Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

Even after the grandeur of the lobby, the room is a surprise. The floor tile is cheap, the wall color offensive, but the bed sprawling, and the bedroom spills out onto an indoor-outdoor room and from there, just the outdoors: green grass, a winding path, and that sea; it’s still there, it wasn’t a dream. The air-conditioning is on with conviction. The porter deposits Lauren’s bags and she realizes she doesn’t have any currency, whatever it is they use in this country. She gives him a five-dollar bill, hopes that’s enough, or not too much to be an insult. Anyway, he doesn’t say anything. The bathroom is strangely old-fashioned, but the water in the shower is wonderfully hot. Her skin feels oily and her hair smells like fast food. She uses the shampoo provided for her convenience, not caring what effect it might have on her hair. She can’t afford this, none of this. It’s a little faded, the luxury, but it’s luxury all the same. Sarah is paying for the hotel, for all five rooms. She insisted and in the end no one fought her on this. It’s not as though she doesn’t have the money.

Lauren rubs sunscreen over her body. You have to work at sunscreen or it just sits there on you. There was mutual consent that they’d meet at the bar, where the woman at the front desk told them they could order snacks or sandwiches until the restaurant opens for dinner. She is hungry, actually, almost starving. She puts her bathing suit on, then a dress over that. She wants to eat, quickly, a shrimp cocktail — which sounds suitably tropical and ridiculous, the sort of thing you’d only order if you found yourself in a hotel — then she wants to lie on a chaise by the swimming pool, fall into the cold water, wrap herself in a big and ridiculously fluffy towel. She wants to read and then fall asleep and then wake up and continue reading, but in the end she leaves her book in the room and finds the bar.

Fiona is already there. She’s involved with a cocktail, taking pictures of the view with her phone. She’s wearing the same hat, an exclamation mark to underscore her height.

“Amazing, right?” This by way of hello.

Lauren sits at the table Fiona has commandeered. The bar is empty, only the bartender behind the bar. A beautiful smile there, too. Maybe it’s because they’re black that their smiles seem so bright. Maybe this is a racist thing for her to think.

“To be sure,” she says. Which is, she realizes as she says it, an insane thing to say, some accidental attempt at Englishness. She gets that way with accents sometimes.

Fiona doesn’t seem troubled by this. She’s wearing dark glasses. Her hair looks reddish in this light. She’s pretty, Fiona. “I’m having a mai tai,” she says, the tone confessional.

Lauren laughs, because she thinks she’s supposed to. “That sounds good.”

“It’s good, my friend, highly recommended.”

So Lauren signals the bartender and orders one, as well as some french fries, called chips here, a colonial holdover.

“You’re in food, yeah?”

“Cookbooks.”

“I’m a terrible cook,” Fiona says. “I’m English.”

Lauren laughs again. “I don’t actually cook, either,” she says. “Not much. The cookbooks we publish, they’re by celebrities. Easy recipes. Chocolate cakes with mayonnaise in them, tacos made out of store-bought rotisserie chicken.”

“My husband does the cooking.” Fiona sips her drink. She’s graceful. “He’s always trying to do these ambitious things from magazines. Recipes that begin with things like ‘Dig a hole in the backyard.’ He makes a terrible mess. Dirtying every bowl in the house, that kind of thing. You’re married?”

“No.” The bartender brings her drink. Lauren shakes her head for emphasis. “Not spoken for!”

“Last woman standing.” Fiona sips her drink.

“Something like that.”

“But you have a serious boyfriend, right? I remember Sarah saying something about that.”

“Had. We’re not together anymore.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says. The chips have arrived. “Anyway, been a couple of years.”

Fiona nods. Her eyes have wandered out to the view.

The weird thing about travel: You go, and then you’re there. You’ve been looking forward to it, or dreading it, or thinking about it, whatever, and then all of a sudden there you are. It’s been a month since Sarah told Lauren about this trip. Four weeks of worrying about the expense (and there was that: bathing suit, sunscreen, taxi to the airport; her paychecks have yet to reflect her new salary, and anyway, the change won’t be that dramatic), yearning for the sun, bristling at the thought of an expanse of quality time with these four girls, but delirious with the thought of freedom from routine. She hasn’t left New York in three years. Those three years ago, she went with Gabe to Denver for the wedding of an old friend of his. That was the last time. She needs a change.

She met Gabe through Sarah, though Sarah did not know him, not exactly. Huck had been one of the featured speakers in a series of lectures at the Museum of the City of New York, where Gabe worked as a curator. He and Sarah had happened to meet at a reception after one of the talks, and she’d just asked him — it’s always easier to ask for a friend — if he was “seeing anyone,” that genteel parlance, and hearing that he was not, insisted she set him up with Lauren. Gabe assented, because that was the sort of guy he is. Easygoing, easily led. Lauren didn’t have high hopes for it, figuring first that Sarah didn’t exactly know her type and, second, that anyone willing to go out for a drink with a stranger’s best friend, sight unseen (though later she learned Sarah had shown him a picture of her, on her phone), would be mentally or in some other capacity deficient. But Gabe was not. He was nice. He’d gone out with her, he explained to her, much later, simply because he’d been asked to, and this was easy to reconcile with the Gabe she came to know, the sort of guy who did what people asked of him. He was unerringly obedient.

Lauren jokes, sometimes, that the relationship lasted four years because that was how long college had lasted, and high school before it. Four years and her mind is set, like a cake after forty-five minutes. Four years and the thing, no matter what that thing is, has run its course. It’s true what she says to Fiona — there’s no hatred, no spite, no revision. Hadn’t they fucked on the floor of her living room, Gabe kissing every bit of her, her neck, her armpits, which she particularly liked? Hadn’t they had brunch with her friends and his? Hadn’t they paid those desultory visits to her parents and brothers in New Jersey?

Gabe is big, broad, the body of an athlete despite his near complete devotion to bookishness. Gabe, his glasses always slipping down the bridge of his nose, his distracted air, his terrible seasonal allergies. Gabe, with his big hands, and a penis that curved charmingly to the right, angled so it struck something in her just so. They haven’t spoken but a couple of times in the two years since they broke up, broke up because he wanted her to marry him and she didn’t, though she’s not told anyone, especially not Sarah, especially not her mother, who loved Gabe, thought him just the kind of man she’d imagined her only daughter settling down with. Gabe had wanted for them to marry. She had not. That’s all.

“I think I see Amina,” says Fiona. She fiddles with her watch.

They reconvene at the table. Showered, changed, ready for leisure. It seemed so late in the day when they arrived. Now it seems early, because there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. Mutual agreement that they won’t bother leaving the grounds of the place tonight — maybe not all weekend! ventures Meredith. She and Fiona reorder drinks while everyone else is on their first. The french fries do not last long.