They weren’t a great couple, Alice knew, not like some of her friends and acquaintances, the ones who posted rhapsodic Instagram paeans every birthday and anniversary. They didn’t like all the same things, or listen to the same music, or have the same hopes and dreams, but when they’d met on an app (of course) and had a drink, the drink had turned into dinner, and the dinner had turned into another drink, and that drink had turned into sex, and now it was a year later and the doorman didn’t ask for her name. A year was a decent amount of time. Sam—who was married and therefore knew how these things went—thought that Matt would propose soon. If he did, Alice wasn’t sure what she would say. She examined her toenails, which were in need of some more polish and now had only tiny discs of red at the tips, like polka dots. Her fortieth birthday was in a week. She and Matt hadn’t made any plans yet, but she thought that if something was going to happen, maybe it would happen then. Her stomach did a little flip thinking about it, as if the organ were trying to turn around and face the other direction.
Marriage seemed like a good deal, most of the time—you always had someone there, and when you were dying, they would be huddled next to you, holding your hand. Of course, that didn’t count the marriages that ended in divorce, or the unhappy marriages, where hand-holding was a memory. It didn’t count people who died in car accidents, or had fatal heart attacks while sitting at their desks. What was the percentage of people who actually got to die while feeling loved and supported by their spouse? Ten percent? It wasn’t just the dying, of course, that made marriage appealing, but that was part of it. Alice was sorry for her father, that she was all he had, and she was afraid that she was too much like him to have anything more. No—she would have less. Leonard had a child. Not just a child—a daughter. If she’d been a boy, and not trained by society to be a good, dutiful caretaker, it might have been different. It had all just gone so fast—her thirties. Her twenties had been a blur, and ten years ago, her friends were just starting to get married and have children—most of them didn’t have babies until they were thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, and so she wasn’t that far behind, but suddenly now she was going to be forty, and that was too late, wasn’t it? She had friends who were divorced, friends who were on their second marriages. Those always moved along more quickly, so it was easy to see what had been wrong the first time—if a couple got divorced and two years later, one of them was married with a baby on the way, it was no mystery. Alice didn’t know if she wanted to have children, but she knew that at some point in the very near future, her not knowing would swiftly transform into a fact, a de facto decision. Why wasn’t there more time?
Matt came out of the shower and looked at her hunching over her feet like a worried golem. “Want to order some food? Maybe fuck around before it comes?” There was a towel around his waist, but it dropped, and he didn’t bend to pick it up. His erection waved at her.
Alice nodded. “Pizza? From the place?”
Matt pushed a few buttons on his phone and then tossed it behind her onto his king-sized bed. “We have thirty-two to forty minutes,” he said. Matt might not have been great at cooking, or other things, but he was good at sex, and that wasn’t nothing.
5
Belvedere, like many private schools in the city, was not contained in a single building, but over time had spread across a small patch of the neighborhood like a virus. The lower school and admissions were in the original building, on the south side of 85th Street between Central Park West and Columbus—a compact six-story modern architectural eyesore with excellent air-conditioning and big windows and built-in projection screens and a carpeted library with comfortable chairs in bright colors. The big kids—seventh through twelfth graders—were now in the new building, around the block on 86th Street. Alice was glad not to have to deal with teenagers on a daily basis. The seniors spent the fall loping in and out of the college prep office next door, and seeing their lanky bodies and poreless skin from ten feet away was more than enough exposure. The admissions office was on the second floor, and if Alice craned her neck out the window, she could see the slope up the hill into Central Park.
The admissions office had an airy waiting room, with expensive but well-loved wooden puzzles on the low, child-sized wooden tables, waiting to be played with by anxious parents as their children met with Alice, her colleague Emily, or their boss, Melinda, a formidable woman with wide hips and a rotating selection of chunky, dangling necklaces that the children always wanted to touch. “Tricks of the trade!” she would say whenever a mother complimented them, the woman trembling like a greyhound in her exercise clothes. It was also what Alice and Emily would say when they snuck out for cigarette breaks during the day. Emily would lean her head around the half wall that separated their desks and say, “Tricks of the trade?” and they’d pop out the emergency door in the back of the school and smoke in the small gray square of pavement where the garbage cans lived.
“Did you see Bike Dad today? I fucking love Bike Dad,” Emily said. She was twenty-eight and in the middle of wedding season, which was exactly like bar mitzvah season, only you had to pay for your own outfit and present. Emily had gone to eight weddings over the summer, which Alice knew because Emily was a drunk texter, especially when she was feeling sad. “I bet he’s a Leo. Don’t you think?” she said now. “He’s got that Big Leo Energy. The way he pulls the bike up on the sidewalk with both kids still on it? You know that thing has to weigh, like, two hundred pounds, and he just, raaarrrrrr.” She extended a fearsome claw.
“Nope,” Alice said, taking a drag. The cigarette was Emily’s, a Parliament. It tasted like wet newspapers, if one could set wet newspapers on fire. Alice had mostly quit several times over the last decade, but somehow it had never quite stuck, despite the gum, the books, and the disapproving looks from strangers and friends. Thank god for Emily, Alice thought. Almost none of the younger staff smoked anymore—they didn’t even vape! They smoked pot but could barely roll joints. They took edibles. They were babies. Alice knew that it was healthier, sure, it was better for their lungs and probably the planet, too, but it made her feel lonely.
“He was wearing a striped T-shirt, like Picasso, only hot and not creepy. I love him.” Emily scuffed the sole of her shoe on the concrete.
“His wife does pickup,” Alice said. “What about Ray? Saw him come in, what’s going on with that?”
Ray Young was an assistant kindergarten teacher and played the ukulele, and he and Emily slept together once a month, give or take. Emily always swore that it wasn’t going to happen again, it was just that he walked his dog by her stoop, which Alice thought of as a Melrose Place problem, but Emily had never seen Melrose Place and so she kept her thoughts to herself. He was twenty-five and perfectly available, which meant that Emily found him boring.
“Oh, you know,” Emily said, rolling her eyes. “He fucks like his parents are watching.”
Alice let out a cough of smoke. “You are terrible.”
Emily winked at her. “Let’s go back inside before we get detention.” She dropped her cigarette and crushed it. “Oh, by the way, how’s your dad doing?”
“Not great,” Alice said. She flicked her still-burning cigarette to the ground.
6
Melinda gave them each a stack of file folders, each one with a child’s name written in Sharpie on the front. There were two hundred applicants for thirty-five places, and that was just for kindergarten. Alice, Emily, and Melinda would each interview the applicants in her stack, then they’d put their notes in the shared admissions spreadsheet, with all the children ranked—whether they were siblings, legacies, had famous parents, had applied for scholarship, were students of color, were from international families, anything of note. Sometimes Alice thought about all the boxes these tiny children had already checked and it made her feel sick. She felt like a judge for the Miss America contest. This one could play the piano! This one could read in two languages! This one had won a regatta! But the children were mostly wonderful, of course, weird and sweet and awkward and funny like all children were. The children were the best part of the job. Sometimes she thought that she would like to be a child psychologist, though it seemed late for that. She loved meeting the kids, and talking to them one on one, hearing their crazy thoughts and their high voices and watching their shyness melt away.