Rich and Pretty

by Rumaan Alam

  You don’t ring the doorbell at this sort of party, and anyway, it’s been years since she used this particular doorbell. She comes and goes with impunity, or she did, once upon a time. She walks in, and there are people in the parlor, attended by a pretty girl in a black polo shirt and black pants, cherry red apron around her waist, passing a tray of something that looks tasty even from far away. The men are wearing jackets and ties; these parties are attended exclusively by the kinds of men who wear jackets and ties everywhere, possibly even to bed. There are women, too, of course, and somewhere in the distance she can hear Lulu, because you always can hear her, that big laugh from deep in the throat, the mix of tongues in which she speaks, her native Spanish, her never-wholly-Americanized English, a touch of French, when warranted, for emphasis. Lauren can picture her; she’ll be standing in profile, head tilted back a bit, kind of like the woman in that Sargent portrait that so scandalized the public he had to revise it, adding a dress strap. That’s how Lulu always stands; she thinks it shows to best advantage her “good side.” In her cotton dress, Lauren’s underdressed, but her relative youth makes up for this. She’s not one of the powerful matrons in geometric, collarless blazers, not a Ph.D. in a pencil skirt. She’s just some girl. She doesn’t see Huck anywhere. She climbs the staircase.

  Sarah’s room shares the top floor with Huck’s office. The second floor is divided between her parents’ room and a guest room, frequently occupied. Lauren strolls past the line of women—it’s always women, these lines—waiting outside of the second-floor powder room, past the door to Huck and Lulu’s inner sanctum, which now as ever has a little folk art painting, a portrait of a girl, strung on a silk ribbon, hanging from a nail on the door, because Lulu, in her enthusiastic collecting, long ago used up all the available wall space. The stairs creak horribly. There’s an unspoken consensus among the party guests that it’s fair to wander to the second floor, queue up there for the bathroom, but anything farther than that is an intrusion, so there are raised eyebrows as Lauren continues past the scrum and ascends to the top floor. She tries to look proprietary.

  On the walls: frames, a collage of photographs, hundreds of them. Photographs are meant to be forever, but they’re not. The quality of light, the once-fashionable haircuts and colors of clothing: You can tell these are old from afar, so old they might as well be cave paintings. Everything’s done tastefully, under plastic, but the way the pictures are mounted seems somehow passé, a relic. Lauren doesn’t need to look closely, doesn’t need to scan the pictures to pick out her own face: there beside Sarah’s, girlish attempts at makeup and comic grimaces instead of smiles, on their way out, something to do with boys, she can’t recall now. Or there, hair pulled back into a ponytail that snaked (could it be?) through the gap in the back of a corduroy, suede-brimmed baseball cap. That day, class field trip to a farm, or Storm King, or the Noguchi Museum, something of that order. And Sarah, of course: here, proudly atop a horse, because she had been one of those girls, a horse girl, until the age of thirteen, when it started seeming babyish, like Barbie, Archie comics, drawing with crayons. Sarah as a toddler, utterly recognizable (long nose, wild hair), studying one of her dad’s fat books, a mocking frown on her face, modeling his glasses to boot. Sarah, in overalls, buried in necklaces, because she’d had that phase of making necklaces, stringing beads onto cord and calling it her art. Lauren still has one of those necklaces.

  Lauren thinks of her own parents, their suburban split-level with a far less architecturally interesting stairwell, which is also hung with pictures of the children, though only three, one of each of them. Her parents don’t decorate in quite the same way as Lulu; they prefer the store-bought to the timeworn. The door is closed. She knocks.

  “You hiding?”

  “Just a minute!”

  “I said, you hiding?” Lauren jiggles the knob, which catches. Locked. “It’s me.”

  The door opens. “Shit. You scared me.” Sarah, fanning away smoke, guilty. “Come in here.”

  Lauren closes the door behind her quickly, absurdly afraid of being caught at something. She can’t help it. On the top floor of this house everything she does seems somehow girlish. Sarah drops onto the bed. She’s wearing a navy dress, a little conservative, something that blouses and gathers at the waist in a way that implies the early stages of pregnancy or one’s fifth decade. It’s not a great color for her, but she’s always drawn to strong, declarative shades—blue, black, red—that don’t flatter her skin. She’s somehow not mindful of how she looks in them. Lauren has always been a little jealous of Sarah’s obliviousness to certain things.

  There are two beds, matching headboards, matching upholstered benches at their feet. The bench at the foot of the left bed, that’s where Lauren dropped her overnight bag, nights she came to stay. The bench at the foot of the right bed, that’s where Sarah discarded sweaters and shirts, the ones she’d rejected that morning, with the labels Lauren loved, Benetton this, Gap that, Ralph Lauren this, Donna Karan that, the last less hand-me-down than a pilfered-from courtesy of Lulu, cashmere as perfect as a baby’s skin. The housekeeper would come up in the afternoons, put everything away.

  “Fuck me, it’s like a museum in here.” Lauren sits on the edge of the bed, her bed. She seems to swear more under this roof, shades of her adolescent self.

  Sarah laughs. “A museum to the excellence that is me.” She’s got a pipe in her hand, glass, emblazoned with colorful daisies. “Exhibit A.”

  “Exhibit A is trials, not museums.”

  “Do you want to get stoned or not?”

  “Where did you even find that thing?” Lauren recognizes it, vaguely, studies it with revulsion but also fondness, like a hideous sweater that once made you feel beautiful.

  “The jewelry box, in the little drawer, next to earrings you shoplifted from Bloomingdale’s, I think?”

  Lauren knows just which earrings Sarah is referring to. “You had pot hidden in here, too?”

  Sarah hands her the glass pipe and a tiny, lime-green lighter. She shakes her head. “That, believe it or not, is from the personal collection of Mr. Henry ‘Huck’ Thomas.”

  Lauren is holding her breath, feeling the smoke build in her lungs and then it’s in her nose, as if by magic, and her mouth. She opens it, and it escapes—mere wisps. She’d imagined more. “You’re fucking kidding me,” she says with a cough.

  “I’m fucking not, my dear.” Sarah has taken off her shoes, folds her feet up under her body so she’s in a sitting position but still looks very attentive. “Arthritis. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Oh?” Lauren is coughing more. It’s been a long time since she got high.

  “Too much hand shaking maybe?” Sarah smiles. “Poor Papa. A decade plus on I’m still dipping into his stash.”

  “Kents, that was his brand, right?” Lauren remembers: Sarah, in the other room, distracting him with some nonsense about their school day while Lauren searched the blazer, hung on the back of a dining chair, helped herself to two or three. She passes the pipe and the lighter back to Sarah.

  “You were good, Lolo. Nerves of steel. Unafraid of shopgirls at Bloomingdale’s, unintimidated by the man of this house.”

  “They say everyone is good at something,” Lauren says. She wants to take her shoes off, but also doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to get too comfortable in this room. The poster of the Van Gogh at MoMA, the jumble of madras belts on a peg on the back of the door; it’s too familiar and too foreign, a country she visited once, but doesn’t want to go back to. She’s outgrown this.

  The little flame flickers out of the lighter, rising higher as Sarah inhales in one, two, three gulps. She sets the glass pipe onto the piece of glass that Lulu had cut to protect the antique nightstand from rings from the diet soda the girls drank religiously at age fourteen. “Fuck, actually, I’m pretty stoned.”

  “I’ll open the window,” Lauren says. She’s feeling stifled. She pushes aside the curtains, trimmed in a pale green grosgrain
that complements the headboards, slides the window up.

  “That helps,” Sarah says. She’s risen from her bed, stands behind Lauren, rests her chin on her shoulder. Muscle memory: the two of them joined, if not at the hip, then physically, always—hands held, hot mouths at ears trading confidences, knees pushed together in the backseats of taxicabs. Like infant twins, happily entwined in their crib, they could never stand to be apart. While Sarah showered, Lauren would sit on the floor of the bathroom and talk to her, though the splash of the water on tile made it hard to hear.

  They breathe in the hot city air. It is better, somehow. Sarah sits back on the bed, idly fiddling with her skirt, which pools up around her waist like a deflated life preserver. Lauren sits on the bed opposite, almost knee to knee.

  “So what’s new?”

  “Nothing’s new,” Lauren says. “What’s new with you? What made you decide to sneak away from your parents’ party to get stoned alone on a Thursday night?”

  “You said it, my parents’ party,” Sarah says. “That’s reason enough. I mean, Dan’s not here, and I knew you were coming and was sort of in the mood for a trip down memory lane.”

  “Cool,” Lauren says.

  “Cool?” Sarah says, teasing.

  “Shit, trip is right.” Lauren shakes her head, which feels fuzzy, thick.

  “It’s that medicinal shit,” Sarah says. She starts to giggle. She has a very charming laugh, Sarah does, a girlish giggle that can grow into a very big guffaw. She alone could record a laugh track for a sitcom. Her laugh is that varied, that infectious. “You didn’t call me back.”

  “I didn’t?” She is not good with the calling back, Lauren knows this about herself. Isn’t it enough to hear the message, to think about the person calling? She knows it is not.

  “Sorry.” Lauren is not good at apologizing. She is not being insincere though. This is the kind of thing that bothers Sarah.

  “I’m used to it.”

  “It’s just. I’m here! I came. Sorry.” Now, annoyance: Sarah gives in to injury so easily.

  “I know, you come through,” Sarah says. “Even if you’re too busy to call back. I know how it goes with you. It’s always something. Or, you know, someone.”

  “No someone.” This, another peeve of Sarah’s: the suggestion that she’s been supplanted, that sex outranks her. And a peeve of Lauren’s: this dance around. Just ask, she thinks. Sarah wouldn’t though; conversationally, she bobs, she weaves, she suggests, she retreats. This is recent, recent-ish, Sarah’s way of talking to Lauren, as blunt and transparent as using simple grammar and a too-loud voice when speaking to cabdrivers or waiters for whom you assume English is a second language.

  “No someone?”

  “No someone.” Lauren fidgets with the rubber band that’s around her wrist. The office of the future and she always ends up with rubber bands around her wrist. “I would tell you if there was a someone.”

  “I was so sure. When you’re hard to get on the phone I just assume it’s because your attention is elsewhere.”

  And there it is: Sarah’s real fear. “First off, bros before hos, as always,” Lauren says. “Second off, there is no one my attention has been on. Well, almost no one.” Lauren never has been able to keep much from Sarah, at least, not the stuff she secretly wants her to know.

  “Aha.” Sarah, triumphant, and more interested.

  “Nothing yet,” Lauren says. “I mean, he’s just, well, he doesn’t know he’s someone yet, but maybe he’ll get promoted to someone. But there’s a complication. We work together.”

  “Not your boss, just tell me he’s not your boss.” Sarah’s tone contains something: an accusation, but also titillation.

  “My bosses are women, obviously. No man has ever been a boss at a cookbook publisher. He’s a temp,” she says, whispering it, not like it’s a swear word, like it’s a bad one: cancer, or holocaust.

  “That’s a no-no, right?” Sarah says, suddenly herself.

  “I don’t know,” Lauren says. “I think office romance sounds so 1960s. Kissing secretaries and all that. He seems nice.”

  “Then what’s the problem, precisely?”

  “I don’t know if fucking the temp is the way to climb the ladder, exactly.” Lauren coughs.

  “If he’s a temp, stupid, that means temporary. It’s not for life. You’re an editor, not a justice of the Supreme Court.”

  “I just have to time this right, I guess,” Lauren says, grateful for Sarah’s omission of her titular “associate.” “You know how terrible I am at keeping a secret.”

  “Well, I don’t know, I don’t think you’ve ever kept one from me. But maybe you have and you’re secretly great at it? Anyway, just try a little discretion. Poker faces. Speaking of the Supreme Court, one of them is here tonight.”

  “Which one?”

  “Not one of the good ones.”

  “Oh.” Lauren has long since learned there’s little point talking politics under this roof. It’s discussed, of course, but you don’t talk, you listen. Huck’s conservatism is so deeply felt he’s only ever bemused by dissent, and bemusement is the most infuriating response in any kind of conversation. He’s an asshole. “Forget I said anything. It’s nothing. He’s no one. He’s a temp.” Lauren’s temporarily forgotten what is real and what she imagined. She’s stoned. “I was distracted. Sorry for not calling. I was coming. I came. I’m here. Should we go downstairs?”

  “Probably,” Sarah says.

  In the distressingly pink—toilet, shower, tiles—bathroom, they find a toothbrush, reason it must be Sarah’s, and take turns with it, using a very old tube of Aquafresh that must be prodded and coaxed back into pliability but they figure is probably not poisonous. Sarah wets the corner of a towel, dabs at her eyes, then has to reapply her eye makeup. Lauren sniffs at the dozens of perfume bottles, almost every scent a memory. There’s a cologne they’d stolen from Huck, they thought it so outré to wear a man’s fragrance, something amber, in a bottle shaped like a lozenge, or a stone from a riverbed. She sprays a bit on her wrist, rubs the one against the other, dabs it in the general direction of her armpits, and behind her ears. Mint on her breath, musk on her breasts, she feels ready for the party. Forget the temp: Maybe she’ll meet a man, some ambitious, not-too-sycophantic sort with a very specific goal in life, like to be, say, the secretary of agriculture. You meet that sort of person at the kind of parties Huck and Lulu throw. She wouldn’t mind. She would be happy to be spared having to do anything herself. She could be a trophy wife, or she could have been. At thirty-two you’re not a trophy wife. You’re a plaque wife, a certificate-of-participation wife.

  Sarah has freshened her breath but mangled her eyes. She’s got her shoes back on, adding three inches—in shoes her taste is unassailable. They’re sexy: pointed, aerodynamic, gleaming, expensive. They are shoes that make a commanding clack on the floor, shoes to be reckoned with, less shoes than an actual stage on which you can strut and preen and act the role of a woman who must be taken seriously.

  “Did you see Mom and Papa yet?”

  Lauren shakes her head. Sarah is gripping her arm as they walk down to the party. There’s no line for the second-floor powder room anymore. There’s music coming up from downstairs, and voices, and because it’s summer, the party will have spilled into the basement kitchen and out into the garden. Lulu likes a party where the guests gather in the kitchen; she doesn’t mind them seeing the hired waiters and the chef and only engages caterers who don’t mind being looked at, wielding skewers of satay while prestigious personages squeeze past, behind the stove and around the island and out the French doors. To Lulu, the effect is magic—it’s showmanship.

  “God, you smell fantastic,” Sarah says, and they are in the foyer, and there’s Huck, grinning his grin, comfortable, knowing, holding his drink, and calling them girls, my girls, and they are that for a minute, girls again.

  Huck is not very tall but seems massive; Huck is not fat but seems so. Huck’s natur
al tone of voice is loud, but because when he speaks, everyone else stops speaking to hear what he’s going to say, it seems he’s always shouting. That’s probably why he’s so successful, his ability to shut other people up simply by speaking.

  “This is Lauren,” Huck declares. “She grew up with my Sarah. An honorary member of the family, this one. They were girls only days ago. I don’t understand!”

  Someone says “Nice to meet you,” and Lauren realizes, too late, that this has been an introduction. She smiles. There’s no need to speak, since Huck has the floor.

  “You know my Sarah, of course, the only real work I’ve ever done. Lead line in my obituary. There it is. Tell that to Lehmann at the Times, I mean it.” General laughter. “And if you can believe this, she’s getting married. Betrothed. ‘Thou art sad. Get thee a wife!’ Is that Much Ado? The Venetian Merchant? Never mind. Promised to a wonderful young man. Sarah, Dan’s not here tonight, is he?” Sarah shakes her head. “A doctor. But not one of the saps making rounds, stethoscope at the ready. How are we feeling, Mrs. Johnson? Jesus no. Ten bucks a pop for that shit, though the socialists would have it like the sanitation department. Free for all! A doctor drops by for your vaccinations, Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays. Thursdays, they’ll pick up the recyclables and send the gynecologist.” More laughter. Four more minutes of this and he’s leading an honest-to-God toast to Sarah, right there in the foyer, a clutch of guests raising highball glasses to the future health and happiness of Doctor Dan and Huck’s little girl.

  Lauren escapes his grasp—it’s physical, he’s had an arm around her waist all this time, right up through the raising of glasses, but unlike Sarah’s touch, Huck’s doesn’t kindle fond memories—and steps backward slowly the way you’re supposed to leave the presence of the Queen of England. She’s in the living room, she’s free, no one has noticed. Huck is talking about monetary policy now.