Rich and Pretty

by Rumaan Alam

  Meredith settles in across from her. She’s dressed for the beach: a too-big white T-shirt she’s knotted at her midriff, a skirt fashioned from a long scarf. Her hair is pulled up into a high, girlish ponytail. She yawns, then smiles. It is early. “Good morning!”

  Lauren’s never been good at remembering to say good morning. It seems like something people should just assume. She sips her coffee. It’s not as strong as she wants it to be. “Morning.”

  “It’s thirty-six degrees in New York right now. Thirty-six!” Meredith looks at her joyously.

  “Yeah.” There is no other obvious answer.

  “I tell you what, I could stay here for another week, two, three, whatever.” Meredith unfolds the menu, which is comically oversized, though much of it is just white space. She must have it memorized at this point, they’ve had breakfast here every morning. “What about you, Lauren?”

  “It’ll be hard to go back to reality,” Lauren says, though she doesn’t mean it and misses her reality, her mornings alone: opening her eyes seconds before the alarm clock rings, dressing while watching the newscaster on the local channel who does that segment where he highlights interesting stories in the day’s local newspapers.

  “We have been spoiled,” Meredith says. “All these amenities.” She pauses. “Sometimes I think I should run away, you know? Start over. Like seriously.”

  “Everyone thinks that sometimes. Or all the time. I don’t know.” Lauren studies the dining room even though she knows he’s not working.

  Meredith waves over the waitress, asks for a cappuccino and a mixed-berry muffin. “I just don’t even know what I have to go back to, to be honest,” Meredith says. An audible sigh.

  Meredith is so deeply within her own agony she doesn’t even have it in her to properly tease/needle/blackmail Lauren about what she’s witnessed.

  Lauren pokes at the flesh of the papaya with her fork and feels ill. “It’s that time of year,” she says gamely.

  Meredith looks puzzled. “What time of year?”

  “Oh, the holidays, you know.” Lauren gestures helplessly. “That time of year. The bad time of year. Family. Office parties, presents, money, Christmas music, tourists, love and joy, all that shit.”

  “Oh, you mean it’s hard to be alone this time of year.” Meredith nods. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

  In fact, that’s not what she meant. What she meant is what she said, general as it was. The warm air outside means she feels disconnected from the time of year, but the awareness lingers: It is that time of canned love and joy and peace and it’s irritating. Even as a girl, well, not a girl, but a sullen preteen maybe, she disliked Christmas. The sight of mangled wrapping paper across plush carpeting makes her heart sink. All the meaningless giving, all the mindless getting, all the nothing. Her mother, as mothers do, loves Christmas. Lauren doesn’t want to think about it at the moment.

  Meredith has more to say. Lauren can see it, in the tense hunch of her shoulders, the expectant gleam in her eye, which is trying to fix on Lauren, hold her, as a magnet might. Meredith is lonely. Lauren has been lonely, of course, everyone has been lonely. But she’s not sure she’s been lonely in the way that Meredith is lonely, in this public, ravenous way. Her loneliness is like a smell, it’s there, you’re aware of it. Lauren is relieved by her own imperviousness to this kind of loneliness. It afflicts so many women it seems like it’s the normal way to be.

  Sarah and Fiona come into the restaurant, join them at the table, beckon for the waitress, exchange their good mornings. They, too, are dressed for the beach—they’re enjoying every last minute of this.

  “I’ve forgotten about every part of my real life,” Fiona says, dreamily. “I guess that means this has been a very successful vacation.”

  “Yeah.” Sarah studies Lauren’s face, then turns over her shoulder to consider the sea. “It’s nice to leave reality behind. Get away, drink. Misbehave.” She pauses, looks back at Lauren. “Don’t you think?”

  So Meredith has told her. This is not surprising. Meredith doesn’t seem like the secret-keeping sort. “I guess so,” Lauren says. “No hangover, at least.” She taps her temple. “I hydrated.”

  “You’re so smart, Lauren. I’m in awe.” Sarah smiles, not a real smile. It’s not a rebuke. It’s something else. Discomfort, embarrassment.

  Lauren knows how Sarah feels about sex. Her embarrassment, that hint of awe, they don’t mask a curiosity—they are symptoms of a disinterest. Lauren knows, she’s fairly certain, every guy Sarah’s ever fucked: Alex Heard and Dan Burton, yes, as well as the two in between them. Only those four, fewer than a handful. Lauren’s not being teased, she’s being scolded. Sarah’s so reluctant to talk about sex that this is how it will come out: oblique conversational jabs that would sound odd to Meredith and Fiona were either of them listening.

  “You know what?” Lauren slides away from the table. “I think I’m going to head to my room and pack up before the beach. So I don’t have to later. I’ll meet you out there?”

  She’s wrong: Sarah is capable of more than veiled verbal sparring. She knocks on her door only ten minutes later. Lauren knows it’s her before even opening it.

  “What’s up?” Lauren’s already packed, so she’s just been lying on the bed, half reading an issue of The New Yorker from several months ago. She’s very far behind in her reading.

  “Hi. Can I sit?”

  “Sit. Obviously.” Lauren doesn’t sit. She stands by the door, looking down at Sarah. “You ready to go home?”

  “Look, I—” Sarah stops. “Meredith told me what she saw, and I am just. A little surprised, or something. I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t know what Meredith saw, but . . .” Lauren barely has it in her to protest.

  “Meredith saw enough. She’s annoying but she’s not stupid. You fucked the waiter, Lauren? Seriously?”

  “It’s a vacation.” She is surprised they’re discussing it at all, but not surprised by the tone in Sarah’s voice: disgust. She’s barely trying to conceal it. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Embarrassing, though, right?”

  “Embarrassing for whom, Sarah? Am I embarrassed that Meredith, who is your friend, not mine, saw something, and gossiped to you about it like a prude? I don’t know. It’s her choice. But you know. It happens. I fucked a guy. If this were Afghanistan, you could stone me.”

  “It’s just embarrassing. It’s just . . .” Sarah pauses, looks around the room as if willing the right word to appear. “It’s tacky. What about that temp? I thought you were interested in him.”

  Lauren laughs. “The temp?” She can only barely conjure his face. “What does he have to do with anything?”

  “You liked his shoes,” Sarah says, ridiculously.

  “What can I say? I’m tacky. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that this private thing that has nothing to do with you, and certainly nothing to do with Meredith, is so tacky. You know. I’m sorry that it makes you feel so embarrassed.”

  “God, that is not an apology.” Sarah stands up. Her anger is unusual. She’s whispering, but it’s a loud whisper. “I am so sick of apologies that are like . . . I’m sorry that made you feel this way. That is not how you apologize. You’re not supposed to be sorry for having made me feel a certain way. You’re supposed to be sorry for doing the fucking stupid thing you did in the first place. So don’t try that, okay? You are better than that.”

  “I see. I’m better than a bad apology but not so good, because, I’m still a tacky slut who . . . fucks the help. Is that accurate?”

  “You know what? You can play it that way. That’s totally fine. It’s obviously not about the help, and you know it. It’s obviously not about being a slut, and you know it.”

  “It’s about what, then? It’s about me being me, and not being you. This is what it’s about, Sarah. I am me, and you are you, and there was no difference there for, I don’t know, a decade? But now there is. And you get mad at me, for being me. And I get m
ad at you, for being you. Except you never actually get mad, you just get, morally superior. And smug. And I don’t know what else. And I get mad. And then we don’t talk and it’s a whole fucking thing.”

  “What are you even talking about now?” Sarah is pacing the small area of the bedroom.

  “I don’t know.” She doesn’t. But she does. Lauren means what she’s said and can’t totally believe that she’s said it. Sarah seems, on some level, to disapprove of almost everything she does. She’s still bringing up Gabe’s name, years after the fact. “Is this friendship or is this force of habit?”

  “I don’t know what that means.” Sarah is still whispering.

  Lauren looks at her. She’s more tired than angry.

  Sarah shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Lauren sighs. “I shouldn’t have . . .” She doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. She’s not sure what she’s apologizing for.

  “I’m going to the beach,” Sarah says. “I’ll see you there.” She leaves via the room’s private terrace. Lauren lies on the bed for twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling, before joining the rest of the party in the cabana they’ve reserved until noon. The car will take them to the airport at one thirty.

  She will shower, one final, hot shower in this glorious bathroom, though her hair will still feel salty, her feet still sandy. She will put on the jeans and the shirt and the cardigan, though it’s too hot for a cardigan, because it will be cold on the plane, she knows. She will leave behind the three issues of The New Yorker that she’d brought with her, having read them entirely, except for one article about baseball. She will leave behind twenty dollars on the nightstand, for the housekeeper. She will scurry through the lobby and into the car quickly, but she won’t see the waiter, so it’s fine. She won’t watch while Sarah signs the bill, which she’s already told them all repeatedly she’s going to do and therefore none of them will put up any kind of fuss about it. She will be quiet on the car ride to the airport, they will all be quiet on the car ride to the airport, studying their phones, already thinking about work, and boyfriends and husbands or lack of boyfriends and husbands, about winter coats and the way the city smells when it’s cold outside. The sky will grow dark as the plane continues north, and the city will come into focus as light, a glorious array of lights, as the plane dips below the clouds and the pilot gives his well-rehearsed speech about not moving about the cabin and so on. And she will know that when the pilot says the words Flight attendants, prepare for arrival, that will mean arrival is truly imminent, because the approach to the city is a long one, the lights misleading; you will think you’re there but you’re still a ways off, and then there it is, nearer, nearer, so near it seems you’ll plunge into the sea, it seems the plane’s wheels will skim the roofs of the cars on the highways, but none of that will happen, all will be well.

  Chapter 13

  The people on the street—the disappointed-looking businessman with snow on the cuffs of his pants, the Chinese grandmother moving very slowly, umbrella doing little to protect her, the postman in his cloudy blue fatigues—seem defeated. A sadness more persistent than the snow seems to settle on the city. We think of January as winter’s heart, but in truth, it’s only its beginning. There is much yet to get through.

  Sarah doesn’t succumb to this sadness. She feels liberated. Christmas had been so much distraction. One of Huck’s timeworn jokes: Their religion is gift giving. For Christmas, you didn’t ask for humble, stupid things, common, cheap things, because those you’d get anyway: stockings stuffed full of card games and candies, tiny, plastic things meant for Barbie; later, earrings and bracelets and rolled-up pairs of tights; later still, gift cards and jewelry with a more adult seriousness, no charms in the shapes of cats. At ten: a horse, a beautiful young thing, called Bellatrix. She boarded in the Bronx, and Sarah’s mother drove her up twice a week to ride. That had been her year of the horse. Her clothes were equestrian, the books she read heroic narratives about girls riding through danger or somehow, with the intercession of their fearless steeds, saving the family farm. Her allowance was saved for a dreamt-of new saddle, so expensive that it would have taken her literal years to accrue enough, but somehow that never occurred to her, as a child.

  She lost interest, of course. Kids lose interest, and Bellatrix was sold three years later. Later, at fifteen, she’d realize how weirdly sexual it is, this thing with girls and horses, and she’d feel strange. That year: Cartier watch. Again, much desired; she wears it even now. She had wept viciously the day she’d misplaced it in the locker room before swim class, but one of the custodians had seen it on the bench, taken it to the main office for safekeeping, and her anguish had lasted only an hour or so. Then at seventeen: the car, the compact BMW she’d wanted, but in blue, which Huck had deemed more sensible than red, and not a convertible, because Lulu was convinced that in an accident you’d be decapitated.

  This year, Sarah had prevailed on Fiona to accompany her to Barneys, and they came up with an asymmetrical necklace, something between a collar and a bird’s nest, set with gems in an array of pastel shades. Lulu loved it. Huck was harder, but also somehow easier: A book would suffice, the rarer and odder the better, but this year, she’d wanted something to communicate her as-yet-unspoken thanks for shouldering the expense of the wedding and the attendant hassle as well. She’d been mindful of this for months and had poked around online to see what was at auction, had almost splurged on some first editions (Updike, signed; Shaw, pristine) but had then done one better by purchasing, from a small auction house based in Dallas, a handwritten letter from Winston Churchill to his brother.

  For Ruth, Dan’s mother, retired after years in private practice as a psychiatrist, from her and Dan together, a set of illustrated volumes surveying the work of John Singer Sargent. Ruth was going to devote her retirement to painting. She did watercolors and was very good. She had the sort of precise eye and steady hand required by the medium. For Andrew, Dan’s father, a pair of leather gloves: truly beautiful, horribly expensive. This came after much discussion with Dan, who seemed as puzzled by his father as she was. Fathers are a mystery. Anyway, it gets cold in Michigan.

  They spent the day at Huck and Lulu’s, the whole new family together. Lulu did the cooking, feeling too guilty to employ temporary help. She spent hours on hallacas, wrapped lovingly in banana leaves. They sat in the dining room, set with the best china, and Huck told stories while Ruth, conscientious Emily’s List donor, gritted her teeth. Sarah hadn’t bothered to implore Huck to keep it nonpartisan; it was worse if you admonished him like that. Ruth took two very healthy whiskies after dinner and hurried out, after dessert, claiming a nascent headache. It had been, overall, a success.

  Willa’s office is in a strange corner of the city with no particular character: a small hotel, a kitchen supply showroom open to the trade only, a shuttered Turkish restaurant, heavy maroon curtains still draped across its doors. The office is on the second floor, with big windows looking out over the quiet street and lots of potted orchids that are miraculously thriving despite the dry winter air.

  “How are you holding up?” Willa has a bemused, I-told-you-so demeanor. Wedding planning is her calling; her business depends on making it seem an impossibility.

  Sarah sees Willa not as a mechanic or plumber, an expert called in to address something she couldn’t possibly do herself, but rather as one of the caterers Lulu trusts: someone to do a job she’s capable of but can’t spare time for. “I’m holding up,” she tells her. It’s not a lie. She feels fine.

  “Things are going wonderfully on this end,” Willa says. They’re at a small, round table, set with a teapot and little cups, like girls playing at tea party. The place is full of this kind of frippery: slipper chairs, coffee-table books, doilies under the orchids’ terra-cotta pots, stuff chosen to appeal to the average bride, the Willa bride.

  “That’s great,” says Sarah. There’s a pad of paper and a cup of sharpened pencils on
the table, in case she needs to take notes. She doesn’t feel any particular need to take notes.

  “Why don’t I get the cakes and we’ll get started then?”

  “That’s great,” Sarah says again. She was expecting the table would be laid already. She’s impatient. She doesn’t enjoy being around Willa: She thinks her forceful empathy conceals something—condescension, bitterness, it’s not clear what. But she is efficient. She disappears into the backroom to retrieve the samples of cake.

  There’s vanilla, with a thin band of raspberry between its layers; there’s chocolate, with a coating of crushed, salty nuts; there’s coconut, with a suggestion of banana, somehow; there’s another chocolate with mint that tastes like a Girl Scout cookie. They’re all good. Sarah likes dessert but getting through Christmas while being mindful of her regimen, her plan—diet is such a disgusting word—was so hard. It seems crazy to be sitting in this strange room on Twenty-Fifth Street eating seven pieces of cake in the middle of the afternoon, but you make concessions. She ate the papaya dulce that Lulu made for Christmas dinner, even though it wasn’t all that good, and she had one accidentally fattening meal with Lauren, their own holiday celebration.

  It’s a ritual with precedent: just the two of them, the chance to swap gifts and get drunk and talk shit before disappearing into family and obligation. She texted Lauren a couple of weeks after coming back from the island, banter, though Sarah was still—mad wasn’t the word, but there was a word for the feeling, somewhere. Still, tradition is tradition. Lauren must have felt the same way, because a plan was made, and kept, a bar in Tribeca: subway tile, mustachioed bartenders, one-dollar oyster specials.

  “I’m not sure I understand the appeal of oysters.” Lauren fiddled on her stool, the puffy coat hanging on its back taking up too much space.

  “They’re erotic, right?” Sarah made a face. “I think people just pretend to like them because it seems sophisticated.”