Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

The band practiced during the day now—now that being in a band was their actual job—but some nights he had a show, usually opening for someone else, and Emily went and listened, sipping a pale beer in the VIP section of Irving Plaza or Bowery Ballroom. During the week, he went back home to sleep. He could only write in the morning, he said, and he preferred to wake up in his own bed so he could get right to work. Emily didn’t love this arrangement, but neither did she hate it. She, too, preferred to be alone in the morning, actually, to drink her coffee in silence. And there was something pleasant about Curtis’s leave-takings, as well, something that pleased her in the way she half woke as he kissed her good-bye, then fell back into a hot, dark slumber.

On Friday nights, they went to dinner at Bean or Planet Thailand or one of the new places in the neighborhood. Saturdays, they slept in, ate a late breakfast at Oznot’s, then wandered around the neighborhood—poking in shops, watching the dogs run around McCarren Park—or they got on the L and went to a movie or the Whitney or the Cloisters. Curtis was passionate about photography and abstract expressionism and, oddly, Renaissance art. He loved the gloomy symbolism, all those doomed maidens and dying animals and bloody saints. Sometimes, they walked across the Williamsburg Bridge and wandered around the Lower East Side, looking for the Henry Street building in which Curtis’s great-grandfather had practiced medicine at the turn of the last century. They bought nuts and red licorice and candied ginger from the spice shops on Hester Street and ate dim sum from carts at the big Chinese palace on Elizabeth Street. And sometimes, they woke up early and went to the flea markets in Chelsea, looking for the old cameras that Curtis collected, or the rotting furs that Emily loved to try on, Curtis snapping her photo as she made faces in the mirror.

In the evening, they went to parties or to hear his friends’ bands play or hung around at Curtis’s loft, which inevitably became, on Saturday nights, the site of an impromptu party, the air thick with the woodsy scent of ganja, which Emily would not smoke, ostensibly because she feared damaging her voice, but really because she had a mortal fear—a phobia, almost—of drugs in general, having seen the effects of them on her sister. But she was happy to pass the joint to Curtis—who appeared to be smoking more and more, now that he’d given up drinking, but that was fine—and his roommates and their girlfriends and, often, dozens of other cheerful persons, their friends, all younger than Emily and her friends, but somehow easier to talk to for this very reason. They didn’t want to know why Emily wasn’t married or how she felt about being tossed out of her play or why she stayed, endlessly, at her asinine job, or why she stayed with Curtis, for that matter. And for this, she was grateful, so grateful that she could overlook the fact that they were the sort of people—the sort of girls —she’d avoided in college: the girls who attached themselves to boys in bands. Their names were Meadow and Melody and Rain and Phoenix and Blue and they wanted to know if she’d known Karen O at Oberlin, if she did yoga, if she’d seen them filming The Real World on the North Side a few years back. They thought Curtis was cool, the coolest, and Emily cool by extension, though she suspected that they wondered why Curtis wasn’t dating someone cooler , someone who had an opinion about Interpol and Cat Power and Pavement versus Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.

On Saturday nights, Emily slipped into Curtis’s bed—it was the one night of the week she usually stayed there—alive with contentment and optimism, and awoke the next morning, sun snaking in through the gaps in Curtis’s ratty bamboo blinds, feeling much the same, relieved to be far from the blinking light of her answering machine (her mother, Lil, Sadie, even Tal, once, asking about the play), from the sad piles of unopened bills on her small white desk, from the dust under the gray couch, the dirty refrigerator, the sheets that needed changing, the piles of laundry waiting to be carted to the Laundromat on Bedford. Curtis made coffee in a dented aluminum percolator and brought it to her in bed, inky black in a white mug that said “Mom” in brown pseudocolonial script. She sat, naked, propped up against pillows, and drank it, feeling pleasantly debauched and slightly hungover, while he went for breakfast and the papers. After they’d quibbled over who got the magazine first and eaten Danish or doughnuts or egg sandwiches or grapefruits halved and sprinkled with sugar, and just as Emily was beginning to feel that this was all she ever wanted, that she needed nothing other than this man—this expansive, wonderful man who rested his soft brown head on her hip and read “The Ethicist” aloud to her—Curtis would begin to get antsy and irritable. He wanted, she knew, to play his guitar, to walk around by the water and work out songs in his head, or to lie on his bed in silence. He wanted, she knew, to be alone. It was time, she knew, to go.

For Sundays were, they had agreed, the day on which they took a break from each other. Lying in Curtis’s bed—really just a futon pad laid out on the floor—with the gray Williamsburg light sliding in through the windows, she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him. But leave him she did, growing peevish and querulous as she gathered her clothes and dressed and made her way through the hallways, to the loft’s massive steel door. Arriving home to her dismal little flat, she thrust herself into some sort of activity to fend off despair. In truth, she needed Sundays to herself—when else would she wash her clothes, pay those bills, do her shopping, straighten her drawers, read books, and, of course, see her friends. And some Sundays, the plodding nature of her chores satisfied her, and she felt sure that all would be okay. Come Monday, Curtis would arrive at her spotless apartment, find Emily radiant—hair shiny, skin dewy—and immediately divorce Amy. And Emily would morph back into the girl she was a year prior—vivacious, original, headed for stardom, at the start of a brilliant romance.

The girl she was now would fall away like a bad dream. She hated that second girl, despised her, even as she felt herself becoming her, more and more. Even worse, though, was the way she felt her friends thinking of her as this second girl, as though she were a hapless victim, wittingly brutalized by the theater world (in general), the producers of her play (in specific), and, of course, moody, immature, rock-star Curtis, who was never going to marry Emily. She’d overheard Lil saying she’d “had such a hard time” and become “obsessed with that stupid play.” Even in conversation with her, they let little remarks slip, unable to resist the impulse to improve her life.

“Have you ever thought about going into publicity?” Sadie asked. “You’d be, I think, really good at it.”

“Curtis just seems so different from you,” Lil opined. “Isn’t it hard being with someone so quiet?”

“You don’t want to do TV?” asked Beth. “Just theater?”

“Maybe you just need a change, any change,” Sadie suggested. “Something new.”

But she didn’t. She didn’t want to go work in PR or advertising or marketing, or any of the subliterate, pointless fields that might hire an almost-thirty-year-old failed actress with “people skills.” She also didn’t want a shiny new boyfriend, some chatty egoist like Tuck or Will. Over the years, before she’d met Curtis, her friends had tried, continually, to set her up with men, all of them awful. Lately, her mother had become aware of JDate and emailed her the registration page. (“Look how easy it is! You can use that nice picture from Lara’s bat mitzvah.”) But JDate—and all those other online personal services—were the same, in spirit, as setups. The man she married was not going to be someone who posted his digitally altered picture online under the handle “DramaGeek,” in the hopes of finding a woman who could talk Sondheim with him (even if that guy was straight).