A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  A few weeks later, he paused outside the window of a Court Street Realtor, studying the photographs of available apartments. He recalled the phrase “twenty percent down”—or was it “twenty-five percent down”?—and suddenly realized what this formerly nonsensical term meant: You paid twenty percent of the price of the apartment in cash. Then you took out a mortgage for the rest. Armed with this rudimentary knowledge, he calculated that he could afford to spend about $200,000—that was, presuming he could pay the mortgage and maintenance—and scanned the posted photos for properties within his budget. The next day, he was filling out piles of paperwork—mortgage preapproval and so on—and before he knew it, he’d made a bid on this apartment, the first he saw, with its little garden and strange, dark middle room. It was, the Realtor told him, “priced to sell,” because the owners had already bought a new place, a loft space in a newly renovated building two doors down, and needed the cash.

  He’d been back in New York for ten months now, cobbling together his mortgage payments from teaching piano (which he hated), accompanying (which he hated even more), copying scores for composers (which he vacillated between hating and loving), and various sorts of menial labor, like temping or waiting tables (which, strangely, he enjoyed). The trouble was that while he had very strong feelings about what he didn’t want to do, he possessed only an extremely vague idea of what he did want to do. This being that he would like to work on music that people actually listened to, rather than classical music, which, really, no one cared about anymore. Or only the people who played it and wrote it and taught it. Normal people simply weren’t interested. Maybe they listened to the Brandenburg Concertos or “Appalachian Spring” or kept WNYC on as background music or attended a concert once a year so they could feel cultured, but that was it. This was exactly why he’d given up piano. Or this was what he’d told himself when he decided to drop out of Eastman: that he didn’t want to be part of the absurd, archaic institution that classical music had become. He wanted to make real music, music that possessed some sort of relevance to the dominant culture, music that meant something.

  But the truth was that over four unhappy years of grad school, he’d come to the sad realization that he was not a genius or a prodigy, as he’d been told throughout his life, and that he would not have a career as a soloist, but would be lucky to get a seat with a second- or third-tier orchestra in a provincial city or a teaching post at a Bible college, also in some unappealing place like Kansas or Missouri, teaching talentless undergrads. Both possibilities fell into the don’t-want-to-do category. In theory, he wanted (he thought) to compose music, to do something really revolutionary, something that would garner the respect of critics and a popular audience, something that would transcend current notions of genre. In practice, however, he was only just now figuring out what such music would be, now that he was in this band, this kind of good band, and there was the remote chance of people playing it. Very remote, though, as the band was really a one-man outfit: the lead singer, Curtis, wrote all the songs and refused to entertain the notion of any other members contributing, though the other guys didn’t seem to care at all. It was just Dave who minded, who would have liked to write his own songs, with a lead piano line, and maybe even sing lead vocals from time to time (he had, he thought, a pleasant tenor).

  Lying in his bed, mornings, on Bergen Street—thinking he should really get up and write down the snippet of melody drifting in and out of his brain—he comforted himself with the thought that he was destined for higher sorts of things than pop songs, for this hybrid music he imagined, this relevant classical music. But there wasn’t really any such thing. He would have to invent it. Otherwise, what were his non-pop options? Scoring films (romantic swell as the spaceship hurtles into the dark heart of the unknown galaxy)? Drafting minimalist pieces that called for the players to bang on sheets of metal or pluck violin strings with their teeth? Or shuffling together neoromantic motifs from the pantheon of canonical symphonies, like all the bright-eyed composers at Oberlin, with their tweed jackets and college scarves? He’d hated them all. What would they do, anyway? Get Ph.D.’s at Berkeley or Stanford. (The money was all out west, for reasons he didn’t understand. It wasn’t like people on the far coast listened to classical music any more than people in New York or Boston.) Live off grants and sad little commissions from Bang on a Can or Kronos? Yes, that’s exactly what they’d do. Then settle into dull teaching gigs and fuck the cute violinists. A life of perpetual irrelevance, like a character in a Philip Roth novel or a Woody Allen movie. Or Herzog, fucking Herzog. No way. No, fucking way.

  The irony was, of course, that in college—not to mention in the many years that preceded college—while his friends flailed about, taking classes in performance art or the history of Christian utopian movements, wondering exactly what they wanted to do with their lives, his future had, essentially, been set. Not worrying about career and so on had freed up a lot of his time at Oberlin, allowing him ample hours to fret over other things, like girls or existential matters. During the three years he’d lived with Tal—first in Keep, then in a shabby house off North Professor Street—Tal had patiently listened to Dave ramble on about such things, while they ate cold fried chicken from Convenient Food Mart and sipped cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  Now, with the clear vision provided by hindsight, Dave saw that Tal might have found Dave annoying or whiny or, as Sadie would say, “a bit tiresome,” and maybe this was why Dave rarely heard from him anymore. In those days, he’d had a lot more to complain about than did Dave: Tal’s parents were Boston conservatives who scrutinized Tal’s grades each semester and expected him to go to law school, like a good Brookline boy, never mind that Tal had no interest in law (or medicine or business or the other professions deemed acceptable by his dad), had, in fact, never expressed interest in doing anything other than acting, and, more to the point, was not some stupid, deluded sucker, like half—no, more than half—the losers in the theater department (Emily excluded, of course), but seriously, hugely, freakishly talented and in possession of that certain something that makes people, if not stars, then at least compulsively watchable. Everyone thought so, everyone. One of his professors had encouraged him to apply to Yale; another had suggested he leave school and simply find an agent.

  “Tell your parents that Peter Carson thinks you can get into Yale,” Sadie had encouraged him (had she loved Tal even then? Did she really love Tal now? He’d always half thought he’d been the one she wanted, not that he’d ever admit that to anyone). “My parents,” Tal told her, “don’t care about Peter Carson or what he thinks.” They were so reluctant to encourage his acting that his senior year at Concord they’d refused to attend any and every play in which he was cast—from Midsummer to Six Characters in Search of an Author to the play that Tal himself wrote—which would have been enough to make Dave fucking burn their house down, but not Tal, he loved them, the Morgenthals—“They’re great, really”—and he couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing them, even in the smallest way, which just made no sense to Dave. Poor Tal, Dave had thought, again and again in college, watching his friend take these deadly poli-sci classes to pacify his hard-ass father, who was under the impression that his only son, his only child, would be Harvard Law, class of ’97, not that Tal did anything to disabuse him of this notion.

  “He’s wearing himself out,” Dave told Sadie early in their senior year. “It’s moronic. He rehearses until, like, midnight, then he hangs out with me and when I go to bed, he, like, studies.”

  “Dave, there’s a difference between wearing yourself out and working,” retorted Sadie. “We all can’t live Dave Kohane’s life of leisure.”

  But Sadie, for once, didn’t get it: that Tal might give it all up, give everything up, might become this waste of a life, this suburban nothing, that he might become one of those people who do the “right” thing, the expected thing, that he might go to fucking law school and get married and live in fucking Newton and listen to publi
c radio in his Volvo and Dave would be left alone, alone with himself.

  As it turned out, Dave was the waste, the one who disappointed everyone. Nine months after commencement, there was Tal, hawking Clearasil between segments of 90210 (which Dave watched ironically—or so he told himself). There was a Snickers ad, a play at the Atlantic, then a little spot in a skit on Conan, then regular spots in skits on Conan, then—almost simultaneously—the secondary role in a truly awful Robin Williams movie, a tertiary role in a short-lived sitcom, and the sale of a screenplay, to the producers behind There’s Something About Mary, which Tal had decided was “subversive” rather than stupid (Tal, who, in college, had watched La Dolce Vita so many times he’d worn out the tape), and now this bigger movie, this movie that seemed like it wasn’t actually going to suck. Suddenly, he was out of town half the time and when he wasn’t, he was with Sadie, or he was working on screenplays with his writing partner, some cocky comedy guy who could never remember Dave’s name, and beyond that he always had things to do, people to see, and he never invited Dave along with him, almost as if he was afraid Dave was going to hit up his shiny, successful friends for—what?—a part in their next asshole movie? Money?

  He wasn’t famous, Tal, not even close, but that could change at any second. A few months ago, the alumni magazine had run a little story about Tal and two other alums working in film, an older, famous screenwriter and an even older director of art-house features. Tal, at twenty-six, was the youngest. He was twenty-seven now, as Dave would be in November, which made them four years older than Curtis Lang, the frontman for Dave’s band, a scruffy-haired kid with a long, serious face, class of ’98, who wrote strange, meandering tunes with even stranger lyrics, studded, though, with moments of freaky insight, which Dave wished he’d come up with himself. “How selfish of you, to believe in me,” went one.

  In the mornings, as Dave lay in bed thinking, his new neighbors stomped across the floor—he hadn’t considered this problem before purchasing a garden-level flat (which was, of course, just a nice name for a fucking basement)—occasionally shouting to each other from one end of their apartment to the other. These cries permeated Dave’s ceiling, the materials of which—wood, plaster—translated the English words spoken nine feet above him into a muffled hum, like the incomprehensible mumblings of the unseen adult characters in Peanuts cartoons. The female part of the couple was strange and sexy, with a broad, mannish face and wide-set hazel eyes. He saw her sometimes at the Met Foods, buying limp stalks of broccoli and flower-imprinted luncheon napkins or large quantities of limes for the parties this couple regularly held, loud affairs to which he was usually invited and occasionally attended, returning to his own apartment after a dull conversation with an aspiring journalist or web designer, only to hear the noise of the gathering—hoots and crashes and stomps and laughs—in his own apartment, nearly as loud as it had been moments before, when he’d wandered the center of it, wineglass in hand.

  The building was made of limestone and sounds echoed strangely, select tones amplified. Sometimes, Dave thought of recording them and using them for something. More often, he thought of how the town house was once home to a single family, before being carved up into little apartments, the detail stripped out of them, narrow halls carved in to make way for tiny baby rooms and closets. When Dave was little, his aunt Judy—Uncle Steve’s wife and Evelyn’s mother—had died, and his father and uncle had talked endlessly of leaving their apartments—Dave’s family in Cobble Hill, though it was just called “Brooklyn” then, and Evelyn’s in Brooklyn Heights—buying such a house, and restoring it to its former grandeur, for their two small families to share, the unstoppable Kohane brothers, no longer separated by the twenty-odd blocks between Joralemon Street and Baltic. They’d grown up in such a house, a few miles east in Midwood, chasing each other up and down the stairs (and profited nicely from its sale after their mother’s death). As kids, Dave and Evelyn paid weekly visits to this ancestral home. They, too, chased each other up and down the carpeted stairs, but with much less vigor than their fathers, both of them quiet children, always collapsing onto the nearest sofa with a book and a cookie, dark circles ringing their almond-shaped Kohane eyes. Dave, even skinnier then, could never quite work himself into the frenzy of teasing that came so naturally to the other little boys. He would try, pouncing on Evelyn as she sat reading, and pulling her hair or tickling her until she screamed “Stop, stop, stop, I hate you” in a hoarse voice and ran up the stairs to lock herself in her father’s old room, where she kept a cache of worn stuffed animals and dog-eared mystery novels. Dave would trail her, reach out a long, bony hand to grab her sneakered foot, and drag her down the stairs, booming “You must come vith me,” like his father imitating Bela Lugosi, but his heart wasn’t in it, and eventually he’d let her go.

  Adolescence morphed him into one of those wan kids you see near Lincoln Center on Saturdays, heading off to Juilliard with a black nylon bag full of music, his skin cast green from the fluorescent light of the practice room. He did a double degree at Oberlin, piano performance and philosophy, which he finished in just four years, though—he frequently reminded his parents—most double degree students took five. And he had headed off to Eastman after graduation, full of hope and excitement. Or that’s what he’d thought at the time. Now he saw that maybe this wasn’t the case. Maybe he’d headed off to Eastman already defeated and full of fear. That if he’d really wanted that life—the solo career, the record deal, whatever—he wouldn’t have gone to Eastman at all, but would have entered the big contests, sought out the agent, done the things you do to become a sort of star. The whole point of going to Eastman was to wind up with a job at some sad, loser college.

  In truth, he hated to think about that time—four years of his life spent in fucking Rochester—and tried to steel his mind against it. But, of course, the more he tried to turn himself to other subjects, the more he played over the injustices and embarrassments and disappointments of those years at grad school, which seemed, in a way, to have all blended into one long winter. He had arrived on campus—in a weird, unpopulated section of Rochester (which was itself a weird, unpopulated city, all too reminiscent of Cleveland)—full of swagger, certain that he was the department’s show pony. At Oberlin, he’d been a star, a coveted player—he and Tal equals then—respected by the composition students for his knowledge of new music, which was unusual in a pianist (or any sort of classical musician, for that matter). In fact, as an undergrad, he’d had his choice of schools—Juilliard, Peabody, and, yes, Eastman—but he’d chosen Oberlin for reasons both practical (they’d offered him a full ride) and sentimental (his father was ’67). As a freshman, he’d been given an orchestra seat, a rare honor for so young a pianist. And though he was perpetually behind on his practicing—endlessly playing catch-up, scrambling to learn pieces at the last minute, hours before a concert—it always worked out in the end.

  He’d held his senior concert in Finney Chapel—just a few weeks after Liz Phair played there—and included some unusual stuff on the program, Xenakis, Satie, whatever. At least a hundred people came, a huge turnout for a recital: most were held in the Conservatory’s tiny auditoriums, attended only by professors, close friends, and bewildered, bored family. But Dave was not, as he often mused with satisfaction, a normal Con student. He pulled beer at the bar in the student union—the Disco, or the ’Sco, as the freshmen dorkily called it—along with Tal and Sadie, and had a large following among the grunge contingent, the flannel-clad guys who played in bands and the long-haired girls who worshipped them. He dated the girls (before Beth, of course, though there was a fling or two during) and hung around with the guys—a bunch of whom lived in a shambling pile of wood called “Slack House” or “House of Slack”—drinking bad beer, watching kung fu movies, and engaging in ironic discussions of popular culture. And he played in some of their bands, including an outfit called Quizmaster Quest (after an obscure video game) that became legendary on campus, due less to the
ir sound, which was largely cribbed from fIREHOSE and the Minutemen, and more to the emaciated good looks of the lead singer, a hollow-eyed Minnesotan named Jan Jensen.

  By comparison, Rochester was cold and wretched, both meteorologically and socially. All the other piano students were Asian and silent, or blowsy and schoolmarmish and headed for teaching jobs at Lower Arkansas Community College, or old and male and balding and terminally flustered, or outrageous flaming queens, who smoked cigarette after cigarette in the little courtyard outside the practice rooms. And he the lone straight male, wandering angry and disheveled around the dull, deserted streets, wondering if he should ask out the pretty flautist in his theory class, the one who always wore prim round-necked sweaters, like a coed from the 1950s. But her thin, childlike body disturbed him. He lay in bed at night, envisioning her next to him, her tiny hands running up and down his chest like spiders, and felt like a lech. He started practicing at weird hours and sleeping at even weirder ones, having no friends and no responsibilities other than the few classes he needed to attend and teach, all of them easier than his hardest at Oberlin. By October, it was freezing. He wore thermals under his jeans and sat by a bracingly ugly man-made waterfall that had been mysteriously set into the town’s creepy industrial landscape, feeling sorry for himself and allowing the crashing water—pouring off great slabs of smooth, dun-colored cement—to clear some of the detritus in his head, or, at the very least, to allow him to stop hearing his students’ imprecise notes, and Beth’s whispery voice on his answering machine.