A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Beth pressed her lips together. Mrs. Bernstein could see she was trying not to cry again. “It’s just—” She stopped. Maybe, Mrs. Bernstein thought, it would be better to stop talking about this and head directly to the bridal salon. Sometimes talking about things made them worse, rather than better. Beth opened her mouth. “It’s just— Well, what I was going to say was just that we avoided each other, mostly, in the fall and the winter. But once Will proposed—once we got engaged—I guess I kind of wanted to see him, to show him my ring and how happy I was. So I went to Lil and Tuck’s party last week. Will is in San Jose. And . . .” Mrs. Bernstein’s mind raced frantically. Had she slept with him? If so, she must be told that it’s okay. Mistakes happen. The wedding could go on. She must simply forget about it and move on. Sex was just sex. A choked sound emerged from Beth’s throat. “I got to the party and, at first, I didn’t see him and I sort of panicked, thinking he wasn’t coming, but I was kind of relieved at the same time, you know? But then I went to the back room to get something to eat and there he was. My heart just went crazy when I saw him. I know that sounds dumb, but that’s how it felt. And he just walked over to me and said, ‘Have you tried the dates wrapped in bacon? They’re amazing.’ And we just started talking like no time had passed. It was just like it was when we first met, in college, when we were first friends.” She laughed, a bit bitterly.

  “All those months—when we were first apart—I called him every night and we had nothing to say to each other. And then, last week, it was like, we couldn’t stop talking. It was like that horrible time never happened.” Mrs. Bernstein waited for more, but Beth was fiddling with her tissue, coiling it into a rope. “It was such a relief to talk to him. Mom, I felt like for the first time in years, like, like I could say anything. Like I was talking to the only person who really and truly knows me. Who completely understands me.” Mrs. Bernstein’s face contorted in sympathy. “But what about Will?” she asked. “Is it not the same with him?” “No, it’s different.” She pressed the pads of her fingers into her eye sockets. “How?” Mrs. Bernstein pressed. “Well,” Beth sighed. “I don’t know. I guess, well, Will likes to joke around more. And he’s, he’s, just different. I don’t feel like he knows me the way Dave does.” “Well, sweetie, you’ve known Dave a long time. You only met Will last fall. You can’t really compare the two.” As she said this, she realized that it was she, of course, who’d asked Beth to compare the two men. “You know what? I think you need time to sort all this out, to think things through. It sounds like maybe we should postpone”—she couldn’t bring herself to utter the word “cancel”—“the wedding for a month or two.” Beth nodded dully. Another pair of women walked into the lounge—mother and daughter—smiling at Mrs. Bernstein and Beth. “Why don’t we get washed up and go have some lunch and then we can talk more?”

  “Okay,” said Beth.

  Ten minutes later they were seated at a small table at the café with fresh cups of coffee in front of them. Beth’s face, pink from the cold water, had gone slack and impassive. “So we can go home and see Dad, if you want. Or we can just poke around here a bit, maybe get you some new shoes. Is there anything you need?” Beth shook her head and took a sip of coffee. “We can look at wedding dresses,” she said in a low voice, her eyes fixed firmly, childishly, on her place mat. “Oh, honey, no,” cried Mrs. Bernstein, who now, unaccountably and much to her distress, felt like she might cry. Why, why, why, she asked herself. “This isn’t the right day. You need to figure out what you want. If you’re still in love with Dave, you can’t marry Will. It’s unfair to you, but it’s more unfair to Will and to Sam, too. Beth, he’s been married before, to someone who treated him badly. When he asked you to marry him, he meant it for keeps. Honey, think about it. He wouldn’t even let you meet that poor child until he knew you were going to be his stepmother.”

  “I know all that, Mom,” Beth said, in a cold, distant tone. “And I know I want to marry him. We can get the dress today and order the invitations. I forgot to ask him about the wording, though.” Annoyance overtook Mrs. Bernstein and she struggled to tamp it down. What was wrong with Beth? She pitches some sort of fit, about how Dave—a person with the emotional development of a sixteen-year-old—understands her. And now, when Mrs. Bernstein takes her concerns seriously—rather than dismissing them, as most mothers would have—she insists that everything is fine and they carry on planning the wedding. Did she think her mother would be disappointed in her if she didn’t marry Will, with his blue-chip job and his natty suits? She and Don had tried—in every possible way—to make their children independent thinkers, to let them know that their parents would love them no matter what path they chose in life. She had not—not ever—suggested to Beth that she marry for any reason other than love. (And she had shuddered, some months back, when Beth told her an awful story about Sadie’s mom dismissing Tal, such a great kid, because he was an actor and would “never make a real living.”)

  But the trouble with Dave—who was from a very nice family, and Jewish (which Will, of course, was not, a fact that would cause some problems with the ceremony, but she wouldn’t think about that now)—wasn’t simply that he had neither money nor the impetus to make it. The trouble was Dave himself. He just didn’t have it in him, to take care of Beth, in any way. Instead, Beth would end up taking care of Dave, catering to his every mood and whim. What Dave needed was not a dreamy kid like Beth but someone like Lil, a forthright go-getter who would shake him out of his stupor, who would refuse to tolerate his selfishness. He was nothing but a spoiled little boy. But then, that was exactly the type that made women cry in public restrooms, wasn’t it? She’d met her share of such types. In college, of course. And later, too.

  Some years back, when Beth was just a little girl in overalls and braids (and Jason not yet born), a tall, curly-haired substitute began appearing at the high school, clad in a black turtleneck and a tweed blazer, like Hollywood’s version of an English professor. As it turned out, he was a professor, of sorts: a Yale Ph.D. who’d failed to get tenure at some small New England college and returned home to his parents’ house on Larchmont Avenue. The students had worshipped him—his dark, wounded eyes, his unsettling habit of answering a question with a question—and the female teachers (married and single) quivered whenever he entered the staff lounge. In the end, he’d run off to Oregon with a precocious seventeen-year-old from Mrs. Bernstein’s Honors class. The girl’s parents—the Goldbergs of Christie Street—eventually went to the police, who put out a warrant for the man’s arrest. Though by the time the Portland cops found him—in some squat or something—the girl had sensibly put herself on a bus back to New York.

  The man returned, too, some years later. He’d tapped Mrs. Bernstein on the shoulder one day, not so long ago, at the MOMA—a traveling exhibit of Picasso’s paintings of women, aptly enough—and said, “Scarsdale High School, right?” Though her hair was shorter—trimmed to her shoulders—Mrs. Bernstein knew she looked much the same as she had twenty years prior. The man, however, bore no resemblance to his younger self; he’d had to recount his biography (Yale, Oregon, young Jodi Goldberg, police) before she could place him. Time had not been kind to him, though his eyes still glimmered, darkly, with the provocative charisma of a tragic hero. She was, she realized, a good deal younger than he, though she hadn’t thought so during their brief period as colleagues (she with a little girl and a husband and a large house). Then, she’d resisted his attempts at banter; she’d not been one of the women who’d gathered around the whorl of his pipe smoke, waiting to be favored with a sliver of attention. And she was surprised that he’d even remembered her; in fact, if she was honest with herself, she was flattered to be plucked out of a crowd, her face remembered from two decades before. But she’d simply said “Hello, hello” and “How are you?” and “Nice to see you” and gone on her way. Later, she heard, through the grapevine of old Scarsdale families—to which she now belonged, having married into one—that the man had been
hospitalized, repeatedly, for some sort of drug problem. His parents had bought him an apartment in Chelsea and were “helping out” while he started up a tutoring business and wrote a novel about a working-class family on Martha’s Vineyard, where his own family summered.

  But she herself had never, not really, been attracted to that sort of man: the desolate loner, the misunderstood genius. In her youth, these boys had been jargon-spitting hippies or self-serious radicals or hard-drinking painters. Today, it seemed, they were would-be rock stars or postmodern novelists or overeducated malcontents. Regardless, she always went more for the quiet, slow-and-steady-wins-the-race types—like Donald, whom she’d thought she might marry from the minute she met him, at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, on a blind date. She’d never really, truly loved anyone before him—not in the way Beth loved Dave—and it was the easiest thing in the world to say yes, when he’d said, casually, “Why don’t we get married?”

  Now she wondered, as the waitress deposited a tarragon chicken sandwich in front of her: if that yes was causing Beth such anguish, then perhaps she oughtn’t make good on it, Dave or no Dave. “Beth,” she began, carefully. “You don’t have to marry Will just because you said you would. You can change your mind.” Perhaps she shouldn’t push the issue, she thought before continuing. “You don’t have to marry anyone. It doesn’t have to be a choice between Will and Dave. If Will isn’t the one, and Dave is maybe the one but not ready to commit to you right now, then you could just be alone for a while. You could get a new apartment. Your dad and I could help you find your own place.” Beth had sublet her sublet for the summer. As of July first, she’d be living with Will. “And I’d have to talk to your father, but I bet we could help with the rent.”

  “No, Mom, no,” said Beth, her expression growing grim. Mrs. Bernstein ignored her. “You could just see Dave and figure out if it’s going to work. And maybe see some other people, too. You know, honey, lots of my friends didn’t get married until they were in their thirties and they were very happy. They had a lot of fun, living in the city on their own. It’s good to be on your own.”

  With uncharacteristic violence, Beth pushed away her plate, her sandwich untouched. “No, Mom, it’s not. It’s not. You don’t know what it’s like. It’s horrible.” Mrs. Bernstein could say nothing. Her mouth felt fused together. “It’s supposed to be good to be on your own,” Beth continued angrily. “Everybody says that. But it’s not. It’s not fun. I don’t want to be alone anymore.” “But, Beth, you can’t just marry the first man who asks you because you don’t want to be on your own anymore.” Beth put her hands to her temples. “I know that!” Her voice was rising to levels inappropriate to the third-floor café at Saks. “Mom, I’m not an idiot. I wouldn’t marry Will if I didn’t love him. It’s just, I’m afraid—” Her voice cracked and Mrs. Bernstein prayed no tears would come. It was too much, just too much. “I’m afraid I love Dave, too.” Her head sank low toward the table. Miserably, she looked up through her bangs at her mother.

  Before Mrs. Bernstein could formulate a response, Beth had pulled herself up straight in her little wire bistro chair. “I guess, I just don’t think ‘the one’ exists. I think we make choices. We decide who ‘the one’ is, but we don’t realize we’re deciding because our, I don’t know, conscious minds are saying, ‘This is the one.’ But there are all these other people out there, who we could just as easily fall in love with and make a life with. It would just be a different life, a different sort of being in love. I don’t know why I’ve chosen Will. I don’t, really. Maybe because it makes more sense. I can imagine our life together. But when I imagine life with Dave, I see a blank screen. Or, I see him, in an apartment, alone.” She laughed. “I’ve been thinking about it all week. And, it’s like, I can see us talking and laughing at dinner. Or walking around. But when I get to an apartment, I see him, alone.”

  Mrs. Bernstein nodded and picked up half of her sandwich. Beth’s dilemma was clear to her now: in marrying Will, she’d finally have to relinquish her fantasy of Dave, the little notion she’d kept tucked away as she went about the business of her life, knowing, perhaps, that it would never come true, that he would never be the person she’d wanted him to be, or even the person she’d met all those years back, when she was really just a teenager, and he an attractive, sarcastic boy, with immense talent (a piano prodigy, a winner of awards) and brains, destined for greatness. He wouldn’t be that boy again, no, certainly not. And he hadn’t become the man they’d all expected. Perhaps he would, with time, and some other woman would reap the benefits. But Beth would be happy then, with a career (with any luck, NYU would keep her on for the fall) and a successful, handsome husband and children of her own (along with Sam, of course). Her daughter was right: people simply made choices.

  Beth was eating her own sandwich now—grilled cheese and tomato, always her favorite—with good appetite. The color had returned to her face, though her nose and eyes were still red from the tears. Mrs. Bernstein made a note to take Beth back to the lounge for a quick powder; otherwise, she’d hate the way she looked in all the dresses. The girl dabbed at her lip with her large cloth napkin. Pure white, Mrs. Bernstein thought. With her freckles, the dress has to be pure white. She looked around the room at the tables and tables of women picking at salads or sipping spoonfuls of soup, sharing small slices of pie or Danish cut in quarters, just as she and Beth used to do. All of these women, she thought, had chosen—at some point—propriety, security . . . over what, though? What was the other option? An amour fou? For a grand passion to be grand, need it come with danger? Hadn’t she loved Donald madly—and didn’t she still—despite him being exactly the sort of person her parents might have chosen for her, with the house in Scarsdale, the inheritance, the dental degree, the practice he’d taken over from his father? Her eye settled on an important-looking lady, with a thick sheath of white hair and a scarf fastened by a large cameo. Had that matron, one day in the distant past, given up a Dave for a Will? If she hadn’t, where might she now be? A memory languished along the fringes of Mrs. Bernstein’s brain—some choice not taken, a dashing lover promising excitement and understanding. Whom could she be thinking of? That sad man with his dark, loamy eyes? No. There was no one, no one at all.

  eight

  Dave Kohane lived in a pleasant, three-room garden-level apartment on Bergen Street, which he’d purchased earlier that year with the bit of money he’d come into following the death of his grandmother. This lady—his father’s mother—had been a tiny, churlish person with great mounds of white hair, who, until the very end, cooked massive Mitteleuropean dinners, beginning with hot borscht and ending with plum tart, a roast chicken or pot roast arriving somewhere in between. She had not been rich—at least, not by New York standards—but had, it turned out, been far richer than her two sons knew. She ate brown bread and cottage cheese for breakfast every day, dressed herself in boiled wool suits purchased during the Kennedy administration, and sent Dave and his cousin Evelyn, her only grandchildren, twenty-five-dollar checks twice each year, for Hanukkah and their respective birthdays in November and May. Dave’s uncle Steve, Evelyn’s father, was a corporate lawyer and devoted considerable effort to wresting control of his mother’s assets, thinking he could invest them for her—or, better yet, turn them over to another Kohane cousin, a crackerjack CFP who had cut his teeth in analysis at Goldman, Sachs—but the woman refused, saying Dave’s grandfather had arranged everything “very nicely” before his death. She had a “nice young man” at T. Rowe Price with whom she spoke once each month.

  As it turned out, this nice young man did very well by her. “Jeez,” Uncle Steve had said, sipping beer in Dave’s parents’ tiny kitchen, two weeks after the funeral. “Who knew Mom was loaded? Those twenty-five-dollar checks. God.” Dave’s father nodded sympathetically. He was a lawyer, too, but did labor work, having met Dave’s mom when they were both canvassing for the AFL-CIO after college. Dave’s mom made documentaries about migrant workers and African
wars. They didn’t think about money much. Or rather, they thought about it all the time, having rarely had enough of it, but—as they explained to Dave when he was old enough to understand—they’d decided to make compromises. They could have the life they wanted—working for the common good and so on—and live in a small apartment, with carefully chosen luxuries (his father had an overhealthy and, Dave thought, clichéd interest in wine); or they could live a different sort of life—devoted to the acquisition of goods and property—and be less happy in their work. Dave’s father, at various points, had considered going corporate. And Dave’s mom had, on several occasions, been offered jobs at commercial production companies (particularly after a documentary she produced won an Emmy). But they’d stuck to their guns—scrambling and scraping to send Dave to St. Ann’s with Evelyn—and now, in their middle years, they were doing rather well. Their small apartment—one floor of a Baltic Street brownstone that went co-op in the eighties—was now worth twenty times what they’d paid for it. And thanks to that Emmy, Dave’s mom now ran her own production company, out of a little town house on West Ninety-third, with an endless succession of contracts from PBS. The previous year, after she’d finished a six-part series on DNA, they’d bought a small house up near Woodstock, then flown off to Paris and Provence. Next year, they’d go to Italy. And now that they had this surprising influx of cash, from Dave’s grandmother, they could do so in a bit more style.

  Dave and Evelyn’s share of the money was small in comparison to the sums received by their parents, but large by their own meager standards, as both had been impoverished since leaving college. Evelyn, who was always making Dave look bad, had handed the entire sum over to her father to invest. Dave had originally assumed he’d just live off the money, seeing as he was barely employed at the time of his grandmother’s death, having just dropped out of Eastman. But then his father sat him down after dinner one night and suggested that the cash would disappear pretty quickly, much more quickly than Dave could imagine, and Dave should think seriously about making some big, practical sort of purchase, like an apartment. Since moving back to the city from Rochester, Dave had been sharing a place down the block from his parents, on an unsavory stretch of Baltic, across from a loud, crime-riddled school, with an actor named Jake Martin—one of Tal’s less fortunate friends—whom he rarely saw in person but caught glimpses of on Law & Order, on which he’d played an organic fruit vendor, a stabbing victim, and a distraught single dad. Dave didn’t love cohabitation, but buying a place seemed so grown-up. He hadn’t the slightest idea how one might go about completing such a task. He was afraid, however, to display his ignorance in front of his father and mother and Uncle Steve (who was, again, drinking beer at his parents’ kitchen table when this suggestion was made), and so he said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll think about it.”