Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

She can be loud, is maybe the only person in the world who can be louder than Huck, but she’s most effective when silent. She sees them, she sees all, and beckons urgently, waving enthusiastically but also commandingly. Gripping wineglasses and holding hands, they trip across the stones, weave past partygoers, Lauren’s arm brushing right up against the back of the honorable associate justice. Lulu is standing on the stone, too, but seems somehow to be onstage. She grabs them both, one hand on each girl’s arm.

“There you are” is all she says.

“Hi, Mom,” says Sarah.

“Hi, Lulu,” says Lauren.

“Hi nothing.” She squeezes Lauren’s arm. “You never come anymore. You came.”

“I came,” Lauren says. “I come sometimes.”

“You came!” She relinquishes their forearms and claps her hands together, once, twice, three times. “I’m so happy. Oh, you’ve made me so happy, but darling, where’s Dan; Dan’s not here tonight?”

“Dan’s not here tonight,” says Sarah, in a tone that implies she’s already explained this to her mother.

“Never mind, never mind; oh God, Lauren, you’re so beautiful, look at her, Sarah, isn’t she beautiful, it’s preposterous.”

“Preposterous,” Sarah agrees.

“You never come,” says Lulu again. Another squeeze, something between affection and punishment.

Lauren considers the things she might say in response. I find you ridiculous. Your husband is a warmonger. Your daughter is marrying a fat man. I have not lived up to my potential. She smiles. “I always love coming here,” she says, and it is the right thing to say.

“Everyone always loves being at our home,” Lulu says. She sparkles, Lulu does; it’s not makeup and not beauty, it’s some sort of natural incandescence. She nods her head like the matter is settled. “Everyone loves being at our home. Don’t go away. Stay out here with me. Meet our friends. Your fiancé isn’t here but you can still show off that ring. Lauren, have you seen the ring? It was in his family.”

“I think you can see it from space,” Lauren says. She has seen the ring. Sarah sent her a picture, when it came back from being resized — a diamond like an almond.

Lulu laughs loudly. Once again, the right thing to say. “Do not go, stay, stay, drink more, but sit, stay, stay with me,” she commands. It has been forty minutes, surely, it has been forty years, it has been forever, and Lauren is still here. She takes Sarah’s hand. They are here together.

Lauren’s apartment smells of something—fried oil, a suggestion of an herb — her neighbors have cooked. Sarah is paranoid about smells clinging to her. Once, years ago, dinner with friends, then a party at the home of some guys someone knew from law school, she’d struck up a conversation with a handsome-ish Brian or Ryan. After hellos and how-do-you-knows, Brian or Ryan said, “Thai food?” Not accusatory, but yes: They had gone out for Thai. Sarah had blushed. She had stopped talking. The most insidious thing about smells is how you can be immune to your own. She hopes this fried scent won’t stay with her, though this does remind her that she needs to drop off the dry cleaning.

Sarah strokes the sofa, a chocolate brown corduroy relic of the ’70s that showed up in the store collection one day. It had sat in the unused maid’s room of a Park Avenue apartment for forty-two years until the old lady died and her kids shipped everything to the store to be disposed of — raising some cash for AIDS patients in the bargain. Sarah had known Lauren would love it, in fact, she herself loved it, but Lauren was the one in the market for cheap furniture, had made Sarah promise to be on the lookout for her. Sarah paid for it, held it at the store, and eventually Lauren hired some guy with a van from the Internet to pick it up and deliver it. She can’t remember if Lauren ever paid her back for the sofa. Four hundred dollars. Lauren’s apartment is stylish in a way that is so unforced. Sarah admires that.

Though daylight savings hasn’t ended yet, it’s clear fall has arrived. This is how it goes, always: Labor Day is hot and sunny, then that Tuesday the morning air feels chilly, the evening sky looks so different, and the fashionable girls start wearing their boots. Though it was only days ago, summer feels like something forgotten, something that barely happened. Those ten days on the Vineyard, her skin changing from whole milk to almond milk, maybe, vanilla to French vanilla — faded now, the holiday forgotten. Fall is wonderful, but brief. Winter is a betrayal. Tonight they’re going out; just the two of us is the phrase they kept using in e-mails and text messages, just the two of us, a promise and maybe a lament.

This has become their way: Sarah asks, Lauren demurs. For a long time they were inseparable; for almost as long a time now they’ve been separate, and it’s mostly Sarah’s doing that they still see each other. Mostly, but not always. Sarah doesn’t mind it. She’s good at making reservations, coordinating schedules, developing a plan. Tonight, it’s to go back to a restaurant they went to a few months ago, a place not far from Lauren’s apartment, the kind of restaurant that’s become popular in recent years, pledging no fealty to any particular nationality, just cooking whatever strikes their fancy, sometimes in incomprehensible combinations, and often featuring ingredients you need to ask the server to identify even if you think you know them — the way you can know a word but not quite articulate its meaning, hesitate before using it in a sentence — things like salsify, or chicory, or epazote. That last time, Lauren had greeted the bartender with a familiar “Hey,” the hostess with a kiss on the cheek, so Sarah had gleaned that she was something of a regular and suggested it once more. Maybe it can be their place.

Sarah is on time, always is; in fact, she’s early, and after eleven minutes on the bench in front of the restaurant, she decides to walk to Lauren’s building and wait in the apartment with her while she finishes doing whatever she is doing. Sarah’s building has a Realtor’s office in its storefront level, its windows containing an elaborate display of picture frames suspended from the ceiling by wires, within each frame another portrait of another charming apartment. The apartments in this neighborhood are all lovely, and expensive. Lauren’s is lovely and inexpensive, a quirk. It’s very small, but delightful for its smallness, like a dollhouse. The floors aren’t level, the windowsills are black with soot, one of the living room windows’ top panes doesn’t sit right, sinks down an inch, and Lauren’s propped it in place with a broomstick. Door, living room, closet, fireplace that doesn’t work, two windows over the street, kitchen, fridge that hums too loudly, hallway that’s four steps long, bathroom too close to the kitchen, bedroom with exposed brick wall. It is, though, one specific kind of idea about a city apartment, done perfectly, even down to the mice that appear every summer. Sarah sits on the sofa and waits. Lauren would never ask her if she wanted water or a drink, would never play hostess, not for Sarah; she’s able to get her own drink of whatever is inside Lauren’s fridge.

The étagère near the sofa is stuffed with books. It was another find at the store. That one Lauren came to pick up herself, with Gabe, whose younger brother lived in Brooklyn and had a van because he was in a band. They drove into the city, loaded it into little brother’s van, and were gone. That might have been the last time Sarah saw Gabe. She always liked Gabe, whose work has to do with historical preservation, not manually but academically, of important buildings. In fact, Gabe was her responsibility, her doing. She’d met him first. She has a good instinct for matchmaking. He has nice eyes and a very hairy chest, the hair always peeking out of the collars of his shirts. He is a bookish guy but strong, had lifted the bookcase; well, it wasn’t all that heavy, but she remembers how he maneuvered it into the back of the van so capably, remembers the veins standing out along his forearms. She misses Gabe, wishes he was still around, imagines the four of them at dinner, the four of them at drinks, the four of them on vacation. That had seemed, for a time, to be the promise. That had seemed inevitable. The étagère looks nice, shiny brass against the dark wood floor.