Rumaan Alam - Rich and Pretty

“What’s happening at work?”

“Same as usual,” he says. He’s not unhappy. Dan never seems to find his work especially stressful. “Everything had to happen yesterday. It’s almost the weekend, people are going to be away. No one can handle anything except Bethany and me. It would be funny if it weren’t always the way these things happen.”

Sarah is not the kind of woman to be jealous of his reliance on another woman and is proud of that fact. Besides which, it would never occur to Dan to cheat on her. He’s too busy.

Dan went to Penn with her friend Meredith’s brother Ben. The computer of whoever decides these things selected them to be roommates and did a good job of it: They are great friends still, as she is still good friends with Meredith, whom she’s known since the sixth grade, when Meredith, Ben, and their parents moved to the city from suburban Maryland. Ten years ago, she and Meredith had to drop by a bar in the West Village to leave her keys with her brother, in town for the night and crashing at her place. He was out having drinks with his college roommate, Dan. It wasn’t a setup, an elaborate ruse, though in retrospect it could have seemed like one, and the fact that Meredith was responsible for her knowing Dan at all has forever colored Sarah’s opinion of her friend.

Sarah has a lot of friends. She knows a lot of people. It is important to her to always know and understand precisely how she feels about everyone in her orbit. She maintains a complex ranking system, tracking the last time she’s seen someone, the last time they’ve spoken, the conversation they had, how they felt about each other, how long she’s known someone generally, whether they are similar enough to talk politics, whether she likes their spouse, whether their job or marriage or whatever has changed who they are, fundamentally. This is how she thinks. If she knows someone, if someone is a friend, she has a sense of what that friendship is like, what it’s been historically, what it is now. This helps her understand who other people are. It helps her understand who she is.

She sighs without realizing it.

“What’s tomorrow?” Dan asks.

“Tomorrow, um, Friday. Oh, tomorrow there’s a meeting of that group that Carol is trying to get off the ground.”

“Which one is that?”

“Which group or which Carol?”

“No, Carol Abbott, right, Lulu’s friend? That I remember, but tell me what the group does?”

“Doesn’t do. Will do. Math literacy. Early childhood. Fostering a love of numbers. Minorities, girls particularly.”

“Worthy.” He nods. “Definitely worthy.”

“It’s early stages still; I think it’s just Carol and a partner and maybe an intern, someone at Columbia? Her husband teaches there. I think that’s right. Anyway, it’s about the money at the moment. She thinks I might be able to help her with some of the grant writing.”

“Of course you can,” Dan says. “You’re brilliant.”

“I’m not brilliant.” She yawns. “Should we have a drink?”

“I’d have a drink,” he says.

There’s a bottle of wine in the door of the fridge, stopped up with one of those rubberized corks. It’s so cold it doesn’t actually taste like anything, but it’s the sensation of cold, the comfort of holding a glass and curling up next to Dan, also holding a glass, that she wants now, more than the taste of wine on her tongue.

Friday, Sarah wakes early.There’s a spin class at the gym down the block — the gym down the block is one of the reasons she chose the apartment in the ugly 1980s building — so she does that, then walks home, eats yogurt and frozen blueberries while half watching the morning talk shows, a segment on the season’s new beauty trends, an interview with an actress who’s adopted a baby from Burundi. She checks her e-mail: a message from Willa, a wedding planner who’s come highly recommended by a friend of Lulu’s; a reminder from the store about a staff meeting next week; an invitation from her friend Lexi for brunch Sunday at her new place out in Brooklyn.

She showers. Her hair is a disaster after the class so she has to shampoo it, so then she has to blow it dry, because if she doesn’t it’ll be fine as long as it’s wet, but once it no longer is it’ll dry into a preposterous tangle that’s neither curl nor not curl. Her hair must be tamed. So she does that, dries and brushes it into submission. Better. She brushes her teeth, reminds herself to make a dentist’s appointment, because she’s been wondering about whitening. She fumbles about with lipstick and cream and perfume and a little bit of color on the lids of her eyes. She has to make the effort. It’s part of being an adult.

She puts on a suit and feels ridiculous, changes into jeans and feels less so, but keeps the blazer: happy medium. The buttons on the blazer hit in the wrong places: She buttons, unbuttons, rebuttons — office harlot or Orthodox Jew. She decides devout is better. She puts on her watch, puts on a necklace, then another, one a hammered silver pendant with an S on it, the other a simple piece of turquoise, unpolished, a gift from Lulu. She puts on shoes, they’re too high, so she puts on another pair. She considers herself in the mirror screwed into the back of the bathroom door. Fine.

The meeting is at Carol’s apartment uptown. She shouldn’t have taken her time with her e-mail. It’s not that she’s late, she’s just not early, and she dislikes this feeling that the commute can only take as long as it normally takes, that there’s no cushion, to account for the unplanned-for ambulance, the impromptu stop at Starbucks. Sarah checks her phone in the cab, more e-mails, reminders about this or that. She has a mechanical pencil and a little notebook and makes more notes. She remembers the things she needs to do better when she writes them down. She needs to e-mail her friend Stephanie, an art director at a big luxury goods maker, about a letterpress that she’s used, because she needs to get save-the-date cards and invitations. Someone told her you can order custom stamps from the post office now, printed with anything you want. There’s a picture of her and Dan from their trip to Istanbul that she’s always loved and thought would be a cute stamp, but she needs to see what the dimensions of the stamp are to be sure.

The meeting is somewhat productive. Carol is joined by an unpleasant graduate student named Eliza who has a meandering, exhausting way of speaking without ever making a point. They drink tea and talk about some of the city’s existing educational enrichment programs, most of which Sarah researched a few nights before, computer on her lap, on the couch next to Dan, computer on his lap. Sarah mentions a few organizations she thinks might be helpful, or that she thinks are good at what they do.

“See,” Carol says. “I knew you’d know. I knew she’d know. You’re a wonder.”

They talk for ninety minutes, eventually ignoring Eliza’s long-winded tangents, then Carol has to leave for a meeting at her son’s school, and Sarah has to leave for lunch with Fiona. She’s known Fiona since college, though Fiona had transferred away to finish her education at Parsons. Now she’s a jewelry designer, which is unsurprising, as she looks like the kind of woman who makes a living designing jewelry: aquiline in the very truest sense, with that nose and arms somehow very like wings, blond hair at once bedraggled and tidy, a penchant for dramatic dresses and statement fashion — a turban, a fur shrug, rings of every color on every single finger. Fiona works for a gigantic apparel maker, designing complicated multicolored beaded necklaces, faux-pearl and feather adornments for the hair. All one size fits all, assembled in Bangladesh then shipped to stores in this country where they sell for $98. Sarah wants to ask her to make their wedding bands.