A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Rubbing her arms, she walked back down the hall toward Maria, the gossiping receptionist, and Barbara, the bird lady. They were both brisk and resourceful—the sorts of people who made to-do lists each morning, then spent the day dutifully ticking off items. Rumor had it Barbara had delivered a paper at the NIH while in labor with her first child. That paper—on the gene mutation that causes pseudohermaphroditism—had made her career, as a twenty-seven-year-old resident. In May, Emily would be thirty. Her moment for greatness—or, that particular sort of greatness—had passed, hadn’t it?

  But that moment had existed. She was sure of it. There had been a window, a brief exhilarating time, when something might have happened—when she might have become (so painful to think of it now) if not a star, per se, a—what? Whatever Tal was. A working actor. But that wasn’t all she’d wanted—the supporting parts in crappy movies—she’d wanted more. Clichéd phrases swam into her head. A “leading light of Broadway.” Inwardly, she cringed, not simply because the term was so twee, but because such creatures simply didn’t exist anymore. Well-reviewed stage actors went on to roles on well-reviewed television shows (or, just as often, bad televsion shows)—or were plucked by Hollywood—and in this way secured their measure of fame. But, she hadn’t wanted fame. She had simply wanted to work, to play Phoebe, Nora, maybe one of Shepard’s foul-mouthed, haunted women.

  And now here she was, in her lab coat, tending to Barbara’s hummingbirds. And here, too, was Lil—who had become a scholar of poetry because she couldn’t find the wherewithal to write her own verse, only to let go of even those safer, secondary aspirations—in a faded green gown and a borrowed sweater, stoking the ashes of Tuck’s ambitions. It was unkind, Emily thought, to compare herself to Lil right at this moment, when poor Lil was so clearly at a disadvantage. But the events of the morning had put her in a strange humor, jumbled together, as they were, with some distasteful memories of Lil lecturing her, through the years, on how to find a man.

  It was later, hours later, when she realized she’d walked right by the nurses’ station without asking about magazines for Lil—or making a case, as Lil had bid her, for her friend’s sanity.

  As soon as Lil heard the door click shut, she flopped over onto her back and stretched her body to its full length, reaching her toes down to the footboard and her arms overhead. Her body ached and throbbed, as though she’d been beaten by a thousand tiny bats, and there was a peculiar tightness in her abdomen—the residue of the previous night’s pain. Then again, maybe the pain was still there, lurking, muted by the drugs they’d given her. In a way, she hoped this was so, as it better justified her stay in this creepy room with its faux homey touches (a putrid border of flowers, a Chagall print), staffed by plump, worn-faced nurses in ugly crepe-soled shoes. It was midafternoon already—she’d been in this place for a good twelve hours—and she’d barely yet caught sight of a doctor. Just the tall, bald one who’d come in this morning, fired a few questions at her as though he were reading them off a questionnaire, and abruptly left, saying Dr. So-and-So would be in later. She couldn’t tell if he was referring to himself in the third person or if he was speaking about an actual third person, the doctor who would oversee her case. Regardless, no doctor had so much as peeped in the small window set into the door of her room. Just an endless parade of nurses, bustling around and bringing this or that, refilling her water jug, giving her more forms to sign, asking to see her insurance card again and again, and on and on until she wanted to scream or, at the very least, lock the door so she might sit undisturbed for a few minutes and try to sort through the various competing threads in her mind.

  Earlier, she had, in fact, tried to do exactly this, only to find that the door, of course, wouldn’t lock from the inside (nor, she later discovered, would the bathroom door). And her fiddling had summoned the attention of yet another sour nurse. “Is something wrong?” she’d asked.

  “Everything’s fine, thanks,” Lil told her impatiently.

  But the woman lingered, maddeningly. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Lil said. “I’m fine. I don’t need anything.” And slammed the door right in the nurse’s face. Later, when this same nurse—a short, plain-faced woman of indeterminate ethnicity, with a greasy gray braid—brought her lunch, she’d refused it just to spite her. “I don’t want it,” she’d complained, in a whiny voice that now embarrassed her (why had she made such a fuss, particularly since she was actually hungry?).

  “Well, I’ll just leave it right here, okay?” the nurse said calmly, as if she were talking to a child. “In case you get hungry.”

  “I don’t want it,” Lil insisted. “The smell is making me sick. I’m not going to eat it. Please just take it away.”

  “I need to leave it, hon,” the nurse said calmly. “We can’t have people saying we starve them, can we?”

  Now the tray sat beside her bed, gravy congealed into a gelatinous mass, reminding her of her rashness and stupidity. What she really wanted was to stand up and stretch. To move her legs a bit and hang straight over from the waist, as she did in yoga class. But she was afraid that the nurses might barge in and find her in this position, her body revealed by the flapping gown. And so she stayed in bed and picked at the skin that had formed on the pudding. It was good, she found, in a terrible way—the appealing metallic of artificial vanilla—and sweetly reminded her of her childhood, which had been punctuated with lime Jell-O and pudding from a box and other such toxic, processed foods, which people simply didn’t feed their kids anymore. Normal people, that is.

  Earlier, Lil had thought she might call her mother—which showed how desperate she was feeling—but there was no phone in her room and the nurses had confiscated her cell phone when she was admitted, along with a host of other things from her purse: pens, cuticle scissors, lip gloss, keys. She’d asked one of the nurses if she might have the cell phone back, just for a minute, to call her mother. But the woman had told her no, that her husband would take care of all that, and she shouldn’t worry. Lil had argued, but now she saw that she wouldn’t have made the call anyway. She couldn’t tell her mother that she was in a mental hospital. It had been hard enough to tell her, for the third time, that she was miscarrying. “We’re all so fertile in my family,” her mother had said with typical callousness. “I can’t imagine what the problem is!” The implication, of course, was that there was something defective about Lil or perhaps Tuck or the two of them together, and that if Lil had married a nice doctor, someone like her father, and bought a ranch in the Palisades—rather than staying in the dirty, expensive, outmoded East and forcing her parents to send her checks every month or two so that she and her bohemian husband wouldn’t starve—none of this would be happening. Well. Perhaps it wouldn’t. But she could never have gone back—could never go back—to L.A., to that stultifying sort of life. The blondes in their huge, beastly cars. The kids who’d made fun of her. They were all still there, working in film or television as midlevel producers or agents or entertainment lawyers; taking meetings with their frat brothers from UCLA; stocking their glass houses with kids; meeting their parents for brunch on Sunday. Their lives unfolded before her all too vividly. “Yech,” she said aloud, and polished off the pudding, just as Josh walked in the door.

  “Not bad, right?” he said.

  “No,” she agreed, “it’s pretty good.”

  “You should try the rest,” he told her. “It’s really much better than it looks. And I can guarantee you’ll feel better after you eat something. They taught me that in medical school.” Lil laughed. This was just the sort of joke her father often made. Perhaps that’s what they were taught in medical school—a barrage of self-deprecating witticisms. “I’d bring you something from outside, but it’s strictly against the rules. We could be putting a file in the cake. You know.” Lil smiled at him. She felt, instinctively, that he was on her side—that he believed, perhaps also instinctively, in the force of her sanity and the extent of Tuck’s villainy even more so
than did Emily, who knew her better, like a sister, and was slightly prone to disbelieving Lil. Men had always liked Lil better than did women. “I don’t need a file,” she told Josh now, with a smile. The pudding had made her feel better and she shot an inquiring glance down at the mashed potatoes. “There are no bars on the windows.”

  “True,” he said. “So no file for you. But listen, how are you doing?”

  She wasn’t sure how to answer this question. “Emily told you . . .” she began tentatively.

  He nodded. “Emily gave me the gist of it. And I got the rest from Dr. Goldstein—the doctor who spoke with you this morning—and Dr. Mukherjee, who spoke with you last night.”

  “So you know I was kind of tricked into coming here,” she said.

  “Well,” he said briskly, “I’m not sure I’d put it that way. I’m thinking you feel you were tricked. But it sounds more like you might have misunderstood—maybe you didn’t want to understand—some of what Dr. Mukherjee told you last night. Maybe the painkillers and the anesthetic and the pain and lack of sleep and the general stress of the situation impaired your judgment, but—” Lil began to speak but he held up his hand. “I was going to say that you’re a very intelligent person and my take on the situation is: You understood, if only partly, that you would be brought here to the clinic, a psychiatric hospital. But later, after you agreed, you regretted your choice.”

  His voice maintained its original gentle, friendly tone, but his words now took on a scientific efficiency that, like his joke, reminded her of her father, lecturing her about 401(k)s and filing her taxes on time. How could Emily—Emily, of all people—have married a doctor?

  “Does that sound at all right to you?” he asked, squaring his eye with hers. It did and it didn’t. Instead of answering, she found herself beginning to cry, the knowledge, inescapable, that these tears weren’t exactly genuine making them come all the faster.

  “I guess you think I’m crazy and I belong here,” she sobbed.

  He shook his head. “People belong here if they need help.”

  She rolled her eyes. “So do you think I need help?”

  “From what I’ve heard and seen in the last few minutes?” he said, raising his finger pedantically.

  “Yes—”

  Again, he held her off with a small gesture. “Do I think you’re mentally ill? No.” Lil let loose a stream of air. She’d been holding her breath, she realized, while she awaited his verdict. Why do you care? she thought. Why do you always need everyone’s fucking approval?

  “Really?” she said. “You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me?”

  “No more than the next person. I’d say that, from what I know of it, you’ve had a big shock. A miscarriage can be devastating, especially if there’s no specific cause. And especially if you’ve been trying to conceive for a significant period of time. That aside, I’d say maybe circumstances have contrived to make you feel like your life is no longer within your control.”

  “Yes,” she said, amazed, relieved. How did he know? “That’s exactly how I feel!”

  “And I also think that you may have lost a bit of perspective on certain things. Spending a few days—or maybe a week—here can help you figure out how to put things back in order. And regain that perspective.”

  This was starting to sound a bit like something out of a manual or maybe the clinic’s promotional brochure, and Lil’s mouth twitched with disappointment. Josh was not, as she’d thought for a fleeting moment, brilliant. He was boring, safe, conventional, perhaps not even all that smart, just like her parents, her family, wondering why, oh, Lillian, why would you want to marry that man or move to that apartment or wear that dress or raise your voice at dinner? He was, Josh was, advocating for her to stay in the hospital, just as her father would do in the same situation. She could hear him now, the words he said a thousand times a day, to patients unhappy with their noses or ears or chins, “If there’s a problem, you may as well fix it.” Everything, in her parents’ world, could be remedied by this drug or that procedure. And everything that wasn’t perfect needed remedying.

  “You’re talking about Tuck, right?” she said sullenly. Josh nodded. “You think I should leave him.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and she could see he was being truthful. “But I think you’ll benefit from being away from him for a few days. In a neutral place.”

  “But couldn’t I just go to the Bahamas by myself?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but you’re here. And Aetna doesn’t pay for trips to the Bahamas.”

  She nodded. “And I guess that would be running away from things, rather than confronting them,” she said, supposing that was what he was going to say next.

  “Depends,” he answered. “But that’s beside the point.”

  The truth was, she liked the idea of a few days, even a week away from the endless cycle of work, dinner, laundry, shower, errands, away from the pressure of having to talk to Tuck, from the arguments, sparked by who knew what (an appreciation of the dinner salad, a refusal to pick up the phone), from the awful creep of his hands on her, which she craved and dreaded. In the hospital, she could lie in bed and read novels all day, like she did when she was a kid, and watch movies on television, and write in her journal, if Tuck would bring it, that is, if she was willing to ask him to bring it, running the risk of him reading it. She could talk to the doctors about all the things that were bothering her—Tuck’s lethargy, his inflated ego, his inability to finish rewriting his book, his strangely chauvinistic ways (why did she have to cook dinner and do the dishes every night?), at odds with his liberal persona. It would be like a vacation.

  What she didn’t like was the idea of Josh trying to convince her to stay—which did indeed seem to be the case, and which made her wonder if he was keeping something from her, if he thought she was worse off than he was letting on. “If I said I wanted to leave now,” she asked tentatively, “would you let me go?” Josh cocked his head to the side, apparently gathering his thoughts, and Lil’s stomach dropped. Her suspicions had been correct. “Because you said that you thought I was fine, right?” she said, to fill the silence.

  “Yes,” he replied, “and yes, if you want to go home, you can go home, but it might take a day or two. You’ll need to be evaluated by Dr. Goldstein and a couple of others. They need to make sure that you’re stable. Because if they release you and something happens, they could be held accountable. You get that, right?”

  “But isn’t it obvious that I’m stable?” she asked, mostly because she wanted Josh to say “Yes, of course.”

  Again, he took too long to answer. “Honestly? In psychiatry, you learn to never take anything for granted. The obvious answer is not always the right answer. The person who seems perfectly well-adjusted could jump off a roof tomorrow.”

  “I’m not going to jump off a roof!” Lil cried. “My God.”

  “Okay,” said Josh, nonplussed, which only served to further Lil’s annoyance.

  “I don’t need a fucking lecture on psychiatry,” she said before she thought better of it. “Why don’t you just tell me? Just tell me what you think. Obviously, you’re thinking things about me, things that you’re not saying. Just tell me.” Even as these words were forming in her mouth, she knew she’d taken the wrong tack; she was pushing him away, literally, for now he was unfolding himself from the ugly vinyl chair and walking over to the window, his back, in its white coat, facing her. It was a nice back, broad and tapering, and for a brief, mad moment, she thought she might get up and put her arms around his waist, breathe in his clean, doctor scent, of orange antibacterial soap and powdered latex gloves and bay rum and Pepto-Bismol tablets, and he would turn in her arms and tell her she was the one he really loved, the one he wanted, and kiss her and grab her hair with his clean fingers, and tell her that he would take care of her, as he had taken care of Emily, and Tuck would just disappear, as if he’d never existed. And then he turned, a sharp movement, and gave her a look of s
uch blank pity that she thought she would scream. “Tell me,” she shrieked. “Stop treating me like a child. Just tell me.”

  “I will not,” he told her, hitting each word, the way she’d been taught to do in acting class, “be bullied into saying things I don’t want to say or don’t think you’re ready to hear.”

  “Bullied,” screamed Lil. “Bullied. I’m not bullying you—”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “Now, listen. I’m in a strange position here. I’m trying to talk to you as a doctor, but also as a friend. You want me to talk to you just as a friend? Okay, well, then I’ll give you some advice. You’re in a destructive relationship and you should get out of it. You’re extremely bright and I can’t imagine how or why you can’t see it. But clearly your husband is doing you no good.” Lil stared at him, shocked. “But,” she said, her voice still, she knew, too loud, “but you hardly know Tuck.”

  Josh waved his hand dismissively. “I know him well enough.” With the formal air of a man waiting for a train, he held his wrist up, checked the time, and walked back over to her bed. “I need to get going. If you want to leave, talk to Dr. Goldstein and he’ll, I’m sure, get the release process going. If you have any problems, just tell Emily and I’ll intervene. Tuck should be by with clothes for you. You can eat dinner in the cafeteria tonight, with the other patients. If Tuck doesn’t come, Emily and I can go over and grab some stuff for you. She still has your extra key, right?”

  “Yes,” said Lil, sullenly avoiding his gaze.

  “Okay,” he said, more gently now. Why had she yelled at him? He had been her ally and she had alienated him. She was left alone, as usual. “Okay, Dr. Goldstein should be in soon.” He paused by the door. “And try to get some food down. You’ll feel much better. Really.”