by Rumaan Alam
The living room is not that crowded, but the walls are covered with Lulu’s collection of folk portraits so it seems full of life. A trio of women with identical haircuts are having a serious conversation near the fireplace. Lauren sits on the sofa, which is covered with pillows. She’s never understood that, lots of pillows on a sofa; how are you supposed to sit with all that comfort? It’s aggressive. She takes one cushion from behind her, leans back into the couch, and places it on her lap. She wishes she had a drink, but doesn’t want to move. She wants to check her watch but doesn’t wear one. Forty minutes. She can leave in forty minutes. A wave of loud laughter from the back garden: Something funny has happened. She feels no curiosity at all about it.
“Don’t hide.” Sarah sits on the couch. “It’s not ladylike.”
Lauren studies her. There’s a bit of pink in Sarah’s eyes but she’s feigning sobriety pretty well. “I don’t want to get up,” Lauren says. “I’m comfortable.”
“It’s a party,” Sarah says. She stands, grabs her by the hand.
Lauren lets the velveteen pillow fall on the floor. She doesn’t pick it up.
They cut through the dining room and down the back staircase without having to go past Huck in the foyer. The basement stairwell is bright, white, the only bare walls in the place, because Lulu figured it’s best to create the impression of light and space where there isn’t any. Lulu could have been a decorator. She likes to bring this up in conversation.
There’s a table in the kitchen, plates of grapes and strawberries and something wrapped in some kind of very thinly sliced meat, and sweating bottles of white wine and sparkling water. Lauren grabs the glasses, Sarah pours both full, takes a healthy sip from one glass, tops it off. Lauren tastes the wine. It’s too sweet, but never mind. Sarah is pulling on her arm still, and they squeeze through the scrum toward the back doors, and out onto the bluestone slabs of the garden.
There is Lulu, in just the pose Lauren imagines when she imagines her—head turned to the left as if someone’s only just called her name, cocked just a bit as if there’s some music she’s straining to hear, mouth communicating a smile without actually smiling. There are lanterns in the trees, and the light from neighboring houses, and the ambient glow of the city, and anyway it’s not late so there are traces of sun, and the effect is theatrical. Retired or not, Lulu is a star.
She can be loud, is maybe the only person in the world who can be louder than Huck, but she’s most effective when silent. She sees them, she sees all, and beckons urgently, waving enthusiastically but also commandingly. Gripping wineglasses and holding hands, they trip across the stones, weave past partygoers, Lauren’s arm brushing right up against the back of the honorable associate justice. Lulu is standing on the stone, too, but seems somehow to be onstage. She grabs them both, one hand on each girl’s arm.
“There you are” is all she says.
“Hi, Mom,” says Sarah.
“Hi, Lulu,” says Lauren.
“Hi nothing.” She squeezes Lauren’s arm. “You never come anymore. You came.”
“I came,” Lauren says. “I come sometimes.”
“You came!” She relinquishes their forearms and claps her hands together, once, twice, three times. “I’m so happy. Oh, you’ve made me so happy, but darling, where’s Dan; Dan’s not here tonight?”
“Dan’s not here tonight,” says Sarah, in a tone that implies she’s already explained this to her mother.
“Never mind, never mind; oh God, Lauren, you’re so beautiful, look at her, Sarah, isn’t she beautiful, it’s preposterous.”
“Preposterous,” Sarah agrees.
“You never come,” says Lulu again. Another squeeze, something between affection and punishment.
Lauren considers the things she might say in response. I find you ridiculous. Your husband is a warmonger. Your daughter is marrying a fat man. I have not lived up to my potential. She smiles. “I always love coming here,” she says, and it is the right thing to say.
“Everyone always loves being at our home,” Lulu says. She sparkles, Lulu does; it’s not makeup and not beauty, it’s some sort of natural incandescence. She nods her head like the matter is settled. “Everyone loves being at our home. Don’t go away. Stay out here with me. Meet our friends. Your fiancé isn’t here but you can still show off that ring. Lauren, have you seen the ring? It was in his family.”
“I think you can see it from space,” Lauren says. She has seen the ring. Sarah sent her a picture, when it came back from being resized—a diamond like an almond.
Lulu laughs loudly. Once again, the right thing to say. “Do not go, stay, stay, drink more, but sit, stay, stay with me,” she commands. It has been forty minutes, surely, it has been forty years, it has been forever, and Lauren is still here. She takes Sarah’s hand. They are here together.
Chapter 3
Lauren’s apartment smells of something—fried oil, a suggestion of an herb—her neighbors have cooked. Sarah is paranoid about smells clinging to her. Once, years ago, dinner with friends, then a party at the home of some guys someone knew from law school, she’d struck up a conversation with a handsome-ish Brian or Ryan. After hellos and how-do-you-knows, Brian or Ryan said, “Thai food?” Not accusatory, but yes: They had gone out for Thai. Sarah had blushed. She had stopped talking. The most insidious thing about smells is how you can be immune to your own. She hopes this fried scent won’t stay with her, though this does remind her that she needs to drop off the dry cleaning.
Sarah strokes the sofa, a chocolate brown corduroy relic of the ’70s that showed up in the store collection one day. It had sat in the unused maid’s room of a Park Avenue apartment for forty-two years until the old lady died and her kids shipped everything to the store to be disposed of—raising some cash for AIDS patients in the bargain. Sarah had known Lauren would love it, in fact, she herself loved it, but Lauren was the one in the market for cheap furniture, had made Sarah promise to be on the lookout for her. Sarah paid for it, held it at the store, and eventually Lauren hired some guy with a van from the Internet to pick it up and deliver it. She can’t remember if Lauren ever paid her back for the sofa. Four hundred dollars. Lauren’s apartment is stylish in a way that is so unforced. Sarah admires that.
Though daylight savings hasn’t ended yet, it’s clear fall has arrived. This is how it goes, always: Labor Day is hot and sunny, then that Tuesday the morning air feels chilly, the evening sky looks so different, and the fashionable girls start wearing their boots. Though it was only days ago, summer feels like something forgotten, something that barely happened. Those ten days on the Vineyard, her skin changing from whole milk to almond milk, maybe, vanilla to French vanilla—faded now, the holiday forgotten. Fall is wonderful, but brief. Winter is a betrayal. Tonight they’re going out; just the two of us is the phrase they kept using in e-mails and text messages, just the two of us, a promise and maybe a lament.
This has become their way: Sarah asks, Lauren demurs. For a long time they were inseparable; for almost as long a time now they’ve been separate, and it’s mostly Sarah’s doing that they still see each other. Mostly, but not always. Sarah doesn’t mind it. She’s good at making reservations, coordinating schedules, developing a plan. Tonight, it’s to go back to a restaurant they went to a few months ago, a place not far from Lauren’s apartment, the kind of restaurant that’s become popular in recent years, pledging no fealty to any particular nationality, just cooking whatever strikes their fancy, sometimes in incomprehensible combinations, and often featuring ingredients you need to ask the server to identify even if you think you know them—the way you can know a word but not quite articulate its meaning, hesitate before using it in a sentence—things like salsify, or chicory, or epazote. That last time, Lauren had greeted the bartender with a familiar “Hey,” the hostess with a kiss on the cheek, so Sarah had gleaned that she was something of a regular and suggested it once more. Maybe it can be their place.
Sarah is on time, always is; in
fact, she’s early, and after eleven minutes on the bench in front of the restaurant, she decides to walk to Lauren’s building and wait in the apartment with her while she finishes doing whatever she is doing. Sarah’s building has a Realtor’s office in its storefront level, its windows containing an elaborate display of picture frames suspended from the ceiling by wires, within each frame another portrait of another charming apartment. The apartments in this neighborhood are all lovely, and expensive. Lauren’s is lovely and inexpensive, a quirk. It’s very small, but delightful for its smallness, like a dollhouse. The floors aren’t level, the windowsills are black with soot, one of the living room windows’ top panes doesn’t sit right, sinks down an inch, and Lauren’s propped it in place with a broomstick. Door, living room, closet, fireplace that doesn’t work, two windows over the street, kitchen, fridge that hums too loudly, hallway that’s four steps long, bathroom too close to the kitchen, bedroom with exposed brick wall. It is, though, one specific kind of idea about a city apartment, done perfectly, even down to the mice that appear every summer. Sarah sits on the sofa and waits. Lauren would never ask her if she wanted water or a drink, would never play hostess, not for Sarah; she’s able to get her own drink of whatever is inside Lauren’s fridge.
The étagère near the sofa is stuffed with books. It was another find at the store. That one Lauren came to pick up herself, with Gabe, whose younger brother lived in Brooklyn and had a van because he was in a band. They drove into the city, loaded it into little brother’s van, and were gone. That might have been the last time Sarah saw Gabe. She always liked Gabe, whose work has to do with historical preservation, not manually but academically, of important buildings. In fact, Gabe was her responsibility, her doing. She’d met him first. She has a good instinct for matchmaking. He has nice eyes and a very hairy chest, the hair always peeking out of the collars of his shirts. He is a bookish guy but strong, had lifted the bookcase; well, it wasn’t all that heavy, but she remembers how he maneuvered it into the back of the van so capably, remembers the veins standing out along his forearms. She misses Gabe, wishes he was still around, imagines the four of them at dinner, the four of them at drinks, the four of them on vacation. That had seemed, for a time, to be the promise. That had seemed inevitable. The étagère looks nice, shiny brass against the dark wood floor.
“How was work?” Sarah barely has to raise her voice, knows Lauren can hear her from the bathroom, would have been able to even if she’d closed the door behind her, which she has not done.
“Work was work,” Lauren says, mouth full of toothpaste. “The coauthor on this book had a family tragedy, so that was my day. Looking for someone to replace her.”
“Family tragedy?”
“I assume dead mother, but don’t want to ask.” Lauren spits.
“Dead mothers,” Sarah says. “So inconvenient.”
“I’m not trying to be heartless.” Lauren comes into the room, pulling a sweater over her arms. “Too soon for this?”
Sarah shakes her head. “No, probably not, actually.”
“I’m always cold anyway,” Lauren says. “How was your thing?”
“My thing was a bit of a disaster,” she says. She doesn’t want to get into it now. She pictured this conversation transpiring in the restaurant: a chorus of background noise, the comfort of a cabernet. “I’m totally behind, Lolo. At least, according to Claudia Quinn at the Chelsea Terrace.”
“What does that even mean?” Lauren sits on the floor, looks up at her.
“Evidently, if I am getting married next April, I should have started planning on my fourteenth birthday.”
“No room at the inn?” Lauren asks.
“You should have seen the look she gave me when I told her April,” Sarah says. “It was like she was personally insulted as well as embarrassed on my behalf.”
“Well, screw her,” Lauren says.
“True, but still. She has a point. I wasted the whole summer when I should have been making lists and booking a venue and a photographer and all that shit.” She felt like an idiot, that afternoon, with Claudia Quinn, feels like an idiot still. She prides herself on being prepared, on competently dealing with complex situations.
“It’ll be fine,” Lauren says, standing. “Let’s go eat. And drink. And forget about it.”
The restaurant is crowded but not so crowded they have to wait, and after the single kiss on the cheek (more than one is affected) the hostess, whom Lauren introduces as Meg, her second time introducing them now, shows them to a table, and the restaurant is small enough that no one table is any better than the rest. The menu is just a slip of butcher paper left atop the table.
“What’s celeriac?” Lauren frowns. “I can’t remember.”
“It’s gross,” Sarah says. “You know what being in your place reminded me of, just now? Gabe.”
“Gabe?” Lauren looks at her.
“Yeah. I’m not sure why. Actually, I am. It was the bookcase.”
“Gabe.” She exhales. “God, that seems like so long ago.”
“Not so long,” says Sarah. “You sound positively elderly when you say it like that.”
“Almost two years,” Lauren says. “That’s a while. A full sixteenth of my life. I forgot about the bookcase. We borrowed that van from his brother. Do you remember his band? We went to see them once.”
Sarah remembers. Three guys, skinny as teenagers, posing prettily with their instruments on a stage in some bar somewhere. “I recall that.”
“They actually ended up kind of making it,” Lauren says. “Some song of theirs was in a commercial, a good commercial, for Apple, or maybe a credit card. Anyway, yeah, no idea about Gabe, we haven’t kept in touch.”
“But it was amicable. It was we’ll be friends.”
“That’s a thing people say,” Lauren says.
“I didn’t think it was a thing you’d say,” she says. “I liked Gabe. You liked Gabe. I’m just wondering.”
“We’re not all Sarah and Dan, you know,” Lauren says. She gestures for the waiter, but when he arrives, they realize they both intend to order the fish. They negotiate, retract, urge, then settle (fish for Sarah, steak for Lauren). The waiter brings their wine.
“I realize you and Gabe are not me and Dan,” Sarah says. She’s not done with this conversation. She’s not good at broaching conversational topics subtly. She knows this about herself. Huck raised her with a rhetorical style that brooks no disagreement. She’s a pundit. That’s her heritage.
“This is ancient history, Sarah.” Lauren sips her wine. “You liked Gabe. You think I shouldn’t be alone. I get it. I don’t know.” She shakes her head.
“I’m only saying I liked your ex-boyfriend. Jesus.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Lauren says.
“Could we not, please?” Sarah says at last. That terrible sting that precedes tears. “I’ve had a shitty day.”
“Because of that woman?” Lauren’s cheeks are flushed. She smiles, no longer irritated. They can do this, move easily between annoyance and affection.
“She had a point.” Sarah swirls her glass aimlessly, like a connoisseur, which she is not. “I told myself I’d just take the summer. Work as usual. But otherwise relax. We went on one lousy vacation, to the Vineyard, not even, like, something extravagant. The wedding will wait, I thought. But now I feel like I messed up, like it’s one of those dreams where you’ve got the final for a class you don’t remember enrolling in, and you haven’t done the reading and have no idea what anyone is talking about.”
“Maybe this is your excuse then,” Lauren says. “Just bail. City hall. Brunch afterward. Done and done.”
“Lulu keeps buying me wedding magazines, but they all look the same, so she keeps buying the same ones over and over.” On her bedside: a stack, some of them the size of telephone directories, fragrant with those perfume ads you’re meant to unfold and rub onto your skin. “She’s got plans.”
“Are big white dresses still in this season?”
“She’s not serious.” Lauren knows that Sarah told Lulu about it. Fifteen years later still can’t quite believe it. “I can’t believe that people still think like that.”
“Lulu’s old-fashioned. But for God’s sake, I’ve been sleeping with Dan for a decade.” Sarah finishes her wine. “Hey, how are your parents?” She hasn’t seen Lauren’s parents in—she can’t think how long. Indeed, she sometimes forgets their very existence. It’s as though her parents live far away, in New Mexico, instead of across the river, in South Orange. Lauren’s mother had introduced herself first, those years ago, as Mrs. Brooks. Sarah had grown up calling grown-ups by their first names, but tripped over that “Isabella.” She could tell that it was an affront of some sort. Anyway, Sarah’s always thought of her as Bella—that’s how Lauren had referred to her, teenage disdain distilled into two bitten-off syllables. Bella says I can’t wear lipstick. Bella says call by nine. Bella says it’s not healthy to be a vegetarian. She was nice, though, Bella, with kind, tired eyes, and a reassuring way of speaking. Sarah can’t picture Lauren’s dad, Mike, quite as clearly, but that’s the way it is with most dads, her own excepted, of course.
“My parents?” Lauren, elbows on the table, tears into the piece of butcher paper that’s meant to serve as her placemat. It makes a small but satisfying sound. “I don’t know. But speaking of parents—can’t you just outsource? Lulu knows how to throw a party.”