Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

Emily, she knew, would regard the Will situation somewhat more sympathetically. She had done some curious things, sexually speaking, though Beth only had a vague sense of what these things were, as Emily tended to keep the specifics to herself, speaking in goofy euphemisms and referring to her boyfriends in code—“Method Actor,” “Big Law”—to prohibit the group from taking seriously her involvement with them. In college she’d hung around with a group of attractive dilettantes, a subset of the theater crowd, who favored self-consciously risqué gear—velvet hot pants, fishnet stockings, dog collars—and devoted much time to the organization and execution of “sex parties” or “orgy nights,” in their off-campus Victorians, which they painted purple or black and named “Whore House” or “House of the Little Death.” Their academic activities tended to consist of large-scale productions of Grand Guignol plays or public performance art projects involving nudity, like that of Sebastian Beckmann, who’d shaved off all his body hair and spent three days in a glass box in the middle of Tappan Square; or Seth Morris, who’d made a plaster cast of his penis, from which he manufactured a hundred bronze members, and “planted” them in the garden outside the Conservatory; or Emily herself, who, famously, baked a coffin made of bread (using ovens and flour at the group’s co-op, Tank), then ate her way out of it.

Emily still saw some of these people in New York—most had traded their fishnets and capes for jobs in graphic design or script supervision, but a few performed in burlesque shows at the Slipper Room or worked as strippers (ironically, of course)—and had made the acquaintance of any number of equally flamboyant types: actors and directors and other theatrical folk. She seemed to date an awful lot of men. Though where she met these men was a mystery, Lil said, since she spent much of her time hanging around with men who most definitely and exclusively preferred other men .

But Emily was, actually, intensely sensible—she was the only one of their friends who actually balanced her checkbook—with a puritanical streak that emerged at unexpected moments, sending all but Tal into shamed fits of petulance. Beth could imagine Emily’s response to Will. “This sounds like bad news . The wife? The kid?” Beth’s stomach clenched. She knew it sounded like bad news.

On Friday, as her lunch with Emily drew near, she woke with the intention of making the dreaded phone call to Gail Bronfman and straightening out the situation with the New School, if indeed it could be straightened out. The longer she waited, she knew, the less likely it was that they could use her, if not for her original position, then for something else—adjunct, she supposed—or, at the very least, for a January opening, if by chance there was one. She secretly hoped that the woman would crow with delight upon hearing Beth’s voice. “Oh, no, we simply couldn’t find anyone as great as you, so we held your classes until you arrived.” Or “Oh, Beth, I’m so glad you called. The person we hired to replace you simply won’t do. We’ve had to let her go. Can you take over next week?”

But she knew that this would be unlikely. After that disastrous conversation, back in August, her perpetually helpful, overly avuncular advisor, Dr. Ham (as he was known, being saddled with the name of Hamburger, a source of much amusement to him), had tried to smooth things over for her. He and Gail were friends from grad school, which was how Beth had landed the job in the first place. There was no reason, he thought, that Beth couldn’t show up a few weeks late for the fall semester. A week later, he’d called her back to his office, beetlish brows twitching with displeasure. “Listen, kid, she’s not backing down on this. She says she’s already hired someone else.”

Beth felt the familiar sting of tears. “Hired someone else just for the fall?” she asked. “Or for the whole year?”

Dr. Ham smiled. “I’m not sure. It was hard to hear, what with all the yelling.”

Her face must have belied her feelings—it always did—because Dr. Ham stood up and raised his hands in the air, like a preacher. “For God’s sake, don’t worry about Gail frigging Bronfman,” he barked. “You met her. She’s four feet tall. You could take her.” Beth forced a smile, for Dr. Ham’s sake. He’d received tenure in the glorious early days of cultural studies and didn’t quite understand how hard it was out there. “Just go in to see her when you get to New York, like she said. Suck up a little. Ask if you can help her with research. Talk to her about Barnabas. She’s way into vampires; I think she did a paper on Blacula a few years ago at the PCA—”

“She did,” Beth said. “It was pretty good. Kind of reductive.”

“There you go!” enthused Dr. Ham. “Just give her that Beth Bernstein charm.”

But Beth did not feel charm to be her province. And perhaps the only thing she feared, at this particular moment, more than Gail Bronfman—who, despite her lack of height, had the sort of brisk, overcaffeinated conversational style that reduced Beth’s normally low voice to a whisper—was confrontation itself. And so, on Friday morning, she decided that before she called the woman, she should make a complete to-do list, so as to feel a bit more in control of her time, and after completing said list, she was relieved to see that there were any number of tasks that she could, and should , tick off before picking up the phone, errands that absolutely needed to be run before the weekend, such as having her hair trimmed, and picking up some new clothing, and getting a facial. Quickly, she took the train to Soho, where these processes depleted both her savings and the rest of her day, but were, she thought, necessary to her psychological welfare. If she didn’t call Will, she decided, fate would reward her, by sending him across her path on Sunday. She would be crossing the street, dressed in a brown poplin shirtdress she’d seen in the window of a large, glassy store on Broadway, and look so ravishing—skin glowing, hair shining—that he would instantly regret not calling and invite her over for supper with Sam.

When Sunday morning finally arrived, Beth arose ragged and tired, having barely slept the night before, and dressed carefully, in threadbare jeans and a close-fitting black sweater, the only bits of her Milwaukee wardrobe that now seemed even vaguely acceptable (the brown shirtdress, if purchased, would have finished her savings), and took the two trains to Williamsburg, emerging from the station’s darkness into an impossibly gorgeous, sunny day. If only , she thought, it had been like this for Lil’s wedding. She found Emily seated on a bench outside the place, swinging her legs, her mouth plugged by a blue lollipop. “The hostess just came out and gave us these,” she said, pointing to the lurid candy. “There’s a wait. But they’ll bring us coffee if we want.”

“Oh, good,” said Beth, sitting down beside her.

“Yeh, if I don’t have some coffee I’m going to die. I got home at, like, four last night.”

“Oh no,” cried Beth. “You should have called. We could have met later. I feel terrible. You must be exhaus—”

“No, no, no,” said Emily, shaking her head. Her red hair needed, Beth thought, a washing: it frizzed out around her small head, struggling to escape from the microscopic, rhinestone-crusted barrettes that held a few strands back from her forehead. “I’ve got rehearsal at noon. I had to get up anyway. And I wanted to see you. I can’t believe you’ve been here a week already. Things are just crazy.”

“I know.”

“This show is killing me. I think the director is losing his mind. He wants us there, like, twenty-four hours a day. We’re all exhausted.”