Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

As her body calmed itself, cooled by a stream of air from the kitchen window, her mind grew rapidly more awake, shaking off the fug of wine and food, so that she felt more alert than she had in days, weeks—bizarrely, grimly awake, her mind jumping from one thing to the next. Should she have danced with Dave at the wedding? Why had they not talked, as he’d said they would? And why was she wasting time worrying about all this—three whole days already—when she needed to get to work on her research? Tomorrow, she must go into the Museum of Television and Radio and get herself set up for the next phase. No, no, tomorrow she needed to call Gail Bronfman, at the New School, and settle things with her job, if she had a job, which she knew she probably didn’t, but she couldn’t quite admit defeat. It was all so humiliating—not just that she’d screwed things up with her credits, but that she’d handled everything wrong. “But I can be there by the first week in October,” she’d told Gail Bronfman (this was how she thought of her, not as “Gail” or “Dr. Bronfman,” but as “Gail Bronfman”). “So, if someone could sub for me for the first few classes—”

“ Sub for you,” the woman had shrieked. “This isn’t elementary school. These are your classes. Your syllabus. Your students. You need to be there.”

“I know. But I can’t—they won’t—” At this point, shouting commenced on Gail Bronfman’s end of the line.

“I’m just going to have to find someone else for the fall. A week before classes begin. What a treat. Thanks. You’ve made my day.” Beth asked, sensibly (she thought), if she could simply begin teaching in the spring semester—if they could simply change the start date of her contract. “We’ll see. Call me when you get to New York” was Gail Bronfman’s response, followed by a loud click and silence.

She willed her mind away from this conversation—which she’d shared with no one but her advisor—and toward Will, who was also, for now, a secret. She’d rather easily managed not to tell any of her friends that she would be seeing him—in part because she had a suspicion that they would warn her away, and in part because, she realized only now, she didn’t want Dave to know about it, though she knew that was stupid, but she felt some dumb need—what was it?—to maintain the illusion that they might, if they wanted to, pick up exactly where they’d left off, four-odd years ago, at commencement, before he’d told her, in that mumbled, half-angry, Dave way, that he thought when they went off to grad school they should see other people. She didn’t know anything of his “other people”—her friends had been very good about keeping silent on this subject—and nor did he, as far as she knew, know anything about hers, so perhaps they could simply pretend there hadn’t been any—just as there had been no horrible, humid summer, while they waited to leave for their respective programs and spent countless silent hours wandering around the streets outside his parents’ apartment, drinking beer in barely air-conditioned bars, and fumbling awkwardly, gingerly, in his narrow childhood bed, which barely fit in his closet-sized room, Beth on the verge of tears each time they finished, each time she had to put on her clothes and board the subway to Grand Central, then the train back to Scarsdale, then her green Accord through the village and the curving streets back to her parents’ mock Tudor. Dave , she thought. The memory of that terrible summer—when she knew she’d lost him, yet continued to pretend she hadn’t, and he (worse) allowed her to—somehow reminded her, more than had anything else in recent years, of how she had loved him. Will, suddenly, seemed—in his not being Dave—even more alien than previously. Oh my God , she thought, why am I here? What did I just do?

Just then, Will’s hand dropped heavily to the futon, releasing her wrists. He was, she realized, sleeping . Ripping the loosened cloth off her eyes and mouth, she turned to face him. Weren’t men supposed to fall asleep after orgasm? Had he, somehow, without her knowing it, reached… climax? By rubbing against her? She glanced down at his boxer shorts, which were plain white. They appeared clean and dry. Tentatively, she reached a hand out and touched their front. At this, Will started awake, taking hold of her hand. “No touching, Scarsdale.” She must’ve looked stricken, for he released his grip on her, smiled, and pushed her bangs to one side of her forehead. “ Beth . Sorry. I just think it’s funny. I always thought Scarsdale was a mythological place. Like Xanadu. Where rich Jews go to die or some such thing.” Beth rolled her eyes. “I mean, dating a Jewish girl from Scarsdale is a bit like dating a WASP from Greenwich, isn’t it?”

Beth sat up and looked around for her clothing. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really think of things in those terms.” This was absurd, this kind of talk. She’d hated growing up in Scarsdale, hated every second of it, couldn’t wait to get out, and now this, this lecher —this person who was possibly some sort of pervert or, at the very least, an unscrupulous libertine—had decided to nickname her Scarsdale , as though she were some sort of metonym for conventional, conservative, upper-middle-class Jewry. And he clearly knew nothing about Scarsdale, for if he did, he’d know she was nothing— nothing —like the girls there, with their perma-manicures, their carefully highlighted hair, their spots on the soccer team, their stupid, stupid outfits from Great Stuff, their obnoxious accents, their middlebrow aspirations, their cruel cliquishness, and their moronic sorority membership (“Dee Phi Eee! At U Mish!”). These were the girls who had mocked her from, seemingly, birth. And now, eight years after she’d left the place for good, someone was mistaking her for one of them, simply by virtue of… what ?

She shot him a slit-eyed glance as she climbed over his body, off the futon, and began to gather her clothes. He watched her, idly. Then, as she made her way by him, toward the bathroom, he grabbed her calf. “Let me go ,” she cried, wrenching her leg. But he held on, swinging his legs around so he was sitting, his head level with her stomach, and climbing his hand up her body as he stood, towering over her, she in her bare feet. “Beth, Beth,” he began. “I’m sorry. Don’t be so sensitive. I can be a bit of a cad.” Beth was afraid to speak, certain the tears—her famous, dreaded tears—would begin to flow at the first word. She pulled away from him. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said, voice wavering. “You shouldn’t make generalizations like that. If you knew anything about Scarsdale , you’d know I’m nothing like the girls there.” He smiled without showing his teeth. “Maybe you are in ways you don’t know.” This was too much, too, too much. Her stomach clenched with rage. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she was screaming, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” her voice ragged and shrill. She stormed into the bathroom.

Slumped against the door, the tears finally came—prickly relief—and she turned quickly to lock the nicked brass handle, trying to quiet herself. In a moment, to her surprise, she felt calm. She would wash her face and leave and never see this person—this monster—again. She splashed water on her cheeks, rubbed herself dry with a plush white towel, peed quietly, and swished yellow Listerine in her mouth. Gingerly, she stepped into her underpants and bra, her breasts still achy, pulled on her blouse, and stepped into her skirt. Glancing tentatively into the mirror, she smoothed her hair with a plastic comb she found on the counter, tucking the front pieces behind her ears. She was ready. She unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out into the front room, her swollen lips pressed together with grim determination. Will was not there, but her boots were neatly lined up by the door, her socks tucked inside. She picked them up, sat down on the couch, and slipped them both on, closing the boots’ long zippers up over the sides of her calves. As she stood to leave, her hand hovering by the doorknob, Will appeared in the bedroom doorway, fully dressed—wool trousers, blue shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, white undershirt peeking out below his collar. Blond hairs curved out over the undershirt’s ribbed neck, filling in the hollow at the base of his throat. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You’re Lil’s friend Beth, aren’t you? We met the other night at the wedding. You were wearing the most stunning dress. I’m sure I’m not the first to remark on it. You were easily the loveliest girl there. All the old codgers were checking you out . I noticed you the minute you walked in, with that ginger-haired girl, what’s her name. Redheads. Never cared for them, myself.” She smiled, against her will. “So,” he said, smiling back at her, “what brings you to the neighborhood?” She sighed inwardly. “Well, I’m thinking about moving here,” she found herself saying, in a voice she knew to be soft, seductive, “so I thought I’d take a look around.” He held out his hand to her. “I see. Well, I happen to be an expert on the area.” Now he had stepped closer and taken her hand. “Perhaps you might allow me to…” Now he trailed off, pulling her in close to him, untucking the back of her blouse from her skirt, holding his mouth in close to her neck. “Show you around.”