by Rumaan Alam
The taxi is taking too long. The driver is hesitant. He seems irritatingly uncertain. Though she’s lived here all her life, except the sojourn of college, she can’t direct him. She’s never paid attention, not to the way the roads unfold. She can drive from the garage where her parents keep their beat-up old car to their house in Connecticut without thinking, but she can’t remember which avenues run uptown and which down. She says nothing. She looks at her phone. She looks out the window. There’s been a study, recently, about how often parents look at their phones, about the phones representing some kind of competition to the children, about how addicted we all are to being connected to each other, to being able to access the sum of human knowledge whenever we need it. She’s trying to look at her phone less, since reading that, but it’s true that the things are addictive.
She finds the container of cashews in her bag, chews one thoughtfully. This trying on of dresses: hard to square with her principles, but it makes her want to eat less. She wants to look beautiful. People will remember them as they were on their wedding day, and she wants to be remembered as having looked perfect. It matters, and if it’s stupid that it matters, well, then so be it.
Sarah thinks again of that photograph, Lulu in her gown, less beatific than stunned. They’d dressed the part but in fact, they’d eloped, the two of them, visited a federal judge of Huck’s acquaintance. Was Lulu sad, Sarah wonders, marrying a man her parents had never met, thousands of miles from home? Does it matter how you get married or only that you do? She hasn’t thought yet about who will actually pronounce them husband and wife, who will represent the state, the only god she and Dan actually believe in. She’s been to those weddings where a friend of the couple did the thing, earning his credentials online, which surely illustrated something important about religion. Their love is important, but she can’t think of anything that approaches the sacred in her life, the sort of spirit that inspired great cathedrals, mass hallucinations, civil wars. Their wedding, however it will be, it feels smaller than God. A church is out of the question.
She actually shakes her head as though to dispel the thoughts of the divine. There doesn’t seem to be time for that now. It’s probably an intellectual response to the sheer stupidity of shopping, a sad state because for a long time shopping was all she ever wanted to do. She and Lauren, nosing around the boutiques near Washington Square Park, which were for college kids and therefore irresistible, considering a nose piercing, a pair of thick-soled boots, glittery nail polish, or she and Lauren, uptown at the sort of store Lulu liked, considering a miniature leather backpack, a flowery cotton dress by Betsey Johnson, that sexy unisex perfume in the smooth glass flask. The trying on of dresses, even then, was no fun, not if they were both trying the same thing, because it was clear on whom it would look better. But the Longchamp bag, the dangly earrings, the perfume—with those, it didn’t matter who looked better, and Sarah was the one with the allowance, and later, the credit card. Lauren had saved for that Kate Spade wallet, but she just had less to keep inside it.
Sarah needs that Lauren, the old Lauren. They held each other in mutual thrall. Everything was exciting. Now, so little seems to be, or at least, so little seems to be to Lauren. Sarah doesn’t want this to be true of herself; she doesn’t want to be a cynic. She fiddles with the button to open the window. A bit more breeze might be nice. Yes, the dress thing, it’s humiliating, but she’s going to have to find a way to get excited about it. She’s hungry, but the fresh, bracing air on her face might waken her, stir her, change her. She looks at her phone.
Chapter 7
The celebrity chef is crying into the telephone. These are her plaints: computer trouble, moving to a new office, the death of her dog, the firing of an embezzling assistant. This is above Lauren’s pay grade. This calls for more than she, with that “associate” lodged firmly before her title, is able to affect, to mitigate. What can she say to this but “There, there.” She’s no confessor. She cannot prescribe. She can only listen, listen as the litany turns to tirade. The celebrity chef, she is angry: disappointed by technology, dismayed by the relocation, betrayed by the pettiness of thievery and the grim fact of death itself.
“That’s terrible” is what Lauren manages. This is what it’s come to. She has ideas, chefs she’d love to work with, writers whose work she admires, themes that might be interesting books, events that might actually generate some press attention, but here she is, cooing to a stranger over the telephone.
The woman continues, her impeccable Cuban accent cracking, a coarse edge peeking through, a frayed hem, a shame. It makes Lauren like her better. It makes her remember their impolitic teasing, as kids, about Sarah’s being Latina. It’s there, lodged at the very heart of her name—Sarah Rojas Thomas, corruption or compromise of Venezuelan convention, Lulu’s maiden name as her middle name—and she and their other friends, idiots every one of them, had thought it hilarious, at certain moments, to imply that Sarah was the maid. They lacked the imagination to think of other occupations for a woman named Rojas.
The upshot is: The book is going to be late. Lauren knows this the second she spies the 305 area code on the telephone’s caller ID. This is Miranda’s territory, but Miranda is not here, and the celebrity chef is afraid of Miranda anyway. She knows Miranda outranks Lauren, she knows there’s nothing Lauren can do to her, so it’s Lauren she’s decided to tell. She’s canny, you don’t get to be a celebrity without being canny.
Lauren nods and fiddles on the computer and wills her mind away from her body, wills herself away from this conversation. It ends, eventually, as conversations must. The celebrity chef a little less unhappy, barely disguising her relief at having jettisoned at least one of her many responsibilities—the contractual obligation to deliver a manuscript by the end of the following month. She has gotten her way, as she no doubt knew she would.
The shadow of this conversation stretches across the rest of the day. It gives Lauren that dry feeling in her mouth, that quickening of the breath that makes her feel she’s somehow been at fault, when of course she’s not. This is true power, she thinks, walking home, exorcising the negative thoughts in the bracing air, breathing in the cool, exhaling the stress, to take your problem and make it someone else’s, to slip out of the bonds of your promise, your responsibility, and—nothing. No consequence. This is celebrity. She has known celebrity, in her work, of course; this chef, she’s not the only one. But beyond work, there was that guy from college, a year younger, but they knew him pretty well, who won an Oscar shortly after graduation. Her high school had been lousy with the children of celebrities, and some of them are celebrated now, for owning art galleries on the Lower East Side or throwing charity events or being beautiful and out and about. And of course, there are Huck and Lulu, not celebrities the way some of their fellow students’ parents had been—not models or television stars, rock musicians or English actors who appeared on Broadway—but Huck and Lulu were known. If not celebrities, celebrated. They had nothing to do with what was happening currently in the culture, were not a momentary apparition, the ingénue who graces one magazine cover then vanishes. They endured. Huck endured, anyway, and Lulu sat by his side and was mentioned in the same breath, always with the same parentheticals, the same formulation: “his wife, Lulu, the well-regarded singer.” Well-regarded, to be regarded at all: the American dream.
Huck has never been a celebrity to Lauren; she met him at eleven, and few children that age are conversant in international diplomacy. She remembers very well that first visit to that house—the photographs of Huck, at every age but always, puzzlingly, the same: glasses, hair of varying degrees of thickness and grayness, cigarettes, jackets with strangely wide lapels, smiling comfortably, gripping the hands of Ford and Mrs. Ford, Reagan and the wisp of Mrs. Reagan, Bush and Mrs. Bush, then another Bush and another Mrs. Bush, and Tony Blair, and Mitterrand, and Thatcher, and Powell, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney, that whole lot. Who was this man, her friend from school’s father? It had never
before occurred to her that a friend from school’s father could be a subject worthy of further thought.
Lauren doesn’t normally consider Huck a role model but she has to admit: He’d never miss a deadline, would never call and badger an associate editor into accepting the fact that his promised manuscript would be arriving late, and, well, too bad. True, it can’t take much effort to turn out the garbage he writes, which is less artful than a charming anecdote about and instructions for a beloved ropa vieja. No matter. Real power never apologizes. The celebrity chef is not sorry about her deadline any more than Huck is about Iraq.
It’s that country—the skirmish, the quagmire, any noun seems more appropriate than war—that showed her who Huck really is. She’d known, all along, that he was important, but they’d been insulated by their youth and unbothered by whatever it was Sarah’s papa was writing up in his fourth-floor office. The summer after graduation, at a smallish gathering at Huck and Lulu’s (twenty guests instead of a hundred, sitting around the dining table instead of milling about with plates), Lauren met the man who’d run Iraq on behalf of—well, whom, exactly was not quite clear. Everyone knew, of course, about the looting, the disbanding of the army, the banishment of the political class, the missing millions: It had all, every last bit of it, been a disaster, though if you’d happened in, helped yourself to some of the spinach samosas, which were delicious, you’d never have known it. Handshakes and warm embraces, smiles and Hermès ties, updates on the kids, in law school, at Goldman, and promises to meet up in the Vineyard later that summer.
Her parents had voted for Reagan once upon a time, but her father was vocal on the many children who had, in fact, been left behind. Talk of the war was everywhere, that year they finished school. The subject had come up, to her great dismay, at Poughkeepsie’s best restaurant, reservations secured two months in advance, the whole clan gathered to celebrate graduation. Her mother had insisted Lauren invite Sarah, who remained focused on her pappardelle while her dad railed against the administration. They did not know—or if they did, they did not learn it from Lauren—the extent of Huck’s reach in the world. And Lauren had learned, from watching Sarah, that it was best to simply pretend that current events had nothing to do with real life.
That was, in essence, the takeaway from her expensive education: You are either the sort of person who shapes society, or the sort of person whose life is affected by the shape of society. She wonders if that’s what her parents had hoped for when they decided to ship Lauren off to school in the city. The idea came from the Doctors Khan (Mohammad and Anjali) whose combined practice her mother had been managing for almost two decades now. The Doctors Khan represented the very highest standard of being in her family’s household: as hardworking as they were well educated, sensible despite their financial security (they drove to work together, a Toyota station wagon, used), and savvy in the ways of a culture to which they hadn’t even been born. It was Anjali Khan who had explained to a dumbfounded Bella Brooks that enough parents were willing and able to pay the full near-thirty-thousand-dollar tuition that ample money was left over to ease the burden for those parents who couldn’t swing it. Bella, Dr. Khan thought, owed it to herself and her children to look into this.
Mike and Bella Brooks deemed the small indignities of life as a scholarship parent worth what was gained in exchange: visions of impressive extracurriculars (an archaeological dig over spring break!), college acceptances, graduate degrees, financial liberty. Before the sixth grade, Lauren had delivered straight As across the board, a matter more of competence than brilliance, though no one would figure that out for many years. So she went to the school, the special school, the well-endowed school, the sought-after school, and came out six years later as much a stranger to her parents as Grace Chang was to her Fujianese fishmonger father and seamstress mother. Grace had gone off to Harvard, naturally, then on to Columbia, and worked in the city government. Lauren has seen her on television.
The cumulative effect of the cool air and a longer-than-necessary walk: She’s cold. It’s one of those nights Lauren wishes she could take her brain from her skull and rinse it off. The day—its complaints, the celebrity chef—sticks to her, and there’s the attendant guilt—if this job is so silly, so meaningless, how can she let it affect her this deeply? What did her own mother do, when she was Lauren’s age, with a toddler and newborn at home? Did she sigh this same kind of sigh, did her shoulders slump in precisely this manner? Lauren looks like her mother, and they share mannerisms, as happens in families; she’s recognized it, the way they say hello on the telephone, the way they cross their legs, the way they rub the backs of their heads when they’re tired, and there’s probably more. It’s hard to observe yourself. She showers, the warmth returns slowly to her body, and she tries to picture her mother, imagine what she’s doing at that very moment, Wednesday, a little after 7:30, October well on its way, the air cool and dry. Is she in the house, reheating something for dinner? Is she at the Khans’ office, catching up on paperwork? Is she stuck in traffic, is she auditioning for the next show at the community theater, is she volunteering and delivering meals to shut-ins, is she grocery shopping, is she taking the car in to be serviced, is she on her way to the dentist, did she stop at the library after work, is she meeting Lauren’s dad for an early movie? Lauren has no idea.
Karen is Lauren’s only work friend. The rest of them are fine. Antonia is sweet, if odd, forever bringing up subjects unrelated to anything being discussed (her mother’s foot surgery, the city council elections, the new security guard in the lobby). Dallie talks too much, but generally means well. Hannah is not much younger but somehow of a wholly different generation, and Lauren can never relate to the things she talks about (late nights out, social media, bands Lauren’s never heard of). Kristen has a strange habit of speaking too often in question form, not a terrible character flaw but one Lauren finds very irritating, though she’s inclined now to think charitably about Kristen because it’s her absence that has made possible Rob’s presence. Mary-Beth and Miranda are her bosses, and therefore can’t be considered friends, though she’s fond of them both. Mary-Beth is unglamorous in a way that’s almost glamorous: She wears black and navy blue together, walks around with a pencil behind her ear, has hair streaked with silver. Her not caring makes Mary-Beth seem somehow chic. The office, like every sample group of humanity, breaks into its smaller components. The art directors are friendly with the photo department. The bosses go out to lunches together.
Lauren and Karen are stuck firmly in the middle of this together, a marriage of convenience, though as luck has it, she quite likes Karen and the feeling is mutual. Karen is two years younger than Lauren but acts a decade older. She evinces weariness with the world, vocally dismissing whatever annoys her: the foibles of the bosses, the fawnings of their underlings. Lauren is aware that she’s two years too old to be in the middle of this totem pole—too old for that “Associate”—and that the same weariness, coming from her, feels sometimes like bitterness.
She works at keeping that bitterness at bay. She never wanted this particular turn in her career, so she can’t begrudge not having climbed higher. It would be dishonest. She’s still planning, still plotting, still keeping her options open, though to what end she’s not entirely sure, not yet anyway. She has options but she also has insurance, and the occasional Balenciaga bag.
“This is good, but this isn’t a meal.” Karen is quite expert with her chopsticks. A new restaurant, an all-dumpling menu, and she’s not wrong: The food is fine but unsatisfying.
Lauren knows it’s small of her but she doesn’t like going to a restaurant alone. She supposes this is a measure of her failure as a human being, a certain kind of human being, an evolved human being. How can you claim comfort with yourself if you can’t sit and read The New Yorker while dunking something into a tiny plastic cup of inky soy sauce? You can’t. Maybe she can’t. But don’t we all have those memories of hesitating, plastic tray in hands, while scannin
g the cafeteria for a friendly face, and aren’t friendly faces hard to come by when you’re eleven? She’s always needed a friend. At eleven, at the new school, she was panicked. Who wouldn’t be? The teachers didn’t make her stand up in front of the class and say something about herself, nothing like that, teachers don’t actually do that, do they? But eleven is old enough to understand a lot more than some might think, and Lauren understood, eyeing the queue of taxis and town cars that morning, that things were going to be different.
Her mother had held her hand, then it was her mother who let go of it, her mother who understood she needed to not risk coloring her classmates’ perceptions of her daughter. There were other parents in evidence, fathers and mothers who similarly sensed that they should play it cool for the good of their child’s social capital. But there were unattended children as well: They’d gone to this school for six years together, this was not a first day, merely a return. Lauren took her place among them: They lined up, as they’d been taught to for half their lives, and disappeared inside the school’s actually-ivied walls and Lauren said nothing, not even to the chubby girl who pointed out they had the same model backpack. She would need to make friends, but she would need to be discriminating. She saw the desperation on that girl’s face and was not going to let it pull her into its orbit.
It is not clear to either Lauren or Sarah why they spoke. They can’t recall who approached whom. But they met, almost right away; on that, there’s consensus. Sarah nice enough, but still as fierce as her compatriots; no one is more fierce than an eleven-year-old girl. Even Lauren, eager, nervous, was defended—her need guarded, and because it was hidden, it was vanquished by lunchtime. They were friends by noon. That first moment, conversation, exchange lost to time, but twenty-one years later here they are still.
