This Time Tomorrow(6)

The plan had not been to work at her alma mater forever.

The plan had been to be a painter. Or an artist, of any kind, who got paid to make art. Or an art teacher who was beloved by her students, and had walls full of gorgeous things made by small children, and made her own art in her own time. The chances of her becoming a Famous and Successful Artist now were slim, but because she was still surrounded by people who had known her as an artsy teenager, they still looked at her that way, even though she hadn’t touched a canvas or a brush in over a year. The friends of hers from Belvedere who had actually become artists had all left New York, which was too expensive. They had left five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago. Alice had lost track. The ones she loved the most had even abandoned social media, except for some fuzzy landscapes or pictures of funny things in grocery stores once in a while. Alice missed them all.

“Earth to Alice,” Melinda said, not unkindly. They were sitting in a clumsy circle, their wheeled office chairs pointed inward.

“Sorry, I was just thinking about something. I’m here,” Alice said. Emily winked at her.

“I’d love for us to get through this batch in the next two weeks—if you can reach out to the families on your list and set up times, I believe Emily’s already made the sign-up spreadsheet. Great.” Melinda nodded at them.

The pile of folders was heavy—each one had a child’s photograph stapled to the outside and was filled with their application materials. Alice couldn’t imagine it had been like this when her parents had sent her—they never would have filled out more than a single piece of paper. Alice shuffled the deck of folders on her lap, looking for names she recognized. There were always a few. The classmates of hers who had stayed in New York had procreated at astonishing rates—some were on their third babies, and the private school recycling mill was an effective one. Sometimes Alice thought it was strange, how many people stayed within the zip code where they’d grown up, but then she thought about how many people in small towns and cities across the country did it, too. It only seemed strange because this was New York, a place that regenerated every few years, populated by newcomers and transplants. It was usually nice to see the people she knew—mostly they were women who Alice hadn’t known very well, but who were all perfectly friendly and seemed on very solid ground. More solid ground than she was. Much more rarely, Alice would come across the name of someone she’d known better.

Like little Raphael Joffey. How many Joffeys could there be? The boy in the photograph had olive skin, dark brown hair, thick eyebrows, and one missing tooth. He looked so much like his father that Alice knew what she would find before she opened the folder. There it was, on the second line—Thomas Joffey. The address listed was on Central Park West—the San Remo, where Tommy had grown up. He was nearly two years older than she was, and a grade level ahead. Alice couldn’t remember the apartment number, which was comforting, but she could remember his landline number. If this information was true, he lived just a few blocks from school, and was still in the neighborhood where they’d both grown up. It was odd that Alice hadn’t seen Tommy on the street, not ever, but that was the way it worked sometimes. There were some people who were just on your circuit, people who lived around the corner or across the borough, but for whatever reason, you and they were on the same track and would bump into each other again and again. Then there were the people who lived next door and were on a different schedule, and you never saw them at all. Different paths, different subway lines, different timetables. Alice wondered what Tommy did for a living, if anyone in his life still called him Tommy. If he’d just moved back, or if he’d been right down the street the whole time. If he and his family lived in the apartment he’d grown up in, or on another floor, with little Raphael taking the elevator up or down to see his grandparents. She wondered what Tommy’s face looked like now, if his hair had started to gray, if his body was still as beautiful as it had once been, tall and willowy in his clothes, like there was always a breeze blowing against him. She hadn’t even heard his name since her twentieth high school reunion the spring before last, which he had not attended, but where Alice had overheard several people asking if he was coming. That was the real power move—to be missed.

Alice closed the folder and left it on top of the pile. Alice wondered what they called the boy—if they said his whole name, or if he was Rafe, or Raffy, or Raf. She would send his email first, addressed to both parents. Alice would say what she always said to alumni in her stacks: Hello! This is Alice Stern, class of ’98! At the end, after her copied-and-pasted message about setting up an interview and a tour, with a link to the sign-up page, Alice typed and then deleted a postscript. Hello, she wrote. Hi! No. Hi—looking forward to seeing you and meeting Raphael. It was always best to focus on the children. When she’d started in the admissions office, Melinda had explained that to her—sometimes the prospective parents were movie stars, or musicians who played at Madison Square Garden. It didn’t matter. They didn’t want you to fawn or to stutter. They wanted you to look their kids in the eye and be astonished, just like all parents did. They wanted you to recognize their special flower. The famous people didn’t flummox her, not more than they would if she saw them walking down the street, but there were people she had known as a teenager whose names still made her stomach tighten. Alice didn’t know what she’d say to Tommy if she saw him on the street, or in the back room of a dark, crowded bar—she might not say anything at all—but she knew what to say to him in her office. She would pull open the door and smile, nothing but sunlight and confidence. He would smile, too.