Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“I do,” said Sadie, wondering if this was the truth or not. Did she? Or had she simply read about it? “And with Tuck—”

“It’s amazing ,” said Caitlin.

“Oh,” said Sadie, idly petting the brown cat to her left. She could not, somehow, imagine Caitlin and Tuck in the throes of passion. Perhaps because she didn’t want to, or perhaps because every gesture of Caitlin’s was so calculated, so measured, that it was difficult to envision her giving herself over to anyone, and particularly not to moody Tuck. Why, why would Tuck do this? With Caitlin? Lil , Sadie thought reflexively, is so much prettier . She suddenly remembered that line from the end of The Locusts Have No King , when Dodo runs off with Larry. “Funny, how often it’s the wife who’s the good-looking one,” the secretary says, or something like that.

“And Rob—” Sadie began, her tongue feeling thick and strange in her mouth.

“He knew I was a feminist when he married me,” said Caitlin, impatiently waving a hand. “And he’s a feminist, too. He knows that marriage is, by definition, a misogynist construct.” Then why did you get married? thought Sadie. “I mean marriage, historically, is all about keeping ‘woman’ in a secondary role. Did you know that in traditional Jewish weddings vows the woman says—” Sadie tuned out. She’d heard all this before, as had anyone who’d gone to college in the past three decades. Caitlin’s spin on it seemed to be that before birth control, marriage was a way of keeping a woman constant, while men could sleep with whomever they wanted. Now, of course, things were equal, and women could seek pleasure just as men did. “The thing is,” said Caitlin, returning to the personal, “no one man is ever going to satisfy a woman. Women are too complicated. They need different men for different occasions.”

“Isn’t that kind of essentialist?” Why am I even bothering? thought Sadie. But before she could think better of it, she said, “And what occasions do you need Tuck for? Funerals? Gallery openings?” This was exactly what Caitlin wanted from her. Dramatic accusations.

“Sadie,” Caitlin said. It was the first time, Sadie realized, that Caitlin had uttered her name. She hated the sound of it in Caitlin’s mouth, as though the girl was claiming ownership of it, like those overstuffed, unsmiling cats had claimed the couch. “ Life ,” she said, pausing dramatically after this word. “Is. Complicated. You know what my friends and I used to call you in college?” Sadie’s heart began to beat faster. It was rare, she’d found, for people to tell you what they truly thought of you, and she’d long ago left off caring. But now, somehow, she found herself anxious, and terrified, to hear what Caitlin had to say, even though she knew this was just another ploy—no more the truth than anything else.

“What?” she asked.

Caitlin smiled. She had been waiting, Sadie saw, for this moment. “Princess White Bread.”

Sadie laughed, though she wasn’t sure it was funny. “I’m Jewish,” she said. “And my family tends toward pumpernickel.”

Caitlin cocked her head patronizingly. “You’d never know it. It didn’t bother you that Pound was a fascist.” Junior year, Sadie remembered, they’d had Wadsworth’s British Modernism together and Sadie, yes, had argued that great art transcends the politics and biography of the artist, that such details are parochial and irrelevant. In truth, she didn’t care much for Pound. She found his poetry flimsy and pointless. She was more of an Eliot person, but to mention this was to raise the issue of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which she certainly didn’t want to do.

“Yes, well,” she said, with a smile. “You know, ‘every woman adores a fascist.’”

“Funny,” said Caitlin, though Sadie wasn’t sure she got the reference. “That’s actually a really dangerous statement, don’t you think? Basically condoning violence against women, right? But I guess from your little white tower everything is a big joke. Life seems very simple and clean, right? But it’s not.” Her voice was growing shrill. “It’s messy and dirty. Things happen. People have needs.”

“ Caitlin ,” Sadie snapped, unconsciously falling into her mother’s practiced society drawl. She was furious, suddenly, furious with Caitlin for getting a rise out of her, and furious with herself for falling prey to Caitlin’s traps. “Is that really all sex is to you?” she asked, her heart racing now, adrenaline making her ears hum. “A need. Like scratching an itch. That’s depressing .”

Caitlin shook her head and sucked in her lips—a carefully arranged look of deep sadness. “No.” She smiled broadly, which had the strange effect of making her face appear genuinely sad. “I love him.” Perhaps, Sadie thought, Caitlin did truly love Tuck. And why not? He was handsome—though Sadie didn’t find him attractive per se—and smart. She couldn’t quite explain why he irked her so. Sometimes she worried that the problem was hers, that she was the difficult one. Then, of course, she remembered why she was there and her sympathies disappeared.

“And I know he won’t leave Lil. He loves her, he really does, but he feels like he’s failed her, which makes him kind of hate her, you know?” Sadie wished that this was not true, but she feared that it was.

“And I hate to say it,” Caitlin continued, “because I love Lil, but it’s kind of her fault.”

“Oh, really ,” said Sadie, her anger rising again.

“She just has such conventional ideas about marriage. She thinks Tuck isn’t supposed to look at another woman, or find anyone else in the world attractive, which is just impossible. And she has this, like, Depression-era work ethic. She’s totally hung up on productivity. She can never just relax. So, if he’s lying on the couch, thinking, she gets furious with him. And he feels castrated. So he acts out, against her, to prove her wrong.” She lit her cigarette now and sat back in her chair.

Sadie looked down at her lap and saw that she’d clenched her hands into fists—turning her knuckles yellow and grotesque. The cats stared at her, their yellow eyes still and knowing. Was there—there was —the faint smell of cat pee coming from the animals? Or, no, the couch itself. She shifted uncomfortably. There was nowhere else to sit, other than the floor. “So she knows,” she said.

Caitlin shook her head, blowing thin trails of smoke through her nose. “No,” she said. And for a moment, she appeared to study Sadie, deciding whether to continue. “You know, it’s not just me,” she said. “For a while, he had a thing with this waitress at a coffee shop by his office. I don’t know if he actually did anything with her, but he used to go there, just to see her. And there was this woman he was seeing right before Lil, who he was totally in love with, but she had a boyfriend and wouldn’t sleep with him. After he and Lil got married, she broke up with her boyfriend and started calling Tuck.” She tapped her ash into her coffee mug. “Women love him.”

Sadie considered this, unsure what to say. “You’re right,” she responded finally. “Life is complicated.” Caitlin nodded enthusiastically. “But you”—she could feel the anger rising within her and struggled to tamp it down—“are making your own life more complicated than it needs to be. I just, I don’t understand. Why did you marry Rob if you weren’t going to be faithful to him? Why get married at all?”

Caitlin frowned. “I didn’t think of it in those terms. Faithful or unfaithful. Those are bourgeois terms. I thought of it in terms of value. Utilitarianism, you know? Marrying me would make Rob really happy. And it would make me happy, too. And I knew that no man would ever make me completely happy, so why not choose one who would make me mostly happy.”