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 insomeone 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?”
“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 inThe 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 waswalking, 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 andi♥nyT-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 neonsign 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 redMpainted 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 thatNew Yorkmagazine 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 tohave 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.
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 flirtand 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 betweenpeople 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 weresmokers, 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 sidewalkswere 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 hada 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 dirtpropped 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.
