Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“What the—” she said, then opened the door. “What’s up?” she asked him. He slid past her and sat down on the toilet. Slitting her eyes at him, she closed the door with a firm click. “Dave, what’s the deal?” I don’t know what the fucking deal is , he wanted to say. How do you expect me to know what the fucking deal is? A peculiar feeling was spreading through his abdomen, as though some particular organ—stomach? intestine?—were dropping into a deep pit. Like those dreams he had—maybe everyone had them—just as he slid into sleep, dreams in which he fell into a black void, rousing himself (suddenly, frighteningly) by pressing down on the mattress with an arm or a leg to break the imagined fall.

“So where are you guys going for dinner?” he asked, his words slurring just as he’d feared. He was still, to his surprise, clutching a lit cigarette in his left hand. How nice. He took a long, invigorating drag and watched, through a haze of smoke, as Emily splashed water on her face. She was so fresh and clean. For a moment, he felt the urge to bury his hot head in the cool, white stretch of her neck, to put his arms around her and fall asleep . Then he wondered where he’d put his hot dog. He hadn’t eaten it, that much he knew. “Bean, I guess, if it’s open and we can get a table.” Bean did a nice shitake and spinach burrito, which sounded pretty good to Dave at the moment, and he had the fleeting thought that he should join them for dinner and simply let his party continue on without him. Only his close friends would notice if he left, really, and he doubted they’d mind. But Carmen only seated two. And, of course, they didn’t want him to come along. There was that.

Emily patted her face dry and dug around in her bag, extracting a couple of tubes. With two small fingers, she dabbed a red, eerily bloodlike liquid onto her cheeks, then rubbed it in. “Em, don’t get upset, but I just wanted to say, you know, I have to see Curtis almost every day, so if you don’t, if you’re not…” He drifted off, unsure of what he wanted to say. “What were you guys talking about?” he asked.

“Musical theater,” Emily told him. Dave guffawed, sending ash flying onto his bath mat. “No, really.”

“Really,” Emily insisted.

“Musical theater,” Dave repeated, trying to catch Emily’s eye in the mirror. If he and Emily could share a little look, a little glance, it would mean that they were in this together, that this was all some big joke, that Emily and Dave would continue to band together against the Curtis Langs of the world. But Emily avoided his gaze, deeply involved in spreading some sort of flesh-colored ointment under her eyes and along the sides of her nose. “Among other things,” she finally said, with a smile.

Dave’s head, he realized, had begun to faintly throb, syncopated beats that fought for dominance with a rushing, whirring sound in his ears. Champagne , he thought, he shouldn’t drink it, not ever. Fucking Sadie , he thought, and her stupid champagne . Emily ran the faucet again, sprinkling water on her hair and twisting a few fuzzing ringlets around her index finger. He tried to picture her coming by the practice space to pick Curtis up, coming out for drinks after practice, transforming herself from his friend to Curtis’s girlfriend. He did not want this. And yet, he thought, as the cacophony in his head grew more chaotic, he did not— definitely not—want Emily to be his own girlfriend, either, though her neck still looked almost unbearably inviting, like a slab of vanilla ice cream. Then what did he want? Separation. Boundaries , he thought, that’s the word. I want boundaries . He breathed in deeply, inhaling the peppermintish scent with which she was spritzing herself. She pointed the bottle at him and grinned. “Em, if you could just keep in mind that I work with Curtis,” he started again, hating his words as they came out of his mouth. “I kind of work for him.” Emily nodded. She was running a little wand over her lips, leaving a trail of clear gloss.

“Aye, aye, sir,” she said curtly, giving him a little salute, and with a sigh, she began returning the various pieces of her toilette to her large straw bag.

Suddenly, Dave realized what he wanted. It was very simple: for Emily to stay in his cool, minty bathroom; for Emily to not get into Carmen and go to Williamsburg and have dinner with Curtis at Bean. If she left the bathroom, he would lose her to Curtis—he knew it, he could see it from the way they bent their heads together on the patio—Curtis, who already had everything, the band, the stupid orange Kharmann Ghia, the perfect, irritating family in their big, stupid house in Montclair, the supreme and unshakable confidence in his own talent. It wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t have Emily, too. It disgusted him, just thinking about Emily crossing over into the World of We: “We went to the best wine bar last night!” and “We can’t make it to your birthday party, Dave, we have to go to Curtis’s cousin’s engagement party.” And worst of all: “Have you seen Being John Malkovich ? We loved it.”

He had already lost so many: not just Beth and Lil and Sadie, but Tal, who had put the first chink between him and Sadie, if he really thought about it, and, moreover, was gone, always gone, in the wilds of somewhere, off shooting something, not “filming,” but always “shooting,” such an annoying, pretentious term, it made Dave want to slam his head through the bathroom’s plaster wall. He was gone so often and for so long that Dave had stopped keeping track of the particulars of his work and was perpetually surprised to see that familiar angular face appear in a Yahoo! commercial or a trailer for a downmarket teen comedy, the sort of thing he and Tal would have lavished with ridicule just a few years earlier (only to sheepishly rent it a few months later, telling themselves it would be fun to watch stoned). Tal had dumped him, just as Beth had dumped him, just as everyone had dumped him—everyone but Emily, cool, beautiful Emily.

Before he could think any better of it, he’d stood up, threaded the long, aching fingers of his left hand through her hair, turned her face toward him, and begun kissing her, the scents of her various lotions sending him into a sort of swoon. Her neck was as cool as it looked and her lips were the sort of lips he liked—like Beth’s, actually, full and swollen, like a child’s—and they slid against his own with an almost unbearable softness, the gloss that coated them leaking into his mouth (its taste a cloying ersatz strawberry) and onto his chin. She held one hand, her left, awkwardly in the air, like someone halfheartedly trying to hail a cab, but otherwise seemed to be lost in the same spell that had overtaken him. Through his nose, he breathed deeply and shuddered a little, which only deepened the roaring in his ears. And then, just like that, she pulled away, pushing his hands off her. “Dave,” she said sadly, and shook her head from side to side. “Dave.” Wiping the remnants of her lip gloss on the back of her hand, she strode out of the bathroom.

Dave followed her out. In the kitchen, they found Curtis, just as they’d left him, leaning against the counter, cigarette in hand, and reading a stained, tattered copy of The Moosewood Cookbook . He grinned broadly at Dave. “I hate this fucking book,” he said, ruffling the book’s stained pages. “I ate at Harkness for three years. We had that gado-gado once a week. I want to burn these stupid hippie recipes.”

“Go ahead,” Dave told him. “I stole it from Keep.” Go , he thought, leave . Get out of my house . Let me eat my hot dog in peace . (He had spotted it on the counter, blessedly untouched.) But a moment later, as he watched them climb into Carmen (parked illegally in front of his building, but then Curtis was the sort of person who never got a ticket, it was like he had a fucking force field around him), an overwhelming sadness settled around him. He wished they were still there. He wished he were not standing alone in his living room, with a headache and a garden full of guests to attend to on his own, without Emily. Or even Curtis. Sadie was wrong. He did love the guy.