Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

“Okay, but no dancing, I guess.”

“Right, no dancing,” he said, hailing a cab. “City hall,” he told the driver. Emily opened her mouth questioningly. “What?” he said. “We can still have the wedding. We need the gifts, right? You get great gifts when you’re the rabbi’s son.”

Emily laughed. “What’s going on?” He took her hand.

“We’re going to go get married now, so we can start our life.”

“But we don’t have rings. Or witnesses. And don’t we have to have blood tests?”

“No blood tests, not in New York. And we don’t really need rings.”

At the clerk’s office, they discovered that they did really need rings, as well as a license, after the acquisition of which they would have to wait twenty-four hours before the clerk would perform the actual marriage itself.

“Should we forget it?” asked Emily. “Just wait until May?”

“We’re here,” said Josh. “Let’s get the license.”

The next morning they returned to the clerk’s bereft little antechamber, where Sadie met them, with Jack in his carrier, laughing and drooling, and Dave trailing after them. “Lil and Beth are on their way,” she explained, handing Emily a little bouquet of freesias. “Ed’s stuck at the airport. But he said to call him so he can hear it on the cell.” After, they took a cab to Chinatown and ate soup dumplings and sesame balls, toasting with scratched glasses of Tsing Tao. At three, Josh became all business. “We’re off,” he said. He’d arranged, it seemed, for them to borrow a friend’s cabin up near Great Barrington.

“Do you think they’ll still have a real wedding?” Lil asked sadly, pulling her coat tight around her. “I think Emily really wanted one.”

“You mean you really wanted one,” said Sadie, laughing. Jack, perched on her lap, squawked, releasing a fat stream of drool, which Beth reached over and mopped with the restaurant’s stiff napkins.

“ No ,” bristled Lil. “Em does.”

Josh’s friend Craig, a tall oncologist with wire-rimmed glasses and bristly black hair, nodded sagely. “They will, they will. Josh’s mom would die if they didn’t.”

“Hmmm,” Lil murmured, punching buttons on her cell phone. “Tal,” she said, “you missed out big-time. You need to get back to New York.”

“Where is he?” asked Sadie as they clambered east on Pell Street, stepping around the clumps of already drunk tourists in oversized parkas.

“Jerusalem,” Lil told her. “I think.”

“Again?” asked Sadie.

“Have you spoken to him?” asked Dave, his jaw tensing.

Lil shook her head. “Just email. I got a long note”—she grinned—“long for him —a couple of weeks ago. He said he’s taking a break from film stuff. And TV, I guess. It was kind of interesting. He said he doesn’t want to do crap anymore, basically. That he only wants to work on things that he loves, or that are, like, making the world better . Sort of.”

“What does that mean?” said Dave, though he understood, really. Why, though, had Tal written to Lil about all this, rather than him?

Lil shrugged. “No more serial-killer films?”

“No more Robin Williams movies,” said Dave.

“But, you know, I saw him on an AOL commercial last night,” said Lil. “How can he not have an ethical problem with AOL?”

“Yeah,” said Dave. “I saw it, too. Fucking sellout.”

“He shot that years ago,” said Sadie, a slight tremor in her voice. The situation in Israel was so bad right now, though better, maybe, than in the spring, when there’d been that terrible disco bombing, all those students killed. “They’re just recycling it.”

At the Bowery, they turned north, not yet ready to part ways. It was nearly dark already and they needed to get home, to change for the evening ahead. They had reservations at Oznot’s, a set menu with oysters and steak that struck them all as wonderfully old-fashioned. Four hours later, they sat at a large table across from the bar, the girls in glittering, shining dresses, not warm enough for the weather, the boys in their usual, drinking some sort of champagne cocktail. They were due, over due, at a big party in DUMBO, but no one felt much like going.

“I’m so tired,” said Beth. She was three months along, her stomach protruding already from her pale yellow dress. “It’s driving me crazy. I can’t get anything done.”

“It gets better,” Sadie told her. “Soon.”

“Maybe we should get you home,” said Will, pulling her close to him.

“We could just go back to our place,” Lil suggested, “and drink champagne.” Her friends looked at one another uncomfortably.

Craig had come along with them, filling Emily’s empty seat, and brought a friend, a short, pleasant-faced surgeon, who filled the seat meant for Josh. “A year ago,” Sadie blurted, “Lil would have been trying to set you up with Emily.”

“ I would have?” Lil shouted. “ You would have.”

Tuck took her arm. “ Okay. ” He laughed. “Enough champagne for you.”

“What?” said Lil. “I’m fine.”

“Me, too,” said Sadie, threading her fingers through Ed’s. It was their first night out together since Jack’s birth. They’d left him, nervously, with a neighbor, a college girl studying early childhood development at Hunter.

“Let’s toast,” said Ed, raising his glass. His plane had landed just an hour before and he couldn’t stop yawning. “To new friends and old. To their happiness and health.”

“To Sundance!” cried Sadie.

“ Sadie ,” said Ed, ducking his head and tucking her arm under his.

“Here, here!” the group cried, tinking their glasses. “Here, here!”

Dave kept his arm raised. “To Emily,” he cried, his voice hard and bright. “Who deserves happiness more than anyone.”

“To Emily!” they cried. “To Emily!” their voices echoing throughout the small, dark room, tiled, as it was, in glittering shards of mirror, in which they saw themselves reflected a thousand times over, and broken into as many parts.

After her foot healed, Emily applied to a premed program at Columbia—to the shock of all her friends but Sadie, who said, “Of course!”—and took a job down the hall from Josh, at the clinic, assisting a neuropsychiatrist who was trying to determine whether men and women possessed different brain chemistries. For five years, she’d been observing the frontal lobes of songbirds and was on the verge, she explained to Emily, of publishing a paper stating that yes, definitely, men’s and women’s brains are completely different. Emily had to sign a confidentiality agreement, which struck her as hilarious.

Each morning, she and Josh took the subway uptown, carrying warm cups of coffee in their cold hands and sharing the paper. In the sunny atrium of the pavilion—which she had so recently considered purely the Langs’ territory—they parted ways, Emily heading west toward her boss’s office and Josh heading east toward his own. At lunch, they ate sandwiches in the atrium, before Josh walked up to his new office on Eightieth Street to see private patients. Emily met him at home, on Dean Street, where they sat on the couch and ate omelets or at restaurants on Smith Street or Court Street, where they joined Clara, who was occupied with making slipcovers for the chairs in her new apartment, or her friends, who insisted that they wanted to “get to know him.” “He’s so nice ,” they whispered to her, as they sat side by side along the banquettes of the various Spanish or French or Italian bistros, with their tiled floors and distressed mirrors and black-and-white photos of French bulldogs and saucer-sized medallions of Chilean sea bass. Josh scanned the menus of these places, then signaled for the waiter with an upraised hand, while Emily and Beth were still debating the safety of ordering moules frites on a Sunday.