Rich and Pretty(21)

The upshot is: The book is going to be late. Lauren knows this the second she spies the 305 area code on the telephone’s caller ID. This is Miranda’s territory, but Miranda is not here, and the celebrity chef is afraid of Miranda anyway. She knows Miranda outranks Lauren, she knows there’s nothing Lauren can do to her, so it’s Lauren she’s decided to tell. She’s canny, you don’t get to be a celebrity without being canny.

Lauren nods and fiddles on the computer and wills her mind away from her body, wills herself away from this conversation. It ends, eventually, as conversations must. The celebrity chef a little less unhappy, barely disguising her relief at having jettisoned at least one of her many responsibilities—the contractual obligation to deliver a manuscript by the end of the following month. She has gotten her way, as she no doubt knew she would.



The shadow of this conversation stretches across the rest of the day. It gives Lauren that dry feeling in her mouth, that quickening of the breath that makes her feel she’s somehow been at fault, when of course she’s not. This is true power, she thinks, walking home, exorcising the negative thoughts in the bracing air, breathing in the cool, exhaling the stress, to take your problem and make it someone else’s, to slip out of the bonds of your promise, your responsibility, and—nothing. No consequence. This is celebrity. She has known celebrity, in her work, of course; this chef, she’s not the only one. But beyond work, there was that guy from college, a year younger, but they knew him pretty well, who won an Oscar shortly after graduation. Her high school had been lousy with the children of celebrities, and some of them are celebrated now, for owning art galleries on the Lower East Side or throwing charity events or being beautiful and out and about. And of course, there are Huck and Lulu, not celebrities the way some of their fellow students’ parents had been—not models or television stars, rock musicians or English actors who appeared on Broadway—but Huck and Lulu were known. If not celebrities, celebrated. They had nothing to do with what was happening currently in the culture, were not a momentary apparition, the ingénue who graces one magazine cover then vanishes. They endured. Huck endured, anyway, and Lulu sat by his side and was mentioned in the same breath, always with the same parentheticals, the same formulation: “his wife, Lulu, the well-regarded singer.” Well-regarded, to be regarded at all: the American dream.

Huck has never been a celebrity to Lauren; she met him at eleven, and few children that age are conversant in international diplomacy. She remembers very well that first visit to that house—the photographs of Huck, at every age but always, puzzlingly, the same: glasses, hair of varying degrees of thickness and grayness, cigarettes, jackets with strangely wide lapels, smiling comfortably, gripping the hands of Ford and Mrs. Ford, Reagan and the wisp of Mrs. Reagan, Bush and Mrs. Bush, then another Bush and another Mrs. Bush, and Tony Blair, and Mitterrand, and Thatcher, and Powell, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney, that whole lot. Who was this man, her friend from school’s father? It had never before occurred to her that a friend from school’s father could be a subject worthy of further thought.

Lauren doesn’t normally consider Huck a role model but she has to admit: He’d never miss a deadline, would never call and badger an associate editor into accepting the fact that his promised manuscript would be arriving late, and, well, too bad. True, it can’t take much effort to turn out the garbage he writes, which is less artful than a charming anecdote about and instructions for a beloved ropa vieja. No matter. Real power never apologizes. The celebrity chef is not sorry about her deadline any more than Huck is about Iraq.

It’s that country—the skirmish, the quagmire, any noun seems more appropriate than war—that showed her who Huck really is. She’d known, all along, that he was important, but they’d been insulated by their youth and unbothered by whatever it was Sarah’s papa was writing up in his fourth-floor office. The summer after graduation, at a smallish gathering at Huck and Lulu’s (twenty guests instead of a hundred, sitting around the dining table instead of milling about with plates), Lauren met the man who’d run Iraq on behalf of—well, whom, exactly was not quite clear. Everyone knew, of course, about the looting, the disbanding of the army, the banishment of the political class, the missing millions: It had all, every last bit of it, been a disaster, though if you’d happened in, helped yourself to some of the spinach samosas, which were delicious, you’d never have known it. Handshakes and warm embraces, smiles and Hermès ties, updates on the kids, in law school, at Goldman, and promises to meet up in the Vineyard later that summer.

Her parents had voted for Reagan once upon a time, but her father was vocal on the many children who had, in fact, been left behind. Talk of the war was everywhere, that year they finished school. The subject had come up, to her great dismay, at Poughkeepsie’s best restaurant, reservations secured two months in advance, the whole clan gathered to celebrate graduation. Her mother had insisted Lauren invite Sarah, who remained focused on her pappardelle while her dad railed against the administration. They did not know—or if they did, they did not learn it from Lauren—the extent of Huck’s reach in the world. And Lauren had learned, from watching Sarah, that it was best to simply pretend that current events had nothing to do with real life.

That was, in essence, the takeaway from her expensive education: You are either the sort of person who shapes society, or the sort of person whose life is affected by the shape of society. She wonders if that’s what her parents had hoped for when they decided to ship Lauren off to school in the city. The idea came from the Doctors Khan (Mohammad and Anjali) whose combined practice her mother had been managing for almost two decades now. The Doctors Khan represented the very highest standard of being in her family’s household: as hardworking as they were well educated, sensible despite their financial security (they drove to work together, a Toyota station wagon, used), and savvy in the ways of a culture to which they hadn’t even been born. It was Anjali Khan who had explained to a dumbfounded Bella Brooks that enough parents were willing and able to pay the full near-thirty-thousand-dollar tuition that ample money was left over to ease the burden for those parents who couldn’t swing it. Bella, Dr. Khan thought, owed it to herself and her children to look into this.