Rich and Pretty(51)

Lauren doesn’t love the winter, but accepts that it exists, which makes surviving it much simpler. She’s trying to find something beautiful in the purple of the sky, in the way the city’s ambient lights swell up in the late afternoon. It’s terrible outside, yes, but weather like this, light like this, makes inside seem so much lovelier. Though the workday ends at six, six thirty sometimes, she’s there later tonight: problems with a gluten-free cookbook. She’s the last one there, but that’s okay. It’s her responsibility. Things have changed: Miranda’s corner office is mostly empty, as she’s decamped for the executive floor. There is slack, and Lauren is tasked with picking it up. This feels good, and associating good feelings with work feels new, almost shocking. It’s near eight, and the exhausted-looking cleaning lady shuffles in, emptying the garbage cans and whispering into her cell phone. The bulk of the overhead lights click off, and the office looks so different. In the bathroom, spotless now that the lady has done her thing, Lauren brushes her teeth, tidies herself, and finds a strange satisfaction in knowing she’ll be back in so few hours.

She’s meeting Rob, at a place in the West Village, his choice; she’s never good at picking restaurants. They all seem the same: a cheeseburger for eleven dollars or a cheeseburger for twenty-one dollars. Rob’s not in the office anymore. The journeyman’s life. He’s copyediting a special issue of one of the remaining city magazines, a guide to the boroughs’ best doctors. It’s a paycheck, though he’s optimistic about a prospect at a more literary newspaper, where he’d get to edit a sportswriter he particularly loves. He enjoys reading The New Yorker’s articles about baseball.

It had started after Thanksgiving, after that tropical hiatus, after the bad blood, after the waiter, whom she’s mostly forgotten. Rob had stopped by her desk in the morning, flimsy cup from the office kitchen in his hand.

“Hey, Lauren,” he said. “Just wanted to touch base on that thing we were working on. It’s all set. I sent you everything. I wrapped it up yesterday.”

“Oh, you did?” She spun around in her chair to look up at him. Then, correcting herself: “Hi.”

“I did. I noticed you weren’t in. But it was kind of a slow day for me so I just finished it up.”

“Cool. Thanks for doing that.” She was practicing sounding like a manager: supportive, grateful, acknowledging.

“Long weekend?”

“Long weekend,” she said.

“Looks like you got some sun,” he nodded at her forearm. “Jealous.”

“Oh, yeah. I was away this year. My friend is getting married, my best friend. Turks and Caicos.”

“Nice. Destination wedding.”

“No, this was just the, you know, the bachelorette weekend or something? I don’t know what you call it. Just girls.”

“Girls’ weekend.” He nodded approvingly. “Sounds fun.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly a girls’ weekend. I mean, it was but. We didn’t see the Chippendales or anything like that.”

Rob cocked an eyebrow, which had the effect of making him seem like he was grinning, though his face was serious. “Your loss, I’d say.”

“It’s just that I’m not exactly a girls’ weekend kind of person, is all.”

“What kind of person is that?”

“Never mind.” She shook her head. She was blabbering. The truth was: She’d imagined this. Just this, a casual conversation, Rob in his cute shoes, smiling and flirting, that crackle of energy, that sense of possibility. She’d felt it, even then, on the plane, the idea that she was going home, yes, but also going home to him. Rob. Rob Byrne. She knew his last name, and that knowledge felt like a certain kind of progress. Things happen in her mind, and then they come true; it’s discomfiting.

He chuckled. “It’s cool. I think it sounds fun. More fun than Thanksgiving in Maryland with my mother and my sister.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Thanksgiving isn’t so bad, right? At least you don’t have to buy anyone a present.” Then, that last bit: She was flirting.

“My sister is doing this gluten-free thing, it’s a real drag.”

“That’s a coincidence,” she said. “I’m waiting on a gluten-free manuscript to come in. I’ll have to get you a copy. It’s going to be one of our big fall releases.”

“I’m sure by the fall she’ll have moved onto a new obsession, but that’s so nice of you.” He paused. “What is gluten exactly?”

She shook her head. “One of the wonders of the world, actually. Anyway, thanks for taking care of that. I’ll let you know if I need extra hands on anything else, if that’s okay?”

“It’s what I’m here for,” he said. “Hey, let’s have lunch today?”

They had lunch. Lauren was going to ask Karen to join them, which would have made it feel slightly less unprofessional, but she was out with the flu, so it was just the two of them, at the diner across the street, the one so authentically New York that tourists rarely ventured into it, the one not long for the world, the one that would someday soon be transformed into a drugstore, or a quiet, efficient lobby holding blinking, beautiful automated teller machines and nothing more.

Rob had landed the temporary gig because his old boss was friends with Kristen, recommended him as a capable set of hands to help out in her absence; he wasn’t an aimless, career temp, but being adrift is a condition of being a certain kind of bookish dude in the contemporary economy. He had moved to New York to do his MFA at Columbia, finished that with minimal debt, worked at a magazine aimed at the collectors of yachts and race cars, left that to work at a literary imprint of one of the big publishers, lost that job in a round of belt tightening, and gone to work as a research assistant to an academic writing a popular biography of a pioneering art dealer, but that book’s research was finished and now here he was, on the assembly line at their office. As this story came spilling out of him, she saw more clearly what this thing was. It was as she had imagined. We only tell these stories about ourselves to those to whom we need to give some context, some understanding. These are details we offer to those we feel might find something meaningful in them. He wanted to be known by her, to be understood by her, and to kiss her, to sleep with her, to—whatever the verb is. He wanted her, and she had known he would. She is good at that, at being wanted.