A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  But on this Sunday—this bad, bad Sunday, which should have been a good, better-than-good Sunday, for the next day was a holiday and they would be happy, they would be celebrating, they would be among their friends!—as she cooked her sad solo meal (spaghetti with jarred sauce), a spot of rage broke through and she brought out the bottle and the corkscrew, ensuring, in her private schema, that Curtis wouldn’t call that night—as he sometimes did on Sundays—just to say good night and that he loved her and was thinking of her.

  “Fuck him,” she said aloud. “I’ll see him tomorrow. I don’t need to talk to him tonight.” At that, the pins of the top lock thunked heavily in their steel casings. Emily jumped and put down the bottle with a heavy thud, just as Curtis’s long head poked through the door.

  “Hey,” he said, loping across the room and kissing her.

  “Hey,” she said warily. He had never, ever broken their Sunday rule. “What are you doing here?”

  Curtis shrugged. “I just thought I’d stop over and see you.” He looked at the bottle of wine on the counter. “Were you just about to have a glass of wine?” She nodded. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll have one, too.”

  “But what about—” she asked.

  “My three months are up,” he said, grinning. “I saw Amy today and she talked to my sponsor. He told her that I’ve been clean for the whole summer.”

  Emily began to laugh. “Oh my God, Curtis, I got so wrapped up in all this that I guess I thought it was forever.” She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. She felt giddy, lighter than she had in months, since this whole business had started. “So, if you’re having a drink, does that mean you’re not an alcoholic?”

  “Yep,” he said. “Just like you said. I’ve done a lot of thinking.”

  Emily ran her hands over his long arms,with their fine brown hairs, and wrapped them around her. “Oh my God, Curtis, it’s been so hard. I’ve been trying so hard not to ask you about it, but I feel like there’s nothing else to talk about.” She looked up into his face. “So this means, right, that you’ll get the divorce soon? Right after Labor Day?”

  Curtis nodded. “Not right after Labor Day, because of the tour. But right when I get back.”

  Say nothing, she counseled herself, but her pulse had already sped up, the words rushing out in venomous spurts. “But you’re not leaving until Thursday. Couldn’t you get started on the paperwork on Tuesday? You know, Meredith Weiss said she’d help.” Curtis sighed and took off his glasses. Without them he looked young, so young that she wanted to grab him and hold him and run her fingers through his hair. She wanted to say, I’m sorry. I hate myself for being this way, but I can’t stop. But her mouth had turned hard. She couldn’t open it to speak.

  “We have the show on Wednesday night, at Hammerstein, and Alana”—this was the publicist—“has some interview for us, some NPR thing, and some other stuff. It’s gonna be crazy.”

  He sounded, she thought, as tired as she felt. Good, she thought, he deserves it. And suddenly she knew what she wanted: she wanted to punish him. “She won’t do it,” she said. “Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”

  Curtis held up his hand to her and gave her a look so sad she knew she was right. She pulled her legs from his and planted them on the floor. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “She just wants to wait a bit. A few months. It’s no big deal.”

  “Oh my God.” Emily dropped her head in her hands. She’d expected him to deny this, to say no, no, no, everything was fine. “A few months. No. No. No.” Before he could answer, she’d sprung up from the couch and was shouting, “I am so sick of her shit. If I ever have to hear her name again, I’m going to fucking slit my wrists. She’s a stupid, manipulative, selfish bitch. I just don’t get it. I don’t fucking get it.” She had moved from shouting to screaming, her hands shaking with rage (adrenaline, she thought, from some rational corner of her brain). “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why don’t you see it? She does this shit to you, Curtis, she manipulates you.”At this word, she began to cry, which only made her more angry, for Amy, fucking Amy, didn’t deserve her tears. “Everything goes right for you and she does this stupid shit to cut you down, telling you you’re an alcoholic—it’s fucking ridiculous. And you believed her.” Curtis was staring at her, lips parted, from his perch on the couch, the skin around his eyes white and shiny with fatigue.

  “Emily, come on,” he said, in a whisper. “Don’t say these things. This isn’t you.”

  A hoarse sob escaped her throat, then turned into a scream. “This is me. I want to get married and have kids and do . . . do normal things, just like everyone else. Just like fucking Amy, the fucking anarchist, with her fucking apartment in Park fucking Slope, that her fucking parents bought her.” Her breath was coming in big ragged gulps and her eyes burned, but the storm was passing. All she wanted now was for him to leave, to leave her alone. “I’m just like everyone else,” she said, pressing her hands into the sockets of her eyes. “I want the same things. I want a normal life.”

  “No, no, you’re not,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “You’re not.” He smoothed her hair back from her hot forehead and she allowed herself to relax, to melt into him for a moment before she remembered what he’d said—there would be no divorce, not now, not ever, she knew. She shook his hand off.

  “She manipulates you. She manipulates you,” she whispered into his chest. “Why do you let her? Why, Curtis? Why?” And then, plain as day, she saw the answer to her own question. She pulled away from him and wiped her hand across her nose.

  “Hey, hey,” he said softly, and reached out a hand to gather her back into him, but she twisted away.

  “You’re going to go back to her. You don’t think you are, but you are. Otherwise, you wouldn’t put up with this.” Curtis’s face went white.

  “No,” he said. “Emily, how can you say that? That’s crazy. How many times have I told you that I love you. I want to be with you. You’re my special girl.” For a long moment he looked at her, almost as if he were seeing her for the first time. Then he ran his hand over his face. “Could I have a glass of that wine now?”

  Emily nodded, stepped back to the counter, uncorked the bottle, and poured them each a glass. Drinks in hand, they sat side by side on the sofa, in silence. Finally, Curtis drained his glass in one draught and took Emily’s hand in his own. “It’s been hard,” he said. “She’s been a part of my life for so long—a part of my family, too—that I can’t imagine life without her.”

  “I know,” said Emily.

  “And she just can’t seem to manage on her own.” He looked at her sadly, his brows sliding closer together, and Emily saw that she was right—she hadn’t been sure of it until she said it—that he was going back to Amy. Already, he was looking at Emily like someone he used to love, something he’d sacrificed to the greater good. Amy was wrong about him after all. He wasn’t motivated by selfishness, but by a desire to set the world right that was as strong, stronger, than Amy the Anarchist’s. The thought made her ill—a great gob of something rising sickly in her throat, sweat prickling out all over her back—and she stole her hand back from Curtis.

  “Why a few months?” she asked.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You said before that she wanted you to wait a few months. Why?” Curtis blinked, slowly, behind his glasses.

  “Health insurance. I have it through my parents, still. She’s on my plan.” Emily nodded, worrying her lip—the tears were coming back. She hadn’t known that Curtis even had insurance, much less that he was responsible for Amy’s.

  “Why,” she asked, “didn’t she bring this up in May?”

  “Because,” he said, turning to face her, “in May she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “Okay,” said Emily. A calm had come over her, giving her the peculiar feeling that she was watching someone else have this conversation with Curtis, rather than engaging with him herself. “Okay. I get it. I understand.” Curtis slid over and pulled h
er to him. This time, she didn’t resist.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “It’s not mine. I never—”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I just don’t care anymore. Please. I don’t want to hear anything about it. I don’t want to know.” The tears, at last, made their slow, itchy march down her face, but they came with something like relief: these were the last tears she would cry over Amy, because it was over. She and Curtis were through. They were breaking up, to use the high school parlance. The thing she’d dreaded was now, finally happening. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Please just leave me alone.” And, to her surprise, he obeyed, pulling his warm arms away from her.

  “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You’re not like her. You’re strong.”

  “I know,” she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

  “Better than fine. You’re going to find someone better than me, someone who deserves you.” Can’t he, at least, spare me the clichés, she thought. But then he kissed the top of her head and she loved him all over again. And then, somehow, he was walking out the door.

  In the dark courtyard, he turned and looked back at her, a black, stringy figure, like a rendering of Ichabod Crane she’d seen once, at the little museum in Sleepy Hollow. She raised a hand to him—a royal wave—and he to her. In a moment, he was gone and Emily’s tears stopped. She rose, creakily, from the couch, found a tissue, and blew her nose. It was unimaginable that Curtis wouldn’t simply walk back in the door, smiling his closemouthed grin, and crawl into bed with her. They wouldn’t make love again. Not ever. At this thought, her mind fell into a tailspin of sorts. She cupped her hands around her mouth, afraid she might scream, then drank down her goblet of wine and fell into a deep, restless sleep, splayed out on the small couch, still clad in her blue sundress with the apple print. At four, she woke and had a moment of warm, sleepy bliss before remembering what had happened. Her mind began to race. Dave’s party was tomorrow—no, today. Would Curtis go? Should she go alone? But then she’d have to explain what happened with Curtis. No, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell them that Curtis had left her—Dave’s smug face materialized before her—and she certainly couldn’t do it at the party. She wouldn’t go. And perhaps she should call Curtis to let him know that she wasn’t going, so that he might go without her. No, no, God, what was wrong with her. Why was she worrying about denying Curtis the pleasure of her friend’s party?

  And so her mind went, in circles and circles, until well past dawn, when she took off her dress, slid between her cool, clean sheets, and fell into a dreamless sleep. When she woke, the second time, it was after one; she was relieved, at least, that she’d slept through half the day—only eight more hours to get through before she could sleep again. She stayed in bed for as long as she could stand it, flipping through magazines she’d already read, ignoring the ringing of the phone. Eventually, sleep came again, then morning, and she rose and went to work, where she took great pleasure in doing everything absolutely perfectly: faxing and filing and photocopying with the utmost precision, answering the phone in exactly the way her boss preferred. At six, she raced to the train, as she always did, to get to her apartment before Curtis and, thus, have time to change her clothes, take a shower, smear on lip gloss. But as she pushed through the turnstile, she realized that Curtis, of course, wouldn’t be coming. There was no reason to rush home. She was free to do whatever she wanted: run errands, window-shop, meet friends, see a movie. A movie. A dumb, soppy, girly movie at the huge, awful multiplex by Union Square. Yes.

  The 6 train rolled into the tiled station and she rose with the crowd and pushed her way onto it, but at Union Square, where she normally switched to the L, she walked up the stairs and into the park, crossed from the north to the south side of Fourteenth Street amid another, younger throng, and bought a ticket for the seven fifteen showing of a romantic comedy that Curtis had refused to see with her (“You should go with your girlfriends”). The theater was deserted, it being Tuesday, and she stood, bewildered, in the foyer for a moment, sick with regret. Going to the movies alone suddenly seemed pathetic. I should go home, she thought. I can’t sit through a movie. I should go home and lie down. But her home was haunted now, not by Amy, as on those gloomy Sundays, but by Curtis. “Okay,” she said aloud, glancing around to see if anyone had heard her, then strode out the glass doors onto Broadway, forcing her shoulders back, as she did in yoga class, her head high, and turned herself back north. She had forty-five minutes to kill and she would sit in Union Square, alone, and read the fat book that Sadie had given her, about a Midwestern family, a satire.

  But the street was as crowded as the theater deserted. “Excuse me,” she said to the tourists in their polo shirts and khakis. “Sorry,” she said. “Can I just sneak by here,” she said to the clumps of hard, angry-looking teens awkwardly smoking menthol cigarettes and laughing so loudly she wanted to scream at them to shut up. “Excuse me,” she said, and edged by them, flattening herself against the window of the Virgin Megastore, where she found herself face-to-face with Curtis. Or, not Curtis himself, but his likeness: a blown-up image of the band’s album cover hung in the store’s southmost window. It took her a moment—more than a moment—to realize that this was indeed Curtis, her boyfriend until less than twenty-four hours before, staring at her from a piece of foam board, his name imprinted in white script, like handwriting, above his head, the other bandmembers standing slightly behind him, receding into the background as the label wanted them to (though Dave’s red hair flamed like a beacon). The teens kept laughing and laughing, until Emily began to wonder if they were laughing at her—if her skirt was tucked into her underwear or her face streaked with mascara—but, no, they were shouting, “Shaneekwa said what?” and “She is stupid.” Emily was nothing to them, they hadn’t even noticed her, a small, sad girl—no, woman. To them, she was old, in her dull, gray shift. A nonentity, in the same negligible adult category as guidance counselors and youth ministers.

  She squeezed past them and stared, glassy-eyed, at Curtis. With his long, sad face, his large, watery eyes, airbrushed and exploded 300 percent—literally larger than life—she saw what she’d never seen in the flesh-and-blood Curtis: a strange ferocity. She had been such a fool. She had believed it all, this romantic crap. She had really believed it, some mystical system of cause and effect, in which Curtis had no desire or need for material, earthly success—wanted only to be able to do what he loved to do, even if it meant living in a pup tent and eating beans—and was rewarded for his lack of ambition, while she, she had wanted it all too badly, and thus would never have it. It was all just bullshit. Curtis had wanted it more than anything. And she hadn’t wanted it enough. That was the truth. The real, actual truth. She had jumped at the chance to give up auditioning. She had freed Curtis from keeping his promises to her, freed him to go back to Amy. And Amy? Well, she’d fought for him—and won. Perhaps she really did love him more than Emily did. Or perhaps Emily wasn’t capable of loving anyone or anything enough to fight for it. Sadie, she knew, would say that Curtis shouldn’t have made her fight for him in the first place. That he didn’t love her enough. That he was weak. But then what did Sadie know, Sadie, who’d never had to fight for anyone, anything, in her life. (“What would she do,” Lil had asked Emily years back, “if men didn’t just fall in love with her on sight?”)

  Across Broadway beckoned the maroon interior of a Starbucks knockoff that had recently joined forces with an overpriced sandwich shop. Hiking her bag on her shoulder, she crossed the street and strode inside, squeezing through the maze of small tables, and found a seat near the south window. All around her, tourists gabbled in French and Spanish and German, and NYU students in faded jeans and pastel lip gloss chatted about their boyfriends (“He’ll only give me his cell number!” “Okay, so he’s totally married!”). At the next table, two dark-haired women spoke in low, husky voices, taking large sips of red wine and fumbling with their packets of cigarettes. “Cabernet,”
Emily mumbled, to her surprise, when the waiter came to take her order. Maybe I am an alcoholic, she thought.

  When the wine came, she drank deeply. The warmth that spread through her head and limbs was thrilling—she was strong, invincible, she could do anything, fight anyone for anything, she could. The room slowly came into sharp focus and she saw that she was the only lone woman. The only lone woman and there she sat, drinking, alone. “Oh my God,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it of thoughts. She pulled out her wallet, extracted a ten, slipped it under the wineglass, got back on the subway, and went directly home, where she found her apartment a bit less haunted than she’d imagined. The red light on her answering machine blinked angrily. Suddenly, she was tired, exhausted, but she would not go to bed, not without doing something, something to show she was not defeated, so she watered her plants—the African violet in the north window (a gift from her boss), the ivy in the bedroom, the spider plant in the south window—and knelt by the bathtub to wash the dishes. She made the bed, put her clothing away, changed out of her work dress and into her kimono, then sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her answering machine, which itself sat on a small tile table, a gift from Curtis, who had given it to her soon after they met, when he noticed that she kept the machine on the floor. This was the sort of person Curtis was, she thought, biting her lip again: he didn’t mind living in a pup tent and eating beans, but he thought it barbaric that she didn’t own a phone table.

  Gathering a pad and pen, she pressed play and listened to Sadie, Lil, Dave, and Beth ask her if she wanted to head to Dave’s place together (Sadie, Lil), what time she might arrive (Dave, Beth), and why she wasn’t there (Dave again). The sixth, seventh, and eighth messages were from her mother, pinched and impatient (“Emily, if you’re there, pick up—Please, Emily—now”), increasingly angry (“Emily, where are you? your cell is off; call me back”). The ninth caller she couldn’t place at first: “Hi, Em, just calling to say hello and, um, see how you’re doing. I guess you’re out.” The voice was high, sweet, female, slightly nervous, slightly shy, hesitant, apologetic. Her stomach twitched: Clara. She stopped the message midway and replayed it.