Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

Sarah doesn’t especially want a boiled egg. “Danielle, would you like to know a secret?”

“Hit me,” she says. The tone of a woman used to being confided in. People love to confide to their hairdressers.

“I’m pregnant.” Sarah pauses. It feels less odd to say it aloud now. It’s a secret but it’s still the truth. “You can’t say anything in front of my mother, though, promise me on a million Bibles.”

Danielle clasps her hands together. “You’re pregnant! Congratulations. You are so lucky. Pregnant women have the most beautiful hair. Your hair will never be better. It’s something hormonal.”

She’s read the exact opposite but doesn’t disagree, only nods, smiling. “I planned it this way so my hair would look amazing.”

“It’s good news, though,” Danielle says. “A big year for you. Married, baby. It’s wonderful. And you must be early, you’re not showing at all. So your secret is safe, I think.”

“I’m not far along, no. This wasn’t exactly the plan, knocked up on the wedding day, if you want to know.” Sarah laughs. “I think I’m just getting in under the wire. I feel like tomorrow I’m going to wake up five hundred pounds heavier. I think she’s waiting, trying to be polite. She doesn’t want to ruin my big day.”

“A girl?” Danielle turns her back, fusses with the accoutrements on the table, but catches Sarah’s eye in the mirror.

“A hunch.”

“Does your fiancé know?”

“He knows. Just me, him, Lauren, and you. Top secret, swear to me.”

“Sworn,” Danielle says, in a tone that makes clear that she’s to be trusted.

That’s not quite true, though: The doctor knows, the seamstress from Bergdorf Goodman knows, and she knows that Lauren must have told Rob. It’s clear they’ve reached the secret-sharing stage in the relationship. She doesn’t mind.

She’d finally laid eyes on Rob a few weeks before. “You should meet Rob,” Lauren had said, calling from the office one afternoon, using that hushed and inexpressive tone she used when she telephoned from the office. “He’s coming to your wedding, after all.”

This was something Sarah had been waiting for, had asked for, but something she’d not wanted to insist upon. She was thrilled. The four of them met for a drink on a Thursday evening after work, a restaurant in the West Village, equally inconvenient for all of them, but a place that Dan’s fond of. She wasn’t sure what she expected from Rob — had to see him to realize that she’d suspected there’d be something distasteful about him, some reason Lauren had kept him hidden away. But there was nothing.

He’s handsome, Rob, tall, with tousled hair and those smart eyeglasses that everyone wears nowadays. His eyes crinkle shut when he laughs, his voice has a bit of a creak, an almost adolescent squeak, and he makes no attempt to disguise the extent to which he’s smitten with Lauren, always touching her, casually stroking her thigh, resting an arm on the back of the banquette and with his right hand teasing a bit of her hair. His manners are old-fashioned, the work of a vigilant mother: He’d stood to greet Sarah, stood again when Dan, late at work, finally arrived, a firm handshake and lots of eye contact. He’d kept signaling the waitress whenever their glasses were near empty, insisted on ordering appetizers even though they’d all said more than once that they were just going for drinks. Sarah, unable to drink, of course, had happily eaten everything that came to the table, and Rob had ordered more. When it was over, he paid the check, flatly refusing to discuss the matter. He didn’t have a tattoo on his neck, wasn’t dressed like a hobo, wasn’t preoccupied with some delusion like being in a band.

Nor was he just normal; he was interesting. Their conversation was about books, about the media, about his job, about baseball, but he’d had several questions for Dan about medical ethics, and his inquiries were informed, his interest genuine. Rob might be better than Gabe, and she loved Gabe, remembers fondly what Lauren was like when Gabe was in her life. Sarah saw a suggestion of that, with Rob, noted the way Lauren leaned into him, their bodies occupied with each other even as their minds were not. Lauren speaks more loudly with Rob around, or did that night, anyway, and a smile seemed to play across her lips when her face was at rest, when the rest of them were talking and she was silent. Rob is good, Rob is great, and more important than that, the Lauren that is beside Rob is good, is great, is happy. That’s the Lauren she loves the best.

Lauren’s read somewherethat the proper way to boil an egg is to put it in the cold water, bring the pot to boil, then cover it, removing it from the heat and letting it sit for ten minutes. So this is the method she follows. She must have dropped one of the eggs in too forcefully, though; a small fissure opens in the shell, and the albumen ribbons out, swirls and bobs on the surface of the agitated water. When she lifts it out of the pot after the allotted ten minutes, she runs it under cold water until she can bear handling it. The white has cooked into a little mass of lumps, like a flower, or a tumor.

She’s not hungry herself, and in fact, dealing with the egg makes her less hungry. It’s sort of disgusting. She tosses the brown shell into the garbage disposal, even though Lulu composts. There are bananas in an enamel bowl on the windowsill, and she takes two of those. She makes toast, too, because it seems like the thing to do, moving slowly, because she is tired.

She slept heavily, drunkenly, but also with satisfaction: The party was perfect. The private room was comfortable, the staff attentive. There were big stone bowls of guacamole and mountains of chips, warm from having just been fried. There were juices in glass pitchers you could have taken for alcoholic, though they weren’t; she had insisted on those at the last minute, remembering that Sarah wouldn’t be able to drink the special wine Huck was having sent over. There was corn slathered in mayonnaise and cheese and there were tacos, four kinds — fish, pork crispy and not, and chicken, all in floppy little tortillas stuffed with cilantro and radishes. The platters just kept emerging, take as many as you like, then there were toasts with both champagne and tequila, then churros, sugary and thick. Dan’s dad spoke, Huck spoke, Meredith’s brother Ben spoke, and it had occurred to Lauren, and then panicked her — as Sarah’s oldest friend, as her maid of honor, was she supposed to give a speech? She’d asked Sarah this, the night they were out, the night Sarah discovered she was pregnant.

“God no,” Sarah had said. “God no.”

So, no speech. She thought maybe Meredith would be unable to resist clanking fork against flute (Meredith was the kind of girl who always had to drink champagne; it’s curious how we consider it so ladylike to drink something that makes you burp) and tell some long-winded, discomfiting tale about how she and Dan were the ones meant to end up together. But no: She seemed occupied. Her date that night, and for the wedding, too, Jamie, a coworker of Dan’s, arranged by Sarah out of some sense of obligation that only Sarah seemed to live with, held her attention nicely. Lauren got a good look at Jamie. He had a very young face, was clearly younger than they were, but a bald spot he had tried to atone for by wearing the rest of his hair longish. The desired effect had not been achieved, but Meredith seemed happy.

It had been fun. Lauren had suspected it might not be, and she had been wrong. Leaving, she’d taken Sarah by both hands, hugged her, told her just that.

“I was wrong,” she’d said. “It was fun.”