A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  Just two years earlier, this specific section of Williamsburg (east of Bedford, but west of the BQE) had offered deliriously cheap rents: run-down apartments for $300 or $400 per month, nicer ones for $700 or $800. Now, Caitlin said—as if Sadie wasn’t aware of this—the area was being gentrified at warp speed. Developers had broken ground on two new apartment complexes, one two doors down, on the site of an old chicken processing plant, the other a block or so down Havemeyer Street, next to Will Chase’s building (or, really, Will and Beth’s building, since Beth had pretty much moved in), which was itself a fairly new structure, home to white professionals. The Latino families—most from Puebla, some from the Dominican Republic—who had occupied the area in recent decades were being pushed out. Landlords who hadn’t replaced a sink or stove in years were now hiring laborers—the same Mexicans, Caitlin said, who were being pushed out of their homes—and putting granite counters and steel appliances into the old railroad flats and charging $1,800 for them.

  “And how long have you lived here?” asked Sadie, glancing at the gleaming butcher-block counter.

  Caitlin paused and wrinkled her brow before responding. “Since last June, so about a year. Which makes us old-timers in the neighborhood.” Caitlin gave Sadie a meaningful look. “The place is filled with trust-fund kids who moved here, like, a week ago. All the old Italian ladies are being forced out. It makes me so sad.”

  In the years since graduating, Caitlin had acquired the raspy, cigarette-tinged voice of a fifty-year-old alcoholic. It was hard to believe that in her early, enthusiastic college days, she’d sung with Nothing But Treble, an all-female a cappella group that wandered around campus, subjecting passers-by to high-pitched renditions of Edie Brickell and Suzanne Vega songs. Before long, though, Caitlin had fallen under the spell of Hortense James, the English department’s lone radical feminist, and made herself over in her idol’s image, lopping her hair into a severe bob, and donning men’s shirts and work boots with her long skirts. She stopped singing (too frivolous, presumably), dropped her boyfriend—a short, hirsute person who had no compunctions about publicly displaying his affection for her—and announced that she was bisexual. But the queer contingent on campus—whose circles overlapped with Sadie’s—had regarded Caitlin with suspicion, and she generally could be found with the little group of strange, sad-eyed girls she’d gathered together as comrades, presumably because none of them fit into any of the campus’s larger social circles. They were timid or angry persons, all underweight or overweight, with out-of-date eyeglass frames and odd nicknames, like Kitten or Poodle or Candy and real names that seemed more suited to those in middle age, like Judith or Peggy or Trish. If they took acting classes, they did scenes from The Glass Menagerie or Our Town. If they took creative writing classes, they turned in stories about old ladies in small Southern towns making horehound candy (famously, the one called “Poodle,” had inspired George Wadsworth, Sadie’s mentor, to say, “The first sentence of a short story should convey an emotion. Cute is not an emotion”). They sat in the nonsmoking section of the snack bar, drank hot chocolate, studied on the library’s second floor, among piles of brightly colored cushions and “womb” chairs, attended “Early Eighties Night” at the Disco, obtained their meals from the campus’s stale dining halls, and, come weekends, ate pizza at Lombardi’s, which served fluffy, buttery pies reminiscent of those available at Pizza Hut. Sadie and her friends sat in the smoking section of the snack bar (even if they didn’t smoke), drank coffee, studied in the library’s basement lounges or in private scholar studies on the third-floor gallery, brought their mentors to the Disco on Friday afternoon for “professor beer,” ate their meals at co-ops, and ordered stromboli from Uncle John’s, a Chicago-style hole-in-the-wall staffed by aging punks.

  “Coffee’ll be ready in a sec,”said Caitlin, placing a pastel box of soy milk on the table. “We’re vegan,” she announced. Sadie, of course, had heard all about Caitlin’s eating habits from Lil, who thought Caitlin and Rob were pathological about food. Caitlin sat down in the chair next to Sadie, perhaps a little too close.

  “Wow. Vegan,” said Sadie. When, she wondered, is she going to come to the point? The coffee machine began to sputter, thankfully, and Caitlin jumped up and grabbed two brown, earthenware mugs from an open rack by the room’s lone window.

  “You know, meat stays in the colon for up to a week,” Caitlin was saying. “It’s disgusting, when you think about it, and it explains why you feel so heavy after you eat a steak. Here’s coffee.” She placed a mug in front of Sadie. “Sorry I don’t have any sugar. We’re trying not to eat it, at all. It’s addictive, you know.”

  Unlike coffee, thought Sadie, taking a sip. It was weak and sour, but she said “Thanks” and poured in some soy milk, which rose to the top in mealy chunks.

  “Listen, Caitlin,” she began, interrupting an explanation of different types of intestinal flora.

  “I know, I know,” Caitlin broke in. “Lil’s your friend, I’m not. You’re on her side.” She glanced petulantly at Sadie. “I know you never liked me.” Oh, let’s not do this, thought Sadie. “None of you did,” Caitlin continued, staring intently at Sadie over the rim of her mug. “I was too political for you. Too radical. I made you uncomfortable.” Sadie struggled not to laugh. Caitlin seemed to believe that reading bell hooks made her a radical.

  “Not really,” she said, taking a tentative sip of coffee, which the soy milk had done little to improve. “That’s kind of . . . extreme, isn’t it? I—we—maybe didn’t agree with you about everything, but we weren’t apolitical.”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t out protesting the Gulf War either.”

  “You’re wrong,” Sadie retorted, a bit too sharply. “Emily, Lil, Dave, and Tal all went to the Washington march. And Beth didn’t go because she was glued to the television. She had friends in Israel. She was obviously worried about them.” She paused and took a breath. Why was she defending herself when she’d done nothing wrong? Caitlin pursed her lips and nodded her head.

  “Israel,” she spat. “Of course she was worried about her friends in Israel.”

  “What’s your point?” asked Sadie, then thought better of it. “You know, forget it. The point is—”

  The dog raised himself creakily to his feet and began licking Sadie’s bare knee with a warm tongue.

  “Mumia,” shouted Caitlin. “No!” The dog lay down, with another whimper, and placed his head atop his paws. “Sorry,” she told Sadie, “he’s not really trained.”

  “Um, that’s okay,” said Sadie, reaching down to stroke the poor beast’s head. She was beginning to feel she had slipped down the rabbit hole. “Listen, Caitlin,” she began, again, “this was ages ago. You and Lil are friends now. Why rehash this?”

  “Because,” Caitlin said slowly, in her careful way. Sadie was now beginning to wonder if she had, indeed, rehearsed all this. “You made me feel terrible about myself.” By existing? Sadie thought. What had she ever done to this girl? It was true, though, she’d always felt the peculiar heat of Caitlin’s resentment, from the first time they’d met, as freshmen in a low-level English class. Each time Sadie spoke in discussion, Caitlin made a self-conscious little noise—a “hrumph” or a “huh”—as though she couldn’t believe Sadie was passing off such bullshit as insight and she wanted the class to know that she, Caitlin Green, wasn’t buying it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sadie flatly. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings—”

  “Right, right, right. Because you just didn’t think about me at all.” Sadie flushed. This was true. But she’d rather Caitlin speak honestly, she thought, than make these grand statements about politics.

  “Caitlin—” Sadie began, but the girl cut her off, thrusting her pointy little chin forward.

  “No, no,” she said, her voice rising, “I thought about you all the time. I was so jealous of you. It’s funny, right?”

  Sadie flushed again, her face—she knew—turning from pink to red. “That�
�s insane,” she said, in a voice that was harder than she liked, because she, curiously, had lost all sympathy for Caitlin—which made her realize that she’d actually had sympathy for her when the conversation started. “Why would you be jealous of me—of us?”

  “Because everything was easy for you. And you had everything: men following you around, the right clothes, the right vocabulary.” Oh, please, thought Sadie. Caitlin’s parents, she knew, were academics of one sort or another. There was nothing wrong with her vocabulary. She was trying to flatter Sadie into friendship, to guilt or shame her into, as she’d said, being “on her side” rather than Lil’s. But then she was a bit flattered, wasn’t she? How could she not be, she who’d been friendless as a kid? Sadie had not thought herself “popular” or “cool” in college—and she had pretended that Oberlin society was immune to such classifications—but there was something thrilling, wasn’t there, about the possibility that she had been part of some coveted elite? And there was something shaming about finding this possibility thrilling. All of which, she realized, Caitlin knew. She frowned and pushed her coffee away.

  “Why don’t we go into the living room?” said Caitlin suddenly, as if she’d just remembered that such a room existed.

  “Sure,” said Sadie, and followed Caitlin and Mumia down a dark little corridor—past a sunny nook, in which a brand-new iMac sat on a built-in desk, and an alcove, of sorts, that held a double bed, covered with an Indian-print fabric—into a bright, pleasant room, with two large windows overlooking Metropolitan’s little commercial strip: a bar, a Thai restaurant, a car service, an ancient hairdresser’s shop, and a host of boarded-up storefronts. On one wall stood two tall glass-fronted bookcases filled with political and theoretical tracts: Marx and Engels and Guy Debord and Gramsci and Chomsky. On the opposite sat a large, blond-wood-framed futon, on which rested three enormous cats: one on each end of the seat and a third stretched along the top of the backrest. With their legs tucked under them, their breasts puffed out, and expressions of superiority etched on their round faces, they resembled giant pigeons.

  “You’re not allergic, are you?” Caitlin asked.

  “No,” said Sadie, seating herself between a tabby and an orange tom. “I love cats.” The large rug below, she saw, was clogged with fur, a pale, fibrous layer thick enough to obscure the carpet’s pattern. The dog settled down on it, oblivious to or uninterested in the cats, and Caitlin yawned, folding herself into a metal-framed leather side chair, reflexively pulling a cigarette out of a second crumpled pack, which lay on the chair’s arm. The soles of her feet, Sadie saw, were gray with grime.

  “I’m actually allergic. I get shots every week. And I have an inhaler.”

  The girls looked at each other.

  “So,” said Caitlin, impotently flicking a small Bic lighter. Her cigarette was still unlit. “Tuck and I are in love.”

  Sadie hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath—but she had and now she was able to release it, though her heart began to beat faster with anxiety. This was not, of course, good news, but first of all, she doubted its truth, and second, she was relieved that they’d simply arrived at the point. Though Caitlin had not, Sadie noted, come out and said that she and Tuck were sleeping together. Was it possible that they weren’t? No, Sadie thought, it wasn’t.

  “Oh,” she said. “Really.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” said Caitlin. “I mean, Rob is incredible. He completely takes care of me. It’s like, he even makes sure I take my medication. But he has this problem”—she leaned in toward Sadie, suggesting in her demeanor that she and Sadie were of like minds, that Sadie would surely understand what she was about to impart—“because he worships me, we can’t have that kind of animal, rip-each-other’s-clothes-off sex. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” said Sadie, wondering if this was the truth or not. Did she? Or had she simply read about it? “And with Tuck—”

  “It’s amazing,” said Caitlin.

  “Oh,” said Sadie, idly petting the brown cat to her left. She could not, somehow, imagine Caitlin and Tuck in the throes of passion. Perhaps because she didn’t want to, or perhaps because every gesture of Caitlin’s was so calculated, so measured, that it was difficult to envision her giving herself over to anyone, and particularly not to moody Tuck. Why, why would Tuck do this? With Caitlin? Lil, Sadie thought reflexively, is so much prettier. She suddenly remembered that line from the end of The Locusts Have No King, when Dodo runs off with Larry. “Funny, how often it’s the wife who’s the good-looking one,” the secretary says, or something like that.

  “And Rob—” Sadie began, her tongue feeling thick and strange in her mouth.

  “He knew I was a feminist when he married me,” said Caitlin, impatiently waving a hand. “And he’s a feminist, too. He knows that marriage is, by definition, a misogynist construct.” Then why did you get married? thought Sadie. “I mean marriage, historically, is all about keeping ‘woman’ in a secondary role. Did you know that in traditional Jewish weddings vows the woman says—” Sadie tuned out. She’d heard all this before, as had anyone who’d gone to college in the past three decades. Caitlin’s spin on it seemed to be that before birth control, marriage was a way of keeping a woman constant, while men could sleep with whomever they wanted. Now, of course, things were equal, and women could seek pleasure just as men did. “The thing is,” said Caitlin, returning to the personal, “no one man is ever going to satisfy a woman. Women are too complicated. They need different men for different occasions.”

  “Isn’t that kind of essentialist?” Why am I even bothering? thought Sadie. But before she could think better of it, she said, “And what occasions do you need Tuck for? Funerals? Gallery openings?” This was exactly what Caitlin wanted from her. Dramatic accusations.

  “Sadie,” Caitlin said. It was the first time, Sadie realized, that Caitlin had uttered her name. She hated the sound of it in Caitlin’s mouth, as though the girl was claiming ownership of it, like those overstuffed, unsmiling cats had claimed the couch. “Life,” she said, pausing dramatically after this word. “Is. Complicated. You know what my friends and I used to call you in college?” Sadie’s heart began to beat faster. It was rare, she’d found, for people to tell you what they truly thought of you, and she’d long ago left off caring. But now, somehow, she found herself anxious, and terrified, to hear what Caitlin had to say, even though she knew this was just another ploy—no more the truth than anything else.

  “What?” she asked.

  Caitlin smiled. She had been waiting, Sadie saw, for this moment. “Princess White Bread.”

  Sadie laughed, though she wasn’t sure it was funny. “I’m Jewish,” she said. “And my family tends toward pumpernickel.”

  Caitlin cocked her head patronizingly. “You’d never know it. It didn’t bother you that Pound was a fascist.” Junior year, Sadie remembered, they’d had Wadsworth’s British Modernism together and Sadie, yes, had argued that great art transcends the politics and biography of the artist, that such details are parochial and irrelevant. In truth, she didn’t care much for Pound. She found his poetry flimsy and pointless. She was more of an Eliot person, but to mention this was to raise the issue of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which she certainly didn’t want to do.

  “Yes, well,” she said, with a smile. “You know, ‘every woman adores a fascist.’”

  “Funny,” said Caitlin, though Sadie wasn’t sure she got the reference. “That’s actually a really dangerous statement, don’t you think? Basically condoning violence against women, right? But I guess from your little white tower everything is a big joke. Life seems very simple and clean, right? But it’s not.” Her voice was growing shrill. “It’s messy and dirty. Things happen. People have needs.”

  “Caitlin,” Sadie snapped, unconsciously falling into her mother’s practiced society drawl. She was furious, suddenly, furious with Caitlin for getting a rise out of her, and furious with herself for falling prey to Caitlin’s traps. “Is that rea
lly all sex is to you?” she asked, her heart racing now, adrenaline making her ears hum. “A need. Like scratching an itch. That’s depressing.”

  Caitlin shook her head and sucked in her lips—a carefully arranged look of deep sadness. “No.” She smiled broadly, which had the strange effect of making her face appear genuinely sad. “I love him.” Perhaps, Sadie thought, Caitlin did truly love Tuck. And why not? He was handsome—though Sadie didn’t find him attractive per se—and smart. She couldn’t quite explain why he irked her so. Sometimes she worried that the problem was hers, that she was the difficult one. Then, of course, she remembered why she was there and her sympathies disappeared.

  “And I know he won’t leave Lil. He loves her, he really does, but he feels like he’s failed her, which makes him kind of hate her, you know?” Sadie wished that this was not true, but she feared that it was.

  “And I hate to say it,” Caitlin continued, “because I love Lil, but it’s kind of her fault.”

  “Oh, really,” said Sadie, her anger rising again.