Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“So I can leave whenever I want?” Lil asked. If she was excited about this prospect, her voice showed no evidence of it.

“Not exactly,” Emily told her. “Now that you’re here—and you’ve signed yourself over to the clinic’s care—you can’t leave until they make sure you’re not a danger to yourself. Or, I guess, others. But that doesn’t really apply in your case.”

Lil laughed. “Actually, it does. Tuck told them that I attacked him with a pair of scissors.”

Emily tried to smile. “That’s crazy. You didn’t, right?”

Lil shook her head, still laughing a little. “No, I mean, yes.” Emily’s mouth fell open. “I didn’t attack him! I just held them up to him. I was so mad, Emily. He went out last night. He knew I was miscarrying. It started on Friday. I’d been in bed all weekend. I told him I felt weird and dizzy, that the bleeding seemed heavier. I said I wanted to call the doctor. But he said I was ‘wallowing’ and I should get up and come out with him. Can you believe it? While he was out, I started to get scared. Everything started to hurt. I was afraid if I got up I was going to fall down.”

“Where did he go?” asked Emily, not sure why it mattered.

“A screening of Ed’s movie. He said he needed to go for the book.”

Emily had received an invite to the press screenings, too. She and Josh had RSVP’d for one the following week. Surely Tuck could have postponed.

“He said he’d come home right after, but he didn’t. And I was so tired, but I was afraid to go to sleep—like, I wouldn’t wake up or something. He got home at, like, two and he acted like nothing was wrong. He tried to hug me and I just couldn’t—couldn’t let him touch me. And he kept coming at me. And then, I don’t know how, there were scissors in the night stand. And I just picked them up and said, ‘Stay away from me. Leave me alone.’” She stopped talking suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch at the base of her skull. “Oh God, Emily. Maybe I am crazy. Only crazy people have fights like that.”

“No, you’re not,” Emily said firmly. “Plenty of people have fights like that. You’ve just been going through a rough time. The doctors will see that immediately.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced down at her watch. More than half an hour had passed. She half rose from the bed. “Listen, Lil, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to go in a minute—”

Lil grabbed her arm, panicked. “Are you going to talk to the doctors? Will you tell them I’m not crazy? Or out of control or suicidal or something. You’ll tell them right? Can you explain that to them?”

Emily sat back down again beside her friend. “Of course, of course,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if she could do this or not. “And Josh will be here to see you in a minute, I think. He’ll talk to the other doctors and find out what’s going on.”

“And what about Tuck?” Lil asked forlornly.

“He should be back soon—with some clothes and things for you. I’ll call him and check in.” She tried another smile. Lil wanly smiled back. Her mirth about the scissors had vanished.

“Do you think I could get something to read?” she asked in a small voice.

“I’m sure the nurses can bring you some magazines. I’ll ask them.” Emily hoped this was true. There could well be some sort of ban on outside reading material. “And I have a book in my bag. I’ll bring it to you as soon as I can. I’ve got to go back to my office for a bit, then I’ll come back and bring you some things.”

“What is it?” asked Lil, skeptically. Emily knew her friends doubted her taste in literature. She was the only one of them who hadn’t been an English major, and the only one who’d read Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing .

“You’ll like it.” She was reading a novel given to her by Lil herself, years earlier. Josh loved it, too, and had suggested Emily pick it up. “ The Forsyte Saga .”

Like a child, Lil clapped her hands together and smiled. A real smile. What was it Tuck used to say about Lil? That she was born in a bookshop? Within the belled sleeves of the green gown, her arms looked pale and wooden and miniaturized—like the limbs of a doll or a mannequin. “Oh! The Forsytes! If only I’d married Young Jolyon instead of Soames.”

Emily laughed and kissed Lil on one cheek. “No spoilers!” she said, holding a hand up to Lil. “I’m not even through the first chapter.” She took off her glasses and slid them into her pocket. “Okay, I’ll be back. Try to relax, okay? Sleep if you can. And I’ll ask the nurses about sending in some magazines.”

Rubbing her arms, she walked back down the hall toward Maria, the gossiping receptionist, and Barbara, the bird lady. They were both brisk and resourceful—the sorts of people who made to-do lists each morning, then spent the day dutifully ticking off items. Rumor had it Barbara had delivered a paper at the NIH while in labor with her first child. That paper—on the gene mutation that causes pseudohermaphroditism—had made her career, as a twenty-seven-year-old resident. In May, Emily would be thirty. Her moment for greatness—or, that particular sort of greatness—had passed, hadn’t it?

But that moment had existed. She was sure of it. There had been a window, a brief exhilarating time, when something might have happened—when she might have become (so painful to think of it now) if not a star , per se, a—what? Whatever Tal was. A working actor. But that wasn’t all she’d wanted—the supporting parts in crappy movies—she’d wanted more. Clichéd phrases swam into her head. A “leading light of Broadway.” Inwardly, she cringed, not simply because the term was so twee, but because such creatures simply didn’t exist anymore. Well-reviewed stage actors went on to roles on well-reviewed television shows (or, just as often, bad televsion shows)—or were plucked by Hollywood—and in this way secured their measure of fame. But, she hadn’t wanted fame. She had simply wanted to work , to play Phoebe, Nora, maybe one of Shepard’s foul-mouthed, haunted women.

And now here she was, in her lab coat, tending to Barbara’s hummingbirds. And here, too, was Lil—who had become a scholar of poetry because she couldn’t find the wherewithal to write her own verse, only to let go of even those safer, secondary aspirations—in a faded green gown and a borrowed sweater, stoking the ashes of Tuck’s ambitions. It was unkind, Emily thought, to compare herself to Lil right at this moment, when poor Lil was so clearly at a disadvantage. But the events of the morning had put her in a strange humor, jumbled together, as they were, with some distasteful memories of Lil lecturing her, through the years, on how to find a man .

It was later, hours later, when she realized she’d walked right by the nurses’ station without asking about magazines for Lil—or making a case, as Lil had bid her, for her friend’s sanity.

As soon as Lil heard the door click shut, she flopped over onto her back and stretched her body to its full length, reaching her toes down to the footboard and her arms overhead. Her body ached and throbbed, as though she’d been beaten by a thousand tiny bats, and there was a peculiar tightness in her abdomen—the residue of the previous night’s pain. Then again, maybe the pain was still there, lurking, muted by the drugs they’d given her. In a way, she hoped this was so, as it better justified her stay in this creepy room with its faux homey touches (a putrid border of flowers, a Chagall print), staffed by plump, worn-faced nurses in ugly crepe-soled shoes. It was midafternoon already—she’d been in this place for a good twelve hours—and she’d barely yet caught sight of a doctor. Just the tall, bald one who’d come in this morning, fired a few questions at her as though he were reading them off a questionnaire, and abruptly left, saying Dr. So-and-So would be in later. She couldn’t tell if he was referring to himself in the third person or if he was speaking about an actual third person, the doctor who would oversee her case. Regardless, no doctor had so much as peeped in the small window set into the door of her room. Just an endless parade of nurses, bustling around and bringing this or that, refilling her water jug, giving her more forms to sign, asking to see her insurance card again and again, and on and on until she wanted to scream or, at the very least, lock the door so she might sit undisturbed for a few minutes and try to sort through the various competing threads in her mind.