A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “Dave, come on,” said Meredith, shaking her head. “We haven’t seen each other in months. Or did you not notice?” She laughed. Dave was having trouble following her words. “I mean,” she went on. There was more! “Dave, we just went to parties and had fun. You were never serious about me. We never really talked.”

  Dave glared at her, folding his arms across his chest. The hammer, so distant before, now beat inside his skull. “You never wanted to talk,” he said. “All you wanted to do was go out. And we were serious. We were . . .” He searched for a word, which increased the force with which the small men beat their mallets. Not “lovers,” yech. “We were dating. We were moving toward something.” Meredith laughed again. Dave shifted miserably on the couch.

  “No, we were moving away from something. Dave, do you think I’m an idiot? You see, like, a different girl every night. And besides, you’re not the sort of guy I’d ever marry.” Now the blood was swishing in his ears, thick and hot. A near-physical urge to grab Meredith and shake her, forcing her to speak to him sensibly, overtook him. He folded his arms more tightly around his chest.

  “What,” he said, his voice sounding strange and trembly, “what do you mean by that?” She shrugged. Her nonchalance was awful.

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot. I suppose—”

  “Forget it,” he said, “fucking forget it. I know the answer. I’m not some loser like that Tim asshole, some guy you can push around, some corporate drone.” She shook her head, sadly, pityingly, Dave realized with a sick feeling.

  “Do you mean Phil? You know, Dave, see, this is it. This is the problem. You don’t know anything about Phil. Do you know what he did before he went to Fordham? He was in a band, just like you. A kind of big band, in Seattle, Red Scare.” Dave bit the inside of his lip to keep from screaming. Red Scare was big. They’d come to Oberlin, played at the Disco, in ’91, opened for the Pixies. He’d worked that night. The lead singer, he remembered, had OD’d, many years ago. “You just have these ideas about people, who they are, what they’re like, but none of it is real, none of it is based on the actual people or the things they do or say.” She was angry, too, now, and he was glad of it. “You’re delusional. You just decide things are true—you and I are ‘going out’ even though we haven’t seen each other in months? Come on. And you just seem incapable of worrying about anyone’s happiness other than your own.”

  This was unbelievable. Truly unbelievable. This boring woman was in his house telling him what was wrong with him. A woman who owned Bananarama albums and went through Oberlin without taking a single English class, a woman who was so dull and status quo that he couldn’t even be bothered to speak to her in college. But then, as suddenly as it had arrived, his anger left.

  Why, if he was so terrible, had she spent so much time with him? And why was she wasting her breath yelling at him, if she didn’t care about him at all? Resting his head on the back of the futon—he was so tired, so tired, and hot—he asked her these questions. She smiled at him. Pityingly. Again.

  “I do care about you. I didn’t plan on saying any of this. I just wanted to let you know that I’m, you know, engaged. So there was no ambiguity. I figured we’d stay friends. Because that’s really all we are, all we’ve been.” She held out her left hand and he saw, for the first time, that it held a rather large diamond in a plain silvery setting. Platinum, he supposed. That seemed to be the material for such rings.

  “I don’t understand,” he said miserably, knowing he should stop, “what you mean when you say I’m not the sort of guy you’d marry.” Before she could answer, Dave let out a strange little croak and—he stretched out this part of the story when he told Sadie about it a few days later—slumped sideways on the couch, odd-colored lights flashing on the insides of his eyelids, then blackness and that awful sensation of falling, falling, into a bottomless cavern, but this time he couldn’t rouse himself. He’d passed out, dead away.

  Later, when Meredith talked to Sadie about it—they became great friends after the party—she said that Dave’s arm felt hot on her shoulder, terribly hot, but she didn’t think anything of it. His face, too, was red, bright red, but she figured the color came from anger, not—as the paramedics informed her—from severe heat prostration (he’d been in the hot sun all day, drinking, his fair, fragile skin unprotected). She thought, at first, that he was joking around, pretending to be stricken with grief over her announcement or slain by her harsh assessment of him. “Dave, I’ve gotta go,” she told him, and washed her wineglass, before realizing that he hadn’t moved, not an inch. When she tried to rouse him, she found his skin burning—“I’ve never felt anything like it,” she told Sadie at Robin des Bois the following weekend, “it was like touching an electric stove”—and strangely dry, like the leather seat of a car. Even more alarming, he wouldn’t wake. She called 911, asked for an ambulance, wondered where the nearest hospital was (Long Island College Hospital on Atlantic?), then ran upstairs and got Katherine and Matt, to see if they might drive Dave (and her) to the hospital. By the time they’d figured out which was the nearest (it was Long Island College), the ambulance had arrived, its sirens audible five minutes before it pulled up in front of the brownstone, where Curtis’s Karmann Ghia had been parked just an hour before. Burbling into walkie-talkies, the paramedics lifted Dave onto a stretcher, hooked a scary web of tubes and masks and things onto him, hoisted Meredith into the vehicle, and zoomed off. Dave came to as they lifted him out of the ambulance, rolling his head from side to side and moaning. They’d strapped his arms down to the stretcher with small cloth ties, which Meredith thought barbaric, but apparently people often awoke hysterical and pulled their IVs out, spurting the paramedics with blood, and undoing all the good the drips had done. “I’m sorry,” he told Meredith in the solemn voice of the terminally ill (as portrayed on film, at least). “If I hadn’t been so scared, I would have laughed,” she told Sadie. “He might have been dying, for all I knew.”

  He was in the hospital three days, rehydrating and having bloodwork done, just in case. Meredith visited him each evening, plagued by a vague worry that she’d caused his illness by speaking her mind. Her fiancé came along on the third day, a jowly guy in Adidas track shoes—not so dissimilar from Phil in appearance. As it turned out, he wasn’t a corporate type at all, but a writer for Rolling Stone. He’d seen Anhedonia twice, once at Mercury Lounge and once when they’d opened for Reynold Marks. They were friends now, too, the three of them, and Sadie and even Beth (and Will, if he was in town) sometimes joined them for drinks or dinner in the neighborhood. “It’s stupid,” Meredith told Sadie (who told Lil, who told Dave). “We were meant to be friends, but we couldn’t really become friends until I was married and we could kind of relax about all the sex stuff. If we were both women, none of this would have happened. We would have just become friends, with no complications, no pressure to sleep with each other, no wondering whether we were ‘in love.’ None of that stupid shit.”

  “Unless you were both lesbians,” Sadie responded. “Or bi.”

  “Right,” Meredith said, “but you know what I mean.”

  “I do indeed,” Sadie told her, twisting her mouth to one side. “Except, well, I don’t mean to be querulous, but Dave has lots of close female friends. Emily, Lil. Me. And we’ve never had anything like this happen. No weird ambiguity.”

  “Right,” said Meredith, in her clear, reedy voice. “Except that’s a whole different pair of gloves.” Sadie laughed. This was one of Rose Peregrine’s pet expressions. Sadie’d taught it to the group. And now Meredith. “Nothing like this would ever happen with you,” Meredith went on, swishing the dregs of her coffee. The stuffed alligator on the wall of the café stared down at the girls with his dusty glass eyes.

  “Why not?” asked Sadie. Meredith rolled her eyes.

  “Haven’t you seen the movie?” she asked. “He’s in love with you.”

  ten

  Sadie Peregrine was pregnant. This was big
news. For many reasons, not the least of which being that she wasn’t yet married—Rose Peregrine was going to lose her shit, the group said—or that the father, as it turned out, wasn’t her boyfriend, Agent Mulder, but Ed Slikowski, whom they hadn’t even realized she was seeing, though they’d certainly been a bit suspicious of the frequency with which his name began showing up in conversation.

  It was January of 2001, a bleak, cold winter, the sort that unfailingly led Rose to cry, “Don’t you wonder how the settlers survived? I could barely make it home from Bendel’s!” But the weather gave Sadie a convenient excuse to stay home (“It’s cold, Lil, I’m not schlepping all the way to Williamsburg”), so that she might avoid her friends and family for as long as possible, until she figured out what to do. There was a chance, she knew, that the pregnancy wouldn’t stick, and she could put it behind her and think through this mess she’d gotten herself into with Michael and Ed. And Tal, too, she supposed, for it was he that she wanted to call, he that she wanted to ask for help, but she couldn’t, of course. But she also knew, somehow, that it would stick, that this was it, that she needed to be a grown-up and rise to the occasion, make some decisions. And though, rationally, she knew the best thing would be for her to wake up bleeding one morning, the mere thought of this possibility, as the weeks went on, became enough to crowd her eyes with tears.

  At the end of the month, she made an appointment with an obstetrician in Soho, randomly selected from her insurance plan’s directory—she certainly wasn’t going to old Dr. Moss, up on Park, whom her mother saw—and told her assistant she might be gone for a few hours. “I’ll hold down the fort,” he said, with a tight smile. She’d been arriving late and leaving early in recent weeks—waking sick and headachy, and growing so again by the end of the day, so that she couldn’t wait to get home, take off her too-tight dress, and lie down—and she could feel the hot force of his resentment as she breezed by his desk and closed the door to her office with a satisfying click. She’d harbored the same during her years with Delores.

  “So, you’re ten weeks,” said the doctor, a pert young woman with a blonde pageboy, running a wand over Sadie’s stomach, her eyes fixed on the screen of a creaky sonogram machine. “Everything looks great.” She pointed to a tiny, pulsing bean. “Nice, strong heartbeat.” She pressed a button and, with a whir, the machine emitted a small paper version of the image on the screen. “Here’s a picture to show your husband,” she said, meeting Sadie’s eyes for the first time. She was visibly pregnant herself, Sadie realized. Everyone seemed to be pregnant lately. In her neighborhood and Lil’s, she couldn’t walk a block without coming across some hipster, heavy with child, or a grinning new mother, baby strapped to her chest in a carrier or peeking out of a sling. “I probably won’t be able to deliver you,” she went on, gesturing toward her abdomen. “But the other doctors in the practice are excellent.”

  “Great,” said Sadie. She’d been half expecting the doctor to tell her that it was a hysterical pregnancy and send her off to a shrink. Barring this, her intention had been, she supposed, to ask about her “options”—she couldn’t utter the word “abortion,” even silently—but she could not bring herself to do so, whether it was because of the doctor’s own pregnancy or her cheerful assumption that Sadie, like the doctor herself, was a settled matron, anxious to call her husband with the good news.

  “And you’re feeling okay? Any bleeding? Cramping?”

  Sadie shook her head.

  “Nausea? And you can keep food down?” She picked up Sadie’s chart.

  “Mostly. I do get pretty nauseated. When I wake up. And then again around five or six.”

  “But you can keep food down?” Impatience was creeping into the doctor’s voice. How long have I been in here? thought Sadie. Five minutes?

  “I can.”

  “Excellent. Just try not to let your stomach be completely empty or too full. Eat small meals. The nausea comes from having no food in your stomach. Or from eating too much. Carry saltines around with you.”

  “Okay,” said Sadie, thinking, Saltines? That’s your advice? Eat saltines?

  “Do you have any questions?” The doctor had already repositioned herself closer to the door.

  “I shouldn’t tell anyone until twelve weeks, right?” she asked hopefully.

  “That’s the rule,” said the doctor, moving closer to Sadie. “But I’d say it’s fine. Once we get a heartbeat, it’s usually fine. Most miscarriages happen around six or seven weeks.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  She looked down at the chart again. “So you’ll go up to the hospital in two weeks for the nuchal. Call and make the appointment today.” She smiled and made for the door. “You can bring your husband. It’s pretty cool. Anything else?” Her hand reached for the doorknob.

  Sadie sat up on the table. “Um, I’m so tired all the time. That’s normal, right?”

  The doctor smiled. “Completely normal. Just make sure to listen to your body. Sleep when you’re tired.”

  But Sadie couldn’t sleep when she was tired. She had a job. She’d been slogging through her days like a somnambulist, missing her stop on the train, forgetting to buy milk, unable to make it past a few pages of a manuscript. And so it was that she dressed herself, handed over thirty dollars for her copayment, and fought her way up Broadway, a sharp wind lashing her face, to Lil’s new office, on the twelfth floor of a small building between Prince and Houston. At the end of the last semester, Lil had suddenly—and without consulting with Sadie—taken a leave from school and accepted a full-time job at the poetry foundation where she’d interned the past few summers. She’d started after the New Year, editing the foundation’s little magazine, really a glorified newsletter. “The last editor became a staff writer at New York magazine,” Lil told Sadie as she showed her around the office, a large loft cordoned off into columns of offices. Lil’s was doorless, a sort of pen, but beautifully situated by the back window, which looked out over the low buildings and water towers of Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side.

  “There’s my aunt Minnie’s building,” cried Sadie, pointing to a brick tower by the water. “I can’t believe you can see that far east.”

  “How is she?” asked Lil, pursing her lips. In college, Sadie had dragged Lil—and Dave, and Beth, anyone who would come—to see her aunt, who served as a sort of surrogate maternal grandmother, Rose’s parents having died long before Sadie’s birth.

  “Okay. All her friends are dying. I think she’s pretty lonely.”

  “I’d love to see her,” said Lil. Sadie did not, lately, want to bring Lil round to her family. Lil’s interest in them made all too stark Sadie’s own neglect (it had been months since she’d visited Minnie; she resolved to go that weekend).

  “Sure,” she said. “We’ll make a plan.”

  Outside, the sun had come out and the wind had picked up, blowing the ends of Sadie’s scarf around her face. Light flakes swirled around them. At Kelley and Ping, they were greeted with a welcome gust of warm air. Steam rose from the grills of the open kitchen, where white-coated cooks tossed noodles in pans. Lil and Sadie sat at a low table by the bar and surveyed the plates in front of them: pad thai, pad see yew, Chinese broccoli, all glistening with oil, the sight of which made Sadie’s stomach lurch. I should have ordered soup, she thought. But all the soup involved meat, which she was definitely off, chicken in particular. She was also, however, off vegetables, particularly strong-tasting vegetables, and so she pushed the broccoli toward Lil and spooned a few noodles onto her plate.

  “So are you thinking you want to go into journalism?” she asked Lil. Like Tuck, she almost said. “Is that why you took this job?”

  “I don’t know.” Lil shrugged happily. “Maybe. Sort of. They offered it to me and it just seemed like a good opportunity. I’ve never had a job job before.” From the pile of noodles, she plucked a shrimp with her chopsticks and contemplated it. “It’s so easy, compared to grad school. It’s weird. We have these me
etings and people argue about, like, what hors d’oeuvres to serve at the Jorie Graham reading.” She bit the top off the shrimp. “And I just go home and I’m done. No papers to grade.”

  “Do you think you’ll go back to school?” The previous semester her dissertation proposal had at last been approved, after three revisions. It seemed, to Sadie, such a waste to leave now. Why not just write the thing and be done with it? But she supposed that was easy for her to say. She wouldn’t want to spend three years reading through jargon-heavy essays on Mina Loy.

  “I don’t know. I mean, what’s the point? What am I going to do when I finish? Go teach at, like, a junior college in Wyoming? Tuck won’t move to someplace like that. And anyplace he would move, I won’t be able to get a job, because everyone else wants to move there, too.”

  “But isn’t it possible you’d find something here? I know it’s a different field”—Lil began shaking her head, an irritated expression taking over her face, for she knew what Sadie was going to say—“but Beth seems to be doing okay . . .” In the fall, she’d become Slate’s television critic—which was exciting and much deserved, since she’d been writing for them for a year, making, she said, pretty much nothing (though Sadie wondered if anyone actually read Slate, or if they just talked about reading it)—and had promptly been offered classes at NYU’s J school, which she’d taken, despite having already signed on to teach Television and History, two sections, to undergrads at Steinhardt. They’d barely seen her all fall. And when they did, she looked drawn and tired, eternally curling herself into Will’s arms and yawning. Will, for his part, seemed almost too proud of her. “Did you read her Sopranos piece?” he was always asking. “Did you read that piece she did on Gilmore Girls?” The Svengali thing, in Beth’s case, had worked, Lil said.