“I’m on my way to meet Matt for dinner, and it’s at this fancy place, and I don’t know, I think it might be an early birthday surprise thing, or . . .” Alice chewed on a fingernail. “I don’t know.”
Baby Leroy kicked his legs and slapped his tiny hand against Sam’s chest. “Okay,” she said. “I think this is it. I think he’s going to ask you to marry him, and it’s going to be quietly public. Like, no mariachi band, no flash mob, but, like, a ring hidden in dessert. And your waiter will know before you do.”
Alice sucked in a whistle. “Okay. Yeah. Maybe.”
Sam looked at her. “Are you breathing?”
Alice shook her head. “I’ll call you after, okay? I love you.” Sam blew a kiss and waved Leroy’s tiny hand for him. They both looked so small in the back of Sam’s SUV, a big hulking thing with one baby seat facing toward the back and a booster seat facing toward the front and Cheerios crushed into the floor mats. Alice pressed the button and made them vanish.
There had been a number of years—her twenties and early thirties—when Alice had been envious of her friends. Not only Sam, but Sam in particular. When Sam and Josh had gotten married, seeing Sam in her sleek white silk dress, dancing to Whitney Houston with all the Black women in her family and the Jewish women in Josh’s family, Alice had thought: This is what real happiness looks like, and I’m never going to have this. She had cried when Sam got pregnant the first time, and the second. Alice wasn’t proud—she’d talked it through in therapy. But then, years later, Alice had looked around and realized that while all of her friends from college had kids and couldn’t stay out late, or couldn’t sleep late, or could only meet her between the hours of 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., depending on someone else’s nap, she could still do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She had come out the other side of her jealousy. Alice was free to travel, free to go home with strangers, free to do anything.
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.