Rich and Pretty(61)

“I haven’t been up here in ages.” Lauren surveys the view, the only thing you can do from that vantage. In the context of the city, of course, the house does not seem that high, but there, on the roof, you feel like a giant, a minor god. “It’s so nice today.”

Sarah sighs, relieved. “Cross your fingers. I should have waited until May.”

Lauren nods at Sarah’s midriff. “You dodged a bullet there,” she says.

There are four wooden chairs gathered around a round table, and they sit.

“I feel like we’re at a spa or something.” Lauren digs into her bag, removes the package of cigarettes and a small blue plastic lighter. “You know? All this primping, us in our gym clothes or something.”

“I thought you quit,” Sarah says.

Lauren lights a cigarette, exhales. “I’m not really smoking,” she says.

“Optical illusion.”

“I just thought, you know, for old time’s sake.” Lauren shrugs.

“We got our emphysema started right here on this rooftop,” Sarah says.

“Shit beer, cigarettes, Friday nights,” Lauren says.

“Ryan,” says Sarah. “Ryan something.”

“Tim Alhadef,” says Lauren. A beautiful half-Arab, half-Swedish guy on the soccer team with whom Sarah had been obsessed for a full year. He had curly hair and thick eyebrows and wore shorts even when it was cold outside.

“Tim Alhadef,” says Sarah, wistful. “God, he was f*cking gorgeous.”

“Those legs,” Lauren says.

“Give me some of that,” says Sarah.

Lauren hands her the lit cigarette. “Whatever happened between the two of you anyway?” She knows there was something—a kiss, more than, a makeout in a corner while the rest of them were drinking and talking, but she can’t recall the specifics, and anyway, Sarah was always coy about that kind of thing. She could talk about sex in the theoretical, but not as it related back to her.

“Fuck,” Sarah says, exhaling the smoke. “That is good. Take this away. I’m going to kill the baby.”

“Our grandmothers smoked during pregnancy,” Lauren says.

“We kissed, once, Tim and me,” she says. “It was friendly, then more, and then nothing. A slip of the tongue. That’s it.”

“He was gorgeous, wasn’t he? Whatever happened to him?”

Sarah shrugs. “No idea.”

Lauren looks past Sarah, over her shoulder, over the backyard, at the roofs of the houses on the block behind theirs, at the skyline beyond that, at the pale blue gray of the sky. She’d hooked up with Tim Alhadef, once, a party at his parents’ place, in what was then, to her, the wilds of Brooklyn but was probably, she realizes now, somewhere near where she lives. She can’t remember where Sarah was that night, but knows she wasn’t there as she took the subway alone, spent the night at her friend Michelle’s apartment, though she told her parents she was at Sarah’s. Tim stripped out of his sweatshirt, which was heavy with the smell of him, armpits and cologne, pulling her nearer and nearer. He was strong, he was hairy, and he was persistent, working a hand down the front of her jeans, working a finger up and inside of her, the first time a finger not her own had been there. She kissed him for a while, felt guilty, pushed him away, made some excuses.

Lauren stubs the cigarette out, shreds of tobacco, a black streak on the table. Sarah fiddles. “Shit, is my hair going to smell like smoke?”

“Let’s sit out here for a minute in the fresh air,” Lauren says. “No one will ever know.”



The makeup artist, Ines, makes less of an impression than Danielle. She’s quiet, has a vaguely Eastern European quality, reminds Sarah of a spy, or a flight attendant. Her hands are soft, her touch tentative, and her work requires her to be so close, so intimately involved with Sarah’s face. Sarah’s just giving into it, though. She feels like a piece of poultry, being trussed, dressed, prepared. Ines’s breath smells of spearmint gum and, beneath that, but discernible given the four inches that separate their heads, coffee.

“Look up, now,” Ines says, almost whispers.

She means for Sarah to aim her eyes to the ceiling without moving her head or neck, which will have some kind of effect on the skin under her eyes, something Ines needs to mask, or perhaps capitalize on. Her approach is complex, almost pointillist. Sarah’s own application of makeup on a daily basis is, well, cosmetic. Color on the parts of the face we’ve decided need more color, working within the palette she learned decades ago best suited her. This is a thing you learn young, via quizzes in magazines, experiments with friends, the sage advice of older sisters, the occasional visit to a persuasive woman on the ground floor of Saks.

Sarah knows that this matters, on a daily basis, and that it matters more, on a day like today, a day photographs will be taken, the sort of photographs you’re supposed to treasure for decades. She’s interested in looking her best, but she can’t quite forget that her best looks the way it does. Her best is realistic, which is complicated by the fact that best, for her mother, is movie star.

At some point, all those “She looks just like her father!” must have started to sound a great deal less enthusiastic to Huck and Lulu, or less like cause for celebration, anyway. Lulu’s never implied to Sarah that she’s anything less than beautiful, but most of her parents’ positive reinforcement had to do with brains, with achieving high, for which Sarah is grateful. Isn’t that more important? She’s had moments of envy, but they are genuinely fleeting. Lauren’s hair, for example, wouldn’t she love hair like that, so long but so thoughtless, so full and lovely—genuinely effortless, Sarah knows Lauren well enough to know that: inexpensive shampoo, the occasional, desultory brushing. Sarah’s own hair almost a meteorological instrument. Danielle has done her work, and it looks wonderful, and she’ll touch it up in a bit, bring it back to life, once Ines has had her turn. Sarah feels apologetic, though there’s little she can do about the fraught relationship between her hair and the day’s relative humidity.