A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  A crumpled pack of Basics had materialized on the bar. Curtis pulled two out and handed one to Dave as if they were old friends. “You really think we sound good?” he asked. Dave shrugged. “Yeah, yeah,” Curtis muttered, shaking his head slowly, indicating neither yes nor no, but some sort of befuddlement. His lips were full, the sort described as bee-stung when possessed by women, and looked out of place with his otherwise sparse features. “’Cause I have this weird feeling that we’re getting worse.”

  “No, no, man, no way,” said Dave, though he knew, as he said it, that it was a lie, that the shows—the thought, the threat, of the shows—were, it was true, having some sort of pernicious, soul-draining effect on Curtis, who seemed to be losing his Buddha-like countenance, his flannel-shirted imperviousness to—no, disregard for—the treats and temptations of the normal, lucre-propelled world. All of a sudden it dawned on him: Curtis wanted it. That’s why he was rattled. He wanted it all. The record deal, the European tour, the Rolling Stone cover. He had wanted it all along, wanted it rabidly, wanted it so badly he couldn’t even speak. And suddenly Dave liked him.

  “Well,” Dave said, “it’s probably for the best, right? Nobody’d sign us if we were too good. Right? It’s all about mediocrity.” To his surprise, Curtis laughed—a true, honest-to-God, fully formed laugh, which gave Dave an embarrassing sense of satisfaction. He likes me, he thought, and the thrill this gave him immediately dissolved into shame. He was drunk, he realized.

  “Seriously,” said Curtis, scrutinizing the still-pristine filter of his cigarette. His voice had dropped down to its normal whisper. “I don’t think it’s working. It’s like, we sound too much the same, you know. I keep”—he waved his hands and shook his head—“futzing with it, but it’s still not right. We need something else, you know?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave answered. But then, all of a sudden, he did know and blood began to pound at the delicate centers of his ears and through the rigid veins at his wrists and temples. Even the smallest fibers of his being seemed to stand on end, screeching at him to speak plainly, for once, to scrape off this stupid mask of ironic indifference, because what good had it ever done him, anyway, and his mouth opened, the words already formed and spilling out of it, for they had been lying dormant now for weeks, lined up and ready to march out along his tongue, to crawl out into the world and pierce the heart of his no-longer enemy. “Yes, Curtis,” he would say, “I completely comprehend your meaning, despite your utter and complete inability to speak in normal English sentences, which everyone apparently finds charming and indicative of your superior intelligence and freakish musical talent, but which I happen to find annoying, but all that aside, I have that something else you think we need. If you would proceed with me to the piano, I will play you the three songs that will, I believe, win us fame and fortune and ass-licking reviews in the New York fucking Times and the love of that loser Reynold Marks, which is maybe a sellout, asshole thing to want, but I want it, and you know you want it, too, because he can help us, and I need some help right now, and so do you, since you’re living in a fucking pup tent and you clearly haven’t bathed in weeks. So come with me to the piano, my friend, come with me right now. Curtis, my friend, I am your man.”

  But he didn’t say this or anything like it. He said, casually, “I think we sound good,” even as Sadie’s voice somehow, in his head, morphed with his mother’s voice into a chorus of “Dave, what is wrong with you?” And for them he had no answer, other than that there was some perversity of spirit, some untraceable, possibly archaic, pretty definitely misguided—he knew, he knew!—idea that true genius, or even just a good pop song, should be discovered by accident, by fate, rather than by canny maneuvering or self-promotion or mere suggestion. If he asked for it and received it, the resultant triumph would be cheapened, tainted, by his efforts. Or maybe it was that he was afraid to fail. Again. “Seriously, man, we sound good,” he said again, because an unfamiliar expression was distorting the calm sea of Curtis’s face, an expression Dave slowly recognized—with shock—as anger.

  “Don’t lie to me, okay,” said this new, unfamiliar Curtis, his voice rising in volume. “I’m trying to talk to you.” And then, as if in a dream, he heard Sadie’s—and his mother’s!—words come out of Curtis’s mouth. “What’s wrong with you, man?” Dave looked at him, speechless. “I mean, what’s your problem with me. Or with us. You act like we’re a bunch of stupid kids. I just don’t get it. I am so sick of your attitude.” Bending low over the bar, Curtis at last lit his cigarette, his face growing increasingly red and taut, as if someone had turned a crank and tightened the flesh that covered it. “We’re a band, man. We’re supposed to be like a family.” He took a sharp breath. “You think we’re too”—again, the wave of his bony hand—“for your songs.”

  Dave had gone from speechless to stunned. Accused, he almost found himself issuing denials: Songs? What songs? But even he was not this perverse. A strange calm settled over him in the face of Curtis’s fury. Instead, he said, “What do you mean?” Curtis sighed heavily, took off his thick-rimmed glasses, and placed them carefully on the bar. His eyes looked small and vulnerable without them.

  “I’m really tired,” he told Dave.

  “Me, too,” said Dave. “We should get some sleep.”

  “Yeah,” said Curtis. “So, you’re starting your own project? That’s it, right?”

  “What?” Dave asked. “Oh. No. I don’t have”—he smiled, for as he said it, he knew it was true—“the necessary leadership skills.”

  “Then what’re the songs for. What’re you gonna do with them?”

  Dave blinked. “I don’t know,” he said. “How—”

  “Sadie Peregrine told me,” said Curtis. “She said they’re, like, the best thing ever.” The blood returned to Dave’s ears and resumed its infernal crashing, washing out the sounds of the bar, the clanking of glasses, the hiss of the soda nozzle, the clack of balls on the pool table behind him. Sadie? Curtis and Sadie had met once, maybe twice, in passing. When? At Lil’s party, a month or two ago? Yes. Why had they been discussing him—not just him, but his most private, crazy-making pursuits. Curtis was moving his mouth again, but Dave could hear nothing of his words for the cacophony in his ears and the hot flush that had crept into his cheeks, which seemed to emit a sound, a buzz or hum, of its own. He was furious. And he felt, without willing them to, his legs pulling his body down off the bar stool and readying for flight. “She’s really cool,” he heard Curtis say from a million miles away.

  “No,” said Dave, slinging his bag over his shoulder, already loathing himself for this small betrayal. “She’s not.”

  nine

  Curtis Lang met Emily Kaplan at a party given by Dave Kohane the following summer. It was Labor Day, in the year 2000, and the entire group was in town for the holiday weekend. All except Tal, who was in Israel shooting some sort of thriller. “It’s 110 degrees here,” he’d emailed Dave the week before. “But it’s amazing.” They’d all agreed to come to Dave’s little thing, just twenty people or so, the first gathering he’d held at his apartment, though he’d been living in it for a year and a half now. The previous owners had left a small barbecue, which he’d never used, so he decided to serve up a big batch of ribs. On the Saturday before the party, he went to his parents’ place and obtained a recipe that called for brining and marinating the ribs, which were supposed to be the large beef kind, but (according to his father) could possibly be the small pig kind, then walked over to the butcher on Smith Street to pick up the meat, only to find that the store—operated by a portly Italian man who owned half the buildings in the area—was closed. Back at home, he called Emily, who was still at her dodgy place in Williamsburg (the rent still $500 per month), and explained the situation. “Do you think any of the Polish butchers on Bedford are open?” he asked. “Would you want to buy a few pounds of ribs and bring them over here?”

  “Um, sure,” said Emily, warily.

  “You’re sur
e? I’m not ruining your day?” he said.

  “No,” she said, with a bit more enthusiasm. “We could go to a movie after, maybe.”

  A couple of hours later, she rapped at his door, red hair frizzing in the late summer heat, a slightly pissy look on her face, which was flushed from exertion. He opened the wrought-iron gate and grabbed the white plastic bags from her. They were incredibly heavy. “Em, whoa, how did you carry these?” Emily was five foot two, almost a full foot shorter than Dave.

  “Well,” she considered, “let’s just say it wasn’t fun. I got pork ribs. The guy said you need a pound per person, because there isn’t much meat on them. So I got twenty pounds. It ended up being, like, sixty bucks.”

  “Okay,” said Dave, quelling a mild panic. Sixty bucks was way more than he’d expected to spend. It was just like Emily to agree to do him a favor, he thought, then mess it up (twenty pounds of ribs? What was he going to do with twenty pounds of ribs?) and make him feel guilty. But then, she was sweet to do it, and so at the last minute, and those bags were really heavy. And the money was fine, fine, he told himself. He had more cash than usual, from band stuff: they’d signed a small deal with Merge in the end. Over the summer, they’d flown to Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places, and recorded an album. In late September, they were supposed to go back to mix the thing. “I’ll stop at the cash machine when we go out.”

  “Okay,” said Emily, walking past him toward the kitchen, which was really just the back wall of his living room. “I also got some stuff for ceviche.” She began unpacking thin bundles of green, frondy things and clear plastic bags of fish. “I can make my dad’s recipe. It’s really easy. Do you have any white wine?” Emily’s family had lived in South America—Chile or someplace—for a few years, her mom on a Fulbright, and picked up all sorts of interesting recipes, which Emily would occasionally deploy. The whole lot of them spoke Spanish as a result, even Emily’s sister, Clara, who was crazy and lived in a halfway house in Durham. None of the group had ever met her. Emily hardly ever spoke of the girl and they constantly forgot that she had a sister. From time to time, she’d mention Clara in passing and they’d think, Who?

  “All right,” she said now, washing her hands. “You can squeeze the limes. I’ll cut up the fish.” A moment later, she’d found a cutting board Dave hadn’t even known he owned and the blue bowl his mother had given him when he’d moved in. She pulled out another bag, filled with small, pastel creatures. “Octopus,” she said. “In Peru, they use black clams.” She looked at him. “The limes are right there.”

  “Right,” he said. There seemed to be way too many limes. At least a dozen. “Tell me again what you want me to do with them?”

  “Forget it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll do it.”

  “Okay,” he said, and sat back down on the couch, watching as she poured salt on the fish, set it to soak in water, then sliced and squeezed the beautiful green limes. “You know how this works, right?” she said, briskly slicing the white slabs of fish into squares and piling them in the blue bowl. “The lime cooks the fish.”

  “Wait,” Dave asked, “you don’t actually cook it at all? Don’t you have to boil it or something first?”

  “No, Dave.” Emily laughed. “I just said. The marinade cooks the fish. It’s a chemical reaction. It, you know, alters the molecular structure of the fish.”

  “Is that safe to do at home?” he pressed. “I don’t want to poison everyone with day-old raw fish.”

  “It won’t be raw,” Emily told him, grabbing a large pot for the ribs, which would be brined overnight, then marinated. “Didn’t you work in a restaurant?”

  She was, Dave thought, amazingly efficient. It would have taken him hours to put all that together, and he would have cut corners in a disastrous way, deciding not to peel the shrimp or something. Who else would come over and help him like this? Not Sadie, not since she’d dumped Tal for Agent Mulder—as Dave liked to think of him—and effectively disappeared. “So he has, like, a gun?” Dave had asked Sadie too many times to mention. But then, he had to ask dumb questions like that, because he couldn’t ask the real question, which was, “Um, Sadie, you’re, like, seeing someone who works in law enforcement?” Dave had only met the guy a few times, though they’d been dating—oh my God, he thought, as he calculated the months—a year now. No. More. Which, in a way, made things easier for Dave, as he didn’t have to worry about liking the guy, or even becoming friends with him, and then feeling weird about Tal, who asked about Sadie in his emails, always, and Dave always said the same thing. “She’s okay.” Not, “She’s still dating that Fed she dumped you for.”

  “He works weird hours,” Sadie explained, when her friends complained that she never brought him around. “And he’s always away.” But they suspected otherwise. Or, at least, Dave did. He was an FBI agent, which was just insane. He wore, like, suits. He would not mix. “He did philosophy at Brown,” Sadie told them. Yeah, like a million years ago. The guy had to be at least thirty-five, probably more like forty. “He’s not some sort of freak.” In truth, Dave’s few encounters with him had been relatively pleasant. He had a sort of craggy, Peter Coyote thing going on, and he listened intently—even intensely—when Dave explained the minutiae of copying out scores, which he was still doing, though less frequently, and said, “That sounds so satisfying. I love the way music looks on the page,” which was exactly—too exactly—how Dave felt. And yet, he was an FBI agent. He’d been investigating their friends. Okay, not their friends, but people like them. People they all sort of hated, but still. Though he wasn’t anymore. He’d had himself taken off Rob Green-Gold when he started seeing Sadie. Which, Sadie said, was why he was out of town all the time. Apparently, all the anarchist activity—his specialty—was elsewhere, in Seattle, and Albuquerque, and Florida.

  “Is Sadie bringing Agent Mulder?” he asked Emily. “She said she might.”

  “I’m not sure,” said Emily, dropping the rib bones into Dave’s big pot. “I think she’s afraid that Lil will bring Caitlin and Rob, and it would be weird for him.”

  “Oh, right,” said Dave, with a smirk. “Why doesn’t she just ask Lil not to?”

  “I don’t know,” said Emily. She smiled faintly. “I think maybe she thinks”—she smiled broadly at this construction—“Lil is still mad about Tal. She doesn’t want to talk to her about Michael. And stuff.”

  “Hmmm.” Dave shrugged. If he thought about it, he was possibly still mad at Sadie for dumping Tal. He tried not to think about the fact that he’d been nearly as annoyed when Tal and Sadie had started dating as when they broke up. At least that had made sense. This new guy—okay, not so new—made no sense at all. And Tal had pretty much stayed out of town since. Dave pushed all this from his mind and turned to Emily. “What’s up with your play?” he asked. It had been a year or so since a team of producers, serious producers, had picked up the play for a small Broadway house (Broadway proper, not off-Broadway, as she’d initially been told). Every once in a while, she’d mention that she’d been in a showcase for backers or some such thing, but otherwise the production didn’t seem to be moving forward at all, which sucked, really, since her career, if it could be called that, didn’t seem to be moving forward at all either.

  She’d been in New York for six years now and worked steadily—doing the terrible stuff, like dinner theater in Connecticut, and the weird, experimental stuff, like Brechtian productions at La Mama—but still couldn’t make enough money off acting to leave her day job. And despite Lil’s and Sadie’s urging, she refused to ask Tal for help. And he, maddeningly, refused to offer. (“Maybe he just doesn’t think she’s good enough,” Lil had recently suggested. “Maybe he just doesn’t think,” Sadie corrected.) On her lunch break, she ran to auditions. Evenings and weekends, she rehearsed or took dance and voice lessons or toiled at the gym. When she landed a part in some long run or tour, her company allowed her an unpaid leave and in the event of such an occurrence, she saved nearly every penny sh
e earned. That is, what she had left after paying her rent and utilities and student loans. Unlike the others’, her parents hadn’t been able to pay for even a fraction of her tuition. Every penny they earned went to Clara, who was always in and out of some expensive mental hospital, or needing money for bail or lawyers or rent or psychiatrist’s fees or who knows what. Rent, probably. And food.

  Emily, meanwhile, lived a spartan sort of existence: though the walls of her apartment were covered, dorm-room style, with all sorts of colorful, kitschy prints, she owned no furniture save for a sagging bed, a small, battered couch that they pulled off the street, a child’s white dresser, and a matching desk, brought up from her parents’ house in Greensboro. In fact, it was kind to call her apartment such, for it was really a small, sloping room along the back wall of which the landlady had installed a two-burner stove and tiny fridge. This space represented one entire floor of a doll-sized back house on North Eighth Street, a block from the Bedford Avenue L stop. To get to the apartment, you had to walk through the front door of the building it backed (a four-story town house, long converted into dismal flats), out the back door, down a splintered wooden staircase, through a sad little cement courtyard, then up another staircase to the back-house’s front door. A surly Polish man lived above her, a jovial Mexican man below. Emily was friendly with both, as well as with a few of the tenants in the front house, a disproportionate number of whom were unemployed. As the girls often lamented, Emily’s kitchen had no sink—the landlady had been promising to install one for years—and her lone kitchen cabinet, a strange, ancient metal contraption, contained one ruined Teflon pan, one large tin pot for cooking pasta, a few chipped pieces of Pfaltzgraff picked up at the Salvy on Bedford, and four black mugs, bearing the name of her firm. She rarely spent money on herself, the way the other girls did, getting manicures and stupidly expensive haircuts.