A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “She just has such conventional ideas about marriage. She thinks Tuck isn’t supposed to look at another woman, or find anyone else in the world attractive, which is just impossible. And she has this, like, Depression-era work ethic. She’s totally hung up on productivity. She can never just relax. So, if he’s lying on the couch, thinking, she gets furious with him. And he feels castrated. So he acts out, against her, to prove her wrong.” She lit her cigarette now and sat back in her chair.

  Sadie looked down at her lap and saw that she’d clenched her hands into fists—turning her knuckles yellow and grotesque. The cats stared at her, their yellow eyes still and knowing. Was there—there was—the faint smell of cat pee coming from the animals? Or, no, the couch itself. She shifted uncomfortably. There was nowhere else to sit, other than the floor. “So she knows,” she said.

  Caitlin shook her head, blowing thin trails of smoke through her nose. “No,” she said. And for a moment, she appeared to study Sadie, deciding whether to continue. “You know, it’s not just me,” she said. “For a while, he had a thing with this waitress at a coffee shop by his office. I don’t know if he actually did anything with her, but he used to go there, just to see her. And there was this woman he was seeing right before Lil, who he was totally in love with, but she had a boyfriend and wouldn’t sleep with him. After he and Lil got married, she broke up with her boyfriend and started calling Tuck.” She tapped her ash into her coffee mug. “Women love him.”

  Sadie considered this, unsure what to say. “You’re right,” she responded finally. “Life is complicated.” Caitlin nodded enthusiastically. “But you”—she could feel the anger rising within her and struggled to tamp it down—“are making your own life more complicated than it needs to be. I just, I don’t understand. Why did you marry Rob if you weren’t going to be faithful to him? Why get married at all?”

  Caitlin frowned. “I didn’t think of it in those terms. Faithful or unfaithful. Those are bourgeois terms. I thought of it in terms of value. Utilitarianism, you know? Marrying me would make Rob really happy. And it would make me happy, too. And I knew that no man would ever make me completely happy, so why not choose one who would make me mostly happy.”

  Money, Sadie thought suddenly. Rob was wealthy, wasn’t he? Very wealthy, if his little speech the previous night was any indication: only the very rich spoke disparagingly of the compromised values of the somewhat rich. Did she marry him for money? she thought. Did people do that anymore? Rose’s voice insinuated itself in her head: Don’t be stupid, Sadie. Of course people do that. All the time.

  “I guess I just thought that you would understand all this,” said Caitlin, pouting in a manner that, in a different set of circumstances, might have been dubbed flirtatious. Sadie dropped her face into her moist hands. This was too, too much. She thought of her family, drinking dark, thick coffee from her mother’s set of mismatched Limoges, of her old cat George, asleep on his tattered red pillow, waiting to be fed scraps of salmon and leftover cream. She should be there now.

  “Caitlin,” she said, almost choking on the name, “the way I see it, if one is going to devote one’s life to social justice—to challenging the status quo and trying to make the world a better place—one needs to start by living an ethical life. By being honest with oneself and trying not to hurt others.” Sadie had not quite known that she thought this until she said it, and with a pang she wondered how honest she was with herself—and how many others she’d hurt, if only in small ways.

  Caitlin compressed her full lips and nodded. “You think I’m hurting other people?” she said in a small voice that, too, sounded practiced.

  Sadie suppressed a laugh. “Well, you’re cheating on your husband. I’m assuming he doesn’t know. Right?” Caitlin nodded. Suddenly Sadie had a terrible thought: she needed to tell Lil. It was her responsibility, wasn’t it? She pushed this thought away.

  “And Tuck isn’t the first”—as she said this, she knew it to be true—“right?”

  Caitlin nodded again.

  “So you’re cheating on your husband, first of all, with the husband of a person you allegedly love.”

  Caitlin pursed her lips again. “Your logic only works,” she said, “if you buy into the bourgeois approach to marriage, which is positively medieval.” A childish rage overtook Sadie. She feared she might burst into tears from frustration.

  “What other approach to marriage is there?” she said, her voice cracking. “Marriage is marriage. It means pledging yourself to one person. If you don’t believe in marriage, then you shouldn’t have gotten married.” She stood up, brushed the cat hair off her skirt—or tried to—and walked to the window. The sky, blue when she arrived, had clouded over. “You know, you’re right. Tuck isn’t going to leave Lil for you,” she said, her voice low and threatening. “He’s not.”

  “I know,” said Caitlin coolly.

  “Good,” replied Sadie. She snatched a cigarette from Caitlin’s pack and stuck it in her mouth. “Then stop seeing him. Just drop Lil and Tuck as friends. Move on.”

  “I can’t. Our lives are intertwined. Rob and Tuck are really close. It would be unfair to Rob.”

  Sadie lit her cigarette. “He’ll get over it. You’re missing the point. You need to end this.” Caitlin started to speak but Sadie raised her voice. “You, you need to listen to me. You need to stop justifying your actions with this political rhetoric. When you get down to brass tacks”—ah, there was Rose, creeping in again—“you’re just an ordinary woman who’s cheating on her husband and deceiving her friend. You’re not some renegade subverting ‘conventional ideas about marriage.’ You’re not glamorous. You’re not Erica Jong—who’s an idiot, anyway—or Germaine Greer or Simone de Beauvoir. You’re not empowering yourself, you’re degrading yourself. It’s pathetic. You’re selfish. You’re just selfish.” Caitlin’s olive complexion paled and Sadie felt her skin grow even hotter. Her outburst sprung less out of fealty to Lil, she suspected, than general anger with Caitlin. This embarrassed her, this urge to reform Caitlin, who faintly repulsed her, with her unwashed feet and searching eyes. But there was something attractive about her, something that made Sadie want to help her, however slightly, even as she knew she was being played by her. The girl was clearly unhappy—miserable—caught in some pathetic mythology she’d devised for herself. A bit like Lil, Sadie supposed. “If you don’t believe in marriage—or if Rob isn’t right for you, if you don’t love him enough, or whatever”—she hated this word, where had it come from?—“then get a divorce and be alone. Learn to take your own medication.”

  To Sadie’s surprise, Caitlin nodded soberly. Her face had returned to its normal color. “You’re right,” she said. She took a third cigarette. Smoking, Sadie realized, that’s how she lost all that weight. “I guess I read so much theory. I write so much about symbolic actions that I think about my life as a novel, kind of. Like in Passing, that Nella Larsen novel? Have you read that?” Sadie nodded. She had. She’d liked it, too.

  “That’s my period,” said Caitlin. “The twenties and thirties. Harlem Renaissance. There are all these novels where the heroine liberates herself by smoking and drinking and having wild sex.”

  “What happens at the end?” she asked, though she knew the answer. The heroine of Passing throws herself out a window.

  “Well.” Caitlin laughed. “Usually she dies, actually. Society has no place for her.”

  “Does she get caught?” asked Sadie.

  “Hmmm. I’m not sure. I’ve never thought about it.”

  I bet, thought Sadie. “The reason I ask is,” she said mildly, “I guess I sometimes wonder if people have affairs in order to get caught.” Caitlin stared up at her, rapt, her mouth open in a sort of O. “I mean, like last night. Why did you need to go off into the bedroom? Lil could have walked in.”

  “We had to talk,” admitted Caitlin. “And Lil almost did walk in. It was a close call.” She smiled. “We keep having them lately. Tuck says it’s a sign that we nee
d to stop.” Sadie’s cigarette had burned down and she had no place to put it. Spent, she sank back into the couch, breathing deeply of cat urine. The cigarette had made her head throb and she needed to use the bathroom. “Last week, we were on the couch, right there—” Caitlin pointed to the ginger cat, who had now gone to sleep, thrumming like a cricket. “Where Shiva’s sitting. And we’d just had an argument, actually, about how we needed to stop . . . doing this . . . But then. Well, we can’t be in the same room with each other without—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Sadie, waving her hand to fend off elaboration.

  “All of a sudden, we hear these loud footsteps stomping up the stairs. At first, I was confused, because, you know, we’re on the top floor. No one comes up here except us. But then it occurred to me that, you know, Rob’s not the most popular guy. He has an FBI file like this thick.” She held her fingers a few inches apart. “He’s doing some stuff, like, really advance stuff for this huge thing in November. And his other big project right now, I can’t really talk about it, but it’s this big protest against one of the biggies.”

  “The biggies?”

  “Top of the Fortune 500. More powerful than the government. Truly evil. Rob is organizing this whole thing with the Rainforest Action Network and the anarchist collective. Protests all over the country, with street theater and all sorts of stuff. They’re going to, like, burn an effigy of the CEO.”

  “Wow,” said Sadie, though this didn’t sound particularly effective to her.

  “So I’m thinking, this is the FBI or something, coming looking for Rob. I’d been half expecting it for a while. And then I start thinking, what if Rob is doing stuff that I don’t know about. He’s really into guerrilla tactics and he reads obsessively about the Weathermen and Abbie Hoffman and SLA and all that. Some of the people he works with are really hard-core ecowarrior types. They’re like chaining themselves to trees and dismantling logging equipment and blowing up generators and all that. Anyway, we’re, like, naked and there’s this pounding at the door. And two seconds later these guys are shouting, ‘Open up. This is the United States government.’ You wouldn’t believe it. I mean, it was unbelievable. And Tuck completely freaked out. He just pulled his . . . pulled himself together and ran into the bathroom. It was unbelievable.”

  Sadie could, rather easily, believe it. The scene unfurled in her mind in the manner Caitlin had suggested: like a movie. Tuck peering at his face in the bathroom mirror, clearing his head, so as to form a smile for the intruders, whoever they might be. Caitlin tumbling off the couch and pulling on a stained kimono, a few strands of hair rising from her head. She wondered how much Caitlin was embellishing.

  “It really seemed like they were going to break down the door, but I put my robe on, finally, and opened it and this pig flashed me his badge and said—just like on Law & Order”—here Caitlin lowered her voice and approximated a Brooklyn accent—“‘Agent Connelly.’ Irish! How cliched is that? And then the other guy—there were two of them, in normal clothing, suits—whips out his badge and says, ‘United States—’”

  Sadie finished her sentence for her: “Immigration and Naturalization Service.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” Caitlin said. “How did you know?”

  Sadie shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

  “They were here for the family downstairs. Mr. and Mrs. Jimenez. Can you believe it?” Shaking her head—the relief, apparently, was still vivid—she picked another cigarette out of the pack and contemplated it. “The weird thing is: Mr. and Mrs. Jimenez are legal. They have green cards.”

  “Strange,” admitted Sadie. “Could they be fake?”

  “Do you think?” asked Caitlin. “I suppose.”

  “So, what happened?” asked Sadie.

  “Well, at first they thought I was Mrs. Jimenez. I mean I have dark hair and I’m kind of tan right now, so it’s not such a stretch, I guess. I told them that I wasn’t, of course, and explained that they had the wrong apartment, but then, as I was talking, I realized that I wasn’t going to send these bastards to the Jimenezes’ place, either, so they could take them all out to some INS prison—those places are just, like, hotbeds of human rights violations, you know—and ship them back to Mexico. So I said I didn’t know of any Jimenez living in the building. And then they got very suspicious and asked to see my ID. I got my wallet and showed them my driver’s license, and my ID cards from Cornell and Oberlin, which I still have, and my faculty card from LaGuardia, and they seemed to believe that I was who I said I was.” She laughed. “A CUNY prof. Boring as shit.”

  Yes, Sadie thought, it would be so much more exciting to be Mrs. Jimenez from Puebla, living in a three-room apartment with nine other people.

  “They asked who else lived here and I said, ‘My husband,’ and they asked for his name, and I was just like, Why do they need his name? He’s not here. So I asked them, and they got all suspicious again and said, ‘For the record.’ And I didn’t know what to do. So I told them. And two seconds later, Tuck came out of the bathroom to make sure everything was okay.” She pressed her lips together. Her cigarette, still unlit, was growing moist between her fingers. “He was worried about me.”

  “I’m sure,” said Sadie.

  “The first guy, the Irish guy, was such an asshole. He just kind of smirked and said, ‘I presume this isn’t your husband.’ But the other guy—he was black—just looked really uncomfortable, and he was like, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ And they left.”

  “Wow,” said Sadie.

  “Yeah,” Caitlin sighed. She pawed, bluntly, at her eyes and yawned.

  “So what happened?” asked Sadie. “With your neighbors.”

  “Oh, right.” Caitlin sat up and lit her cigarette. “Nothing. They weren’t home. But the Feds are clearly watching them. There’s always a policeman on the corner now. And look out the window.” Sadie looked. In front of the hairdresser’s sat a plain, navy blue sedan. “An unmarked car,” said Caitlin, raising her brows darkly. “They come every day at noon. And they’re there when I go to bed.”

  “Is it noon?” asked Sadie, alarmed.

  “It’s one,” Caitlin said.

  “Oh my God.” Sadie sprang up. “I’m sorry. I have to go. I actually have to work today.”

  “Why don’t you stay for lunch?” Caitlin jumped up, too, a caricature of a concerned hostess. “Are you hungry?”

  “No, no.” Sadie struggled to remember where she’d left her bag.

  “I was going to make a big tofu scramble. It’s really great. We have fresh coriander, from our roof garden.”

  “Sorry,” said Sadie. She walked to the threshold of the hallway, hoping Caitlin would stand up and follow suit. “I can’t eat tofu.” She smiled. “Had too much of it in college.”

  “Oh my God,” said Caitlin. “Me, too.”

  “Then why are you making it?” asked Sadie, unable to contain her impatience. Caitlin shrugged and slunk down in her chair, childlike.

  “I need protein.” She shrugged. “You have to be really careful, being vegan, you know.”

  “But”—Don’t, Sadie told herself, just don’t ask—“why are you vegan?”

  “Rob feels really strongly about it.” Caitlin lit the cigarette. “It’s political. We’re opposed to factory farming and genetically modified food. It’s complicated. Though I ate anything before I met him. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did. I kind of lack discipline.” The ginger cat, just then, jumped off the couch with a loud thwop and ran into the kitchen, releasing a larger dose of the ammonia smell. In the spot where she’d sat, Sadie saw a dark, wet stain. She had to get out of this place immediately.

  “Couldn’t you just tell him that you don’t like it?” she snapped. “Has it ever occurred to you that if you tried to make your life with Rob a little more . . . fun, you might not need Tuck. Or someone like Tuck.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Caitlin, her brows knitting together.

  Sadie looked straight at Caitlin. “Well, it’s just, if you mak
e every single choice in your life based on how that choice affects the entire world, then you never get to have any fun.”

  An odd look had taken hold of Caitlin’s face, something between an angry pout and a baleful grin. “What do you mean exactly?” She doesn’t want Tuck to leave Lil, Sadie realized. She likes her life just the way it is.

  “Well, if you don’t want to eat tofu, then don’t,” said Sadie, exasperated. “Go out and eat a cheeseburger.” She paused, knowing that she sounded ridiculous, like her own mother. “Take a long bath. Get dressed up. Go out to dinner. Go to Oznot’s or go into Manhattan and go somewhere really nice. Take a walk along the river at night. Just do things for the sake of doing them together. And read a novel just because you want to. Something not from your period.”

  Caitlin protested. “The problem is I don’t have time. I’m teaching freshman comp and it’s, like, all these dead white guys—”

  “I know, I know, but I mean you should read something just for pleasure. Before you go to bed at night. Sentimental Education. Have you read that?” Caitlin shook her head. “You’d like it. It’s about the horrors of the bourgeois. Just go over to the library on Devoe and get a bunch of good novels: Dickens, Austen, the Brontës. The books you loved when you were a kid. Remember when you could just give yourself over to a book?” Sadie sighed. This was why she hadn’t gone into academia, so she wouldn’t become like Caitlin, dogmatic and weird.

  “I do,” Caitlin admitted, offering a glimmer of a genuine smile. “I miss that. Don’t you?” Sadie nodded. “I get what you’re saying. What else would you do if you were me?”

  Sadie considered, shrugging back a tiny feeling of satisfaction—perhaps she could master the girl’s unhappiness. But a part of her knew she was being baited, knew Caitlin was laying a trap. “Well,” she said slowly. “I’d get rid of this futon. It smells of cat urine.”

  Caitlin laughed again. “It does, doesn’t it? We pulled it in off the street. After we got upstairs we realized that it smelled like cat pee, but we thought maybe the smell would fade. But then because it smelled like cat pee, the cats kept peeing on it. Mumia won’t go near it.”