Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

She’s tired of this preoccupation with the circumstances of her own life. It seems petty, all this wedding talk. A night last week, dinner with Michael and Bethany, Dan’s coworkers, and their spouses, Andrea and Elias. Lovely people, with the same palpable affection for Dan as everyone who knows him, and now, by some transitive principle, for Sarah, too, since they’re getting married. A ring still means something. And that ring, what it symbolized, the conversation kept turning back to it — talk about work, then talk about the wedding, talk about real estate then reminiscences of their own weddings, then swapped details about honeymoons in Namibia, the necessity of providing guests some late-night snack (doughnuts, it happens; both couples had served doughnuts, this before they even knew one another), the perils of the registry and the importance of writing thank-you notes.

The wedding hasn’t even happened yet and she’s exhausted being the center of attention. Being a bride is apparently a solo effort. For example, she’s not heard anyone ask Dan any specific questions about what he’ll be wearing or what the guests will be eating. In a way, it’s an improvement over the general tendency to only talk about what people do for a living — the first thing everyone asks someone they’ve just met, isn’t it?

Her unsatisfactory answer to that query is that she’s always thought of herself as a solver of problems. She just isn’t clear on how to make this a career. Anyway, there never seems to be time to think about what she’s going to do, because she’s so busy doing it. Because there’s no noun for what she’s doing now, she tries to steer the conversation away from it. There’s no noun, not really, for what Huck does, but he does so much. This is the family business, these things that Sarah does, the connecting of dots, the solving of problems, though she’s aware that not everyone understands this, and she envies that friends like Fiona and Lauren can explain in one word what their business is.

At the moment her business is this wedding. Sarah doesn’t mind it and doesn’t expect Dan to be any more helpful than he is already: It’s her responsibility, she gets that. It’s not sexist, simply a measure of which of the two of them has the bandwidth to think about things like flowers and cake. It’s not some kind of betrayal of a deeply held feminist conviction, that she has to now think about this shit — it’s a reflection of the kind of relationship they have, the kind they want to have, one in which they take turns helping each other. She knows that if she complained, Dan would slip away on his lunch break to sample wedges of cake.

The truth is that she cares fuck all about cake. She’d have gone to the courthouse. But it’s too late now. This is how they’re getting married, and she’s got to take it seriously, give the people what they expect, what they want: to put on a tie or a not-too-pretty dress, to eat lukewarm salmon, to tap a champagne flute with a dessert spoon, to take pictures, to dance, to say hello to the older relatives, to see friends from college and high school, to eat warm doughnuts from sticky boxes as the clock strikes midnight. She’ll get through this, and make it perfect, too. She will not disappoint.

There’s Halloween candy on displayin the drugstore across the street from the office, the one that’s more like a grocery store, or a boutique, that sells nail polish but also cantaloupe or a sweatshirt. It’s a confusing but seemingly successful business model. Lauren had gone to get a yogurt, a midafternoon snack, that Greek yogurt with a little compartment of strawberry jam you can squeeze into the cup and mix up so it’s like dessert. She’s hungrier lately; the body responding to the calendar, presumably.

She’s been looking forward to dinner, because of that hunger, if at the same time dreading it, because of Sarah. Not that she doesn’t want to see her, not exactly. She’s uncertain, actually, why she’s reluctant.

Sarah’s chosen a restaurant downtown, she always does, because, Lauren thinks, of a tirade she once went on, about how restaurants uptown are all terrible. Lauren stands by it, but at the time wasn’t talking about Sarah at all, was relaying an anecdote about a party for one of her books, held in a too-bright spot in the West Seventies, where the air-conditioning was powerful and the food charmless. But she’s fairly certain that Sarah made a note of it. She knows how her mind works.

Walking from the subway, Lauren is rather enjoying the chill, though she knows what will come next and thinks of warmer climes. One of the essential conditions of living in New York City is thinking wistfully about living in California. It’s the opposite coast, therefore presumed to be the opposite in every other way. She’s only been there twice, herself — that cookbook conference in San Francisco, where she went to some nice restaurants, drank a lot of thin, local wine, and spent a lot of time wishing she was outside. And Los Angeles once, years before that, a postcollege vacation with Sarah where they stayed with friends who shared an adorable little house. They couldn’t get over the novelty of it: an actual house, all your own, a driveway, a table on the patch of concrete outside the kitchen door, bougainvillea shedding like mad. Greg, her college boyfriend — though it seems insane to use that word to describe their relationship, they were in college, they never went anywhere, just shuttled back and forth between his apartment off campus and her room on campus, fucking — had moved to Los Angeles after graduation to begin his career in the film business. He worked at a production company vaguely associated with a well-known director. He was mostly responsible for ordering lunch, unwrapping it, and placing it in the center of the table in various conference rooms. Greg was what that trip had been about. She couldn’t afford it, but Sarah had urged it: a break from the rigors of their first jobs, a break from the shitty apartment they shared, plus a taste of an alternate life. Sarah had never wanted Lauren to break up with Greg, but what was the alternative: to have married him? He’s married now, anyway. He’s gained seventy pounds since college, not fat, but mass. He was so slender and hard, now he’s positively burly, with a big jaw that he developed at some point in his midtwenties. He still works in film, as a line producer, though Lauren doesn’t know what that means. His wife is a prop stylist, they live in Silver Lake, they have a daughter named Violet, whose existence he’s lovingly documented online.

She couldn’t have gone to California, those years ago, because she would have been going only for Greg, and that seemed idiotic, pathetic, would have been vastly overestimating what their relationship had been, never mind that he hadn’t asked her to. College ended, their romance ended, and they’d both known that was coming. In fact, if they’d broken up, formally, a conversation, in bed one morning, she can’t remember it. He was very sweet, and she had loved fucking him, but life had a lot more in store for her, in New York City, in publishing. Adventures. Now it’s eight years later and far too late for her to move to California. And on the good days, she retains that sense that life holds something in store for her. On the bad days, she is not so sure. On the average day, the day like today, she can let her mind wander. But what would she do for a job? She can’t style props, whatever that means. Still, on a chilly evening it’s nice to think of bougainvillea.

Sarah is there before her, sitting, looking at her phone.

“Am I late?” Lauren doesn’t want to start the evening off on the wrong foot.

Sarah shakes her head. “I’m early.”