This Time Tomorrow(3)

Even though Alice had a key to Matt’s apartment, she always stopped at the desk before going to the elevator, the way visitors were supposed to. It wasn’t unlike going to the hospital and giving her name. Today, one of the doormen, an older man with a shaved head who always winked at her, just pointed toward the elevator as she approached, and Alice nodded. A free pass.

Around the glossy marble corner, a woman and two small children were waiting for the elevator. Alice recognized the woman immediately but zipped her mouth shut and tried to be invisible. The children—both towheaded boys, maybe four and eight, ran in circles around their mother’s legs, trying to whack each other with tennis rackets. When the elevator finally arrived, the kids darted in, and their mother trudged behind them, her thin ankles sockless in her loafers. She looked up when she turned to face the doors, and that’s when she saw Alice, who sidled in right next to the buttons, tucking herself into the corner of the small cube.

“Oh, hi!” the mother said. The woman was pretty and blond, with an earnest tan, the kind that accumulated gradually on tennis courts and golf courses. Alice had met this woman—Katherine, maybe?—when she’d brought the older child to the admissions office at the Belvedere School.

“Hi,” Alice said. “How are you? Hi, guys.” The children had abandoned their racket swords and were now kicking each other in the shins. A game.

The woman—Katherine Miller, Alice now remembered, and the boys were Henrik and Zane—pushed her hair back. “Oh, we’re great. You know, so happy to be back in school. We were in Connecticut all summer, and they really missed their friends.”

“School sucks,” Henrik, the older boy, said. Katherine grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him tight against her legs.

“He doesn’t mean that,” she said.

“Yes, I do! School sucks!”

“School sucks!” parroted Zane, in a voice three times as loud as the elevator required. Katherine’s cheeks turned purple with embarrassment. The elevator dinged, and she shoved both boys out. The younger one would be applying for kindergarten this fall, which meant that Katherine would be visiting Alice’s office again soon. There were several emotions visible in Katherine’s face, and Alice diligently ignored them all.

“Have a great day!” Katherine called out in a singsong voice. The elevator doors closed again, and Alice could hear her whisper-shout at her children as they walked down the hall.

There were so many kinds of rich people in New York City. Alice was an expert, but not because she wanted to be; it was like being raised bilingual, only one of the languages was money. One rule of thumb was that the harder it was to tell where someone’s money came from, the more of it they had. If both parents were artists or writers or maybe had no discernible jobs at all and were available for pickup and drop-off, it meant the money was trickling down from a very large source, drips from an iceberg. There were lots of invisible parents, both mothers and fathers, who worked constantly, and if they did wind up at school or on the playground, they were always taking phone calls, a finger shoved into the other ear to drown out the noise of real live life. Those were the families with help. The ones who were ashamed of their wealth used the term au pair and the ones who were not used the word housekeeper. Even if children didn’t always fully understand, they had eyes and ears and parents who gossiped with each other at playdates.

Her own family’s money was fairly simple: When she was a child, Leonard had written Time Brothers, a novel about two time-traveling brothers that had sold millions of copies and gone on to become a serialized television program that everyone watched, either on purpose or as a result of unwillingness to change the channel, at least twice a week between the years of 1989 and 1995. And so Alice had gone to private school at Belvedere, one of the most prestigious in the city, since she was in the fifth grade. On the spectrum from blonds-in-uniforms to no-grades-and-calling-teachers-by-their-first-names, Belvedere sat close to dead center. It had too many Jews for the WASPs, and too many cozy traditions for the Marxists.

If one trusted the literature, most of the private schools in New York City were the same—challenging, enriching, and superlative in all ways—and while that was true, Alice understood the differences: This one was for the eating-disordered overachievers, that one was for dummies with drug problems but rich parents. There was the school for athletes and the school for tiny Brooks Brothers mannequins who would end up as CEOs, the school for well-rounded normies who would become lawyers, the school for artsy weirdos and for parents who wanted their kids to be artsy weirdos. Belvedere had started in the 1970s on the Upper West Side, and so it had been full of socialists and hippies, but now, fifty years later, the moms at drop-off idled outside in their Teslas and the children were all on ADHD medication. Nothing gold could stay, but it was still her place, and she loved it.

Alice only really saw the different categories of families once she was an adult: the blonds who had toned arms and well-stocked proper liquor cabinets; the actors with television shows and another house in Los Angeles for when fortunes changed; the intellectuals, novelists, and the like with vague trust funds and houses bigger than they should have been able to afford; the finance drones with their spotless countertops and empty built-in bookshelves. There were the ones with last names from history books, for whom jobs were superfluous but could include interior design, or fundraising. Some of those rich people were very good—good at making martinis, good at gossip, good at complaining about problems, because who could be mad at them? Everyone was on a committee of a cultural institution. And almost always, one of these types would marry one of the other types, and they could pretend that they had somehow married outside their bubble. It was a farce, the contortions that rich people would make so as to appear less dripping with privilege. It was true of Alice, too.