A Fortunate Age Read online

  For Amy

  What she was clear upon was, that she did not wish to lead the same sort of life as ordinary young ladies did; but what she was not clear upon was, how she should set about leading any other . . .

  —GEORGE ELIOT, DANIEL DERONDA

  contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  acknowledgments

  one

  On a gray October day in 1998, Lillian Roth found herself walking down the stone-floored aisle of Temple Emanu-El, clad in a gown of dark ivory satin and flanked by her thin, smiling parents, who had flown into New York from Los Angeles a mere seven days earlier, still in mild shock that their obstreperous daughter was submitting to the ancient rite of marriage. The synagogue’s vaulted ceiling spinning above her, she took small, self-conscious steps toward the bima, where a serious-faced young man named William Hayes—saddled with the improbable nickname of Tuck—waited for her in an unfamiliar black suit, purchased two days earlier by his mother, who’d deemed the gray suit selected by Lil and Tuck inappropriate for an evening affair.

  Four years and four months prior, Lillian had graduated from Oberlin College with honors in English (just plain honors, she often reminded herself in the years that followed, not highest honors, like her friend Sadie Peregrine, or even high honors, like their departmental nemesis, Caitlin Green). At her commencement brunch, dressed in another frock of dark ivory, she’d made a scene, feverishly arguing with her father about the purpose of marriage in the modern age. “It’s an outmoded institution,” she’d insisted, her dark brows moving closer together. The brunch, sponsored by the college, was held in a dank tent on Wilder Bowl, and the Moët was flowing perhaps a bit too freely. Lil had already spilled several sips down her dress. “Read any modern thinker—” Struggling to come up with a specific name, she looked to her friends, her “crowd,” as her father annoyingly called them—Sadie, Beth Bernstein, Emily Kaplan, Tal Morgenthal, and Dave Kohane—who sat around and opposite her, surrounded by their own parents, faces flushed proud. “They all say so.”

  The adults grinned serenely (smugly, to Lil’s mind) and tilted their heads toward her, in gestures of intense patience. “You want a certain sense of security,” suggested Sadie’s mother, Rose, with whom Lil was a great favorite, having been brought home to the Peregrine town house for numerous Thanksgivings and spring breaks and even one summer, which Lil recalled as two months of unbridled bliss. “At a certain point, you want to belong to something, to a family.”

  Dave’s mother leaned across the table toward Lil, her long red hair falling into the remains of her omelet. “I remember saying the exact same thing when I was your age.”

  “Mom,” Dave moaned.

  “Really?” said Lil, biting bits of dried lipstick off her lower lip. “I really don’t think I’m going to change my mind.” Her elders shared a dark glance. “I mean, is there any reason why people should get married?” Lil’s father raised his wiry black brows, white threads extending from them like antennae, and let a gust of air out through his nose, from which hairs, white and black, also poked, mortifyingly. Twenty-odd years in Los Angeles had done nothing to weaken his Brooklyn accent.

  “Taxes,” he grumbled. “You get some tax breaks if you’re married.”

  “Barry,” cried Lil’s mother, giving his arm a push.

  Lil rolled her eyes. “Then why,” she asked, “do I always hear people complaining about the ‘marriage penalty’?”

  Those five friends now sat in the synagogue’s front benches—soon they would be called to the bima to take part in the ceremony—the girls zipped and laced and strapped into evening dresses, which they’d carried uptown in plastic garment bags and hung up to steam in the guest bathroom at the Peregrine town house, almost thirty blocks north of Emanu-El. They’d emerged from the 6 train at Eighty-sixth Street in the early morning to the sights of this strange and hectic neighborhood: blonde moms in jogging suits pushing goggle-eyed babies in old-fashioned prams; fancy grocers and chemists; matrons with pageboys, in dated suits and low-heeled pumps, and even, in some cases, neat fabric gloves. Such things proved exotic to these girls, who were just discovering the city from the vantage point of its more downtrodden, Bohemian outposts: Williamsburg, Carroll Gardens, the grimy fringes of the Lower East Side. All neighborhoods that now command impressive rents, but were then regarded as vaguely suspect and marginally safe, particularly by the parents of the young persons in question.

  Not that they cared (“Mom, it’s fine!”). They lived where they could afford to live without the dreaded parental supplementation: in run-down tenements on narrow Brooklyn blocks, illegal sublets found through friends of friends (who could afford a broker’s fee?), or rickety apartments in crumbling back-houses, let by landlords who’d never heard the word “code” in their miserly lives and who insisted on installing everything—from stoves to toilets—themselves, despite their inability to read English-language instruction manuals. According to Lil, Emily’s apartment, on an increasingly expensive block in Williamsburg, had almost exploded a year prior, when the landlady used water piping rather than gas piping in the flat’s little wall heater. “The gas just ate through the pipes,” Lil had told Beth, breathlessly, over the phone. “She got home from work and there was gas puddled all over the floor. The fumes were so strong she could smell them on the street. Brooklyn Gas told her that if she’d worked an hour later, the place would have blown.” Emily had stayed with Lil, at her place on Bedford, for nearly a week before things were straightened out.

  And though Emily and Sadie worked in midtown and Lil attended Columbia, they met at bars in the East Village, coffee shops on the Lower East Side, and restaurants in Brooklyn, which Sadie Peregrine had, for a year or two after college, until the joke became old and a little embarrassing, called “the Far East,” as she’d never visited the borough in her youth, never mind that her mother had grown up in Greenpoint, in a railroad apartment above Sadie’s grandfather’s optician shop (though she behaved, as Sadie liked to say, relishing the cliché, as though she were to the manor born).

  Thus, the Upper East Side—where Sadie herself was born and raised, as were several generations of Peregrines before her—was alien territory to the other girls, save for the occasional trip to some doctor or other or, of course, to the Peregrine house, where they were occasionally brought round for dinner or Sunday breakfast with the dwindling Peregrine clan. Said neighborhood struck them as utterly outside the realm of their New York (the real New York, Emily privately thought, though she would never say so in front of Sadie), it being primarily inhabited by persons of some degree of wealth or those who aspire to it. Which is not to say that these girls—and their male counterparts, Dave and Tal—did not come from money, for, in a way, they did. With their shining hair and bright, clear eyes, they, all of them, were the dewy flowers of the upper middle class and, as such, were raised in needlessly large houses with a surplus of bathrooms and foodstuffs in the fridge, with every convenience, every luxury, every desire met. Their high school classmates—the superstudents of Scarsdale (Beth), Brookline (Tal), Sherman Oaks (Lil), and so on—were starting residencies at Mt. Sinai or on the partner track at Debevoise; they were, perhaps, even living in the blank residential towers of the East Nineties (despised by Sadie’s parents for blocking their view), biding time before making their escapes to Westchester or Long Island or even (dread!) New Jersey.

  But this group, our group, wanted nothing to do wit
h money, the whiff of which had, they thought, spoiled their brash bourgeois parents and aunts and uncles, all of whom were, inevitably, doctors or lawyers or businessmen or sometimes teachers, and none of whom had read Sentimental Education or could identify the term “deconstruction” or made regular visits to the theater, except, perhaps, to see musicals or Neil Simon comedies. They—the adults—were too corrupted, too swayed and jaded by the difficulties and practicalities of adulthood, by the banal labyrinths of health insurance and Roth IRAs, by the relative safety of Volvo versus Saab versus Subaru, or flat Scottish cashmere versus the newer, softer, fluffier—but possibly less durable—stuff, imported from Nepal, that Neiman’s is carrying lately. Their children were interested in art, though they wouldn’t have ever put it like that. They had read Sentimental Education—Dave in the original French—and directed Ionesco and Genet plays. They went to the Whitney Biennial and visited the new galleries in Chelsea and Williamsburg and twice attended the Lucian Freud retrospective at the Met, but scorned anything to do with Picasso or Seurat or Monet or—my God—the Pre-Raphaelites. They kept up with not just The New Yorker but Harper’s and The Atlantic and even, for spurts of time, The New York Review of Books, and lately, Lingua Franca and Salon and various little magazines, though they agreed that the heyday of such ventures had passed decades earlier (what they wouldn’t have given to be transported back to those early days of The Partisan Review, arguing Trotsky with Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy). They joked about Derrida and Lacan and Heidegger and Hume and Spinoza and New Criticism, and went to Shakespeare in the Park, and to see the RSC at BAM, and to movement-oriented stage adaptations of Anna Karenina at La Mama, and to Goddard, Fellini, Pasolini, Lubitsch, Bergman, and, of course, Woody Allen festivals at Film Forum.

  Or, at least, they had done so—read their classics, favored black-and-whites in repertory—for four long years. Now, at twenty-six, as they struggled to make rent on their grimy apartments, as they bathed in chipped bathtubs, which in Emily’s case—poor Emily being the most impoverished of the group—also served as a kitchen sink, they were starting to feel a little tired, a little sick of the nights in cafés typing on their laptops, the endless drinks dates because who could afford to eat dinner out. Lately, they were starting to look upon their parents’ houses, the green of their lawns, the comfortable lives of their youth, with a bit more kindness.

  And then—entirely without warning—Lil announced that she was getting married, married to a man she’d met in her doctoral program, a man none of them knew well, if at all, though they’d glimpsed him at parties over the past year, Lil’s first at Columbia. He was older, at least thirty, and had an aura of glamour about him, which the girls attributed as much to his large, masculine features as to his polite, disaffected air. There was, Sadie remarked, a bit too much James Dean about him. He’d studied poetry, like Lil, before dropping out to take a job at a new magazine, supposedly a cross between Spy and The New Yorker, but focused on business, or technology, or both. Lil spoke as if this was a great opportunity for him, but her friends weren’t convinced.

  As was the practice of those of their class and generation, she’d introduced him, at first, as her “friend,” and they’d pretended for some months that there was nothing more to the story. So well did this pretense work that they’d barely adjusted to the idea that Tuck was her “boyfriend” when he became her “fiancé”—though thankfully she refrained from using that term. It was impossible for them to imagine Lil married, in part because it was impossible to imagine any of them married. They knew no married people of their own age. And so, when Lil called her friends, one by one, and told them, in the hushed tones required by her summer job—an internship at a poetry organization, where she was largely responsible for answering the phones—that not only was she getting married but also that she would have an actual wedding, with a white dress and a rabbi and maybe even a veil and a bouquet (though definitely no bridesmaids in matching dresses, that much she could promise), she waited, tensely, for the jibes, the disapproval. But they were so shocked, her friends, that none—not even Dave, not even Beth—could think of anything to say, other than “Wow!” and “Lil, that’s great!” and “I can’t wait to meet him, really meet him.”

  Two weeks later, the couple got in Lil’s beat-up Accord and drove down to visit Tuck’s family in Atlanta, where his mother—hair elaborately dyed and streaked an unnatural auburn, nails manicured to a high sheen—outfitted Lil with an alarmingly large diamond, tucked inside an elaborate Victorian setting, for which she apologized. “Those old settings don’t show off the stone at all,” she said, her lipsticked mouth pulling down at the corners. “But it’s at least three carats.” The ring had belonged to Tuck’s grandmother, his mother’s mother, and possibly her mother before that, no one knew for sure. It was exactly Lil’s size and precisely her style, the girls told Lil, though in fact the ring instilled in them an odd mix of anxiety and admiration, aesthetic interest and adolescent annoyance. It was so large, so “important” looking (in the words of Rose Peregrine, who agreed that she should have the stone reset), so unequivocally grown-up. Were it not a family heirloom, according to Emily, it would be horribly uncool.

  Beth, meanwhile, felt that it quite possibly defied the feminist principles they’d mastered—or, she’d thought, internalized—in college. The ring claimed Lil as somebody’s chattel, some man’s prize. “You’re wearing an engagement ring?” Beth whispered into the phone one hot night in August, incredulous. She was still in Milwaukee, working on her doctorate. In September, once she’d finished teaching summer session—two sections of Feminist Approaches to Twentieth Century Advertising—she’d move to New York to teach at the New School and write the second half of her dissertation, which she couldn’t do without a semester or two of research at the Museum of Television and Radio, a need that neatly coincided with her absolute desperation for her friends and her mounting disgust with freezing, boring Milwaukee. That is, if she could get everything straightened out with her teaching credits. She’d been sure she had enough, but in June—after she’d accepted the job at the New School—she’d received a note saying no, she was one credit shy. Maddening. And embarrassing. She said nothing of all this to Lil. “A real engagement ring?” she asked, peevishly, instead. “Like, a diamond?”

  “Yeah,” said Lil, sighing. “His mom gave it to us. It means a lot to her that I wear it, so I feel like I have to.”

  “Oh,” said Beth. “I guess I didn’t think you were the sort of person who would wear an engagement ring. But it makes sense, I guess.” Lil, she thought, was moving in this new and strange direction, becoming someone other than the girl she’d roomed with in college, the girl who’d earnestly churned out papers critiquing the phallocentric focus of Harold Bloom’s critical work on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. “But you don’t feel weird, wearing this big rock on your hand? It doesn’t make you feel like your mom or something? Or like one of those girls we went to high school with? It doesn’t make you feel”—she paused here, unsure of what she meant—“like you’re someone you’re not?”

  In fact, it did. Lil understood now why jewels were once considered amulets, investing their wearers with supernatural powers. With the large diamond glinting on her left hand, she felt herself to be a new and different Lil, one capable of doing anything, going anywhere. At night, she and Tuck drank brandy out of tumblers and talked about writing novels and making documentaries and moving to Romania. By day, whispering furtively into her office phone, she negotiated with caterers and jazz quartets and the Sisterhood of Temple Emanu-El, the Peregrines’ synagogue, and the only venue Lil considered acceptable for the ceremony, despite the fact that she was not, of course, a member, nor was she from the sort of family that belonged to Emanu-El, with fortunes in banking, real estate in the vicinity of Park, and rarefied German lineage. Her grandfather had sold black bread from a cart on Orchard Street and her father was a plastic surgeon who catered to the faces of
Hollywood’s third tier, preferred pastrami from Langer’s to sushi, and on Fridays brought home prune danish from Fairfax, where the Orthodox lived in large pink houses. But Lil had Rose Peregrine—secretary of the Sisterhood, member of every possible committee, and the preschool’s board of directors—and thus, by July, Lil had a date in the Beth-El Chapel, and by September a dress, heavy and autumnal, from the sample rack at Kleinfeld, where she’d journeyed alone, taking perhaps too much pleasure in the fuss the saleswomen made over her small waist. As the month wore on and the hot, humid weather continued unabated, she began to wonder if she should have gone with her second choice: a dead-white ballerina dress, with delicate off-the-shoulder sleeves and a full tulle dancing skirt. But she kept such fears to herself, for Sadie and Emily were irritated that they hadn’t been invited on the buying trip. In fact, she avoided talking about the wedding whenever possible, as her friends, she was realizing, were, despite their alleged enthusiasm, a bit, well, weirded out by it. Beth grew silent when Lil told her, gleefully, that Tuck had found them a new apartment, a loft big enough to hold the reception. Dave got crabby when she recounted the talents of the jazz band they’d enlisted—a bunch of NYU students—for a cut rate. He’d just dropped out of Eastman, moved back to New York, and joined a band himself, though not the sort of band that played at weddings, of course.

  “They’ll probably suck,” he said.

  “No, they’re great,” she assured him. “We heard them play at Aggie’s.”

  “Aggie’s,” said Dave. “Whatever.”

  Only Tal seemed, however vaguely, to approve of the nuptials in general, and Lil’s plans specifically. After college he’d broken from his parents almost completely—they still barely spoke—but he’d never quite shaken their conservative bent, at least toward things like marriage and family. He smiled at babies in the park and had, on occasional Sundays, been caught reading the “Vows” column. “It’s sweet,” he said. “Especially the old people.”