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 timeshe’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.
•••
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.
•••
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.
•••
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 caption4-0.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—onsale—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.
•••
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 millionyears 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 ourthirdbaby, 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 notgrunge,” 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 wasforty, 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, Joshwasn’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 anguishby 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’sForever Changeson 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 sosolid, always. Like a bulldog. Terrestrial, you know.”
