“Sure,” she said. “Are you still at your place on Union?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m excited to be back. I met this guy in Jerusalem who’s from South Williamsburg. Isn’t that weird? He’s, like, Satmer, though he kind of doesn’t fit in.” Sadie nodded. Tal had always collected people like this: rebels, outcasts, loners. She supposed he felt like one himself, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. “Anyway, he’s going to take me all around there. It’s ridiculous that it’s like ten blocks away, but I’ve never been.”
“Me either,” said Sadie. “That’s cool. What play are you doing?” Her heart had started thudding, though, thudding so heavily that her throat seemed to vibrate, turning Tal’s voice into a weird, wordless buzz. She was hot. Too hot. Oh God, she thought. She knew what this meant. Please no, she thought. I am not, she told herself sternly, as she had at lunch, I am not going to throw up.
“—Daniel Sullivan, you know, who directed Proof, so . . .”
“Wow,” she whispered. Sweat was beginning to bead her forehead.
“How are you?” asked Tal, blinking behind his small, square glasses. He looked, she saw, different, though she couldn’t say how. “I feel like I’ve become this L.A. guy. I’m just like ‘my play blah blah blah and don’t you want to hear more about me.’” Scratching his head, he seemed to notice the protesters for the first time. “Weird,” he said, with a frown. “Anyway, how are you?”
Before she could answer, her phone began to bleat. “Sorry,” she said, unsnapping the front pocket of her bag. Her phone, the beast, was flashing red, its bleat now squawking. “Lil,” she said, trying to smile, though her bile was rising. “I’m sure she’s late.”
She snapped open the silver clamshell. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey is for horses,” came Ed’s low voice.
“Hey.”
“How’s my baby?” he asked, and her heart leapt—how did he know?—then, of course, she realized he was talking about her.
“I’m well,” she said breathlessly, clumsily trying to unbutton her coat. “I’m quite well.”
But she wasn’t, she wasn’t at all. Another wave of nausea was rolling over her, saliva filling her mouth, her limbs turning liquid. Her stomach flipped over and seemed to throb in on itself, as though, well, as though something was moving inside her. Something is moving, she thought, and an image of the baby came to her—some crossbreed of the aliens on the signs across the street and the fresh pink newborns she’d seen in Brooklyn. Sadie could see her—a girl, it was definitely a girl—curled up in a blue pool, a round blue pool suspended inside her. Another wave arrived and she knew, without a doubt, that she was going to throw up. Coffee, she thought. Without thinking, she ran down the block, her gorge rising sickly, ducked between two cars, and vomited heavily onto the pavement. “Oh my God,” she said, her voice raw, rasping. “Oh my God.” To her right was a shiny black SUV, its tire splattered with her lunch, looking much as it had on the plate. She sat on its front fender, praying she wouldn’t set off the alarm. “Sadie,” she heard Tal shout, through a fog. “Sadie?” Ed called, his voice tinny and distant.
Morning sickness, Lil had told her, was once taken as a sign of a pregnancy’s strength: if you had it, you knew you wouldn’t lose the baby. Her doctor, however, had already told her this wasn’t true. “Old wives’ tale,” she’d scoffed. In Sadie’s right hand, her phone sat limply, moist from sweat, Ed’s voice still emanating faintly from the earpiece. She wiped her mouth with the back of her left hand and fumbled in her old, battered bag for a bottle of water. “Sadie,” called Ed, louder now. “Are you there?” She sighed heavily and shook her head, her curls falling back into place on her collar.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here.” Her stomach twisted again, a jerk like a kick, her throat convulsing. The baby, she thought, the baby is already doing what babies do. She’s asking for her father.
eleven
For a year now, Emily Kaplan and Curtis Lang had been having an affair. Of course, it wasn’t actually an affair per se since Curtis and his legal wife, Amy, had been separated for more than a year. But Emily, who liked to make everything a big joke, had taken to calling herself “the other woman” and, lately, “Mrs. Robinson.” Amy, apparently, had made some derogatory comment about Emily’s age when Curtis mentioned that he was seeing someone new, and Curtis had repeated this comment to Emily (unwisely, her friends thought), as evidence of Amy’s hypocrisy—she considered herself such a radical, and yet she wasn’t above common pettiness. “She’s ridiculous,” he said, smiling with just his upper lip. If she’s so ridiculous, Emily thought sourly, then why haven’t you divorced her yet?
A year earlier—even a few months earlier—such thoughts wouldn’t have occurred to her. Things had changed for Emily. When she’d met Curtis, she’d been a working actress—with roles, back-to-back, for years—on the brink, she was sure, of breaking through into some sort of success. The play she’d made a splash in the previous year, at a little theater on East Fourth Street, was still headed for Broadway and the director had sworn, and continued to swear as the transfer was endlessly delayed, that he was taking the original cast with him. “This is as much about you as it is about us,” he’d told them, gesturing to the playwright. And it was true. The critics had raved about the “energetic young cast” and Ben Brantley had singled out Emily herself, as “an irresistible redhead with a deadly combination of spot-on comic timing and screen-siren looks.” New York and the Voice had pictured her in a flattering close-up. But none of that mattered in the end. The delays were over, at last, the final backers in place—and they’d decided to recast with “box-office draws.” Emily’s role, the second lead, had gone to a well-known sitcom actress, a redhead like Emily, of anorexic proportions.
It was Labor Day again; or the day before, to be exact, Sunday. Alone in her increasingly decrepit apartment, Emily folded her laundry. In the bathroom, five plain knee-length shifts—her summer work clothes—hung damply from plastic hangers slung over the curtain rod. The following day, Dave was hosting what he now referred to as his annual barbecue. The following week, her play—and it was still her play, though she was no longer in it—would start previews. Ads were appearing on buses, the redhead’s grinning face popping out of the lower left corner. In a misguided gesture of apology, the director had sent Emily tickets for opening night and invited her—along with the other members of the original cast—to the big party that would follow it, at some cheesy pan-Asian place in Chelsea.
For eighteen months, believing this role awaited her (“another month,” the director kept telling them, “we just need one more producer to sign on”), she’d gone on hiatus from auditioning. Which meant that she hadn’t worked—hadn’t had a role—in over a year and she was, now, fucked. Truly and completely fucked. Her friends had warned her—“Is it really definite?” Sadie and Lil kept asking—but she had not listened, no, because, the truth was—she could see this now, all too clearly—she had been looking for an excuse to stop auditioning. She was tired. For years, she’d run around the city, from audition to audition, eternally late, eternally lugging a mammoth backpack stuffed with dance clothes, yoga clothes, book to read while she waited, manila envelope of headshots, protein bars, huge bottles of water, and sacks of cosmetics. For years she had dieted and fasted; had risen at five thirty to go to the gym; had spent every lunch hour at yoga or dance or an audition or memorizing lines or reading sides or researching agents or doing something else productive, while the rest of New York milled around her, chatting and laughing and shopping and eating sandwiches made from triple-cream brie and drinking wine and spending the money they made doing who knows what.
The promise of this role—her role—had allowed her to live, at last, like a normal person. At lunch, she sat on a bench and ate a sandwich, watching the tourists lope around Rockefeller Center. Sometimes she met up with her actor friends, still picking, carefully, at their sad little salads, and their horror stori
es filled her with incredible relief. She had moved on and up in the world. No longer would she suffer through cattle calls, through the nonunion productions of Midsummer set on Mars, through the West Radish Playhouse take on Brigadoon. Her career, she imagined, would play out in the way it often did with indie actresses, the ones who were attractive in a quirky way, too tall or too short, big nosed or small eyed, or, like Emily, redheaded: the play would be one of the hits of the season and would lead Emily to some sort of interesting television drama, which would, in turn, win her a cult following of devoted fans, who would tell the uninitiated, “You know, she’s really a stage actress.” Movie roles would follow and she’d return to Broadway triumphant, in a revival of Burn This or, maybe, playing Portia in the park.
In truth, she’d expected some of that stuff to happen after the Times review, after the photo in New York, and so on. And she did get calls from talent managers and agents. She’d signed with one, a young, aggressive-seeming guy who sent her on auditions for commercials—Trident, Ford, Allegra—and suggested she start doing voice-over work (he could recommend a great coach, who would help her make a demo tape). But within a few months, after the guy’s initial rabidity wore off, he stopped sending her out. She wasn’t sure why. Because she hadn’t landed any of the parts? Because she didn’t want to do voice-overs (and certainly didn’t want to pay for a coach)? Maybe he’d simply taken on another young redhead—younger than Emily, cuter than Emily, thinner than Emily—who might be an easier sell? Or was it just like everything in theater—inexplicable?
Regardless, she hadn’t worried about it at the time, because she had her play and soon enough she’d sign on with someone great, someone at ICM or wherever. But no. Sadie had been right. Lil had been right. Everyone had been right. And now it was over. She was fucked. She had nothing. She had never, not ever in the entirety of her life, wanted anything other than the theater. Broadway. The whole sad cliché of it. But still, she’d wanted it, wanted it badly enough to waste her days, her expensive degree, her everything, answering phones for a soulless banker. This play had been her shot, her chance, her break—if she couldn’t count on going to Broadway in a play for which she’d won raves, then what could she count on? Nothing. Nothing but Curtis. Curtis, who was eternally baffled by the reams of paperwork he needed to file in order to divorce Amy and, of course, marry Emily. Which was similar to nothing. She was a secretary now. Nothing but a secretary.
Nowadays, when she walked around at lunch, she made little lists in her head—the sort that women’s magazines often instruct girls to make—of all the good things in her life: She had a cheap apartment in a popular neighborhood, which she could sublet for three times her rent. She had a stable job. She had her friends, though they were all busy with their husbands and careers and, in Sadie’s case, baby. But still. She had great parents, too, she told herself—supportive, kind, cool, easy to talk to—though she’d barely spoken to them lately. She just couldn’t, couldn’t, bear to tell them about her recent travails. Their disappointment—not to mention her mother’s disapproval, the I-told-you-so’s registering in her thin, nasal voice—was more than Emily could bear. She’d also told them nothing of Curtis, for she knew that once she told them something, anything, about him, she would end up telling them everything about him and be subjected to her mother’s hysterics on the subject of his marriage. “It doesn’t matter if he’s only married on paper,” her mother would say. “You can’t have a real relationship with a man who still has ties to someone else. It’s not honest.” Her mother was hung up on honesty. “Just give him an ultimatum. Tell him: ‘Divorce her next week, or it’s over.’”
The fact was, though, that she was never quite sure if such measures were necessary, for she was happy, really, and she and Curtis lived rather like the married couples Emily knew. Happier, actually. Curtis had finally moved out of the practice space and into a massive loft around the corner from her, on Wythe, which he shared with a group of scruffy, Curtis-like guys. On weeknights, after Emily came home from work, he walked over to her place and poured himself a beer—or, well, he had done before he gave up drinking, back in April. Now he made himself a cranberry spritzer—thick, sludgy, unsweetened cranberry juice from the health food store, seltzer, a wedge of lime. But he still opened a bottle of wine for Emily and poured her a glass. He was a better cook than she—he’d learned at the elbow of his father, a great gourmand in the baby boomer style, who’d worked his way through Julia Child—and, after drinks, could often be coerced into cooking chicken pounded paper thin and covered with chopped tomatoes, or steaks with peppery, seared crusts and melting pink interiors, which Emily ate in small, tentative bites, a vestige of her collegiate vegetarianism. Other nights, Emily made her way to the tiny two-burner stove and made pasta with pesto or vegetables or tomatoes and garlic, swatting Curtis away when he tried to add great knobs of butter or glugs of oil to her pots. He liked to pretend they were a couple of a different era, drinking their highballs while dinner bubbled away on the stove. “Salisbury steak? Hmmm, my favorite,” he’d say, with a closemouthed smile and a swat at her ass.
The band practiced during the day now—now that being in a band was their actual job—but some nights he had a show, usually opening for someone else, and Emily went and listened, sipping a pale beer in the VIP section of Irving Plaza or Bowery Ballroom. During the week, he went back home to sleep. He could only write in the morning, he said, and he preferred to wake up in his own bed so he could get right to work. Emily didn’t love this arrangement, but neither did she hate it. She, too, preferred to be alone in the morning, actually, to drink her coffee in silence. And there was something pleasant about Curtis’s leave-takings, as well, something that pleased her in the way she half woke as he kissed her good-bye, then fell back into a hot, dark slumber.
On Friday nights, they went to dinner at Bean or Planet Thailand or one of the new places in the neighborhood. Saturdays, they slept in, ate a late breakfast at Oznot’s, then wandered around the neighborhood—poking in shops, watching the dogs run around McCarren Park—or they got on the L and went to a movie or the Whitney or the Cloisters. Curtis was passionate about photography and abstract expressionism and, oddly, Renaissance art. He loved the gloomy symbolism, all those doomed maidens and dying animals and bloody saints. Sometimes, they walked across the Williamsburg Bridge and wandered around the Lower East Side, looking for the Henry Street building in which Curtis’s great-grandfather had practiced medicine at the turn of the last century. They bought nuts and red licorice and candied ginger from the spice shops on Hester Street and ate dim sum from carts at the big Chinese palace on Elizabeth Street. And sometimes, they woke up early and went to the flea markets in Chelsea, looking for the old cameras that Curtis collected, or the rotting furs that Emily loved to try on, Curtis snapping her photo as she made faces in the mirror.
In the evening, they went to parties or to hear his friends’ bands play or hung around at Curtis’s loft, which inevitably became, on Saturday nights, the site of an impromptu party, the air thick with the woodsy scent of ganja, which Emily would not smoke, ostensibly because she feared damaging her voice, but really because she had a mortal fear—a phobia, almost—of drugs in general, having seen the effects of them on her sister. But she was happy to pass the joint to Curtis—who appeared to be smoking more and more, now that he’d given up drinking, but that was fine—and his roommates and their girlfriends and, often, dozens of other cheerful persons, their friends, all younger than Emily and her friends, but somehow easier to talk to for this very reason. They didn’t want to know why Emily wasn’t married or how she felt about being tossed out of her play or why she stayed, endlessly, at her asinine job, or why she stayed with Curtis, for that matter. And for this, she was grateful, so grateful that she could overlook the fact that they were the sort of people—the sort of girls—she’d avoided in college: the girls who attached themselves to boys in bands. Their names were Meadow and Melody and Rain and Phoenix and Blue
and they wanted to know if she’d known Karen O at Oberlin, if she did yoga, if she’d seen them filming The Real World on the North Side a few years back. They thought Curtis was cool, the coolest, and Emily cool by extension, though she suspected that they wondered why Curtis wasn’t dating someone cooler, someone who had an opinion about Interpol and Cat Power and Pavement versus Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.
On Saturday nights, Emily slipped into Curtis’s bed—it was the one night of the week she usually stayed there—alive with contentment and optimism, and awoke the next morning, sun snaking in through the gaps in Curtis’s ratty bamboo blinds, feeling much the same, relieved to be far from the blinking light of her answering machine (her mother, Lil, Sadie, even Tal, once, asking about the play), from the sad piles of unopened bills on her small white desk, from the dust under the gray couch, the dirty refrigerator, the sheets that needed changing, the piles of laundry waiting to be carted to the Laundromat on Bedford. Curtis made coffee in a dented aluminum percolator and brought it to her in bed, inky black in a white mug that said “Mom” in brown pseudocolonial script. She sat, naked, propped up against pillows, and drank it, feeling pleasantly debauched and slightly hungover, while he went for breakfast and the papers. After they’d quibbled over who got the magazine first and eaten Danish or doughnuts or egg sandwiches or grapefruits halved and sprinkled with sugar, and just as Emily was beginning to feel that this was all she ever wanted, that she needed nothing other than this man—this expansive, wonderful man who rested his soft brown head on her hip and read “The Ethicist” aloud to her—Curtis would begin to get antsy and irritable. He wanted, she knew, to play his guitar, to walk around by the water and work out songs in his head, or to lie on his bed in silence. He wanted, she knew, to be alone. It was time, she knew, to go.
A Fortunate Age Page 33