The bar was two rooms long: the narrow space where patrons entered, which contained the bar itself, and a small seating area with black leather couches that looked like they’d been loved, abandoned on the curb, and dragged down the subway stairs to their final resting place. There were a few aging pinball machines at the far end, and a jukebox, one that Alice and Sam had always loved. Alice was surprised to see it—there had been jukeboxes everywhere when she was in high school, at bars and diners, sometimes tiny individual table-sized ones, but it had been years since she’d seen one like this, up to her shoulders and enormous, the size of a New York City closet. The bartender nodded at her, and Alice startled. It was the same guy who had worked there ages ago—which was normal, of course, he probably owned the place—but he looked exactly as she remembered him. Maybe there were a few white hairs sprinkled throughout, but he didn’t look as much older as she did, Alice was sure. The darkness was flattering to everyone.
She nodded hello back and took a lap of the bar, walking into the second, larger room. It was where she and her friends had mostly spent their time, because it had more couches, and room to sprawl and flirt and dance. A photo booth took up space in the back corner, where sometimes people posed for photos but mostly people hooked up, as the machine was usually broken but there was still a curtain and a small bench and the titillating feeling of somehow being caught on film anyway. Pockets of people sat around drinking and laughing, their knees pointed toward each other’s laps, their mouths open and beautiful. Alice didn’t know if she was looking for someone she knew, or pretending to look for someone she knew, or just half-heartedly looking for the bathroom. She circled back to the bar and sat down, her enormous shopping bags on the floor next to her.
“It’s my birthday!” she said to the bartender.
“Happy birthday,” he said. He put two shot glasses on the bar and filled them with tequila. “How old are you now?”
Alice laughed. “Forty. I. Am. Forty. Hoo, really not sure about how that sounds.” She accepted the glass that he pushed across the bar and clinked it against the other, which the bartender drained effortlessly into his mouth. The shot burned. She’d never gotten into real alcohol—not in quantity, like the drunk housewives in movies, and not in quality, like the people she’d gone to college with who now had well-stocked vintage bar carts and fancied themselves amateur mixologists. “Wow,” she said. “Thank you.”
There was loud laughter coming from the corner by the jukebox. A trio of young women—younger than Alice, younger than Emily even—were taking pictures of themselves and then showing each other their phones.
“I used to come here when I was in high school,” Alice said to the bartender. “I had a fake ID that I got on Eighth Street that said I was twenty-three, because I thought it would be too obvious if it said I was twenty-one, but by the time I was actually twenty-one, my fake ID said I was almost thirty. But now I can’t tell the difference between people who are twenty-one and twenty-nine, so maybe it didn’t really matter anyway.”
The bartender poured another shot. “On the house. I remember turning forty.”
Alice wanted to ask if it was last year, or a decade ago, or yesterday, but she didn’t. “Okay,” she said, “but this is the last one.” The liquid tasted better this time—less like fire, and more like a smoky kiss.
15
Pomander Walk was so much closer than home, and she had a key, somewhere. It was three in the morning when Alice’s car pulled up to the corner of 94th and Broadway. She’d abandoned her leftovers at the bar, or maybe she’d shared them? In any case, she was down to one shopping bag, and instead of the new sweater, it held her old sweater, because she’d spilled a whole beer onto it and then changed into the new one in the bathroom. The girls at the end of the bar had been hilarious, and they were smokers, thank god, at least in the way that early hours of the morning will make smokers out of nearly anybody. It was a ten-minute ride uptown—she could have taken the train, of course, but it was still Alice’s birthday, and so she pushed the button on her phone for the most luxurious car around. When she got in, the driver took one look at her, a bit sprawled on the back seat of his brand-new Escalade, and Alice just knew that he expected her to vomit. She would not.
The minute the car pulled away, she did, in the gutter. The sidewalks were empty. Alice shivered and looked in her purse for her keys. She always carried a key to her father’s house, just in case, but she hadn’t been in several weeks. Often she would stop by to pick up mail or to feed Ursula, but one of the girls who lived on Pomander was getting paid to feed and pet the cat, and so Alice never felt too bad if she stayed away. She scraped the bottom of the bag with her fingers. The keys had to be there somewhere.
The main entrance to Pomander was on the 94th Street side, a small gated door next to the long list of names and buzzers. Tourists would sometimes stand at the gate and wait to be let in. During the day, it was mostly harmless. Pomander Walk must have been on some German travel websites or in some guidebooks, because it was almost always Germans, and the occasional Brit. No one rang the bells at three in the morning. The super didn’t live on-site, and there was no doorman, just a part-time porter, someone you could ask for help with moving things in and out of the storage cave, a tiny closet with a mile-long waiting list. If Alice didn’t find her key, she could always buzz Jim Roman, who lived at number 12, the closest to the gate—if he was up, at least he wouldn’t have far to walk, and he had a key to her father’s front door, too. But the thought of waking up Jim Roman was deeply unappealing, as Jim was a dandy widower who had to be past eighty, and whom she had known since she was a small child. Exposing him to this iteration of her drunk and possibly still sticky self was too depressing to stomach, and so Alice leaned against the gate to further devote herself to excavating the contents of her bag. When she pushed her weight against it, the heavy black wrought-iron behemoth that had once crushed her ankle so hard that she’d needed an X-ray, the gate swung open. “Oh, sweet Jesus, thank you,” Alice said. Who else had a key to her apartment in Brooklyn? She had an extra set of keys at school, but what good was that? Her landlady had a key. Matt had a key, despite the fact that he had never once used it to get into her apartment—she would need to get that back.
Alice climbed the steps to the walk itself and then steadied herself at the top. Pomander Walk was the most beautiful place she would ever live. The houses were doll-sized, almost, with gingerbread details, like something out of a Hallmark Christmas movie, only with the ever-present New York City soundtrack of honking horns and jackhammers. Because it was fall, people already had pumpkins sitting on their front steps, pretty ones that came from some farm upstate, ones too expensive to be carved. Those would come later, just before Halloween. There were always enough kids on Pomander for a good Halloween party—tiny little humans in costumes waddling from one door to the next, all the grown-ups drinking wine or apple cider in masks and funny hats. Her dad had lots of funny hats, and a few fake mustaches, and they had always enjoyed themselves, both when she was small enough to trick-or-treat herself and when she was too big and helped him give out candy.
She still couldn’t find the key. One of the windows was a little bit wobbly, Alice knew, and it might be easy enough to open from the outside. Or she could just wait a few hours, until it was properly morning, and then Jim Roman could let her in, or the super. That was probably a better idea. Alice was just starting to sit down on her dad’s front step when the little guardhouse caught her eye. It was one of her father’s treasured domains—the way Alice imagined men in the suburbs felt about their garages, his own realm of domesticity, more orderly than the house itself. It belonged to all of Pomander equally, whoever needed dirt or a shovel or one of the shared tools inside, but Leonard loved it the most, and took care of it.
Close up, the guardhouse was nearly empty—there was a broom standing upright in one corner and a few sealed bags of gardening dirt propped up against the opposite wall, but otherwise the tiny little shack was spotless. Alice closed the door behind her and sat on the floor. After a few minutes, she wadded up the shopping bag with her dirty sweater in it and used it as a pillow behind her head, with the dirt as back support. She fell asleep quickly, imagining herself as the tiny bunny in the Richard Scarry book, cozy in his tree all winter.
16