Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

She’d been in New York for six years now and worked steadily—doing the terrible stuff, like dinner theater in Connecticut, and the weird, experimental stuff, like Brechtian productions at La Mama—but still couldn’t make enough money off acting to leave her day job. And despite Lil’s and Sadie’s urging, she refused to ask Tal for help. And he, maddeningly, refused to offer. (“Maybe he just doesn’t think she’s good enough,” Lil had recently suggested. “Maybe he just doesn’t think ,” Sadie corrected.) On her lunch break, she ran to auditions. Evenings and weekends, she rehearsed or took dance and voice lessons or toiled at the gym. When she landed a part in some long run or tour, her company allowed her an unpaid leave and in the event of such an occurrence, she saved nearly every penny she earned. That is, what she had left after paying her rent and utilities and student loans. Unlike the others’, her parents hadn’t been able to pay for even a fraction of her tuition. Every penny they earned went to Clara, who was always in and out of some expensive mental hospital, or needing money for bail or lawyers or rent or psychiatrist’s fees or who knows what. Rent, probably. And food.

Emily, meanwhile, lived a spartan sort of existence: though the walls of her apartment were covered, dorm-room style, with all sorts of colorful, kitschy prints, she owned no furniture save for a sagging bed, a small, battered couch that they pulled off the street, a child’s white dresser, and a matching desk, brought up from her parents’ house in Greensboro. In fact, it was kind to call her apartment such, for it was really a small, sloping room along the back wall of which the landlady had installed a two-burner stove and tiny fridge. This space represented one entire floor of a doll-sized back house on North Eighth Street, a block from the Bedford Avenue L stop. To get to the apartment, you had to walk through the front door of the building it backed (a four-story town house, long converted into dismal flats), out the back door, down a splintered wooden staircase, through a sad little cement courtyard, then up another staircase to the back-house’s front door. A surly Polish man lived above her, a jovial Mexican man below. Emily was friendly with both, as well as with a few of the tenants in the front house, a disproportionate number of whom were unemployed. As the girls often lamented, Emily’s kitchen had no sink—the landlady had been promising to install one for years—and her lone kitchen cabinet, a strange, ancient metal contraption, contained one ruined Teflon pan, one large tin pot for cooking pasta, a few chipped pieces of Pfaltzgraff picked up at the Salvy on Bedford, and four black mugs, bearing the name of her firm. She rarely spent money on herself, the way the other girls did, getting manicures and stupidly expensive haircuts.

Not that she needed to worry about the latter. Her red hair—once the same carroty shade as Dave’s—had darkened a bit in the years since college, to a streaky auburn, but it was still head-turningly beautiful, no matter that she’d cut it to her shoulders, which the girls thought made her look a bit boring , like the worker bees whose cubicles adjoined hers. In her off-hours, she still wore the sorts of clothes she’d worn in college—minidresses from the 1960s and enormous wedge-heeled shoes—and she arrived at the Labor Day party thusly clad, in an alarmingly short dress, printed all over with palm trees and men on surfboards. The top of the dress tied around her neck, leaving bare her bluish white shoulders and her back and arms. She’d planned on arriving early, to help Dave get the grill started and mix up some margaritas, but instead she showed up nearly an hour late.

“Clara called just as I was leaving the house,” she explained breathlessly, as she clomped through the threshold of Dave’s apartment and dropped her big straw bag on the sofa.“I could not get her off the phone. She was coked up. Have you ever been around people on coke?” Dave shook his head. He knew more pot-smoking types. “It’s the worst. They can’t stop talking. They think everyone is their best friend.” It’s good , Dave thought, that she can take this stuff in stride .

The party swelled, unaccountably, to unexpected proportions. By the late afternoon, Dave’s garden was filled with people—a full third of them, by Dave’s count, strangers—seated on the stacked railroad ties that lined the grassy area, sipping beer from bottles and gnawing happily on rib bones. The ribs and ceviche disappeared quickly, and Dave had to run out and buy hot dogs and tofu pups and potato chips at the fancy bodega on Court Street. Everyone seemed more excited by the hot dogs—blistered and bubbling—than the ribs, which was a bit annoying, after all that brining and marinating. Dave’s “date” for the party was Meredith Weiss, the dark-haired lawyer he’d been seeing, on and off, for more than a year—nearly two years, actually. His other girls had mostly moved on: the blonde poet now lived with a semifamous novelist, in a brownstone on Wyckoff (though she and Dave were still friendly); the yoga teacher was studying anthropology at Columbia and had moved up to Morningside Heights; the French girl had returned to France; and so on. Only Meredith remained.

He wondered if she might now be considered his girlfriend, if only by default; it had been at least six months since he’d seen anyone else. The idea kind of appealed to him, partly because—and he could admit this—he was lonely, with Sadie absorbed in her weird romance, and Tal pretty much gone, off playing poker with Philip Seymour Hoffman or whatever the fuck he was doing. Meredith was great, too, really great. Occasionally, he found himself saving up funny stories to tell her or reading things in the paper and thinking of her. He had a feeling that the evening would serve as a turning point; that, in bringing Meredith into his fold, he might now be able to settle in with her, to leave off the callow restlessness of his youth, exemplified by the Beth debacle, an episode that increasingly unnerved him; he still didn’t quite understand his behavior and preferred not to think about it.

In the garden, Meredith sat in a little circle with Lil, Beth, and Sadie, who had come without Agent Mulder, just as Emily had predicted. They all sat cross-legged on the grass, drinking the champagne Sadie had brought (typical Sadie; champagne for a barbecue) from plastic cups. They hadn’t been friends, per se, at Oberlin, but they knew enough people in common, he supposed. From across the garden he waved, and Meredith caught his eye with her own dark one and smiled, her little brown arms emerging from a plain black sundress, her shiny hair, almost as black as the dress, curling to her shoulders. Proximity to those pretty women, all of them laughing and waving their arms, somehow made her more lovely. How, he asked himself, could he have ever considered her simply one of many? How could he have taken her so lightly?

As the sky began to darken, Dave—who hadn’t eaten a thing, between manning the barbecue, mixing drinks, and introducing strangers—realized that he was, as was so often the case, on the verge of inebriation. He slipped inside the house to grab a glass of water and found there, to his surprise, Emily sitting on his couch with Curtis Lang, engaged in some sort of quiet, intense discussion. Emily appeared to be picking bits of apple out of a glass of sangria and feeding them to Dave’s cat, Thermos, who had a bizarre predilection for fruit (cantaloupe, in particular), but who would, no doubt, throw up all over the place later. Dave sighed and cracked his knuckles. Not trusting his voice, he nodded in their direction, grabbed a glass, filled it, quickly, with lukewarm tap water, and walked back out to the patio. Lil and Sadie waved their hands at him, gesturing for him to come over, but he was too tired to walk the ten feet between them. He sat down, heavily, in a chair, and grabbed a handful of tortilla chips (where had they come from? Had he bought them?).