A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  The girls weren’t exactly sure what to do. It was just getting on midnight—still early—and had this been a normal party, they might have helped Lil and Tuck clean up, then gone out for a drink at a nearby bar. But the caterers would be cleaning everything up. “Should we see if everyone wants to go to Galapagos?” Emily whispered to Dave. The bartender there was an actor Emily knew from voice class, and would certainly grant them a round of free drinks or a bottle of champagne. “Or is it too far a walk?” The dark-haired band girl conferred with her friends, then came over and squatted behind Emily and Dave, her arms hooked companionably over the backs of their chairs. “Hey, we were thinking, if you guys want, we could go to Irving Plaza. Guided by Voices is playing and we have, like, VIP passes. We can definitely get you all in. Bob”—she pointed to a small, bucktoothed man with extraordinarily greasy hair—“toured with them last year. Lil could go in her dress. It’s cool.”

  Before Dave or Emily could say anything, Sadie was standing on a chair, the toes of her silk pumps primly touching, the last trace of her peevish mood vanished. She tinked a fork on a dirty champagne flute, the imprint of someone’s coral lips adorning its edge. “Okay, everyone,” she said, tossing her arms open wide in a gesture of mock theatricality. Sadie was quiet—reserved rather than shy, like Beth—but lapsed, with drink, into fits of irony-fueled giddiness. “It is time for Lil to throw the bouquet. All the ladies must gather here.” She pointed to an open space near the door. Nobody moved.

  “Oh, come on, Sadie, they did the cake-eating thing,” Dave protested, tugging on a hank of his hair. “They don’t need to do this.” Emily kicked him under the table. “Don’t be a spoilsport,” said Tal. “You know you want the bouquet.”

  “I know I want the bouquet,” said Ed Slikowski.

  “Everyone up.” From her perch, Sadie gazed imperiously down at Dave. “Lil, up.”

  Wearily, Lil rose, leaving her round-toed pumps at the base of her chair. Without them, she appeared to crumple in on herself, like a doll, her dress trailing sadly on the floor. She walked to the fridge at the back of the loft’s great room and removed a box. “Throwaway bouquet,” she explained, holding a small bunch of roses aloft. “My mom ordered it. It’s so you can keep your real bouquet.” Dave rolled his eyes.

  “Okay, on the count of three,” Sadie shouted, jumping down unsteadily from the chair. “One. Two.” The band girls scrambled up, and the others—giving each other looks of forbearance—followed suit. “Three.” Lil, her back turned, tossed the roses into the air. The bouquet arced up sharply, then dropped directly toward Sadie herself, who tilted her neat profile up in the air, making her hands into a basket for her dubious prize; but as the flowers reached her waiting arms, the smaller band girl, the blonde, jumped directly in front of her, knocking her to the floor, and snatching the bouquet with one outstretched fist. The heavier band girl rushed over to her friend and hugged her, their outsized joy rather undermining their hipstery aspirations. The band guys raised their fists in mock salute and shouted, “Yeah. Way to go, Taylor. All right.”

  As one, the group glared at Taylor and then turned toward Sadie, whose yellowy skin had gone rather white, though she smiled, forcibly, as she rose from the scarred wood floor. Carefully, she made her way back to her seat, at Tal’s right. He tucked an arm around her shoulder. Her hair, in large, loose ringlets—wilder and heavier than Lil’s smooth, glossy waves—sprung up around her long face. Had her eyes, Beth wondered, always been so large, so shadowed? Up close, in the flickering light, she had the aspect of a serious child—a child from a Dutch painting, prematurely aged by the rigors and politics of court. How could Taylor have caught the bouquet, Beth thought, angrily. Taylor, who wasn’t even invited. The evening had soured for her. Was it bad luck, she thought, for a stranger to catch the bouquet? Did this bode poorly for Lil’s marriage? No, no, of course not. Across the table, Lil leaned heavily against Tuck’s shoulder, her eyes drooping with fatigue.

  “It’s time,” said Sadie, meeting the eyes, pair by pair, of her friends, “for all of us to go.” And so they gathered their coats and shawls and bags, pecked Lil and Tuck on the cheek, and offered a final congratulations.

  Outside, the air had turned cold, wintery, the harvest moon hanging low in the black sky, orange and unreal, like a painted set. The girls shivered in their thin coats and shawls. Dave offered his cigarettes around, pulling one from the pack with his lips, then lighting one for Sadie. They began walking west, toward Bedford, the populated part of Williamsburg. “That was really fun, wasn’t it?” sighed Sadie. The others nodded their assent and quickened their step, for the air was growing cooler, it seemed, each moment, as they drew closer and closer to the river. Instinctively, they huddled together as they crossed under the BQE overpass, a desolate, graffiti-covered tunnel, the girls stepping gingerly in their delicate shoes to avoid the broken beer bottles and black, desiccated banana peels that lay at their feet in scant piles.

  “I’m so tired,” said Beth, with a shiver, her voice echoing in the dank little hollow. A quick wind picked up scraps of trash—plastic grocery bags, candy wrappers—and swirled them in their direction, the fruit scent of rotting garbage filling their mouths. “Maybe we should just go home.”

  “We can’t go home yet,” Will Chase shouted from behind them. “Be strong, Beth Bernstein, there is liquor to be drunk.”

  “First round’s on me,” called Ed Slikowski, who was half jogging down the street. “Let’s drink to the love!” he shouted.

  Emily looked at Beth. “It’s freezing,” she whispered. “Maybe you’re right.”

  But then they were back under the cover of the city’s black, monolithic sky. There were, Beth saw, no stars. Not one. The wind died down—or perhaps it had been a product of the tunnel—and the air cleared, smelling now of leaves and gasoline and a thousand other things coming from the thousands and thousands of cars and houses and people and dogs and cats that surrounded them.

  “We’re almost there,” said Sadie. And it was true, they were only a few long blocks from the water—with their next step, the orderly lights of the Manhattan skyline, beaming across the river, began, slowly, to enter their line of vision.

  two

  As Beth followed Will Chase down the dim hallway leading to his apartment, a peculiar notion insinuated itself into her brain. Some months earlier, Lil had walked down this same corridor with Tuck, to do, perhaps, the same things she might now do with Will. Not that she had decided she was going to do anything with Will—she still wasn’t even sure if she liked or hated him. And not that she knew whether he actually wanted to do anything with her. An hour earlier, as they’d finished dinner, at a dark Mediterranean restaurant with walls of bright mosaic, he’d asked if she had “plans for the rest of the evening.” She was rather taken aback by this question, seeing as it was eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night—four days after Lil’s wedding. What exactly might she have planned at such an hour?

  “Well,” she said, smiling, “I am supposed to meet some friends at the Tunnel, but that’s not until four. So I guess you’re stuck with me for, oh”—quick look at her watch—“another four, five hours.”

  “Would you like to take a stroll, then? The weather’s gorgeous. And the moon is out.” Somehow, the clipped tones of his voice managed to drain whatever romantic potential Beth might have wanted to associate with words like “moon” and “stroll.” Alarmingly, he stuck his head under the table. She snapped her legs closed. “You’re not wearing ridiculous shoes, are you?” She gestured toward her boots—calf-covering things with low square heels, which she’d bought the day before at a loud shop on Eighth Street—and they ventured off down Berry Street, then west, toward the river, where he showed her a giant mound of glass—blue, clear, a thousand shades of green—glinting in the white moonlight. “Is it for recycling?” she asked, hating the studenty tone of her voice.

  “Don’t know,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets and rolling back on his he
els. “But it’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”

  They walked for blocks among Williamsburg’s low houses, which were certainly not gorgeous, she thought, with their vinyl siding and creaky metal awnings, decrepit warehouses with flat, narrow banks of windows, garbage on the street. Why did her friends want to live here, in this ugly place? But maybe there were parts that were nicer, the streets lined with soothing brownstones, like where Dave had grown up. When Emily and Lil and Tal had talked about living in Brooklyn, she’d pictured Dave’s parents’ apartment—preposterously narrow, lined with bookcases, wedding cake moldings—and their shady, quiet block, with its tall stone stoops, the onyx facade of the funeral home on the corner.

  “I think Emily lives near here,” she said, stopping at a dark corner and peering down the street they were about to cross. “North Eighth Street, I think. That’s her street.”

  “Do you want to stop in?” Will asked, in such a way that the question sounded rhetorical.

  “No, no, no.” Beth flushed, feeling suddenly stupid, though not exactly sure why. Was it such a banal thing to mention that her friend lived nearby? Was that what he was implying? “I just . . . she’s probably not home.” She studied the buildings around her, with what she hoped appeared to be cool, anthropological interest: a barely lit bar, the restaurant in which they’d eaten—somehow they’d doubled back and she’d not realized it—and a lawn on which the Virgin Mary stood, hands clasped in prayer, a sky-blue plaster shell at her back. Was Lil and Tuck’s place near here, too? It was hard to tell.

  “Then would you like to come to my place?” asked Will. “For a nightcap?”

  “Um, sure,” said Beth. She wasn’t necessarily enjoying herself, but she wasn’t yet ready to give up on the possibility of enjoying herself. And she was flattered. He’d seemed only half interested in her all evening, inspecting the coterie of pretty women at the restaurant’s bar (all of them somehow sharper than she), while she, perhaps, talked too long about her family (“My mother is the best!”) and Astoria (“Lil said there wasn’t any place even to get a cup of coffee, and she was right”) and the classes she’d taught that summer (“I totally overloaded the syllabus”) and Dave, whom she’d not meant to talk about, but of course, did (“It was just so weird to see him”). But then there they were, passing under the slender trees of Havemeyer Street—just beginning to shed their spade-shaped leaves—and into the glaring light of his building’s bare, ugly lobby. He twisted open a battered tin mailbox and extracted a sheaf of envelopes and flyers, then guided her up a flight of stairs and down a short hallway to a shiny new steel door. The door, it turned out, opened directly into the apartment’s sitting room, a sparsely decorated space, with a neat white couch on one wall, a fussy little chair facing it, and a square kitchen table in the far corner. To her left, she saw a small bedroom, the mere glimpse of which made her flush. And around a corner, a tiny kitchen—really just a walled-in section of the living room—with plants on dusty shelves bolted across the windows.

  Will went into the kitchen and emerged with a bottle of dark liquor in one hand, two unmatched tumblers in the other. “Remy, okay?” She nodded, though she wasn’t sure what it was. She rarely drank; she couldn’t, couldn’t smoke either, due to what her mother half jokingly called her “delicate constitution.” She’d spent her junior year of high school in bed with a bout of mono, like some sort of Victorian spinster. “Sit, sit.” He gestured toward the futon, placing the glasses on the little table and unscrewing the bottle’s cap. She sat, straightening her skirt around her and crossing her legs, fighting the urge to take off her new boots, which were pinching her toes.

  “Most of this furniture was Tuck’s actually,” he said, handing her a squat tumbler. “He decided he wanted to start afresh with Lil, so he left it here. He has good taste.” He shrugged. “And I don’t have any. So I’m happy with his hand-me-downs.” He had a habit of pronouncing certain words—clichéd phrases—as though they had quotes around them. Beth was beginning to find this affectation a little annoying, in part because she was so familiar with it. Her friends in grad school had all done the same. This was the fate of academics the world over: to view even the most harmless phrases as dangerous clichés. She was guilty of it herself.

  She took a tentative sip of her drink, coughing a little from its fumes, and immediately began to feel warm all over. “You didn’t have any furniture of your own?” He shook his head, swallowing. “Not much. I’m not good with stuff.” For the first time that evening, she felt she had his whole attention—but she was now having trouble focusing on him. To her right, above Will’s head, several rows of mounted shelves held well-thumbed books—she could spot no fiction published since the First World War—in front of which, at various intervals, stood an army of garishly colored children’s toys: a plastic dinosaur, a Kewpie doll, and a Lego tower. After four years around pop culture grad students, this didn’t strike her as all that strange. She knew forty-year-olds with complete collections of original-issue Star Wars action figures or Strawberry Shortcake dolls still in the original packaging.

  “You have some toys,” she said, smiling.

  “Yes, yes,” he agreed, nodding a bit too energetically. “Yes, I do.”

  “Is there a story behind them?”

  “Well, yes, yes, there is. They belong to my son, Sam.”

  “Oh.” Beth grinned stiffly. “Wow.”

  He turned his palms upward, smiling. “I know, it’s rather a shock, isn’t it?”

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “No, it is, you mustn’t be overly polite about it. I’m the Englishman, right?” he said, smiling broadly—sadly, actually—and his particular beauty hit her with a thud. For a moment, she was certain she’d never been so attracted to a man.

  “Okay,” she said, drawing out the word. “I won’t. Promise. No politeness from me. How old is he, Sam?”

  “Four,” he said, leaning back on the couch and crossing his legs at the knee. “He started prekindergarten last month. It’s a big deal. He has a backpack.”

  “I can imagine,” she said, taking another inventory of the toys on the shelves. There was a Barbie, naked, her long legs jutting from the shelf. No gender hang-ups, Beth thought.

  Will followed her glance. “It’s a game we play. He stands on the couch and lines up everything on the shelves. Hours of entertainment.”

  Beth nodded, suddenly impatient. “So does Sam have a mother?”

  “No,” Will replied. “No, he doesn’t. It’s quite an amazing story. He was hatched from an egg.”

  “That is amazing. Does he look at all like, I don’t know, a chicken?”

  “No, he’s a perfectly normal little boy. Quite blond, though, now that you mention it, a bit chickenlike, isn’t it? So maybe there is a bit of chicken blood somewhere in there. That would explain the egg thing.”

  “So, he doesn’t live with you?”

  “Well, it’s funny. We don’t actually have any firm custody arrangements—me and the egg, that is—so, for now, Sam stays here about half the time. Usually on weekends. Which is why I made our assignation”—a sardonic smile—“for a Wednesday. Otherwise I’d have done the proper thing and asked you out for a Saturday night. But Sam will definitely be with me this Saturday.”

  “And the rest of the time he lives with a broken egg.”

  Will laughed a true, unguarded laugh, his first of the evening. “Well, yes, that’s actually a pretty accurate description.” He bunched up his mouth, a not unattractive gesture. “Shall I put some music on?” Before she could answer, he’d risen and turned his back to her, shuffling through a pile of CDs on the mounted shelves. “Yes, well. Sam’s mother is actually kind of a nutcase. She is, as you’ve probably guessed, my wife.”

  “Your wife?” said Beth, in a voice that sounded, to her, like a squeak.

  “Yes. I’d like to say ex-wife, but we’re not quite divorced yet. Almost there, though.”

  Beth stared at him.

  “
I know, I know,” he said. “It’s not some line. We’ve been separated for a long time. Since Sam was a baby.”

  Then why aren’t you divorced yet, she wanted to ask, but couldn’t bring herself to, for this would imply that she cared—though, of course, why would he have told her all this, if he didn’t want her to care. But then, he hadn’t. He’d said nothing until there was no way for him not to say something.

  “Listen,” he was saying now, “let’s stop talking about this. Why don’t you take off your blouse?”

  Beth laughed. “What?”

  He looked at her intently for a moment, then glanced down at the jewel case in his hands. “Take your blouse off.”

  “Um, Will . . .” She laughed again.

  “Beth.” His back was to her once again. She heard the tray of the CD player slide out and watched him slot in a CD, the silver disc shooting bits of light at her.

  A quivery heat, pulsating and uncomfortable, was developing between her legs. He turned and looked at her, crossing his arms across his chest. Unsure exactly of what she planned to do, she rose from the futon. There was no reason to obey him. But was there a reason not to? For a moment she looked at him, then—almost to escape the glare of his eyes—she slowly began to untuck the tails of her shirt, which was black and made of a thin, shiny cotton, in the style of a men’s dress shirt. It, too, was new. She unbuttoned the cuffs, the sleeves falling over her hands, then, gaining speed, unbuttoned the mother-of-pearl discs on the front placket. Will held out his hand and, after a minute, Beth—realizing his meaning—handed over the shirt, which he laid over the almost feminine chair, gingerly, taking care not to crease it. She stood in front of him, her freckled breasts propped up by a plain black cotton bra, a demi cup. He hadn’t pressed play on the CD player, she realized, and the apartment felt strangely silent, no street noise creeping in, no sounds from the apartments above or below. He gestured toward her skirt—her favorite, a velveteen A-line, in brownish maroon, that fell just below her knees—with an open palm. But this seemed too much. Her breasts, she knew, were her best feature. Until recently, she’d liked her thighs, which were long and smooth and white, and her narrow knees and flat calves. But at Sadie’s, as the girls dressed before the wedding, she’d become acutely conscious of their flaccidness. Her friends—who had once scorned exercise and, moreover, the conscious pursuit of thinness; who had taken the Women and Body Image ExCo class—had become sleek, muscled creatures. Emily, in particular, once pleasantly curvy, now had the solid, ridged legs of a chorus girl, though, Beth supposed, she was a chorus girl, of sorts.