A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “I’m okay,” snapped Lil, as if it was strange of Emily to ask the question. Emily nodded and said nothing. “I’m much better than last night. Emily, it was such a nightmare. Would you believe they just left me in this, like, weird room alone after the D and C?” She paused and gave Emily a questioning look. “Tuck told you what happened?” Emily nodded. “It’s just been so awful. I kept thinking it was a mistake, that I wasn’t really miscarrying. You know, we’ve been trying for so long.”

  “I know,” said Emily. Actually, Lil had never told her this, though Emily had guessed it; they had all guessed it. “I’m so sorry about all this.”

  “I just don’t see why it all had to be so awful.” She shook her head sadly. “My doctor was supposed to meet us here. That’s why we came all the way up here. But she got stuck in traffic, so they made us wait forever. And then, finally, they were like, ‘We can’t wait any longer. We have to do it right now! You’re running the risk of infection! You could die!’ And so I was completely terrified.”

  “Why do doctors do that?” asked Emily.

  “I don’t know,” said Lil. “I guess they’re thinking of the worst-case scenario. I mean, maybe they were right. Maybe I could have died.”

  “I guess,” said Emily.

  “It was scary,” Lil told her. “All of it. I was half awake—they give you this twilight sleep stuff—and I could kind of feel it, like a tugging. And afterward, they put me in this room—I guess it was the recovery room—and they just left me. I sort of fell asleep and when I woke up, my entire body was in spasms. It was just unbelievable. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It was like”—she closed her eyes for a moment, searching for the right words—“a pair of jaws inside me snapping open and shut. I really, literally, thought I was going to die.”

  “Oh, Lil! How awful!”

  “I felt like an animal. I heard this horrible moaning and was thinking, ‘Make it stop’—and then I realized it was me.”

  “But someone eventually came in to check on you, right? And brought you painkillers?”

  Lil nodded. “And I was still in sort of a daze, like half asleep, and couldn’t figure out how to signal a nurse or a doctor or how to get Tuck. Eventually, a nurse heard me and came in. She asked me what was wrong and all I could say was, ‘It hurts. It hurts.’ And would you believe, she said, ‘Most people are fine after a D and C.’”

  “Oh my God,” said Emily. “That’s insane.”

  “I know! I’ve never had one before! How am I supposed to know how most people react afterward? And why should it matter to me? Then she said, ‘The doctor has to see you before I can give you anything.’ It was almost as though she thought I was lying! I’m writhing in pain and she’s yelling at me. She left for a while longer and then a man came in—the doctor, I guess—and had me sit up. I was actually feeling a little better—until I sat up. And I couldn’t help myself, I started moaning again—it was so embarrassing. And he just said, ‘Your uterus is contracting. That’s all it is. There’s nothing wrong. Sometimes it hurts for a while afterward.’”

  “And he gave you pain medication?” Emily could and could not believe this. Some of the doctors she’d met through Josh were shockingly callous. And the nurses were worse. Bitter. Resentful. Some of them, at least.

  “Yeah. He gave me a pill. And I fell asleep again. But this is the worst part.” She bit her lip from the inside and furrowed her brow. “When I woke up, there was somebody else in the room, a woman. She was asleep and this man was standing there stro—” Her voice broke and tears began to creep into her eyes. “He was stroking her hair and whispering to her and holding her hand. And all this time I’d thought Tuck hadn’t come in because he wasn’t allowed to. But he was, he was, and he just didn’t want to.”

  A sob escaped her throat—a small, defeated sound—and she laid her head in her hands, her back hunched into a C shape. “Maybe he didn’t know,” Emily suggested, in a soft voice. It was very possible, actually. “The doctors in the ER are so busy. They might not have even told him where you were.”

  Lil looked up. The whites of her eyes were a terrifying, mottled red. “He could have asked.”

  “Yes,” said Emily, and sat down beside her friend on the bed, smoothing stray tentacles of her hair, which, she saw, was threaded with gray.

  But Lil squirmed in her grasp. “I’m fine,” she said, twisting her neck as if to crack it. “I guess he didn’t tell you that it was his idea for me to come here.”

  “To New York Hospital?”

  “No!” Lil shook her head impatiently. “Here. He told the doctor that I was hysterical. And that I refused to come home with him. He said I’d been acting strange and depressed for days, since I started to miscarry. And that he’d been worried about me since September eleventh. And that he thought I was going to try to kill myself. Me!”

  “Oh my God.” This was worse than she’d thought. But then, maybe he really had been worried about her. Hadn’t Lil retreated from all of them in recent months? Wasn’t that, in and of itself, a sign of depression? “And he told you he told the doctor that?”

  Lil let out a little snort. “The doctor told me!” That seems weird, thought Emily, resolving to ask Josh about it. “He asked if it was true and I said sort of, in a way, that I’d been very sad, but I didn’t think I was depressed. But then I said—and this was probably a mistake—that maybe I was depressed. That I didn’t actually know because I wasn’t sure what depression meant anyway and I thought it was all a bogus term invented by Pfizer and Eli Lilly.” Emily laughed. She could just see one of the humorless residents dutifully scribbling Lil’s comment on her chart. “Later, when he brought the psychiatrist in, I heard him say that I was hostile and paranoid. He had, like, woken me up to talk to me—and he wanted me to be, you know, friendly?”

  “I know,” Emily told her. “I know. It’s ridiculous.” The two women sat there for a moment, looking out the window, which faced the spare brick buildings of Seventieth Street. This was, Emily realized, the first time she’d been inside a patient’s room at the clinic. It didn’t look quite as she expected. There were, for example, no bars on the windows. She supposed they were fused shut and made of some sort of dense, unbreakable glass. A fat pigeon warbled and thrummed on the stone sill, swelling his gray chest. “That looks like Thermos,” said Lil, sitting up to get a better look.

  “Dave’s, um, cat?”

  “Yes, look.” Lil pointed to the pigeon and smiled. “The way it’s all puffy.”

  With her face in repose, Emily was alarmed to see that Lil looked old. Her bright beauty—black hair, fair skin, large eyes, like an Italian film star—appeared to be hardening into a caricature of beauty: containing all the proper elements, but lacking the harmony to fuse them into a lovely whole. For years now, ever since college or marrying Tuck or leaving Columbia or something, she’d been in a state of constant movement, running glibly in conversation from one thing to another, eternally thrusting the focus of her attention on some minute detail of another person. She was a perfect, devoted, obsessively attentive friend, who could spend hours dissecting Emily’s or Sadie’s or Dave’s problems; who always remembered birthdays and bought too many perfectly chosen gifts; who would meet for coffee at the drop of a hat—and yet over the years somehow those virtues had hardened into something akin to flaws. The light of her affection shined too brightly for any one friend to bear, and she demanded too much in return, more than anyone could give. It was not that she wanted the same—the birthday surprises, the days of rapid-fire conversation—all of that would have been bearable and easily, if not agreeably, accomplished. No, Emily thought sickly, what she wanted was complicity. She wanted her friends to swallow her own willful misconceptions about her life: that Tuck was a genius and she his happy muse. Or, in a different mood, that Tuck was a monster and she his unwilling victim.

  “What happened with the psychiatrist?” Emily asked.

  “Oh.” Lil waved her hand dismissively. “He
was really nice, actually. Indian. Skinny. Kind of good-looking.”

  “Dr. Mukherjee,” Emily said.

  “Yes! You know him!”

  Emily nodded. “Just a little. Josh used to supervise him.”

  “He was great. He just sat and talked with me for a while. And then he said it seemed like I’d been through a lot and asked if I would want to have a rest for a day or two. And I said that sounded okay to me. I figured they’d move me to the OB-GYN floor. I thought I could just sleep a lot—I’m so tired—and maybe Dr. Mukherjee would come by and talk to me. I’ve just had so much going on.” Lil sighed gravely. “Well, he said he’d make some arrangements and I should try to sleep. I thought I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, but I did. And when I woke up I actually felt much better. Tuck finally came in and sat with me for a while and I told him I thought I was okay to go home. But then when I sat up, I had those spasms again. I stupidly told Tuck and he said, ‘Well, then don’t sit up.’ And I just burst into tears, because why did he have to say that? I mean he could have thought it, but he didn’t have to say it.”

  “Of course!” assented Emily, who thought he didn’t necessarily have to think it either.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” said Lil quietly, and Emily braced herself for more tears.

  Just then, an awful shriek came from somewhere in the corridor, followed by a metallic crash. “Nooooooo, nooooo,” sounded the voice. The girls looked at each other, eyes wide. Rubber soles squeaked quickly by, followed by an electronic bleep and buzz. “Yikes,” said Lil, with an ironic smile, but Emily could tell she was scared. “It’s probably just an anorexic. They cause most of the scenes. They’ll, you know, pretend to eat for a while, then just sort of lose it.” Lil nodded warily. “It’s kind of interesting, actually, they’re—the anorexics—well, they actually have borderline personality disorder, like Clara. It’s a personality disorder—not a mood disorder, like depression—which is why it’s so hard to cure.” Lil, she saw, had begun to shiver. She stared out the window, an odd, unreadable expression on her pale face. “Are you cold?” asked Emily, snapping herself back to attention. Lil nodded, her eyes still wide with fear, her mouth a grim, rigid line. True, honest fear, Emily thought, with a sudden clarity, was not something with which she and her friends had ever had to cope. They lived in such comfort, such luxury. In college, they’d been aware of their position of relative privilege. But now, well, now they got annoyed when their cappuccinos arrived without the requisite amount of foam. Oh, shut up, she told herself. That’s not true.

  “Take my sweater,” she instructed Lil, taking off her lab coat and unbuttoning her cardigan. She had forgotten the extra sweater she kept in her desk. “Tuck is coming this afternoon with some clothes for you. They told you, right, that the patients in the clinic wear their own clothes. They—you—have to get dressed every day.” Lil nodded again and slipped the black sweater over her hospital gown. “Lil, there’s really nothing to be afraid of,” Emily started. “This isn’t like The Bell Jar or Girl, Interrupted or whatever.” She smiled a little and, before she could correct her expression, was pleased to see Lil smile back at her.

  “Or The Snake Pit?” offered Lil, with a weak smile.

  “Definitely not The Snake Pit. It’s really small and private and everyone is here voluntarily. And short-term. The longest stay is maybe six months. Most people are here for a few weeks or a month or two. And it’s totally normal people. A lot of depression. A lot of bipolar disorder. A lot of anorexics.” There were also, she knew, a number of schizophrenics, but she thought it better to leave them out for the time being.

  “But I’m not depressed. I don’t want to take Prozac or Zoloft or whatever—”

  “You won’t have to—”

  “They gave me some pills when I got in this morning. I don’t know what they were.”

  “They were probably just sleeping pills or—”

  “I didn’t need them. There’s nothing wrong with me.” Lil’s voice had started to rise in volume. “Tuck just put me in here so he’d have something to hold over me for the rest of our lives. So we wouldn’t have to have a baby. He doesn’t wa—” Here she began to cry. “—want one. He doesn’t. He always says that I’m crazy. Whenever we get into a fight about something, he says I’m crazy, that I need help. But I’m not crazy. I just get upset, because he doesn’t listen to me. It’s like, he can’t have anyone be upset. We all just have to be happy all the time and accept whatever he says, even when he’s wrong.”

  “I know, I know,” said Emily, taking Lil’s cold hand.

  “He wanted to get rid of me. He doesn’t care about me. What kind of person would do this to his wife? I should be at home and he should be taking care of me.”

  “Maybe he thought that they’d take better care of you here,” said Emily, when her friend had lapsed into small, calm sobs. “Maybe he was really worried about you.” She ran her hand over Lil’s thin back, the knobs of her spine protruding from Emily’s sweater. “Lil,” she said tentatively, unsure if the information she had to impart would make Lil feel better or worse. You know, this is—” She paused. “This is a voluntary facility. Tuck didn’t put you here. He couldn’t make you stay here without your consent.”

  She had thought that, hearing this statement, Lil would utter a sigh of relief and brighten a bit. Instead, her face turned wooden. “Voluntary,” she said dully.

  “Yes. You don’t remember signing any forms?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it was late and you were tired and scared and in pain.”

  “Yes,” Lil said, but now she was looking at Emily as if she was the enemy. Oh, God, Emily thought, I’m an idiot. Why didn’t I see it? She wants to blame Tuck. She wants this to be his fault.

  “So I can leave whenever I want?” Lil asked. If she was excited about this prospect, her voice showed no evidence of it.

  “Not exactly,” Emily told her. “Now that you’re here—and you’ve signed yourself over to the clinic’s care—you can’t leave until they make sure you’re not a danger to yourself. Or, I guess, others. But that doesn’t really apply in your case.”

  Lil laughed. “Actually, it does. Tuck told them that I attacked him with a pair of scissors.”

  Emily tried to smile. “That’s crazy. You didn’t, right?”

  Lil shook her head, still laughing a little. “No, I mean, yes.” Emily’s mouth fell open. “I didn’t attack him! I just held them up to him. I was so mad, Emily. He went out last night. He knew I was miscarrying. It started on Friday. I’d been in bed all weekend. I told him I felt weird and dizzy, that the bleeding seemed heavier. I said I wanted to call the doctor. But he said I was ‘wallowing’ and I should get up and come out with him. Can you believe it? While he was out, I started to get scared. Everything started to hurt. I was afraid if I got up I was going to fall down.”

  “Where did he go?” asked Emily, not sure why it mattered.

  “A screening of Ed’s movie. He said he needed to go for the book.”

  Emily had received an invite to the press screenings, too. She and Josh had RSVP’d for one the following week. Surely Tuck could have postponed.

  “He said he’d come home right after, but he didn’t. And I was so tired, but I was afraid to go to sleep—like, I wouldn’t wake up or something. He got home at, like, two and he acted like nothing was wrong. He tried to hug me and I just couldn’t—couldn’t let him touch me. And he kept coming at me. And then, I don’t know how, there were scissors in the night stand. And I just picked them up and said, ‘Stay away from me. Leave me alone.’” She stopped talking suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch at the base of her skull. “Oh God, Emily. Maybe I am crazy. Only crazy people have fights like that.”

  “No, you’re not,” Emily said firmly. “Plenty of people have fights like that. You’ve just been going through a rough time. The doctors will see that immediately.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced do
wn at her watch. More than half an hour had passed. She half rose from the bed. “Listen, Lil, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to go in a minute—”

  Lil grabbed her arm, panicked. “Are you going to talk to the doctors? Will you tell them I’m not crazy? Or out of control or suicidal or something. You’ll tell them right? Can you explain that to them?”

  Emily sat back down again beside her friend. “Of course, of course,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if she could do this or not. “And Josh will be here to see you in a minute, I think. He’ll talk to the other doctors and find out what’s going on.”

  “And what about Tuck?” Lil asked forlornly.

  “He should be back soon—with some clothes and things for you. I’ll call him and check in.” She tried another smile. Lil wanly smiled back. Her mirth about the scissors had vanished.

  “Do you think I could get something to read?” she asked in a small voice.

  “I’m sure the nurses can bring you some magazines. I’ll ask them.” Emily hoped this was true. There could well be some sort of ban on outside reading material. “And I have a book in my bag. I’ll bring it to you as soon as I can. I’ve got to go back to my office for a bit, then I’ll come back and bring you some things.”

  “What is it?” asked Lil, skeptically. Emily knew her friends doubted her taste in literature. She was the only one of them who hadn’t been an English major, and the only one who’d read Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.

  “You’ll like it.” She was reading a novel given to her by Lil herself, years earlier. Josh loved it, too, and had suggested Emily pick it up. “The Forsyte Saga.”

  Like a child, Lil clapped her hands together and smiled. A real smile. What was it Tuck used to say about Lil? That she was born in a bookshop? Within the belled sleeves of the green gown, her arms looked pale and wooden and miniaturized—like the limbs of a doll or a mannequin. “Oh! The Forsytes! If only I’d married Young Jolyon instead of Soames.”

  Emily laughed and kissed Lil on one cheek. “No spoilers!” she said, holding a hand up to Lil. “I’m not even through the first chapter.” She took off her glasses and slid them into her pocket. “Okay, I’ll be back. Try to relax, okay? Sleep if you can. And I’ll ask the nurses about sending in some magazines.”