Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“Um, sure,” said Emily, warily.

“You’re sure? I’m not ruining your day?” he said.

“No,” she said, with a bit more enthusiasm. “We could go to a movie after, maybe.”

A couple of hours later, she rapped at his door, red hair frizzing in the late summer heat, a slightly pissy look on her face, which was flushed from exertion. He opened the wrought-iron gate and grabbed the white plastic bags from her. They were incredibly heavy. “Em, whoa, how did you carry these?” Emily was five foot two, almost a full foot shorter than Dave.

“Well,” she considered, “let’s just say it wasn’t fun . I got pork ribs. The guy said you need a pound per person, because there isn’t much meat on them. So I got twenty pounds. It ended up being, like, sixty bucks.”

“Okay,” said Dave, quelling a mild panic. Sixty bucks was way more than he’d expected to spend. It was just like Emily to agree to do him a favor, he thought, then mess it up (twenty pounds of ribs? What was he going to do with twenty pounds of ribs?) and make him feel guilty. But then, she was sweet to do it, and so at the last minute, and those bags were really heavy. And the money was fine, fine , he told himself. He had more cash than usual, from band stuff: they’d signed a small deal with Merge in the end. Over the summer, they’d flown to Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places, and recorded an album. In late September, they were supposed to go back to mix the thing. “I’ll stop at the cash machine when we go out.”

“Okay,” said Emily, walking past him toward the kitchen, which was really just the back wall of his living room. “I also got some stuff for ceviche.” She began unpacking thin bundles of green, frondy things and clear plastic bags of fish. “I can make my dad’s recipe. It’s really easy. Do you have any white wine?” Emily’s family had lived in South America—Chile or someplace—for a few years, her mom on a Fulbright, and picked up all sorts of interesting recipes, which Emily would occasionally deploy. The whole lot of them spoke Spanish as a result, even Emily’s sister, Clara, who was crazy and lived in a halfway house in Durham. None of the group had ever met her. Emily hardly ever spoke of the girl and they constantly forgot that she had a sister. From time to time, she’d mention Clara in passing and they’d think, Who ?

“All right,” she said now, washing her hands. “You can squeeze the limes. I’ll cut up the fish.” A moment later, she’d found a cutting board Dave hadn’t even known he owned and the blue bowl his mother had given him when he’d moved in. She pulled out another bag, filled with small, pastel creatures. “Octopus,” she said. “In Peru, they use black clams.” She looked at him. “The limes are right there.”

“Right,” he said. There seemed to be way too many limes. At least a dozen. “Tell me again what you want me to do with them?”

“Forget it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll do it.”

“Okay,” he said, and sat back down on the couch, watching as she poured salt on the fish, set it to soak in water, then sliced and squeezed the beautiful green limes. “You know how this works, right?” she said, briskly slicing the white slabs of fish into squares and piling them in the blue bowl. “The lime cooks the fish.”

“Wait,” Dave asked, “you don’t actually cook it at all? Don’t you have to boil it or something first?”

“No, Dave.” Emily laughed. “I just said. The marinade cooks the fish. It’s a chemical reaction. It, you know, alters the molecular structure of the fish.”

“Is that safe to do at home?” he pressed. “I don’t want to poison everyone with day-old raw fish.”

“It won’t be raw,” Emily told him, grabbing a large pot for the ribs, which would be brined overnight, then marinated. “Didn’t you work in a restaurant?”

She was, Dave thought, amazingly efficient. It would have taken him hours to put all that together, and he would have cut corners in a disastrous way, deciding not to peel the shrimp or something. Who else would come over and help him like this? Not Sadie, not since she’d dumped Tal for Agent Mulder—as Dave liked to think of him—and effectively disappeared. “So he has, like, a gun ?” Dave had asked Sadie too many times to mention. But then, he had to ask dumb questions like that, because he couldn’t ask the real question, which was, “Um, Sadie, you’re, like, seeing someone who works in law enforcement ?” Dave had only met the guy a few times, though they’d been dating— oh my God , he thought, as he calculated the months—a year now. No. More. Which, in a way, made things easier for Dave, as he didn’t have to worry about liking the guy, or even becoming friends with him, and then feeling weird about Tal, who asked about Sadie in his emails, always, and Dave always said the same thing. “She’s okay.” Not, “She’s still dating that Fed she dumped you for.”

“He works weird hours,” Sadie explained, when her friends complained that she never brought him around. “And he’s always away.” But they suspected otherwise. Or, at least, Dave did. He was an FBI agent , which was just insane. He wore, like, suits . He would not mix. “He did philosophy at Brown,” Sadie told them. Yeah, like a million years ago . The guy had to be at least thirty-five, probably more like forty. “He’s not some sort of freak.” In truth, Dave’s few encounters with him had been relatively pleasant. He had a sort of craggy, Peter Coyote thing going on, and he listened intently—even intensely —when Dave explained the minutiae of copying out scores, which he was still doing, though less frequently, and said, “That sounds so satisfying. I love the way music looks on the page,” which was exactly— too exactly—how Dave felt. And yet, he was an FBI agent . He’d been investigating their friends. Okay, not their friends, but people like them. People they all sort of hated, but still. Though he wasn’t anymore. He’d had himself taken off Rob Green-Gold when he started seeing Sadie. Which, Sadie said, was why he was out of town all the time. Apparently, all the anarchist activity—his specialty—was elsewhere, in Seattle, and Albuquerque, and Florida.

“Is Sadie bringing Agent Mulder?” he asked Emily. “She said she might.”

“I’m not sure,” said Emily, dropping the rib bones into Dave’s big pot. “I think she’s afraid that Lil will bring Caitlin and Rob, and it would be weird for him.”

“Oh, right,” said Dave, with a smirk. “Why doesn’t she just ask Lil not to?”

“I don’t know,” said Emily. She smiled faintly. “I think maybe she thinks”—she smiled broadly at this construction—“Lil is still mad about Tal. She doesn’t want to talk to her about Michael. And stuff.”

“Hmmm.” Dave shrugged. If he thought about it, he was possibly still mad at Sadie for dumping Tal. He tried not to think about the fact that he’d been nearly as annoyed when Tal and Sadie had started dating as when they broke up. At least that had made sense. This new guy—okay, not so new—made no sense at all. And Tal had pretty much stayed out of town since. Dave pushed all this from his mind and turned to Emily. “What’s up with your play?” he asked. It had been a year or so since a team of producers, serious producers, had picked up the play for a small Broadway house (Broadway proper, not off-Broadway, as she’d initially been told). Every once in a while, she’d mention that she’d been in a showcase for backers or some such thing, but otherwise the production didn’t seem to be moving forward at all, which sucked, really, since her career, if it could be called that, didn’t seem to be moving forward at all either.