Chapter Three
THREE
Wednesday morning Alex switches on her bathroom light. Outside on her apartment’s narrow window ledge two pigeons coo and shift, swiveling their little orange eyes toward her. “Hi, Mildred. Morning, Percy,” she addresses the pair with the names she’s given them as she reaches into her shower and turns the water on. They ruffle their feathers in response. Alex knows a lot of people think of pigeons as an unsanitary nuisance, but she can’t help but feel impressed by their resilience. They’re just trying to get by like the rest of us.
She puts on a podcast on her phone. She’s chosen one called Reaching . It is hosted by an expensive-looking blond woman who interviews other women with aspirational jobs. It will be the perfect accompaniment to her shower. She has a wide variety downloaded to fill in the silence of living alone. Her only constraints are that nothing be too complicated or depressing. Too much quiet can be damaging, can lead to spiraling thoughts and unproductive days. Alex can’t afford to dig herself out from that, so Reaching it is. She props her phone on the edge of the sink and steps out of her pajama shorts, leaving them on the tiled floor as she gets into the shower.
The soothing voice of the podcast host penetrates the steam. She is interviewing a woman who started a bespoke line of candles named after herself. It is the kind of vanity business that suggests the woman already had plenty of money.
“I gua sha first thing every morning,” the woman is saying. “Lymphatic drainage is key to my well-being. Then lemon water, an oat milk latte, these are my nonnegotiables. They truly make me feel grounded and give me a sense of inner joy.” Her voice sounds thin and fragile. Alex frowns. There is something between the lines that she is hiding. And it isn’t just the obvious fact that no amount of lemon water can make a person truly happy.
Alex shampoos her hair, thinking ahead to her own day. On today’s docket: Colesna, a stomach pill to offset the damage from one of the company’s other medications. From there the day yawns and then contracts. An afternoon snack, rarely a full dinner. Some popcorn from a bag, kettle corn if the corner deli has it. Maybe a few cookies or a bowl of noodles. Always a glass of wine, maybe two, usually three. And then to sleep, though it often doesn’t come easily. Her days are always the same. A patchwork of order she’s created for herself out of the nothing she came to New York with seven years ago.
“And would you say you feel content now?” the host asks her guest. Alex closes her eyes and lets the water trickle down over her face, soaking her hair. No.
The woman on the podcast pauses before she replies. “It’s taken me a long time to get to this place of peace and stillness in my life, but yes, through my daily practice I am happier now than I’ve ever been.” There is a slight tremor in the woman’s voice. “I just have to stay consistent. That’s the key.” It’s fear, Alex realizes. The rich candlemaker is afraid of something. But what could she possibly have to be scared of?
Alex picks up her body wash. It’s in a glass bottle with a gold top. Enjoy the transportive scent of Ylang-Ylang , the packaging says. She’d bought it on a whim while wandering around the Upper East Side. Cheaper than therapy, and just as good , she likes to lie to herself about her daily walks. In her seven years in the city, Alex has walked nearly every block of Manhattan, expanding her circle every week. There are places she’s been only once and others so well-trod she can walk them without thinking. Walking might not be as good as psychotherapy, but it is the only way to feel like she is still moving forward in her life, even if she isn’t.
She isn’t sure what had possessed her to go into the store and buy the fancy body wash. Maybe it was the faint smells of rose and sandalwood wafting out onto the sidewalk. But more likely it was a group of women inside. They were laughing and chatty, making each other sniff various perfumes until the whole store was a cloud of essential oils and musks. It reminded Alex of who she thought she would be at thirty. A businesswoman with a gaggle of friends. Or perhaps she might have been one of the other women, the one pushing a bassinet up Madison Avenue and serenely gazing into shop windows with a Ralph’s coffee in hand, her Celine sunglasses pushed back onto her head. The kind of woman who stopped in on a whim to do whatever she liked, who had a sort of lightness to her as if nothing terrible had touched or could touch her. Alex had felt almost like crying as she looked around the shop at these other women whose full and beautiful lives she might have had if only things hadn’t gone so horribly and irrevocably wrong.
And so, she’d gone into the store and bought a fancy body wash. To be near them. Alex had imagined the scent of it making her calm and content. Instead, the bottle sits on the side of the old porcelain tub, and it just makes the rest of her shower look shabby. It serves to remind her of things she wanted for herself that never came to pass, of how far she still has to go. She swallows back images of her old self before they overwhelm her and pours some of the precious liquid into her hand, knowing she can never fully join them, the rich podcasters or the carefree women who shop on Madison Avenue.
When she gets out of the shower the pigeons are gone. She wraps herself up in a towel. The podcast is nearly over. The women’s conversation has moved on to exercise routines and food. “I like to nourish my body with chia pudding,” the woman says. Alex can practically hear the thinness in her voice. “Sometimes I’ll put a touch of cinnamon in for sweetness.” It is her admission to this sad indulgence that makes Alex suddenly understand that the woman’s major fear is of losing control. Of failing. Before she has time to explore that thought further, the podcast is interrupted by her phone’s chiming ringtone.
She steps across the bathroom in her towel to look down at an unfamiliar New York number lighting up her screen. She stares at the phone as it vibrates on the vanity. Alex does not answer unfamiliar numbers. It is one of the rules she has for herself, one of the long list of things she does every day to keep herself safe. But at the last second, something makes her snap the phone up and drag her finger across the answer button.
“Hello?” Alex says suspiciously.
“Hi, I’m looking for Alex Marks?” a man’s voice replies. Alex’s stomach twists at the sound of her name in a stranger’s voice.
“Yes?” she says, her mouth dry.
“Hi, Alex. This is Jonathan Amin. I work as an assistant to Howard Demetri, editor in chief at the New York Herald .” He sounds crisp, efficient, slightly irritated.
Her heart thumps. The application. She leaves the bathroom wrapped in her towel and crosses her small living room to the table where Raymond’s copy of the Daily is still folded open to the article about Francis.
“Alex?” The voice is impatient. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, sorry. I’m here.” Droplets of water from her hair spatter onto the photo of Francis Keen.
“Good. Howard was very impressed with your sample letters. He’d like to schedule an interview with you to discuss your application,” Jonathan says. Alex’s mouth opens and closes. She yanks the phone away from her face to reaffirm the phone number. She’ll google it later to make sure no one is fucking with her. Howard Demetri, editor in chief of the most respected newspaper in the country for over three decades, was impressed with her?
“In person?” she says, quickly bringing the phone back to her ear.
“Yes, that is how Howard likes to do things.” Of course, the Howard Demetri isn’t going to have some sort of sad virtual meeting. There is no way he could ever appear as a talking head in a square on her desktop.
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry. When should I come in?”
“Thursday. He has nine a.m. available.”
She scrambles to process this information. “Yeah, like this Thursday? Tomorrow? I can do that.” She writes the numeral 9 with a blue pen on the margin of the newspaper and circles it several times.
“Thursday would be tomorrow, you are correct,” he says impatiently. “Bring your ID to the front entrance and the doorman will give you a pass. Just give him your name and say you are coming to see Howard Demetri. They’ll send you up to the forty-ninth floor.”
“Okay, I’ll be there,” Alex says.
“Great.”
“This is very exciting,” she adds, cringing at her unconcealed enthusiasm.
“I’m sure,” Jonathan replies, clearly disgusted.
Alex hangs up the phone and continues to stare down at the newspaper, watching as the drops of water form dark crimps in the page around Francis’s face. She remains rooted in place, her skin prickling under the thin towel despite the sun beating in through her apartment window.
Standing there, Alex feels something beginning to shift, gears and cranks turning that haven’t been used in years. Answering the letters was the first unwitting step toward the change. Or maybe it started even before that, with the impulsive purchase of the ylang-ylang body wash. To even have put herself out there like that Alex knows she must have wanted it on some level, that part of her has been ready and waiting for the right moment to make her grand reentry into the world.
Before she can tamp it down, she feels a hum of excitement pumping from her heart into her extremities. It has been so long since she’s experienced this sensation that she almost doesn’t recognize it. She clutches the towel to her, a smile slowly spreading across her face. All she knows is that for the first time in many years she feels on the cusp of something momentous. She only hopes that this time she can keep herself safe.