A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  At the ladies’ room she found a line—older women in suits, Lil’s aunts and cousins—and she walked on, without hesitating, into the foyer, then pushed open the synagogue’s heavy metal doors. Outside, the sun shone heavily, pricking her arms through the weave of her dress, and the sky was a brilliant, deep cloudless blue. The cars Dr. Roth had ordered to drive the mourners out to the Island had not yet arrived. Shading her eyes with one hand, she peered up Fifth, to see if they were on their way. European tourists, brightly and tightly clad, in groups of two and three and four, strolled gamely along the sidewalk, dispatched from the St. Regis and the Plaza and the Sherry-Netherland, and bound for Barneys or Bergdorf’s or the park. Suddenly, an odd thought possessed Sadie: What if she were to cross the street and enter the park? She had a fat book in her bag—a galley of the new Zadie Smith, which she hadn’t yet opened—and the arts section of the paper. She could buy a bottle of water and lie under some big tree—how good it would feel to lie down without Jack jumping on top of her or Mina nursing beside her—and read, just as she and Steph had in high school. Would anyone really miss her?

  Just then the glossy nose of a town car glided silently up to the curb. With a low hum, one dark window slid down and the driver, in a cap, called out to her: “Roth?” he asked. “Um, yes,” she said, pulling her arms back over the stains on her dress. He nodded. “The other cars’ll be here in a second. There was some traffic on the bridge.”

  “Okay,” she said, “do we need to get on the road soon?”

  The driver pulled back a crisp white sleeve and studied the enormous face of his watch. “The funeral’s at three? I’d say, we leave in fifteen minutes, we’ll be in good shape.” A second car was already rolling up behind the first.

  “Great, thank you. I’ll start rounding people up.”

  Some sort of herding instinct—or perhaps Rose Peregrine—had propelled the crowd upstairs before Sadie had made it past the foyer, much less back to the ladies’ room, and she unexpectedly found herself within a mass of people, many of them hugging her and kissing her cheeks. Dr. Roth began guiding his family into the waiting cars, which drove off, one by one, like an army of beetles. When just he and Mrs. Roth remained, he walked quickly over to Sadie. “We’ve ordered extra cars,” he said. “For you”—he waved his arms in a circle—“for the group, the friends.”

  “Oh,” she said, “thank you. Thank you.” He nodded, by way of an answer, and helped his wife into a car. Sadie’s mother and father climbed into the car behind them. “See you there,” Rose called. “Yes,” said Sadie weakly, wondering where her friends had got to, where her husband was—but then there they were, Beth and Emily and Dave, and, yes, Tal, bringing with them a gust of the synagogue’s stale air. Ed put his arms around her. “Hey,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

  “They ordered cars,” she told him, told all of them. “We can go. The Roths said so.”

  “You don’t have to go,” said Ed, pulling back and inspecting her face, a gesture she hated, actually. “If you’re tired.”

  “I want to go,” she said. She did. And yet the thought of driving out to Long Island made her want to go back inside the synagogue and crawl under a bench.

  “I don’t mean to intrude,” the driver called. “But we should get going. Traffic’s bad today.”

  Beth and Will and Emily and Dave climbed into the car, followed, before they could stop her, by Caitlin and Ismael, and Meredith Weiss, whose husband had gone back to work, as had Josh.

  “Um,” Sadie said, looking at Ed.

  “They can make room for you,” he said.

  “You’re not going to come?”

  He looked at her uncomfortably. “I was thinking I’d go back to the office.” She folded herself into his chest, stiffly, stupidly, conscious of Tal nearby.

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s fine.”

  “No, I’m going to come,” he said, resting his head on hers. “I’m sorry I said anything.” He pulled her closer. “It’s just because we’re leaving tomorrow.” Toronto, she’d forgotten about it. “But I can go into the office tonight.” He pulled back from her. “I just thought, you know, we weren’t supposed to go to the burial, so I’d planned to go back—”

  “It’s okay,” she said, pulling away from him, irritated. She wished that he’d just go and leave her alone with her friends. “I’m okay to go alone.”

  “No, I can come,” he said, pulling her close again and pressing his face into her hair.

  “No, I forgot we were leaving. Maybe Jack and Mina and I should stay here.”

  “No.”

  “We can make room,” Beth called, glancing angrily at Caitlin.

  “We should really get on the road,” the driver said.

  “I have a car here,” said Tal, whom Sadie had sort of forgotten about. His thin shoulders had grown thicker with age, pulling at his white dress shirt, but he otherwise looked eerily the same, his wide slash of mouth sloppy, like a child’s drawing, red against his new beard. “I can take you.”

  Ed looked at her. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll go with Tal. You go to the office.”

  “You’re sure,” he said, inspecting her face.

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “We’ve met,” said Ed, holding out his hand to Tal. “At Lil and Tuck’s. A few times. I’m Ed Slikowski.”

  “I know,” said Tal. “Tal Morgenthal.” He turned to Sadie. “I’m parked around the corner.

  “Can I have a ride?” came a hoarse voice. Tuck.

  “Sure,” said Tal, with a heavy exhale. “Let’s go.”

  They sat in silence over the glistening ribbon of the East River, but once the grim houses of Queens gave way to the strip malls of western Long Island, Tuck leaned in toward the driver’s seat.

  “So you found God?” he asked Tal.

  “What?” said Sadie.

  Tal smiled, keeping his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him, and said, “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

  “What?” asked Sadie again. “What are you talking about?”

  Tuck nodded, ignoring her. “I can understand that.” He nodded again and lolled his head lightly against the window. For a moment, Sadie thought that they might continue in silence, as befit the occasion, but then he sat up again. “I just never saw you as the religious type.”

  Tal shrugged.

  “Tal?” said Sadie, unsure, even, of what to ask him.

  “So what are you?” Tuck pressed. “Lubovitch?”

  “Tuck, what are you talking about?” Sadie swiveled fully around to face Tuck, but he refused to meet her eye. He’d pulled off his jacket, she saw, and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. The hair on his forearms was turning gray. And his face had lost all of the softness she’d seen after the service.

  For a moment, Tal turned from the road and looked back, wearily, at his companion on this bleak journey. “No,” he said. “Not Lubovitch. Not even close. The opposite.”

  “But you’re religious, right?” Tuck pressed, with a slight guffaw. “Was it like, one of those guys stopped you on the street and asked if you were Jewish—and next thing you know you’re in the mitzvah mobile? Didn’t they, like, recognize you from that Robin Williams movie?”

  Tal said nothing.

  “Sorry,” Tuck offered. “I’m an asshole.”

  “You are,” Tal agreed.

  “Tal?” said Sadie. He had not, she saw, taken off his yarmulke when they left the synagogue, but then neither had Dr. Roth or many of the other men. “We all thought—”

  “Oh, come on, Sadie,” said Tuck. “Are you blind?”

  “You don’t need to take that tone with her, okay?” said Tal, turning his head sharply toward Tuck.

  “Tal, what—” Sadie began, then stopped herself. Did she really need to ask? When she thought about it, it all made sense. He had always questioned the purpose of everything. She thought back over the years, trying to piece the story together: the ulpan, the retreat, back when she was
pregnant with Jack. The note Lil had told them about, saying he’d nearly given up acting. And then mostly silence. Back in college, she thought, he’d railed against his parents’ materialism, their hypocrisy. But they all had, hadn’t they? “We thought,” she said, not knowing where these words would lead. “We thought you were taking a break. From acting. What have—”

  “We can talk about it later,” he said. “After.”

  “Sadie will have to get home to her children later,” said Tuck, with such venom that the tears she’d been suppressing all afternoon finally rushed into her eyes and down her face. Why did he hate her so?

  “Oh my God,” she said, wiping her eyes with a fist. “I can’t believe this. Tuck, don’t do this.”

  “What?” said Tuck. “I’m telling the truth.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” said Tal. “I’ll give you the sixty-second version, okay?” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Tuck. “I’d been unhappy. I wanted all these things that seemed unattainable, that everyone, my parents, told me I could never have—”

  “Fame,” said Tuck

  “No,” said Tal. “Not fame.”

  “He just wanted to be an actor,” said Sadie loyally, though she wasn’t sure she believed this; there had been something more rapacious in Tal, the thing that had allowed him to succeed where Emily failed.

  “Yeh.” Tal shrugged. “And it turned out that I could be. That it was attainable. I’d wanted it for so long, my whole life, and then when I had it, it wasn’t so exciting. You know?”

  “Yes,” said Tuck, in a small voice that made Sadie, again, feel sorry for him.

  “That’s the rational part,” said Tal, who seemed to be warming to the task of revealing himself. And now, suddenly, she wanted to know, wanted to know everything, every minute he’d spent apart from her. Her mind began racing. Was there a wife somewhere—in Israel? In L.A.?—wearing a wig and a long, heavy skirt? Was there a baby with Tal’s angular face and long arms? And how did he make a living? The Orthodox couldn’t act, could they? Was he Orthodox? What did he mean, the opposite of Lubovitch? Had he just thrown everything away? Oh God, oh God, she thought, I hope not. But then, what difference would it make?

  “The irrational part is just that I felt this longing to know,” Tal was saying.

  “To know what?” asked Tuck, leaning forward into the space between the two front seats. “Can I smoke in here?”

  “No,” said Sadie.

  “The prayers that my grandfather knew. Things like that. The truth.”

  Ahead of them, on the LIE, traffic had come to a standstill and Sadie groaned.

  “Please stop,” she said. She was succumbing, she knew, to temper. As she did more and more these days, though poor Ed bore the brunt of it. “Please just stop talking. Please. I have a headache. I just, I can’t listen anymore.” Her breasts, stuffed inside the wool dress, had turned to rocks. Why had she not simply asked Tal if she could run to the bathroom before they left? The pump, no, was not in her bag, but she could have hand pumped, like the chipper hippies in the Dr. Sears book. “Please,” she said. “Just for a minute.”

  Both men wore a similar—and familiar—expression of befuddlement, one she’d seen, occasionally, on Ed’s face lately. Okay, crazy person, they seemed to be saying. But she wasn’t crazy, she was tired, and she didn’t want to hear about Tal’s conversations with God or whatever. This was why she’d cheated on him, why she’d left him, wasn’t it? This hokey earnestness. It was too much. She wanted Tal back the way he was in college, when they’d walked around campus at midnight, the trees a looming canopy above them, and she’d felt so happy and lucky it was all she could do not to hug him with joy, when they were friends, such good friends, and she could talk with him about anything, without fear of judgment, before things had become complicated, before she’d succumbed. She wanted him the way he’d been the summer before Lil’s wedding, when they’d laughed at Dave’s sulks and moods, and spent their evenings drinking wine in one café or another, when he’d been on the verge of breaking through, the two of them giddy with possibility. Was this why she’d fallen, crashingly, in love with him? And had she really left him because she knew him too well, loved him too much, because she’d needed him so terribly? Such an old story. An ancient story. A cliché. Did she love Ed less? Or Michael, whose very name still made her flush with guilt, yes, but also desire? No, probably no. But falling in love at thirty was different, so different, than falling in love at eighteen. It was never the same, was it?

  “Please stop,” she said again, almost without thinking, dropping her head into her hands. “Please. I think I’m a little carsick.”

  “We’re not getting anywhere anyway,” said Tuck. Off the exit to their right, a neon sign in the shape of a martini blinked erratically. “We could have a drink.” Around them, cars were frantically trying to get across traffic and over to the exit.

  To Sadie’s surprise, Tal said, “Sure. Why not,” and scooted the car over a lane, up the exit, and onto some downtown byway that looked as though it had seen better days. Where were they? Babylon? Great Neck? Someplace that had once been a real town, with a barbershop and a grocer and a pharmacy, but was now just a conglomeration of oversized houses on undersized plots serviced by a series of malls and car dealerships. Tal coasted the car down the street until they arrived at the tall sign that had beckoned to Tuck, parking in the decrepit lot beneath it, weeds sprouting from cracks in the gray, pebbly asphalt.

  The bar, too, had seen better days. But it was cool and dark, its wood-paneled walls covered with aged photos of smiling celebrities, its chairs filled with florid-faced old men. “Jameson with a soda back,” Tuck told the bartender, a young man with slick, dark hair and the sort of mustache that had gone out of style thirty years prior. “Same,” said Tal.

  “Will you, um—” Sadie asked. “Can you—” Tal nodded.

  “Okay,” she said nervously. “Could you order me a cup of decaf, if they have it? I’m going to run to the bathroom.”

  When she emerged—mildly less uncomfortable—Tuck and Tal had taken their drinks to a small Formica table lit by the red glare of a Budweiser sign and adorned with a set of Heineken coasters. Tuck held a short, unfiltered cigarette between his fingers. “Isn’t that illegal?” Sadie asked, nodding at it.

  Tuck shrugged and lit a match. “I thought outside of the city you could smoke.”

  “No. Statewide ban.”

  “That guy’s smoking.” At a table in the corner, an ancient man sat hunched over a hand-rolled cigarette and a beer.

  “Oh.” Sadie looked balefully at her white mug of coffee, which smelled burned, then turned her attention to the faux-wood bowl of miniature pretzels, but could not bring herself to eat even one. They should not be here. They should have waited, patiently, in the punishing traffic, or figured out a new route along the city streets. Now she knew, in a flash, they would never make it to the funeral. Tuck would order scotch after scotch, growing more and more belligerent, until they had to carry him home.

  “The truth,” he said now to Tal. “Don’t you feel weird saying that?”

  Tal looked at Sadie for the first time, she realized, since his arrival, and stretched his long hand out toward her on the table. Did he mean for her to take it?

  “Tal,” she said. “The bartender might be able to give us directions to the cemetery that bypass the LIE.”

  “I just don’t get that you could think that the world offers one truth,” Tuck said. “You went to Oberlin.”

  Tal turned from Sadie, taking a quick gulp of his drink. “So?” he said finally.

  Tuck stared at him. “Well, it’s just so archaic. It’s, like, premodern. Our generation, we’re postmodern. There is no one truth. The truth isn’t a fixed thing. It’s subjective.”

  Suddenly, Tal began to laugh. Tuck let out a little chuckle, too, either out of sympathy or confusion. “I loved Kierkegaard in college, too. But it doesn’t really hold up, you know. Life just isn’t
like that. Things are much more black-and-white. She loves you or she doesn’t. You have a job or you don’t. Your parents are alive or dead.” Sadie started at this. Had his parents died without any of them knowing it? Surely he would have told Dave, at least. “The truth is the truth. Incontrovertible facts. How it makes you feel, that’s subjective.” He paused, gauging the length of Tuck’s fuse. “You’re a journalist, right? Isn’t it your job to present the truth?”

  Tuck snorted, downed his drink, and waved his hand at the bartender, signaling for another round. “Please. You don’t really believe that Woodward and Bernstein bullshit.” The drink arrived and Tuck looked at it suspiciously, as though it had come unbidden. “You can drink?” he asked Tal.

  “I’m not Mormon.” Tal laughed.

  But Tuck did not smile. He wrapped his hand around the tumbler of scotch and raised it eagerly to his mouth, flicking his eyes from Sadie to Tal.

  “So you had a thing for Lil, right?” he asked suddenly, his tone becoming brisk and efficient.

  “No,” said Tal, before Tuck had even got the words out. Still, he was too late. Tuck’s face was already twisting into a closemouthed smirk.

  “Not even in college?” He raised an eyebrow. “All those late nights at the radio station?”

  “No,” said Tal, smiling and tilting his chair onto its back legs.

  “I knew it.” Tuck laughed, clapping his hands. “I’m a very good judge of character. She used to say you were in love with Dave. And you fell in love with Sadie because she was a version of him that you could actually have.”

  Sadie sighed. She’d heard this from Lil, too, a zillion times, and now, hearing it from Tuck, she felt deeply bored. She supposed Tuck wanted to shock them.

  “But I always thought it was because she was a version of Lil you could actually have.”