A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “No, no,” he said, “let me grab something for you to put it in.” Emily shrugged.

  “Okay,” she said, “thanks,” and followed Dave to the kitchen. Without too much trouble, he found a wobbly cottage cheese container and handed it silently to Emily, who grabbed the blue mixing bowl and spooned ceviche from the large container to the small, purple octopus arms waving in the air. Dave grabbed a cigarette from a pack somebody had left on the counter and lit it with a kitchen match. “The G is running weird after six, isn’t it?” Dave asked her. “Do you have money for a cab? You don’t want to wait for Lil and Tuck? You could split one?” Emily put the blue bowl back in the fridge and shook her head.

  From the dark little hallway stepped Curtis, brown eyes blinking owlishly behind his glasses. “I’m going to take her home,” he said. “I brought Carmen. I was heading that way anyway. We can grab some dinner. All I’ve eaten today is that hot dog.” Carmen was Curtis’s highly impractical vehicle, an orange Karmann Ghia convertible, courtesy of his father, who bought and restored old cars. Dave took an odd pleasure in the absurdity of Curtis’s existence: he didn’t have an apartment, was still living in the practice space (in a tent and a sleeping bag, no less), but he did have a restored-to-mint collector’s car, which he parked on Front Street, apparently unworried about someone stealing it, or stripping it, or bashing in its front window with a tire iron, as had been the fate of every car ever owned by Dave’s parents.

  “Cool,” Dave said, holding out the found pack—Marlboro Lights—to Curtis, who pulled out a cigarette and lit it with his old Zippo, cupping his hand protectively around the flame as though caught in a heavy wind.

  “I’ll be right back,” Emily said, disappearing around the corner, presumably to the bathroom.

  “Excuse me for one sec,” Dave said to Curtis, and, without waiting for a response, trailed Emily down the hall, placing his foot in the bathroom door as she shut it.

  “What the—” she said, then opened the door. “What’s up?” she asked him. He slid past her and sat down on the toilet. Slitting her eyes at him, she closed the door with a firm click. “Dave, what’s the deal?” I don’t know what the fucking deal is, he wanted to say. How do you expect me to know what the fucking deal is? A peculiar feeling was spreading through his abdomen, as though some particular organ—stomach? intestine?—were dropping into a deep pit. Like those dreams he had—maybe everyone had them—just as he slid into sleep, dreams in which he fell into a black void, rousing himself (suddenly, frighteningly) by pressing down on the mattress with an arm or a leg to break the imagined fall.

  “So where are you guys going for dinner?” he asked, his words slurring just as he’d feared. He was still, to his surprise, clutching a lit cigarette in his left hand. How nice. He took a long, invigorating drag and watched, through a haze of smoke, as Emily splashed water on her face. She was so fresh and clean. For a moment, he felt the urge to bury his hot head in the cool, white stretch of her neck, to put his arms around her and fall asleep. Then he wondered where he’d put his hot dog. He hadn’t eaten it, that much he knew. “Bean, I guess, if it’s open and we can get a table.” Bean did a nice shitake and spinach burrito, which sounded pretty good to Dave at the moment, and he had the fleeting thought that he should join them for dinner and simply let his party continue on without him. Only his close friends would notice if he left, really, and he doubted they’d mind. But Carmen only seated two. And, of course, they didn’t want him to come along. There was that.

  Emily patted her face dry and dug around in her bag, extracting a couple of tubes. With two small fingers, she dabbed a red, eerily bloodlike liquid onto her cheeks, then rubbed it in. “Em, don’t get upset, but I just wanted to say, you know, I have to see Curtis almost every day, so if you don’t, if you’re not . . .” He drifted off, unsure of what he wanted to say. “What were you guys talking about?” he asked.

  “Musical theater,” Emily told him. Dave guffawed, sending ash flying onto his bath mat. “No, really.”

  “Really,” Emily insisted.

  “Musical theater,” Dave repeated, trying to catch Emily’s eye in the mirror. If he and Emily could share a little look, a little glance, it would mean that they were in this together, that this was all some big joke, that Emily and Dave would continue to band together against the Curtis Langs of the world. But Emily avoided his gaze, deeply involved in spreading some sort of flesh-colored ointment under her eyes and along the sides of her nose. “Among other things,” she finally said, with a smile.

  Dave’s head, he realized, had begun to faintly throb, syncopated beats that fought for dominance with a rushing, whirring sound in his ears. Champagne, he thought, he shouldn’t drink it, not ever. Fucking Sadie, he thought, and her stupid champagne. Emily ran the faucet again, sprinkling water on her hair and twisting a few fuzzing ringlets around her index finger. He tried to picture her coming by the practice space to pick Curtis up, coming out for drinks after practice, transforming herself from his friend to Curtis’s girlfriend. He did not want this. And yet, he thought, as the cacophony in his head grew more chaotic, he did not—definitely not—want Emily to be his own girlfriend, either, though her neck still looked almost unbearably inviting, like a slab of vanilla ice cream. Then what did he want? Separation. Boundaries, he thought, that’s the word. I want boundaries. He breathed in deeply, inhaling the peppermintish scent with which she was spritzing herself. She pointed the bottle at him and grinned. “Em, if you could just keep in mind that I work with Curtis,” he started again, hating his words as they came out of his mouth. “I kind of work for him.” Emily nodded. She was running a little wand over her lips, leaving a trail of clear gloss.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” she said curtly, giving him a little salute, and with a sigh, she began returning the various pieces of her toilette to her large straw bag.

  Suddenly, Dave realized what he wanted. It was very simple: for Emily to stay in his cool, minty bathroom; for Emily to not get into Carmen and go to Williamsburg and have dinner with Curtis at Bean. If she left the bathroom, he would lose her to Curtis—he knew it, he could see it from the way they bent their heads together on the patio—Curtis, who already had everything, the band, the stupid orange Kharmann Ghia, the perfect, irritating family in their big, stupid house in Montclair, the supreme and unshakable confidence in his own talent. It wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t have Emily, too. It disgusted him, just thinking about Emily crossing over into the World of We: “We went to the best wine bar last night!” and “We can’t make it to your birthday party, Dave, we have to go to Curtis’s cousin’s engagement party.” And worst of all: “Have you seen Being John Malkovich? We loved it.”

  He had already lost so many: not just Beth and Lil and Sadie, but Tal, who had put the first chink between him and Sadie, if he really thought about it, and, moreover, was gone, always gone, in the wilds of somewhere, off shooting something, not “filming,” but always “shooting,” such an annoying, pretentious term, it made Dave want to slam his head through the bathroom’s plaster wall. He was gone so often and for so long that Dave had stopped keeping track of the particulars of his work and was perpetually surprised to see that familiar angular face appear in a Yahoo! commercial or a trailer for a downmarket teen comedy, the sort of thing he and Tal would have lavished with ridicule just a few years earlier (only to sheepishly rent it a few months later, telling themselves it would be fun to watch stoned). Tal had dumped him, just as Beth had dumped him, just as everyone had dumped him—everyone but Emily, cool, beautiful Emily.

  Before he could think any better of it, he’d stood up, threaded the long, aching fingers of his left hand through her hair, turned her face toward him, and begun kissing her, the scents of her various lotions sending him into a sort of swoon. Her neck was as cool as it looked and her lips were the sort of lips he liked—like Beth’s, actually, full and swollen, like a child’s—and they slid against his own with an almost unbearable softness, the gloss that coated them
leaking into his mouth (its taste a cloying ersatz strawberry) and onto his chin. She held one hand, her left, awkwardly in the air, like someone halfheartedly trying to hail a cab, but otherwise seemed to be lost in the same spell that had overtaken him. Through his nose, he breathed deeply and shuddered a little, which only deepened the roaring in his ears. And then, just like that, she pulled away, pushing his hands off her. “Dave,” she said sadly, and shook her head from side to side. “Dave.” Wiping the remnants of her lip gloss on the back of her hand, she strode out of the bathroom.

  Dave followed her out. In the kitchen, they found Curtis, just as they’d left him, leaning against the counter, cigarette in hand, and reading a stained, tattered copy of The Moosewood Cookbook. He grinned broadly at Dave. “I hate this fucking book,” he said, ruffling the book’s stained pages. “I ate at Harkness for three years. We had that gado-gado once a week. I want to burn these stupid hippie recipes.”

  “Go ahead,” Dave told him. “I stole it from Keep.” Go, he thought, leave. Get out of my house. Let me eat my hot dog in peace. (He had spotted it on the counter, blessedly untouched.) But a moment later, as he watched them climb into Carmen (parked illegally in front of his building, but then Curtis was the sort of person who never got a ticket, it was like he had a fucking force field around him), an overwhelming sadness settled around him. He wished they were still there. He wished he were not standing alone in his living room, with a headache and a garden full of guests to attend to on his own, without Emily. Or even Curtis. Sadie was wrong. He did love the guy.

  Back on the patio, the party, thankfully, appeared to be winding down. Katherine and Matt were heading upstairs to their own apartment; they’d come straight from a weekend away, at his parents’ place in the Berkshires, without even dropping their bags off. “We knew,” moaned Katherine, “that if we went upstairs we’d just collapse and never make it down here. The traffic was unbelievable. It took us forever just to get down here from the bridge. Like, six hours.”

  “Three hours,” said Matt, shaking Dave’s hand. “Thanks, man. Great party. Everyone was really nice.” Lil, Tuck, Beth, and Will approached, the girls flitting around, gathering their sweaters and bags and who knows what. “Well, see you soon,” said Tuck, slipping an arm around Lil. “Yeah,” said Dave, thinking, Go, leave. I’m tired. He kissed the girls good-bye, shook their husbands’ hands, then sat down heavily in his favorite chair, an overstuffed piece of Victoriana he’d rescued from the street, and closed his eyes, before, through a boozy haze, he remembered Meredith. Where was she?

  He’d barely seen her all summer because of their colliding schedules—he in Lincoln, recording; she working night shifts at the prosecutor’s office, traveling to the ends of Brooklyn to look at murder victims, corpses. And it had been some time, too long, since they’d slept together. He looked around the patio, inventorying the remaining guests: Marco and his sister, their bass player, some of Dave’s friends from St. Ann’s (fucking trust-fund drug addicts, all of them), a pair of pianists (one Eastman, the other Juilliard), three veterans of Madame Woo’s, and a number of people Dave didn’t recognize. The sky had gone dark by now, though the lights from the nearby houses—and perhaps the collective glow of the city—kept the patio bright.

  At last he found Meredith, sitting with Sadie and Ed Slikowski on the railroad ties, the girls swinging their bare legs and holding to their lips pale cups, which glowed pearlescent in the moonlight. “We’re playing the name game,” Sadie informed him. “Meredith went to Riverdale.”

  “She did,” Dave confirmed. But his presence, who knew why, put an end to the game. The four of them sat, in silence, watching the party go on, the guests talking, the tips of their cigarettes circling the air like fireflies. He’d lost his hot dog again. He would, he decided, take Meredith out to eat, once everyone left. Why, why would they not leave? And then, as if she’d read his mind, Sadie stood up. “I think it’s time for me to make my excuses,” she said, flashing Dave a lopsided grin.

  “I’ll head out with you,” said Ed.

  What about Agent Mulder? thought Dave. Agent Mulder, where are you? Did you really need to go off on your secret mission this weekend? “Thanks so much for coming,” he said, and they walked out, their laughter flowing back at him in waves. The rest of the guests followed. Dave saw them all to the door, Meredith trailing behind him, gathering her things: a thin, lacy sweater; a large black tote; a hardback book she’d put down when she came in, splayed on the coffee table, some sort of history thing.

  Finally, Dave closed the door. The laughter of the guests grew progressively softer and softer as they made their way down Bergen Street. “Hey,” he said awkwardly. His throat didn’t seem to be functioning properly. And though he felt like he was shouting at her through a long tunnel, the word came out as almost a squeak. “Can I take you to dinner?”

  “I guess,” she said, dropping her bag with a closemouthed smile. “We should talk, at least. This summer has just been crazy. That case, the drive-by, has taken over my life.”

  “I know, I know,” Dave told her. “Let me just wash up and drink a glass of water.”

  “Sure,” said Meredith, sitting down on the edge of the couch and flipping open her book. “Are you sure you’re not too tired?” she called as he slunk back down the hallway to the bathroom. He couldn’t summon the energy to answer, which clearly meant that he was too tired—but then wasn’t he always too tired? Clicking the door shut, he ran the tap and scooped cold water over his face, just as Emily had done earlier. In the mirror, his face appeared ominously gray, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, the skin around them scaly and bluish. His towel still carried Emily’s peppermint scent. He raked his damp hands through his hair, strode out to the living room, and sat down beside Meredith. “So,” he said, running his hand down her narrow arm, though any attraction he’d felt for her had vanished—and yet she was here, on his couch, just as he’d expected, so he felt compelled to go on, to carry out his plan. She was as pretty as Emily, as Sadie; prettier, really, than Beth, from an objective standpoint. “How are you?” he asked. She shrugged, lifting her arm to her dark head.

  “I’m good. A little tired. I don’t mind working nights, but it takes its toll on your body, you know? It’s not natural.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and thought about kissing her, if only so they wouldn’t have to talk anymore. She was tired? He was tired. Too tired to talk—and there, yes, he felt a brief stirring in his groin, but as an image, an exciting image, began to come into focus in the depths of his brain, Meredith’s pixieish features were supplanted by Emily’s stranger ones and he felt, for a moment, oh God, that he might cry. “I know,” he said quietly. “I’m tired, too.” And he put his arm around her shoulders, then reached up and stroked her hair, which felt much as it looked—nearly slick in its softness, like a wet road at night—and thought, Well, this is nice. It is. It is.

  “Listen, Dave,” she was saying and twisting out of his grasp, “I need to tell you something.” The throbbing in his head had returned. Or maybe—yes, definitely—it had never left; he had simply stopped paying attention to it, momentarily. He had a feeling that he knew what was coming. Generally, when women said they needed to talk to him, they had just one subject in mind: Dave’s inadequacies, the ambiguous nature of their relationship. Nearly a year ago, the girl from Their Own Devices approached him on this topic, seated on this same brown canvas couch, her knees tucked into her chest. The earnest, plaintive look on her sunburned face had been too much for Dave and he spewed forth a stream of half-truths—which he believed to be whole truths at the time—which led to crying, followed by the slow sex of reconciliation, followed by no modification of Dave’s behaviors. A month later, she went to Yaddo to write poems, met that novelist—older, Indian, New Yorker editor—and now she was married, pregnant, ensconced in her brownstone.

  In truth, he had suspected for a while that Meredith wanted to get married, purchase some sort of couple-appropriate piece o
f property, and do the things people did (not people he knew, just people), much as he had suspected similar things of Beth, and he’d been right, hadn’t he? But Meredith was an Upper East Sider, after all—like Sadie, he supposed, and yet not like Sadie at all—and occasionally returned from trips to her parents’ classic six on Seventy-second with words about how nice it was up there, how clean, how she totally understood why people move uptown once they have kids (Sadie, by contrast, liked to say, “Why not just move to Westchester?”). After college, and before Dave, she’d dated some superboring guy—Dockers, polo shirt, Topsiders, puffy face—from her class at Fordham Law. He now made an astronomical salary doing corporate stuff for a huge firm. They’d run into him on Smith Street once: twenty-eight going on forty. Prematurely bald, a dead expression in his pale blue eyes, jowls slopping over the collar of his shirt, cell phone clipped to his belt. As they parted he’d said, “Catch you later.” “What a loser,” Dave had moaned, too loudly. Meredith shrugged and said, “He’s nice.” That was the sort of person she was, he thought now. Boring. That was why they hadn’t been friends in college, wasn’t it? But boring, in a way, was good, he thought. He liked the little structures and demands she imposed on her life—she ate dinner, for example, at her little kitchen table every night, even when she was alone. That was good, he thought. That was healthy.

  “So,” she said, standing up and walking toward the kitchen sink. “I’m getting married.” Dave felt his jaw drop. He willed it shut.

  “You are?” he asked stupidly. “But how?” Meredith tossed her head back and laughed.

  “Well, it’s not as complicated as you think. You hire an officiant, send out some invitations, buy a dress.” The blood rushed to Dave’s face.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he heard himself say, nearly shouting. “You know that’s not what I meant. Don’t fucking make fun of me.” Now he was shouting. He sounded, he knew, like a cornered child, whiny and on the brink of tears. And the worst of it was, he didn’t care. Not a bit. He really, truly didn’t care at all. He felt, if anything, relieved. And yet: the little men inside his head were beating their mallets even harder and faster, and now their compatriots inside his ears were sending tidal waves of hot blood from one section of their home into another. “What I meant was, how are you getting married when I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone else. Who’s this asshole that’s marrying you, when you’ve been seeing me at the same time you were seeing him.”