A Fortunate Age

A Novel

Joanna Smith Rakoff

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781416596332
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Like The Group, Mary McCarthy's classic tale about coming of age in New York, Joanna Smith Rakoff 's richly drawn and immensely satisfying first novel details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s and the turn of the twenty-first century. There's Lil, a would-be scholar whose marriage to an egotistical writer initially brings the group back together (and ultimately drives it apart); Beth, who struggles to let go of her old beau Dave, a onetime piano prodigy trapped by his own insecurity; Emily, an actor perpetually on the verge of success -- and starvation -- who grapples with her jealousy of Tal, whose acting career has taken off. At the center of their orbit is wry, charismatic Sadie Peregrine, who coolly observes her friends' mistakes but can't quite manage to avoid making her own. As they begin their careers, marry, and have children, they must navigate the shifting dynamics of their friendships and of the world around them. Set against the backdrop of the vast economic and political changes of the era -- from the decadent age of dot-com millionaires to the sobering post-September 2001 landscape -- Smith Rakoff's deeply affecting characters and incisive social commentary are reminiscent of the great Victorian novels. This brilliant and ambitious debut captures a generation and heralds the arrival of a bold and important new writer.

twelve

Bad luck came in threes, Emily supposed. Her play, Curtis, and now Clara. If everything went well with Clara, Emily thought herself surely due for a dramatic change of fate. Yet, all these things—the play, Curtis, Clara—struck her as thoroughly interlinked, incapable of existing without the others. Had she not been tossed out of the play, and subsequently sunk into a depression or crisis of identity or whatever it was, then things with Curtis might not have fallen apart. And had she not freed Curtis to return to Amy, then Emily might not have allowed Clara to come stay with her.

Her friends were appalled by this latest turn of events. “How long is she going to stay?” asked Lil. “Is she going to sleep on the couch? What if you meet someone? You’ll have no privacy.” This was true; Emily’s small bedroom had no door, just an archway that led directly into the living room. “Is she going to get a job?” Sadie, ever practical, wanted to know. “You can’t support her forever. It’ll kill you. You can’t.”

But she wouldn’t have to. While Clara was at Brattleboro, her parents had completed the paperwork—mountains of it, according to her mom—necessary to get Clara on SSI, which was, Emily found out, disability for crazy people. The payments, her mom said, should start soon after Clara’s arrival, along with a lump sum representing compensation from the date the Kaplans had filed. Emily thought they could use the money to find a larger apartment. “It’s not going to be that much,” Sadie told her. “There’s no way. She’s going to have to get a job.”

“Yeah,” said Emily doubtfully. “I guess so.”

“You know, you don’t have to do this, Em,” Sadie insisted, her straight brows moving closer together, Jack sleeping on her chest in a pale blue sling. Ed had left for Toronto the previous day but she still, to Emily, seemed perfectly at ease, as if she’d always had an infant curled up on her like a pea pod. They were sitting in the new café on Bedford, where a mall, of sorts, had been installed in the shell of the old girdle factory, and everyone around them seemed younger and in pursuit of a level of hipness that made Emily deeply anxious. On their faces, aviator glasses. On their feet, brightly colored Pumas, Nikes, Adidas. On their legs, shredded jeans of recent vintage. On their heads, the sorts of billed caps worn by truckers and convenience-store attendants, emblazoned with embroidered patches advertising obsolete products or brands of interest to the ironically inclined: CAT, John Deere, U-Haul, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Caldor. The guy sitting next to Sadie wore his whiskers in an elaborate handlebar shape. “He’s styling the Marc Jacobs show,” he told his companion, an overweight girl with a bowl cut. “I’m so jealous.”

“I do,” said Emily.

“Why?” asked Sadie, sighing with exasperation.

“She’s my sister,” said Emily. Sadie, Lil, and Dave were all only children. Which, Emily thought, explained a lot. Tal would have understood, but Tal was gone. She hadn’t heard from him in almost a year.

“She’s mentally ill,” countered Sadie.

Now that Clara was coming, she regretted ever telling her friends the extent of her sister’s woes. They looked at Clara’s situation too clinically, as though she were a character in an after-school special: the shaggy-haired girl getting high in her elementary school bathroom; the cinematic junkie, gorgeous and emaciated, lying comatose in a squat, dirty needles stuck in her arm. They didn’t understand that Clara was just a normal person, like any of them. At Chapel Hill, before her first big breakdown, she’d studied painting. After she came out of Holly Hill, with a fat prescription for Prozac, which no one had heard of at that point, she refused to go back to school, saying she was embarrassed (“I just can’t face them”). And so she stayed home and took classes at Greensboro, but something was changed, broken, wrong. She couldn’t finish a painting—her little studio in Gatewood was filled with eerie portraits, complete except for the subjects’ blank, flat faces—much less a class. And yet somehow, despite the drugs and the feuds with professors and the classes failed due to lack of attendance, she managed, after eight-odd years, to put on a cap and gown, march across the sneaker-scarred floor of the Coliseum, and snatch her degree from Dean Garfield, known to Emily and Clara as Uncle Bo (he’d been a new history hire the same year their mother started in women’s studies). Along the way, she’d learned to weld and solder and build things with wood and sew and weave fabric and rewire a lamp and knit, the result of trading painting for sculpture. And she’d learned to cook, too, and bake bread, during the years she’d waitressed at Liberty Oak. Those were good years, as were the ones in which she’d worked at a local architecture firm—she’d talked about going back to school, becoming an architect herself—but they were outnumbered by the bad ones. And they had been long ago. The Clara of recent memory had flung a heavy ball of dough at Emily when she’d argued that no, their parents didn’t actually favor her, and no, she didn’t think Clara’s ex-husband was sneaking into her apartment and adding rat poison to her coffee.

But the Clara who emerged from the Trailways bus into the bleak bowels of the Port Authority seemed positively sane—happy, even. She carried a large tote bag imprinted with the words “Nurses are better lovers”—given to her by Jolene, her favorite nurse, she told Emily (who reflexively wondered if she’d stolen it)—and a bouquet of wilted purple irises, which she’d picked up during her layover in Burlington. “They’re for you,” she told Emily. “I saw them and I thought, ‘Those are the flowers for my sister.’ Because I know you love purple.” Emily thanked her and took the cellophane cone of blossoms, laying them across her arms like Miss America. Purple had been her favorite color approximately twenty-six years earlier, following a stray comment from a stranger that lavender brought out the red of her hair. At the time, she’d also been fond of stuffed unicorns, stylized images of rainbows, and the original cast recording of Annie.

Arm in arm, the sisters made their way up and out of the bus station, Clara nearly skipping with excitement. Years later, Emily would say that Clara’s arrival was the best thing that could have happened to her, for it allowed her to put her own problems—the play, Curtis, her career—behind her and focus her energies on rehabilitating her sister: occupational therapy, just like the little sweaters Clara knitted at Brattleboro, destined for the tiny shoulders of crack babies in New Haven. Perhaps more important, there was the fact of September eleventh, the day before which Clara arrived. Emily didn’t quite see how she could have faced the terrifying—and terrified—city all alone, newly alone. As it was, she had Clara, who reacted to the tragedy with somber, tearful shock—an appropriate response and, Emily told her mother, a measure of the extent of Clara’s recovery. “It’s amazing, Mom,” she’d said. “She’s like a different person. They must have found the right meds for her. I mean, it’s incredible. It’s like she can see other people, you know.”

The Old Clara would have looked at the planes, the hijackers, the legions dead or missing, the vigils and shrines, through a purely solipsistic lens, insisting, maddeningly, on some personal connection, like “My sister used to work in the Trade Center”—this was true; years back, Emily had temped there—“Can you believe it? She could have been there.” The New Clara sat on the couch, hands pressed to her cheeks, saying, “Oh God, Emily, those people, those poor people. We’ve got to do something. Is there anything we can do?” There wasn’t really, they found out when they called the various numbers for volunteers. Only people with medical training were needed, though Emily and Clara could go to the Javits Center and see if there were any tasks for them. But they were in Brooklyn and the train wasn’t running and Emily had already walked all the way home from midtown in her least comfortable shoes—crossing the bridge with legions of refugees from the Financial District, their suits and hair covered in an odd white ash, their eyes grimy and red—and so they stayed in the apartment, listening to the radio in silence, periodically trying to call their parents and Sadie (alone with Jack, my God) and Beth (Will’s office was down there, wasn’t it?) and the others (Curtis, Emily kept thinking, I really should call Curtis), but the phone was dead, endlessly dead, the network of Emily’s cell phone permanently busy.

In the afternoon, they walked over to Lil and Tuck’s and watched their television, gulping beer as the towers collapsed over and over on the screen before them. Lil was uncharacteristically silent, Tuck unusually chatty. “We knew,” he kept saying. “We knew this was fucking going to happen. It’s bin Laden. They’ve been fucking monitoring him for years.” Clara and Emily, from their respective chairs, nodded. “Did you read that piece about him in The New Yorker?” They had not. “It was, like, a year ago. In The New Yorker. Lawrence Wright or one of those guys—I can’t remember—anyway, whoever, he, essentially, said bin Laden was going to do something like this. And fucking Bush paid no attention.”

“I don’t think Bush reads The New Yorker,” said Clara, with a smile.

“You know what I mean,” said Tuck, his arm wrapped around Lil, who sat limply on their sprung green couch, still dressed in her work clothing—a smart wrap dress, black, with blue flowers, that gaped slightly at the center of her chest. Diane von Furstenberg, Emily thought, though she didn’t know how Lil could afford it. There was no way she was making more than thirty grand working at that nonprofit.

“You have to finish,” Lil said a few minutes later, after so long a silence that Emily didn’t know to whom she was speaking or in response to what. Her voice was low and hoarse, her eyes cast down in her lap.

Sullenly, Tuck extracted his arm from her shoulders. “I’m going to finish,” he said.

Oh, thought Emily. They were talking about Tuck’s book, of course, which was now a year late—maybe more. Back in July, under extreme duress, he’d turned in the first three chapters, which Sadie had pronounced “pretty good” (“overwritten,” she told Emily and Beth privately, “I should have never mentioned Gay Talese”). By August, as Sadie’s due date approached, the famous Val had resumed her ominous questioning, and Sadie began a phone campaign (“Tuck, please just give me whatever you have before I go on leave”), this time to no avail. Jack had come, a week early, and Tuck had been passed on to her former assistant, who could not be counted on to shelter Tuck from Val’s bottom line.

“This could be it,” said Lil, finally, looking up from her lap and into Tuck’s pale, oblong eyes, glowing flintily above the knobs of his cheekbones. “This could be the end. We all could have died today. We could have.” Emily nodded encouragingly. “We have to do something. I just feel like we have to make something, to do something. Like, we have to stop wasting our time, watching television”—she gestured toward the muted set, on which a firefighter stood talking, tears rolling down his face, smoke and ash and who knows what roiling in the air around him—“and reading magazines, and just, you know, going to movies. Do you know what I mean?” She turned to Emily, who nodded. “I feel like all we do is go out to dinner. We don’t do anything. We’re just consumers of culture. We need to be manufacturers of it. Like Ed. He’s doing something. He’s making something. We’re just sitting here. This isn’t—” Her eyes, now, were bright and shiny and wide open, a brilliant, pupil-less brown. All remnants of tears or anger or sadness had left her voice, which rang out clear and high, her diction exaggerated, overly precise. As a freshman, Emily remembered—how long ago that was—Lil, too, had thought herself an actor. This was how they’d met. In Peter Carson’s Acting 101. “This isn’t what we were going to do. We have to do something.”

Rising, slightly, from the low, square chair in which she sat, Clara took a deep breath. “We do—” she said.

“We are doing things—” said Tuck, his wide mouth swollen with anger.

“I know what you mean,” Emily jumped in. But Lil wasn’t paying attention to her, or to Tuck—she was staring, openmouthed, at the television. Emily, Clara, and Tuck followed her gaze and saw people—miniaturized in relation to the huge building—jumping out of the windows of the top floor of one of the towers.

“Oh my God,” said Lil, her hand rising to cover her mouth. “Why would they show that? Oh my God.”

“Because,” said Tuck, drawing his wife back into his arms, a gesture that filled Emily, on the one hand, with relief, and on the other with a sort of knee-jerk revulsion, which she was helpless to explain. “Because,” he said, his cheek against her glossy hair, “it’s the truth.”

Her company called her—called everyone—back to work on Thursday the thirteenth, which she thought callous and strange. Even in midtown, the air had an awful, poisonous scent and the few people she passed on the street had the appearance of ghosts, their eyes empty and lost, unsure where to look. Half her coworkers didn’t show—including Emily’s boss, who lived on Long Island—and she found herself wandering around the chilly, fluorescent-lit warren of empty cubicles and dark offices, looking for someone, anyone, with whom she might speak in some sort of normal, human manner. But everyone had their heads down, earphones in, fingers flying across the keyboard, mouths moving against the dull black plastic of the phone’s receiver. Business as usual. She knew, then, that she must quit, soon, not because she was ill-treated (though, if she thought about it, she was) or the company shamed her (though it did), but because Lil was right: it was time—time to stop spinning her wheels and find something to do with herself, something that meant something, that contributed something to the world, even if only in the smallest way, something that mattered to her, something that was vaguely in accordance with the moral, the political, the ethical stakes she’d once felt so integral to her person. She would quit, she decided, by the end of the year, which gave her nearly three months to figure out a new course of action.

But as the days passed, her resolve weakened, because she was, for the first time in ages, happy. As promised, Clara was tending to the housekeeping in exchange for staying with Emily, rent free, and living off Emily’s salary, since the SSI money had not yet come. She went to Tops every afternoon and came home with food Emily knew nothing about—baccalà, kielbasa, lamb shank—and made elaborate stews and puddings and casseroles, then explained them to Emily as they ate, or told stories Emily had never heard, how she’d jumped off the roof of the art building and landed on the college president’s beloved Mercedes; or how she’d snuck into the local post office and stole a stanchion. (“Isn’t that a federal offense?” Emily asked. “Probably!” cried Clara.) She cleaned, too, with the kind of manic fury and focus Emily remembered from high school, when she’d often happened on Clara in the basement, painting with such intensity that she didn’t hear the door open. The apartment looked better than it had when Emily moved in: the stove shone, the counter glistened, the windows sparkled.

Mornings, when Emily rose to go to work, Clara still lay on the sofa, in a deep, stonelike sleep; and at night, when Emily went off to bed, Clara waved good-bye and picked up her sketchpad. “It’s so good that she’s drawing,” she told her mother, who called Emily’s office each aftern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• one
• two
• three
• four
• five
• six
• seven
• eight
• nine
• ten
• eleven
• twelve
• thirteen
• fourteen
• fifteen
• acknowledgments