A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  And you let me sit there? thought Sadie, furious. “Caitlin, Rob has money, doesn’t he?” she said, a thin stream of poison leaking into her voice. She was breaking the cardinal rule of New York bohemia—just as Rob had done the night before—pointing out a person’s financial situation. Nowhere but in New York, Sadie thought, were people so embarrassed to have money. “Why do you need to pull in furniture off the street? Can’t you just go out and buy a sofa?”

  Shifting her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, Caitlin considered this. “Rob has money from his family,” she said finally. “But he believes—it’s kind of an anarchist collective thing—that we should live as close as possible to the poverty level. We have a really strict budget and whatever extra money we have goes into Rob’s projects. He’s starting this new organization, kind of a support group for wealthy kids who want to live an ethical life.” She paused. “You must know a lot of kids like that, right? You went to Dalton, didn’t you? Maybe you could talk to the alumni people about bringing him to talk to the students? Or the alums? He’s an amazing speaker. He’s giving a talk at the New School in a couple of weeks. You should come.”

  “Mmm,” Sadie murmured, glancing around the room. The bathroom, she thought, must be at the rear of the house, off the kitchen. She needed, desperately, to use it, but maybe not as desperately as she needed to leave. “I”—she smiled—“have to get going.”

  Caitlin, at last, rose and followed Sadie back to the kitchen, where she unlocked the door. Mumia jumped up, placed his paws on Sadie’s shoulders, and licked her face. “Hey, sweetie,” she said stiffly, thinking again of fleas.

  “Down,” Caitlin commanded. With a dejected whine, the dog lay back down on the scuffed linoleum floor. Sadie glanced toward a door by the window—the bathroom, surely—but picked up her bag, which was heavy with manuscript, and slung it, purposefully, over her shoulder. “You know, I’m glad you spoke honestly to me,” said Caitlin. “No one ever does. I think people are intimidated by me.”

  “Sure,” said Sadie. She could barely concentrate on Caitlin’s words, so badly did she need to use the bathroom.

  “You’re right about some things. It’s such a cliché, but I guess I keep thinking that none of this will hurt Lil, since she doesn’t know about it. Like, maybe it makes things better between her and Tuck, even, because he’s happier.” Here, she looked up at Sadie, widening her eyes in an attempt to indicate sadness and regret. “I know that this sounds dumb to you,” she said, coughing into her hand. “You know, I feel like you just don’t know much about real life.” Oh my God, thought Sadie. I cannot believe this. “You’ve never really been in love, have you? You think everything is so clean and easy. That I’ll just, like, get a pedicure and go out to dinner and everything will be fine. But it doesn’t work like that. Life is messy. It’s dirty.”

  “Right,” said Sadie, through tight lips. She was not, was not, going to play along anymore.

  “You’re not going to tell Lil anything, are you? About Tuck and me? Or about our talk?”

  At last, thought Sadie, the real point. “I don’t know,” she said, her chest tightening with rage. And with that, she slipped out the door, raising her arm in a stiff little wave. She couldn’t manage to get out the word “good-bye.”

  Down the first flight of stairs she walked calmly, taking care not to trip on the curling folds of linoleum, the low heels of her sandals tapping in a way that pleased her. At the landing, the smell of cabbage grew stronger, and she began to skip, then run down the final flights, bursting out the door into the fresh air, which wasn’t actually fresh at all, but thick with exhaust fumes from the BQE, and rotting garbage from the Dumpster at the corner, and overused oil from the Chinese takeout shop. Sadie looked around her. To the east lay Lil’s apartment. (Should I go right now and tell her? I should, I should.) To the south, she caught a glimpse of Will and Beth’s building, a ten-story brick box. Several blocks west and a few north she could find Emily. So many friends nearby. Williamsburg always made Sadie feel conscious of being a type—all these girls, these women, dressed just like she, wandering the streets carrying yoga mats and clear plastic cups of iced coffee and thick books of recent vintage, hair pulled back from thin faces with small, sparkly barrettes. And the men, in their low-slung corduroys and wide-collared shirts, carrying messenger bags, or sitting in the garden at the L reading copies of McSweeney’s or Philip K. Dick novels, stroking their sideburns.

  And yet Metropolitan, today, was devoid of life. Which was just as well. She felt disgusted with humanity, and with herself. Why had she stayed so long? Why had she even bothered to try to talk to Caitlin? And why was it, she wondered, that Caitlin—just as in college, she realized—had managed to make her feel bad about herself. That perhaps she did know nothing of life in all its grit and dirt. That she had not given herself over to passion—ugh, that word—as Caitlin had. Was it true? She thought of Tal. Did she love him? She did, she did, and she told him so all the time. But then wasn’t there a part of her that wondered, is this all there is? Not that it wasn’t good, or that it wasn’t enough, or that it wasn’t exciting, but that it seemed, somehow, that there should be more. That she couldn’t just marry the guy who lived down the hall freshman year, the guy who’d waited patiently until she came around. And this was it, wasn’t it? That falling in love with Tal had been less an active choice and more a succumbing to the inevitable. And she could imagine, so easily, their life together, all so easy and good, the shine of approval from their friends and their parents and their steady accumulation of objects and houses and the negotiation of careers (for this was what was bothering him, she knew, that he knew he wasn’t coming back from L.A., that after this movie there’d be another movie, and then pilot season, and that he wanted her to come, and she also knew, somehow, that she might say she’d come, might visit him for a week in his new studio in Silverlake or wherever, knowing that she couldn’t stay, couldn’t live there, couldn’t even learn to drive, and it all just seemed a bit too much. She just somehow couldn’t do it.)

  Stop it, stop it, stop it, she thought, stop this. Caitlin’s a snake. You love Tal. She’s not capable of passion. She just wants what everyone else has.

  The clouds had drifted off and the sun, once again, cast a dusty, yellow light on the streets. It was a beautiful day, a perfect June afternoon. She should, of course, go home, make a salad, and read. But she would, she decided, walk down to the river, then maybe have lunch alone at Oznot’s, while reading. She smiled broadly, goofily. How good it was to be completely alone. Putting on her sunglasses, she trotted across Metropolitan, imagining she could see the water in front of her. As she crossed Roebling, she became aware of a voice behind her, growing closer and closer. “Miss, miss, miss,” the voice was saying. Miss what? she thought. Then a soft hand grabbed her upper arm. She let out a little scream, stopped short, and found herself looking into the round, freckled face of a man not much taller than she. His hair was sandy and thick, with a slanting cowlick above his left eye, and he wore a plain, dark suit, which gave her an idea who this might be. And, somehow, she knew that he knew that she knew who he was. “Are you all right?” the man asked. His voice was not deep, but had an appealing rasp.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” she said. His hand, which was warm and dry, was still on her arm. With a sheepish look, he slowly released his grip.

  “You’re sure?” he said. “Nothing happened to you inside that house?”

  “No, I was just visiting someone,” she said, smiling, though she wasn’t sure why.

  “You looked a little upset when you emerged from the building,” he said, furrowing his brow.

  Was this some sort of Fed lingo, emerged from the building, she wondered, like a state trooper saying Step away from the vehicle. “Well,” she said, drawing out the word, “I was. It’s a long story.”

  “I have time,” said the man, sliding his hands into the pockets of his pants.

  “Okay,” said Sadie. “But I’
m not sure it’s going to interest you.”

  “Try me,” he said, with a shrug.

  “Okay,” repeated Sadie, suddenly nervous. “Well, I found out that this woman—the woman I was visiting, she asked me to come over, I don’t really like her, though really, she’s just a sad, sad person and I should feel sorry for her. Anyway, she’s having an affair with my best friend’s husband.” She smiled again, this time self-consciously. “Right. That’s more than you needed to know.”

  A grimace overtook the man’s open face. It was his eyes, Sadie thought, that gave him such a—what was it?—receptive look. They were a deep, unusual shade of blue, almost turquoise and, this was the thing, spaced wide—too wide, really—on his face. He was older than she by at least ten years, and he’d spent time in the sun. “Eh,” he said, shaking his head. “That is not good.”

  “No,” Sadie agreed. Shouldn’t he be showing me his badge or something? she thought. Aren’t there laws about that? Could it be that he wasn’t the INS guy? And she was talking to some random guy in a suit? No one in Williamsburg wore suits.

  Cocking his head, he seemed to consider her anew. “Why did you run off down the street?” he asked.

  Sadie laughed. “I don’t know. I was so happy to be out of that apartment, that building. It smelled like cat pee. It’s a long story.” She paused. “Why?”

  The agent shrugged, then looked Sadie straight in the eye. “There’s some bad stuff going on in that building. Your friend should get out of there.”

  “She’s not my friend,” Sadie told him.

  “Yeah, well then, forget her.” He smiled. “The evil seductress.”

  Sadie laughed. “Vile fornicator,” she said.

  “Jezebel,” he said. He reached into his left-hand jacket pocket and crisply extracted a black leather case, which he flipped open to reveal a large badge. “I’m Agent Michael Connelly,” he said, sticking out his right hand and, again, meeting her gaze directly. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Sadie Peregine,” she said, shaking his hand, a firm, quick grasp. “Just a normal civilian. I don’t actually even have a driver’s license to show you. Would you like to see my library card?”

  “That’s okay,” he said, flipping his little case closed with a snap and returning it to his pocket. Her vision, she realized, couldn’t be so bad, as she’d read the initials on the badge clearly: not INS, as she’d expected, but, in clear black ink, FBI.

  seven

  The following Sunday, Sadie rose early and gave her father quite a shock by appearing on his doorstep at eight o’clock, just as he was leaving to pick up food for breakfast. Amiably, they walked over to Lex, selected their fish, and returned home to prepare the house for their guests. At ten, as they sat in the kitchen, reading the movie reviews from the Friday paper—having given Rose the Sunday paper—Rose called downstairs in the stentorian voice she reserved for situations she considered emergencies, “Sadie?” Father and daughter shared a frowning glance. It was rare for Rose to emerge before eleven. “Sadie,” Rose called again. “Can you hear me?” Sadie skipped up the stairs, by way of responding. Like her father, she was almost constitutionally incapable of raising her voice.

  Reaching the third floor, she found the door to her parents’ bedroom partially open. “Mom?” she said, rapping on the door and poking her head in the room.

  “Oh, Sadie,” came Rose’s voice. She was in the bathroom, an entirely white chamber, en suite, and nearly unchanged since the 1930s, with a massive pedestal sink, chrome towel bars, matte subway tile, scalloped deco sconces, and an enormous claw-foot tub, in which Rose took her evening bath. As a child, Sadie found this chalky vessel a bit too similar to the Egyptian sarcophagi at the Met and refused to bathe in it, though she’d loved her parents’ bedroom, which, too, had changed little over the years: the walls painted Wedgwood blue, the trim white, the floorboards, which were plain and wide as in a country house, stained amber and covered partially with what Rose embarrassingly referred to as “an Oriental,” in muted tones of blue and peach and yellow. The room faced the back, looking out over the little garden plot, and through its two tall windows received fragile southern light, mostly blocked by full silk curtains, sweeping from ceiling to floor, in the color Rose called “bone.” A chaise longue covered in heavy silk patterned in green and white (or perhaps bone again; Sadie had trouble differentiating between the two) stretched against the far wall, under the windows, and next to a short three-legged table, holding a telephone and a hardback library book (Rose considered new books an unnecessary expense). On the wall by the hall door stood a sweet old sleigh bed, topped with a down coverlet (also in bone) and the many pillows Rose favored (with her predilection for reading while propped up against the headboard). The bed, as yet, was unmade—the coverlet on Rose’s side turned down and the paper spread neatly out across it. Sadie picked up the magazine section—bearing a close-up photo of an African boy—and sat down on the chaise.

  “I just read the funniest thing in the paper,” Rose called. “Lil’s husband, he’s called Tuck, but his real name is William, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” confirmed Sadie.

  “I thought so. Well, it seems that he’s been arrested.” Rose appeared delighted by this development.

  “William Hayes has got to be a pretty common name,” said Sadie. “Are you sure it’s him, Mom?” Sadie was sure it was, and sure it had something to do with whatever had transpired at Caitlin and Rob’s the previous week. It was too much of a coincidence: Federal officers barge in on a man having sex. Within ten days, he’s arrested. Clearly, it was Rob who was under surveillance, right? Not the Jimenez family? She was, perhaps, in a position to find out. Agent Connelly had called her on Monday. She’d blanched when she heard his voice on the line—why, why had she given him her card?—and yet, she’d also been uncomfortably, blush-inducingly thrilled, and stunned into silence, when he’d said, in that resonant voice, his diction oddly precise, without any introductory chatter, “I’ve been thinking a lot about you.” Oh my God, she’d thought. “I should tell you,” she’d near stammered, curiously choked with emotion (Caitlin’s words, and their implication, floating back at her: You’ve never really felt anything; You’ve never really been in love), “I’m involved with someone right now.” And then, as if in a dream, she heard herself say, “But I’ve been thinking about you, too.” She had, as yet, said nothing to Lil about Caitlin and Tuck—nor had she mentioned anything to Tal, though she told herself she would, if only so she wouldn’t be the sole bearer of this awful secret—but after this hushed conversation, her arms pricking with sweat as she hung up her heavy office phone, she felt that she couldn’t, not yet.

  Patting her face with a white hand towel, Rose emerged from the bathroom, still in her nightgown and bathrobe, a peach-colored thing with creamy silk piping. Sadie had an identical one, a gift, of course, from Rose.

  “Hi, Dolly,” she said, walking over and giving Sadie a quick peck on the cheek. “Let me look at you.” She stood back and examined Sadie, who had dressed carefully—as she did every Sunday—in anticipation of this moment.

  “What a cute dress!” she said. “Let me see. Stand up.” Sighing, Sadie rose and allowed her mother to pluck at the hem of her skirt. “Where is that from?” Rose was extremely interested in young people’s costumes and shopping habits. Sadie laughed.

  “You gave it to me, Mom.”

  The older woman scrunched her slender nose. “I did?” She made this second word two syllables, suggesting that, perhaps, Sadie was trying to pull off some elaborate ruse.

  “Umm-hmmm,” said Sadie, nodding.

  “Where did I get it?” Rose asked suspiciously. She gestured for Sadie to sit down again, then joined her on the chaise, so that the two might solve this mystery together.

  “Bergdorf’s,” said Sadie. She was already bored with this conversation. “So,” she said, picking up the paper and depositing it on the chaise, “Tuck was arrested? You’re sure it’s him.”


  “Bergdorf’s when?” asked Rose, squinting at the dress.

  “Last summer. End-of-season sale. So, Tuck—”

  “Didn’t I get you a blue dress, too?”

  “Yes,” said Sadie, with a sigh. She started making up the bed. Her mother could, potentially, stand here for hours, cataloging Sadie’s wardrobe. “So, Tuck was—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Rose. “It’s funny, isn’t it? Lil didn’t say anything?”

  “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “Tuck and some other fellow. I can’t remember his name. It sounded vaguely familiar.” She picked the paper off the chaise and riffled through it. “Where is it, where is it. It was a funny sort of article. I read the beginning, then skipped to the end. There’s a picture of Tuck.” Sadie stacked the pillows and ran her hands over the coverlet. She had, she realized, come up to her parents’ early with the vague intention of seeking counsel from her mother—should she tell Lil or stay out of it?—but the subject now seemed unbroachable.

  “Ah! Here it is.” She extracted the Style section.

  Sadie laughed. “The Style section? So, I take it, he wasn’t arrested for murder?” Rose peered at Sadie distractedly over the tops of her reading glasses, which she’d extracted from the pocket of her robe.

  “No, of course not. What makes you say that?”

  Sadie gave her a wry smile. “Nothing, Mom. So tell me what happened.” Rose cleared her throat. “Well. Sadie, I don’t know if you know this, but there’s been all this trouble with Crown, the hotel company. Your father has been very concerned about it. His firm, you know, has a big account with them. Your father personally owns stock in the company—”

  “Yes, yes, but what’s the trouble?” As these words came out of Sadie’s mouth, she realized exactly what the trouble was. Prisons. Of course. Rob Green-Gold. But it was too late, her mother was going to explain it, in her peculiar, laborious way, taking forever to get to the point.