Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

Oliver waited for the doctor to finish, raised his hand. “When we went into the emergency room that first time, Alice”—he hesitated—“they diagnosed you with pneumonia. Could that have been—”

“We don’t know that it was fungal pneumonia,” she said.

“Do we know it wasn’t?”

“That’s how every single thing is going to be from now on?” Alice’s voice simmered, but did not boil. “ We can’t say anything with certainty, but you should still do every single thing we tell you? Then afterward, you hand me a business card, tell me to go wait in the corner like a good little girl. I still die, but this way I die knowing I did everything I was supposed to?”

Finishing, she exhaled and looked down, inward, and if there was a bit of smugness to her — as if she did not need their responses, was not interested in their answers — then there was also satisfaction: a woman who had answers of her own.

DURING JUNIOR YEAR, a professor turned mentor needed help on some sample pieces. She made a simple request after class, and invited Alice to join that proud lineage of Competent Students More Than Eager to Be Worked to the Bone. It was a new world for her, and during those first weeks, as she hunched over a design table in an immaculate Chelsea studio, Alice felt as if she’d been given keys to a special castle wing, heretofore off-limits, that she’d long dreamed of entering. Soon enough, however, she learned that these keys opened doors to oddly quiet rooms, where her weekends would pass, working back-to-back ten-hour days, all but chained to those designing tables and sewing machines. Still, her temp gig evolved, becoming a full-fledged apprenticeship. Alice fleshed out lines for struggling and overextended houses. She figured out the logistics of a knockoff version of a trendy pantsuit that everyone needed. She learned to find the poetry in silhouettes and lines and draped patterns. For her efforts, she received next to nothing — though the day rate, to a twenty-year-old, seemed as extravagant as those gilded buildings alongside Central Park West.

But the way her industry worked was a lot like the city itself: either you owned or you kept renting; either you moved up the food chain — impressing a creative director, getting a shot as a designer yourself, gathering commissions and backers and starting your own line — or you hit your apex and started down the other side. The assignments stacked up, and at some point in between all those deli salads, Alice turned twenty-seven. Her love of clothing and fashion was no longer so glowy, her creative energies too often felt summoned from her body like those last bits of toothpaste, rolled from the tube. She was still working the same brutal hours for that same day rate. It no longer felt glamorous. She still didn’t have any insurance or benefits, still felt herself sprinting to keep from being crushed beneath the hamster wheel of city life. All the while, over her shoulder, in her rearview, newly hatched and eager former hers kept coming, more than ready to push the present her aside. Alice found herself feeling a nostalgic closeness toward her mother. Passing any child opened an ache in the pit of her stomach.

Coming off a string of first dates so astonishingly banal they weren’t even worth relaying to friends, she was working some freelance job or another, taking smoking breaks with Kira, a youngish, also-going-nowhere designer from Milan. There hadn’t been any reason not to bond, not to drink together after work. Sometimes this meant spending time with Kira’s friends — journalists from Uzbekistan with disdainful sneers, grad students from Paris who enjoyed dancing around the highest flames of their parents’ stacks of burning money. Kira invited Alice to a “kind of theme party.” She couldn’t quite articulate the theme, but that hardly mattered. Tilda was supposed to be Alice’s sidekick, but at the last minute booked extra work on some kind of slasher flick. If Alice wasn’t turning cartwheels about going alone, she figured that if pretentious expats were good for anything, it would be a house party.

She was rocking a pixie cut at the time, her dirty blond hair a swirling patchwork ragbag, all firehouse streaks and lollipop highlights, a look she liked to think of as both psychedelic and elfin. That fall was slow in arriving, caught in that amalgam stretch where walking in the shade caused chilliness, but the bright sky was warm enough for a girl to get away with her favorite sleeveless black sweater — especially if she’d inlaid its scooping collar with ceramic pears and strawberries. Alice had run with her instincts, piling her neck with junk necklaces: beads sized like lug nuts and elephant eyes. The common complaint of friends was that she tried too hard, made her tastes too obvious. Why not make it work for her? She put on a few mobster pinkie rings, squeezed on a pair of velvet pants of fairy-tale purple. Giving herself her final once-over examination in the full-length, she saw the shiny fabric hugging her tush and thighs in a way that, huzzah huzzah, did not make her want to vomit. The curved ingress of her skin, robust and pure, flashed in that space just beneath the bottom of her sweater.

Kira’s handwriting had been perfect as a polite child’s, and Alice followed her directions to an almost inhabitable stretch of Williamsburg, civilization only in the sense that it boasted its own twenty-four-hour deli. After she’d been buzzed in to the Uzbek funeral home, but before entering the mourners’ lobby, Alice took the instructed hard left and entered a long rectangular room, the first section of what would show itself to be a railroad flat.

Maybe ten people standing around, fig-leaf groups, their buzzing energetic, even hopeful. The only illumination was across the otherwise dark room, a blue glow from a pair of large terminal consoles — the types of screens you consulted in airports to find out whether you were going to make a connecting flight. Near the consoles, people were leaning over, writing. Soon it became apparent that to head into the railroad flat’s larger living space — where the real party was under way — you needed some sort of name tag. Maybe that was what people were writing? Alice started searching for a sticker when Kira shouted her name, and rushed over with her flatmate, a louche woman whose name Alice never remembered.

House music drifted in from the other room, the real party. Someone was showing his friends a name tag, receiving a scrum of laughter or applause. Though Alice was a bit intimidated by them, both women looked genuinely happy to see her: Kira’s arms opening for a big hug, the French woman following up, swooping in with an air kiss.

Maybe it was simple relief: Alice knew someone here. Maybe it was receiving any shred of kindness. But likely there was something else. These weren’t her best friends, but their openness made her glad to be here, glad to see them.

In the voice of a Vichy collaborator, the louche woman turned, shouting an order to someone: “Oh, do her. You must.”

Alice saw a stout man responding, approaching dutifully. Trailing behind him, not looking happy at all to be there, was another boy.

“You have a name tag?” Kira asked her. “If you’re not into doing the code, it’s fine. Just write a number.”

Before Alice had time to ask what she meant, Kira and the louche girl and the first guy were bantering in French, back and forth at a speed that Alice’s broken command of the language couldn’t follow.

“They’re supposed to ask if you want to learn to write your name in code.”

The other one. A bush of brown curly hair. He continued, “That’s the grand theme.”