Rich and Pretty(6)

“No someone?”

“No someone.” Lauren fidgets with the rubber band that’s around her wrist. The office of the future and she always ends up with rubber bands around her wrist. “I would tell you if there was a someone.”

“I was so sure. When you’re hard to get on the phone I just assume it’s because your attention is elsewhere.”

And there it is: Sarah’s real fear. “First off, bros before hos, as always,” Lauren says. “Second off, there is no one my attention has been on. Well, almost no one.” Lauren never has been able to keep much from Sarah, at least, not the stuff she secretly wants her to know.

“Aha.” Sarah, triumphant, and more interested.

“Nothing yet,” Lauren says. “I mean, he’s just, well, he doesn’t know he’s someone yet, but maybe he’ll get promoted to someone. But there’s a complication. We work together.”

“Not your boss, just tell me he’s not your boss.” Sarah’s tone contains something: an accusation, but also titillation.

“My bosses are women, obviously. No man has ever been a boss at a cookbook publisher. He’s a temp,” she says, whispering it, not like it’s a swear word, like it’s a bad one: cancer, or holocaust.

“That’s a no-no, right?” Sarah says, suddenly herself.

“I don’t know,” Lauren says. “I think office romance sounds so 1960s. Kissing secretaries and all that. He seems nice.”

“Then what’s the problem, precisely?”

“I don’t know if f*cking the temp is the way to climb the ladder, exactly.” Lauren coughs.

“If he’s a temp, stupid, that means temporary. It’s not for life. You’re an editor, not a justice of the Supreme Court.”

“I just have to time this right, I guess,” Lauren says, grateful for Sarah’s omission of her titular “associate.” “You know how terrible I am at keeping a secret.”

“Well, I don’t know, I don’t think you’ve ever kept one from me. But maybe you have and you’re secretly great at it? Anyway, just try a little discretion. Poker faces. Speaking of the Supreme Court, one of them is here tonight.”

“Which one?”

“Not one of the good ones.”

“Oh.” Lauren has long since learned there’s little point talking politics under this roof. It’s discussed, of course, but you don’t talk, you listen. Huck’s conservatism is so deeply felt he’s only ever bemused by dissent, and bemusement is the most infuriating response in any kind of conversation. He’s an *. “Forget I said anything. It’s nothing. He’s no one. He’s a temp.” Lauren’s temporarily forgotten what is real and what she imagined. She’s stoned. “I was distracted. Sorry for not calling. I was coming. I came. I’m here. Should we go downstairs?”

“Probably,” Sarah says.

In the distressingly pink—toilet, shower, tiles—bathroom, they find a toothbrush, reason it must be Sarah’s, and take turns with it, using a very old tube of Aquafresh that must be prodded and coaxed back into pliability but they figure is probably not poisonous. Sarah wets the corner of a towel, dabs at her eyes, then has to reapply her eye makeup. Lauren sniffs at the dozens of perfume bottles, almost every scent a memory. There’s a cologne they’d stolen from Huck, they thought it so outré to wear a man’s fragrance, something amber, in a bottle shaped like a lozenge, or a stone from a riverbed. She sprays a bit on her wrist, rubs the one against the other, dabs it in the general direction of her armpits, and behind her ears. Mint on her breath, musk on her breasts, she feels ready for the party. Forget the temp: Maybe she’ll meet a man, some ambitious, not-too-sycophantic sort with a very specific goal in life, like to be, say, the secretary of agriculture. You meet that sort of person at the kind of parties Huck and Lulu throw. She wouldn’t mind. She would be happy to be spared having to do anything herself. She could be a trophy wife, or she could have been. At thirty-two you’re not a trophy wife. You’re a plaque wife, a certificate-of-participation wife.

Sarah has freshened her breath but mangled her eyes. She’s got her shoes back on, adding three inches—in shoes her taste is unassailable. They’re sexy: pointed, aerodynamic, gleaming, expensive. They are shoes that make a commanding clack on the floor, shoes to be reckoned with, less shoes than an actual stage on which you can strut and preen and act the role of a woman who must be taken seriously.

“Did you see Mom and Papa yet?”

Lauren shakes her head. Sarah is gripping her arm as they walk down to the party. There’s no line for the second-floor powder room anymore. There’s music coming up from downstairs, and voices, and because it’s summer, the party will have spilled into the basement kitchen and out into the garden. Lulu likes a party where the guests gather in the kitchen; she doesn’t mind them seeing the hired waiters and the chef and only engages caterers who don’t mind being looked at, wielding skewers of satay while prestigious personages squeeze past, behind the stove and around the island and out the French doors. To Lulu, the effect is magic—it’s showmanship.

“God, you smell fantastic,” Sarah says, and they are in the foyer, and there’s Huck, grinning his grin, comfortable, knowing, holding his drink, and calling them girls, my girls, and they are that for a minute, girls again.