Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

He chuckled. “It’s cool. I think it sounds fun. More fun than Thanksgiving in Maryland with my mother and my sister.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Thanksgiving isn’t so bad, right? At least you don’t have to buy anyone a present.” Then, that last bit: She was flirting.

“My sister is doing this gluten-free thing, it’s a real drag.”

“That’s a coincidence,” she said. “I’m waiting on a gluten-free manuscript to come in. I’ll have to get you a copy. It’s going to be one of our big fall releases.”

“I’m sure by the fall she’ll have moved onto a new obsession, but that’s so nice of you.” He paused. “What is gluten exactly?”

She shook her head. “One of the wonders of the world, actually. Anyway, thanks for taking care of that. I’ll let you know if I need extra hands on anything else, if that’s okay?”

“It’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Hey, let’s have lunch today?”

They had lunch. Lauren was going to ask Karen to join them, which would have made it feel slightly less unprofessional, but she was out with the flu, so it was just the two of them, at the diner across the street, the one so authentically New York that tourists rarely ventured into it, the one not long for the world, the one that would someday soon be transformed into a drugstore, or a quiet, efficient lobby holding blinking, beautiful automated teller machines and nothing more.

Rob had landed the temporary gig because his old boss was friends with Kristen, recommended him as a capable set of hands to help out in her absence; he wasn’t an aimless, career temp, but being adrift is a condition of being a certain kind of bookish dude in the contemporary economy. He had moved to New York to do his MFA at Columbia, finished that with minimal debt, worked at a magazine aimed at the collectors of yachts and race cars, left that to work at a literary imprint of one of the big publishers, lost that job in a round of belt tightening, and gone to work as a research assistant to an academic writing a popular biography of a pioneering art dealer, but that book’s research was finished and now here he was, on the assembly line at their office. As this story came spilling out of him, she saw more clearly what this thing was. It was as she had imagined. We only tell these stories about ourselves to those to whom we need to give some context, some understanding. These are details we offer to those we feel might find something meaningful in them. He wanted to be known by her, to be understood by her, and to kiss her, to sleep with her, to — whatever the verb is. He wanted her, and she had known he would. She is good at that, at being wanted.

That Friday, he’d asked her for a drink, and a drink meant something different than lunch during the workday. They left the office together, went to a bar in a Midtown hotel, where she ordered a Manhattan and held the glass as seductively as she knew how. He kissed her when they were leaving, stepped toward her as they waited for a taxi on the curb, pressed into her, held her by the chin and brought his face to hers, and their mouths met, and his tongue grazed hers, and then he took her by the hand, held the taxi door open for her like a gentleman, and saw her again Monday morning at the office, where they pretended that nothing was amiss. They maintained this game, and only Karen knew otherwise, because Lauren had confessed to her one day over lunch at the very same diner.

“I knew it.” Karen took a pink envelope of artificial sweetener out of the little ceramic dish and threw it at her accusingly. “You tramp.”

“Shut up.” Lauren grinned. It was part of the game: She wanted to be teased.

He had stopped working with them at the end of December, and so they’d abandoned the complex dance of pretending not to know each other as well as they did. One Saturday before Christmas, he’d come home with her, to order Chinese and watch a movie, but as soon as they entered the house, they’d fallen onto her bed as if it were a familiar place for them both. She wanted this out of the way before dinner; sex is never any good when you’re full of food. She took a shower after, came into the living room to find Rob opening the door to receive a plastic bag containing a paper bag full of oily Chinese from the middle-aged man who did the delivery for Hunan Delight. They sat on the floor, not watching the movie, talking about the quality of the dumplings. When the greasy plastic containers had had their lids snapped back on and were stowed in the fridge, Rob left; having sex was one thing, but it was still too soon for him to sleep in her bed.

He has slept there, twice now, the first time another Friday night, just after starting his new gig, and his cool shoulder in her back that Saturday morning wasn’t as strange as she thought it would be. They’d dressed that morning and gone to the indoor flea market, where they ate fresh doughnuts and looked at people buying garbage. They’d walked around in the unseasonably mild chill, had lunch at a terrible Frenchy place on Atlantic Avenue, and ended up back at her place, Rob still in the clothes he’d worn to the office the day before. He mentioned this, then stripped out of his clothes and fucked her on the floor of the living room. They showered together, she cooked a frozen pizza, and they sat in their underwear and ate it, then he left the next morning, kissing at the front door. Now, seeing Rob waiting, hands in his pockets, in the front of the restaurant, which is dark, and very warm, feels familiar. A scene she’s lived before, the scene of meeting him in a place they’ve never been together before, but recognizing him, the slope of his shoulders, the long arms, the beginnings of a bald spot, the easy grin. Rob always looks satisfied.

“How was work?” Rob had joked to the hostess— Give us the best seat in the house— and it had worked. A back booth, out of the way, giving them a command over the whole room, candlelit, hushed despite the crowd, some trick of the acoustics.

“Gluten free,” Lauren says. The waitress brings them cocktails, and they knock their glasses together before they take a first sip, and Lauren can’t tell if the gesture is ironic or not. “You?”

His face brightens even further. He loves his job. “Great. We got the green light on that profile. So that’s exciting. And spring training starts soon. I think that’ll be good.”

“Awesome,” she says, and that, too, sits awkwardly, somewhere between irony and sincerity. She is excited for him; his excitement is infectious. She wants good things for him, and that seems surprising. It must mean she likes him more than she was aware of liking him, to this point. She is not one of those women who frets about what it all means, who is always checking the present against some grand game plan. She thinks of poor Meredith, her ravenous desire to use those nouns: boyfriend, fiancé, husband. Meredith would love Rob, who is handsome, but accessibly so: not beautiful. Beautiful men are horrible. Much better, a man who looks like a man, a man who is generically handsome, well proportioned, unfeminine, a man with faults, though it’s early enough that Lauren’s not privy to Rob’s faults, not yet. She’s never heard him burp.

“It is, right? What are you going to order?”

They have settled into a pattern of consulting each other before ordering in restaurants, exercising the right to reach across the table to the other’s plate. She opts for fish; he asks for lamb, even though they both agree it sounds cruel, and that there ought to be some euphemism for lamb, something nonpartisan, like veal, or something misleading, like sweetbreads.

They order a warm dessert — apples and caramel in a salty pastry, topped with saltier ice cream, this vogue for salty desserts is a winning one — and she pays the bill. This is something they’re still feeling through, this question of paying, but it’s idiotic to expect him to pay simply because he has a penis. She has the better job, after all. She puts down her corporate card — she’s allowed, it’s research, they’re scoping out the hotshot Korean chef who runs this place — and he says nothing, then thanks her when she’s signed the bill. It all feels like something they’ve done a million times before, but in the best possible way.