by Rumaan Alam
There’s a great florist in the Sixties, so Sarah will end there, so the flowers don’t get bruised and beaten on her other errands. Her to-do list isn’t so long. Maybe she’ll walk, she thinks. It’ll be a nice alternative to going to the gym, which though she has time to do she doesn’t have the will, just isn’t in the mood. You go, you run, you sweat, you listen to music or watch the television, then you shower and it’s hours later and you feel nothing in particular, or not different enough anyway, just a little smug, very hungry. Walking is good exercise.
She’s always enjoyed this kind of time, the dead time in which her body is engaged in a pursuit for which her mind isn’t required. Showering, walking somewhere, driving that familiar path from the garage to the house in Connecticut. In these moments, she makes her mental list, orders and reorders it. The list is, as ever, a hydra. For every matter that’s settled—the house, of course it’s the house—a new concern arises. She wants to tell Lauren about it, strategize on how to cram the cast of thousands her parents are evidently planning on inviting. Lauren knows the place, she’ll have ideas. She should call her, adds that to her list. Not tonight: Tonight is book club. Lauren is not a book club friend; book club is something else: Meredith, who loves it—in fact, she organized it; Iris, a coworker of Meredith’s; Valerie, an old friend of Iris’s but also a friend of Meredith’s; Simone, the wife of one of Dan’s workers, who mentioned to Sarah once, at a party, that she wanted to join a book club. It’s not Lauren’s crowd. Not tomorrow: Sarah’s supposed to go to Carol’s for a working dinner, Chinese takeout and grants and details. Not Friday: work, then in the afternoon, a tasting at a caterer’s; in the evening, dinner with Dan’s coworker Steven and his wife, Amy. Not Saturday: Lulu’s birthday is coming and she’s going to get her a present—what she’s yet to determine—and then meet Dan when he’s off work—he always goes into the office Saturday afternoons, while she shops or reads or whatever. Not Sunday, sacrosanct, reserved for just the two of them, first at home, then dinner with her parents. But soon. And then she can tell Lauren about how they’ll be having the wedding at the house, and how Lulu mentioned that maybe she’d like to sing a song at the reception, and how Lulu has started asking questions about what it’s appropriate for the mother of the bride to wear. Basically everything that’s happened around the wedding, Sarah’s first thought has been to tell Lauren about it.
She’s tired of this preoccupation with the circumstances of her own life. It seems petty, all this wedding talk. A night last week, dinner with Michael and Bethany, Dan’s coworkers, and their spouses, Andrea and Elias. Lovely people, with the same palpable affection for Dan as everyone who knows him, and now, by some transitive principle, for Sarah, too, since they’re getting married. A ring still means something. And that ring, what it symbolized, the conversation kept turning back to it—talk about work, then talk about the wedding, talk about real estate then reminiscences of their own weddings, then swapped details about honeymoons in Namibia, the necessity of providing guests some late-night snack (doughnuts, it happens; both couples had served doughnuts, this before they even knew one another), the perils of the registry and the importance of writing thank-you notes.
The wedding hasn’t even happened yet and she’s exhausted being the center of attention. Being a bride is apparently a solo effort. For example, she’s not heard anyone ask Dan any specific questions about what he’ll be wearing or what the guests will be eating. In a way, it’s an improvement over the general tendency to only talk about what people do for a living—the first thing everyone asks someone they’ve just met, isn’t it?
Her unsatisfactory answer to that query is that she’s always thought of herself as a solver of problems. She just isn’t clear on how to make this a career. Anyway, there never seems to be time to think about what she’s going to do, because she’s so busy doing it. Because there’s no noun for what she’s doing now, she tries to steer the conversation away from it. There’s no noun, not really, for what Huck does, but he does so much. This is the family business, these things that Sarah does, the connecting of dots, the solving of problems, though she’s aware that not everyone understands this, and she envies that friends like Fiona and Lauren can explain in one word what their business is.
At the moment her business is this wedding. Sarah doesn’t mind it and doesn’t expect Dan to be any more helpful than he is already: It’s her responsibility, she gets that. It’s not sexist, simply a measure of which of the two of them has the bandwidth to think about things like flowers and cake. It’s not some kind of betrayal of a deeply held feminist conviction, that she has to now think about this shit—it’s a reflection of the kind of relationship they have, the kind they want to have, one in which they take turns helping each other. She knows that if she complained, Dan would slip away on his lunch break to sample wedges of cake.
The truth is that she cares fuck all about cake. She’d have gone to the courthouse. But it’s too late now. This is how they’re getting married, and she’s got to take it seriously, give the people what they expect, what they want: to put on a tie or a not-too-pretty dress, to eat lukewarm salmon, to tap a champagne flute with a dessert spoon, to take pictures, to dance, to say hello to the older relatives, to see friends from college and high school, to eat warm doughnuts from sticky boxes as the clock strikes midnight. She’ll get through this, and make it perfect, too. She will not disappoint.
Chapter 9
There’s Halloween candy on display in the drugstore across the street from the office, the one that’s more like a grocery store, or a boutique, that sells nail polish but also cantaloupe or a sweatshirt. It’s a confusing but seemingly successful business model. Lauren had gone to get a yogurt, a midafternoon snack, that Greek yogurt with a little compartment of strawberry jam you can squeeze into the cup and mix up so it’s like dessert. She’s hungrier lately; the body responding to the calendar, presumably.
She’s been looking forward to dinner, because of that hunger, if at the same time dreading it, because of Sarah. Not that she doesn’t want to see her, not exactly. She’s uncertain, actually, why she’s reluctant.
Sarah’s chosen a restaurant downtown, she always does, because, Lauren thinks, of a tirade she once went on, about how restaurants uptown are all terrible. Lauren stands by it, but at the time wasn’t talking about Sarah at all, was relaying an anecdote about a party for one of her books, held in a too-bright spot in the West Seventies, where the air-conditioning was powerful and the food charmless. But she’s fairly certain that Sarah made a note of it. She knows how her mind works.
Walking from the subway, Lauren is rather enjoying the chill, though she knows what will come next and thinks of warmer climes. One of the essential conditions of living in New York City is thinking wistfully about living in California. It’s the opposite coast, therefore presumed to be the opposite in every other way. She’s only been there twice, herself—that cookbook conference in San Francisco, where she went to some nice restaurants, drank a lot of thin, local wine, and spent a lot of time wishing she was outside. And Los Angeles once, years before that, a postcollege vacation with Sarah where they stayed with friends who shared an adorable little house. They couldn’t get over the novelty of it: an actual house, all your own, a driveway, a table on the patch of concrete outside the kitchen door, bougainvillea shedding like mad. Greg, her college boyfriend—though it seems insane to use that word to describe their relationship, they were in college, they never went anywhere, just shuttled back and forth between his apartment off campus and her room on campus, fucking—had moved to Los Angeles after graduation to begin his career in the film business. He worked at a production company vaguely associated with a well-known director. He was mostly responsible for ordering lunch, unwrapping it, and placing it in the center of the table in various conference rooms. Greg was what that trip had been about. She couldn’t afford it, but Sarah had urged it: a break from the rigors of their first jobs, a break from the shitty apartment they
shared, plus a taste of an alternate life. Sarah had never wanted Lauren to break up with Greg, but what was the alternative: to have married him? He’s married now, anyway. He’s gained seventy pounds since college, not fat, but mass. He was so slender and hard, now he’s positively burly, with a big jaw that he developed at some point in his midtwenties. He still works in film, as a line producer, though Lauren doesn’t know what that means. His wife is a prop stylist, they live in Silver Lake, they have a daughter named Violet, whose existence he’s lovingly documented online.
She couldn’t have gone to California, those years ago, because she would have been going only for Greg, and that seemed idiotic, pathetic, would have been vastly overestimating what their relationship had been, never mind that he hadn’t asked her to. College ended, their romance ended, and they’d both known that was coming. In fact, if they’d broken up, formally, a conversation, in bed one morning, she can’t remember it. He was very sweet, and she had loved fucking him, but life had a lot more in store for her, in New York City, in publishing. Adventures. Now it’s eight years later and far too late for her to move to California. And on the good days, she retains that sense that life holds something in store for her. On the bad days, she is not so sure. On the average day, the day like today, she can let her mind wander. But what would she do for a job? She can’t style props, whatever that means. Still, on a chilly evening it’s nice to think of bougainvillea.
Sarah is there before her, sitting, looking at her phone.
“Am I late?” Lauren doesn’t want to start the evening off on the wrong foot.
Sarah shakes her head. “I’m early.”
Lauren falls into the chair. If there’s a ladylike way to sit down, she’s not mastered it. “How are you?”
Sarah puts the phone into the bag on the banquette beside her. “I’m good! I’m actually superhungry.”
“Me too. It’s the fall. Hibernating season.”
“God, this is the last thing I need, I’m supposed to put on a dress that you can be damn sure is going to be sleeveless. I can just see myself, arms wiggling in the breeze.”
Lauren makes a sort of tsk sound in response, to register that she’s heard and that she disapproves. “You look great,” she says, but so close on the heels of what Sarah’s said it doesn’t sound sincere.
A pained smile. “How are you?” Sarah asks.
“I’m good, actually. Today was a good day.” As Lauren says it, she marvels at it: She can’t believe it’s true.
Sarah looks surprised. “Do tell.”
“You don’t need to look so shocked,” she says. “Am I such a downer? I have good days.”
“I’m just happy for you,” Sarah says. “Anything noteworthy or just generally a not bad day?”
That afternoon, the remnants of the expensive prechopped salad bar salad (spinach, chickpeas, broccoli, tuna, carrot, sunflower seeds, balsamic vinegar, $11.95) still on her desk, Mary-Beth had toddled over, which is how Lauren now thinks of her gait, and paused there behind her chair for a moment laden with meaning. “Lauren,” she’d said.
This was not of itself worth note—she was her boss, of course they talked—but there was something in it, her pronunciation, some suggestion, some clue. “Do you have a second?”
This too: the implication that they needed to speak privately. Lauren had followed Mary-Beth to her office, worrying about the tuna salad on her breath like someone out of a commercial for gum, or an unimaginative television show. Mary-Beth even asked Lauren to close the door, or anyway, nodded toward it meaningfully.
The short of it: a promotion, and a significant one, the shedding of the epithet associate, a standing invitation to pitch projects, an expectation that there would be travel, and meals out, and even occasional reimbursements for such. The imprint is quite firmly in the black, it seems. Dallie will be leaving; the organization, lean though it is, will be reorganized; and Lauren will find herself, suddenly, quite near the top of the structure. And more—further changes coming, something unspoken but suggested, Miranda taking on a different role, one in the parent company, quite literally kicked upstairs, to the hushed, glass-walled thirty-sixth floor, where all the very most important meetings in the building take place. Mary-Beth had always liked Lauren, told her so, just like that, acknowledging that this change is big, unlikely, amorphous, a gift, a reward, for being good, for being liked. Mary-Beth even mentions the celebrity chef, the quarrelsome Cuban. They’ve been keeping tabs on Lauren, it seems.
Lauren shrugs. “A good day, is all. I don’t know. There’s this chance that I’m going to get some new responsibilities. Which I think is good. I mean, more work, but more interesting work.”
“You mean they’re finally realizing that you’re incredibly overqualified for your job,” Sarah says. “Thank fucking God. Congratulations. A raise?”
Once, years ago, when they were roommates in the city, unable to stop herself, Lauren had peered into one of the fat envelopes from Prudential that arrived for Sarah monthly. The sum—the only sum she was able to divine, amid all those numbers and charts—was astonishing. “A raise,” she says, but doesn’t say what she wants to, which is that Sarah would consider the sum in question inconsequential. “A decent one.” It’s not much to speak of, really, but it’s hers.
They order drinks: a martini, both of them; it seems retro, and celebratory, and somehow funny, and when they’re delivered, precariously, the liquid spilling out over the lips of the unwieldy glasses, Sarah takes a sip, as if for strength, then raises the glass. “Huzzah,” she says.
“Thanks,” Lauren says. She sips her drink. “Editor. No associate.”
“Not assistant?”
“Editor,” she says.
“Fucking great,” Sarah says. “I knew it.” She pauses. “By the way, I just should say it, so whatever, but if you’ve been mad at me since the last time we hung out, I’m sorry.”
Lauren has never known how to deal with a compliment and she’s never known how to deal with an apology. It seems better, in both instances, to change the subject. “I’m not. No, I was just . . . You know.”
“I didn’t mean to keep talking about Gabe,” Sarah says.
“I was in a bad mood,” Lauren says. It’s funny because now, hearing Sarah mention Gabe’s name, she feels nothing, not even a glimmer of recognition. They could be discussing anything at all. Maybe she had been in a bad mood.
“It’s a sensitive subject. I get it. You should have just told me to shut up, you idiot.” And now: back to normal.
“Please, like anyone ever in your entire life has ever told you to shut up, and like you would.” Lauren knows she loves this, the compliment disguised as an insult that Sarah is strong-willed, that Sarah will have her say. “How’s Dan?” Lauren often forgets to ask about him. The giant ring, though, reminds her.
“He’s good. He’s the same. He’s busy, he’s working a lot lately, like more than usual, but it’s good, like the good overworked, not the bad kind. How are your folks?”
“My folks? Um. They’re fine. It was my mom’s birthday two weeks ago. I got her a cookbook, one that we don’t even publish, which is so lame but my father insisted it was what she wanted. I don’t know if I believe him. Are you going on a honeymoon?”
“We talked about it. It’s hard for Dan to get a lot of time off. But everyone is like, oh you have to go on a honeymoon and so on.” She shrugs her shoulders.
“You’re probably going to want like . . . a vacation from your parents, right?” Lauren knows the intricacies of that family’s life well enough to be able to tease.
“Dan’s got to go to L.A. at some point for work; I thought maybe I could tag along on that and we could schedule a real honeymoon later. Like Africa maybe? Africa. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
“L.A., God that is so weird, I was just thinking about when we went out there after school, do you remember that?”
“Do I remember that, of course I remember that, what am I, brain
damaged? Holly and Christina and that tiny little house.”
“You just wanted me to see Greg again, right? That was the ulterior motive.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit, you’re the worst liar. Wait.” Lauren has an epiphany, a small one, if there’s a word for that. “This is just like that Gabe thing. From our last dinner.”
“I don’t know, I loved you guys together. And it’s not like there was so much awesome stuff going on for us here at that point in our lives.”
“The same stuff’s still going on though,” Lauren says, “all these years later.”
“That’s not true.” Sarah looks wounded by this.
The waiter returns, they order more drinks. Sarah asks for a salad and some fish. Lauren asks for a salad and some ravioli.
Sarah clears her throat. “Okay, maybe that was my secret agenda.”
“God, you are obsessed with me having a boyfriend.”
“Gabe was great. That’s all.” The final word.
“But, like, Greg?” Lauren laughs. “I mean, what was I supposed to do—marry him? They even have the same name. Gabe, Greg. God, what’s wrong with me?” Sarah has only ever had Dan. Maybe she fundamentally doesn’t understand that it’s possible to have a boyfriend you don’t mean to marry, to fuck a guy and not have it mean forever.
