Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

Alice smiled toward her child. “I’d be crazy to think of this as a spa,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t treat this stint as therapeutic, take care of things a more competent person would already have done.”

She continued with her arrangements: first the small boxes of thank-you cards wrapped in plastic, then the calligraphy pens. Now those slips of paper and napkins with contact info that had to be added to her newest organizer; now a Moleskine notebook with virgin pages. Alice picked up the thick paperback of Emma she’d been meaning to read for a while. “Last time I read a book for pleasure?” She ignored Oliver’s uninterested shrug, jammed the book into the secondary pouch of her Himalayan climbing backpack, and stretched herself across the length of the sofa. Resting on the breadth of Oliver’s chest, Alice wondered if he’d seen her Discman.

And felt him flinch. And went cold herself.

The answer to her question lay where it had been since their return from New Hampshire: with all the other stuff from that room, untouched inside a backpack, thrown into the back of their closet.

Lifting Doe onto her chest still was effortless, Goddess be praised. Alice started with the opening letter of the alphabet. Oliver joined, a shaky harmony. The infant latched on to a strand of Mommy’s wig. Alice’s voice cracked, but she would not stop, even as the child dislodged her wig, ice-cream-orange hairs going askew.

“Next time won’t you sing wii-iith mee-eeeeee?” The final vowel sounds stretched.

“That was nice.” Alice shifted, dislodged herself from Oliver’s shoulder, lifted her way back upright, and rocked her child, transporting herself again, heading now to a place where she could not hear Oliver’s remarks about the hospital visiting schedule, how well prepared he felt they were.

“I don’t want to lose my eyelashes,” she said.

“Look at me,” he answered.

“Being bald is horrid enough. And eyebrows don’t matter so much. But I always had pretty eyelashes.”

“Alice, just — please look at me.”

“Your mommy’s going to be a tree,” Alice told Doe. “Or how about a smooth bald butterfly with no eyebrows?”

After a few more moments, she gave in, and turned toward him. His hand went to the underside of her chin.

“You still have your eyelashes,” he began. “They’re—”

“They’re thinner. When I put on eye shadow I can tell.”

“You are gorgeous beyond words.”

“It’s horrible to feel vain about these things, but I can’t help it.”

“With or without hair, with or without eyelashes, I still and completely want to bend you over this couch.”

“A charming nondenial.”

“We’re going in there and we’ll take care of this. All this shit’s going to get behind us.”

“I know.” Her voice soft.

“We just have to go through it—”

“Yes.”

“If there was any choice—”

“Yes.”

—

Her plan was to read bedtime stories, feed her baby bottled formula, and lie with her in the darkness until Doe’s restlessness stilled. Check-in was at six, in case she needed surgery for a central line. Then that would be at eight. Alice planned on listening to her child’s breaths and snores for as long as she could bear, lying with her sleeping Doe and staring some more. Then Alice was going to come back out into the living room. Entwining on the couch with Oliver, she was going to finish packing, pick up their conversation again; talking deep into the night, confiding in Oliver and assuring him at once. She hated herself for how agitated her disease made him; she knew it was stupid, but nonetheless felt guilty. Before her physician-mandated moratorium on the digestion of food and drink kicked in at its mandated midnight hour, she planned on unzipping his jeans, releasing from his underwear that gorgeous prick of his, and, even if it was all sweaty and smelly, even if Alice’s body may have looked like something beamed down from a mothership, she planned on giving Oliver one hell of a reminder of her womanly charms. But her plan was even bigger, extended even longer, into the healthy life she planned on having. Whenever entitled young men and gorgeous women would not give way as she pushed her monstrosity of a stroller down the street, Alice planned on remembering what it had been like to feel that young and beautiful and invulnerable. On Friday afternoons when the child was being impossible and the weekend was looming — all those empty hours with little childcare, few moments of rescue — Alice planned on recalling this particular moment, how afraid she was. She planned on appreciating Doe’s amazement at blue and red mixing into purple. On some freezing day in that kindergarten school yard, as Alice tried to halt Doe’s supreme shitfit about not being able to share some other kid’s toy, she planned on being that much more patient. She planned on soaking in the sight of her young little lady, all elbows and knees and sparkly taffeta princess dress, Doe climbing brownstone steps, ringing doorbells, and letting loose: Trick or treat . Sneaking her growing child up the secret entrance that got you onto the roof of the Plaza hotel; telling her about the summer night she and Doe’s father — back when they were first dating — had climbed up and sat with their feet hanging over the edge of the roof, and between bits of good cheese and sips from a bottle of cheap red, they’d leaned into each other and sweetly made out. The plan was to strike the right balance — sixty percent fury, forty compassion — when her teenaged daughter experimented with all the things a teenaged Alice had experimented with. For sure Alice planned on being in the front row with a camcorder when her child graduated from an Ivy, one of those good ones, where undergrads had majors that actually let them earn a living. It was a goddamn law of nature that she was going to walk that little girl down her matrimonial aisle.

Alice was the sun. A groggy sun, a sun who had just enjoyed an evening of walking and laughing and wonderful food, but who still had enough energy, she was sure, to enliven the thick blanket of darkness that covered the Meatpacking District. Enough light to fill the arid compartments of the yellow cabs parked along the side streets. Wake the drivers catching up on their needed sleep. And the ones waiting for relatives to get to the designated changeover spot and relieve them after a twelve-hour shift. She watched the men in industrial jumpsuits spraying water through the grooves between cobblestones on the street, washing away the blood and excess and pink slime. The sky wouldn’t light up for a few more hours yet; this sun was justified in her sleepiness.

—

Oliver brusquely lifted the black boxy object out of the cab and set it to the ground. He pulled on the suitcase’s roller handle. The rag doll that was their dozing offspring hung wanly from the straps around his pecs. Alice murmured another apology. She’d lasted as long as she could, hadn’t meant to doze off, hadn’t wanted it to be that way.

He did not make eye contact, said it was fine.

Pink hues crept along the high-rise silhouettes, the sides of the canyon that was Sixty-sixth Street. Thick clouds hung, low and heavy, over midtown. The night air thinned into a hue of tarnished silver.

On the sidewalk near the hospital, a dowdy figure was lumbering toward the revolving entrance doors with that recognizable, troubled gait. Alice welcomed the distraction. “Oh, Tilda,” she said, allowing herself some distress and drama. “We bought that coat together. The most lovely, fine cream you ever saw. Like it’d been whipped to that shade.”

Now the coat was the color of lentils. Oliver knew better than to respond. However Tilda’s pheromones might transform wool and rayon and polyester, the woman had risen at this horrid hour, made her way from a one-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up in Hoboken — a trip that had encompassed not just the PATH but across this city. None of her de rigueur grumbling, or her usual under-the-breath disagreements. Tilda had volunteered for this thankless task, out of simple goodness, because having a friend keep Alice company was aeons easier than finding a sitter at this hour, which otherwise would have been their task. ( Anything you need, Tilda had said before the request was even finished.) A woman worth her weight in brown gold.