Rich and Pretty(15)

Getting things done makes Sarah so happy. She’s accomplished a lot: meeting with Carol, lunch with Fiona, picking up some sweaters, and now, stopping to see her mom. She’s solved what to do about the wedding bands and still has time this afternoon to send more e-mails, figure out what to do about dinner, maybe surprise Dan with mushroom risotto, the only thing she truly knows how to cook. A specialty of sorts. Just reviewing this list, these to-dos and dones, her pace quickens; she feels lighter, she feels smarter, she feels in control, she feels alive. She thinks about Dan, in his suit, in his office, somewhere blocks from where she is now, and smiles. She’ll call him in a bit, when she leaves her parents’ place.

A section of the street on this block is cordoned off with yellow tape. Some men are milling about, repairing or rejiggering something, it’s not clear what. They’re from the gas company, she can tell by their uniforms. It takes a million people to make life run the way it should run. Everyone has their own part to play in it. This is what she loves about being in the city, living in the city—seeing this all unfold around her. She likes to know the part she plays in the whole system, in the whole universe.

Her parents’ house is just here, on the left. Sarah climbs the steps, her keys are already out and in her hand, one of those actions your body performs before your brain even asks it to. She unlocks the door, gives it a shove, it’s a heavy door, prone to sticking. The door falls shut behind her, and the sounds, the alarm, the helicopter, the siren, the bus, they vanish. The house is quiet, though not silent. Footsteps from above.

“My darling.” Her mother walks down the steps, head held like a queen’s, smiling. She has been expecting her. There’s a lot to be done.





Chapter 5


His name is Rob. Lauren figures it out pretty quickly—the office isn’t big, she’s not an idiot—but she pretends, still, that she’s not a hundred percent clear on who he is when Antonia mentions him.

“You could ask Rob to pitch in on this one,” Antonia says, helpfully, she’s always very helpful. She’s not the boss, so she’s careful to never sound too bossy. Women learn this at an early age.

“Rob?” Lauren makes a face that’s vaguely unpleasant, a little confused, like Antonia has lapsed into a foreign tongue.

“The temp,” Antonia says. “He should have some time. And he’s got a lot of writing experience, so it shouldn’t take him long. You should divide the list and then edit each other, don’t you think?” Phrasing it as a question turns what is a command into something else.

“Rob?” She says his name aloud to him like she has no idea if it’s his name.

He swivels around in his seat. He’s smiling. He stands. “I’m Rob. We haven’t had a chance to meet.” He proffers his hand.

“Lauren.” She shakes his hand firmly. She hates weak handshakes. A lot of women give pathetically weak handshakes, but she doesn’t believe there’s a correlation between gender and the strength of one’s hand. She thinks women are taught to fake this.

“Nice to meet you finally,” he says. “Of course, I’ve seen you around.”

“It’s a small office.” She nods. They’ve been nodding hello for weeks, but she’s avoided being alone with him in the kitchen or the elevator or at the printer, embarrassed by the depth and specificity of her initial fantasy about him, a fantasy so vivid in its mundane detail she can almost picture the holes in his socks. Thus far, they’ve only been together among crowds, and an introduction seemed beside the point. Maybe she doesn’t want to f*ck him, after all; maybe she only wants to pretend. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

“Antonia said you might have some time to help me on this project?”

He sits back in his swiveling chair, a posture of insouciance. “Sure, no problem,” he says.

“Great. It’s simple, you know they’re doing this site redesign, and we were thinking it’s a good time to update all the bios of all the authors.” She’s lapsing into the first person plural for reasons that are unclear.

“Cool.” He seems amenable. He’d do anything she asked. He’s that sort of guy.

“So just, like, update with new projects and new books or whatever they’ve been up to,” she says. It sounds idiotic, this explanation, but she can’t stop herself. “I can give you the actual update info, or e-mail addresses or whatever so you can kind of figure that out from them.”

“Not a problem.”

“Well, there are thirty-eight bios, so we can just split it in half. I’ll do the first nineteen? That sound good?” Maybe she should be doing what Antonia does, saying things more nicely so it sounds more like a suggestion than a command.

“That sounds good,” he says.

She feels odd standing when he is sitting down. “Good.”

“Good.”

“I’ll e-mail you the details.”

He picks up a pen, writes his address on the back of one of Kristen’s business cards. “This is me,” he says.

She takes the card from his hand. “Awesome,” she says, overly enthusiastically.



Everything makes Lauren think of something else. That morning, the weather, which was so perfect she’d gotten off at Thirty-Fourth Street, two stops early, eager to enjoy it before spending another day confined to the computer, made her think of California, that one trip to San Francisco, the shock of the clarity of the air, which she noticed the second she stepped out of the airport’s sliding glass doors. You couldn’t not notice. A work trip, that one, a rarity she wishes were not. She took her place in the steady flow of commuters in the knot of tunnels issuing from Penn Station, which she knew well enough to navigate without thinking, or while thinking about other matters, like the delicious liberty of San Francisco, working while away from the office she’d arrive at in a little less than half an hour, and the fact that, despite what she thinks has been her best effort, the working day still takes place there and there alone. She had imagined better: shared confidences with her bosses, invitations into important meetings in the glass-walled conference room, the chime of the computer reminding her about another lunch or conference call, being asked her opinion, being thanked in the acknowledgments by grateful authors. She used the exit on Thirty-Seventh Street, as she always did, and thoughts of California had given way to thoughts of Thanksgiving, of cranberry sauce, of awkward silence. How did this happen, she wondered, trying to retrace her thoughts, how did her mind leap from one thing to the other, and did this happen to everyone? Maybe it was the autumnal note in the air.