Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

What Sarah says, when asked, at parties, in passing, by Dan’s or Papa’s colleagues: There have been so many advances in how we think about AIDS, and how we treat it. Our understanding of the disease shifts almost annually; shouldn’t our organizational infrastructure similarly shift to accommodate new ways of combating the disease? It sounds impressive, or at least, it sounds right. She shows up, she puts on the name tag and sits behind the desk, she wanders the floor, trying to put that once-loved vase into a setting that shows its loveliness to greater advantage. She is not going to let a power struggle undermine her commitment. There are board members who are noticeably nicer to her now than when she first showed up. It’s been two years. This is vindicating.

The taxi is taking too long. The driver is hesitant. He seems irritatingly uncertain. Though she’s lived here all her life, except the sojourn of college, she can’t direct him. She’s never paid attention, not to the way the roads unfold. She can drive from the garage where her parents keep their beat-up old car to their house in Connecticut without thinking, but she can’t remember which avenues run uptown and which down. She says nothing. She looks at her phone. She looks out the window. There’s been a study, recently, about how often parents look at their phones, about the phones representing some kind of competition to the children, about how addicted we all are to being connected to each other, to being able to access the sum of human knowledge whenever we need it. She’s trying to look at her phone less, since reading that, but it’s true that the things are addictive.

She finds the container of cashews in her bag, chews one thoughtfully. This trying on of dresses: hard to square with her principles, but it makes her want to eat less. She wants to look beautiful. People will remember them as they were on their wedding day, and she wants to be remembered as having looked perfect. It matters, and if it’s stupid that it matters, well, then so be it.

Sarah thinks again of that photograph, Lulu in her gown, less beatific than stunned. They’d dressed the part but in fact, they’d eloped, the two of them, visited a federal judge of Huck’s acquaintance. Was Lulu sad, Sarah wonders, marrying a man her parents had never met, thousands of miles from home? Does it matter how you get married or only that you do? She hasn’t thought yet about who will actually pronounce them husband and wife, who will represent the state, the only god she and Dan actually believe in. She’s been to those weddings where a friend of the couple did the thing, earning his credentials online, which surely illustrated something important about religion. Their love is important, but she can’t think of anything that approaches the sacred in her life, the sort of spirit that inspired great cathedrals, mass hallucinations, civil wars. Their wedding, however it will be, it feels smaller than God. A church is out of the question.

She actually shakes her head as though to dispel the thoughts of the divine. There doesn’t seem to be time for that now. It’s probably an intellectual response to the sheer stupidity of shopping, a sad state because for a long time shopping was all she ever wanted to do. She and Lauren, nosing around the boutiques near Washington Square Park, which were for college kids and therefore irresistible, considering a nose piercing, a pair of thick-soled boots, glittery nail polish, or she and Lauren, uptown at the sort of store Lulu liked, considering a miniature leather backpack, a flowery cotton dress by Betsey Johnson, that sexy unisex perfume in the smooth glass flask. The trying on of dresses, even then, was no fun, not if they were both trying the same thing, because it was clear on whom it would look better. But the Longchamp bag, the dangly earrings, the perfume — with those, it didn’t matter who looked better, and Sarah was the one with the allowance, and later, the credit card. Lauren had saved for that Kate Spade wallet, but she just had less to keep inside it.

Sarah needs that Lauren, the old Lauren. They held each other in mutual thrall. Everything was exciting. Now, so little seems to be, or at least, so little seems to be to Lauren. Sarah doesn’t want this to be true of herself; she doesn’t want to be a cynic. She fiddles with the button to open the window. A bit more breeze might be nice. Yes, the dress thing, it’s humiliating, but she’s going to have to find a way to get excited about it. She’s hungry, but the fresh, bracing air on her face might waken her, stir her, change her. She looks at her phone.

The celebrity chef is crying into the telephone.These are her plaints: computer trouble, moving to a new office, the death of her dog, the firing of an embezzling assistant. This is above Lauren’s pay grade. This calls for more than she, with that “associate” lodged firmly before her title, is able to affect, to mitigate. What can she say to this but “There, there.” She’s no confessor. She cannot prescribe. She can only listen, listen as the litany turns to tirade. The celebrity chef, she is angry: disappointed by technology, dismayed by the relocation, betrayed by the pettiness of thievery and the grim fact of death itself.

“That’s terrible” is what Lauren manages. This is what it’s come to. She has ideas, chefs she’d love to work with, writers whose work she admires, themes that might be interesting books, events that might actually generate some press attention, but here she is, cooing to a stranger over the telephone.

The woman continues, her impeccable Cuban accent cracking, a coarse edge peeking through, a frayed hem, a shame. It makes Lauren like her better. It makes her remember their impolitic teasing, as kids, about Sarah’s being Latina. It’s there, lodged at the very heart of her name — Sarah Rojas Thomas, corruption or compromise of Venezuelan convention, Lulu’s maiden name as her middle name — and she and their other friends, idiots every one of them, had thought it hilarious, at certain moments, to imply that Sarah was the maid. They lacked the imagination to think of other occupations for a woman named Rojas.

The upshot is: The book is going to be late. Lauren knows this the second she spies the 305 area code on the telephone’s caller ID. This is Miranda’s territory, but Miranda is not here, and the celebrity chef is afraid of Miranda anyway. She knows Miranda outranks Lauren, she knows there’s nothing Lauren can do to her, so it’s Lauren she’s decided to tell. She’s canny, you don’t get to be a celebrity without being canny.

Lauren nods and fiddles on the computer and wills her mind away from her body, wills herself away from this conversation. It ends, eventually, as conversations must. The celebrity chef a little less unhappy, barely disguising her relief at having jettisoned at least one of her many responsibilities — the contractual obligation to deliver a manuscript by the end of the following month. She has gotten her way, as she no doubt knew she would.

The shadow of this conversation stretchesacross the rest of the day. It gives Lauren that dry feeling in her mouth, that quickening of the breath that makes her feel she’s somehow been at fault, when of course she’s not. This is true power, she thinks, walking home, exorcising the negative thoughts in the bracing air, breathing in the cool, exhaling the stress, to take your problem and make it someone else’s, to slip out of the bonds of your promise, your responsibility, and — nothing. No consequence. This is celebrity. She has known celebrity, in her work, of course; this chef, she’s not the only one. But beyond work, there was that guy from college, a year younger, but they knew him pretty well, who won an Oscar shortly after graduation. Her high school had been lousy with the children of celebrities, and some of them are celebrated now, for owning art galleries on the Lower East Side or throwing charity events or being beautiful and out and about. And of course, there are Huck and Lulu, not celebrities the way some of their fellow students’ parents had been — not models or television stars, rock musicians or English actors who appeared on Broadway — but Huck and Lulu were known. If not celebrities, celebrated. They had nothing to do with what was happening currently in the culture, were not a momentary apparition, the ingénue who graces one magazine cover then vanishes. They endured. Huck endured, anyway, and Lulu sat by his side and was mentioned in the same breath, always with the same parentheticals, the same formulation: “his wife, Lulu, the well-regarded singer.” Well-regarded, to be regarded at all: the American dream.