Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

The lighting is not good. There are no windows. Lauren washes her face, but maddeningly the faucet is the kind that you press and water comes out for about twelve seconds then shuts off so you have to keep pressing it again and again. She brushes her teeth, checks her armpits, which are fine; she hasn’t sweat since her walk from the subway to the office. She pulls her hair away from her face; it still gets a little wet but it doesn’t matter. Her hair looks great, it always does: It’s thick, falls in this subtle wave that’s natural and not studied, and that some girl in college once told her she was lucky to have and ever since then she’s been proud of it. She doesn’t wear jewelry, not even a watch. She’s got on a sort of hippie dress that she found somewhere, vaguely Mexican. It’s prettier than she normally wears to the office, and under the belted sweater she keeps stashed on the back of her chair, and with the heels she’s just slipped on, it looks like a real I’m-going-to-a-party outfit. A bit of color on the lips, something on the lashes. She hurries, she doesn’t want anyone to see her in the bathroom and think she’s primping for a date like some kind of loser.

She takes the bus east on Fifty-Seventh Street and waits eight minutes for another going down Second Avenue, but grows impatient and decides to just walk. Even when she sweats she’s not very smelly. It should be fine. She takes her place among confused tourists, the occasional jogger, dog walker, little old lady, coworkers and friends drinking cold wine at sidewalk cafés; al fresco dining in Manhattan, she’s never understood that, the whole thing smells like exhaust and urine.

Huck and Lulu’s house is covered in ivy. The window boxes — Lulu’s handiwork — look bountiful. The parlor windows are open, and Lauren can hear those party sounds drifting out: polite chatter, the occasional decorous laugh, ahems and footfalls on parquet, the cell phones of rude guests. Though it’s still light out, in her mind she sees the house theatrically illuminated, light spilling onto the stoop, onto the sidewalk, the windows offering a glimpse of something, another way of life, like the dioramas at a museum, the vignettes in a department store. The house was always lit up as though for a party, life with Huck and Lulu and Sarah is always a party.

You don’t ring the doorbell at this sort of party, and anyway, it’s been years since she used this particular doorbell. She comes and goes with impunity, or she did, once upon a time. She walks in, and there are people in the parlor, attended by a pretty girl in a black polo shirt and black pants, cherry red apron around her waist, passing a tray of something that looks tasty even from far away. The men are wearing jackets and ties; these parties are attended exclusively by the kinds of men who wear jackets and ties everywhere, possibly even to bed. There are women, too, of course, and somewhere in the distance she can hear Lulu, because you always can hear her, that big laugh from deep in the throat, the mix of tongues in which she speaks, her native Spanish, her never-wholly-Americanized English, a touch of French, when warranted, for emphasis. Lauren can picture her; she’ll be standing in profile, head tilted back a bit, kind of like the woman in that Sargent portrait that so scandalized the public he had to revise it, adding a dress strap. That’s how Lulu always stands; she thinks it shows to best advantage her “good side.” In her cotton dress, Lauren’s underdressed, but her relative youth makes up for this. She’s not one of the powerful matrons in geometric, collarless blazers, not a Ph.D. in a pencil skirt. She’s just some girl. She doesn’t see Huck anywhere. She climbs the staircase.

Sarah’s room shares the top floor with Huck’s office. The second floor is divided between her parents’ room and a guest room, frequently occupied. Lauren strolls past the line of women — it’s always women, these lines — waiting outside of the second-floor powder room, past the door to Huck and Lulu’s inner sanctum, which now as ever has a little folk art painting, a portrait of a girl, strung on a silk ribbon, hanging from a nail on the door, because Lulu, in her enthusiastic collecting, long ago used up all the available wall space. The stairs creak horribly. There’s an unspoken consensus among the party guests that it’s fair to wander to the second floor, queue up there for the bathroom, but anything farther than that is an intrusion, so there are raised eyebrows as Lauren continues past the scrum and ascends to the top floor. She tries to look proprietary.

On the walls: frames, a collage of photographs, hundreds of them. Photographs are meant to be forever, but they’re not. The quality of light, the once-fashionable haircuts and colors of clothing: You can tell these are old from afar, so old they might as well be cave paintings. Everything’s done tastefully, under plastic, but the way the pictures are mounted seems somehow passé, a relic. Lauren doesn’t need to look closely, doesn’t need to scan the pictures to pick out her own face: there beside Sarah’s, girlish attempts at makeup and comic grimaces instead of smiles, on their way out, something to do with boys, she can’t recall now. Or there, hair pulled back into a ponytail that snaked (could it be?) through the gap in the back of a corduroy, suede-brimmed baseball cap. That day, class field trip to a farm, or Storm King, or the Noguchi Museum, something of that order. And Sarah, of course: here, proudly atop a horse, because she had been one of those girls, a horse girl, until the age of thirteen, when it started seeming babyish, like Barbie, Archie comics, drawing with crayons. Sarah as a toddler, utterly recognizable (long nose, wild hair), studying one of her dad’s fat books, a mocking frown on her face, modeling his glasses to boot. Sarah, in overalls, buried in necklaces, because she’d had that phase of making necklaces, stringing beads onto cord and calling it her art. Lauren still has one of those necklaces.

Lauren thinks of her own parents, their suburban split-level with a far less architecturally interesting stairwell, which is also hung with pictures of the children, though only three, one of each of them. Her parents don’t decorate in quite the same way as Lulu; they prefer the store-bought to the timeworn. The door is closed. She knocks.

“You hiding?”

“Just a minute!”

“I said, you hiding?” Lauren jiggles the knob, which catches. Locked. “It’s me.”

The door opens. “Shit. You scared me.” Sarah, fanning away smoke, guilty. “Come in here.”

Lauren closes the door behind her quickly, absurdly afraid of being caught at something. She can’t help it. On the top floor of this house everything she does seems somehow girlish. Sarah drops onto the bed. She’s wearing a navy dress, a little conservative, something that blouses and gathers at the waist in a way that implies the early stages of pregnancy or one’s fifth decade. It’s not a great color for her, but she’s always drawn to strong, declarative shades — blue, black, red — that don’t flatter her skin. She’s somehow not mindful of how she looks in them. Lauren has always been a little jealous of Sarah’s obliviousness to certain things.

There are two beds, matching headboards, matching upholstered benches at their feet. The bench at the foot of the left bed, that’s where Lauren dropped her overnight bag, nights she came to stay. The bench at the foot of the right bed, that’s where Sarah discarded sweaters and shirts, the ones she’d rejected that morning, with the labels Lauren loved, Benetton this, Gap that, Ralph Lauren this, Donna Karan that, the last less hand-me-down than a pilfered-from courtesy of Lulu, cashmere as perfect as a baby’s skin. The housekeeper would come up in the afternoons, put everything away.