by Rumaan Alam
“My wedding is too small for Lulu,” Sarah says. “She should be planning an inauguration. A coronation.”
Lauren shakes her head. “Maybe she’s the one who should wear white.” They both laugh.
“So here’s the thing,” Sarah says. Again: Huck’s way of doing things. You need something, you make a call, you ask, though asking and telling are not so far apart. “I’m going to need your help.”
Lauren shrugs. “I’ll help. I’m helpful. First things first, are we going dress shopping and can I try one on, too, or will the salesgirl find this suspicious?”
“You’re the maid of honor; you tell me,” she says. “Anyway, we can pretend it’s a double wedding. We can pretend to be Mormon sisters.”
“I’m not married, are you sure it’s maid? God, that’s such a gay term.”
“Yeah. Maid is unmarried, I think. Matron is married.”
“Shit, you get married and suddenly you turn into a matron?” Lauren frowns.
“Sexy, don’t you think?”
“That’s almost reason enough for me to get married before you do. So I can be a matron of honor. This is my friend Lauren, she’s my matron of honor.”
“So you’re okay with this, right? Your maidly duties?”
“Don’t be dumb,” Lauren says. “You can count on me, I’m equal to the task, whatever. Licking envelopes. Filling bags with rice? Tying cans to your car?”
“I’m just making sure,” Sarah says. “We talked about this but then we never really got into it and now it’s fall already. And you can’t do rice anymore. It doesn’t actually make birds explode, but people think it does, and it’s a bummer to end a wedding with visions of bursting pigeons.”
“Wait, are you trying to tell me I am a bad matron of honor?” Lauren reaches across the table as though to take Sarah’s hand, but doesn’t. “Is this an intervention? Do you not want me as matron?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she says.
“You’re being the asshole. Just tell me what to do. I don’t know about matrimonial custom. Everything I know about weddings comes from sitcoms.”
Sarah remembers the years they lived together in the city. Sarah would handle the bills, and Lauren, in a gesture that approached, but did not achieve, the apologetic, would come home with hundreds of dollars of groceries—repayment not quite in kind. She’s not irresponsible, not exactly, she just has her way of doing these things, and it’s not Sarah’s way. She’s going to have to guide Lauren through this, which is fine, because Sarah wants only help, not to cede all responsibility. “Fine.” It comes out more meanly than she wants it to, so she says it again. “Fine. I guess to start, we should make a list. There’s the dress. There’s a party. Something bachelorettey, but not too, I guess. There’s the hair and makeup. The flowers, the cake. Photographer.”
“I didn’t realize this was going to be such a traditional wedding.”
“I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world to want some pretty flowers around the day I get married.”
“I’m going to help, relax,” Lauren says, suddenly a little nicer. “We’ll find a dress that’s not too poufy but still implies that your hymen is intact.”
The food arrives. Sarah doesn’t say anything to the waiter. Lauren says something, a thank-you maybe, it’s not clear. Sarah picks up her fork, assesses the plate. She’s not hungry, she wants to leave but wants another glass of wine, too. She had a feeling that Lauren might make her feel this way about the wedding, a wedding done in a way that Lauren would never do things.
When the check comes, Lauren pays. Sarah doesn’t care. When they leave, they kiss on the cheeks, in a way that’s somehow different from the way Lauren kissed the hostess when they arrived at the restaurant. There is a taxi outside, so Sarah doesn’t walk Lauren home, as she normally might.
Chapter 4
The building Sarah and Dan live in was built in the 1980s and has a corporate feel that she’s never much liked, but the apartment is a good one: both bedrooms roughly the same size, a closet in the foyer that’s big enough to hold a bike, a kitchen with real walls and a window so when he cooks (it’s mostly Dan who cooks), the whole apartment won’t smell like puttanesca or stir-fry. He’s got a pretty small repertoire. They order in a lot.
There’s a doorman, which makes life easier with things like dry cleaning and UPS, and there’s a rooftop garden, though they rarely take advantage of that amenity. When she saw the apartment, she fell in love with its straight solid floors; its modern, hefty windows; how you could see but not hear the traffic below. Her parents’ house is so rickety, so idiosyncratic, by contrast. Windows swollen by rain and impossible to open more than an inch; in her father’s study, the chair, on casters, forever sliding across the crooked floor. Who needs character? She wanted comfort. So they bought the place, two years ago. They agreed they wanted two bedrooms, said it was for out-of-town guests, but in truth it was because eventually they’d have a baby, though they never said as much out loud, which seemed bad form, or tempting fate.
Dan is on the couch. The television is on, but he’s not paying attention. He’s looking at his phone, but also has his computer on his lap, and the newspaper crumpled up on the couch beside him. He’s a multitasker. It’s how his mind works—quickly, enthusiastically. His general knowledge of the universe always surprises her. He can talk to almost anyone about almost anything. The only thing people talk about anymore is what they do for a living, but he’s comfortable talking about people’s careers no matter what they do: doctors, real estate agents, financial analysts, computer people, journalists, publicists, cabdrivers, people who do things with art. A polymath, maybe that’s the word. He skipped the tenth grade.
“You’re home,” he says. He doesn’t get up.
“I’m home.” There’s a chair by the door where Sarah always puts her bag when she comes in. There’s mail on the table: junk, and a magazine she’s not interested in reading. “Did you have dinner?”
“Bethany ordered from that Korean place. I just got home.”
“Late night.” She slips out of her shoes, shoves the newspaper aside, and sits, their bodies barely touching.
“Hi.” He looks away from his phone, kisses her on the cheek. “Do you believe this thing with this congressman?”
She hasn’t been following the story. Staying on top of the news is her father’s job, one she’s never wanted for herself. She makes a noncommittal mm hmm. The way spouses communicate. They are as good as married already. It’s been a long time.
“Our exhibitionist representative is distracting me from my work.” He puts the phone down and turns his attention back to the computer. The television is showing a commercial for Boeing. The music is stirring. “You can turn that down.”
He knows she doesn’t like the television to be as loud as he does. She wonders sometimes if he’s a little bit deaf. She turns it down.
“Where were you again?” He’s typing as he talks.
“Dinner with Lauren. That place near her place, you know the one she likes?”
“Something ampersand something? That place is pretty good. I liked whatever I ate that time we went there. Skate, I think? Purple potatoes. I remember purple potatoes.” He has an amazing memory. She loves that he is brilliant, that it’s true brilliance because it’s so effortless. He could never set out to impress someone because it would not be his nature. He impresses simply by being. Women like being on the arm of a beautiful man, but she prefers being on the arm of an impressive man. Dan is the kind of man you would want to have near you at a party.
“What’s happening at work?”
“Same as usual,” he says. He’s not unhappy. Dan never seems to find his work especially stressful. “Everything had to happen yesterday. It’s almost the weekend, people are going to be away. No one can handle anything except Bethany and me. It would be funny if it weren’t always the way these things happen.”
Sarah is not the kind of woman to be jealous of his r
eliance on another woman and is proud of that fact. Besides which, it would never occur to Dan to cheat on her. He’s too busy.
Dan went to Penn with her friend Meredith’s brother Ben. The computer of whoever decides these things selected them to be roommates and did a good job of it: They are great friends still, as she is still good friends with Meredith, whom she’s known since the sixth grade, when Meredith, Ben, and their parents moved to the city from suburban Maryland. Ten years ago, she and Meredith had to drop by a bar in the West Village to leave her keys with her brother, in town for the night and crashing at her place. He was out having drinks with his college roommate, Dan. It wasn’t a setup, an elaborate ruse, though in retrospect it could have seemed like one, and the fact that Meredith was responsible for her knowing Dan at all has forever colored Sarah’s opinion of her friend.
Sarah has a lot of friends. She knows a lot of people. It is important to her to always know and understand precisely how she feels about everyone in her orbit. She maintains a complex ranking system, tracking the last time she’s seen someone, the last time they’ve spoken, the conversation they had, how they felt about each other, how long she’s known someone generally, whether they are similar enough to talk politics, whether she likes their spouse, whether their job or marriage or whatever has changed who they are, fundamentally. This is how she thinks. If she knows someone, if someone is a friend, she has a sense of what that friendship is like, what it’s been historically, what it is now. This helps her understand who other people are. It helps her understand who she is.
She sighs without realizing it.
“What’s tomorrow?” Dan asks.
“Tomorrow, um, Friday. Oh, tomorrow there’s a meeting of that group that Carol is trying to get off the ground.”
“Which one is that?”
“Which group or which Carol?”
“No, Carol Abbott, right, Lulu’s friend? That I remember, but tell me what the group does?”
“Doesn’t do. Will do. Math literacy. Early childhood. Fostering a love of numbers. Minorities, girls particularly.”
“Worthy.” He nods. “Definitely worthy.”
“It’s early stages still; I think it’s just Carol and a partner and maybe an intern, someone at Columbia? Her husband teaches there. I think that’s right. Anyway, it’s about the money at the moment. She thinks I might be able to help her with some of the grant writing.”
“Of course you can,” Dan says. “You’re brilliant.”
“I’m not brilliant.” She yawns. “Should we have a drink?”
“I’d have a drink,” he says.
There’s a bottle of wine in the door of the fridge, stopped up with one of those rubberized corks. It’s so cold it doesn’t actually taste like anything, but it’s the sensation of cold, the comfort of holding a glass and curling up next to Dan, also holding a glass, that she wants now, more than the taste of wine on her tongue.
Friday, Sarah wakes early. There’s a spin class at the gym down the block—the gym down the block is one of the reasons she chose the apartment in the ugly 1980s building—so she does that, then walks home, eats yogurt and frozen blueberries while half watching the morning talk shows, a segment on the season’s new beauty trends, an interview with an actress who’s adopted a baby from Burundi. She checks her e-mail: a message from Willa, a wedding planner who’s come highly recommended by a friend of Lulu’s; a reminder from the store about a staff meeting next week; an invitation from her friend Lexi for brunch Sunday at her new place out in Brooklyn.
She showers. Her hair is a disaster after the class so she has to shampoo it, so then she has to blow it dry, because if she doesn’t it’ll be fine as long as it’s wet, but once it no longer is it’ll dry into a preposterous tangle that’s neither curl nor not curl. Her hair must be tamed. So she does that, dries and brushes it into submission. Better. She brushes her teeth, reminds herself to make a dentist’s appointment, because she’s been wondering about whitening. She fumbles about with lipstick and cream and perfume and a little bit of color on the lids of her eyes. She has to make the effort. It’s part of being an adult.
She puts on a suit and feels ridiculous, changes into jeans and feels less so, but keeps the blazer: happy medium. The buttons on the blazer hit in the wrong places: She buttons, unbuttons, rebuttons—office harlot or Orthodox Jew. She decides devout is better. She puts on her watch, puts on a necklace, then another, one a hammered silver pendant with an S on it, the other a simple piece of turquoise, unpolished, a gift from Lulu. She puts on shoes, they’re too high, so she puts on another pair. She considers herself in the mirror screwed into the back of the bathroom door. Fine.
The meeting is at Carol’s apartment uptown. She shouldn’t have taken her time with her e-mail. It’s not that she’s late, she’s just not early, and she dislikes this feeling that the commute can only take as long as it normally takes, that there’s no cushion, to account for the unplanned-for ambulance, the impromptu stop at Starbucks. Sarah checks her phone in the cab, more e-mails, reminders about this or that. She has a mechanical pencil and a little notebook and makes more notes. She remembers the things she needs to do better when she writes them down. She needs to e-mail her friend Stephanie, an art director at a big luxury goods maker, about a letterpress that she’s used, because she needs to get save-the-date cards and invitations. Someone told her you can order custom stamps from the post office now, printed with anything you want. There’s a picture of her and Dan from their trip to Istanbul that she’s always loved and thought would be a cute stamp, but she needs to see what the dimensions of the stamp are to be sure.
The meeting is somewhat productive. Carol is joined by an unpleasant graduate student named Eliza who has a meandering, exhausting way of speaking without ever making a point. They drink tea and talk about some of the city’s existing educational enrichment programs, most of which Sarah researched a few nights before, computer on her lap, on the couch next to Dan, computer on his lap. Sarah mentions a few organizations she thinks might be helpful, or that she thinks are good at what they do.
“See,” Carol says. “I knew you’d know. I knew she’d know. You’re a wonder.”
They talk for ninety minutes, eventually ignoring Eliza’s long-winded tangents, then Carol has to leave for a meeting at her son’s school, and Sarah has to leave for lunch with Fiona. She’s known Fiona since college, though Fiona had transferred away to finish her education at Parsons. Now she’s a jewelry designer, which is unsurprising, as she looks like the kind of woman who makes a living designing jewelry: aquiline in the very truest sense, with that nose and arms somehow very like wings, blond hair at once bedraggled and tidy, a penchant for dramatic dresses and statement fashion—a turban, a fur shrug, rings of every color on every single finger. Fiona works for a gigantic apparel maker, designing complicated multicolored beaded necklaces, faux-pearl and feather adornments for the hair. All one size fits all, assembled in Bangladesh then shipped to stores in this country where they sell for $98. Sarah wants to ask her to make their wedding bands.
Fiona has chosen a restaurant that’s not far from her office—she can only spare an hour, an actual hour, it’s that kind of office—and, when Sarah arrives, is perched on a bench in front of the restaurant. She wears a simple white button-down, but the buttons all hit in just the right place, the top one undone, so she looks like Katharine Hepburn instead of a woman trying to appear sexy. She stands, and Sarah is surprised again at how tall she is, how lovely.
Fiona somehow looks English, which she is. “Sarah,” she says. Her accent is wonderful.
“Hi!” Sarah reaches up, deposits a kiss on each cheek.
Lunch is a departure—normally, when she sees Fiona, it’s at a party. Fiona is a woman who’s reliably invited to a certain kind of party and remembers to extend that invitation to Sarah, at least a few times a year. A post–fashion show celebration for a mutual friend, also from college, now well known enough that her initials are embroidere
d on the tags inside asymmetrical dresses sold at Barneys; a genteel fund-raiser for an organization that plants trees in Costa Rica. Sarah relishes these invitations. Sometimes it’s fun to do something so frivolous, so glamorous, and Fiona moves through such parties with an ease that makes Sarah, too, feel at home. With Fiona, she feels like a different version of herself. She knows it’s silly, and knows it’s pretend, but she enjoys it.
There’s small talk about the men in their lives, about the rigors of work, but the clock is ticking—that hour, Fiona was clear about that hour—so Sarah broaches the subject of the wedding bands with her usual forthrightness.
No sooner are the words out of her mouth than Fiona claps, actually claps, once, twice, three times. “Of course, my God, what an honor, I can’t believe you’d ask,” she says.
“Really?” Relief. “I was worried you’d be insulted.”
“Insulted, don’t be silly.”
“Obviously, I’ll pay you, for your time, for the materials, for everything. I would just love to have something special, something unique.”
Fiona waves this away. “I know just what to do. Rose gold for you, a simple silver for Dan. Or platinum? Maybe platinum.” Fiona produces a small tape measure from her bag, wraps it around Sarah’s finger.
“I can’t tell you what this means to me,” Sarah says.
“We’re going to make you something beautiful,” Fiona says.
Because Fiona’s office is not far from her parents’ place Sarah decides to stop there. Papa’s gone but her mother is sure to be there, and there’s a lot they need to talk about, not to mention that if she hears that Sarah had lunch nearby and didn’t come over there will be a whole discussion, one that’s easier to avoid. She walks Fiona back to the office, they kiss their good-byes and say their let’s do it again soons.
Downstairs from her office is an outpost of the chain for which Fiona works. Sarah goes in, browses. The music is just the right volume, the salesgirls just the right amount of pushy. There’s a table of simple cashmere sweaters in several colors that feel like fall—burnt orange, saffron, chocolate, moss. She chooses two; they’re the perfect, simple weight, and they’re cheaper if you buy two, actually. She hates taking a big paper shopping bag. She always carries a little cotton tote, folded up into nothing, in her bag, so she takes this out and the salesgirl deposits her sweaters, wrapped in tissue paper, sealed with a sticker, into it. The bag weighs nothing because the sweaters weigh nothing.
