“Dad, I smoked a pack a day. When I was fourteen.” Alice rolled her eyes. They had smoked together, at the kitchen table, sharing an ashtray.
He laughed. “No, seriously? But you never even got in trouble. You and Sam and Tommy and all your friends, you were such funny, good kids.”
“When I was in high school, you treated me like a grown-up. And so I thought I was a grown-up. But not, like, a square grown-up. I thought I was Kate Moss or Leonardo DiCaprio or something, one of the movie stars that was always stumbling out of nightclubs. That was my goal, I think.”
Leonard nodded, his eyes starting to close. “Next time, we’ll have more rules. For both of us.”
It was true—she had always been just fine. So fine that no one ever checked to see what was happening underneath. There were kids with problems—Heather, who got sent to rehab for shooting up between her toes like she was in The Basketball Diaries, and Jasmine, who ate only one hundred calories a day and had to be held back because she spent four months in inpatient treatment, being fed through a tube. That wasn’t Alice. Alice was fun, she was normal. She and her dad were like a comedy team, and she always laughed the loudest. If she’d had rules, or a curfew, or a parent who grounded her when he found drugs instead of just taking them away, maybe she could have gone to Yale, maybe she could have had test scores high enough that she could even have said that out loud without the college counselor laughing. Maybe she’d be wearing white in the fall, her hair long, and she would have left town and moved to France and done something, anything. Maybe she’d be talking to the hospital’s nurses’ station from her house in Montclair, watching through a window as her husband and kids splashed in the pool on the last seasonable days. When Sam had gotten too drunk as a teenager, she came to Pomander, and Leonard let her sleep it off in Alice’s bed. Maybe parents were supposed to be narcs. Alice had always assumed that he knew everything and trusted her enough not to get in trouble, but maybe he just had never been paying attention, like everyone else. Now it was harder for him to pay attention, and he had to ask her the same question over and over again. Leonard remembered Sam and Tommy but couldn’t have named anyone Alice worked with. Alice understood—this was how it worked. When she was young, she’d thought he was old, and now that he was old, Alice realized how young he’d been. Perspective was unfair. When Leonard was fully asleep, Alice left.
14
Alice had one large shopping bag in each hand—her fancy sweater in one and her doggie bag in the other. She had never, in her life as a New Yorker, been alone, at night, in the far west Thirties. She walked east until Eighth Avenue, when she found herself in a crowd of people with wheelie suitcases heading into Penn Station. Alice didn’t feel drunk, not exactly, but the world had taken on a slightly goofier tinge, and she giggled as she walked against the current of bodies in the crosswalk. The subway was right there, but she didn’t want to take it yet—the beauty of New York City was walking, was serendipity and strangers, and it was still her birthday, and so she was just going to keep going. Alice turned and walked up Eighth, past the crummy tourist shops selling magnets and keychains and i ? ny T-shirts and foam fingers shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Alice had walked for almost ten blocks when she realized she had a destination.
She and Sam and their friends had enjoyed many, many hours in bars as teenagers: they’d spent nights at the Dublin House, on 79th Street; at the Dive Bar, on Amsterdam and 96th Street, with the neon sign shaped like bubbles, though that one was a little too close to home to be safe; and some of the fratty bars farther down Amsterdam, the ones with the buckets of beers for twenty dollars and scratched pool tables. Sometimes they even went to some NYU bars downtown, on MacDougal Street, where they could dash across the street for falafel and then go back to the bar, like it was their office and they were running out for lunch. Their favorite bar, though, was Matryoshka, a Russian-themed bar in the 50th Street 1/9 subway station. Now it was just the 1 train, but back then, there was also the 9. Things were always changing, even when they didn’t feel like it. Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone was a lobster in the pot.
There was nothing else like Matryoshka—subway stations often had tiny, closet-sized bodegas with bottled water and candy bars and magazines, and some in midtown had shoe repair shops that also sold umbrellas and various other things commuting businesspeople might need, and there were a few barbershops, but nothing came close. All bars were dark—that was part of the point, of course—but Matryoshka was literally subterranean, on the left side of the turnstiles, at the bottom of the flight of stairs that led up to the street. Its entrance was a black doorway with a red M painted at eye level and no other discerning marks. Alice hadn’t been in fifteen years. She knew it was still there—it was famous, an underground landmark, the sort of place that New York magazine liked to send reporters and movie stars to for some real ambiance. Alice pulled out her phone to text Sam, but then she thought about what it would sound like—It’s my birthday and I’m ending the night by going to a bar in a subway station. Alone! It was a joke tweet, a cry for help. But Alice didn’t want help, she wanted to have one last drink in a place that she had loved, and then she would go home and wake up forty and one day and she could start all over again.
A clump of people were walking up the stairs in the station, and for a moment, Alice worried that Matryoshka had gotten too popular, that there would be some sort of a line to get in, which she obviously wouldn’t wait in, but it was just people getting off the subway. The door was propped open, and the familiar, yeasty darkness of the bar was exactly the way Alice remembered it. Even the stool that was propping open the door—black, with a cracked leather seat—looked like one she’d clocked some hours on, her skinny teenage elbows on the sticky bar.