“Are you still going to go for a run?” Tommy asked. Alice heard him go back into the bathroom, and then the sound of the water in the shower.
“Yes,” Alice said. She was desperate to get out of the room, the apartment—she wanted to go back to Pomander. She wanted to call her dad. “Can we, uh, just talk about the plan for the day? I’m feeling a little, I don’t know, foggy.”
“You know, I thought I could avoid this problem, marrying a younger woman. I didn’t think the dementia was supposed to start quite this early.” His voice bounced off the tiled walls.
“Come on,” Alice said. Tommy’s birthday was only a week after hers. She would always remember it, so close to her own, hovering there on the calendar as if it were written in invisible ink that only she could see. Was this how they talked to each other? Alice felt like she was still in teenager mode, unable to say how she really felt about anything, capable of only sarcasm and feigned irritation. She looked at the date on her phone—it was October 13. The day after her fortieth birthday. The chute had spit her out at the same time she’d gone in, only now, she had managed to knock the car at least partially off the track. Alice wanted to call her dad, but she was afraid. She wanted to call Sam, but she was afraid. Mostly she wanted to do both those things in private, because she wasn’t sure how they were going to go, and Alice didn’t think she was a good enough actress to play off her reactions. If her father was fine, would she know it? If he was dead, would she know that? Alice didn’t know anything for sure, not yet. Tommy emerged from the shower, a towel around his waist.
“Okay, okay. Forty is the new thirty.” He put his hands up in defense and leaned away from her. “I’ve got Leo and Dorothy for now, you’ll hang with them after your run, then Sondra is coming at ten. You go visit your dad, then the party is at seven. Whatever else you want to do, up to you!” Tommy kissed her on the cheek. He was being cheerful because it was her birthday week. Somehow this was clearer to Alice than anything else.
“Dorothy,” Alice said. “Got it.” There was a window on the far side of the room, and Alice walked over to look out of it. Below her, Central Park stretched out like a carpet. The lake, a part of the park Alice had never paid much attention to because it seemed like it had been built for tourists, was right below. To their left, she could see one pointy tower. One tower out of two.
“The fucking San Remo,” Alice said. “Where are your parents?” She should have known the answer, of course, but Tommy rolled his eyes, continuing a different conversation.
“Oh, yeah, like they’d be helping with the kids before dawn. Or, you know, ever,” Tommy said. He was standing there, completely naked, carrying on a conversation. There were gray chest hairs, tight little coils like the springs that held in batteries. When he turned toward his closet, Alice noticed the slight droopiness of his butt, which felt unkind but also comforting, that she wasn’t the only human alive who was aging, that even Tommy Joffey—was her name Joffey now? No, no, she would never have done that—wasn’t immune. Tommy got dressed and closed the door behind him, and Alice rummaged through her drawers to find some clothes. Leonard had been right—there was a certain muscle memory in moving around the room. Alice knew which drawers to open, or at least some part of her did. She got dressed quickly and ducked out into the hallway, her phone clutched in her hand like a security blanket.
It wasn’t that Alice hadn’t wanted children. The timing had never been right. She’d had one abortion, with the first boyfriend she lived with, whom she had very much wanted to marry someday. He hadn’t wanted a baby, or at least that’s what he said until they’d broken up and he immediately had a baby with someone else. She had a list of names, though, and Dorothy had always been on it. For all of her twenties and thirties, Alice had believed that she would have children someday, until she didn’t anymore. It was like balancing a bowling ball in the middle of a seesaw. There were people who were so sure, one direction or the other, and then there were people like her, who had never really decided until one day they stopped paying attention and then got knocked sideways. One of the actors from The Odd Couple had had a baby when he was seventy-nine years old. Men never had to decide a thing.
The apartment was enormous. The hall she’d stepped into was long and dark, lined on one side with bookshelves and on the other with framed family photographs. Leo’s loud voice echoed from another room, and there was also the sound of a British pig that Alice recognized—it was important, when meeting small children, to keep up to date on their parasocial relationships with cartoon characters. Alice walked slowly, her socked feet silent on the wooden floor. Most of the photos were of the children—Leo as a Ghostbuster and his sister, Dorothy, as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man; the two kids in the bathtub, surrounded by a mountain of bubbles—but at the center of the wall was a photo from the wedding. From Alice’s wedding, to Tommy Joffey. She took a step closer, so that her nose was nearly touching the glass of the frame. In the photograph, Alice was wearing a floor-length lace dress, white, with cap sleeves and a giant bow under the bodice, a human present. Her hair was doing something she’d never seen her hair do, cascading over one shoulder like a swimsuit model’s. Alice couldn’t quite identify the look on her face—it was slightly more demented than joyful, flush with endorphins or terror, she wasn’t sure. There were photos of Alice richly pregnant, clutching the bottom of her massive belly as if the whole thing would fall to the ground if she didn’t hold it up. Alice reached down to her midsection, where the skin was soft and squishy, like rising dough.