When Alice had been fresh out of art school, working at Belvedere had seemed quirky and amusing, a punch line. Belvedere often hired recent graduates for low-level jobs, a gentle tide of nepotism that never seemed to cause much harm because people never stayed long. But Alice had stayed. She had stayed in New York, she had stayed in the same apartment, she had stayed at Belvedere.
It had always been one of her best qualities, she thought—steadiness. Reliability. The last time she’d gotten a promotion was when Emily was hired, four years ago. Before that, she’d been Melinda’s only assistant, and before that, she’d been moved around the school, temporary help for whatever hole needed to be patched. The time had passed quickly, five years, then ten, and so on. Now she’d worked at the school longer than she’d been a student, and some of her favorite colleagues had once been her teachers. For the first decade Alice had been on staff, she’d been a human Band-Aid: someone was on maternity leave; someone broke their leg and couldn’t get on the subway—and Alice was there, reliable and familiar. She had always been happy at Belvedere, as happy as one could be. Sometimes she felt like a doll that had been left behind, with too much obvious sentimental value to just throw away, but most of the time, yes, she was happy.
“You’ll like her, Alice,” Melinda said. “I think she’ll be a good mentor, actually. Better than me.” Melinda cocked her head to the side, and Alice saw that her eyes were teary. “I was always just making it up as I went along.” Alice and Emily both cried, and Melinda swung the tissue box from one to the other, always prepared.
12
Having a birthday fall on a saturday as an adult was a little bit like having a summer birthday as a kid. In one’s twenties, of course, it was great, and meant not being hungover at an office job, but after that, the appeal dulled. Weekday birthdays had impromptu office parties, maybe a dusty bottle of champagne opened at lunch, if the mood was right. On the weekend, though, adults were less likely to reach out to friendly coworkers to wish them a happy birthday. A short text or a comment on a social media post, that was about the extent of it. Alice was actually sorry that her birthday was on a Saturday, but then feeling sorry about it made her feel pathetic and so she pushed her coffee table against the wall and pulled up a ten-minute yoga video on YouTube, though she abandoned it halfway through, when the instructor started breathing quickly through her nostrils while pumping her stomach in and out like a cat about to vomit.
The doorbell rang. A delivery—the package had her mother’s PO box as its return address. Serena hadn’t been to Brooklyn for a decade, and had visited Alice’s apartment only once or twice in all the time she’d lived on Cheever Place. Serena didn’t always send presents, but this year was significant, and when Alice opened the box, she was not surprised to find several large crystals and a metal singing bowl inside. Serena had never met a healing modality she didn’t like, and Alice understood that these gifts, and all the ones like them that she’d ever received, were their own form of silent apology, the only kind she was ever going to get.
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When Alice had imagined her fortieth birthday, as much as one imagines things like that, it had not been like this. She had attended a handful of swanky fortieth birthday parties, catered affairs in Brooklyn Heights town houses, and she knew she wouldn’t have something like that, something with hired waitstaff passing around tiny quiches. Maybe Peter Luger, or some other ancient New York restaurant where the waiters were not would-be actors and models but grumpy old men in waistcoats, a place that felt nicely frozen in its fustiness. When Sam turned forty a few months ago, her husband had gotten her a hotel room, where she spent the night alone, in silence. Alice’s parents were already separated by the time her mother was forty, and Serena was out the door and on her way to a new life. So many of Alice’s father’s doctors were younger than she was—people who would come into the room and talk to her with confidence, their advanced degrees and professional expertise. Some of them were probably a whole decade younger. While they’d been dissecting cadavers and memorizing names of bones, what had Alice been doing? Her father read three books a week, sometimes more, and responded to every fan letter he received. She had tried to take up running, once. For a couple of years, she had joined a mentoring program, but the little sister she’d been assigned had then gone to college and they’d lost touch.
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It was always hard to make a dinner date with Sam, because she had children and lived in New Jersey, each of which on their own would have been tricky odds to overcome. They were supposed to meet at a restaurant in the West Village, which wasn’t exactly convenient for either of them but meant that they both had to travel, which at least felt fair. An hour before dinner, though, and soon before Alice would start walking to the F train stop, Sam called to say that Leroy had a fever, and that she could still come but wouldn’t be able to stay long, and would it be possible if they met closer to the Lincoln Tunnel? The tunnel emptied out onto 39th Street, just above the Javits Center, perhaps the least appealing corner of Manhattan. “Of course,” Alice replied, because she wanted to celebrate, and it didn’t matter where it happened, not really.
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They settled on a place on the lower level of a much-maligned shopping mall just south of the tunnel. If they were going to do it, why not go all the way? Not only were they going to go somewhere with hot dogs on the menu, but the hot dogs cost twenty dollars. On the way, Alice redownloaded a couple of dating apps and did a little scrolling. The blessing and the curse of the dating app lifestyle was that you could tell the app exactly what you were looking for, and, more or less, that’s all you would see. Men? Women? Under thirty, over forty? All the men and women whose pictures showed up looked fine. They either went to the gym or had cats. They were either snobs about cooking or snobs about music. Alice closed the app and put her phone in her pocket. On the screen, everyone seemed equally unappealing, even the good-looking ones.
When she got off the train, there was a message waiting from Sam—she was running late. Alice wasn’t surprised. When they were in high school, Sam would often show up an hour late, still loitering around her parents’ Columbia faculty housing in Morningside Heights when Alice was waiting by the pay phone outside the Barnes & Noble on Broadway and 82nd Street or holding up a diner table and refusing to order more than one bottomless cup of coffee. Hudson Yards, the giant mall that held the restaurant, was still open, and so Alice wasted time by wandering in and out of empty shops. She nodded at salespeople, who looked back at her hungry for interaction, and then Alice pointed to her phone, pretending that she was listening to someone talk. Emily texted; Melinda sent an email. Alice took a photo of her hands making a peace sign and posted it with the caption 4-0. Four-zero. Was that four wins, zero losses, or zero wins and four losses? Alice wasn’t sure. One store full of beautiful sweaters was having a sale, and Alice tried one on in the aisle. It was two hundred dollars—on sale—but she bought it anyway, because it was her birthday. Sam texted, finally, to say that she had found a parking spot, and that she’d meet her in ten minutes.
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