A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Not that she needed to worry about the latter. Her red hair—once the same carroty shade as Dave’s—had darkened a bit in the years since college, to a streaky auburn, but it was still head-turningly beautiful, no matter that she’d cut it to her shoulders, which the girls thought made her look a bit boring, like the worker bees whose cubicles adjoined hers. In her off-hours, she still wore the sorts of clothes she’d worn in college—minidresses from the 1960s and enormous wedge-heeled shoes—and she arrived at the Labor Day party thusly clad, in an alarmingly short dress, printed all over with palm trees and men on surfboards. The top of the dress tied around her neck, leaving bare her bluish white shoulders and her back and arms. She’d planned on arriving early, to help Dave get the grill started and mix up some margaritas, but instead she showed up nearly an hour late.

  “Clara called just as I was leaving the house,” she explained breathlessly, as she clomped through the threshold of Dave’s apartment and dropped her big straw bag on the sofa.“I could not get her off the phone. She was coked up. Have you ever been around people on coke?” Dave shook his head. He knew more pot-smoking types. “It’s the worst. They can’t stop talking. They think everyone is their best friend.” It’s good, Dave thought, that she can take this stuff in stride.

  The party swelled, unaccountably, to unexpected proportions. By the late afternoon, Dave’s garden was filled with people—a full third of them, by Dave’s count, strangers—seated on the stacked railroad ties that lined the grassy area, sipping beer from bottles and gnawing happily on rib bones. The ribs and ceviche disappeared quickly, and Dave had to run out and buy hot dogs and tofu pups and potato chips at the fancy bodega on Court Street. Everyone seemed more excited by the hot dogs—blistered and bubbling—than the ribs, which was a bit annoying, after all that brining and marinating. Dave’s “date” for the party was Meredith Weiss, the dark-haired lawyer he’d been seeing, on and off, for more than a year—nearly two years, actually. His other girls had mostly moved on: the blonde poet now lived with a semifamous novelist, in a brownstone on Wyckoff (though she and Dave were still friendly); the yoga teacher was studying anthropology at Columbia and had moved up to Morningside Heights; the French girl had returned to France; and so on. Only Meredith remained.

  He wondered if she might now be considered his girlfriend, if only by default; it had been at least six months since he’d seen anyone else. The idea kind of appealed to him, partly because—and he could admit this—he was lonely, with Sadie absorbed in her weird romance, and Tal pretty much gone, off playing poker with Philip Seymour Hoffman or whatever the fuck he was doing. Meredith was great, too, really great. Occasionally, he found himself saving up funny stories to tell her or reading things in the paper and thinking of her. He had a feeling that the evening would serve as a turning point; that, in bringing Meredith into his fold, he might now be able to settle in with her, to leave off the callow restlessness of his youth, exemplified by the Beth debacle, an episode that increasingly unnerved him; he still didn’t quite understand his behavior and preferred not to think about it.

  In the garden, Meredith sat in a little circle with Lil, Beth, and Sadie, who had come without Agent Mulder, just as Emily had predicted. They all sat cross-legged on the grass, drinking the champagne Sadie had brought (typical Sadie; champagne for a barbecue) from plastic cups. They hadn’t been friends, per se, at Oberlin, but they knew enough people in common, he supposed. From across the garden he waved, and Meredith caught his eye with her own dark one and smiled, her little brown arms emerging from a plain black sundress, her shiny hair, almost as black as the dress, curling to her shoulders. Proximity to those pretty women, all of them laughing and waving their arms, somehow made her more lovely. How, he asked himself, could he have ever considered her simply one of many? How could he have taken her so lightly?

  As the sky began to darken, Dave—who hadn’t eaten a thing, between manning the barbecue, mixing drinks, and introducing strangers—realized that he was, as was so often the case, on the verge of inebriation. He slipped inside the house to grab a glass of water and found there, to his surprise, Emily sitting on his couch with Curtis Lang, engaged in some sort of quiet, intense discussion. Emily appeared to be picking bits of apple out of a glass of sangria and feeding them to Dave’s cat, Thermos, who had a bizarre predilection for fruit (cantaloupe, in particular), but who would, no doubt, throw up all over the place later. Dave sighed and cracked his knuckles. Not trusting his voice, he nodded in their direction, grabbed a glass, filled it, quickly, with lukewarm tap water, and walked back out to the patio. Lil and Sadie waved their hands at him, gesturing for him to come over, but he was too tired to walk the ten feet between them. He sat down, heavily, in a chair, and grabbed a handful of tortilla chips (where had they come from? Had he bought them?).

  “Dave,” Lil shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Dave, c’mere.” Wearily, he rose to obey her, clutching his water glass for stability. He wound his way to the back of the patio, where the previous owners had planted grass and bulbs, which had surprised him, his first spring, by sprouting into little purple and yellow and white flowers. Tuck was now manning the barbecue, smiling as he flipped hot dogs into the buns he’d neatly lined up on a plate. He would, Dave thought, do anything to avoid Sadie: his book was now three full months late. “He’s got to get it in,” Sadie had told Dave back in July, the last time he’d seen her. “They’ll make me cancel his contract. They will. This isn’t the kind of book that they can publish in five years. Ed’s not really in the news anymore.” He’d left the magazine and, was now, apparently, making a film. “A documentary?” Dave asked. Sadie shook her head. “A feature. A dot-com satire. Set in San Francisco. They start filming in the fall, I think.” Sadie, too, had moved on to bigger things. A novel of hers had unexpectedly made it onto the bestseller list and she’d been promoted again. Though she didn’t, Dave thought, seem particularly happy about it. “I’m just a little tired of tending to other people,” she’d told him. “I read these manuscripts and I think, ‘I can write a better book than this.’”

  “You should,” he’d said, but she’d just shrugged and sipped her drink.

  “Dave,” Lil called again. I’m coming, he thought, somehow unable to gather the energy to say it aloud. It seemed to be taking him forever to walk across the garden. There were all these people in the way, more and more of them, continually stepping directly into his path. “Hey,” he said to the girls when he finally reached them. Lil pulled on his pant leg, indicating that he should sit down. “Is Emily still in there with the rock star?” she asked, raising her arched black brows.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why?” The girls laughed.

  “They’ve been in there for hours,” Sadie informed him solemnly. “For the whole party, really.”

  “You’re kidding,” Dave said.

  “Nope,” Lil insisted, raising her eyebrows in a knowing way that set Dave’s teeth on edge.

  “That’s weird. What are they talking about?” he asked peevishly.

  “Musical theater,” suggested Sadie. “Curtis is really into Sondheim, right?”

  “No,” cried Lil. “Andrew Lloyd Webber!”

  “Oh, right,” said Sadie. “He always wears that Phantom T-shirt.” Dave tried to laugh along with them, but his stomach had begun to turn in on itself and his head felt like it might explode. He was hungry and tired and annoyed. How could Emily have spent the whole party talking to Curtis? Making conversation with Curtis was like slowly pulling out the hairs on one’s head.

  “Seriously,” he said, pouring a slug of champagne into a dirty cup. “They have nothing in common. It’s weird.”

  Sadie tilted her head to one side. “I don’t know. He looks kind of like Ken Posa . . .” This was Emily’s college love.

  “Yeah,” said Lil. “He doesn’t actually look like Ken, but he sort of has the same look, you know? That shy schoolboy look.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right!” cried Meredith
, nodding vigorously. “With the hair that kind of sticks up like a baby chicken. And the big eyes. Like it’s painful for him to speak.” Across the patio, as if they knew they were the subject of discussion, Emily and Curtis emerged from the back door, her bright head followed by his dull one. They walked to the barbecue, where Curtis obtained hot dogs for them, daintily handing Emily a paper plate and a fresh beer, then sat down at Dave’s wrought-iron table (it, too, had come with the apartment) and resumed their conversation.

  “He’s really young, right?” asked Lil in a dramatic stage whisper, though there was no way that Curtis might hear her, being a good twenty feet away, with a wall of bodies between them. Dave nodded. “Class of ’98.” The girls emitted cries of shock and, Dave thought, delight. They stared at him, rapt, waiting for more information.

  “He’s a good guy,” he said. “His parents are both psychiatrists. They’re kind of freakishly nice. They, like, come to our shows.”

  “Oh, no,” moaned Lil. “Shrinks’ kids are always fucked up.”

  “Um, Emily’s father is a therapist,” Sadie reminded her. She cocked her head at Dave. “We know you don’t love him.”

  “He’s cool,” said Dave. “He’s great.” Then he remembered something. “You know, he’s married.”

  “Wait,” said Sadie. “He’s married. He’s, like, twelve. How is he married?”

  “I know!” agreed Meredith.

  “He got married in college—” Dave began.

  “In college—” cried Beth.

  “—sophomore year, so that he could live off campus—”

  “Ohhhhh.” This was not so strange. Oberlin’s housing regulations were draconian: no student could live off campus—in a house, rather than a college-owned dorm or co-op—until junior year, and even then, one had to luck into a high number in the housing lottery. That is, unless one happened to be married, which no one was, of course. But every year a few students—those with older, cooler friends or those whose nicotine habit had grown too heavy to tolerate what the brochures called “a nonsmoking environment”—lined up potential spouses and begged rides to Cleveland’s city hall in order to get around this ridiculous rule. Junior or senior year, they’d have the marriage annulled. Or so they said, at the outset. Their friend Josh Weissman, who was gay, was still officially married to a quiet girl named Jill Bialystock. He lived in San Francisco, she in Ithaca. Presumably, when Jill wanted to marry someone else (or Josh, if gay marriage became legal), they’d fill out all the requisite paperwork.

  “So he’s not really married,” said Lil, with a little sigh of relief. They were all so worried about Emily—poor, single Emily—like a tribe of mother hens. Why, Dave thought, was no one worried about him?

  “Not really,” Dave admitted. “But sort of. He and his wife—it’s really weird to say that—ended up getting involved.” The girls, in silence, exchanged a dark glance. “Their senior year, I think. They’d been living together for a while—in Blue House, remember?” They smiled, for they did—a big, rambling house on North Professor. Their friend Erin had lived there senior year, in an attic room with a slanted ceiling. “And they got really close. They moved to New York together.”

  “Weird,” said Meredith.

  “But kind of charming,” said Sadie, “right? It’s like a romantic comedy.”

  “Green Card,” said Beth. “Meets Reality Bites.”

  “Exactly,” said Dave, who suddenly realized that he was still standing, and sat, too hard, down on the grass beside her.

  “But they broke up,” suggested Lil, anxious to get to the point.

  “Yeah,” said Dave. This was why, it turned out, Curtis had moved into the practice space. His wife, Amy—who had, in Dave’s first weeks with the band, shown up occasionally at rehearsals bearing bags of vegetable chips and soy jerky—now lived in Park Slope, Dave explained, in some sort of collective, and worked at the food co-op. In November, she’d be going to Seattle with a rainforest group, to protest the WTO’s regulation on something to do with an endangered species of turtle. “She says Curtis lives irresponsibly.”

  “She must know Caitlin and Rob,” Lil said excitedly. “They’re going, too.”

  Dave shrugged. “She seems like kind of a freak,” he said. “So maybe she and Caitlin are friends.”

  “Dave,” said Lil.

  “A child bride!” cried Sadie. The girls nodded. They looked, he realized, vaguely impressed, which only served to further darken Dave’s mood.

  “So, they’re getting divorced, right?” asked Lil.

  “Yeah,” Dave told her. “They haven’t been together in a while. She has a boyfriend, some anarchist guy. That’s how all this started. She met this guy.” The girls looked at one another, skeptically. They were wondering, he knew, if they should go over and rescue Emily from the clutches of this Married Man. “It’s definitely over,” he told them confidently, though he wasn’t entirely sure this was true. “I mean, they were teenagers. It wasn’t a real marriage. It’s like if Beth and I had gotten married.” Immediately, he regretted this last part, though it was certainly true. All the girls looked down into their cups, stealing furtive, embarrassed glances at Beth, who had gone all red, and Meredith, who was nodding, oblivious to Dave’s gaffe.

  “Hey,” came a voice across the garden, and they all turned to see Ed Slikowski making his way toward them, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes. “I put some beer in the fridge, man,” he told Dave, shaking his hand. “This is a great place.”

  “Thanks, man.” Ed Slikowski flummoxed Dave. He was always just a little too nice. From Dave’s experience, someone like Ed—for whom doors seemed to open as he walked by (he was making a movie? How?)—should be a complete ass.

  “Ed!” cried Lil, rising up to kiss his cheek.

  “Ed!” called Tuck, putting down his tongs and striding over to them. He handed Lil a hot dog and shook Ed’s hand. Great, thought Dave, now I’ve gotta cook again. A small crowd had formed around Ed, including Will Chase—it killed Dave, the way he glanced at Beth proprietarily—and those odious Green-Golds, whom Lil had indeed brought along. Um, this is my party, he thought sullenly. Fuck it, he thought. The hot dogs can burn.

  But then, across the garden, Curtis and Emily moved from the table to the grill, where they stood companionably, shoulder to shoulder, prodding the hot dogs. Emily’s breasts were rather in evidence, pooching out of the low neck of her dress, and it made Dave a little embarrassed to see it. The girls all thought Emily’s problem was that she wasn’t willing to give anyone a chance. She’d go out on one or two dates, then decide the guy was wrong for her. But Dave—who spent a lot of time at parties with Emily and who was, after all, a guy—thought that the trouble was, in fact, the exact opposite. That she tried too hard. Introduce her to some guy she might really like and suddenly she became coy and flirtatious, pouting her lips and putting on what Lil called her “stage face,” which meant that she arranged her features in such a way as to indicate “happy” and “upbeat” and “sexy.” But when she spoke to men she didn’t care about she was her sweet, cool self. And of course these men pursued her, to no avail.

  Which category would Curtis fall into? It didn’t really matter, because there was no way Curtis would be interested in Emily. Dave knew guys like Curtis. They dated androgynous elfin girls who worked in record stores and could spout music trivia on command, or tall, skinny, model types, with long, sleek hair and overly visible midriffs. And sure enough, as Dave watched, Curtis strode across the stone patio, and kissed Marco’s sister Paola—a smiling sylph, with shiny black hair to her waist—on both cheeks, holding her thin shoulders in his hands rather intimately. He heard a faint echo of her hoarse “Ciao.” The crowd had thinned a bit and sounds were starting to float across the patio, snatches of conversation. His upstairs neighbors—Katherine and Matt—walked out the back door, grabbed beers from the ice bucket, and waved at him.

  Just then, Emily snuck up behind him and proffered a hot dog. “I grabb
ed the last one for you,” she said. He took the thing, not sure if he should eat it now—he feared dribbling food on himself, in his inebriated state—or make his way to someplace private before he wolfed it down.

  “Thanks,” he told Emily.

  “De nada,” she replied, crouching down beside him and fidgeting with the ties of her dress. “Listen, I’m gonna take off. Is it okay if I grab some of the ceviche? I told Mr. Gonzalez I’d bring him some. He has his own recipe and he’s curious about my dad’s.” Dave’s ears turned hot. This was so like Emily, to offer him something, then take it away. She barely knew Mr. Gonzalez. He was just her neighbor—an old man, dwarflike, with a brown wrinkled face—not a real friend. Why should she bring food to him, Dave’s food, particularly when Dave himself was fucking starving, and, more important, too fucking tired to go rummaging through his messy kitchen cupboards for a piece of Tupperware.

  “There isn’t any left,” he said.

  “There’s a whole bowl in the fridge that you didn’t put out. I wasn’t sure if you were saving it for something or what.” Scratching his head, Dave looked around, then remembered the hot dog, cooling in his hand. There were still a lot of people around, showing no signs of leaving. He wanted, more than anything, to go inside his cool, dark apartment and shove the entire hot dog in his mouth, alone.

  “It’s not going to keep,” offered Lil, annoyingly. She was in some sort of mood today.

  “You know what?” said Emily, standing up. “Forget it. It’s too much trouble. Listen, I’m going to head.” Her voice had a wounded tone that Dave thought just too much. He hoisted himself up.