A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “To Emily!” they cried. “To Emily!” their voices echoing throughout the small, dark room, tiled, as it was, in glittering shards of mirror, in which they saw themselves reflected a thousand times over, and broken into as many parts.

  thirteen

  After her foot healed, Emily applied to a premed program at Columbia—to the shock of all her friends but Sadie, who said, “Of course!”—and took a job down the hall from Josh, at the clinic, assisting a neuropsychiatrist who was trying to determine whether men and women possessed different brain chemistries. For five years, she’d been observing the frontal lobes of songbirds and was on the verge, she explained to Emily, of publishing a paper stating that yes, definitely, men’s and women’s brains are completely different. Emily had to sign a confidentiality agreement, which struck her as hilarious.

  Each morning, she and Josh took the subway uptown, carrying warm cups of coffee in their cold hands and sharing the paper. In the sunny atrium of the pavilion—which she had so recently considered purely the Langs’ territory—they parted ways, Emily heading west toward her boss’s office and Josh heading east toward his own. At lunch, they ate sandwiches in the atrium, before Josh walked up to his new office on Eightieth Street to see private patients. Emily met him at home, on Dean Street, where they sat on the couch and ate omelets or at restaurants on Smith Street or Court Street, where they joined Clara, who was occupied with making slipcovers for the chairs in her new apartment, or her friends, who insisted that they wanted to “get to know him.” “He’s so nice,” they whispered to her, as they sat side by side along the banquettes of the various Spanish or French or Italian bistros, with their tiled floors and distressed mirrors and black-and-white photos of French bulldogs and saucer-sized medallions of Chilean sea bass. Josh scanned the menus of these places, then signaled for the waiter with an upraised hand, while Emily and Beth were still debating the safety of ordering moules frites on a Sunday.

  One cool Monday in April, Emily arrived at the clinic alone—Josh had departed early for Eightieth Street to meet with a new patient. Siphoning herself a cup of coffee in the lobby’s small café, she nearly bumped into a dark-haired man, his cheeks rough with beard, who on closer inspection appeared to be Tuck Hayes. Tuck Roth-Hayes, Emily corrected herself. It had been—how long?—four months, perhaps, since she’d seen him and he looked worse for the wear. Increasingly, Lil had been appearing alone—when she had appeared at all, as she regularly canceled lunch dates—and speaking little of Tuck’s flaws and virtues, his ambitions and efforts (or lack thereof), the subjects that had consumed her in their first years of marriage. “My nagging him doesn’t do anything except make him annoyed with me,” she’d told Emily and Beth some months back. “I have to let him do what he wants to do, at his own pace.”

  What Tuck wanted to do wasn’t exactly clear. In November, he’d finally turned in his book, just as things were getting really bad: magazines shutting down (Lingua Franca, which was depressing; Talk, which was inevitable), dot-coms shouting bankruptcy, and all the pundits intoning doom, doom, doom for everything: the economy, the American two-party system, the air-travel industry. The age of irony, they were told, was over. Yet, no one wanted tragedy, because things were already tragic enough. And no one wanted comedy, real, straight comedy, because laughter—or at least the absence of tears—was an affront to the newly sober state of the nation. Readers, according to Sadie’s publisher, wanted books on Islam and terrorism and fundamentalism and the Middle East and globalization and germ warfare. They wanted books about America’s place in world culture, books that would explain why “they” all hate us so much and books about Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden and the oil industry and the intense corruption of the Bush family and the crimes allegedly perpetrated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, books by Times and Washington Post reporters, books by foreign correspondents who posed for their author photos in camouflage vests, against a backdrop of sand and blue, blue sky. They did not—at least, according to Val—want to part with thirty dollars to read about Internet impresarios and dot-com bazillionaires, and particularly not about Ed, who wasn’t exactly one or the other, who hadn’t invented anything or made a sick amount of money or, when you really thought about it, done much of anything, other than start a magazine. Boom Time had relaunched as planned, the previous June, and no one, really, had cared very much. Times had changed. A magazine was now just a magazine, not an instrument of cultural revolution. And Ed, well, no one cared about him either, according to Val, at least. Val, who was so nonplussed that Sadie had coupled with her subject—apparently it wasn’t such an uncommon occurrence—that she didn’t feel the need to mince words.

  “Didn’t we cancel the contract on that one?” Val asked when Sadie called to tell her the manuscript had come in (hoping Val would conveniently forget how late Tuck had delivered). She was still out on maternity leave, of course, and Tuck had been instructed to send it to her old assistant, but Tuck, being Tuck, just gave it to Sadie at home. “I’m thinking we should write this one off, Sadie. That Amazon book bombed. The one by that fat guy. Remember?”

  “I think,” Sadie responded, carefully measuring out her words, “you might want to read it first. The writing is great—” This had become her mantra with regard to Tuck’s book. “It’s not really a book about Ed. It’s more of a memoir. Sort of social satire. A commentary on the times. The dot-com bubble.”

  “Does it need work?” Val had asked her. Sadie had admitted that it did—“just a little”—and Val instructed her to send Tuck edits; she’d read the revise. Her edits, however, did not strike Tuck as “little.”

  “She doesn’t get what he’s trying to do,” Lil fumed to their friends. “It could take him another year to make these changes.”

  “That’s absurd,” Sadie insisted coolly. “It’s a month’s work.” She and Lil were barely speaking. But then, Lil rarely—or never, actually—called Emily either, though she kept in touch with Caitlin Green, as did Tuck, apparently. Emily had run into the girl on Atlantic in March and been the recipient of a breathless monologue about her divorce (“Rob just didn’t understand me”), her move to Carroll Gardens (“It’s so warm here! Like Paris”), and the rather too intimate specifics of Lil’s marriage: Tuck, according to Caitlin, hadn’t started in on his rewrites yet—he was still smarting that Sadie hadn’t accepted the book wholesale—and was instead spending his afternoons at Belmont, under the tutelage of a local celebrity, the editor of a trust-fund-financed Williamsburg magazine, the sort with fashion spreads that looked like stills from seventies porn films. As a result, he’d lost sums of money equivalent to the next installment of his book advance, which he’d figured he’d have in hand by now. So they were back to square one, Lil and Tuck, living off Lil’s small salary. Even if Lil didn’t yet know it. God, thought Emily. I hate him. “Don’t say anything to Lil,” Caitlin told Emily. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sort of his confidante.”

  “Don’t worry,” Emily told her, more bitterly than she intended. “I haven’t even spoken to her in a month or two.”

  It had been longer than that since she’d seen Tuck—since New Year’s Eve—and he’d lost weight, the flat hollows of his cheeks cast blue under the bright overheads of the hospital cafeteria. For a moment she contemplated pretending she hadn’t noticed him—turning on her heel and heading up to her office—but then he caught her eye and she forced a smile. “Tuck,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Emily Kaplan,” he said in his deep, rasping voice, running a hand over his face. “Boy, am I glad to see you.”

  “What’s up?” asked Emily. Nothing good, she knew. “What are you doing here?”

  “Lil’s here,” said Tuck, waving his hand toward the elevators. “Upstairs.”

  “Oh my God,” said Emily. Upstairs meant the clinic. “Is she okay?” She thrust a few bills at the glowering cashier.

  “Can we sit down? I’ve been up all night.”

  “Um, sure.”r />
  They carried their coffee to a small table by the terrarium, where Tuck took a long gulp, then shook his head from side to side, like a dog, his hair, which he’d let grow long, flopping around his ears.

  “Lil had a miscarriage,” he said at last.

  “Oh, no,” Emily cried. “Oh, Tuck.”

  But he was looking away from her, up at the ceiling, then across the room, where a long-legged resident, Anne-Marie, was cleaning her glasses on the hem of her lab coat.

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. The bleeding got kind of scary, so the doctor said to bring her in. To the ER.” A shudder of relief skipped across Emily’s shoulders. She had been wrong. Lil wasn’t in the clinic. She was next door—“upstairs,” in the next building over—in the regular hospital, recovering from a normal physical ailment. “They did a D and C and she just kind of freaked out. She was just, like, crying—” He waved his hand in the air, unable or unwilling to explain what else Lil had done.

  “It can be painful.”

  “I guess.”

  “How far along was she?” It couldn’t have been very far. Emily would have known. “They’re keeping her for tests? Or she lost too much blood?”

  Tuck shook his head. “She wouldn’t stop crying. They brought in a psychiatrist. He said she seemed depressed and they decided to admit her—which took fucking all night.”

  Emily drew in a breath. So it was as she’d initially thought. “There’s a lot of paperwork. Insurance companies.”

  “Yeah, and we had to wait for a bed.” She nodded, but her mind had left Tuck. She needed to call Josh immediately and get his take on this. And she needed to find Lil. It was all she could do not to run toward the elevator bank, leaving Tuck alone at the table without so much as a good-bye. But she was due at her desk in ten minutes. The bird lady was big on punctuality. She also wasn’t sure they’d let her in to see Lil, unaccompanied by Josh.

  “You should go home and get some sleep,” she said, more sharply than she intended.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice cracking on this one small word. “I have to bring Lil some things. She doesn’t have anything to wear. Her clothes are all a mess.” Suddenly, Emily felt sorry for him. Was it his fault he was broken? If she were Lil, would she have stayed with him? Probably. Yes, probably. “I may have some stuff in my office. An extra sweater, at least. I’ll go up and see her. Do you know what room she’s in?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I can find out.” Emily stood and glanced at her watch. “I’ll go up to her as soon as I can.”

  From her desk, in the antechamber of the neuropsychiatrist’s mahogany-lined office, she left a message on Josh’s voice mail, explaining the situation sotto voce, so as not to alert the nosy receptionist whose desk adjoined hers. Twenty long minutes later, as she halfheartedly fiddled with spreadsheets on brain activity, he called her back. “She’s probably fine,” he said, against a backdrop of blaring horns. “Just overwrought and exhausted. Do you want to go up and see her now? Will Barbara let you out for a sec?”

  The door to the bird lady’s office was closed. “I could probably sneak out for a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” said Josh, his voice breaking up slightly in the wind. “I should be there in about ten minutes. We’ll go up. Or do you want to go right this second? I can call and let them know you’re coming.”

  “No, no, I’ll wait for you,” said Emily.

  At the front desk, they found a plump nurse talking intently to a tall, bald doctor, “The patient is recalcitrant. She keeps insisting we let her out. Says she’s here by mistake. Usual stuff.” Emily was continually amazed by the eerie manner in which the hospital staff’s conversations exactly mirrored those on hospital dramas.

  “Bob,” Josh called to the doctor, who took his eyes off his clipboard at the sound of his name.

  “Hey, what’s up?” said the doctor. His plastic name tag read “Dr. Robert Goldstein.”

  “You know my wife, Emily, right? She’s working with Barbara.”

  Bob held out his hand. “I’ve seen you around, I know. How do you like the bird lady?”

  “She’s great,” said Emily, through gritted teeth—her stomach had started flopping the minute they entered the clinic. She remembered visiting Clara after her first breakdown, Clara, hollow eyed and furious, screaming at Emily, at her parents, that they’d ruined her life.

  “We’ve got a situation,” said Josh, with another grin, mimicking the clipped tones of a cinematic cop. “A friend of Emily’s was admitted last night. From the ER.”

  “Right, right,” he said, pulling out his cell phone and scrolling through messages. “The miscarriage. Lillian Roth.”

  “Lillian Roth-Hayes,” Emily piped in.

  The doctor gave her an irritated glance. “A bit paranoid, possibly delusional, hostile to the nurses. Generally friendly to me. Eager to please. She’s seriously not happy to be here, though.”

  Josh nodded. “What are you thinking?” Bob puffed out his cheeks and blew out a gust of air. “Well, I just did the intake interview—we’re swamped today—so these are just preliminary ideas.” He gave Emily an appraising glance, as if trying to gauge how many words to mince in her presence. “You know, I can see why they sent her over—couldn’t stop crying, was screaming about it all being the husband’s fault, all that—but she doesn’t seem depressed to me, just upset about the miscarriage.”

  “So you’re thinking acute problem, few days’ rest, send her home?” asked Josh.

  “Actually, I’m tossing around narcissistic personality disorder.” He raised his eyebrows at them, as if to say, How do you like them apples. “Maybe dependency disorder,” he added, glancing back down at his cell phone, which he held flat in his palm, like a detonator.

  “Dependency disorder?” said Emily. “Lil is”—her voice began to fail her—“so independent.”

  Bob turned to her again, this time more kindly, his voice taking on the formal tone she knew he must use with patients. “I’m sure she is,” he said. “And she certainly seems very opinionated and able to speak her mind. But dependency disorder is more about an emotional dependence on another person, or people, that”—he moved his hands in circles—“is so strong that you lose yourself, literally, in that other person. You’re so dependent on that other person’s moods and desires that you can’t determine your own. You seek approval constantly.”

  “Oh,” said Emily. She hadn’t realized that such a thing qualified as mental illness. How, in all her reading on psychological complaints, had she not come across this particular malady? It sounded fake, like something spoofed on Saturday Night Live.

  “Your friend Lillian’s relationship with her husband seems to indicate possible dependency disorder,” Bob went on, sliding his phone back into a holster on his belt and picking his clipboard off the counter. “But. Well. These are just preliminary thoughts. I need to talk to her more. Talk to the husband, too, get some background.”

  “Tuck! You’re going to talk to Tuck?”

  “Yes, we generally talk to the person responsible for the patient, so we can get a sense of history. Behavior patterns.” She thought he might ask if there was a reason why he should not speak to Tuck, but instead he turned to Josh and said, “It’s also possible there’s nothing wrong with her. Emotional strain. Difficulties in the marriage. Normal stuff.” Josh pushed his lips together. “Okay if we stop in and see her?” Bob nodded. “She’s in 406-B. Alone for now.”

  Inside room 406-B, they found Lil lying on her side in the bed nearest the window, her face turned away from them, several layers of thin white blankets pulled up around her shoulders, which were covered in the pale green of the hospital’s standard surgical gown. Splayed out on the pillow, her hair looked fuzzy and dull, preternaturally black, and her skin yellow and raw under the room’s cruel fluorescents. On a rolling table beside the bed sat an untouched lunch tray, containing pale blobs of food, vaguely recognizabl
e as pudding, mashed potatoes, and some sort of poultry. Tonight, Emily knew, Lil would have to eat dinner in the cafeteria, with the rest of the patients, presuming Tuck arrived with her clothes. From the pocket of her lab coat, Emily extracted her glasses—she wore them only for distance, but now she felt she might need a shield between Lil and herself—and watched as her friend stirred. “Who is it?” she called, her voice thick with sleep. Emily rushed to the far side of the bed and sat down in the chair beside it. “Emily!” Lil cried, bolting up and embracing her friend. “I was hoping you’d come! I wasn’t sure if you’d find out that I was here, like, automatically. Like if a list of patients gets circulated to the whole staff or something? I asked Tuck to call you but I didn’t think he really would. He asked me for your number. Isn’t that crazy? I’m lying there on a gurney, bleeding, and he wants me to find him a phone number—which he has anyway, in his phone.” She swallowed, hard, and Emily handed her the cup of water that sat on her tray. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m so thirsty.” She drank again, with a loud gulp. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

  Emily smiled. Lil seemed exactly like herself. “Josh is here, too,” she said, gesturing toward the door.

  “And I’m glad you’re here, too,” Lil told him, rather grandly.

  “Actually, I’m going to head out for a minute, “ he told them, with a smile. “I’ll be back in a bit.” And then he was gone, the door shut, and Emily alone with Lil, a prospect that, she realized, rather frightened her.

  But before she had time to contemplate this, Lil had thrown her arms around her again. “You look amazing!” she said. “I love your glasses. Why do you never wear them?”

  “Well, they’re really only for distance—”

  “God, I love them. The color of the frames really makes your eyes look really blue.”

  “Thanks. But—” She paused, unsure how to ask Lil what happened. “How are you? Tuck told me—”