This Time Tomorrow(4)
Alice met them all when they walked into the admissions office at the Belvedere School, where she, a single, childfree woman with a degree in painting and a minor in puppetry, would decide whether their little darlings would be accepted or not. There were lots of kinds of rich people, but they all wanted to get their children into the school of their choice, because they saw their children’s lives like train tracks, each stop leading directly to the next, from Belvedere to Yale to Harvard Law to marriage to children to a country house on Long Island and a large dog named Huckleberry. Alice was just one step, but she was an important one. There would be an email from Katherine later in the day, she was positive, saying how very nice it was to run into her. In the real world, and in her own life, Alice had no power, but in the kingdom of Belvedere, she was a Sith Lord, or a Jedi, depending on whether one’s child got in or not.
4
Matt’s apartment was always clean. He’d lived there for a year, and had yet to prepare himself more than one meal a day in it—Matt did as many things as possible via app. As a city kid, Alice had also ordered in food a lot, but at least she had picked up the telephone and spoken to other humans. Like many transplants from small towns around the world, Matt seemed to look at New York City as a set to walk through, not thinking too much about what had come before. Alice set her bag down on the long white counter and pulled open the fridge. There were three different kinds of energy drinks, a half-empty kombucha that she’d left there a month ago, a salami, an unwrapped hunk of cheddar cheese that had started to harden around the edges, half a stick of butter, a jar of pickles, several takeout containers, a bottle of champagne, and four Coronas. Alice closed the fridge again, shaking her head.
“Hello? Are you home?” she called, in the direction of Matt’s bedroom. There was no answer, and instead of texting him, Alice decided to do the small pile of dirty laundry she’d shoved into her tote bag before going to the hospital. The very best part about Matt’s apartment was that it had a dishwasher and a washer/dryer. The dishwasher was wasted on him, as he rarely ate off actual plates, but the washer/dryer was the love of Alice’s life. Usually Alice lugged her bag of dirty clothes to the laundromat around the corner from her apartment, which she didn’t have to cross a single street to get to, and where they would wash and fold her things and then return the clean clothes to her inside a giant laundry bag dumpling, but the ease with which she could wash her favorite jeans and three pairs of underwear and the shirt she wanted to wear to work tomorrow, that was something special. Standing in front of the open washing machine, Alice decided she might as well wash what she was wearing, and so she peeled off her jeans and T-shirt and threw those in, too. When the clothes started to spin and swish, she slid in her socks down the slippery floor to Matt’s bedroom to find something to throw on. The front door opened, and Alice heard Matt’s keys hit the kitchen counter.
“Hi! I’m back here!” she shouted.
Matt appeared in the door of his room, giant horseshoes of sweat on his neck and armpits. He took out his headphones. “I swear, I almost died. Today was a Mash Attack, which is three circuits, including dead lifts and extra burpees. I drank, like, four beers last night, and I fully thought I was going to puke.”
“That’s nice,” Alice said. Matt went to CrossFit enough to have a smaller beer belly than he otherwise might, but not enough to be able to complete a class without threatening to vomit. He said the same thing every time he went.
“Gonna shower.” He looked at her. “Why are you naked?”
“I’m not naked,” Alice said. “I’m doing laundry.”
Matt opened his mouth and panted. “I still think I might boot it.” He walked around Alice’s body and pushed open the door to the bathroom. She sat down on the bed and listened to the water go on.
They weren’t a great couple, Alice knew, not like some of her friends and acquaintances, the ones who posted rhapsodic Instagram paeans every birthday and anniversary. They didn’t like all the same things, or listen to the same music, or have the same hopes and dreams, but when they’d met on an app (of course) and had a drink, the drink had turned into dinner, and the dinner had turned into another drink, and that drink had turned into sex, and now it was a year later and the doorman didn’t ask for her name. A year was a decent amount of time. Sam—who was married and therefore knew how these things went—thought that Matt would propose soon. If he did, Alice wasn’t sure what she would say. She examined her toenails, which were in need of some more polish and now had only tiny discs of red at the tips, like polka dots. Her fortieth birthday was in a week. She and Matt hadn’t made any plans yet, but she thought that if something was going to happen, maybe it would happen then. Her stomach did a little flip thinking about it, as if the organ were trying to turn around and face the other direction.
Marriage seemed like a good deal, most of the time—you always had someone there, and when you were dying, they would be huddled next to you, holding your hand. Of course, that didn’t count the marriages that ended in divorce, or the unhappy marriages, where hand-holding was a memory. It didn’t count people who died in car accidents, or had fatal heart attacks while sitting at their desks. What was the percentage of people who actually got to die while feeling loved and supported by their spouse? Ten percent? It wasn’t just the dying, of course, that made marriage appealing, but that was part of it. Alice was sorry for her father, that she was all he had, and she was afraid that she was too much like him to have anything more. No—she would have less. Leonard had a child. Not just a child—a daughter. If she’d been a boy, and not trained by society to be a good, dutiful caretaker, it might have been different. It had all just gone so fast—her thirties. Her twenties had been a blur, and ten years ago, her friends were just starting to get married and have children—most of them didn’t have babies until they were thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, and so she wasn’t that far behind, but suddenly now she was going to be forty, and that was too late, wasn’t it? She had friends who were divorced, friends who were on their second marriages. Those always moved along more quickly, so it was easy to see what had been wrong the first time—if a couple got divorced and two years later, one of them was married with a baby on the way, it was no mystery. Alice didn’t know if she wanted to have children, but she knew that at some point in the very near future, her not knowing would swiftly transform into a fact, a de facto decision. Why wasn’t there more time?