. That story about anarchists. Like, the web allows them to organize without, you know, having a central organizing body. Did you guys read it? In the December issue?”

  Sadie and Beth nodded. “Will loved it,” Beth told her.

  “Oh my God, he was reporting it for months.” Lil sighed and shook her head. “He talked to, like, a hundred people. And this one guy, he’d asked to be anonymous and Tuck used his name.” Beth looked down at her bowl. She knew, from Will, that this wasn’t nothing. “The guy complained. He’s, like, threatening to sue.”

  “Wow,” said Emily.

  “I know,” said Lil. “But the thing is they were looking to get rid of Tuck. Or that’s what he thinks. That they knew they could replace him with a twenty-two-year-old—who they could pay, like, a third of his salary.”

  “It’s probably true,” said Sadie, breaking off a piece of roll.

  “His boss was just on him all the time.” Tuck despised this woman, a severe, slate-haired middle-management type in her fifties, who didn’t, according to Tuck, get Boom Time at all. Lil had met her, just once, and trusted that this was true, but also suspected that the woman sensed Tuck’s resentment and disdain—and behaved accordingly. Tuck believed she was both jealous of him—for being young and successful—and bizarrely attracted to him. She bothered him about obscure grammatical matters, complained about his lateness, and made not-so-subtle—inappropriate, really—comments about his failure to shave on certain mornings. “I don’t know if I ever told you guys this, but back in November, one
night he left early to meet me at your play, Em, and she made this big deal about it. I guess he sort of made it out to be my fault and she said, ‘Your wife is demanding, isn’t she? Journalism is for the unattached and ambitious.’”

  “Who is she?” asked Sadie. “Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday?”

  “I know, right.” Emily laughed. “That’s crazy.”

  “Wasn’t she, like, the copy chief at Seventeen?” asked Beth. “Or that’s what Will said.”

  Lil nodded. “But she never would have gotten there if she hadn’t been unattached and ambitious,” she said, smiling wickedly. The truth was, Lil sometimes wondered if Tuck wasn’t making some of this stuff up, skewing his stories so that he seemed the victim. Tuck had terrible problems with authority. It was why, she knew, he’d never become a true star at Columbia. He didn’t get that he had to wend his way into the good graces of his superiors. He hated schmoozing with professors at cocktail parties and readings. He never went to office hours or engaged his advisors in lively discussions of current scholarship or even sought advice from them. Everyone knew academics—toiling away in their nichey salt mines, publishing papers in Eighteenth Century Studies or Gender and Hegemony—wanted to feel needed and appreciated and worshipped by their students. But Tuck made them feel the opposite: unnecessary and outmoded. Which, Lil had to admit, many of them were. But still. It was as though he was determined to lead life in the most difficult way possible, out of some misguided sense of integrity.

  He talked constantly of the new regime and the small rebellions planned and enacted by the Slikowskers. Lil listened patiently and sympathetically, but she thought she, in Tuck’s place, might change her habits and adjust her thinking to meet the demands of the new people, who were, after all, simply doing their job, the best they knew how. They were trying to make the magazine operate more like other magazines. Was there anything really so wrong with that?

  “The whole thing is so depressing,” lamented Beth. “Ed is just a wreck. He really regrets selling.”

  “Then why did he do it?” asked Sadie.

  “He needed money,” said Lil.

  “His backers were freaking out,” Beth explained. “They’re these software guys. They don’t get that magazines don’t make money overnight. They were threatening to pull the plug.”

  “Especially magazines run by people who have no idea how to run magazines,” said Sadie. Lil gave her a dark look, through lowered lids, for Ed’s lack of magazine experience was—as everyone knew—what had made Boom Time great. Ed was a visionary, a genius. At sixteen, he’d earned a modicum of fame for hacking into his high school’s computer system and rearranging students’ schedules, so that uptight AP physics students wound up in health class with dull-minded jocks and cheerleaders. The school’s guidance counselors quickly remedied the prank, but not before Ed’s goal—a Breakfast Club-style commingling of social groups—had been realized and, moreover, reporters had flocked to Pasadena, wanting to interview the techno-socialist. He’d wound up a human-interest item, in the pages of People and Time and USA Today, cheerfully opining on the vicious social structure of the modern high school and the democratizing power of the home computer. Most magazines, he’d told Lil when she’d first met him, were written by “corporate whores and yuppie porn slaves” and filled with “glorified ad copy and assorted insipid drivel.” The world was ready for stories that explored popular culture—for that was what technology was becoming, wasn’t it?—without sycophantic references to demi-celebrities and barely concealed product placement. He’d decided to run Boom Time as if it were “the first magazine to walk the earth.”

  The Times mag, in their profile, had run a photo of him at sixteen, in a green Atari T-shirt and too-long jeans, his elbow resting on a boxy Mac Plus, his cheeks, even then, covered with a dense, inky growth. Lil had loved this photo, for reasons she couldn’t explain, and she’d blushed and stammered when next she saw Ed, remembering how she’d lingered over it. The real Ed was somewhat less approachable. He always greeted Lil like an old friend, but he spoke so passionately and forthrightly and earnestly that it perpetually caught her off guard. “What do you think about this impeachment madness?” he’d asked the last time she saw him, in November, before Tuck was fired. “It’s crazy,” she’d said, stupidly, realizing that her thoughts didn’t go much deeper than that. By all rights, he should consider her an idiot. But he didn’t seem to, which made her even more uncomfortable, for this made her the recipient of his charity.

  “I think he’s going to leave,” Beth told them.

  “And do what?” asked Lil skeptically.

  “Go back to MIT, finish his Ph.D., work in the Media Lab.”

  “How could he go back?” asked Lil. She seemed almost angry. The girls looked at one another. “To Boston? To school? After running his own magazine?”

  Beth shrugged. “He’s been talking about making a movie. With Jonathan. About this company they wrote about last year. They own the rights. I think he’s working on the screenplay.”

  “A movie?” cried Lil. Her friends looked away, embarrassed by this display of emotion. Why should it matter to her if Ed left Boom Time? Though, of course, Sadie thought, she felt betrayed. Ed could leave, could go off and do whatever he liked, could rise from the ashes of his success, but Tuck had been forced out, demoralized.

  “Would Tuck go back to Columbia?” she asked.

  Lil shook her head furiously. “No, never. He thinks it’s all bullshit now.” She smiled, a bit wanly. “And I suppose it is.” They had talked of this too long and her head was beginning to ache with all that she couldn’t say. Namely, the figures that kept appearing before her eyes, the money they owed ($1,500 for rent, for December and January; $400 for Tuck’s student loans; a frighteningly high figure in credit card bills, since they’d paid for much of their wedding with plastic, rather than cede control to Lil’s parents). And the terrifying notion, which she tried to push out of her mind, that Tuck was somehow not the person she’d thought he was, someone very different from the man who’d come home from work each night during the hot summer of their engagement, peeled off his clothes, and carried her to bed, murmuring “You’re too far away” if she so much as rolled out of his arms. Everything she did, everything she said seemed to be wrong, and had been wrong since sometime in the fall, a few weeks after the wedding. But certainly it had been worse since the day Tuck was fired.

  She’d been standing at the stove, browning meat for Bolognese and panicking about a rash of late papers she needed to grade, when she heard the lock turn in the loft’s heavy front door. It couldn’t be Tuck, she thought, as it was just getting on six o’clock and he never left work before seven or, usually, eight. But it was Tuck. She knew what he had to tell her even before he’d shut the door. “Hey,” she said, taking care to keep her tone light.

  “Hello,” he responded jauntily, locking the door and rushing over to her. “Hey,” he said, and kissed her neck, wrapping his arms around her from behind, so that she could smell the faint odor of his sweat and cigarettes and something else, something sweet and slightly sickening. “You look beautiful.”

  “Hey,” she said again, stirring the meat and half turning to face him. Strands of graying hair fell lankly over his forehead—he was long overdue for a haircut—and the lids of his eyes were crepey, worn. “Is everything okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “Why do you always expect the worst?”

  “I don’t,” she said softly, willing herself not to get angry. She had so many papers to grade. She couldn’t fight with him tonight. “I don’t, sweetheart, really.”

  “Well, you’re right,” he said, swiping his hair back and letting his lips go slack. “Those fuckers,” he said, gripping her arm. “Those fuckers.”

  “Who, Tuck?” she asked, though she knew who, but maybe, maybe he was talking about something else.

  “Who do you think, Lil?” he shouted. His face was slick with sweat, t
hough it was cold out, and that faint sweetness was, she realized, whiskey. Oh God, she thought, he didn’t really stop at a bar on his way home. “Those fucking corporate bastards. They’ve been out to get me from the start, just waiting for me to make a mistake, looking for an excuse to fire me.”

  “What?” she asked, pouring tomatoes into the meat. “What happened? Please just tell me.”

  “I was fired, Lil. What do you think?” He dropped into a kitchen chair, rested his elbows on the table, and dropped his head into his hands.

  “Why don’t you take off your coat?” she said, trying to quell her anxiety. “Why don’t you let me run you a bath and fix you a cup of tea? You can just relax and I’ll finish making dinner. And then we can talk.” She turned the heat down on her sauce, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and ignited the flame under the teakettle.

  “I’m not,” said Tuck, his eyes following her movements in a way that made her freeze, both literally and metaphorically, “a five-year-old, Lil, so don’t treat me like one.”

  “Tuck, I wasn’t—”

  “I’ve. Just. Been. Fired,” he said. “I’ve just been completely humiliated.” He circled his hands in front of his face, as though words couldn’t capture the full measure of his fury and degradation. When he spoke again, his voice was a notch higher. “A cup of tea, Lil? Herbal tea, right? Because it’s too late to have any caffeine. I’d be up all night and that would be just frightful.” He grasped his cheeks in an expression of mock horror. “Thanks, but I don’t want any tea. I’d like a drink and if you had any compassion, you’d join me.”