There was nothing else like Matryoshka—subway stations often had tiny, closet-sized bodegas with bottled water and candy bars and magazines, and some in midtown had shoe repair shops that also sold umbrellas and various other things commuting businesspeople might need, and there were a few barbershops, but nothing came close. All bars were dark—that was part of the point, of course—but Matryoshka was literally subterranean, on the left side of the turnstiles, at the bottom of the flight of stairs that led up to the street. Its entrance was a black doorway with a red M painted at eye level and no other discerning marks. Alice hadn’t been in fifteen years. She knew it was still there—it was famous, an underground landmark, the sort of place that New York magazine liked to send reporters and movie stars to for some real ambiance. Alice pulled out her phone to text Sam, but then she thought about what it would sound like—It’s my birthday and I’m ending the night by going to a bar in a subway station. Alone! It was a joke tweet, a cry for help. But Alice didn’t want help, she wanted to have one last drink in a place that she had loved, and then she would go home and wake up forty and one day and she could start all over again.
A clump of people were walking up the stairs in the station, and for a moment, Alice worried that Matryoshka had gotten too popular, that there would be some sort of a line to get in, which she obviously wouldn’t wait in, but it was just people getting off the subway. The door was propped open, and the familiar, yeasty darkness of the bar was exactly the way Alice remembered it. Even the stool that was propping open the door—black, with a cracked leather seat—looked like one she’d clocked some hours on, her skinny teenage elbows on the sticky bar.
The bar was two rooms long: the narrow space where patrons entered, which contained the bar itself, and a small seating area with black leather couches that looked like they’d been loved, abandoned on the curb, and dragged down the subway stairs to their final resting place. There were a few aging pinball machines at the far end, and a jukebox, one that Alice and Sam had always loved. Alice was surprised to see it—there had been jukeboxes everywhere when she was in high school, at bars and diners, sometimes tiny individual table-sized ones, but it had been years since she’d seen one like this, up to her shoulders and enormous, the size of a New York City closet. The bartender nodded at her, and Alice startled. It was the same guy who had worked there ages ago—which was normal, of course, he probably owned the place—but he looked exactly as she remembered him. Maybe there were a few white hairs sprinkled throughout, but he didn’t look as much older as she did, Alice was sure. The darkness was flattering to everyone.
She nodded hello back and took a lap of the bar, walking into the second, larger room. It was where she and her friends had mostly spent their time, because it had more couches, and room to sprawl and flirt and dance. A photo booth took up space in the back corner, where sometimes people posed for photos but mostly people hooked up, as the machine was usually broken but there was still a curtain and a small bench and the titillating feeling of somehow being caught on film anyway. Pockets of people sat around drinking and laughing, their knees pointed toward each other’s laps, their mouths open and beautiful. Alice didn’t know if she was looking for someone she knew, or pretending to look for someone she knew, or just half-heartedly looking for the bathroom. She circled back to the bar and sat down, her enormous shopping bags on the floor next to her.
“It’s my birthday!” she said to the bartender.
“Happy birthday,” he said. He put two shot glasses on the bar and filled them with tequila. “How old are you now?”
Alice laughed. “Forty. I. Am. Forty. Hoo, really not sure about how that sounds.” She accepted the glass that he pushed across the bar and clinked it against the other, which the bartender drained effortlessly into his mouth. The shot burned. She’d never gotten into real alcohol—not in quantity, like the drunk housewives in movies, and not in quality, like the people she’d gone to college with who now had well-stocked vintage bar carts and fancied themselves amateur mixologists. “Wow,” she said. “Thank you.”
There was loud laughter coming from the corner by the jukebox. A trio of young women—younger than Alice, younger than Emily even—were taking pictures of themselves and then showing each other their phones.
“I used to come here when I was in high school,” Alice said to the bartender. “I had a fake ID that I got on Eighth Street that said I was twenty-three, because I thought it would be too obvious if it said I was twenty-one, but by the time I was actually twenty-one, my fake ID said I was almost thirty. But now I can’t tell the difference between people who are twenty-one and twenty-nine, so maybe it didn’t really matter anyway.”