A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  It had taken her some time to realize that Curtis was, despite appearances, still under the thrall of his parents’ expectations. When she’d met him, a year prior, she’d thought him the exact opposite, some sort of pure being, like a bodhisattva, shot down from a higher plane to bless mortals with his unusual wisdom. He didn’t want to talk about any of the things other people talked about at parties: new restaurants, rents, movies. He hadn’t read a magazine since 1984, when his subscription to Highlights expired, and he hadn’t read a book published since around that same date, other than Vineland (he was mad about Pynchon, the only person she knew who’d made it through Gravity’s Rainbow). He didn’t go to movies and didn’t own a television. He hadn’t asked her what she did or where she lived or how she found her apartment. What did they talk about? she wondered now, padding around her clean apartment. Family, she supposed. Art.

  On her second visit to Montclair, in March, Mr. Lang served a cassoulet—“French peasant food!” he cried in such a way that Emily knew he shouted this whenever he served the dish—and a big salad, and talked at length about the wine, which came from a grape that had fallen out of vogue but was now being revived by artisanal vintners in Virginia (“Turns out the soil has the exact same pH level as the Loire”). After dinner, Mrs. Lang shooed Emily and Mr. Lang into the study—they’d eaten at the big plank table in the Langs’ sleek open kitchen—and summoned Curtis to help her with the dishes. “How about some port?” asked Mr. Lang, raising one bony finger, and slipped through the study’s second doorway, which led to a funny little passageway under the stairs. Emily was left alone in the Lang study, a dark, book-lined room straight out of Martha Stewart, though presumably the room’s design and decoration predated Martha Stewart’s invention of herself as the arbiter of things domestic. Emily ran her finger over the books in the cases: medical and psychological texts, British mysteries, short stories by Cheever and Carver and McCullers, paperback thrillers, a shelf of yellowing editions of poetry, presumably dating to the Langs’ undergraduate days. One section of a bookcase was covered with a massive door, behind which, Emily suspected, was a television. She imagined Curtis as a towheaded kid, lying on the flat kilim, watching cartoons.

  From the kitchen came the low murmur of Curtis’s voice, punctuated by the higher, sharper inflections of Mrs. Lang. Emily tried not to listen, until she heard Mrs. Lang say, unmistakably, “What’s Amy up to these days?” Curtis’s response—or the parts of it she could make out, from where she sat frozen in an oversized leather club chair—had something to do with Amy’s continuing legal problems, following her arrest in Seattle at the WTO the previous year, and the fallout from a massive protest against Crown: a mock New Orleans funeral for the company, with an effigy of its CEO in a coffin, and a fifteen-piece brass band (“It was really cool”). Emily had read about the protest in the paper—and heard a bit about it from Lil, as Caitlin Green-Gold and her husband were, of course, involved—and wasn’t surprised to hear that Amy the Anarchist had been in attendance. But she was surprised that Curtis could outline Amy’s activities for his mother. She’d been under the impression they were barely in touch. Just calm down, she told herself. It’s not a big deal.

  But a few days later, she flew into a rage—“You still love her!” etc.—and Curtis confessed that part of the time he didn’t spend with Emily—Sundays, his time, he’d said, for solitude—was spent at Amy’s place, visiting Dudley, the grayish, wiry-haired dog they’d adopted in college. Curtis kept a photo of Dudley in his wallet and looked longingly at every dog they passed on the street. “I miss him,” he told her. “He’s an old guy. He’s not going to be around much longer.” Emily’s fury—tamped down, briefly, by thoughts of Dudley—leapt into her throat again.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s good to see Amy, too,” she said, in a clipped, formal tone. “You guys have known each other for so long. It would be terrible if you just, you know, never spoke.” Curtis nodded slowly. He appeared to be slightly afraid of her, which only made her more angry.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said carefully, after a while. “I was a terrible husband to her and I feel like I can kind of make it up to her by being a good friend. She can’t really take care of herself. It’s hard for her, being alone.”

  Emily refrained from pointing out that Amy had a boyfriend who lived on her block—whom she’d started sleeping with while she and Curtis were still living together—and so she wasn’t alone, was she? She also managed to restrain herself from mentioning this development to her friends, since she knew they would make too big a deal out of it. But she added a third Curtis to the list: the Curtis who spent time with Amy on Sundays. She would never meet this Curtis and that was absolutely fine with her. She wondered whether he and Amy talked about politics or their mutual friends or the weather or what, and whether, in doing so, he studiously avoided mentioning Emily, as he avoided mentioning Amy to Emily.

  Not that it mattered. On Sunday afternoons she went about her chores with the specter of Amy trailing her, like some kind of hovering, bewinged Disney witch. Come Sunday night she often felt that she’d rid herself of this ghost, so content was she in her small, neat home, her three plants watered, her hair freshly washed, her bed lined with clean sheets, her laundry folded and put away, her face pink and exfoliated, a pot of tomato sauce bubbling on the stove. Some Sundays, she even found herself dreading Curtis’s Monday invasion. Maybe, really, she was meant to be alone. Maybe she preferred being alone and she’d simply been conditioned by the media—or society in general—to think she had to partner off with someone and start a family and so on.

  This was how she felt on some Sundays. On other Sundays—like this one, the day before their anniversary—Amy remained unvanquished, a convenient repository for all Emily’s fears and anxieties. As the evening wore on, she practically had to sit on her hands in order to keep herself from picking up the phone and calling Curtis. This was another thing she’d sworn she wouldn’t do: call him on Sundays. She didn’t want to seem incapable of going a day (less, really!) without speaking to him. Nor did she want to appear to be checking up on him, making sure he actually came home from Amy’s place, though of course she did want to make sure, particularly since the Monday, back in April, when Curtis walked in the door, kissed the top of her head, and announced, quietly, that he was going to quit drinking.

  “Quit drinking,” Emily parroted, shocked. Curtis loved to drink. More than anyone she knew. She put down the bottle of wine in her hand. “Quit drinking,” she repeated. The phrase sounded strange and false to her, like something from a Jimmy Stewart movie or an Arthur Miller play, as though drinking were Curtis’s occupation and he’d decided to leave it and pursue something more lucrative, like selling aluminum siding. “Why?” she asked, hearing a whine creep into her voice. Curtis shrugged and smiled, sitting down on Emily’s gray couch. He picked up that week’s New Yorker, which lay open to the movie reviews, the section Emily read first. “Curtis, why?” she asked again, sitting down next to him and taking one of his hands in her own. Instead of looking at her, he glanced blankly at the bottle of wine on the counter.

  “Emily, I mean, come on. Why does anyone quit drinking?” She pursed her lips together so as not to ask him to please stop using that ridiculous phrase.

  “I don’t know anyone who’s ‘quit drinking,’” she told him primly.

  “Sure, you do,” Curtis said. “Clara.” Emily recoiled at the mention of her sister’s name.

  “Clara stopped drinking,” she told him, feeling that now-familiar switch click on, unleashing an electric jolt of anger; there was something strangely exciting, even sexy about it, that odd, off-kilter feeling that anything, anything, might fly out of her mouth, “because she’s crazy. You’re nothing like Clara. Are you”—she was on the verge of screaming, the muscles in her arms strangely taut, her temple pounding—“are you saying that you’re an alcoholic? Is that what you’re saying? Because you’re not. You don’t know anything about it, Curti
s. You’re not an alcoholic.”

  “I could be,” he said, his eyes still on the magazine. “And I am like Clara in some ways. I have a problem with addiction. I smoke. I drink too much coffee.”

  Emily threw up her small hands. “Curtis, this is crazy! My sister has serious problems. It’s offensive to say that you, your, I don’t know”—her voice sputtered—“the fact that you smoke, like, a pack of American Spirit Lights every two days is in some way the same as my sister being an unreformed junkie who can’t function in normal society.” She was screaming now, her voice ragged, and Curtis had put down the magazine and dropped his head into his hands. His legs were so long that his knees poked up in sharp angles from the low couch.

  “Please calm down,” he said, in such a quiet, heartbreaking way that Emily burst into tears.

  “This is Amy, isn’t it?” she said. “This has something to do with Amy.”

  “No, no,” he told her. He’d been thinking, a lot, he said—with the album coming out and the tour and all that—and realized that everything he and Emily did together involved drinking. They never sat and talked without a glass of wine in their hands. “You just have one, but I always want another. I get a taste for it.” And he thought, just as an experiment, that he’d stop and see how things progressed without alcohol as a “lubricant.” Amy, she thought. That sounds like Amy. And sure enough, when pressed, Curtis confessed that Amy had planted the idea in his head: she’d been insisting, lately, that Curtis’s drinking had driven them apart. And she was concerned, sweet girl, that it would do the same to him and Emily. Alcohol was a depressant and Curtis had depressive tendencies anyway, she said. He should really think about Prozac or Zoloft or something.

  “Curtis, that’s just stupid,” Emily said. “You don’t need to be on antidepressants.” But she was remembering that in college he’d gone through an amphetamine phase (“It helped me focus”) and an LSD phase (“It helped me write”), and she was counting the number of his lyrics that had something to do with one drug or another. Or self-loathing. Or suicide. Okay, Emily thought, maybe I’ll give her this one.

  “According to Pfizer, we all need to be on antidepressants,” he said, smiling, but she would not, no, she would not, let all this go with a laugh.

  “Oh,” she said, folding her arms against her chest. “Well. Then. Why don’t we hook up the IV right now.” Curtis shrugged again, maddeningly, then let the real bomb drop: Amy had decided that they shouldn’t divorce until Curtis “sobered up.” Not, he insisted, because she didn’t want the divorce—she did, he said—but for Curtis’s own welfare. She didn’t want him to go through with the divorce in some sort of alcohol-induced fog only to regret it later.

  “Why would you regret it?” asked Emily. “And why does it matter? If she wants the divorce, too, then why should she care if you regret it.” Curtis sighed and gave her a look of great tolerance, as though Amy’s logic was flawless and Emily a dolt for not understanding, but he would be kind enough to explain it one more time.

  “She wants us both to be in the same place.” This was not Curtis-speak either, this “same place” talk. “Emily, listen, I don’t know why I’m defending her. This is crazy. I’m making you miserable with all this. I want to be with you—you’re my girl.” He grinned and shot her an embarrassed look. “I don’t want to be with Amy. I, I don’t even want to talk about Amy.” He moved his long hands around, formlessly, helplessly. “All this stuff with the band,” he said, his voice growing smaller. “I’m nervous.”

  “But isn’t that normal?” Emily asked angrily. Suddenly, as though a camera inside her were shuffling its lens around, bringing everything into sharp focus, she understood what bothered her, what made her anxious about the way Curtis engaged with the world: he viewed every feeling, every fear, as aberrant, as necessitating a cure. Is this what came of having psychiatrists for parents? Or was this what he meant when he said he had an “addictive personality”: that he was always seeking to soften the edges of his emotions.

  “Curtis,” she began. If she didn’t force herself to talk, she was, she was sure, going to start screaming. “You don’t have to do something just because she wants you to—” And then she stopped herself. Another thing she’d sworn: no negative words about Amy. They would only make Emily look bad and Amy wronged. Somehow, she saw, she and Amy had shifted positions. When she’d met Curtis, Amy had been the villain—she had cheated on Curtis; she had belittled him and abused him—and Emily his savior. Now, somehow, Emily had become the evil temptress who had seduced Curtis away from his wife. How had this happened?

  “She’s just asking me to do this one thing,” he said firmly. “And it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing anyway. It’s the truth.”

  Emily nodded. “Okay,” she said. “No drinking. For how long? Did she give you a time?”

  “Three months.”

  “Okay. Three months.”

  All summer Curtis avoided drink, seemingly without any trouble. The guys had long stopped bringing beer to rehearsals anyway, now that they had a proper practice space in a nice, finished loft building a few blocks down on Bedford. She stopped drinking, too—at least when she was with him—and was delighted when she found that she’d lost a few pounds without even trying: the simple caloric difference between having a glass of wine with dinner each night and not. Each evening he went to a meeting at a church on North Eighth Street—two blocks from Emily’s apartment and she’d never taken note of it—and conferred with his sponsor, a thirty-year-old legal proofreader, whom he hated at first, then grew to like. “If we hadn’t met through AA, I bet we would have become friends anyway,” he told Emily. The sponsor was alarmed to hear that Curtis was about to start (or restart, as the case was) divorce proceedings. Apparently, you weren’t supposed to make major life changes when you were in “recovery.”

  “It’s not a ‘major life change,’” Sadie cried when Emily explained this to her, over a much-needed glass of wine at Black Betty, back in May. “He and Amy haven’t lived together for two years. Getting back together with her would be a ‘major life change.’”

  “I know,” said Emily. “I know.”

  She came home from such outings with friends, hoping she didn’t smell like a bar, to find Curtis sitting on the couch tensely reading a paperback, resentful, it seemed to her, that she was not required—or willing—to participate in his experiment with abstention. But the nights she stayed in were no more comfortable: he arrived at her place reeking of smoke, his large, round eyes lowered with shame. What, she wondered, had he been talking about at the meeting? “How was it?” she’d asked the first night. But he’d just shrugged and flung himself down on the couch. “We’re not supposed to talk about it,” he mumbled, hours later, into her hair. “The meeting. It’s private.” “Okay,” Emily said, and thereafter tried, brightly, to talk around the subject, chatting about her day at the office or her friends, or silently crawling on top of him and burying her head in his neck, until the discomfort abated and he became her Curtis again. Still, she realized, she now had a fourth Curtis to contend with: the Curtis who went to meetings at a dingy, Italianate church and talked to strangers about deeply personal things—things he wouldn’t (okay, couldn’t) tell her. Three private selves was, she thought, verging on too many.

  During the day, at work, she read about alcoholism and depression. There were, she found, hundreds of websites devoted to each and twice that many message boards where people conversed about their own struggles or those of their husbands, mothers, brothers, and so on. There was a large group, Al-Anon, for family and friends of alcoholics, which had meetings of its own all over the city. Briefly, she considered going, to show her support for Curtis’s endeavors—but then dismissed the idea as overzealous and more likely to annoy or embarrass Curtis than to impress him with the extent of her devotion. Instead, she kept reading, tracking the cycle of addiction—and depression, for the two seemed interlinked—from start to finish. She read about genetics�
�the importance of family history—in both diseases (“Alcoholism is a disease,” the AA sites shouted). She memorized the signs of alcoholism—Do you drink alone? In the mornings? Do you have blackouts? Do you frequently drink to excess?—and the signs of depression. Curtis, she decided, had none of the former, and some of the latter. She read about codependency—which seemed, clearly, to be what was going on with Curtis and Amy—and “addictive personality,” the existence of which, she discovered, was currently in debate among psychologists and neurobiologists, though it made a sort of sense to her, for she saw Clara in the profiles she read, and Curtis, too, and most troublingly, herself, the way she had to have her first cup of coffee—made precisely the way she liked it, in a tiny French press, with a half teaspoon of sugar—at precisely 8:00 a.m., and her first glass of wine at 7:00 p.m. Now that Curtis had given up his glass, she found herself, during her lonely Sundays, counting the minutes until she could allow herself this pleasure. On the good Sundays, when she was content with her own company, she sat, lazily drinking, through the evening, then fell into bed early, her head pleasantly fuzzed. On the bad Sundays, though, she tried to resist the urge, for wouldn’t it be slightly disloyal to Curtis to drink in his absence? Wouldn’t she somehow jinx their whole affair if she took so much as a sip of pinot noir?