Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

“You know what?” Lauren slides away from the table. “I think I’m going to head to my room and pack up before the beach. So I don’t have to later. I’ll meet you out there?”

She’s wrong: Sarah is capable of more than veiled verbal sparring. She knocks on her door only ten minutes later. Lauren knows it’s her before even opening it.

“What’s up?” Lauren’s already packed, so she’s just been lying on the bed, half reading an issue of The New Yorker from several months ago. She’s very far behind in her reading.

“Hi. Can I sit?”

“Sit. Obviously.” Lauren doesn’t sit. She stands by the door, looking down at Sarah. “You ready to go home?”

“Look, I—” Sarah stops. “Meredith told me what she saw, and I am just. A little surprised, or something. I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know what Meredith saw, but. .” Lauren barely has it in her to protest.

“Meredith saw enough. She’s annoying but she’s not stupid. You fucked the waiter, Lauren? Seriously?”

“It’s a vacation.” She is surprised they’re discussing it at all, but not surprised by the tone in Sarah’s voice: disgust. She’s barely trying to conceal it. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Embarrassing, though, right?”

“Embarrassing for whom, Sarah? Am I embarrassed that Meredith, who is your friend, not mine, saw something, and gossiped to you about it like a prude? I don’t know. It’s her choice. But you know. It happens. I fucked a guy. If this were Afghanistan, you could stone me.”

“It’s just embarrassing. It’s just. .” Sarah pauses, looks around the room as if willing the right word to appear. “It’s tacky. What about that temp? I thought you were interested in him.”

Lauren laughs. “The temp?” She can only barely conjure his face. “What does he have to do with anything?”

“You liked his shoes,” Sarah says, ridiculously.

“What can I say? I’m tacky. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that this private thing that has nothing to do with you, and certainly nothing to do with Meredith, is so tacky. You know. I’m sorry that it makes you feel so embarrassed.”

“God, that is not an apology.” Sarah stands up. Her anger is unusual. She’s whispering, but it’s a loud whisper. “I am so sick of apologies that are like. . I’m sorry that made you feel this way . That is not how you apologize. You’re not supposed to be sorry for having made me feel a certain way. You’re supposed to be sorry for doing the fucking stupid thing you did in the first place. So don’t try that, okay? You are better than that.”

“I see. I’m better than a bad apology but not so good, because, I’m still a tacky slut who. . fucks the help. Is that accurate?”

“You know what? You can play it that way. That’s totally fine. It’s obviously not about the help, and you know it. It’s obviously not about being a slut, and you know it.”

“It’s about what, then? It’s about me being me, and not being you. This is what it’s about, Sarah. I am me, and you are you, and there was no difference there for, I don’t know, a decade? But now there is. And you get mad at me, for being me. And I get mad at you, for being you. Except you never actually get mad, you just get, morally superior. And smug. And I don’t know what else. And I get mad. And then we don’t talk and it’s a whole fucking thing.”

“What are you even talking about now?” Sarah is pacing the small area of the bedroom.

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t. But she does. Lauren means what she’s said and can’t totally believe that she’s said it. Sarah seems, on some level, to disapprove of almost everything she does. She’s still bringing up Gabe’s name, years after the fact. “Is this friendship or is this force of habit?”

“I don’t know what that means.” Sarah is still whispering.

Lauren looks at her. She’s more tired than angry.

Sarah shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Lauren sighs. “I shouldn’t have. .” She doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. She’s not sure what she’s apologizing for.

“I’m going to the beach,” Sarah says. “I’ll see you there.” She leaves via the room’s private terrace. Lauren lies on the bed for twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling, before joining the rest of the party in the cabana they’ve reserved until noon. The car will take them to the airport at one thirty.

She will shower, one final, hot shower in this glorious bathroom, though her hair will still feel salty, her feet still sandy. She will put on the jeans and the shirt and the cardigan, though it’s too hot for a cardigan, because it will be cold on the plane, she knows. She will leave behind the three issues of The New Yorker that she’d brought with her, having read them entirely, except for one article about baseball. She will leave behind twenty dollars on the nightstand, for the housekeeper. She will scurry through the lobby and into the car quickly, but she won’t see the waiter, so it’s fine. She won’t watch while Sarah signs the bill, which she’s already told them all repeatedly she’s going to do and therefore none of them will put up any kind of fuss about it. She will be quiet on the car ride to the airport, they will all be quiet on the car ride to the airport, studying their phones, already thinking about work, and boyfriends and husbands or lack of boyfriends and husbands, about winter coats and the way the city smells when it’s cold outside. The sky will grow dark as the plane continues north, and the city will come into focus as light, a glorious array of lights, as the plane dips below the clouds and the pilot gives his well-rehearsed speech about not moving about the cabin and so on. And she will know that when the pilot says the words Flight attendants, prepare for arrival, that will mean arrival is truly imminent, because the approach to the city is a long one, the lights misleading; you will think you’re there but you’re still a ways off, and then there it is, nearer, nearer, so near it seems you’ll plunge into the sea, it seems the plane’s wheels will skim the roofs of the cars on the highways, but none of that will happen, all will be well.

The people on the street—the disappointed-looking businessman with snow on the cuffs of his pants, the Chinese grandmother moving very slowly, umbrella doing little to protect her, the postman in his cloudy blue fatigues — seem defeated. A sadness more persistent than the snow seems to settle on the city. We think of January as winter’s heart, but in truth, it’s only its beginning. There is much yet to get through.

Sarah doesn’t succumb to this sadness. She feels liberated. Christmas had been so much distraction. One of Huck’s timeworn jokes: Their religion is gift giving. For Christmas, you didn’t ask for humble, stupid things, common, cheap things, because those you’d get anyway: stockings stuffed full of card games and candies, tiny, plastic things meant for Barbie; later, earrings and bracelets and rolled-up pairs of tights; later still, gift cards and jewelry with a more adult seriousness, no charms in the shapes of cats. At ten: a horse, a beautiful young thing, called Bellatrix. She boarded in the Bronx, and Sarah’s mother drove her up twice a week to ride. That had been her year of the horse. Her clothes were equestrian, the books she read heroic narratives about girls riding through danger or somehow, with the intercession of their fearless steeds, saving the family farm. Her allowance was saved for a dreamt-of new saddle, so expensive that it would have taken her literal years to accrue enough, but somehow that never occurred to her, as a child.