A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, he worked at a popular restaurant on Smith Street called Madame Woo’s, a cross between a traditional bistro—white tile floor, cloudy gilt-framed mirrors, Parisian street signs, black-and-white photos—and a Midwestern Chinese joint, with purposefully tacky red vinyl booths, a kitschy drinks menu, and a weird assortment of pan-Asian antiques. Thursdays and Fridays, he worked the main dining room, which was filled with older couples eating multicourse meals and moaning about real estate. Saturdays, he covered the front bar, in which girls of his own age perched on bamboo stools at the high tables by the front doors, watching the passers-by or perhaps desiring to be watched themselves, in their sundresses and capri pants and tank tops. In the room’s dark interior, similar girls clustered around small tables, talking animatedly to one another over watermelon margaritas and square plates of Vietnamese ravioli. These women inevitably flirted with him, often in an adorable, sweet, shy manner, as though they were simply bowled over by Dave’s particular charms and didn’t make a habit of throwing themselves at waiters. Among them, sometimes, was his upstairs neighbor, Katherine, flanked by two pretty friends, who always insisted on shouting something that managed to be both offensive and flattering, “I can’t believe you really work here! You just don’t seem like a waiter.” “Well, I am,” Dave would say. “Which makes me uniquely qualified to tell you about our specials. We have a nice roast duck in red curry sauce . . .” And the girls at the neighboring tables would lean in to hear what he was saying to these lucky friends of his, to see if he was somehow giving them preferential treatment.

  Sometimes, he thought he saw Beth among this crowd of women and a little shiver went through him. But the tall girl sipping lemonade alone, making marks on a thick manuscript, was not Beth, nor was the fair-haired girl smiling calmly at a short, fat, freckled man. He would not admit that he was looking for her, that he was hoping to find her in his section, nor would he admit that he missed her—for he wasn’t even sure that he did—but he had no trouble confessing a less savory desire: he did not want her to marry Will Chase. Or anyone, for that matter. And yet, he did not want to marry her himself. And so he did nothing, nothing other than disparage Will to his friends—“Isn’t he kind of stiff?”—and take home the endless rounds of women who, like Katherine, made themselves strangely available to him when he approached their table, notepad in hand: a wholesome-looking yoga instructor who liked to go to foreign films at the Quad (not French films, as would be Dave’s choice, but tragic Chinese and Indian social realist flicks about child prostitution and such); a sunburned blonde who had played guitar for Their Own Devices, a Chapel Hill band that had been famous for a moment in the mid-1990s, though, the girl explained, they’d made no money, really, despite having toured the world with Neil Young and Sonic Youth; a boyish French girl who drank wine by herself at the bar, scribbling in a little notebook, and whom he’d shocked with his decent French. He was particularly fond of a lawyer, an earnest lefty like his dad, who’d been in his class at Oberlin, tiny and vivacious, with bright black eyes and shiny black hair. He hadn’t known her at school, but she recognized him the moment he approached her table.

  As of late, these girls were feeling rather neglected, for Dave’s free nights were becoming increasingly rare. The Reynold Marks shows were coming up, and nearly every night, he found himself walking over to DUMBO, trying to ward off the pangs of anxiety that this whole endeavor instilled in him. “You’ve got to just get over yourself,” Sadie kept telling him, and he knew she was right, but he still felt stupid and awkward around the band’s other four members, mostly because of the enormous—or, okay, big—discrepancy in their ages. The drummer, a spoiled kid named Marco LaRoue, was only nineteen, nearly ten years Dave’s junior. He’d been kicked out of Bard his freshman year for drug trafficking. Which sounded hard-core, but in reality he’d just received a packet of pot through the mail (a campus mailroom clerk had detected the scent and called the cops). Like Dave, he’d gone to St. Ann’s, but he was one of the rich kids. His father was some sort of big art dealer and the kid now had his own place, a loft in a mixed-use DUMBO building, not far from the practice space. His father, he said, had bought it as an investment, thinking he might want to open a satellite gallery in DUMBO and since it was just sitting there empty, well, why not move in, right? (“Yeah, man. Totally,” Dave had responded.) He was obnoxiously handsome in the manner of an Italian movie star: full lips, olive skin, dark curly hair, the sort of large, hooded eyes that celebrity journalists inevitably describe as “soulful.”

  When the band went to Pedro’s for a beer after practice, girls stared at him, openmouthed, or whispered to one another, perhaps wondering if he was a movie star. Some nights, he sulked and ignored them. Others, he played up this attention, sending over drinks to a table of pretty girls and bowing in their direction, like James Bond or a Korean gangster, which made Dave want to puke, even as he wished he could pull off such suavity without seeming like a complete asshole. He treated Dave in a similar manner: Sometimes, he jumped off the ratty plaid couch they’d installed in the practice room and gave Dave a manly hug, kissing him on both cheeks (his mother was from Milan, his father a Brooklyn Jew who had spun LaRoue from Lazarowitzky), and offering him a beer. Other times, for no discernible reason, he simply glared at Dave, responding with extreme sarcasm to any words that emerged from Dave’s mouth. Sadie suggested that he was intimidated, owing to Dave’s advanced age and musical pedigree. Quizmaster Quest, after all, was the stuff of Oberlin legend—their tapes on rotation at WOBC—particularly now that Jan Jensen’s postcollege band, Ladderback, was getting some serious play. But Dave suspected it was the exact opposite: the guy thought Dave some sort of fogy, with his Cure and Smiths references, and his classical repertoire. He remembered, quite clearly, what it was like to be nineteen: twenty-seven had seemed impossibly old, an age he’d never reach.

  Sundays and evenings, when Dave arrived at the DUMBO space, they were generally all there already, sitting around smoking pot and drinking beer, talking and laughing. Sometimes they stopped abruptly when he walked in the door, which terrified him (were they discussing him?). Just as often, they simply ignored his arrival, the reedy Curtis continuing on whatever stream of thought he’d been following before Dave’s arrival. Had they all decided to meet early purposefully, in order to exclude him? Had they told Dave to come at eight, knowing they’d arrive at six thirty to share a pizza and perhaps trade stories about Dave’s lameness? Thinking about this possibility, he’d grow furious, for he was so utterly and decidedly not lame. He had not sold out. He hadn’t gone to law school or become a web designer or a day trader. And he knew more about music than the four of them put together. Not just classical or whatever—all of it, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, the Carter family, Bill Monroe, Gershwin, Elvis Costello, Hüsker Dü, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Bauhaus, Bob Dylan, Django Reinhardt, every fucking thing.

  And the fact was that they were wasting him, wasting his talent and skill (playing these piddly little parts, not letting him write songs), not to mention his knowledge, his experience, even his Jan Jensen connections. He kept thinking he would quit, but then he would think better of it, mostly because of one incontrovertible fact: they were good. Really good. Curtis’s songs—which somehow managed to be both ironic and romantic—were lovely and true. It was a pleasure to play them. And yet, he wanted to play his own songs, which had, since his joining the band, begun to materialize. They were different from Curtis’s, of course, but in the dark of his apartment, at the ancient upright he’d pulled in off the street, or the too-expensive keyboard his uncle Steve had given him his first year at Eastman, they sounded just as good. Darker, plainer, more plaintive, and with, he thought, more humor. They were piano songs, of course, not guitar songs, though the guitar would come in, on most of them. And he wanted a violin—a fiddle, really—on some, a sort of Weimar sound on others.

  “Does he even know you’re writing songs?” suggested Sadie, when
he complained about Curtis and his lack of interest in Dave’s work for the millionth time. Dave was trying, really, to not be irritated by the fact that he now only saw her alone when Tal was out of town. Though he supposed he saw her more often than he saw Tal. “Why don’t you just tell him? Play them for him.”

  “Trust me,” Dave told her. “He does not care. He knows I did comp at Eastman. He knows I’m writing stuff.”

  “So, then why don’t you just quit and start your own band?” asked Sadie, in an overly patient way, as if to indicate that they had had this conversation before, hadn’t they, which, of course, made him furious.

  “I don’t want to quit,” he told her. “I like the band. You don’t understand.”

  But she had a point, and the real truth was that he was afraid to quit, afraid that without actual physical people—people he knew and could touch and whine about in their absence—for whom to write songs, he would cease to write them, as he had after leaving Eastman and before joining up with Curtis. Each time he worked up the nerve to quit, something happened that disallowed him from doing so. First, they booked that show at Mercury Lounge (Marco’s dad knew the owner). So he decided to stay on for that. And now this Reynold Marks gig, which was, really, a huge fucking deal, even though Reynold Marks was, yes, lame. He’d been vaguely cool at one point—a college radio staple—but then there’d been that big single, some shitty ballad, and—bam—the baseball-capped morons at Syracuse and SUNY-Binghamton and wherever had stopped listening to Hootie and the Blowfish or Dave Matthews or whoever long enough to buy a million copies of Reynold Marks’s second album and go all apoplectic when he appeared on Letterman.

  The thing about Reynold Marks, though, was that he was a pianist (like Dave) rather than a guitarist (like Curtis), and for this reason alone Dave felt a strange affection for the guy—though he would never admit it to anyone—and wondered if the presence of a pianist, not just a keyboard player, wasn’t what attracted Marks to Anhedonia (if that was what they were going to call themselves), now that it mattered, for the show was almost upon them, and Curtis et al. were going kind of nuts about it. Actually, it was two shows—two sold-out shows—a Thursday and Friday night at the end of the month. Dave had found subs for his shifts at Madame Woo’s and carefully laundered his favorite T-shirts, a faded black relic from the first Pixies tour (“Death to the Pixies”) and a tattered navy thing with the Oberlin seal on it, in cracked white ink, passed down from his father. They sat on his dresser, sending out faint beams of promise in advance of their wearing. He had secured VIP passes for all of his friends, except Beth, who wouldn’t want to come anyway. They were rehearsing nearly all night, every night, and Dave was behind on a huge copying project for some big-deal Juilliard guy. He’d have to work night and day in August to catch up.

  Curtis had prepared the set list, of course, without input from anyone else. He’d chosen mostly newer songs, which was sort of stupid, Dave thought, and kind of stressful, as they now had to rush to learn them all. And as soon as they’d mastered one, Curtis decided it sucked and swapped in something newer. The guy was incredibly prolific, churning out a few songs a week, and always thinking the newest stuff was better. And even the new stuff, he couldn’t leave alone. “What if we try it really slow?” he’d say, about a fast, anthem sort of thing that was, Dave thought, meant to be fast. Or “What if we change the key?” Then why did you write it in this key, Dave wanted to ask, but never did, of course. And Curtis, of course, never asked what Dave thought of anything. He seemed to regard Dave as something akin to an animated piece of furniture. “Why don’t you just talk to him?” Sadie had moaned a few days prior, dropping her head heavily onto her right hand. Tal had left for L.A., his big-deal film, so suddenly Sadie was free for drinks whenever Dave wanted. “You’re killing me.”

  “You don’t understand what this guy is like,” Dave told her.

  “He seems perfectly nice,” she insisted. “Play him the stuff you’re working on.”

  “Seems nice,” Dave explained, “but has the icy heart of a hired assassin.”

  The closer they got to the show, the more quiet and impassive Curtis became, gesturing with his long hands to indicate “louder” or “softer” or “faster” or “slower” instead of speaking the words. He was living in the practice space now, in a pup tent, having given up his apartment (and the unfriendly girl installed in it) and quit his job at a coffee shop in order to devote every waking minute to the band. Dave had started biting his cuticles again, after years on the wagon. He awoke in the early morning, breathless and anxious, with the feeling that he had somehow boarded a train that refused to stop. This was his chance, his shot—things were going, somehow, to change, would change irrevocably, so that his life would be divided into “before” and “after” the show—and yet, somehow he had, he felt, already missed it, already messed it up.

  Exactly a week before the show they broke early—they were sniping and snarling at one another, anyway, and fumbling, now, even on songs they knew well—and went to sit at Pedro’s short, cruddy bar. Marco and the others sipped Maker’s Mark while the bass player recounted some long story about a member of Sleater-Kinney, who had been married to some indie rock guy, but they were now divorced and had formed a band together, which was much better than Sleater-Kinney. Quasi, thought Dave, yes, tell me something I don’t know. But he pretended the bass player, whose name also happened to be Dave, was providing him with new and fascinating information and drained his beer. I should go home, he thought, I hate these people.

  But he hated even more the thought of being left out of anything, anything, they did, and so he ordered another beer and before he could finish it Curtis slid onto the stool next to him, mumbling “Hey” to Dave and gesturing to the bartender for another round. Several days’ worth of patchy beard covered his pale cheeks and a sharp smell wafted from parts of his long body that Dave didn’t want to think about. There was no bathroom in the practice space—just a grimy shared toilet down the hall—and he was showering, presumably not very often, at Marco’s. “So,” said Dave, already weary of the conversation, already hating whatever was going to come out of his mouth next. He turned into a moron when left alone with Curtis. “So, we sound pretty good, huh.” Curtis nodded.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. It speaks, thought Dave. “I’m just really stressed out about . . .” His voice trailed off and he raised his hand, making an incomprehensible gesture, a sort of circular wave.

  “I know, I know,” said Dave, shaking his head. “It’s rough. It’s a lot of pressure.”

  “Exactly,” Curtis replied, sighing deeply. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I didn’t think it would happen this way. That we’d have something so . . .” He waved his hands again.

  “Big?” Dave offered.

  “Yeah! Something so big, so quick. You know?” Dave nodded. He’d not expected this either—no, that was a lie, in a strange way, he had, that’s why he’d stayed on. Though he wasn’t entirely sure what the gig would mean for them. A deal? With a small label? Or a big one? (Didn’t big labels stick to bland pop acts these days? But then, didn’t big labels own all the small labels now anyway? Though Merge was still independent, he supposed, and maybe Kill Rock Stars.) And, if so, how would their lives change? Would they suddenly have money? He knew—having dated the girl from Their Own Devices (she’d be at the Thursday night show)—that a band could become kind of famous without actually making any money. But he also knew that sometimes—who knew why?—particular bands became instantly popular. First, you’d see them written up in the Voice or New York Press, a small blurb, maybe, explaining the group’s merits and urging you to go to their show Wednesday at the Knitting Factory or Arlene Grocery or Luna. Then there’d be a little something in Time Out, with a big photo (five guys against a red wall, disheveled in old cords) and a coolly sycophantic profile, dubbing them as, maybe, “the best band you’ve never heard of” or “Brooklyn’s best-kept secret.” Next, flipping throug
h The New Yorker, you’d see a little sketch of the band (Buddy Holly glasses, vintage Converse, shaggy hair) in the “Goings On About Town” section (Saturday at Mercury Lounge or Northsix), and you’d think, Oh, I heard they were good. Where did I hear that? At the dentist, you’d find a photo in the “Cue” section of New York. And then, before you knew it, there they’d be, on the cover of Time Out, for the annual music issue or whatever, in which they promote five new bands as The Next Big Thing. Days later, the cover of their album would appear in the window of the Virgin Megastore, magnified a hundredfold, in between the latest horrors from Janet Jackson and Celine Dion. Presumably, their single would be getting some serious airplay (Dave didn’t listen to the radio), the corollary video in heavy rotation on MTV, and they would be appearing on Saturday Night Live and Letterman and Conan. And your friends, who saw them months ago at the Knitting Factory, would be saying, “No, they’re really good. I know they’re everywhere, but they’re actually really good.” And sometimes, they were. It could happen, Dave thought, to us. It could. He glanced at the other guys, who were now talking about some girl they knew who was dating Stephen Malkmus. They lived and breathed this stuff. Were they lying awake at night, Schlitz buzz going sour, imagining the moment the Sub Pop A&R guy approached them backstage? Or, what? Dave couldn’t get past that point, the offer, the approach. He didn’t know what would happen after. It was, for him, like sex: when he fantasized about it, he never got past the seduction.