Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“I know. I didn’t think they’d have anything that was right for you, but I didn’t think it would hurt to take a look. Boy, was I wrong!” She glanced at her watch. “Is it time for lunch? Should we eat in town? Or we can just go to Saks and eat there.”

Beth considered. “Let’s go to Saks. I’m not really hungry.”

“Okay,” said Mrs. Bernstein, resolving to give in to any and all of Beth’s wishes for the entirety of the day. “So is Sam excited about the wedding? You loved being a flower girl at Aunt Margo’s wedding. Do you remember?”

“Just barely,” said Beth. In fact, she did not remember at all, but she wished she did.

“You wore the most adorable dress. I still have it—in the cedar closet. It was pink cotton, with a layer of thick lace over it, and a wide black satin ribbon around the waist. And you had little black shoes with straps.”

“Mary Janes?”

“Yes, yes. You looked so cute. You loved to get dressed up. Other kids hate it, you know. But you loved it.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Bernstein slowed her gait, distracted. “Beth, I just remembered. Did you read the paper today?”

Beth hadn’t. It still sat unopened in her bag. “Why?” she asked.

Her mother smiled mischievously. “Well,” she said. “Let’s put it this way. A friend of yours has been arrested.” Beth looked at her mother blankly. None of her friends were very likely to be arrested, unless it was for some sort of benign negligence, like unpaid parking tickets. Then, of course, she knew. Of course . There was only one person it could be. One person with a temper, who would, perhaps, get into a fight at a bar, or leave a restaurant without paying, or break into a friend’s apartment through the window and get mistaken for a burglar. Her sinuses prickled. “Maybe you know all about it already,” Mrs. Bernstein said. Beth shook her head. “No?” cried Mrs. Bernstein, her blue eyes twinkling. “Okay, if you had to choose one friend who might be arrested, who might it be?”

“I don’t know, Mom,” said Beth. “I have no idea.”

Frowning, Mrs. Bernstein reached up one small hand and smoothed her daughter’s fine hair. This moodiness was just too much. “I’m sorry, honey. What’s bothering you?” Beth clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth and jerked her head away.

“ Nothing , Mom. Nothing is bothering me. I’m fine.”

Mrs. Bernstein shrugged. Why were children like this? “Okay,” she said.

They began walking, in silence, down Chase Road, toward Mrs. Bernstein’s red Subaru. In silence still, they drove out of the town center and got on the Bronx River Parkway going north, toward Saks. “So,” Mrs. Bernstein said finally. “I’m thinking we can stop in at the stationery department and quickly price invitations, then head directly to the bridal salon, the fun part! We want as much time there as possible, right?” She flashed Beth a broad smile. “They’re having a sample sale, so it may be mobbed, though the sale started on Thursday, so everything may be gone, but that’s fine. You should choose the dress you like. Don’t worry about whether it’s on sale or not. Daddy and I are paying for this, okay?” Beth nodded nervously. She hated talking about money. “You only get married once,” Mrs. Bernstein rambled on. “And then we can go to Neiman’s and take a look at the dishes and stuff. I don’t remember if they do bridal or not. But it could be a good place for you to register.” Beth nodded, avoiding her mother’s sidelong gaze. A familiar feeling took root in her chest, like warm needles. If she spoke, the tears would start. In the months since she’d met Will, she’d barely cried in the old way, as she had, embarrassingly, at Lil’s party the previous week. She’d thought herself reborn, reinvented, with a new sort of confidence, a new toughness, which was strange, ironic, really, considering the uncertainty of those first days. She smiled now, the warmth in her chest abating, as she remembered how nervous she’d been, thinking he was interested in Sadie. She knew now—he’d confessed, much later, maybe in January—that he’d asked about Sadie merely as a way of speaking to Beth without seeming as though he was hitting on her. “An age-old tactic,” he’d said. “Really,” she’d asked. “It seems kind of weird.” “Well,” he replied, “it worked, didn’t it?”

After that first date followed a week of terrible anxiety—Beth wondering what exactly had passed between them—during which she heard nothing from Will; and then another week, during which she wondered why exactly she agreed to go out again with this man. But she’d gone, of course she’d gone, as she’d thought of little but him—her mind, returning eternally to him, the feel of his hands on her, the set of his jaw—and she felt she had to see what came next, as though their fates were ordained, their story already written, and she needed merely to show up to catch the ending. And so she’d gone, rather than running away, as some little voice inside her kept suggesting, so that even, at the last minute, as she walked in the door of a dark Italian place in the West Village—a relic from a more mannered era, with silent, nodding waiters and dark booths and brass fixtures—she’d thought, Should I just go? I could just go home right now .

Part of her thought that he mightn’t show up, that she’d be left alone, sipping Chianti, for hours. But then, no, he was there, waiting for her at the table, a bottle of wine in front of him. He stood when she came in and kissed her gently, on the cheek. Some level of reserve had vanished, though all his pretensions and weird turns of phrase and banter remained. He was so—she struggled to find the word— unbridled in his opinions, and somehow this—she saw now—forced her to figure out her own thoughts about all sorts of things, rather than simply blandly agreeing or saying “I don’t know much about it.” That night his problem—this was how Beth thought of it now—seemed to have disappeared. He never mentioned it again and she’d not asked, though she liked to think that she’d cured him. Soon they were spending every Wednesday and Saturday together—Will arranged for Sam to spend the latter night with his mother. They always ended at his apartment, rather than her sublet, which still felt more like a hotel than a home and was, after all, in Queens. He showed her pictures of Sam—a saucer-eyed waif, with blond curls sticking out all over his head, and rosy lips—but refused to allow Beth to meet the boy. “Doesn’t it bother you?” Lil asked her constantly. “Not really,” said Beth, though it did, of course. “It would drive me crazy,” Lil told her. “He’s keeping the most important part of his life from you.”

One day in April—a week or so after Will signed his divorce papers—Beth finally cracked. “Are you ever going to let me meet Sam?” she asked as they sat at his small table, sipping the dregs of an after-dinner coffee (Nescafé, Will’s secret shame). “No,” he responded. “I’m not.” Beth was so shocked she didn’t know what to say. “Not until I know you’re going to be in his life permanently,” he went on. “So you need to think about whether you want that.” She’d nodded numbly. Permanently , she thought, egads . The ongoing fact of his marriage had neatly allowed her to avoid questions of permanence. But now it was over. Nothing in her life felt even close to permanent, not her apartment, nor her work, which involved, of course, her dissertation, which was seeming more and more distant and irrelevant in the face of the job she’d finally managed to wrangle for the spring semester, teaching two 200-level English classes at Baruch—for so little money, she’d been using her credit card to buy food, which made her burn with shame—with no real indication that they’d give her a real contract, though she seemed to be making inroads with both Gail Bronfman and NYU, where she’d start teaching summer session in a week. It was just one class, but in her field, at least, and for a thousand dollars more than at Baruch, where the students had barely spoken English. Will kept telling her to pitch stories to magazines, now that her piece had come out on Salon (to little fanfare, though it had thrilled her to see her name on the site, her words below it).