“Hi! I’m back here!” she shouted.
Matt appeared in the door of his room, giant horseshoes of sweat on his neck and armpits. He took out his headphones. “I swear, I almost died. Today was a Mash Attack, which is three circuits, including dead lifts and extra burpees. I drank, like, four beers last night, and I fully thought I was going to puke.”
“That’s nice,” Alice said. Matt went to CrossFit enough to have a smaller beer belly than he otherwise might, but not enough to be able to complete a class without threatening to vomit. He said the same thing every time he went.
“Gonna shower.” He looked at her. “Why are you naked?”
“I’m not naked,” Alice said. “I’m doing laundry.”
Matt opened his mouth and panted. “I still think I might boot it.” He walked around Alice’s body and pushed open the door to the bathroom. She sat down on the bed and listened to the water go on.
They weren’t a great couple, Alice knew, not like some of her friends and acquaintances, the ones who posted rhapsodic Instagram paeans every birthday and anniversary. They didn’t like all the same things, or listen to the same music, or have the same hopes and dreams, but when they’d met on an app （of course） and had a drink, the drink had turned into dinner, and the dinner had turned into another drink, and that drink had turned into sex, and now it was a year later and the doorman didn’t ask for her name. A year was a decent amount of time. Sam—who was married and therefore knew how these things went—thought that Matt would propose soon. If he did, Alice wasn’t sure what she would say. She examined her toenails, which were in need of some more polish and now had only tiny discs of red at the tips, like polka dots. Her fortieth birthday was in a week. She and Matt hadn’t made any plans yet, but she thought that if something was going to happen, maybe it would happen then. Her stomach did a little flip thinking about it, as if the organ were trying to turn around and face the other direction.
Marriage seemed like a good deal, most of the time—you always had someone there, and when you were dying, they would be huddled next to you, holding your hand. Of course, that didn’t count the marriages that ended in divorce, or the unhappy marriages, where hand-holding was a memory. It didn’t count people who died in car accidents, or had fatal heart attacks while sitting at their desks. What was the percentage of people who actually got to die while feeling loved and supported by their spouse? Ten percent? It wasn’t just the dying, of course, that made marriage appealing, but that was part of it. Alice was sorry for her father, that she was all he had, and she was afraid that she was too much like him to have anything more. No—she would have less. Leonard had a child. Not just a child—a daughter. If she’d been a boy, and not trained by society to be a good, dutiful caretaker, it might have been different. It had all just gone so fast—her thirties. Her twenties had been a blur, and ten years ago, her friends were just starting to get married and have children—most of them didn’t have babies until they were thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, and so she wasn’t that far behind, but suddenly now she was going to be forty, and that was too late, wasn’t it? She had friends who were divorced, friends who were on their second marriages. Those always moved along more quickly, so it was easy to see what had been wrong the first time—if a couple got divorced and two years later, one of them was married with a baby on the way, it was no mystery. Alice didn’t know if she wanted to have children, but she knew that at some point in the very near future, her not knowing would swiftly transform into a fact, a de facto decision. Why wasn’t there more time?
Matt came out of the shower and looked at her hunching over her feet like a worried golem. “Want to order some food? Maybe fuck around before it comes?” There was a towel around his waist, but it dropped, and he didn’t bend to pick it up. His erection waved at her.
Alice nodded. “Pizza? From the place?”
Matt pushed a few buttons on his phone and then tossed it behind her onto his king-sized bed. “We have thirty-two to forty minutes,” he said. Matt might not have been great at cooking, or other things, but he was good at sex, and that wasn’t nothing.
5
Belvedere, like many private schools in the city, was not contained in a single building, but over time had spread across a small patch of the neighborhood like a virus. The lower school and admissions were in the original building, on the south side of 85th Street between Central Park West and Columbus—a compact six-story modern architectural eyesore with excellent air-conditioning and big windows and built-in projection screens and a carpeted library with comfortable chairs in bright colors. The big kids—seventh through twelfth graders—were now in the new building, around the block on 86th Street. Alice was glad not to have to deal with teenagers on a daily basis. The seniors spent the fall loping in and out of the college prep office next door, and seeing their lanky bodies and poreless skin from ten feet away was more than enough exposure. The admissions office was on the second floor, and if Alice craned her neck out the window, she could see the slope up the hill into Central Park.