This Time Tomorrow(5)
Matt came out of the shower and looked at her hunching over her feet like a worried golem. “Want to order some food? Maybe fuck around before it comes?” There was a towel around his waist, but it dropped, and he didn’t bend to pick it up. His erection waved at her.
Alice nodded. “Pizza? From the place?”
Matt pushed a few buttons on his phone and then tossed it behind her onto his king-sized bed. “We have thirty-two to forty minutes,” he said. Matt might not have been great at cooking, or other things, but he was good at sex, and that wasn’t nothing.
5
Belvedere, like many private schools in the city, was not contained in a single building, but over time had spread across a small patch of the neighborhood like a virus. The lower school and admissions were in the original building, on the south side of 85th Street between Central Park West and Columbus—a compact six-story modern architectural eyesore with excellent air-conditioning and big windows and built-in projection screens and a carpeted library with comfortable chairs in bright colors. The big kids—seventh through twelfth graders—were now in the new building, around the block on 86th Street. Alice was glad not to have to deal with teenagers on a daily basis. The seniors spent the fall loping in and out of the college prep office next door, and seeing their lanky bodies and poreless skin from ten feet away was more than enough exposure. The admissions office was on the second floor, and if Alice craned her neck out the window, she could see the slope up the hill into Central Park.
The admissions office had an airy waiting room, with expensive but well-loved wooden puzzles on the low, child-sized wooden tables, waiting to be played with by anxious parents as their children met with Alice, her colleague Emily, or their boss, Melinda, a formidable woman with wide hips and a rotating selection of chunky, dangling necklaces that the children always wanted to touch. “Tricks of the trade!” she would say whenever a mother complimented them, the woman trembling like a greyhound in her exercise clothes. It was also what Alice and Emily would say when they snuck out for cigarette breaks during the day. Emily would lean her head around the half wall that separated their desks and say, “Tricks of the trade?” and they’d pop out the emergency door in the back of the school and smoke in the small gray square of pavement where the garbage cans lived.
“Did you see Bike Dad today? I fucking love Bike Dad,” Emily said. She was twenty-eight and in the middle of wedding season, which was exactly like bar mitzvah season, only you had to pay for your own outfit and present. Emily had gone to eight weddings over the summer, which Alice knew because Emily was a drunk texter, especially when she was feeling sad. “I bet he’s a Leo. Don’t you think?” she said now. “He’s got that Big Leo Energy. The way he pulls the bike up on the sidewalk with both kids still on it? You know that thing has to weigh, like, two hundred pounds, and he just, raaarrrrrr.” She extended a fearsome claw.
“Nope,” Alice said, taking a drag. The cigarette was Emily’s, a Parliament. It tasted like wet newspapers, if one could set wet newspapers on fire. Alice had mostly quit several times over the last decade, but somehow it had never quite stuck, despite the gum, the books, and the disapproving looks from strangers and friends. Thank god for Emily, Alice thought. Almost none of the younger staff smoked anymore—they didn’t even vape! They smoked pot but could barely roll joints. They took edibles. They were babies. Alice knew that it was healthier, sure, it was better for their lungs and probably the planet, too, but it made her feel lonely.
“He was wearing a striped T-shirt, like Picasso, only hot and not creepy. I love him.” Emily scuffed the sole of her shoe on the concrete.
“His wife does pickup,” Alice said. “What about Ray? Saw him come in, what’s going on with that?”
Ray Young was an assistant kindergarten teacher and played the ukulele, and he and Emily slept together once a month, give or take. Emily always swore that it wasn’t going to happen again, it was just that he walked his dog by her stoop, which Alice thought of as a Melrose Place problem, but Emily had never seen Melrose Place and so she kept her thoughts to herself. He was twenty-five and perfectly available, which meant that Emily found him boring.
“Oh, you know,” Emily said, rolling her eyes. “He fucks like his parents are watching.”
Alice let out a cough of smoke. “You are terrible.”
Emily winked at her. “Let’s go back inside before we get detention.” She dropped her cigarette and crushed it. “Oh, by the way, how’s your dad doing?”
“Not great,” Alice said. She flicked her still-burning cigarette to the ground.
6
Melinda gave them each a stack of file folders, each one with a child’s name written in Sharpie on the front. There were two hundred applicants for thirty-five places, and that was just for kindergarten. Alice, Emily, and Melinda would each interview the applicants in her stack, then they’d put their notes in the shared admissions spreadsheet, with all the children ranked—whether they were siblings, legacies, had famous parents, had applied for scholarship, were students of color, were from international families, anything of note. Sometimes Alice thought about all the boxes these tiny children had already checked and it made her feel sick. She felt like a judge for the Miss America contest. This one could play the piano! This one could read in two languages! This one had won a regatta! But the children were mostly wonderful, of course, weird and sweet and awkward and funny like all children were. The children were the best part of the job. Sometimes she thought that she would like to be a child psychologist, though it seemed late for that. She loved meeting the kids, and talking to them one on one, hearing their crazy thoughts and their high voices and watching their shyness melt away.