A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Lil, by this point, had flattened herself against the counter and averted her eyes from his. “No, thanks, not right now,” she said, though she was thinking, Why did I bother to make dinner? I could have been grading my L&R papers. “I’m okay. If you’re not going to take a bath—”

  “Lil, what is wrong with you?” Tuck shouted, banging his fist down on top of the kitchen counter. Lil opened her mouth but said nothing. Was there something wrong with her? Did she lack compassion? “You think this is all my fault, don’t you?” His voice was lower now, ragged from shouting. “Well, you’re wrong. They were itching to fire someone, to make someone an example, and it just happened to be me. I happened to be the asshole who got stuck slaving for that pathetic bitch. And you can’t, you can’t have a drink with me, like a normal human being? What is wrong with you? Why do you always blame me?”

  At this, Lil burst into tears, for he was right, he was right, he was always right. Deep down, she did blame him. “I’m sorry,” she said, through sobs. “I didn’t know how bad it was for you. I’m so sorry. It’s just, I have so much to do. I’m so tired. I have like fifty papers to grade and I made dinner—”

  But it was too late. He was beyond consolation, possessed by some sort of wild, rigid fury. “I didn’t ask you to make dinner,” he screamed. “What is wrong with you? If you have papers to grade, grade them. Don’t make dinner.”

  “But we have to eat,” she said, or shouted, for she was angry now, too. What was wrong with him? Why did he always act as though everything was her fault? “What would we eat for dinner if I didn’t cook?” Didn’t he see that this was the point of being married? To eat dinner together, to make a life together, out of small things.

  “Why do you have to be such a bitch?” he asked, grabbing a bottle of scotch, uncapping it—keeping his eyes on her, as if daring her to react—and tipping a slug of liquid into his throat, then exhaling dramatically, like a movie outlaw. “Why?” he asked. “I don’t get it.” And the sad, quiet way in which he asked this question—as though he really wanted to know the answer; and as though an answer were truly possible, as if she might say, “Well, Tuck, you see, I received this special training from an institute in Uzbekistan”—stung her more, somehow, than all his shouting and sarcasm, for she could see that he really meant it. He really thought she was being purposefully unkind, undermining, castrating, whatever. But she could not answer, and so she watched, fighting more tears as he wiped his lips with his hand, and stalked heavily into the bedroom, closing the door behind him with a resonant thud.

  “So, is this why you didn’t go away for Christmas?” Sadie asked her. Emily had gone up to the counter to get them coffee and a cookie.

  Lil nodded. She’d seen Sadie at New Year’s—the Peregrines’ annual party—and not said a word.

  “Were your parents upset?” asked Beth. Will, to all of their shock, had taken her home for Christmas. Sam had been with his mother’s family, in California.

  “Not really.” Lil smiled. “You know they hate the holidays.” Lil’s parents both reviled Christmas and rejected Hanukkah, which they viewed as an invented holiday and “too much fuss.” Still, Lil and Tuck had planned to visit them in December—spending the twenty-fifth, as per one of the Roths’ few traditions, at the Golden Panda on Melrose—and then head to Atlanta, for a few days with Tuck’s mom, over New Year’s. But they’d waited to buy their tickets, which they thought they’d pay for with Tuck’s bonus, rumored to be handed out in cash on the twenty-third. But fate—or Tuck’s boss—had intervened three days before that date and there had been no bonus, which meant there had been no trip. And though her parents weren’t terribly upset, they were baffled that Lil canceled so late. “Are the tickets refundable?” her father asked. “Um, we don’t actually have tickets,” Lil told him. “How were you planning on getting here?” he asked gruffly. Her father would have made the arrangements back in September, perhaps cashing in some of his many frequent-flier miles. He would have planned the whole trip long before Thanksgiving, from car rentals to guidebooks to restaurants. This was part of it, Tuck’s inability to plan. He was, it seemed, incapable of thinking beyond the next five minutes. When he was hungry, he wanted to eat immediately. Or, as with his job, if he wanted to sleep, he simply slept. He was a child. And she’d thought him, when they met, so grown-up, so different from Dave and Tal and the other men she knew, who all seemed spindly and adolescent by comparison.

  “I think I was more disappointed than they were,” she said, dropping an irregular lump of brown sugar into her coffee. It was true. Her parents, typically, seemed more annoyed at the inconvenience of her canceling than disappointed that they wouldn’t get to see their only child at the holidays. But then Lil hadn’t been particularly looking forward to seeing them, either. Her visits home always devolved into arguments—“What are you going to do with a Ph.D.? Work in a coffee shop?”—which ended with Lil slamming the door to her childhood room and hiding therein for hours, thumbing through old copies of Sassy, just as she had in adolescence. As a child she’d wondered if she was adopted—a fantasy she now recognized as commonplace and clichéd—and that her real parents, quiet and dignified, might swoop in and save her from the Roths, who in turn existed in a state of rankled perplexity at their bookish daughter. (Did she really not want a nose job? Did she really not want to spend Saturday at the Beverly Center?) She wasn’t sure, in retrospect, why she’d wanted to go home, other than to show Tuck off, to show them that she’d succeeded, if not in the way they’d wanted her to. “I was really needing to get out of the city.”

  “But you got to go to Rose Peregrine’s fabulous partay,” said Emily. She’d gone down to North Carolina for the holidays. “You guys were, like, doing lines off the coffee table, right?”

  “Of course,” said Sadie. “But we stopped when the hookers arrived. They get so greedy.”

  “It was fun?” asked Beth earnestly.

  “It was fun,” Lil confirmed. In fact, it was the promise of the party that had sustained her, in a way, on that awful night, while Tuck stayed locked in their room and she finished dinner—boiled the penne, compiled a pale, perfect salad that she knew would not be eaten, at least not that night. Tuck would find another job, a better job, she told herself, as she peeled cucumber and tore apart the cool leaves of a Boston lettuce. Or, if he didn’t, she would convince him to go back to Columbia, which would, in a way, be better. They would have less money—much less—but he would become Tuck again, the man who could spend hours talking about the prosody of Gerard Manley Hopkins and why Charles Simic was a fraud, which she would infinitely prefer to a fifteen-hundred-square-foot loft and a trip home to L.A. And it would be fun to be in New York over the holidays. They could do New York things, touristy things—the storefronts of Fifth Avenue, the skating rink in Central Park—and, for the first time, attend the Peregrines’ party, which, to Lil, had taken on a sort of mythic status. She envisioned the Peregrine place lit gauzily by candles, flowers springing from oversized vases, chattering masses of Peregrines dressed in black.

  But when she pictured herself among her beloved Peregrines, she saw herself alone. She could easily imagine the party, like others she’d attended, but more festive, more fancy. She would wear the navy wool sheath she’d just found at Beacon’s Closet, a Dior from the sixties, which was surely worth more than she’d paid for it, and sip Prosecco from a slender flute, her back warmed from the parlor fire as she chatted with Rose Peregrine or Sadie’s aunt Minnie, whom she loved, a cranky old socialist. She tried to insert Tuck into the picture, to no avail. Though she could, without effort, imagine arguing with him about going to the party. She had seen it happen countless times. He would agree to go, then, when the night arrived, say, “Where is it again? All the way up there? Isn’t it just going to be a lot of old people?” And then there would be the assertions that the Peregrines hated him, everyone hated him, everyone was against him, even those whom he’d met for all of a moment. And on and on, so th
at it would come as a relief when he said, at last, that she should just go alone.

  Oh God, she’d thought, putting down her knife. Before her lay the remains of a red pepper, its delicate seeds clinging to the counter. This is bad. And an impulse came over her: to take off her white chef’s apron and walk out the door, to go to Emily’s or, really, Sadie’s. Sadie could make sense of all this. But Sadie was always with Tal now. Lil had barely seen her since the wedding. And she didn’t want to talk to Tal, nor did she want to talk to Tal and Sadie together, a smugly happy couple, offering advice to their troubled friend. How could they understand anyway? In choosing each other they’d taken the easy route, the path of common understanding. There would be no arguments of this sort between them. They knew each other completely.

  Just then, the phone emitted its shrill digital chirp, a sound Lil hated, and she rushed back to the study—they didn’t yet have a phone in the kitchen—certain that Sadie was on the other end, that she’d summoned her with her thoughts. By the time she’d arrived at her desk, the ringing had stopped. Tuck must have picked it up in the bedroom. She heard faint murmuring through the closed door, then Tuck’s boisterous laugh. “Hey, honey,” he called. “Lillian? Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” she said, in a small, choked voice. She wasn’t prepared to face him. Tuck opened the bedroom door with one long arm and smiled at her, the portable phone cradled under his left ear.

  “Hello,” he said, softly, with a crooked smile. “It’s Rob. He’s wondering if we want to come over and have a drink with him and Caitlin.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lil, the words sounding wobbly and wrong to her. “I don’t really feel like going out right now. And I’ve already made dinner.”

  “No, later. After dinner. Maybe at nine or nine thirty. Caitlin’s not even home yet.”

  “They don’t want to come here?” Lil desperately did not want to go out, did not want to walk through the cold wind on Metropolitan all the way to the Green-Golds’ dingy flat. But she knew she should agree. This was Tuck’s way of apologizing. “We still have all that leftover wine from the wedding.”

  “No, they want us to come there. Caitlin’s really tired. Today’s her heavy day: three classes. And Rob’s baked a pie.”

  “Okay,” whispered Lil, forcing herself to smile. Rob’s pies were disgusting. “That sounds great. I’m going to go check on the pasta.”

  “Okay, I’ll have a quick shower.” He turned back to the phone. “You still there, Robby?” Lil shut the door and went back to the kitchen.

  Lil always forgot about Rob and Caitlin in cataloging her friends, as they didn’t fit neatly into any particular category, and yet she and Tuck generally regarded the fact of the couple’s existence as a happy accident, a sign that the Roth-Hayes were meant—if not fated—to be together. Rob Gold was a childhood friend of Tuck’s, who’d dropped out of Bard to trek through Asia, then resurfaced a few years later in Portland, Oregon, living in a squat and heading up some sort of anarchist group. It was he who had tipped Tuck off to the story that had gotten him in so much trouble.

  Lil, meanwhile, knew Caitlin Green from Oberlin. Like Lil and Sadie and Beth, Caitlin had studied English—the four of them, in fact, were the only women selected for the Honors seminar their senior year. Her parents taught biology at Haverford or Swarthmore, someplace Quaker, and her early and prolonged exposure to academe had lent her a too-warm sense of her own intellectual superiority and sophistication, which, in turn, led her to regard her fellow students with unconcealed disdain. She adopted a world-weary pose in all her classes, even the Honors seminar, resting her round cheek on one black-nailed fist, sighing whenever someone asked a question she found particularly elementary, and periodically trying to catch the professor’s eye, so the two might commiserate over these sad products of the American education system, who didn’t fully grasp Bataille’s concept of sovereignty. Her field of specialty was “queer theory” and she habitually accused professors and peers alike of “unconscious gender bias” and such, when not organizing rallies for the LGB union and “students of color,” though she herself was neither gay nor visibly ethnic. If questioned, she said that she was bisexual and that Jews were “the original persons of color.”

  In college, Lil had hated Caitlin, particularly after she launched a campaign against George Wadsworth, Lil’s and Sadie’s advisor, whom she considered dangerously misogynistic (“Why,” she shouted, on Tappan Square, “are there only four women in Honors English?”), but she seemed to have changed, matured, in the ensuing years, during which she’d met and married Rob, who was slight, and odd, and serious. His latest project was a nonprofit aimed at curbing the prison industry, which Lil had not really seen as “burgeoning” and “sinister” until Rob explained it all to her—that prisons were now run by private companies, which had, of course, a profit motive for getting as many people as possible behind bars. A week after their wedding, she and Tuck had run into the couple on Bedford and discovered the coincidence of their mutual acquaintance. Caitlin had lost weight. She was now gaunt (but still, Lil noted, wide-hipped) and her eyes were smeary with dark circles, which lent her face a hollow, exhausted look that, Lil decided, was strangely sexy, as though Caitlin had traveled many places and done many things.

  “Will you guys be okay?” Beth asked as they finished their coffee. They were both restless and reluctant to step out into the cold. “Did he get severance?”

  “He did,” said Lil. “But it’s getting hard. We just have to find ways to cut back.”

  “I’m sure Caitlin Green can help with that,” said Sadie. The Green-Golds lived like monks, making do with almost nothing, in a dingy railroad apartment they’d cordoned off into small, nooklike rooms, subsisting on various grains and nuts and legumes, and riding their bikes around the city rather than taking the train or a taxi.

  Lil rolled her eyes. “I know. We went over there the night Tuck was fired.”

  Her friends let out a chorus of groans.

  “I was a wreck. And I was stupidly honest with her.” She paused, unsure if she should speak honestly again. “I told her our apartment was too expensive and that this was going to push us over the edge.”

  “What did she say?” asked Sadie. “That you should become vegan?”

  “Yes!” marveled Lil. Sadie shrugged. “She’s just too much. She was like”—Lil adopted Caitlin’s ripe vowels—“‘It’s unbelievable how much you can drop on cow pus alone.’”

  “Cow pus?” queried Beth, her mouth bunched in revulsion.

  “Milk,” Emily told her.

  “And I told her I love milk. I just can’t imagine giving it up. And she said, ‘Dairy cows are raped, like, twelve times a day.’”

  “Even the organic ones?” asked Beth skeptically.

  “That’s exactly what I said,” cried Lil, turning her palms upward. “She says even the organic ones.” Lil sighed. “They only spend forty dollars a week on food.”

  “Well, that’s not hard when all you eat is beans and rice,” said Emily.

  “True,” said Sadie, with a roll of her eyes. But Lil felt there was something admirable about such frugality, though in Rob and Caitlin’s case, it seemed slightly histrionic, because Rob was rich. Truly rich. His father owned half of Atlanta and all of Richmond. Their apartment was studded with heavy bureaus and thick rugs and oils of long-nosed ancestors filched from his great-grandfather’s Rhinebeck “cottage.” It was all a game to them. They could live on nothing but get married on Baldhead Island. They could eat beans but buy Hindu Kush.

  This should have made their choices seem more heroic—they had simply opted out of conspicuous consumption—but for Lil it only made them seem less so, a childish pretense, their convictions mere self-righteousness. And Tuck’s infatuation all the more galling, particularly when he held Lil up to their model for comparison—and, of course, found her lacking. “Everything is in its place,” Tuck liked to say, almost angrily, after visiting the Green-Golds. �
��Their apartment is small, but they’ve made the best of it. They use every bit of space.” Or “They don’t have piles of shoes and books lying around. Did you see Caitlin’s desk? There was nothing on it.” Lil’s own desk, at any given time, was covered in mounds of papers—Xeroxed articles, drafts of her own papers, student essays, coupons, receipts, Post-it notes with scrawled reminders on them, gum and candy wrappers, dog-eared legal pads containing her copious notes for her dissertation proposal, grocery lists, to-do lists, recipes clipped from the Dining In section.

  “I would have run out of there screaming,” said Emily.

  “I did, kind of.” Lil pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I was so tired, I just felt like I couldn’t stay awake another minute. It was kind of crazy. I told them I had to go home, I had all these papers to grade, but Caitlin, of course, was like, ‘I have papers to grade, too. We can go to the L tomorrow and just plow through them.’”

  “As if you can’t grade papers alone,” said Beth, contemplating the remains of their cookie. “That’s just weird.”

  “I know! It was too much”—she paused, unsure whether her friends would think her actions deranged—“and I just kind of left.”

  “You didn’t say good-bye?” asked Sadie, starting to laugh.

  “I couldn’t! I just had to get out of there.”

  “Wow,” said Emily. “Good for you.”

  What she didn’t tell them was that Tuck had come running after her, furious, shouting her name down the block. At the corner of Marcy he’d caught up with her and made to grab her arm. “Don’t touch me,” she’d shouted, in a voice she didn’t recognize, low and tear-choked. “Don’t talk to me like that,” he’d shouted back. “I’m your husband. Do you not love me anymore? Because it doesn’t seem like it.” But before she could answer, an electronic ring pierced the air between them: her new cell phone, obtained for her, against her wishes, by Tuck, who’d become umbilically attached to his own since starting at Boom Time. She fished it out of her pocket and pressed the talk button. “Hello?” she said, the word emerging more as a question.