Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

It was Labor Day again; or the day before, to be exact, Sunday. Alone in her increasingly decrepit apartment, Emily folded her laundry. In the bathroom, five plain knee-length shifts—her summer work clothes—hung damply from plastic hangers slung over the curtain rod. The following day, Dave was hosting what he now referred to as his annual barbecue. The following week, her play—and it was still her play, though she was no longer in it—would start previews. Ads were appearing on buses, the redhead’s grinning face popping out of the lower left corner. In a misguided gesture of apology, the director had sent Emily tickets for opening night and invited her—along with the other members of the original cast—to the big party that would follow it, at some cheesy pan-Asian place in Chelsea.

For eighteen months, believing this role awaited her (“another month,” the director kept telling them, “we just need one more producer to sign on”), she’d gone on hiatus from auditioning. Which meant that she hadn’t worked—hadn’t had a role—in over a year and she was, now, fucked. Truly and completely fucked. Her friends had warned her—“Is it really definite?” Sadie and Lil kept asking—but she had not listened, no, because, the truth was—she could see this now, all too clearly—she had been looking for an excuse to stop auditioning. She was tired. For years, she’d run around the city, from audition to audition, eternally late, eternally lugging a mammoth backpack stuffed with dance clothes, yoga clothes, book to read while she waited, manila envelope of headshots, protein bars, huge bottles of water, and sacks of cosmetics. For years she had dieted and fasted; had risen at five thirty to go to the gym; had spent every lunch hour at yoga or dance or an audition or memorizing lines or reading sides or researching agents or doing something else productive , while the rest of New York milled around her, chatting and laughing and shopping and eating sandwiches made from triple-cream brie and drinking wine and spending the money they made doing who knows what.

The promise of this role— her role—had allowed her to live, at last, like a normal person. At lunch, she sat on a bench and ate a sandwich, watching the tourists lope around Rockefeller Center. Sometimes she met up with her actor friends, still picking, carefully, at their sad little salads, and their horror stories filled her with incredible relief. She had moved on and up in the world. No longer would she suffer through cattle calls, through the nonunion productions of Midsummer set on Mars, through the West Radish Playhouse take on Brigadoon . Her career, she imagined, would play out in the way it often did with indie actresses, the ones who were attractive in a quirky way, too tall or too short, big nosed or small eyed, or, like Emily, redheaded: the play would be one of the hits of the season and would lead Emily to some sort of interesting television drama, which would, in turn, win her a cult following of devoted fans, who would tell the uninitiated, “You know, she’s really a stage actress.” Movie roles would follow and she’d return to Broadway triumphant, in a revival of Burn This or, maybe, playing Portia in the park.

In truth, she’d expected some of that stuff to happen after the Times review, after the photo in New York , and so on. And she did get calls from talent managers and agents. She’d signed with one, a young, aggressive-seeming guy who sent her on auditions for commercials—Trident, Ford, Allegra—and suggested she start doing voice-over work (he could recommend a great coach, who would help her make a demo tape). But within a few months, after the guy’s initial rabidity wore off, he stopped sending her out. She wasn’t sure why. Because she hadn’t landed any of the parts? Because she didn’t want to do voice-overs (and certainly didn’t want to pay for a coach)? Maybe he’d simply taken on another young redhead—younger than Emily, cuter than Emily, thinner than Emily—who might be an easier sell? Or was it just like everything in theater—inexplicable?

Regardless, she hadn’t worried about it at the time, because she had her play and soon enough she’d sign on with someone great, someone at ICM or wherever. But no. Sadie had been right. Lil had been right. Everyone had been right. And now it was over. She was fucked. She had nothing. She had never, not ever in the entirety of her life, wanted anything other than the theater. Broadway. The whole sad cliché of it. But still, she’d wanted it, wanted it badly enough to waste her days, her expensive degree, her everything, answering phones for a soulless banker. This play had been her shot, her chance, her break—if she couldn’t count on going to Broadway in a play for which she’d won raves, then what could she count on? Nothing. Nothing but Curtis. Curtis, who was eternally baffled by the reams of paperwork he needed to file in order to divorce Amy and, of course, marry Emily. Which was similar to nothing. She was a secretary now. Nothing but a secretary.

Nowadays, when she walked around at lunch, she made little lists in her head—the sort that women’s magazines often instruct girls to make—of all the good things in her life: She had a cheap apartment in a popular neighborhood, which she could sublet for three times her rent. She had a stable job. She had her friends, though they were all busy with their husbands and careers and, in Sadie’s case, baby. But still. She had great parents, too, she told herself—supportive, kind, cool, easy to talk to—though she’d barely spoken to them lately. She just couldn’t, couldn’t , bear to tell them about her recent travails. Their disappointment—not to mention her mother’s disapproval, the I-told-you-so’s registering in her thin, nasal voice—was more than Emily could bear. She’d also told them nothing of Curtis, for she knew that once she told them something, anything , about him, she would end up telling them everything about him and be subjected to her mother’s hysterics on the subject of his marriage. “It doesn’t matter if he’s only married on paper,” her mother would say. “You can’t have a real relationship with a man who still has ties to someone else. It’s not honest .” Her mother was hung up on honesty. “Just give him an ultimatum. Tell him: ‘Divorce her next week, or it’s over.’”

The fact was, though, that she was never quite sure if such measures were necessary, for she was happy, really, and she and Curtis lived rather like the married couples Emily knew. Happier, actually. Curtis had finally moved out of the practice space and into a massive loft around the corner from her, on Wythe, which he shared with a group of scruffy, Curtis-like guys. On weeknights, after Emily came home from work, he walked over to her place and poured himself a beer—or, well, he had done before he gave up drinking, back in April. Now he made himself a cranberry spritzer—thick, sludgy, unsweetened cranberry juice from the health food store, seltzer, a wedge of lime. But he still opened a bottle of wine for Emily and poured her a glass. He was a better cook than she—he’d learned at the elbow of his father, a great gourmand in the baby boomer style, who’d worked his way through Julia Child—and, after drinks, could often be coerced into cooking chicken pounded paper thin and covered with chopped tomatoes, or steaks with peppery, seared crusts and melting pink interiors, which Emily ate in small, tentative bites, a vestige of her collegiate vegetarianism. Other nights, Emily made her way to the tiny two-burner stove and made pasta with pesto or vegetables or tomatoes and garlic, swatting Curtis away when he tried to add great knobs of butter or glugs of oil to her pots. He liked to pretend they were a couple of a different era, drinking their highballs while dinner bubbled away on the stove. “Salisbury steak? Hmmm, my favorite,” he’d say, with a closemouthed smile and a swat at her ass.