A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

For Sundays were, they had agreed, the day on which they took a break from each other. Lying in Curtis’s bed—really just a futon pad laid out on the floor—with the gray Williamsburg light sliding in through the windows, she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him. But leave him she did, growing peevish and querulous as she gathered her clothes and dressed and made her way through the hallways, to the loft’s massive steel door. Arriving home to her dismal little flat, she thrust herself into some sort of activity to fend off despair. In truth, she needed Sundays to herself—when else would she wash her clothes, pay those bills, do her shopping, straighten her drawers, read books, and, of course, see her friends. And some Sundays, the plodding nature of her chores satisfied her, and she felt sure that all would be okay. Come Monday, Curtis would arrive at her spotless apartment, find Emily radiant—hair shiny, skin dewy—and immediately divorce Amy. And Emily would morph back into the girl she was a year prior—vivacious, original, headed for stardom, at the start of a brilliant romance.

  The girl she was now would fall away like a bad dream. She hated that second girl, despised her, even as she felt herself becoming her, more and more. Even worse, though, was the way she felt her friends thinking of her as this second girl, as though she were a hapless victim, wittingly brutalized by the theater world (in general), the producers of her play (in specific), and, of course, moody, immature, rock-star Curtis, who was never going to marry Emily. She’d overheard Lil saying she’d “had such a hard time” and become “obsessed with that stupid play.” Even in conversation with her, they let little remarks slip, unable to resist the impulse to improve her life.

  “Have you ever thought about going into publicity?” Sadie asked. “You’d be, I think, really good at it.”

  “Curtis just seems so different from you,” Lil opined. “Isn’t it hard being with someone so quiet?”

  “You don’t want to do TV?” asked Beth. “Just theater?”

  “Maybe you just need a change, any change,” Sadie suggested. “Something new.”

  But she didn’t. She didn’t want to go work in PR or advertising or marketing, or any of the subliterate, pointless fields that might hire an almost-thirty-year-old failed actress with “people skills.” She also didn’t want a shiny new boyfriend, some chatty egoist like Tuck or Will. Over the years, before she’d met Curtis, her friends had tried, continually, to set her up with men, all of them awful. Lately, her mother had become aware of JDate and emailed her the registration page. (“Look how easy it is! You can use that nice picture from Lara’s bat mitzvah.”) But JDate—and all those other online personal services—were the same, in spirit, as setups. The man she married was not going to be someone who posted his digitally altered picture online under the handle “DramaGeek,” in the hopes of finding a woman who could talk Sondheim with him (even if that guy was straight).

  “So then who is the guy? How do you find him?” Sadie had asked when Emily explained this theory to her. “I don’t know,” Emily admitted, feeling her face grow hot, her anger rise. “But he’s not going to be the person you’d expect. And definitely not an actor.” This was when she still thought she was going to Broadway. She’d felt bold and brash and happy alone. A month later, she’d met Curtis. Which was how it always happened, wasn’t it? You had to be completely satisfied with yourself, certain that you could live forever alone—she saw herself like Katharine Hepburn, in slacks and turtleneck, rattling around her cluttered apartment—before you could attract others. But once you settled on someone—settled in with someone—you lost the contentment and confidence that attracted him in the first place. You began worrying about his happiness, and his goals and wants, so that you internalized them, and your own happiness and goals and wants were banished to some dark and musty part of yourself. She’d seen it happen with Lil, who had clearly dropped out of Columbia so she wouldn’t be a threat to Tuck’s precious intellect, and with Beth, who always seemed exhausted lately, running herself ragged teaching adjunct, still—at NYU, but still—and writing for anyone who would have her (Will kept telling her to give up the teaching, but she couldn’t let it go, the idea of herself as an academic), her dissertation still unfinished, and schlepping Sam to soccer and gymnastics and swimming, as if she could make up for not being his actual, biological mother by sheer calories spent. Emily could barely stand to see either of them. They were, she supposed, the Ghosts of Marriage Future, with their glib, superficial chatter; they seemed positively terrified that she might engage them in some sort of real conversation and pierce the fragile bubble of their unions. And yet—and yet—she was jealous, stupidly, embarrassingly jealous of their clichéd resentments (“Tuck stayed out until four last night”) and their domestic squabbles (“Will just won’t do the dishes”) and even their boredom (“I feel like we have nothing to talk about”). Marriage, with all its flaws, had to be better than her current state, a sort of limbo.

  There was Sadie, too, of course. She and Ed seemed happy—though Emily still couldn’t believe that Sadie had ended up with someone other than Tal—and even happier now that they had Jack, who at two weeks struck Emily as preternaturally alert, with his enormous blue eyes, and vast, drooping cheeks. But then, they had things better than the others, in a way. They were—Why, why, Emily often wondered—the sort of people for whom everything came easily. In April, Sadie’s ancient aunt had died, leaving Sadie her apartment in the old union co-ops on Grand, unnervingly close to the Williamsburg Bridge. They’d moved in just a few weeks back, right before Jack was born. She’d visited them the day before, in the new apartment—boxy but pleasant—and been struck by the effortlessness of their interactions, Sadie resting against Ed on her old velvet couch, Jack sleeping on her lap. Was it because they were still sort of new? Or was it simply that they were right? Regardless, she was dismayed to find that it made her a little sick. “I think you’re the most calm new mother I’ve ever seen,” she told Sadie, trying not to grit her teeth.

  “Well, you should come back next week.” Sadie had laughed, giving Ed a wry smile. “I might not be so calm.”

  “I’m going to Toronto,” Ed explained. “The film festival.”

  “Oh, right!” Emily had completely forgotten about this. “So exciting!”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see what people think.”

  “People are going to think it’s brilliant,” said Sadie.

  “Are you nervous about being alone?” Emily asked her.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” said Sadie.

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “I do,” said Sadie. “I was planning on going. But what would I do with Jack. He has to nurse every five minutes. I don’t know if I could leave him with a sitter.” She smiled down at him. “He’s so little. And how would we even find a sitter?” Leaning over, she kissed Ed’s cheek, a gesture so intimate that Emily had to look away. “And I think it’s probably better for Ed to go alone. He has to network.”

  When Jack woke, Sadie handed him to Emily. She’d been startled by the warm heft of him—his breath hot on her shoulder, his eyes meeting her own—and she’d walked out the door limp with yearning, though she didn’t understand why. She’d never particularly wanted a baby. Or even marriage. Was it the world, changing around her? Everyone seemed to be getting married these days, and everyone in Williamsburg seemed to be having babies. Or was it all, yes, because she had nothing, nothing?

  Meanwhile, Curtis was on the verge of having everything. As was, of course, Dave, which was particularly irritating, since he was, by far, the laziest person she knew. The band’s first album, recorded over a year ago, would finally be coming out the following week. There had been some uncertainty eight-odd months back, when their label was bought by another, larger label, which fired the original staff (who used their buyout cash to start another label). The new people—the marketing execs, the producers, the other nameless, uncategorizable middle managers with whom Curtis and Dave and the other guys met in glassy midtown conference rooms—didn’t know exactly what to
do with them and admitted as much. For a while there was talk of dropping them (“The market’s saturated with this Elliott Smith kind of stuff”); for a while there was radio silence—no word, nothing, no calls answered; but finally, in the end, things had turned out surprisingly, strangely well. In May, a younger producer actually listened to the Lincoln recordings—during all those months of grumbling and silence, no one, it turned out, had bothered to listen to the band’s stuff—and decided the band had a “unique sound” and “next-big-thing potential,” terms that made Curtis more nervous than elated. “Now is when I’d really like a beer,” he said after hanging up the phone with the producer. “So have a beer,” Emily said. “I can’t,” he told her, with a flash of anger. “You know I can’t.”

  But then money—not huge amounts of it, but money nonetheless—began to arrive, money for them to live on while they mixed the album. Money to hire a famous, crazy photographer to take moody, retro shots for the album cover; money to plaster the city—or at least the East Village—with posters of that cover; money to send them on tour (they left on Thursday; Emily had been trying not to think about it); money to pay a shrill publicist with streaked blonde hair and a Five Towns twang, who called almost daily with reports of her success on their behalf: a piece in Time Out, a piece in New York to coincide with their show at Hammerstein Ballroom (back of the book, but still); reviews here, interviews there, Saturday Night Live was maybe interested. “Big things are HA-pen-ING,” she liked to say. And then the biggest: an off-puttingly cool magazine—its text printed in mod sans serif, its models clad in rags—selected them as one of its “five bands to watch.” Or something like that. The issue would be out on Tuesday—Curtis had been promised an advance copy, which never arrived—and it was possible, the publicist kept bleating, that the band would be on the cover (“They’ve told me the cover is a POS-si-BIL-ity. Fingers crossed!”). A couple months back, Curtis and Dave and the others had been styled and photographed and interviewed. Afterward, they’d talked about how silly it all was, but Emily could see they all loved it. All except Curtis, who seemed even more fidgety and quiet than usual. When Emily asked him about it—Was he not excited? Worried? Anxious?—he shrugged his shoulders, which were narrow, and blinked behind his round glasses. “I don’t really want to talk about it,” he told her. “I’m trying not to think too much about it. I don’t want to be disappointed. This could all turn out to be nothing.”

  Emily tried not to take such statements as a reproach of her own, more optimistic mode, which had led to such extreme disappointment. But there was reproach in his voice, she could feel it, whether Curtis intended it or not, and she told herself not to be bothered by it, for if she allowed herself to be offended on this count there was no turning back, the gates would open and it would all be over. At work, over the long, dull day, she found herself dwelling on this small injury. It was one thing, she thought, for her friends, who had known her for so long, to express anxiety over her future or her well-being (though, of course, it annoyed her when they did so). It was quite another for Curtis—who was younger than she, who had barely struggled—to criticize her, to act as though she was to blame for everything that had happened, when she had been cheated, wronged, taken for a ride, and when he didn’t know the first thing about theater, anyway, about how things worked, how promises were made.

  This line of thinking troubled her, for it smacked of Clara, who eternally believed herself cheated, wronged, taken for a ride by anyone who’d crossed her wayward path. And lately a new worry had crept into Emily’s tired brain: that she would end up like her sister, talking to her demons on a street corner. Clara was on her mind, as she seemed to be all Emily and her parents spoke of these days. Back in May, Clara had been found in a roadside motel off 70, ranting about a patient of their father’s, a skinny high school student who, she said, had broken into the room, raped her, and stolen her “meds.” Indeed, there were no meds on the premises, but this appeared to be because she’d taken them all herself and, as a result, entered into what the ER doctor called a “drug-induced psychosis.” Emily’s father, for the most part, concurred and a day later, the Kaplans drove Clara up to a facility in Vermont. Now, every afternoon around four, Emily picked up her line at work and heard Clara’s low, cigarette-scarred voice complaining about the food, the know-it-all psychiatrist, and the crazy people in her group sessions. “They’re all crazy-crazy, know what I mean? Not like me.”

  Meanwhile, Emily knew, from talking to her parents, that the institute was on the verge of kicking Clara out for refusal to cooperate. “She lies,” her mom explained. “She simply will not tell the truth about anything in her sessions. She lies to her psychiatrist. She lies to the nurses, to the other patients in group. And she refuses to take blame for anything. It’s all part of the disease.” Emily asked why, then, they were planning on letting Clara leave. Shouldn’t she stay until they’d cured the disease? “Yes and no,” her mom said, clicking her tongue impatiently. “Hasn’t your father explained this to you? They used to think Clara had a mood disorder. Mood disorders are stabilized pretty easily with medication. You know this, Emily, you took psych”—Emily’s parents were fond of reminding her of this, by way of suggesting that she had other skills, that she could leave this ridiculous acting business anytime and become a therapist, like her father—“but Clara never responded well to any of the medications. They never really worked. You know.” Emily did know. What she didn’t know was why her mother felt the need to rehash Clara’s sad history each time Emily asked a question about her sister’s current situation.

  “So now, this new doctor says the other doctors were wrong. She has borderline personality disorder—”

  “Mom, I know. But I don’t get why the doctor is trying to send her home for lying, if lying is a symptom of her disorder.”

  “It’s because of money, Emily. Personality disorders take time—months, years—to treat. You can’t just give someone like Clara a pill and send them on their way. The doctor thinks Clara would need to stay at Brattleboro for a year in order to make some real progress. And there is absolutely no way we can afford a year at that place. The well has run dry, my dear.” She let out a brittle laugh. “Since she can’t stay long enough to be treated properly, there’s no point in keeping her there for much longer, unless she has some sort of breakthrough.”

  “What does that mean?” Emily asked.

  Her mother sighed. “She needs to start talking. Or show some sign of progress. Like that she’s in touch with reality.” For the time being, she told Emily, they were giving Clara “coping classes,” which would help her develop techniques for managing her anger, for keeping the various elements of her life in check. She was learning to draw up lists of pros and cons, which would help her make decisions (she would often become paralyzed at, say, the grocery store, unable to choose between Raisin Bran and Special K), to balance her checkbook, to keep a calendar on which she would write down the due date for her rent and credit card bills and shifts at work, and other seemingly basic human activities that Clara had never mastered.

  “Isn’t there anything else they can do?” Emily asked her mother. “A different type of therapy? Behavior modification?”

  Again, her mother let out a heavy sigh. “Well, I guess that’s what the coping classes are. And they are trying some other things. We’ll see.”

  To Emily, Clara actually sounded better. And yet Emily herself seemed, somehow, worse. Each day, her emotions snuck closer and closer to the surface of her skin, threatening to interfere with even the most minor components of her daily life. A week earlier, she’d completely lost her temper when the guy at the post office had refused to accept her credit card without ID, even though she’d been buying stamps from him for years. She’d run home to Curtis, taut with anxiety.

  “You’re not mentally ill, okay,” Curtis said, with a shrug, when she told him what happened. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I know,” she said. “But, Cu
rtis, I just went crazy. I started screaming at the guy. It was exactly the kind of thing Clara would do.”

  Curtis twisted his puffy lips into a smile. “It’s the kind of thing everyone does. Postal workers are assholes.”

  “I know,” she said again, looking down at her feet.

  “Do you want to talk to my mom about it?” he asked.

  “No, no,” Emily said quickly. His parents were both psychiatrists at New York Hospital, on Sixty-eighth Street. He met them for lunch every couple of weeks, and sometimes Emily accompanied him, trying to keep up with the Drs. Lang as they trotted through the building, dropping off papers, conferring with their residents, armies of clean-shaven, short-haired, vaguely pompous young white men in dark suits covered over with lab coats, who eyed Emily and Curtis suspiciously.

  Mr. Lang specialized in sexual dysfunction. Mrs. Lang in eating disorders, which, Emily had recently discovered, through rampant Googling, were a type of borderline personality disorder. The Langs made Emily a little nervous, though she knew they didn’t mean to and she should just chill. If anything, Curtis’s parents were overly familiar: Peace Corps vets, like her own parents, who lived in a renovated Victorian—white, with black shutters—in a quaint, lushly landscaped town, with an overabundance of antique shops and bistros. They’d met at Harvard Med and still seemed appropriately fond of each other, both of them tall and thin and long faced, and clad in the sorts of garments worn by affluent suburbanites who wish to broadcast their interest in nature and the various activities one might partake in by way of communing with it.

  Now that Curtis and his sister Cordelia were grown, the Langs spent part of each year in Africa, volunteering at an AIDS clinic. Their house was filled with tribal masks and fetishes, which frightened Emily, with their empty eyes. She knew it was politically incorrect of her to feel this way. She also knew that Sadie would have said that Emily’s fear of the masks was really a manifestation of—“a mask for, if you will,” she could hear Sadie saying, with a laugh—her fear of the Langs, Curtis included. For in a way, the problem with her visits to Montclair lay less with the Drs. Lang and more with the way a different Curtis emerged the minute he set foot on their plush lawn: the suburban overachiever, the yearbook photographer, political activist, track star. She didn’t mind this Curtis, but she knew, somehow, that if Curtis were to betray her, to renege the promises he’d made to her, to leave her, that this second Curtis—the Montclair Curtis—would be responsible. For this Curtis—who sweetly brought up the subjects on which he knew his father loved to expound, like T. S. Eliot and North Fork wines—was first and foremost a Lang, and secondarily everything else.