A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  “I like it,” Sadie had insisted. It seemed barbaric, somehow, to just come into the apartment in which Minnie had lived for fifty years, nearly half her life, and start ripping things up. But then there was also, again, the money. They didn’t have forty grand on hand.

  “No,” she told Caitlin as they landed, with a jolt, on the fourth floor. “We haven’t had any work done.”

  “It’s such a pain dealing with all these people roaming around your house.” Woefully, she jangled her key ring in the direction of the green metal door to the right of the elevator. “Osman leaves for work before they arrive and I’m supposed to tell them what to do—and I have no idea. He’s used to ordering people around. He grew up with servants. But I just have no idea.” A couple of short bangs and the low murmur of voices issued forth from the apartment. “Steve is here,” Caitlin sighed, selecting a gold Medeco key, similar to Sadie’s own, and inserted it into the dull brass lock. With a thwack the tumblers fell—and Jack’s eyes popped open. For a moment it seemed as if he might close them again. Then his face contorted into a familiar expression—the silent scream, Ed called it—and it was clear things would not end so easily. The wail that followed seemed magnified a thousandfold by the hallway’s stucco walls; and yet, somehow, Ismael slept on.

  “Oh, baby,” Sadie cried, as she struggled to unlatch the straps of the stroller. “You’re so tired. My poor baby. We should have gone home.” Jack in her arms, sobbing in great gulps, she followed Caitlin into a loftlike room of jaw-dropping size. Even Jack seemed stunned by the expanse of the space in which he found himself, for he immediately stopped crying, pointed to a wide floating staircase that presumably led to a second, lower floor, turned his face to Sadie, and said, “Oooooooh!” Large windows lined three walls. In one corner, the makings of a kitchen surrounded a short, whiskered man in paint-covered clothes, wrestling with a piece of wood.

  “Hey, Steve,” Caitlin called.

  “Hey,” he called back.

  “We’re just home for lunch. We won’t get in your way.”

  Steve laughed. “I’m starving,” he shouted. “What are we having?”

  Caitlin shot Sadie a panicked look. “Well, actually, we’re just going to have coffee, but Meera can find you something.”

  He laughed again. “I’m playing with you,” he said, and returned to the obstinate slat of wood.

  In another corner sat a long, rustic table, lined with austere metal chairs, and overhung with three small crystal chandeliers all in a row, the spindly, deconstructed sort they sold at ABC. On the far side of the staircase, south of the kitchen, two long, spare sofas faced each other. A pelt of some sort lay between them, cow or gazelle or perhaps some unidentifiable Western sort of beast. Near its head—or where its head would have been—a sole, uncomfortable-looking chair, seemingly made of twigs, presided over the room with a certain hauteur, as if daring anyone to sit on it. The rest of the space was bare, as were the windows. And the floor was not oak plank, like all the other apartments in the building, but a flat, uniform red. “Colored concrete,” Caitlin told her. “It’s the ‘latest thing.’” She smirked, so Sadie might understand that she didn’t care at all—of course—about the latest thing in interior design, but was, rather, making fun of herself for installing a trendy floor. “People are using it for kitchen counters, mostly, but our architect convinced us to do the floor. It was a fortune. I can’t believe we did it.”

  “Down, down,” said Jack, and ran off the minute his feet touched the ground, with which he seemed to be transfixed. He stared down at it, turning in circles, and trying to catch the eye of Steve, who was affixing a hinge to a cabinet door. From the bowels of the apartment came, quickly, the sound of flip-flopping sandals, followed by the emergence from the lower level of a dark, glossy, bowed head and a slender body, encased in faded jeans and a gauzy cotton tunic of the palest aqua.

  “Hey,” Caitlin said to the woman, who was very pretty, with large, dark eyes and a small, dimpled chin. Her thick black hair fell past her shoulders in heavy waves. “We’re back.” She gestured to Sadie. “This is my friend Sadie”—without meaning to, Sadie flinched at this description—“and her son, Jack. Do we have something for him to eat for lunch?”

  “Sure,” said the woman, with almost off-putting grace. “Meera,” she said to Sadie, holding out a neatly made hand, which Sadie took in her own.

  “Hi,” she said. “Jack will eat anything, really. And if it’s any trouble, we can—”

  “It’s no trouble at all,” said Meera. With one swift move, she lifted Ismael out of his stroller and onto her shoulder, where his fat cheek slouched against the soft fabric of her shirt. “Come, Jack,” she said, “do you want to help me put the baby in his crib? Then we’ll have some nice stew?”

  “Yes!” Jack cried, clambering down the stairs alongside her. “Baby!”

  “So,” said Caitlin, spreading her arms widely. “Grand tour. This is the upstairs. The kitchen, you can see, isn’t completely functioning yet. We can go downstairs and have some coffee.”

  “Great,” said Sadie, following her down the stairs, just as Jack trailed Meera up them, whispering “baby” and “sleep” to her as he passed. The lower floor was as close and cluttered as the first was spare and empty: a replica of a 1970s-style rec room, with two ship-sized couches, slunk low to the ground and clad in orange velveteen, a white woolen shag rug, built-in Danish-modern cabinets lined with books and CDs. One held a nook with a small bar sink, a drip coffeemaker, an electric kettle, and shelves of mugs, brandy glasses, and highballs. At the center of another was a large door, which she presumed hid a television. Caitlin, she thought, was the sort of person who would buy the largest television possible—then hide it. The room, long and narrow, divided in half by the staircase, and lined with doors that presumably led to bedrooms, was much less sunny than the great room upstairs, but far more cozy, and Caitlin seemed to relax once installed on an orange couch. Suddenly, Sadie felt sorry for her, padding around on her cold concrete floors. “Osman’s a programmer?” she said, for lack of any other subject.

  “Yeah,” Caitlin told her, filling the coffeepot with water. “Back in, like, ’95 he started this company with his friend Sal. He went to Reed. Everyone was doing things like that out there.” From the refrigerator, she extracted a small brown bag of ground coffee and haphazardly dumped some into the filter. “No one I knew had even heard of the Internet.” Sadie nodded. It was true. In 1995, all her friends had been in grad school or trying to be actors or writers or painters or directors. She’d worked in an office—a professional office, with fifty-plus employees—without a single computer, typing letters on an IBM Selectric. How strange all that seemed now.

  “They developed these message-board-type things. You know, the software that makes them work. Eventually, Yahoo! bought the company for I don’t know how much.” She widened her eyes. “A lot.”

  “Hmmm,” said Sadie. If it was that much, she wondered, then why does he have a job? But then, who knew? Maybe he’d lost it all in 2001. Maybe he liked to work.

  “Sit,” Caitlin instructed, as if she’d suddenly remembered that Sadie was there, that she wasn’t just talking aloud to herself. She kicked off her sandals, grabbed a stray pencil from the bookshelf, twisted her hair into a knot, and settled back down on the couch. Obediently, Sadie seated herself on the opposite couch. “Do you mind if I smoke?” Caitlin asked.

  “No, of course not,” said Sadie, though she did.

  “Good.” Caitlin grinned. “That’s one of the things about South Asians. They smoke their lungs out and drink like fiends. Americans are so puritanical. People give me the worst looks when I’m out with Ismael and I light up. I want to say to them, Give me a break. I smoke like one cigarette a day.” From the bookshelf above her head she extracted a yellow packet of American Spirits, pulled a cigarette out, lit it with a kitchen match, and inhaled deeply. The coffee machine let out a deep burble.

  “Shall I pour?” Sadie
asked, gratefully rising from the couch.

  “Would you? That would be great.”

  The coffee, Sadie could see, was too weak—an amber color, almost like tea.

  “Is it okay?” Caitlin called.

  “Yes, fine,” Sadie lied, pouring the stuff into two of the little mugs.

  “It’s good coffee, so you can drink it black,” Caitlin informed her.

  “Great,” said Sadie, and passed her a mug.

  “So where did you deliver?” Caitlin asked.

  Sadie had been waiting for this question. Normally, when she met new mothers, this was the first thing they wanted to talk about. “Roosevelt.”

  “New York Hospital,” Caitlin told her. “How was Roosevelt? I almost went there. I wanted to do the Birthing Center, at first.”

  Sadie shrugged. “It was okay. I had kind of a hard labor. Back labor—”

  “Me, too!”

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  Caitlin nodded. “Did you do the epidural?” This seemed to be the second question all new mothers asked her.

  “I did.” She wished she hadn’t. But it was all so far in the past now—the vivid reality of Jack trumping the twelve hours in which he’d fought his way out of her body—that she didn’t feel like explaining how it had stopped her labor, so that she’d then had to be given Pitocin, and on and on.

  “Me, too,” said Caitlin. “I’d always thought I wanted to give birth at home, in a tub, with a midwife. And then, you know, I was going to do the Birthing Center. But then I thought if I was going to deliver in a hospital, I might as well go the whole medical route. Demerol. Epidural. Whatever they could give me.”

  Sadie supposed Caitlin thought natural childbirth part and parcel of the Plot Against Women. Why should we suffer when we don’t have to? It’s not natural, it’s medieval. She’d heard these arguments before, from her mother.

  “I kept thinking about Lil,” said Caitlin, “as I was lying there, waiting to push.”

  Enough, thought Sadie. “Why?” she asked.

  “Well, it just seemed so ironic. I’m in New York Hospital, having a baby, and, like, a year before, Lil was in the exact same place having a miscarriage. It just seemed so unfair. She wanted kids more than anything.” She shook her head in a cinematic gesture of sadness and took a sip of coffee. “This needs cream,” she whispered, and sprung, catlike, from the sofa. “I suppose you know how it turned out,” she said, striving to sound casual, as she strode across the room. “With Tuck. And me.”

  Unconsciously, Sadie let loose a deep breath. That’s where all this had been leading. Of course. Who thought about a friend’s miscarriage on the delivery table? No one. Caitlin simply wanted someone with whom she could talk about Tuck. “Cream?” Caitlin asked, holding out a carton of organic half-and-half.

  “Sure,” she said, though the coffee was beyond hope.

  Caitlin sat back down, sipped loudly, then gave Sadie a serious look. “He was the love of my life,” she said. Oh God, thought Sadie. Why today? “I know you think it was just about sex.” Sadie did not correct this notion. “I think, at first, it may have been purely sexual, for Tuck, at least. But it never was for me. From the minute I met him, I knew.” This was all sounding a bit too Danielle Steel for Sadie’s tastes. Knew what? she wanted to ask, not because she actually cared but because she couldn’t stand Caitlin presuming that she understood what she meant, that Sadie, too, had had some moment, with some man, probably not her husband, when she “knew”; when, in fact, her life—contrary to her adolescent expectations—had been a series of accumulated moments, of knowing bits and pieces at different times and hoping they would add up to some knowledge that would be useful to her, and feeling different conflicting things, and trying to suss out the difference between love and friendship, between trouble and desire, and between love and desire (that was the tricky one, as everyone knew). She did not believe, most certainly did not believe in the one moment of “I knew.” Moreover, she didn’t—did she?—want to hear about whatever had happened between Caitlin and Tuck.

  “It was never going to work, of course. Even if he hadn’t had Lil and I hadn’t had Rob. Tuck’s one of those guys who’s afraid of happiness, you know? Who feels like he can’t be happy, like he doesn’t deserve it, so he always has to do something to wreck it. He always has to fuck things up.” She lit another cigarette from the first and took a loud sip of coffee. “And it didn’t last that long, the sex part. It was just too agonizing, doing that to Lil. He loved her, really, but he loved her intellectually. And he was incredibly protective of her. But he still craved women who were different. Wilder.”

  Oh, please, thought Sadie. Wilder. Which meant what, exactly? That she’d cheat on her husband? Watch porn? Take it up the ass? What? That she bought into his overblown ideas of his own coolness? But then this was Caitlin talking, not Tuck. She was speaking, of course, of her overblown ideas of her own coolness.

  “Lil probably told you. I know she knew. It was so obvious. When he and Lil would go to parties, he would play this game with her where she’d have to pick out the woman he’d most like to sleep with, other than her, of course. He always said other than her. If she guessed wrong, he’d go and talk to the right woman. If she guessed right, he wouldn’t.”

  “Really,” said Sadie. Was this true? Lil had never told her anything like this, anything of cruelty on this level, though she’d heard certain things from Emily, things Lil had said in the hospital, but she’d discounted them as exaggerations, as the product of depression and grief. Just as she’d struggled to forget her knowledge of his affair with Caitlin, so that she might forge on with her friendship with Lil. She should have told her. She should have. Their friendship had died anyway. She took a sip of coffee and found herself unable to swallow it.

  “It’s not a big deal,” said Caitlin. “He didn’t sleep with them. After me, he decided he couldn’t do that anymore.” Right, thought Sadie. “Sex made him feel too vulnerable.” The sour smell of the coffee was making Sadie slightly ill. She had to get rid of it—immediately—and nearly ran to the little sink beside Caitlin to dump it out.

  “Oh, don’t do that!” Caitlin cried. “Meera will do it.”

  On cue, the girl’s feet, in their slim, silvery sandals, appeared on the stairs. “Hello,” she called. “We’ve come to see the kittens.”

  “Mama, Mama, Mama,” called Jack, appearing behind her. “Cat. Cat. See kitty cat.”

  Sadie had forgotten about the kittens. Where were they, exactly? Locked in some special kitten-proof room?

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said, pulling Jack into her arms. “Did you have a good lunch?”

  “Yes,” he said, wriggling free from her grasp and grabbing Meera’s slender fingers. “Meera.” He gave her a mischievous look, then collapsed into giggles. “Mee-rah.” In his right hand he held a squat, creamy plastic ring rattle, filched from Ismael.

  “So,” Sadie said, clapping her hands together, “let’s see these kittens.”

  “All right,” said Meera, with a smile. “They’re just in here.” She opened a door at the back of the rec room and let them into a small, bright laundry room.

  “They were living in the courtyard,” Caitlin explained. “This group of cats. One day, I rounded them up and brought them all over to the animal shelter in Williamsburg.” Oh God, thought Sadie. Those cats had been in the courtyard her whole life. An old man who lived on Bialystoker Place left food out for them. When it got cold, they squeezed into the basement of the Amalgamated through an exhaust pipe and the janitors took care of them.

  Meera nodded approvingly. “It’s a no-kill shelter,” she added.

  “Yes,” said Caitlin. “I was filling out the paperwork and one of them started making strange noises.”

  “She was giving birth,” said Sadie. She’d read enough Little House on the Prairie to know what happens when an animal starts making strange noises.

  “Yes,” Caitlin cried. “There were six just like th
is. All spotted. They were so small, like mice. I wanted to take them home, but the woman at the shelter said they had to stay with their mom for at least two weeks. We brought these two home last week. The rest have been adopted.” She snorted. “Two weeks! Imagine if we let these guys”—she gestured to Jack and, Sadie thought, Meera—“out into the world at two weeks.”

  These words, somehow, caused a sob to lodge in Sadie’s throat. Two weeks. She turned to Jack, to see if he had registered Caitlin’s meaning, if her words had frightened him, but he was engrossed in the kittens, his blond head level with theirs. He was good with animals, she thought proudly. “You have cats, right, Jack,” she said. She turned to Meera and Caitlin. “We have two. When we adopted them they were as small as these guys. Now they’re huge. Fat.” In Rose’s view, the cats were “morbidly obese,” but Sadie couldn’t worry too much about this. They were sweet cats, friendly and good with people, more like dogs, really. They flopped down on the floor and begged to be petted. And they never scratched. I’m good, she thought, the unexpected swell of emotion still lodged somewhere in her chest. I’m a good person. I am, she thought. I am. She had made them gentle, all three of them, the cats and Jack. She had done—was doing—something.

  “Cat,” said Jack, attempting to pet all the kittens at once. “Cat.”

  “One at a time, sweetie.” Sadie turned to Caitlin. “What are their names?”

  “Actually, we haven’t decided yet. So he can just call them ‘cat’ if he wants to.”

  “Cat,” said Jack, laughing. “Cat cat.”

  “Mama, look.” He turned to face her, but the white toy obscured his face; it was not a toy, of course, but a bottle, filled with something thick and white.

  “Is that?” she asked, pointing.

  “I hope it’s okay,” said Meera. Her accent was British, precise, soothing. “It’s one percent milk. Organic. He’s not allergic? He seemed to—” She patted herself on the chest. “He was—”