A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

Was this true? Sadie wondered. No, certainly not. In college, they’d been close, Lil and Tal, and at one point the rest of them had speculated, but they’d speculated about everyone. Though there was that night—which year? junior or senior?—when she, Sadie, had asked him about Lil—why? Had she wanted him, way back then? Had she wanted proof that he didn’t want Lil more than her? Was she such a monster of vanity, unable to imagine a world in which men and women didn’t trample one another vying for her friendship? No, no, of course not, on all accounts. They’d just been talking—they were friends—and he’d told her, without hesitation, something that had made no sense to her at the time. “If Lil became my girlfriend,” he’d said, “she wouldn’t be Lil anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Sadie had asked him querulously. “How could she not be herself? She is herself.”

  “No,” Tal insisted. “She’d be diminished.”

  Now, a decade later, she finally understood what he meant: marriage had, certainly, diminished Lil—made her petty and sad and afraid and certainly less than the sum of her parts. And this was because of Tuck, yes, but it was also Lil—she had, somehow, allowed it.

  “Sadie,” Tal said to her now, but she would not look at him, no, she would not.

  “I’m going to talk to the bartender,” she said. Five minutes later she had directions, in blue ink, on a plush cocktail napkin. “Let’s go,” she said, hoisting her bag on her shoulder.

  They left the small parking lot, with its cluster of dinged, dated cars, and continued through the low, gray town and onto the sort of artery that gave Sadie a chill: mile after mile of auto dealerships and strip malls and gas stations and Bennigan’s and Applebee’s, streams of people inexplicably filing into their depths.

  “We’re in hell,” Tuck droned, his large forehead pressed to the window, and Sadie, for once, was inclined to agree with him. “This is what Atlanta looks like now. Hell. The fucking Roths would make us come out here.”

  There was traffic on this road, too—presumably other travelers trying to bypass the expressway—and they missed every light. Tuck slowly began to beat his head against the window.

  “I bet everyone else is stuck, too,” said Sadie. Tuck shrugged, his face still turned to the window, in the posture of a sullen twelve-year-old. But as the road narrowed and the shopping centers grew farther and farther apart—they were getting closer, Sadie was sure—he sat up straight and folded his hands tensely in his lap.

  “I know you all think this is my fault,” he said. “Everything that happened.”

  “No,” said Sadie. “We don’t.”

  “No,” said Tal. “None of us think that.”

  “See,” Tuck nearly shouted. “That’s what I just couldn’t stand. The ‘we.’” He mimicked Sadie: “‘Oh no, we don’t blame you.’ I got so sick of hearing about your little group. Your perfect, interesting little lives. Your interesting jobs. Your stupid perfect families.”

  “If you knew my father,” said Tal, grinning at Sadie. “You wouldn’t say that.”

  “No,” said Sadie, staring sadly out the window. They were passing by a set of enormous mirrored cubes—a brand-new office park—in which she saw Tal’s silver rental reflected a thousandfold, her dark head a small point within it. Her breasts still chafed and itched. The milk she’d expelled into the bar’s rancid sink had just barely taken the edge off. Mina was a hungry girl and, already, more milk was coming in. And yet, now, her children, Ed, felt very far away. She could imagine, for a moment, casting herself into Tal’s arms and leaving everything behind, telling him to just drive. “Tuck, I don’t get it. Were we ever anything but nice to you? We tried so hard. We wanted Lil to be happy.”

  Tuck snorted. “Happy? Lil? How could she be when she was always comparing herself—and me—to all of you?”

  “What?” said Tal. “That’s crazy.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” cried Sadie. “Was that—” She grabbed the napkin off the dashboard. “I think we should have turned left at that light. By the first office building.” She held the napkin up and tried to make out the bartender’s slanted, half-formed cursive.

  Tuck was still talking. “All of you went on with your lives, but she still wanted to be the center of all of your attention, like in college, when she was special. I could never make her feel as special as you all did.”

  “Please stop,” she said, “let me just look at this.” They were deep inside the complex now, the too-bright sun glinting off the endless rows of mirrored cubes. It was odd, Sadie thought, to think of the workers inside them, thousands of them, invisible to passers-by, typing memos and inventing numerical codes for dental procedures and answering the calls of those defeated by the instructions supplied with their DSL modems.

  Tuck was still speaking, but his words were clumping together in Sadie’s mind, a haze of sound. They were, she realized, with a sudden twist of the gut, the only car on the road. In order to get directions, they would have to stop at one of the menacing buildings—or drive back toward civilization. The bar’s burned coffee—she’d taken just a sip or two—sat acidly in her stomach. She should have eaten after the service. Her mother had said so.

  And then, just as suddenly as they’d come upon them, they left behind the silver buildings and found themselves on a bare stretch of asphalt, fields of new grass extending as far as they could see on either side of them. This area must have been clear-cut by the developers, Sadie thought, who’d run out of money. Or tenants. Long Island, she thought, was terribly flat. A terminal moraine. The road here stretched endlessly, infinitely into the distance, a thread of inky black, with the lush sheen of new tar. There was nowhere, nowhere at all, to inquire about the cemetery.

  But then—miraculously—they were upon it. First, from the distance, they saw a clump of . . . something—they knew not what. As they grew closer, they made out the forms of trees and a low stone fence. And soon they were driving past mile after mile of graves, low stones engraved with Stars of David—on both sides of the road—and scanning the area for an entrance. “So many dead Jews,” Tuck marveled, trying for a satiric tone but managing to sound merely sad. Sadie had a grim thought: Soon, we’ll be among them.

  “I don’t know if I want to do this,” Tuck said suddenly. “I feel kind of sick. Does it smell like carbon monoxide in here?”

  “Not really,” said Sadie. “We’ll be there in a second. We just have to find the right entrance.”

  Furiously, Tuck fumbled with his door. “No,” he said. “I want to get out, okay? Now. How do you get the fucking window down? I need a fucking cigarette. Open the fucking window. I need to get out.” From his side, Tal pressed the appropriate button, but Tuck was pulling at the handle of the door, his face flushed and sweaty.

  “Whoa,” said Tal. “Don’t jump out of the car, okay? I’ll stop.”

  “No,” said Sadie. “Tal, don’t stop. We’re almost there. Let’s just get there. We’re going to miss the funeral.”

  “No,” said Tuck. “I can’t do this. Pull the fucking car over. I’m getting out. I can’t go. I—”

  “You have to go,” said Sadie. “You’ve come this far. She was your wife.” But Tal pulled off the road onto a mound of dark, soft earth, just as Tuck wrestled the door open. “I can’t do this,” he shouted, stumbling out of the car, his shoes kicking up sprays of black dirt and clumps of new grass. “Any of this.”

  “Okay,” said Sadie, stepping out of the car. “Okay.”

  From afar, a loud humming eclipsed the sounds of Tuck’s raspy breathing. Moments later, a sleek black car sped past them—the first they’d seen in who knew how long.

  “That must be them,” said Sadie. “Or some of them.” She raised one hand to her eyes and watched to see where the car would turn. Tuck would be fine in a moment and they would go on to the funeral, though perhaps they would be the first to arrive, the only ones to get off the clogged highway. But the car didn’t turn—it kept going, straight and fast along the spookily straight road, until
it disappeared from sight. Tal put his hand in his pocket and gazed questioningly at Sadie, who shrugged. “I guess it wasn’t them,” she said.

  “Tuck,” she said. “We really should go.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not going. I’m going home.”

  “Home?” she asked. This was too much, this childishness. “How are you going to get home?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” he shouted, loosening and pulling off his tie with a violent tug.

  “Tuck, come on,” she said, aware that she was using the tone she employed to coax Jack into the bath. “Let’s go. It’s going to be fine.”

  But he was already walking off along the shoulder of the road, lighting a cigarette in cupped hands, stumbling with every other step, his shoes sinking into the rich soil. “Fuck you,” he shouted, though it wasn’t clear whether he was addressing Sadie and Tal or the world or the Roths or the mirrored buildings with their hives of drones.

  Tal shook his head and looked at Sadie. “Okay,” said Sadie, with a shrug. “Bye.” For a long time they stood, watching his slow progress, then they stepped back into the car, the crack of closing doors impossibly loud on the dead stretch of road, and drove off, west, in the direction of an ocean they couldn’t see. “He’ll be fine,” Tal said, reaching a hand toward her. “He won’t miss it.”

  “Okay,” she said again. Tal was right, she knew, and she forced herself to keep her eyes facing forward. But still, she saw him, in the rearview mirror: a small, dark figure, hobbling along the side of the darker road, east toward Queens, and then home to Brooklyn. And for a moment she wished that she could join him.

  acknowledgments

  My most profound thanks to the incomparable Alexandra Pringle, Tina Bennett, Stephanie Koven, Laura Brooke, Amanda Shipp, Alexa von Hirschberg, Brendan Fredericks and Svetlana Katz. I’m hugely grateful to Amy Rosenberg, who read numerous drafts of this novel and offered invaluable edits and insight, and to Andrea Crawford, Ellen Umansky, Kate Bolick, Rachel Scobie, and Stan and Phyllis Rakoff. Thank you, also, to the MacDowell Colony, the Writer’s Room, Raina Kattelson, and Bob, Maeve and Romi Butscher. Last, it’s strange to thank those who can’t say ‘you’re welcome’ in return, but I’m profoundly indebted to three writers: Sylvia Plath, Dawn Powell, and, of course, Mary McCarthy, to whose marvellous novel, The Group, my own is, of course, an homage.

  Also available by Joanna Rakoff

  My Salinger Year

  Twenty-three-year old Joanna Rakoff moved to New York City, taking a job as assistant to the literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Spending her days in the old-fashioned, wood-panelled agency and returning at night to a threadbare Brooklyn apartment, Rakoff precariously balances between glamour and poverty. Tasked with answering Salinger’s fan mail, she finds herself unable to type the agency’s formulaic response and begins writing back.

  My Salinger Year is a poignant, keenly observed and irresistibly funny memoir about a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing. It is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer and testament to the power of books to shape our lives.

  ‘Extraordinary ... The book is so gripping and funny, you feel sure she had only to twitch her nose to be back there’ Observer

  ‘In prose that is clear, precise and evocative, Rakoff renders her people and places touchably real’ Independent

  ‘Like a literary The Devil Wears Prada, this is the story of Joanna Rakoff’s first job in publishing in the ‘80s … an irresistible read’ Harper’s Bazaar

  About the Author

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  First published in 2009 in the US by Scribner, New York

  First published in Great Britain 2015

  © Joanna Rakoff 2009

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  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-6239-1

  TPB: 978-1-4088-6241-4

  ePub: 978-1-4088-6240-7

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