Rich and Pretty

by Rumaan Alam

  “You could have married Greg.” Sarah is drunk now, and her gestures have gotten bigger. She points accusingly, hilariously, at Lauren across the table.

  “Please, the idea that I could have married the skinny guy from Art History is ridiculous. Even if that is, let’s be honest, how most college romances turn into failed first marriages.”

  “You make it sound like it was so unserious,” Sarah says. “He met your parents.”

  “Once, Miss Marple.” How does Sarah remember these things? “We were kids!”

  “People do that, you know, Lauren. People marry the people they met in college. It’s not as ridiculous or out of the question as you’d like to pretend.”

  “You’re my life partner,” Lauren says. She reaches across the table and drapes an affectionate hand over Sarah’s. She’s tipsy, but it’s not a lie. She cannot imagine sitting in this restaurant across from Gabe or Greg, not the way she can imagine sitting here now with Sarah, or a year from now, with Sarah, or ten years from now, with Sarah.

  “People gave up lesbianism at graduation, however.”

  “Speaking of lesbians, I saw Jill. Shit, Jill what’s her name? With the twin brother?” Now she’s drunk, too.

  “Jill Hansen? You saw Jill Hansen? And she’s a lesbian?”

  “No, just her haircut. But her brother is gay.”

  “Of course he’s gay; remember junior year he gave that presentation on Giovanni’s Room?”

  “No, how do you remember this shit?”

  “I take my vitamins. Where did you see Jill Hansen?”

  “She’s my neighbor. Married, moved here, I can’t remember all the details. She asked about you. She gave me her number but I mean . . . am I supposed to call her? It seems very bizarre.”

  “Call her, she’s nice.” Sarah rolls her eyes.

  “Two kids. What would we talk about?”

  “Wait, Jill Hansen lives near you?”

  “There goes the fucking neighborhood, right?”

  “Seriously. I think she might actually be a billionaire. Listen. Before our food comes, there’s something I need to tell you, or ask you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t be insulted, first of all. But you know, as maid of honor, you’re supposed to be in charge of this whole bachelorette situation.”

  Lauren nods. “I was once at a store in the West Village that sold pasta shaped like little tiny dicks.”

  “I’m serious. Hear me out: I found this place. Tropical island. Nice hotel, actually nice, not tacky. All inclusive. The five of us can laze around, order room service, sit by the pool, get massages, the whole cheesy stupid thing.”

  Lauren considers this information. Pros: sun, a hotel bed, a massage, swimming. Cons: everything else. The groupthink that attends every gathering of more than two women that she’s ever been a part of. She doesn’t bring this up. Now is not the time. She smiles. “Five?” She pauses. “This sounds amazing, by the way.”

  “You think so?” Sarah looks relieved. “I was worried you were going to be, like, not into it or something.” She pauses. “Yes, five. You, me, Meredith, Fiona, Amina.”

  “Cool,” she says. She likes Fiona well enough, her smooth accent, her weird way of dressing. She thinks Meredith is quite silly, though, and Amina has always seemed to her like sort of a bitch. But they’re Sarah’s friends, and it’s Sarah’s thing, and actually, they’re sort of her friends, too, by association, and she understands her responsibility at this particular moment. “The beach,” she says, blankly, though she does love the beach.

  “I was thinking, actually, Thanksgiving,” Sarah says.

  Thanksgiving. This is a stroke of genius. Lauren relaxes, immediately. This gives her the perfect excuse. “Thanksgiving. Yes. What a great idea. We’ll go for Thanksgiving.”

  “Good, that’s settled. Now, where is our food?”

  At a certain point in her youth, back when it wasn’t inconceivable as it now is that she’d be out late, Lauren had decided that if it was after 11:30 she would, by default, take a taxi. The subway was not safe at that hour, nor was it reliable. She couldn’t afford a taxi, but neither could she afford to be raped or vomited on on the subway. So this was simply the rule. And she followed it faithfully, never even screwed the driver on his tip, even though she could have used those one-dollar bills probably just as much as he. Now her rule is 8:00 P.M. Any later, and no public transportation for her, certainly not all the way between Chelsea and her apartment. She can afford it. Not really, not in the big scheme of things, but she can, and she knows she’ll be almost happy to hand over the twenty-four dollars at the end of this ride, to send it back out into the world. It will symbolize something, this transaction.

  The taxi nudges into place among its compatriots and competitors on the bridge. The Manhattan is the uglier of the bridges, but it affords the superior view. She’s drunk. She opens the window, gulps at the air. She’s so thirsty.

  The night is cool, but Lauren doesn’t care. She’s going to a tropical island soon, she thinks, but she doesn’t even know which one, because Sarah didn’t tell her. She’s laughing at herself, laughing at the whole enterprise. Getting married is a silly business. It might be the catalyst or conclusion of all that Shakespeare, but it’s still idiotic, in its way, or idiofying—it makes idiots of us all. She has the strangest desire for a cigarette, though she’s not smoked in years. There’s a shop on the corner, she’ll stop and get a pack. She can smoke on the fire escape, that won’t stink up the apartment. She can sit and smoke and think about nothing at all.

  Chapter 10

  It’s wet, anemic, and sort of pathetic, but it’s snow. The view from the apartment is nothing special, normally: the void of the sky, there just beyond the staggered buildings, the blankness of the river, a suggestion of New Jersey. The snow, such as it is, gives Sarah something to look at, makes her grateful for the view. Anyway, staring out the window is preferable to reviewing résumés for Carol, who has requested Sarah’s input. She’s been moving the stack of papers around on the coffee table for an hour, not reading or understanding any of it. The day feels over, somehow. She picks up her telephone.

  As a teen, getting a telephone installed in her bedroom was a hard-won privilege. They were probably the last generation of American girls to have to lobby their parents for that specific perk. Only two decades later, it seems as antiquated and impossible as traveling by blimp. But the negotiations: They had been brutal. Sarah had begged and promised, and the good behavior and good grades with which she bargained were finally accepted, this though she reliably delivered both without any added incentive. In retrospect, it’s less that her parents were duped than that they didn’t actually care. The telephone line was installed. She was charged with monitoring her usage—the bills, in those smaller-than-standard-size envelopes, which she studied looking for what, exactly? They recorded every call she had placed, the eight cents that she would be required to pay for the time she called Hannah at her apartment and had had to leave a message with the grandmother Cho. Sarah didn’t have a checking account, of course, and her parents paid the bills, and never made any particular fuss about the number of minutes she spent on the telephone.

  How did they find the time, she wonders? Two-hour phone calls with Lauren: When were they even apart for two hours, and what did they talk about? One of her stronger memories of childhood: the hot plastic of the telephone receiver pressed up against her ear.

  She’s still a telephone person, though she can’t now concentrate on both a telephone call and some other task, as she had as a girl. She used to do her homework that way. The ubiquity of telephones hasn’t done anything to change the fundamental intimacy of a telephone call. A little miracle, is what it is. She pushes the résumés away, calls Lauren.

  “Hi.” Lauren, familiar.

  Another lost aspect of the old telephone culture: never knowing who was calling. “Hi.” Sarah’s surprised Lauren picked up. She’s usually harder to get.

&n
bsp; “I was just thinking about you. That’s so weird. But so perfect.”

  “Good things, I hope.”

  “The greatest, actually. Do you remember our Goth phase? Please tell me you remember our Goth phase.”

  “That hardly qualifies as a phase,” Sarah says. “We bought some Urban Decay and went to a Nick Cave show.”

  “We were so dark and mysterious.” Lauren laughs.

  Sarah shrugs, forgetting Lauren can’t see it. “Adolescence is a dark time. We were experimenting.”

  “It’s funny to think about. It was unlike us. It was unlike you. You were . . .” Lauren trails off.

  “I was . . . ?” Sarah asks.

  “You were, you know, you were the alpha. The leader. The role model, the head of the class, the girl most likely.”

  “Bullshit.” Sarah’s laughing. “I was not. I was just some girl. Just a teenage girl trying things on, like you were.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Nothing up.” Sarah stands. Pacing has supplanted homework as what she does when she’s on the telephone. “I felt like calling. Do you remember how much we talked on the telephone when we were kids?”

  “My parents hated that.”

  “I remember you insisting that they get call waiting.”

  “They refused. Eight dollars a month! An outrage.”

  “But what did we talk about, Lauren? What was it that we had to say to each other, so urgently?” Sarah stares out at the snowy night. Snow makes you feel more cozy, always, and she doesn’t even care about having to go out into the stuff tomorrow. The tickets are bought, the rooms reserved: four nights, a pool, a hot tub, a spa, room service, a bar, golf, if for some reason she decides to take up golf. Having this to look forward to makes everything else seem possible.

  Lauren sighs, or exhales, it’s not clear, the weight of her breath surprisingly loud. “I’m glad we don’t know. I’m sure it was idiotic. Did you ever read anything you wrote in a journal as a kid? It’s all garbage. Thank God I never had the discipline to write in my journal more than three times a year.”

  Sarah was the same way. A journal as a birthday gift, two or three dutiful entries, then the book sat fallow in an old shoebox in her closet where she kept secret possessions: notes from friends, old boarding passes, playbills, useless foreign currency. That box must still be there in the house on East Thirty-Sixth Street. “I don’t know,” she says. “Whatever we were worried about then, it’s probably so sweet and unimportant.”

  “It probably didn’t seem that way at the time, though,” Lauren says. “We wore black nail polish. We had real problems. The problems we have now pale in comparison.”

  “You have problems?”

  “I have no problems. How about you?”

  “Wedding planning problems. Boring problems.”

  “What’s the latest? Lulu been practicing her repertoire for you? She should do something with a mariachi band. Mariachi bands are so festive.”

  “That’s cute, actually. No, the music is up to her. I just need to show up and get dressed. That’s the problem. The dress.”

  “The dress, yeah. Have you been trying stuff on?”

  “It’s all terrible, Lolo. Giant and puffy or like . . . slutty. I had no idea slutty was such a big thing in wedding dresses.”

  “I think you should go slutty. I think it would be a real departure for you.”

  “This is just one of those things. You can’t go in alone. I think I know what I want then I step inside and I turn into a babbling idiot and start trying on the most ridiculous things and I look at the salesgirl and she’s like ‘You look great!’ and I think maybe I do look great and should just give her four thousand dollars so I can be done with this torture.”

  “The problem is you’re going in alone. Why don’t you take me? I’m rational.”

  “Why don’t I take you?”

  “I am the matron of honor,” Lauren says proudly.

  “Maid.”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I got married. Sorry! I should have mentioned it. I just really wanted that matron.”

  “If you want to come, please come, that would be so great. I could use the help,” she says.

  “Why don’t you just ask? Yes, I will come. Duh. Don’t be a moron.”

  “Talk to me about something besides this wedding.” Sarah’s eye falls on the stack of bridal magazines on the coffee table, several pages dog-eared for reasons she can’t recall. It just felt like what she should be doing—folding down pages and mentally filing away: mason jars for cocktails, Polaroid cameras left with the centerpieces, a basket of flip-flops by the dance floor. “What happened with temp?”

  “Temp is fine. Temp is the same. Temp and I are working together on something, actually.”

  “Just be careful,” Sarah says. “Your promotion probably means you’re his boss. A sexy complication.” Sarah’s teasing contains her own happiness: five years Lauren’s worked there, making cookbooks; it’s about time this happened for her.

  “I just think he’s cute is all,” Lauren says. “He wears shoes. I’ve barely actually spoken to him.”

  “Shoes are good.”

  “No, I mean, like, shoes. Man shoes. Driving shoes. Moccasins? Drivers? What are they called, the ones that have the little buckle over the top? He might be the first man I’ve ever been interested in whose dressiest shoes aren’t Chucks.”

  “Oh yeah. Drivers? Wait, are those loafers? Dan has a pair of those. Horsebit. It’s called a horsebit.”

  “Of course Dan has a pair of those. He probably wore those in the second grade.”

  “Shut up.” Sarah laughs. “Maybe. But yes. Man shoes, for a grown man. So the temp is a grown man, only without a grown man’s job.”

  “Hey, it’s competitive out there, cut him some slack.”

  “So you’re working on something. Mixing business with pleasure yet?”

  “Nothing like that, Sarah. I’m trying to figure it out. I think maybe it’s not a good idea. I wouldn’t want my bosses to know that I was fucking some guy in the office, you know?”

  She’s impressed. Lolo, her Lauren, making the responsible decision about a guy. “Maybe you’re right, maybe an office romance isn’t a good idea. Besides, guys, whatever, but this job thing, I mean, it’s about time this happened, really. You should enjoy it.”

  Lauren is quiet. “It’s not that long coming. I mean, don’t make me sound like some kind of loser.”

  “No, come on, all I meant was that it makes sense, I think, for you to be thinking about how this would look to your bosses. Versus your own wanting to date a guy who wears real shoes.”

  “Okay.” Lauren is not convinced. Lauren sounds wounded. This is her way of punishing: monosyllables.

  “I didn’t mean anything.” Sarah is quiet. “I shouldn’t have said it like that. If it’s real shoes you like in a man, we can find you real shoes. Let’s start looking. You’ll need a date for the wedding!” This last—a way to change the subject, to make herself the butt of the joke, to make herself seem the pathetic one.

  “Yeah. Fine. So, okay, wedding dress. Let’s make a plan.”

  They make a plan—next Wednesday, at Bergdorf’s—then they talk, more, almost an hour longer, and later, falling asleep, Sarah realizes she has no idea what it is the two of them talked about for so long.

  Chapter 11

  The water looks the way Lauren expects it to: unreal. Seen from above, unfolding all around them, the color of toothpaste. There’s an impossibility to it, but also that disappointment she’s thought, until this point, specific to the experience of encountering a famous, much-reproduced work of art in its original form. Come face-to-face with the Pietà and feel nothing profound. Gaze upon those Bacon triptychs and feel no more disturbed than any other day. So now, leaning forward in her seat to peer out of the window that is, for some reason, set a couple of inches in front of the seat rather than comfortably abutting it, she takes in the expanse of the sea and thinks the th
ings you’re supposed to think (like jewels, like silk, so blue, etc.) but feels unmoved nonetheless. Not that she isn’t looking forward to getting into that water. She’s not insane.

  It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and the airport is crowded, but so, too, more surprisingly, is the plane. She did not know about this, before; that a significant subset of our fellow Americans say fuck all to grace and grub with their racist great-uncles, get onto planes, and fly off to resorts where the only concession to the holiday is a turkey and cranberry sandwich on the lunch menu. Lauren’s parents were unthrilled when she bailed on what’s one of the family’s last remaining rites.

  “Oh, a bachelorette trip, that’s nice,” her mother said, meaning the same thing every mother says when she uses the word nice.

  It’s the latest way she’s found to disappoint her mother: denying her the pleasure Lauren knows she derives from seeing all three of her children, arrayed around the table, just like old times. Lauren feels sorry for her mother, a terrible truth. She’d gone to college, married a sweetheart, and taken a job at the doctor’s office thinking of a future of three or four children, vaccinated and checked up, gratis, by the Doctors Khan. That had all come to pass. Why the pity, then, if everything had gone swimmingly? Because it wasn’t enough. Even with the scholarship, there was scrimping related to Lauren’s schooling. Her parents consider Macy’s a splurge.

  They had singled her out for this not because she was smart, though she was not dumb, but because she was theirs, and therefore special. Plus her mother had in her, deep somewhere, a feminist feeling about the thing. Lauren suspected that her mother harbored fantasies of being a doctor herself, and that filing insurance claims for the Doctors Khan was the closest she had come to it. Bella wanted more for Lauren. She still did, needled her about things like a title change, and flextime, and business cards, things she must have studied up on, having no personal experience with them. At least, then, there was some concession, some good news.