by Rumaan Alam
They lie there, his snore soft, like a baby’s, then she sleeps, then wakes, notices he’s not there. He’s in the kitchen, because they’ve made a plan. He’s promised her a meal, promised to use one of her books, by a celebrity Italian chef, small as a bird, whose signature touch is putting lemon zest into everything.
“Veal,” he says, triumphantly. He sweeps an arm over the counter, proudly, as she comes in from the bedroom. He’s bought the good stuff, wrapped in white paper and tied with twine, from the old-school butcher. Those used to be everywhere in this neighborhood—as well as plumbers, coffee roasters, funeral directors. You still see statuary (the somber virgin, the lamb of God) in front of the homes of the more devout, though most of the old Italians have moved off to Long Island, sold their brownstones to enthusiastic millionaires of no particular faith. One of the churches has been turned into condos.
“How cruel,” she says. She yawns and crawls onto one of the kitchen stools.
“Cruelly delicious,” he says, flicking through the twine with the end of his sharpest knife and unrolling the paper, like a child at Christmas.
The kitchen counter divides the kitchen from the living room, nominally; in truth, the kitchen is a wall of the living room. Rob likes to cook or is learning that he likes to cook, anyway. The cookbook is splayed open on the cheap stone countertop. An NPR quiz show is playing softly in the background. He probably didn’t want to wake her. He rents this apartment. It’s nice enough.
“I have a secret,” she says.
“Do tell.” He’s not wearing an apron, but there is a striped dish towel draped jauntily over his shoulder.
“Maybe you should sit down,” she says. “Sarah is pregnant.”
“Sarah, friend Sarah, the Sarah who’s getting married? Premarital sex?”
“I was shocked, too,” she says.
“Congratulations to Sarah, friend Sarah whom I have never met but whose wedding I will dance at. We should have a toast. Pour some wine, would you?” He gestures at her with his meat-contaminated hands.
She pours the wine, which has been breathing, though she can’t see how that would make any difference in the thing. The wineglasses are very tall. She clinks her glass against his, which is still sitting on the counter. “To Sarah and baby,” she says.
“Seriously, though, is this a surprise? It must be a surprise.”
“It’s a surprise,” she says. “Which is unlike her. She’s usually got everything under control. I guess she thought she had this under control, too, but you know, sperm, they’re dogged little suckers.”
“There but for the grace of God,” he says. He washes his hands, sips the wine. “Is she excited?”
“I think so,” she says. “It’s the way it was meant to be. Just early. I told her not to sweat it. I don’t think anyone will know it to look at her. She’s got a body for childbearing. She can disguise it.”
“A body for childbearing,” he says. “Ouch.” He sips the wine. “Cheers.”
“Well, I’m just saying.”
“I’ve never even met her,” he says. “Am I going to meet her before this big fancy wedding?”
“Probably,” she says, though she has no real idea.
“Sarah with the important father, whose parties are attended by members of the Supreme Court, that’s all I know about her.”
She shrugs. “I’ve known her for a million years,” she says. “She’s my best friend.”
“So you don’t want her to meet me,” he says. “What am I, your sexual plaything?”
“And personal chef, don’t forget personal chef.”
“Seriously, though, we should all get together, do something, don’t you think? I think. Invite them over. I’ll cook.” He looks at her.
She tries, fails to imagine Sarah and Dan here, in this kitchen. There are four wooden folding chairs pulled up to a shabby table Rob also uses as a desk. A jar that once held organic strained tomatoes has been repurposed as a vase. The flowers are a nice touch though. “Dan,” she says.
“The fiancé?”
“He’s unbearable,” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe we can all get a drink or something.”
“He’s unbearable, but your best friend is marrying him,” he says. He’s slicing mushrooms, pushes his slipping glasses back up his face with his shoulder.
“He’s not so bad, I guess. He’s not my favorite person in the universe, but they’re very well suited to each other. It makes, like, one hundred percent sense that they’re getting married.”
“Because he’s a loser?”
“He’s not a loser.” She pauses. “I don’t know.”
“You described him to me, like two weeks ago, and I quote, as a ‘loser.’”
“I didn’t realize you were taking notes. He’s fine. He’s just such a . . . I don’t know what the word would be. A nerd?” She knows that’s not right.
“I’m a nerd.”
“You like baseball,” Lauren says. “Dan likes medical ethics.”
“I like medical ethics.”
“You do not.”
“I could.” Rob reaches into the fridge, removes the butter.
“You couldn’t, trust me, it’s horribly boring.” The wine is good.
“Can I just ask though, seriously, it’s not me, right? You’re not ashamed of slumming it with the lowly editor type? Fucking the temp.”
“You’re not even a temp, anymore,” she says.
“I’m asking a serious question here, Lauren.”
“Don’t be insane,” she says. “I’m not hiding you from them. I’m protecting you from them.”
“Well, you can see how a guy might get the wrong idea,” he says. “It’s not like I’m saying take me home to meet the folks.”
“The folks,” she says. “Let’s talk about something else, okay?”
“Are you sure Sarah is your best friend? You never sound all that psyched about her.”
“I don’t? Yes, I’m sure. Obviously. Look, we’ve known each other for years, and maybe we’re a little different now, as grown-ups, but there’s a long history there. We go way back, as they say.”
“You seem a little on edge, though, when you talk about her. You know what I mean?” He’s dicing garlic.
She isn’t sure what to say. She’s annoyed. She’s known Rob four months, she’s known Sarah twenty-one years.
“I’m just saying, sometimes it doesn’t sound like you’re best friends. You seem a little . . . annoyed by her,” Rob says.
“Everyone’s friends annoy them sooner or later, right?” She drinks. “She’s my best friend. I can’t explain it.”
“I didn’t mean to make you mad,” he says. “I thought we were just talking.”
“We are just talking.” She’s being short with him but she can’t stop herself. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. It’s—” She doesn’t know how to complete the thought. It’s complicated. It’s her way. It’s private. All of those things, though this last is too mean—she doesn’t think Rob should be allowed to talk to her about Sarah. Four months, fine, but they don’t know each other. She can’t be known in so short a time.
“Hey.” He puts the tongs down on the counter and looks at her seriously. “You there? I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. I’m just curious about Sarah. I’d like to meet her. She’s a big part of your life. It seems right that I would know her.”
She looks down into her glass. He is right. “You’re right. Never mind. Let’s focus on the task at hand. Can I help?”
“I don’t know, Lauren. I run a pretty serious kitchen.”
She climbs off the stool and goes to stand beside him in the kitchen. Things are very organized in there: cutting board, bowls, the pepper mill. She’s seized with a powerful urge: to take him by the hands and pull his arms around her, to feel the weight and warmth of his body behind her, to feel him, there, a real human being, hers, to just stand there for a moment, quietly. She doesn’t do this, though she doesn’t know why. She reaches up�
��he’s taller than she is—and grabs the towel from his shoulder. She tosses it over her own with a flourish, like Isadora Duncan with her fatal scarf.
“Let me show you how it’s done,” she says.
Chapter 15
The morning is cool. Sarah is in the library, waiting for it to be eleven past the hour, when the local channel recaps the forecast, but also hiding from Willa. It doesn’t work.
Willa sweeps in with purpose, takes Sarah by the hand. “Don’t worry, darling, it’s going to clear.” Willa shakes her cell phone in the air triumphantly. “I’ve got an app. Hour by hour. It’s saying noon. So don’t you worry.”
Sarah isn’t worried, in fact; it’s April, what did they think? She no longer cares about whether the weather will hold, but Willa seems almost to want her to be unhappy. If Sarah is petulant, that will give Willa something to do; if Sarah is grumpy, that will reinforce Willa’s value. Sarah doesn’t want it to rain, obviously, but she wants Willa to somehow be proven wrong. After tomorrow, she’ll never have to see her again. She turns the television off before the weather report even comes on and goes upstairs to wait.
Willa has been calling the bedroom “the bridal suite” and “the staging area” alternately: the former possessed of too much grandeur, the latter too silly. Neither can elevate what is, after all, Sarah’s childhood bedroom. In this room, what can she be but a girl again—all that childish ephemera: years’ worth of yearbooks, framed certificates for this or that accomplishment; a Lladro figure of a horse; a sterling, hollow pig, filled with Kennedy half-dollars. Behind the door of the walk-in closet—the only space where Sarah was allowed to exercise her decorative instincts, her adolescent psyche made visible. There, glamour shots of horses torn from the pages of magazines gave way to a parade of soft, shirtless lads, interchangeable really, the stars of screens large and small, Jonathans and Tylers and Aarons and Eriks, who were then ripped down, supplanted by postcards of paintings, stolen from the gift shop at the Met, an Avedon portrait of Allen Ginsberg ripped from the pages of Huck’s New Yorker, though she never managed Howl, a photograph of Sylvia Plath she found God knows where. Even here, this assemblage wasn’t necessarily the real Sarah. There was an artifice to it, she was aware even as she had assiduously set about Scotch taping.
Danielle, the hairstylist, is waiting for her, sipping a gigantic paper cup of coffee, as is Lauren, sitting on the edge of one bed and reading an old Vanity Fair. Danielle arrived half an hour ago, rolling a suitcase, black, efficient, the sort a flight attendant uses, in her wake. But now she’s unpacked, the tools of her trade arrayed neatly on the bureau, atop clean, white towels that she must have brought with her.
Danielle came recommended by Willa. Sarah had only glanced at her portfolio, a panoply of dewy brides with stunning updos and tousled manes, but upon meeting her, Sarah knew she was the one: It’s hard not to be impressed with a woman like Danielle, a hairstylist who wears her own hair shorn to the scalp, something black women are uniquely capable of pulling off. Danielle wears a black tank top and black jeans, and Sarah considers, resentfully, her well-formed biceps. After all these weeks of dutifully lifting and dropping those stupid pink barbells, she doesn’t have much to show for it. Danielle had listened carefully at their meeting and seemed to agree that what Sarah envisioned—hair back, not up—was the right thing to want. Danielle had taken Sarah’s face in her hands, studied the shape of her head, and the whole thing was so intimate, so loving, her warm, strong touch. Danielle was the kind of woman you’d let do anything to you.
“You look lovely this morning,” Danielle says. “How are you feeling? Nervous?”
“A little,” Sarah says. Why lie? She can admit to Danielle what she won’t admit to Willa.
“First things first,” Danielle says. “Have you eaten?”
Sarah shakes her head. She hadn’t even tried. Not morning sickness, thankfully, just a disinterest in her usual bowl of yogurt and cereal.
Danielle frowns. “This is your job,” she says, accusingly, to Lauren.
“She doesn’t want to eat,” Lauren says. “I tried!”
“You didn’t tell her she has to?” Danielle shakes her head. “You have to.”
“Maybe I should eat.” Sarah’s still not hungry, but if Danielle says she must, then she must.
“You should. A boiled egg, something with some protein, and some fruit, just because.” Danielle sips her coffee.
“So should I . . .” Lauren trails off. “Should I, like, go downstairs and boil an egg?”
“You should,” Danielle says. “That would be the right thing to do.”
Lauren puts the magazine aside and stands. “Okay. One boiled egg, coming up.”
“Make it two,” Danielle says. “One isn’t enough. And find some fruit.”
Sarah finds it reassuring that even Lauren is cowed by Danielle. Lauren stands, sort of shrugs, leaves the room. Danielle’s tone isn’t unkind, but she’s clearly someone to whom other people listen.
“I’m all set up,” Danielle says. “You’re going to sit here. The light is good right here.” Danielle has pulled one of the little benches from the end of the bed to a spot in the sunlight, by the window.
“Sounds good,” Sarah says. “Are you ready for me now?”
“No, no,” Danielle says. “Once you’ve eaten, we’ll start.”
Sarah wonders what Dan is doing, if he’s taken a shower yet. The guests are due to arrive at four. The ceremony itself is supposed to take place half an hour after that. It’s early, but she knows how quickly these hours will fall away. Time being relative, of course, and speedy on a day such as today. Dan will send some last work e-mails, take a shower, dress, take a taxi to the hotel to meet his parents, fetch them, take another taxi downtown to her parents’ place, come inside, chitchat, fuss over the arrangements, retie his tie, and then guests will start trickling in. What seem like hours will turn out to be minutes. She’s excited to see him all dressed up. She likes the way Dan looks in a suit.
Last night was fun. More fun than she’d anticipated, and genuinely celebratory, which had been her biggest concern. She’d worried that everyone would gather in a room and it would feel like an office birthday: sheet cake in a conference room. But it was the kind of night people remember, will be the thing they remember when they think of her and Dan. Remember the night before your wedding, we went to that taco place downtown? That was so great!
Sarah didn’t eat much, something every wedding magazine told her would happen. She nibbled on a piece of corn, sodden with cold cheese, but did her duty—to circulate, to hug and kiss the guests who had made the trip in from out of town, her mother’s cousin in from Miami, her father’s sister’s widower and her cousin in from Los Angeles and New Haven. Willa kept bringing Sarah plates of food, but she mostly ignored them.
Sarah had been dreading the toasts, but in the end, they were sort of charming, even heartwarming, and she’d endured them with as much grace as she could muster. She felt like the actresses at the Academy Awards must: It’s hard to manage poise when you’re so conscious of wanting to seem poised. But there were moments the smile, practiced, conscious, slipped into real happiness. She can’t remember much of what was actually said, now, but never mind. Everyone had a great time, which is what matters.
The party was a gift, her gift from Lolo, the best gift, better than the handblown footed glasses, the Conran plates, the Porthault napkins that the people she knows less well than Lauren will give them. Better because she could never have come up with it on her own. Who would have thought of tacos? They didn’t talk much—Huck or Lulu pushing and pulling her into obligatory hellos and kisses and catch-up conversations. She caught sight of Lauren, in red, across the room, nodding at something that Lulu was telling her, then later, when Huck had the floor, expounding upon his theory of love, a speech that was moving, that was persuasive, because that’s what he does for a living. Sarah watched Lauren, who was listening, reach out and put her hand in the crook o
f one of Rob’s arms, which were crossed against his chest. Leaving, Lauren had leaned in close and whispered into her ear, twice (it was noisy): “That was so fun.”
“Thanks to you,” Sarah had said. It wasn’t clear if Lauren heard.
Lauren smiled. Next to Rob she looked tinier. Her breath was citrusy, from the wedge of lime the waiters had forced on the participating guests of one round of celebratory shots. Her eyes were the way they got when she’d been drinking, bright, a little wild, wider than normal. “See you in the morning,” Lauren said, leaning in for an actual hug then, surreptitiously, gently, placing her hand against Sarah’s stomach.
Sarah doesn’t especially want a boiled egg. “Danielle, would you like to know a secret?”
“Hit me,” she says. The tone of a woman used to being confided in. People love to confide to their hairdressers.
“I’m pregnant.” Sarah pauses. It feels less odd to say it aloud now. It’s a secret but it’s still the truth. “You can’t say anything in front of my mother, though, promise me on a million Bibles.”
Danielle clasps her hands together. “You’re pregnant! Congratulations. You are so lucky. Pregnant women have the most beautiful hair. Your hair will never be better. It’s something hormonal.”
She’s read the exact opposite but doesn’t disagree, only nods, smiling. “I planned it this way so my hair would look amazing.”
“It’s good news, though,” Danielle says. “A big year for you. Married, baby. It’s wonderful. And you must be early, you’re not showing at all. So your secret is safe, I think.”
“I’m not far along, no. This wasn’t exactly the plan, knocked up on the wedding day, if you want to know.” Sarah laughs. “I think I’m just getting in under the wire. I feel like tomorrow I’m going to wake up five hundred pounds heavier. I think she’s waiting, trying to be polite. She doesn’t want to ruin my big day.”
“A girl?” Danielle turns her back, fusses with the accoutrements on the table, but catches Sarah’s eye in the mirror.
“A hunch.”