This Time Tomorrow(9)

It didn’t help that her father had always treated marriage like a horrible disease he had overcome. Being a divorced single father suited him—he loved Alice and her friends, he loved going to the playground, he loved eating in front of the television, all in equal measure to the way he had hated all the things that marriage had once made him do. He didn’t like buying Christmas presents for relatives he didn’t otherwise speak to. Leonard could not abide dinner parties, or making small talk with parents he found boring. He was eccentric in a way that private school parents were not used to, meaning he was not exactly like everyone else. There had been women, at various points, whom Alice had imagined might be her father’s girlfriends, but they never stayed the night or so much as kissed her father on the cheek in front of her. The hardest thing for Alice to picture was her father and mother together, in the same room, touching. Not even in an intimate way—touching in any way. A hand on a shoulder. Arms, side by side. They’d been married for almost ten years, four years before Alice was born and six after. When Alice was in first grade, Serena left for California, and they were separated by the entire country.

She had known happy married couples, of course—friends’ parents whose lives she got to inhabit during sleepovers and on holiday weekends—but it always felt like watching a nature documentary. Here is a heterosexual American couple in the year 1989—watch as they prepare a tomato sauce for dinner while occasionally touching each other’s posteriors in a playful manner. It wasn’t real life. For the first time, Alice wished that her father had been some other kind of dad, a boring one with a set of golf clubs in the trunk of his car. With a car, period. And someone kind sitting in the passenger seat. If he’d been a dentist instead of an artist, if he’d been an accountant, a veterinarian, or a plumber, like his own father had been, maybe his life would have worked out differently. If her parents had stayed married, they would have been miserable. Surely this was what they had discussed at the time—which misery was the most important, which sadness was the heaviest? Was it the lack of whatever unknown happiness might still be ahead of them? Was it Alice’s feelings? She doubted they had thought quite this far ahead.

The evening had begun to cool, and Alice shivered, wishing that she’d thought to wear another layer. The restaurant was in the lobby of a hotel on Central Park South. She walked along the park, passing the horses hitched up to hansom cabs, their drivers lazily trying to wave down tourists with money to burn. She narrowly avoided a pile of dog shit, and then a pile of horse shit. The leaves of every tree in Central Park shimmered in the last gasp of sunlight. People who didn’t love New York could just fuck all the way off. Look at this place! Look at these benches, at these cobblestones, at these taxicabs and horses side by side! Whatever happened, she had this. Alice exhaled, stepped off the curb, and waited for a break in traffic before running across the street.





9



The restaurant was so dark that Alice had to put her hand along the wall as she walked down the two steps and toward the hostess stand, where three tall women in identical black dresses stood stone-faced, and for a moment Alice thought that it might be so dark that they actually couldn’t see her, but then the woman in the middle said, “Can I help you?” Alice cleared her throat and gave them Matt’s name, and one of the other women silently turned, holding out her flat hand like a mime delivering an invisible cocktail. She turned a corner into the dining room, and Alice followed.

The floor was black, glossy as a marble, and Alice stepped gingerly, afraid she might slip. All of the chairs were covered in what looked like draped tablecloths, the way furniture is covered in period piece films, to be whipped off by a fleet of servants just before the rich family arrives. Matt was sitting at a table along the far wall, handsome in a suit.

“Hi,” Alice said, kissing him on the cheek before settling into her chair. It felt like sitting on a badly folded fitted sheet.

Matt picked up his glass and took a gulp. “Hey,” he said. “Isn’t this place crazy?”

Alice looked around. The waitstaff were all wearing silk pajamas, which seemed like a terrible idea, in terms of stains and dry-cleaning bills. The restaurant was new. Alice hadn’t worked in food service, but she was a native New Yorker, which meant that she knew the statistics for how many restaurants failed. Her hopes were not high. At least nowadays gorgeous celebrity chefs could always turn back to television.

A silk-pajamaed server came over and deposited menus on the table—each one a leather-backed tablet nearly two feet long. As far as Alice could tell, the food items were described only by their ingredients and not by their final form: pea shoots, kabocha squash, handmade ricotta. Sage, egg, brown butter. Oyster mushrooms, sausage. “Can I have a large glass of wine, please? White? Nothing sweet?” Alice said before the woman walked away.

Matt was bouncing his knee under the table, shaking the surface slightly, like a minor earthquake. He looked handsome and sweaty, and Alice knew what was going to happen. She could see it all on fast-forward—the meal, Matt getting more and more anxious, them eating tiny, delicious things off plates that looked like painted compositions, a pause before dessert, and then Matt putting a small velvet box in front of her, right on top of a small drop of soy sauce.

“I’ve been thinking,” Matt said. “What if you moved in?”

The server brought over Alice’s wine, and she took a big sip, feeling the cool liquid slide across her tongue. “Why?” she asked. “Don’t you like having your own space? Time alone?” Alice had never introduced Matt to her father. Sam thought it was weird, but Alice thought it was weird that Sam liked being pregnant. It was obvious that Leonard and Matt wouldn’t particularly like each other, and so it had never seemed worth it. One upside to having a single parent was not rushing to get married, like so many people she knew had, just because they were trying to be adults. It was embarrassing, if you slowed down long enough to think about it, how many major life decisions happened because they looked like the model you’d been given.