Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

“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.

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.