A Fortunate Age

by Joanna Rakoff

  He’d spent the previous summer at home, in Brooklyn, cramming four years of stuff into his tiny childhood room, the back abutment of his parents’ floor-through. At night, he drank beer with his friends from St. Ann’s, all of them staying in New York and starting jobs at publishing companies or design houses or theater troupes. He planned on practicing—planned on practicing every day and reading In Search of Lost Time. Instead he sat on the stoop of his building, smoking and skimming the arts section of the Times. He slept until noon, or sometimes one or two, then padded into the apartment’s tiny kitchen, unchanged since the mid-1970s, and made himself a cup of coffee in the smallest of his mother’s three French presses (his mother was insane about coffee).

  All that summer he attempted to avoid speaking to Beth, who was holed up at her parents’ house, thirty miles north, reading Victorian novels and swimming in her neighbor’s pool. Once a week or so, she’d train into the city on some errand and call him from Soho, where she was having her hair cut, or midtown, at a matinee with her grandmother. “Come over,” he always found himself saying. And she always agreed to, with studied nonchalance, and made her way, hesitantly, to Brooklyn. He’d throw on stained khakis, stained T-shirt, and flip-flops and meet her at the Bergen Street F stop, as she had a suburbanite’s sense of distance and always got turned around on the way to his parents’ apartment, thinking she’d gone too far when she wasn’t even halfway there. Through the station’s wrought-iron bars, Dave watched the smatterings of people getting off the trains—mostly studenty types, like himself, for who else would be at liberty to wander the city at three in the afternoon?—mesmerized by the flow of the metal cars, sleepy with heat, longing for a cigarette. Just when he was beginning to worry that she was lost, Beth would appear, hair lank around her soft, pliant cheeks. Her eyes were the exact same shade as her hair—the color of weak tea—which lent her the look of a forest creature, perhaps a fawn. She was such a Beth, he thought. What if her mother had named her Jo?

  As they sat drinking iced coffee at the new bistro on Smith Street (three months earlier it had been a crack bodega that his mother crossed the street to avoid), the sweat slowly drying under their arms and along the sides of their spines, Beth detailing the horror of a Scarsdale summer (“I think every guy I went to high school with is going to medical school in the fall”) and the advances made upon her person by the manager of the local Banana Republic, where she’d recently bought a maroon dress that her mother hated, Dave would be thinking of the moment when they would walk the three blocks back to his childhood room and he would give her a glass of his dad’s white wine, and Beth would stop her nervous chatter. He would put his arms around her—her body soft and white, smooth and unmuscled, like fabric—and lead her to his small bed, the fan blowing on them as they sweated and sweated the already damp sheets. Afterward, Beth would sleep, thick from wine, and he’d wake her for dinner with his parents, an event she loved and hated. She knew—she certainly knew—that it was over, that he didn’t love her enough, or that he did, but she wasn’t quite the person he wanted to love, and that he invited her to Brooklyn because she loved him—for her, he was the one, the end, the thing in itself—and he knew, he knew, he should love her with equal devotion, should embrace some semblance of their future, their contributions to the Oberlin scholarship fund, but he couldn’t, he just couldn’t. And neither could he say “No, don’t come” when she called and said “I’m here.” At dinner, she told funny stories, complimented his mother’s chicken paillard, and laughed at his father’s stupid jokes. Dave sat silently, in a semisulk, avoiding his mother’s serious blue gaze. She knew, too, of course, that Dave had closed himself off to Beth, who was pretty rather than beautiful, sweet rather than dangerous, devoted rather than confused, and she tried to avoid saying “You’re making a mistake,” though she didn’t need to, really, which annoyed him, as everything seemed to annoy him that summer.

  Even Tal. Who, at that point, wasn’t faring much better. Over commencement weekend, he’d confessed to his parents that not only had he not been accepted at any of the law schools—Harvard, Yale, Columbia—they’d simply assumed he’d attend, but he hadn’t actually even sent in any of the applications. “But you’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” his mother kept saying, “ever since you were a little boy.” If Dave were in Tal’s place, he would have said, “No, Mom, you wanted me to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an actor.” But Tal was Tal and he just smiled and shook his head.

  Still, when the Morgenthals got back to Brookline, he and his father had it out. Tal called Dave a few days after commencement. “Things are pretty dire here,” he said, in a sharp, ironic tone that did little to mask his very real anguish. “My mother won’t come out of their bedroom. My father says I’ve broken her heart.” To add insult to injury, they’d transformed his childhood room into a blank, Formica-filled office for his mother’s kosher-style catering company—Ella’s Edibles—which had expanded tremendously in the four years since Tal left home, the Jews of Brookline (not to mention Newton) having entered into a Renaissance period and being in need of an endless supply of salmon puffs and mock sushi.

  “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Dave told him. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m leaving,” he said, to Dave’s surprise. “I’m just going to come to New York. Carson said he’d put me in touch with agents.” There was a brief silence. “Do you think your parents would mind if I stayed with you for a few days?”

  “Um, no,” said Dave, who was sure his parents wouldn’t mind, but suddenly, confusingly, felt that he might.

  “It’ll just be a few days,” Tal said. “I’ve just got to get out of here.”

  “Do you have a job?” asked Dave, feeling like an asshole.

  “No,” said Tal, his voice ragged, “I don’t have a fucking job, Dave. How could I have a fucking job? Who are you, my fucking dad?”

  “It’s just, you know,” said Dave sullenly. Why was he annoyed by the idea of Tal moving to New York? Because he would be going to Rochester in two months and Tal would stay and at Christmas, when Dave came home to visit, Tal would be wanting to take Dave to his favorite Chinese place and his favorite coffee shop and it would all just be too much for Dave. Or because Tal was actually doing the thing he wanted to do, rather than hiding in some dumb graduate program where he’d learn nothing he hadn’t learned already. “It’s expensive here. It’s, you know, there are broker’s fees and stuff. Sorry. I was just, you know—” Dave heard a sharp intake of breath: Tal willing himself to be calm. Dave had heard him do it a thousand times while on the phone with his dad.

  “I know,” he told Dave. “I have bar mitzvah money. It’ll float me for a while. I just need a place to stay while I find an apartment, but I can ask Sadie if I can stay with—”

  “No, man, that sounds great.” A strange sensation had overtaken Dave, which he quickly recognized as relief. Tal was coming. He loved Tal. “Come whenever. You can stay as long as you need to. My mom loves you.”

  He arrived the next day, Sunday, on the Chinatown bus, his fraying army duffel slung over one shoulder. Dave met him on East Broadway, under the Manhattan Bridge overpass, and took him to the dim sum place in the mall built into the bridge’s northern buttress. “Did you tell them you were going?” Dave asked. Tal gave him an odd look.

  “Of course I told them.”

  “And your dad didn’t go ballistic?”

  Tal shook his shaggy head and laughed. “No,” he said, “it was weird. He was completely calm.” Dave thought, but did not say, that this was not, somehow, all that weird. Tal’s father, like Tal, could be torturous in his restraint.

  “What did he say?” asked Dave. Tal smirked and adopted the posture of his father—spine flat against the back of his chair, mouth turned down at the corners, glasses dangling from one hand. “‘Tal, I don’t understand why you’re being so irrational,’” he intoned. “‘If you don’t want to go to law school, fine. But renting a place in New York? It doesn’t
make any sense. When you pay rent, you’re just throwing money down the toilet.’” Dave laughed.

  “So what does he want you to do? Live there with them forever?”

  “Yup,” said Tal.

  “No,” said Dave.

  “Oh, yes,” said Tal, his grin growing wild. “He has it all planned out. I’ll live with them for three years and work at his firm”—Tal’s father did something mysterious having to do with the mergers of enormous companies—“and save enough money to buy a place. In Boston, of course.”

  “Not Brookline,” Dave said.

  “Of course Brookline. Or Newton. Or Cambridge. Though Cambridge”—he smirked—“isn’t really cost-efficient.”

  Chewing on shumai and shreds of bean-curd skin, Dave began to pick out the threads of the restaurant’s din: individual voices gabbing in Mandarin, the plates clattering against each other or the sides of rubber bussing tubs, the hiss of steam from the dumpling carts that traversed the aisles. “I don’t get it,” Dave said finally. “They turned your room into an office. He’s not even speaking to you. But he wants you to live with him? For years?”

  Tal laughed, a sad, hollow sound. He was tired. Dave should have taken him right home, let him get settled in. “It’s normal, right,” he asked Dave, who started nodding even before Tal had finished the question. “I mean, it’s normal for grown children to find their own apartments. I’m not doing something weird, right?”

  “Um, yeah,” Dave said, with a grimace. “Tal, come on. It’s totally normal. You know that.”

  Tal shrugged and gulped his Tsing Tao. “I don’t know,” he said. “He said I’m breaking her heart.”

  “By not going to law school? By not living with them until you’re like thirty?” Dave rolled his eyes. “Trust me,” he said. “They’ll get over it.”

  “I guess,” agreed Tal. “I went to synagogue with them yesterday—”

  “Wait, they go to synagogue?” asked Dave.

  “Yeah,” Tal told him. “Not so much when I was growing up, but now they’ve become weirdly religious. They go every Saturday. It’s good for Mom’s business.”

  “Ohhhh, right,” said Dave.

  “It all comes down to the bottom line with the family Morgenthal,” he said, raising his eyebrows, which were dark and thick and extraordinarily straight. “But, yeah, it was really weird to be back there. I don’t think I’ve been since my bar mitzvah. And, you know there’s that part where they, where you, you know, stand up and recite the mourner’s kaddish, if you’ve lost someone in the last year.” Dave nodded. He and Evelyn had been forced to attend daily services at their Zionist summer camp, albeit of the stapled-together-hippie-prayer-book variety. “Well, my dad stood, because, you know, Grandpa Harry—” Dave nodded again. Tal’s grandfather, a chain-smoking garmento, had died in December, during finals week, which meant Tal had missed the funeral. “And I couldn’t remember the prayer, so I tried to read it in Hebrew, and I couldn’t—I’d forgotten everything, so I just sort of pretended, but I just felt like such a loser.” Dave looked at him, unsure of his point. “My own grandfather and I can’t even say this little prayer for him.”

  “Well, you could have—” Dave started, but Tal waved his words away. “What?” asked Dave. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tal. “I just, I don’t know.”

  In Rochester, Dave’s plans for hard-core dating—not to mention any semblance of a normal social life—were quickly thwarted. There was no one even remotely datable. He spent nights on the phone with Beth, listening to tales of Milwaukee, a town that seemed vaguely more exciting than Rochester, which bothered him. In mid-December Beth obtained a “best friend,” named Glyn, a Brit who’d actually crossed the pond to write his dissertation on Gilligan’s Island or some other such absurdity. Suddenly Glyn’s name came up every five minutes—“Glyn’s mom came to visit and brought us Marmite. Marmite, Dave!”—and Dave decided it was over, Beth could no longer call him at four in the morning to tell him she was lonely. He was always wondering if Glyn was in the other room, sleeping, incapable of properly quelling the particular loneliness of a Jewish girl from Scarsdale. And he could not call her either. No, he most certainly could not. Dave’s mother worked for PBS, after all, so what was he doing mooning over a girl who sought meaning in, like, Hollywood Squares?

  He started hanging around with the queens—who were, he saw, just like his Oberlin friends, cynical and bitter and frighteningly smart—and spent his weekends at Rochester’s gay clubs, of which there were surprisingly many. He took up smoking for real, buying cartons of Basics, and he ignored the messages that piled up on his machine, from his mother, from Tal, from Beth, and from Evelyn, who always managed to make him feel like an ass. “Dave, did you get my email,” she’d say, modulating her voice so as not to seem irritated. “I’m wondering if you’re coming home for Grandma’s eightieth birthday party in March.”

  That summer—and the three that followed—he stayed at Tal’s place in Williamsburg and waited tables at a Southern restaurant on Cornelia Street. He tried to pretend his parents lived in a different city—half ashamed, half proud that he’d ignored them all year—and spent most of his time alone, actively not doing what he should have been doing, which was, of course, practicing. Some nights, half drunk from the staff round that commenced at midnight, after the kitchen closed, he’d walk home, across Houston, then Delancey, and up and over the Williamsburg Bridge, a fat roll of cash bulging in his pocket. At the dead center of the bridge, he’d stop and rest, his buzz worn off, and peer out over the railing at the tall buildings that lined the Manhattan bank of the East River, inside one of which lived Sadie’s aunt Minnie, an ancient, balding schoolteacher, fiercely devoted to Sadie, having never had any children of her own. He’d gone with Sadie to visit her a few times—she loved young people—in her boxy apartment, overfilled with Judaica and peeling, dark-veneered furniture, and left feeling virtuous and terribly, horribly alone. Later, when his grandmother died, he wondered why he’d never thought to bring Sadie out to visit her, or even to visit her at all, unaccompanied by his parents. And why hadn’t he gone home for her birthday in March?

  Each August, his coffers replenished, he’d return to Rochester, sick with excitement and anxiety, certain the next semester would mark his triumph, his ascendance. Instead, he fell further and further behind, racking up record numbers of incompletes and incurring the wrath and, even worse, disappointment of his professors. After the fourth year of this, he drove back, once again, to Rochester, and instead of unloading his summer stuff, he silently packed up his winter stuff and his books and drove back to New York, steering his car to his parents’ apartment, rather than Tal’s, for this year, he knew, Tal had been glad to see him go, though their paths had barely crossed: Tal had been out of town half the time, on location in Vermont, and when he was in town, he was always making plans with Sadie, plans that didn’t include Dave, though, of course, they always said “Come along” as they headed out the door. It was the fall of 1998, a month before Lil’s wedding. His mother happened to be at the front window when he pulled up, and ran downstairs, he thought, to greet him. Instead, he received a look of cold fury, her thin lips pressed into an even thinner line. She knew. “This is just like you!” she said grimly. “To quit right before you’re finished. What is wrong with you?” He shouted something back—trying to ignore the fact that she was crying—something about never having wanted to go to Eastman, having done it for her and Dad, because everyone expected him to, though he didn’t know if this was true or not, he just knew it would hurt her. And, of course, it had. “Well, you’re not staying here,” she’d shouted. He’d gone around the corner to Sadie’s, though she didn’t seem particularly happy to see him either. A week later, he’d moved into Jake Martin’s dusty apartment, selling his car to cover the security deposit. Three months later, in January, he’d bought his place. Which meant, he supposed, that he was back for good. This was his life.

  Over
his ten months in New York, he’d settled into a dissolute routine of sorts. The piecemeal way in which he earned money meant that each day was markedly different from the next: On Sundays, he spent most of the day practicing with the band—they were calling themselves Anhedonia, though they worried that was too much of a cliché—in the space they rented in DUMBO, a cement-floored room in a warehouse that had been converted into studios. On Mondays, he attempted to lay out the principles of music theory for a small but terrifying bunch of students at Queens Community College. Though he only taught one two-hour class, the task generally consumed his entire day, as it took him a good ninety minutes to get out to the college, which was only accessible via a chain of obscure city buses. After class, he stayed and fooled around on the piano in his classroom, access to a half-decent instrument being the one perk of this awful job. (He’d hated practicing at Eastman, when it had mattered, but now he looked forward to it, if only because it was preferable to getting on the bus and making the slow journey back to Brooklyn.) Tuesdays and Wednesdays he stayed at home, recovering from his trip to Queens, and doing whatever copying work he had at the time. This was a tedious, detail-oriented business—often done by composition students desperate for extra cash—which entailed taking a large piece of music (a symphonic score or some such thing) and copying out, by hand, the parts for separate instruments (anywhere from four to sixty). One major score could take him months. In a bizarre, masochistic way, Dave enjoyed the coolie labor of copying, even though the scores he was copying were usually the worst derivative sort of crap. He loved the sight of the fresh black ink on the clean white page, and it was pleasurable to pattern out the beautiful, curving notes. He’d generally memorized parts of the pieces by the end, crappy though they were.