Rich and Pretty

by Rumaan Alam

  It’s warm now but she can tell it won’t be all day, that in a couple of hours, wherever she is, probably walking back to the apartment, she’ll be glad she has the blazer on. At the moment, though, she feels damp. She’s heard about people injecting something into the armpits, that this can control your perspiration. Her legs are a bit sore from the morning’s class. She doesn’t get to class as often as she means to. She’s a little out of practice.

  Sarah walks east. The sun is bright. She worries her sunglasses might be leaving a tan line on her face. In only a few weeks, though, she’ll be yearning for the sun. She hates the winter. She’s been thinking of a getaway before the wedding, her and some friends—Amina, Fiona, Meredith, Lauren, of course. Florida, Mexico, maybe even into the Bahamas, somewhere that’s the right blend of tacky (tropical drinks in comically sized glasses, dance contests) and luxurious (a proper restaurant, somewhere to get a massage). She meant to mention this to Lauren last night, had thought Lauren might actually know just the right destination. She reads a lot of magazines. They had not, in the end, talked about the wedding as much as she’d hoped to. Their conversations lately do not seem to go the way that she imagines they will go.

  Lauren, whom she has always known and understood so well, suddenly seems a mystery. Things change, in life—of course they do. People grow up, become interested in new things, new people. Our way of being in the world is probably a lot less fixed than most people think. But Lauren is a part of her world, and she’s a part of Lauren’s. She knows this. The circumstances have changed over the years, of course—but that fact has remained. They’ve fought. They’ve grown apart. Those first few years, after living as roommates, it had been Lauren who wanted a place of her own and seemed to begrudge every dinner invitation (there was always some guy). Then, there had been Gabe, whom Lauren had put at the very center of her life. Sarah had been jealous, but that had passed. She continues to tender the invitations, to make the telephone calls, and Lauren continues to answer them. They have a good time together, and they need each other.

  She worries that on some level Lauren is jealous, and there is no way to ask her that, no way to suggest the possibility, nor is there anything that Sarah can do to undo it if that is the case. Thinking of Lauren makes her think of being a kid. It is a wonderful thing, to have a friend who knew you as a kid. It is the closest of course that she has to a sibling, a thought she doesn’t like to spend too much time on, because it reminds her that she had one, a sibling, once, a long time ago, but he is dead.

  She’d have to get over it, or through it, somehow. She’ll buy Lauren a gift, or take her out for another dinner, and reassure her that the wedding is going to be cool, is going to be their thing, not Lulu’s thing. Not white dresses and ornate flower arrangements, not guys in tuxedos and a string quartet. She hates that kind of wedding. She wants to have fun, and good food, and people she likes around her, and she wants them all to be happy. She knows that she can make Lauren understand this, and she knows that Lauren can help her make the wedding this way. It’s important, it’s imperative, really, because the only way to get Lulu to realize it’s not her party is to show her that it’s theirs.

  Sarah is excited to get married and annoyed that it seems that Lauren is embarrassed by her excitement about this. She feels embarrassed herself, like someone has caught her wearing something out of fashion, like she’s admitted to liking a movie everyone hates. She thought this was what people wanted: a happy ending. Do people not want happy endings after all?

  Lauren would be better off with a man. It sounds a stupidly unfeminist thing to say, but it’s what she thinks, not because she thinks a woman needs a man to be happy, not because she thinks a person who is single can’t be as happy as a person in a romantic relationship, but because she knows Lauren. She’s known her since she was a kid, she’s known her with boyfriends and without boyfriends and she knows which is the better Lauren. She knew her with Gabe, and the Lauren with Gabe was the best Lauren she’s known in the twenty years she’s known her. The Lauren with Gabe smiled, and laughed, and was never in any hurry, and always seemed so satisfied to be doing whatever she was doing. The Lauren with Gabe was a beat slower, almost like she was stoned—perhaps she was stoned, come to think of it. But he had a way of looking at her and Lauren had a way of being looked at by him: Sarah liked it. She liked him. Lauren pretends now that the whole thing meant less than it did, but Sarah is not fooled by this. She wants Lauren to be happy, and she wants her to be happy for her. She wants them to be happy at the same time.

  The blocks are long. She prefers to walk on quieter ones, away from the avenues, away from the buses. A nanny on a cell phone pushes a stroller past, the baby sound asleep. An old woman with terrible posture is waiting on the corner, an envelope in her hands. A man unloads a van, shouting companionably at a man from the corner grocery to which he is delivering whatever it is he has in those cardboard boxes. There’s a siren, somewhere, and a car alarm, and a helicopter, and a jackhammer, and from somewhere, some music she can only barely hear. She steps around a puddle. She stops to wait for the light.

  Getting things done makes Sarah so happy. She’s accomplished a lot: meeting with Carol, lunch with Fiona, picking up some sweaters, and now, stopping to see her mom. She’s solved what to do about the wedding bands and still has time this afternoon to send more e-mails, figure out what to do about dinner, maybe surprise Dan with mushroom risotto, the only thing she truly knows how to cook. A specialty of sorts. Just reviewing this list, these to-dos and dones, her pace quickens; she feels lighter, she feels smarter, she feels in control, she feels alive. She thinks about Dan, in his suit, in his office, somewhere blocks from where she is now, and smiles. She’ll call him in a bit, when she leaves her parents’ place.

  A section of the street on this block is cordoned off with yellow tape. Some men are milling about, repairing or rejiggering something, it’s not clear what. They’re from the gas company, she can tell by their uniforms. It takes a million people to make life run the way it should run. Everyone has their own part to play in it. This is what she loves about being in the city, living in the city—seeing this all unfold around her. She likes to know the part she plays in the whole system, in the whole universe.

  Her parents’ house is just here, on the left. Sarah climbs the steps, her keys are already out and in her hand, one of those actions your body performs before your brain even asks it to. She unlocks the door, gives it a shove, it’s a heavy door, prone to sticking. The door falls shut behind her, and the sounds, the alarm, the helicopter, the siren, the bus, they vanish. The house is quiet, though not silent. Footsteps from above.

  “My darling.” Her mother walks down the steps, head held like a queen’s, smiling. She has been expecting her. There’s a lot to be done.

  Chapter 5

  His name is Rob. Lauren figures it out pretty quickly—the office isn’t big, she’s not an idiot—but she pretends, still, that she’s not a hundred percent clear on who he is when Antonia mentions him.

  “You could ask Rob to pitch in on this one,” Antonia says, helpfully, she’s always very helpful. She’s not the boss, so she’s careful to never sound too bossy. Women learn this at an early age.

  “Rob?” Lauren makes a face that’s vaguely unpleasant, a little confused, like Antonia has lapsed into a foreign tongue.

  “The temp,” Antonia says. “He should have some time. And he’s got a lot of writing experience, so it shouldn’t take him long. You should divide the list and then edit each other, don’t you think?” Phrasing it as a question turns what is a command into something else.

  “Rob?” She says his name aloud to him like she has no idea if it’s his name.

  He swivels around in his seat. He’s smiling. He stands. “I’m Rob. We haven’t had a chance to meet.” He proffers his hand.

  “Lauren.” She shakes his hand firmly. She hates weak handshakes. A lot of women give pathetically weak handshakes, but she doesn’t believe the
re’s a correlation between gender and the strength of one’s hand. She thinks women are taught to fake this.

  “Nice to meet you finally,” he says. “Of course, I’ve seen you around.”

  “It’s a small office.” She nods. They’ve been nodding hello for weeks, but she’s avoided being alone with him in the kitchen or the elevator or at the printer, embarrassed by the depth and specificity of her initial fantasy about him, a fantasy so vivid in its mundane detail she can almost picture the holes in his socks. Thus far, they’ve only been together among crowds, and an introduction seemed beside the point. Maybe she doesn’t want to fuck him, after all; maybe she only wants to pretend. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

  “Antonia said you might have some time to help me on this project?”

  He sits back in his swiveling chair, a posture of insouciance. “Sure, no problem,” he says.

  “Great. It’s simple, you know they’re doing this site redesign, and we were thinking it’s a good time to update all the bios of all the authors.” She’s lapsing into the first person plural for reasons that are unclear.

  “Cool.” He seems amenable. He’d do anything she asked. He’s that sort of guy.

  “So just, like, update with new projects and new books or whatever they’ve been up to,” she says. It sounds idiotic, this explanation, but she can’t stop herself. “I can give you the actual update info, or e-mail addresses or whatever so you can kind of figure that out from them.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Well, there are thirty-eight bios, so we can just split it in half. I’ll do the first nineteen? That sound good?” Maybe she should be doing what Antonia does, saying things more nicely so it sounds more like a suggestion than a command.

  “That sounds good,” he says.

  She feels odd standing when he is sitting down. “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll e-mail you the details.”

  He picks up a pen, writes his address on the back of one of Kristen’s business cards. “This is me,” he says.

  She takes the card from his hand. “Awesome,” she says, overly enthusiastically.

  Everything makes Lauren think of something else. That morning, the weather, which was so perfect she’d gotten off at Thirty-Fourth Street, two stops early, eager to enjoy it before spending another day confined to the computer, made her think of California, that one trip to San Francisco, the shock of the clarity of the air, which she noticed the second she stepped out of the airport’s sliding glass doors. You couldn’t not notice. A work trip, that one, a rarity she wishes were not. She took her place in the steady flow of commuters in the knot of tunnels issuing from Penn Station, which she knew well enough to navigate without thinking, or while thinking about other matters, like the delicious liberty of San Francisco, working while away from the office she’d arrive at in a little less than half an hour, and the fact that, despite what she thinks has been her best effort, the working day still takes place there and there alone. She had imagined better: shared confidences with her bosses, invitations into important meetings in the glass-walled conference room, the chime of the computer reminding her about another lunch or conference call, being asked her opinion, being thanked in the acknowledgments by grateful authors. She used the exit on Thirty-Seventh Street, as she always did, and thoughts of California had given way to thoughts of Thanksgiving, of cranberry sauce, of awkward silence. How did this happen, she wondered, trying to retrace her thoughts, how did her mind leap from one thing to the other, and did this happen to everyone? Maybe it was the autumnal note in the air.

  Thanksgiving has always been at home, the place she still thinks of as home, though it hasn’t been that for years, her room transformed, anonymized, the perfect place for guests. She’s never been able to bring herself to spend a night there, sipping coffee after dinner, then proclaiming her own alertness, rushing out to catch the train. The pale purple carpet, which she’d chosen, had loved as a girl then loathed as a teen, had been ripped up, replaced by that wood flooring you buy at the hardware store then snap together like a child’s toy, her dad, who had always been handy, doing the work with her younger brother Adam over the course of one weekend. The twin bed had been replaced by a full, flanked now by matching nightstands with a box of tissues and a coaster: all the comforts. There was a framed poster, from when all those Monets came to the Met. She and her mom had played hooky, gone into the city to see them, a jaunt that seems out of character, now that she thinks about it.

  Thanksgiving is a Brooks family specialty. Her mother cooks amiably and ably, checking measurements against handwritten notes decades old. Her dad was a chemistry teacher, once upon a time, so he does the baking. “Baking is science,” he says. He wears an apron, though he doesn’t need one: He works with a scientist’s precision and doesn’t spill. Thanksgiving, he does pies, both pumpkin and pecan, and bread, a beautiful, warm thing, perfectly shaped and very soft inside. The day’s rites haven’t changed much over the course of her life; there are no grandparents left, so there are no longer grandparents in attendance; instead there’s Alexis, Ben’s girlfriend, but otherwise, it’s the same as it ever was. Lauren finds Alexis uninteresting. A little too pushy, a little too proprietary inside the house—it might not be Lauren’s house anymore, but she doesn’t want to think of it as Alexis’s. And at the previous Thanksgiving, Alexis had made a fuss about Lauren’s bag.

  “Ba-len-ci-ag-a.” The enunciation was meant to be indicate awe. “That must have cost a fortune.”

  “It was on sale,” Lauren lied. It had most certainly not been on sale, but she didn’t want to defend having spent fourteen hundred dollars on a bag to Alexis, and discussing having spent fourteen hundred dollars on a bag at the holiday table was as unthinkable as discussing anal sex or Israeli settlements. The Lauren who goes home to South Orange is not the same Lauren who shops at Barneys. The Lauren who goes home to South Orange is her parents’ only daughter, the smart one, the one with drive, the one off in the city living the sort of grown-up life parents want for their children. Since Lauren’s never entirely been certain what her parents’ image of that life entails, she glosses over most of the details. She’s shaved a third off her rent, in the telling, and her parents still think it an astronomical sum. Still, they never appeal to her to move to Jersey City or Hoboken. That would be a concession of some sort, they realize. That would be losing at whatever game it is their daughter is playing, and at least she’s in the game—better than poor Adam, with his deep voice and an adolescent reluctance to make eye contact, despite the fact that he’s fast approaching thirty. Adam’s bedroom decor has changed, too, but unfortunately, he’s still occupying the place. Anyway, her mother hasn’t mentioned law school in at least three years, which is a relief.

  Lauren pulls her chair closer to her desk, frowns at her computer, can’t remember what she was working on. She checks her e-mail. That’s what work is, that’s all work is, anymore, discussing the work to be done. She does the work, thinks about something else. She can do that: She’s been in this job long enough, unexpectedly long, if she’s being honest. She’d studied English with some vague idea that she’d work at a magazine, but began her career at a website, where a fellow alumna was a highly placed editor. After a year and a half of picking up her boss’s prescriptions and writing the occasional eighty-word movie review, she’d moved into book publishing, first as an assistant, later a junior editor, at one of the conglomerate’s more literary houses. Now: cookbooks. At least this imprint is profitable; a measure of job security.

  She’s got a piece of paper stuck inside her book and takes it out. It’s her running list. She has to return the bedsheets that she bought online because she buys everything online, but they feel terrible, and so she stuffed them back into the box they’d come in, borrowed the tape gun from one of the guys at the messenger center, and sealed it up, and the box is sitting under her desk, a persistent reminder that she’s out eighty-nine dollars until
she can stomach standing in line at the post office with the local sociopaths. That’s been on the list for a few days now. There was a problem with her taxes last year, damn the inexpensive Chinatown accountant she’d made the mistake of trusting, and there was a letter that she ignored, then another letter that seemed slightly more serious, then there was a bill for more than a thousand dollars, which just didn’t seem possible, seemed like a mistake, so she ignored that, then there was another, and another, and then there was something that said Warrant on it, which she knows is serious but still doesn’t want to deal with so there’s that, folded up carefully in its envelope back in her apartment waiting for her like a poltergeist. It’s her parents’ wedding anniversary next week, so there’s a reminder to buy a card! And she’s supposed to see Sarah; there’s a note to remind her to e-mail her to schedule a time, a drink—it’s been specified that this is a meeting that is to happen over a drink. Sarah wants to talk wedding strategy. For a crazy moment, Lauren considers taking the red pen from her black metal mesh cup of pens, the one with the red top that slides off so smoothly, a thick wet tip like a child’s marker. She’ll write Fuck Rob in tiny, neat print on her to-do list. She doesn’t do it, of course, but it’s returned, her initial sense that the man in their midst might be an enjoyable fuck. There’s just something in his unhesitant eye contact that appeals to her.