Alice had already gotten a table when Sam hurried in, holding an enormous shopping bag. Sam always looked beautiful, even when she was exhausted and wearing sweatpants. Her hair, which had been relaxed in high school, she now wore naturally, and her enormous head of curls surrounded her face like a halo. Sometimes, when Alice complained about the lines around her eyes or her thin, flat hair, Sam would laugh gently and say that aging well was a Black woman’s legacy, and that she was sorry for Alice’s trouble.
“Hi hi hi,” Sam said, throwing her arms around Alice’s neck. “I’m so sorry, I know that this is a nightmare, and that this is never in a million years where you would want to come for your birthday, and I’m sorry. Also, hi! I miss you! Tell me everything.” Sam crashed into the opposite side of the booth and started taking off layers of clothing.
“Hi hi,” Alice said. “Oh, you know, nothing much. Broke up with Matt, didn’t get a promotion that I didn’t know was even a possibility at work, my dad is still dying. Everything is great.”
“Yes, okay, but,” Sam said, “look at what I got you for your birthday.” She reached into the shopping bag and pulled out a pretty box with a wide silk ribbon wrapped around it. Sam had always been crafty. On the table, Sam’s phone vibrated. “Shit,” she said, and picked it up. “I swear, Leroy is our third baby, and sometimes I feel like Josh is worse than a teenage babysitter. He just texted me to ask where we keep the baby Tylenol, as if it would be somewhere weird, you know, like the garage, or in my underwear drawer.”
Alice slid the box closer to her. “Can I open it?”
“Yes, open, open!” Sam said. “Also, I need a very large drink, but just one, or two at the most, so I can pump and dump when I get home.” She looked around for a waiter and flagged down the first one she saw.
Alice slid the ribbon off the box and pulled off the lid. Inside was a tornado of tissue paper, and nestled inside the paper was a tiara. The diamonds weren’t real, but it was heavy, not some plastic bridal shower nonsense. “Keep going,” Sam said, and so Alice set the tiara on her head and took out another crumpled sheet of tissue paper. At the bottom of the box was a framed photograph. She lifted it out carefully. In the photo, Alice and Sam were both wearing tiaras and slips and dark lipstick. Sam had a beer bottle in her hand, and Alice was taking a drag off a cigarette. They were both staring at the camera, eyes like knives.
“We were so grunge,” Alice said.
“We were not grunge,” Sam said. “Please. We were sixteen, and glorious. This is from your birthday, do you remember?”
The party had been on Pomander Walk. It was a risk, having people over, since Alice knew every single one of her neighbors, but as with all risks she’d taken at the time, Alice had been totally unable to foresee any consequences. She had made sure all the curtains were drawn, and she’d only invited fifteen people, and when nearly twice that number showed up, it was okay, as long as the house stayed quiet. Leonard was spending the night downtown at a hotel, at a science fiction and fantasy convention he attended every year, coming back the next evening. Alice could remember the party in flashes—the Calvin Klein underwear she’d been wearing, the smell of the empty beer bottles that littered every available surface, all the bottle caps filled with long cylinders of cigarette ash. She and Sam had both thrown up that night, but not before the picture was taken. It was widely appreciated as a very good party. Alice had ended the night heartbroken and sobbing. It was a long time ago.
“I love it,” Alice said, and she did. It also made her feel profoundly sad.
The waiter brought over Sam’s large glass of wine, and a second one for Alice. They ordered more appetizers than they needed, fried chickpeas and roasted cauliflower, bread and cheese, ham fritters, tiny shot glasses of gazpacho. “I’m paying,” Sam said, “and I want to eat things that would make my children hide under the table.” They ate octopus and olives and anchovies on toast. Sam asked about Leonard, and Alice told her. It wasn’t that she was afraid that he was going to die—he was dying, she knew that. It was that she didn’t know when it was going to happen, or what it would feel like when it did, and she was afraid that she would feel relieved, and afraid that she would feel too sad to go to work, and afraid that she’d never have another boyfriend because she was going to be too sad to meet anyone, and she was already forty, now she was forty, which was really different from thirty-nine, but then Sam’s phone buzzed and buzzed again and Leroy had rolled off the couch and hit his head and maybe needed stitches, Josh wasn’t sure. Sam paid for everything and kissed Alice on both cheeks and then on the forehead and was out the door before she even had her arms through the coat sleeves. The table was still full of food, and so Alice ate as much as she could, and then asked for a box to take things home.
13
Before he’d checked into the hospital, Leonard had called Alice a few times a week. They’d talked about whatever they were watching on Netflix, or the books they were reading, or what they’d eaten for lunch. Leonard was a terrible cook, capable only of boiling water for pasta or hot dogs or frozen vegetables. Like so many New Yorkers, Alice had learned to cook by dialing the telephone—Ollie’s for Chinese, Jackson Hole for burgers, Rancho for Mexican, Carmine’s for pasta with meatballs, the deli for bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches. Sometimes they would talk about Alice’s mother, about whether or not she believed in aliens (she did), about whether or not she was an alien herself (potentially). Leonard liked hearing about the kids at school. It wasn’t that Alice and her father weren’t having honest conversations—they were, and better conversations than many people had with their parents, to be sure—but they were conversations that skimmed happily over the surface, like a perfect flat rock.
Leonard had been in pain for months, and once he’d finally agreed to go to the hospital, the nurses on duty would help lessen the anguish by attaching his IV to a bag of diluted fluid, the strong stuff, and in the minutes before he got too stoned and fell asleep, Alice and her father started to really talk.
“You remember Simon Rush?” Leonard had asked. This was when he was in a room with a view, the mighty Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge right out the window. Alice watched boats go up and down the water, even Jet Skis. Where did people get Jet Skis in New York City?
“Literally your most famous friend? Of course I do.” Alice could picture him standing in the doorway on Pomander, and remembered sometimes coming across him and her father smoking cigarettes on the corner of 96th Street and West End Avenue when she and some of her friends were climbing back up from Riverside Park.
“He always had stuff like this. Was too trippy for me, usually, but sometimes, yeah. Sometimes we’d get so zonked and just sit in his apartment on Seventy-Ninth Street and listen to Love’s Forever Changes on vinyl. He had everything on vinyl, plus the best speakers money could buy.” Leonard pointed at her. “You have that, on your phone? Can you play it?”
Leonard had never gotten a smartphone—didn’t see the point. But he liked that Alice could immediately conjure anything he wanted to listen to, like it was magic. She pushed a few buttons and then music came pouring out of the tiny speakers. Guitars like dancers. Leonard raised a thin hand and softly snapped his fingers.
“It’s amazing, Alice, the way you were always just perfect. I was doing my thing, like always, and you were so solid, always. Like a bulldog. Terrestrial, you know.”
Alice laughed. “Thanks.”
“What? Am I not supposed to say that? I was great when you were little, man, and we could play, and just use our imaginations, and make up stories, but by the time you hit puberty, I should have called in someone who knew what they were doing. Sent you to some boarding school. Moved you in with Sam and her parents. But you were just such a good kid, you didn’t seem to notice.”
“You let me smoke in my room.” Alice’s bedroom had shared a wall and a fire escape with her father’s.
“You didn’t smoke, not really, did you? Cigarettes?”