A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “Oh, brilliant,” said Tom Satville, dipping his head in delight. He had, Lil thought, a faint British accent. “Most undergrads write on Plath or Dickens.”

  “I know,” cried Lil, declining to mention that she’d written on Plath, though obscure Plath—the early landscape poems, really quite Audenesque, not “Daddy” and all that.

  “Which one is Sadie, again?” the agent asked brightly. “I can’t believe we haven’t met. She’s Delores Rosenzweig’s assistant, right?”

  “Sadie, come here,” Lil called loudly, by way of an answer. “We’re talking about you. Sadie.” With visible reluctance, Sadie pulled herself away from Ed Slikowksi, who held in his hands, Lil saw now, a bowl of the spiced nuts Sadie loved. “Sadie, this is Tom Satville. He works with Kapklein.”

  “Oh, hello,” said Sadie, with a nod of her neat head. She knew Lil wanted her to say something brisk and professional, like, “Sadie Peregrine. I’m Tuck’s editor.” That was, of course, why Lil had called her over here, to instigate a frenzied professional discussion of the sort Lil disproportionately loved. Under normal circumstances, Sadie had no aversion to shop talk, but she was not in the mood for it tonight. This whole party—the huge deal Lil was making about Tuck’s contract, before he’d even signed the thing—made her nervous, for it only underscored the extent to which Tuck’s fate—and, by extension, Lil’s fate—lay in Sadie’s hands, a power she wasn’t quite sure she wanted, in part because, as of now, she didn’t have very much power, still being a serf in Delores Rosenzweig’s increasingly ineffectual fiefdom. An influential serf, sure, since Delores had largely checked out lately, to the extent that Sadie was essentially doing her job for her, but a serf nonetheless, with a whimsical and strange and anxious ruler, who often reneged on agreements and meted out unfair and illogical criticism or punishments.

  There was promise of escape, though. The previous week, Sadie had been summoned for a talk with Val, her publisher, who had congratulated her on finding Tuck’s book—“Delores would have never even looked at that New Economy stuff”—and told her that as of July 1, she would be an associate editor (not assistant but associate, which meant a sort of double promotion) overseeing a new series of novels by writers under the age of thirty-five called “Fast-Forward Fiction,” a title clearly devised by a team of marketers who still listened to their Creedence Clearwater Revival or whatever on cassette tape. “If you can sit tight for a few more weeks, we’ll make it official,” said Val, with a tight smile. “It’s not official?” asked Sadie. Val shook her head. “It is. We just haven’t told Delores yet. So, please, not a word to anyone. We don’t want Delores to hear about it from anyone other than me.” “Of course,” Sadie told her, “I completely understand.” And she did—no one wanted to upset Delores—but she also didn’t. Why must they all be, perpetually, in Delores’s thrall? And, more important, if Delores put up a fight—as she might, for she’d certainly realized how dependent she was on Sadie—would they retract the promotion? This didn’t seem out of the question.

  Sadie glanced at Lil, who looked anxious and weary, despite her constant proclamations of joy about Tuck’s book. The joy, Sadie thought, had been a bit too long coming, which was why Sadie had concocted her little plan. Though she’d failed to take into account the fact that she’d now have to work closely with Tuck, about whom she was still a bit too ambivalent. Sometimes she found him funny and charming, with a sly, satirical eye, and she wondered why she’d wasted so much energy disliking him. Just as often, though, she was disgusted by his overabundance of pride, which his dismissal from Boom Time had exacerbated rather than cured. Sadie didn’t doubt his affection for Lil, but she found something unnerving in his need to marry her immediately, and in the way, now, he made such a big show of her being his wife—his arm always draped heavily around her—never mind that he was eternally abandoning her, refusing to come with her on New Year’s Eve or, now, allowing her to be cornered by this smarmy guy, with his thin, reptilian lips and his ersatz British affectations (a tweed jacket in June?), who was now blathering to Lil about the decline of the novel, but peering at Sadie expectantly, an ironic smile twitching at his jowls. He reminded Sadie of some sort of desert mole, with his dark, tiny eyes, blinking behind microscopic, rimless spectacles, his skin nearly the same colorless brown as his hair.

  “So you worked with Kappy at Random House?” he asked, turning to her.

  “I did,” she said, offering him, unthinkingly, a small grin. He was, she thought, the sort of fellow who would be easy to win over and hard to dismiss. Better to get away quick. Toward the back of the loft, she spotted Tal, leaning against the kitchen counter and glumly sipping a beer. He’d been acting strangely since Thursday, when his agent had given him the good news. In fact, he hadn’t wanted to come tonight. “You go by yourself,” he’d told her. “You haven’t seen any of them in ages.” It was true. She had been spending all her time with Tal. She hated to admit it—hated to think what it might signify about herself—but she couldn’t stand to be apart from him. At work, as she drafted letters and thumbed through manuscripts and checked on contracts and answered the phone, a low buzz, a sort of vibration, enveloped her body—she imagined it as a circle of wavy lines, the sort that connote electrocution in the old Warner Bros. cartoons—rising in volume and intensity as the day progressed, so that by six o’clock, her need to see him, to feel him and smell him, was as physical and unignorable as the need to breathe or sneeze. It wasn’t sex exactly. But she wasn’t sure what it was.

  “Will you excuse me for just a moment?” she said, rattling the ice cubes in her plastic cup. “I’m afraid it’s time to—”

  “Her entire family talks like that,” Lil said.

  “No, they don’t,” she said, giving them a small wave and turning toward the kitchen. Here it comes, she thought. And, yes, a moment later, Lil’s voice came at her.

  “They’re kind of an old New York family, but in the Jewish way. Like in Laurie Colwin?”

  Sadie’s family was a favorite topic with Lil, who imagined the Peregrines to be terribly special and genteel and charming, playing chess on long winter nights, arguing about subjects intellectual, engaging in quaint customs at the holidays. To some extent this was true—or sort of true—but that didn’t necessarily make them fun, and regardless, Sadie disliked having her life read back to her, transmogrified into mythology. But that was Lil, making myths out of accidents, deciding that, say, the sidecar was “our drink” or Von was “our bar” or even determining that their little circle of friends constituted a “set” (a word she appeared to have gleaned from Gatsby), when in reality they were just a bunch of people who were friends in college (though equally friends with other people, like Maya Decker and Abe Hausman) and had ended up living together, and thus grown close. But to Lil, the very groupness of their little group was as important as the individual friendships that comprised it. Sadie knew, of course, the reason for this: that Lil felt herself an alien in her own brash family and, thus, sought a sort of hysterical comfort in her friends—not to mention Sadie’s own family. And Lil’s parents, from the little Sadie had seen of them, were indeed a bit horrible, but then so were Sadie’s own. Lil just never saw that side of them, never saw the ways in which Rose could be cruel and controlling, and James silent and remote.

  By raising the volume on her “excuse me’s,” and pushing aggressively on the elbow of a young man whose muttonchop sideburns curled fiendishly toward each other, Sadie managed to make it to the kitchen area, where she wove in and out of the various bodies opening and closing and drinking from bottles of wine and beer and liquor, and, at last, wrapped her arms around Tal’s narrow waist and looked up into his face. It was an odd face. The mouth too wide. The nose long, sharp, like one of Picasso’s women. The whole thing just slightly too compressed, too small for his long body. He would never be a leading man, though it wasn’t clear to her—even after all the years she’d known him, the long nights talking, the dark walks around campus, y
ears back—if he wanted to be. His latest round of headshots, she supposed, supplied the answer: a three-quarter view, which minimized the slope of his nose, his dark eyes gazing stormily at the camera from lowered lids. “It’s your George Clooney shot,” she’d told him. “My agent picked it,” he’d said with a shrug.

  “Hey,” he said to her now, flatly. Who knew how long he’d been standing here on his own, half crushed against the counter, waiting for her or Dave to come rescue him from abject boredom.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, yeah.” He untwined her arms from him, put his bottle down on the counter, and stretched his arms up over his head, yawning. “Dave and I were talking about getting something to eat.”

  “You don’t want to see the band?” To her left they were setting up, laying out a complicated network of wires and amps.

  He shook his head. “They suck.”

  “Okay.” Though she wasn’t sure she needed one, she began making herself another drink: fresh ice, slosh of bourbon, cherry juice. “Are you heading out now?”

  “Soon.” He turned to face her. “Do you want to come with us?”

  She took a sip. Too sweet. “You guys should do your guy thing. Drink beer. Eat hamburgers. Talk about football.”

  “I think it’s baseball season.” He turned to face her, hunching over the counter.

  “I’m impressed that you know that.”

  “Well, I’m not sure, actually.” He smiled.

  “Okay,” she said, sighing. Against her will, she felt wounded by this small abandonment. Stupid, stupid, she thought. She saw him almost every night. But in a couple of weeks he’d be in L.A. and she had a suspicion he wouldn’t be coming back.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, perhaps too curtly. “I have brunch. Then I’ve got to work.”

  From behind her, Lil and Tom Satville materialized, grabbing tall bottles of wine and sniffing them.

  “A gewürztraminer,” Tom Satville cried.

  “Sadie brought that,” Lil responded, clapping her hands and shooting Sadie a look of amazement, which Sadie chose to ignore. “Is it one of your dad’s?” Lil pressed.

  “No.” Sadie caught Tal’s eye. “It’s from the wine shop on Court Street. The one that looks kind of ghetto. With the bulletproof glass.” She turned to Tom Satville. “Have you met Tal?”

  “Sadie’s dad collects wine and sometimes he gives us his castoffs,” Lil confided. “Her parents are amazing.”

  “Amazing,” said Tal, nodding.

  Lil ignored him. “Tell Tom about your mother,” she instructed.

  “What about my mother?” she asked, though she knew full well what Lil wanted—tales of the wacky Peregrine clan, straight from the annals of Salinger. Why don’t we talk about your family, she sometimes wanted to say, for she knew Lil had funny stories about her father’s practice—the aging porn star who wanted to up her cup size to J (Dr. Roth had refused, saying breasts of such magnitude would be disproportionate to her height—five two); the lingerie model who’d asked for fat to be sucked from her pubic area, because it “puffed out too much” (on this, he had obliged)—and her general rearing in Los Angeles, a city of vast mystery and fascination to New Yorkers. “My mother’s really not that interesting,” she said, with a yawn.

  Lil rolled her eyes. “Sadie,” she complained, shaking her head. “Sadie’s mother is the most amazing woman. She’s actually from Greenpoint! She grew up there, in the fifties.”

  “The forties, actually,” said Sadie, smiling at Tal, who shook his head. He didn’t share Lil’s adoration of her mother, which came as something of a relief to Sadie.

  “The forties?” said Tom Satville skeptically. “She must have had you late in life.”

  “She was forty-two,” confirmed Sadie. “It was scandalous at the time. Everyone used to think my dad was my grandfather.”

  “You must have older siblings,” the man said, rather presumptuously, she thought. She was used to this question, and yet it always bothered her. The funny thing was, now it was perfectly normal for people to have kids in their forties. And yet everyone always acted like it was just bizarre that her parents were two generations removed. “Are you one of many?”

  “I have a brother. A half brother.” She refrained from mentioning that this brother was dead. For this, in fact, was how her parents had met: Her father’s child from his first marriage, a boy named Ellison, arrived at the Dalton infirmary—where her mother, widowed by the Korean War, doled out aspirin and bismuth—complaining of a headache. Thirty hours later he was dead of meningitis. Or something like it. Sadie wasn’t exactly clear on this, the disease itself. She’d never asked and neither of her parents had ever volunteered the grim particulars, not even Ellison’s age at his death. Her father’s first marriage hadn’t survived the tragedy. The story came to her from her aunt Dora, her father’s sister, after Sadie happened upon some photos in a drawer (a beautiful boy, with her own deep-set eyes), and was later confirmed by her cousin Bab, in London. Sadie herself hated mentioning this brother, for what did she have to say about him but that he was dead. She hadn’t known him, nor had her parents told her anything about him—and yet it seemed somehow dishonest to say she had no siblings.

  “But the thing about Sadie’s mom,” Lil went on, though it seemed to Sadie that Tom Satville was not particularly interested in hearing about Sadie’s mother, of all people, “is that she’s brilliant. When she was young she looked like Joan Fontaine. Do you remember her? From Hitchcock? Vivian Leigh’s sister. And she’s still gorgeous now.”

  “She is,” confirmed Tal. “She’s like something from a different era.”

  “She is,” Sadie clarified, “from a different era.”

  “She doesn’t watch TV.”

  “She watches a little,” said Sadie. “She loved St. Elsewhere.”

  “And she was really into the first season of Survivor,” said Tal.

  “She was?” cried Lil, a look of horror on her face.

  “No,” Sadie assured her. “No.”

  “Oh,” said Lil, turning to Tom. “Sadie had, like, a storybook childhood.” This was, of course, how Rose liked to characterize Sadie’s early years.

  “Which means,” said Sadie, who had now resigned herself to playing the role Lil had chosen for her, “I had no friends. All the other kids thought I was weird.”

  “Can you believe it?” Lil asked.

  “I can’t,” said Tom Satville, shoving his hands in the pockets of his corduroy pants and rocking back on his heels.

  “Oh, it’s true,” said Tal. “She was a major dork. I’ve seen the pictures.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Sadie. “My mother would throw birthday parties for me and invite my whole class. And the kids would come and bring these big, expensive presents and then whisper ‘You smell’ as soon as my mother left the room.”

  “Poor little rich girl,” said Tal, stroking her palm.

  “You don’t know my pain,” said Sadie.

  “Why did they hate you so much?” asked Tom Satville.

  “I was weird,” said Sadie dispassionately. “I was fat. My mother dressed me like it was the fifties.” Her mother had also prohibited her from watching any television, except Sesame Street and Masterpiece Theatre and, moreover, striven to give Sadie a “women’s education” in the style of the class Rose had made her own—albeit one, as Tal had said, of a far-bygone era. Sadie took lessons in piano, painting, dance, gymnastics, tennis, skiing, singing, and golf. She rode in Central Park and skated at Wollman Rink. She learned to sew and knit and bake. She took Saturday classes at the Met, where she picked up the difference between a Manet and a Monet, and Sunday classes at the Museum of Natural History, where she studied dinosaur bones and the earliest forms of humanoid life. She learned to throw pots from a married pair of potters, with a kiln in the basement of their Ninetieth Street brownstone. With the city parks commissioner—a tan, wiry fellow, who
lived around the corner and played squash with James Peregrine—she studied different sorts of trees and shrubs and plants and birds. At eight, she dissected a cow’s eyeball in an after-school biology tutorial, and drafted illustrated storybooks in the manner of Edward Gorey, with titles like “The Girl and the Monster” and “Penguin Have Sharp Teeth.” She refused to drink soda or eat sugared cereals or packaged cakes and went through a period of vegetarianism in her tenth year. She was an excellent student, but never the top student, which her mother took as a sign of success (“Sadie has interests outside of school”) and her teachers took as a sign of boredom, since she was always finishing her work ahead of the other students and withdrawing a thick book from the woody interior of her desk, or sketching complicated William Morris–like patterns on filmy sheets of onionskin with a set of calligraphic pens and colored inks. All of this, of course, was why she’d had no friends. She hated now to think of her childhood—at least the part lived at school, outside the safety and comfort of home.

  “What does she do, your mother?” asked Tom Satville.

  “She’s on a bunch of committees. Hadassah. The temple sisterhood. That kind of thing. She throws parties. Fund-raisers.” She smiled. “And she shops. That’s mainly what she does.”

  “And she reads,” corrected Lil. “She’s read everything. She reads like, ten books a week.”

  Sadie smiled apologetically at Tom Satville. “I think it’s more like one or two.”

  “She reads a lot,” confirmed Tal.

  “But she reads everything,” Lil went on. “Books about string theory. William Gaddis. Donna Tartt. Mystery novels. Crazy stuff. John Grisham.”

  “She loves John Grisham,” Sadie agreed. “And British mysteries. Cozies. Elizabeth George. Who’s not actually British.”

  “And every magazine,” continued Lil.

  “Every magazine?” asked Tom Satville.

  “A lot of magazines,” Sadie conceded with a shrug. “She has a lot of time on her hands.”

  “Like what?” asked Tom Satville.