Rich and Pretty

by Rumaan Alam

  As a girl, she’d been loved, indulged, and aware enough to understand that this meant she was, in a word, spoiled. She took pains to remember that. It was unbecoming, she learned quickly, to whine, to brag, to push. The thing to do was wield her power subtly. Never a tantrum, whether over a doll or, later, a saddle, later still a CD changer for the car, a credit card, tickets to Florida, because she understood that these would come, by virtue of the fact that she wanted them to. So, too, at school, deemed academically one of the best in the country—the country, understand—she’d managed A’s almost across the board simply by expecting them for herself. And if, on occasion, she forgot to read the book, she would expect, and receive, a reprieve.

  The October of her freshman year of college, Doctor Diana Baker had startled her, during office hours, by saying a firm no to Sarah, supplicant, come to inquire about an extension on a paper. She had her argument ready, should it come up—something to do with Huck, but not a name-drop.

  “We’re all adults here. You don’t want to or can’t get to the work, that’s your concern. I’m not in the business of keeping tabs on my students.”

  Sarah must have sputtered or begun to speak, apologetic, embarrassed, her cheeks growing hot.

  Then this. “I can’t help you. No one can, no one but you. Thanks for dropping by.”

  The good game show has ended and is followed, as it always is, by the stupid one, which she loves anyway. It’s got a comforting cadence to it, spin the wheel, mention a letter, take a stab, win some prizes. The winning contestant today, the one who’s advanced to the final round, is a portly guy in a purple button-down shirt with a raspy voice who can barely contain his excitement. The camera pans to the crowd as he introduces the two people in the audience rooting for him. His friends, a woman with very alert eyes, wearing a dress more suited to a cocktail party than being in a studio audience, and another friend, goateed, gray haired, heavyset, probably a coworker. Poor thing, to have no spouse, no family there to cheer him on in his moment in the spotlight. The clue, the answer, is a phrase: Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. He gets it right, wins forty thousand dollars. Good for him, she thinks.

  Sarah had always confused a proximity to excellence for excellence. She had confused the expectation that she’d be exceptional with the reality that she was not exceptional. She got the paper in on time, after all, got a C, finished the class without ever speaking to Doctor Diana Baker again. This wasn’t a turning point, the kick in the pants Doctor Baker might have thought she was giving; Sarah looked deep down into herself and saw there was nothing else there. She did fine in college, got the degree, naturally, on time. She met Dan, which affirmed that her suspicion that she was not, herself, smart, was well founded. Dan was smart. Maybe it was enough that she was nearby. That was how she’d felt about Lauren, first meeting her; she was so pretty, maybe it was enough to be within that. That had never faded, that love of Lauren’s prettiness, the love of sitting firmly within the confines of its spotlight, its halo, its shadow. Now, she’s blaming the stupidity—and let’s be honest, it’s more absentmindedness—on the pregnancy. She’ll need an extension on everything. She’ll get it done in eight months. It’ll be fine.

  This resignation manifests itself as a sigh, one louder than she’d intended, but isn’t that always how they come out?

  “What is it?” Dan turns his gaze from the computer to her, even though he’s fully capable of maintaining a split focus, indeed seems to focus better when he’s doing two things at once. Some of their best conversations have taken place while he’s driving, or typing, or cooking.

  “I forgot to do something,” she says.

  “Wedding thing or life thing?”

  “Work thing,” she says. “I need to e-mail Carol about this grant, and the fall, and I don’t feel prepared to answer any questions.”

  “Because you can’t, because you feel like it’s dishonest to discuss this with her without disclosing that you’re pregnant,” Dan says.

  “Bingo.” She impatiently picks up a fat bridal magazine, which has slipped from its perch atop a pile of four others on the shelf under the coffee table. “This place is a mess.”

  “We should get Aga in,” Dan says. “A deep clean.”

  “She was here a week ago,” she says.

  “Maybe she should come weekly instead of bi-,” Dan says.

  “That seems excessive. How much mess could we make in a week?”

  “This much,” Dan says, gesturing around the apartment. “Aga is happy for the work, I think. I mean, we pay her well, we treat her nicely, I hope. I would like to think we’re model employers. Besides, if she comes weekly, the house won’t be as dirty each time she comes, so her job will actually get easier, even as she makes more money.”

  “Fine, we’ll have her come weekly, then.” Sarah is displeased by the fact that he’s solved this problem so quickly.

  “You don’t need to be angry. You have better things to be doing with your time, I think. Your work. The wedding. The pregnancy. I have less time to spare, to clean, with my work, and honestly, when I’m home like this, I would rather hang out with you than clean the bathroom. It’s not an ethical dilemma. It’s not even a financial imposition.”

  “Fine, I don’t know why we’re talking about it.” She shrugs.

  “We’re talking about it because when you, or anyone for that matter, says ‘fine’ they usually mean something else entirely, and we’re talking about it because you were just complaining that the apartment is messy and I was trying to offer a solution.”

  “Okay.” She’s angry now for no particular reason. She counts to three, as she was advised to by her mother, once, and it works: The anger dissolves like a tablet in water. She sighs again, and it’s noisy again.

  “You’re stressed.” Dan gets up from the desk, settles onto the sofa beside her.

  “I am that,” she says. She looks around the room. The jade plant needs watering.

  “What’s on the list?”

  “There’s nothing on the list,” she says, though this isn’t the truth. She needs to remind her mother that their cleaning lady will have to come the day before the wedding, and she’ll have to bring a whole team with her. They’ll need someone to help with shifting around some of the furniture. These are things she can’t ask Dan to do, it doesn’t make sense for him to do them. They’re not impositions on her, even, just facts.

  “Maybe you should take a day off,” he says. “See a movie, go shopping, walk in the park, it’s nice enough out. Go to the museum. Hell, go to the theater, isn’t that one of the reasons people are always giving for living in New York, the proximity to the theater? We never go to the theater.”

  She laughs. “I don’t need to go to the theater, I’m not eighty years old.”

  “David, at work? He told me we have to be sure to go to the movies and out to dinner whenever we feel like it, until the baby comes. That after, those things, those small things, those last-minute let’s-go-out-for-Indian-food whims, become impossible.”

  “I’ll feel fine when this wedding is done with, I think. Coordinating, it’s fine, it’s what I do.”

  “Yes, it is. You’re very good at it. You’re very good with a task.”

  “But a meaningful task,” she says. “Not the task of throwing a party, with my mother and father, to celebrate our love.”

  He laughs. “We should have eloped. To Paris. Or Vegas, do people still do that?”

  “It’ll be fine,” she says. She gathers the pile of bridal magazines, walks to the kitchen, and dumps them into the can under the sink where they keep the recycling, where they land with a satisfying thud. She won’t be needing those anymore.

  “Let’s go out.” Dan stands.

  “What out? We were going to order Thai and watch that show.”

  “Screw that show,” he says. “Screw this presentation, screw the world. Let’s put on our coats and go somewhere. Let’s get a cab. We’ll go to the Ode
on.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead,” he says. He’s already stuffing his feet into his boots. “I’ll even look the other way if you want to take a sip of my martini.”

  “Yeah,” she says. He’s right. She’d been looking forward to Thai and TV, but now that’s not what she wants at all. She wants to be out of this apartment, in the cold wintry night. She wants someone to bring her food, then take away the dirty plates. She wants to look around a crowded restaurant and try to imagine the lives of all the people around her. She wants to sit in a taxi, next to Dan, next to the man she loves, and remember that she loves him, and marvel at that, and think about the fact that they’ve made a human being, and that is a miracle. She doesn’t care about her wobbly biceps, she doesn’t care about what she’s wearing, she doesn’t care about the fact that they might run into someone they know; she only washes her hands at the kitchen sink, then wraps herself in her coat, and they go. She doesn’t even bother looking in the mirror by the door.

  Chapter 14

  She’s relieved to get to February. January is cheap gym memberships and best intentions. It’s atonement. For Lauren, a product of the American educational system, the year begins in September. The Jews had this one right, she remembers her dad saying, which sounds vaguely anti-Semitic in the retelling and so she never retells it. She can’t muster any of this self-improving spirit, because it’s the same instinct as its ostensible inverse, the greed and gluttony of the holidays. Some of the girls in the office brandish their juice fast bottles, numbered, multicolored, as proudly as if they were designer bags. The fridge in the kitchen is full of them, and when she’s getting milk for a cup of tea one particularly overcast Thursday, she briefly thinks about taking out one of the bottles, pouring its contents down the drain, just to see what happens.

  Lauren doesn’t love the winter, but accepts that it exists, which makes surviving it much simpler. She’s trying to find something beautiful in the purple of the sky, in the way the city’s ambient lights swell up in the late afternoon. It’s terrible outside, yes, but weather like this, light like this, makes inside seem so much lovelier. Though the workday ends at six, six thirty sometimes, she’s there later tonight: problems with a gluten-free cookbook. She’s the last one there, but that’s okay. It’s her responsibility. Things have changed: Miranda’s corner office is mostly empty, as she’s decamped for the executive floor. There is slack, and Lauren is tasked with picking it up. This feels good, and associating good feelings with work feels new, almost shocking. It’s near eight, and the exhausted-looking cleaning lady shuffles in, emptying the garbage cans and whispering into her cell phone. The bulk of the overhead lights click off, and the office looks so different. In the bathroom, spotless now that the lady has done her thing, Lauren brushes her teeth, tidies herself, and finds a strange satisfaction in knowing she’ll be back in so few hours.

  She’s meeting Rob, at a place in the West Village, his choice; she’s never good at picking restaurants. They all seem the same: a cheeseburger for eleven dollars or a cheeseburger for twenty-one dollars. Rob’s not in the office anymore. The journeyman’s life. He’s copyediting a special issue of one of the remaining city magazines, a guide to the boroughs’ best doctors. It’s a paycheck, though he’s optimistic about a prospect at a more literary newspaper, where he’d get to edit a sportswriter he particularly loves. He enjoys reading The New Yorker’s articles about baseball.

  It had started after Thanksgiving, after that tropical hiatus, after the bad blood, after the waiter, whom she’s mostly forgotten. Rob had stopped by her desk in the morning, flimsy cup from the office kitchen in his hand.

  “Hey, Lauren,” he said. “Just wanted to touch base on that thing we were working on. It’s all set. I sent you everything. I wrapped it up yesterday.”

  “Oh, you did?” She spun around in her chair to look up at him. Then, correcting herself: “Hi.”

  “I did. I noticed you weren’t in. But it was kind of a slow day for me so I just finished it up.”

  “Cool. Thanks for doing that.” She was practicing sounding like a manager: supportive, grateful, acknowledging.

  “Long weekend?”

  “Long weekend,” she said.

  “Looks like you got some sun,” he nodded at her forearm. “Jealous.”

  “Oh, yeah. I was away this year. My friend is getting married, my best friend. Turks and Caicos.”

  “Nice. Destination wedding.”

  “No, this was just the, you know, the bachelorette weekend or something? I don’t know what you call it. Just girls.”

  “Girls’ weekend.” He nodded approvingly. “Sounds fun.”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly a girls’ weekend. I mean, it was but. We didn’t see the Chippendales or anything like that.”

  Rob cocked an eyebrow, which had the effect of making him seem like he was grinning, though his face was serious. “Your loss, I’d say.”

  “It’s just that I’m not exactly a girls’ weekend kind of person, is all.”

  “What kind of person is that?”

  “Never mind.” She shook her head. She was blabbering. The truth was: She’d imagined this. Just this, a casual conversation, Rob in his cute shoes, smiling and flirting, that crackle of energy, that sense of possibility. She’d felt it, even then, on the plane, the idea that she was going home, yes, but also going home to him. Rob. Rob Byrne. She knew his last name, and that knowledge felt like a certain kind of progress. Things happen in her mind, and then they come true; it’s discomfiting.

  He chuckled. “It’s cool. I think it sounds fun. More fun than Thanksgiving in Maryland with my mother and my sister.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Thanksgiving isn’t so bad, right? At least you don’t have to buy anyone a present.” Then, that last bit: She was flirting.

  “My sister is doing this gluten-free thing, it’s a real drag.”

  “That’s a coincidence,” she said. “I’m waiting on a gluten-free manuscript to come in. I’ll have to get you a copy. It’s going to be one of our big fall releases.”

  “I’m sure by the fall she’ll have moved onto a new obsession, but that’s so nice of you.” He paused. “What is gluten exactly?”

  She shook her head. “One of the wonders of the world, actually. Anyway, thanks for taking care of that. I’ll let you know if I need extra hands on anything else, if that’s okay?”

  “It’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Hey, let’s have lunch today?”

  They had lunch. Lauren was going to ask Karen to join them, which would have made it feel slightly less unprofessional, but she was out with the flu, so it was just the two of them, at the diner across the street, the one so authentically New York that tourists rarely ventured into it, the one not long for the world, the one that would someday soon be transformed into a drugstore, or a quiet, efficient lobby holding blinking, beautiful automated teller machines and nothing more.

  Rob had landed the temporary gig because his old boss was friends with Kristen, recommended him as a capable set of hands to help out in her absence; he wasn’t an aimless, career temp, but being adrift is a condition of being a certain kind of bookish dude in the contemporary economy. He had moved to New York to do his MFA at Columbia, finished that with minimal debt, worked at a magazine aimed at the collectors of yachts and race cars, left that to work at a literary imprint of one of the big publishers, lost that job in a round of belt tightening, and gone to work as a research assistant to an academic writing a popular biography of a pioneering art dealer, but that book’s research was finished and now here he was, on the assembly line at their office. As this story came spilling out of him, she saw more clearly what this thing was. It was as she had imagined. We only tell these stories about ourselves to those to whom we need to give some context, some understanding. These are details we offer to those we feel might find something meaningful in them. He wanted to be known by her, to be understood by her, and to kiss her, to sleep with her, to�
��whatever the verb is. He wanted her, and she had known he would. She is good at that, at being wanted.

  That Friday, he’d asked her for a drink, and a drink meant something different than lunch during the workday. They left the office together, went to a bar in a Midtown hotel, where she ordered a Manhattan and held the glass as seductively as she knew how. He kissed her when they were leaving, stepped toward her as they waited for a taxi on the curb, pressed into her, held her by the chin and brought his face to hers, and their mouths met, and his tongue grazed hers, and then he took her by the hand, held the taxi door open for her like a gentleman, and saw her again Monday morning at the office, where they pretended that nothing was amiss. They maintained this game, and only Karen knew otherwise, because Lauren had confessed to her one day over lunch at the very same diner.

  “I knew it.” Karen took a pink envelope of artificial sweetener out of the little ceramic dish and threw it at her accusingly. “You tramp.”

  “Shut up.” Lauren grinned. It was part of the game: She wanted to be teased.

  He had stopped working with them at the end of December, and so they’d abandoned the complex dance of pretending not to know each other as well as they did. One Saturday before Christmas, he’d come home with her, to order Chinese and watch a movie, but as soon as they entered the house, they’d fallen onto her bed as if it were a familiar place for them both. She wanted this out of the way before dinner; sex is never any good when you’re full of food. She took a shower after, came into the living room to find Rob opening the door to receive a plastic bag containing a paper bag full of oily Chinese from the middle-aged man who did the delivery for Hunan Delight. They sat on the floor, not watching the movie, talking about the quality of the dumplings. When the greasy plastic containers had had their lids snapped back on and were stowed in the fridge, Rob left; having sex was one thing, but it was still too soon for him to sleep in her bed.