Rich and Pretty(9)

The étagère near the sofa is stuffed with books. It was another find at the store. That one Lauren came to pick up herself, with Gabe, whose younger brother lived in Brooklyn and had a van because he was in a band. They drove into the city, loaded it into little brother’s van, and were gone. That might have been the last time Sarah saw Gabe. She always liked Gabe, whose work has to do with historical preservation, not manually but academically, of important buildings. In fact, Gabe was her responsibility, her doing. She’d met him first. She has a good instinct for matchmaking. He has nice eyes and a very hairy chest, the hair always peeking out of the collars of his shirts. He is a bookish guy but strong, had lifted the bookcase; well, it wasn’t all that heavy, but she remembers how he maneuvered it into the back of the van so capably, remembers the veins standing out along his forearms. She misses Gabe, wishes he was still around, imagines the four of them at dinner, the four of them at drinks, the four of them on vacation. That had seemed, for a time, to be the promise. That had seemed inevitable. The étagère looks nice, shiny brass against the dark wood floor.

“How was work?” Sarah barely has to raise her voice, knows Lauren can hear her from the bathroom, would have been able to even if she’d closed the door behind her, which she has not done.

“Work was work,” Lauren says, mouth full of toothpaste. “The coauthor on this book had a family tragedy, so that was my day. Looking for someone to replace her.”

“Family tragedy?”

“I assume dead mother, but don’t want to ask.” Lauren spits.

“Dead mothers,” Sarah says. “So inconvenient.”

“I’m not trying to be heartless.” Lauren comes into the room, pulling a sweater over her arms. “Too soon for this?”

Sarah shakes her head. “No, probably not, actually.”

“I’m always cold anyway,” Lauren says. “How was your thing?”

“My thing was a bit of a disaster,” she says. She doesn’t want to get into it now. She pictured this conversation transpiring in the restaurant: a chorus of background noise, the comfort of a cabernet. “I’m totally behind, Lolo. At least, according to Claudia Quinn at the Chelsea Terrace.”

“What does that even mean?” Lauren sits on the floor, looks up at her.

“Evidently, if I am getting married next April, I should have started planning on my fourteenth birthday.”

“No room at the inn?” Lauren asks.

“You should have seen the look she gave me when I told her April,” Sarah says. “It was like she was personally insulted as well as embarrassed on my behalf.”

“Well, screw her,” Lauren says.

“True, but still. She has a point. I wasted the whole summer when I should have been making lists and booking a venue and a photographer and all that shit.” She felt like an idiot, that afternoon, with Claudia Quinn, feels like an idiot still. She prides herself on being prepared, on competently dealing with complex situations.

“It’ll be fine,” Lauren says, standing. “Let’s go eat. And drink. And forget about it.”

The restaurant is crowded but not so crowded they have to wait, and after the single kiss on the cheek (more than one is affected) the hostess, whom Lauren introduces as Meg, her second time introducing them now, shows them to a table, and the restaurant is small enough that no one table is any better than the rest. The menu is just a slip of butcher paper left atop the table.

“What’s celeriac?” Lauren frowns. “I can’t remember.”

“It’s gross,” Sarah says. “You know what being in your place reminded me of, just now? Gabe.”

“Gabe?” Lauren looks at her.

“Yeah. I’m not sure why. Actually, I am. It was the bookcase.”

“Gabe.” She exhales. “God, that seems like so long ago.”

“Not so long,” says Sarah. “You sound positively elderly when you say it like that.”

“Almost two years,” Lauren says. “That’s a while. A full sixteenth of my life. I forgot about the bookcase. We borrowed that van from his brother. Do you remember his band? We went to see them once.”

Sarah remembers. Three guys, skinny as teenagers, posing prettily with their instruments on a stage in some bar somewhere. “I recall that.”

“They actually ended up kind of making it,” Lauren says. “Some song of theirs was in a commercial, a good commercial, for Apple, or maybe a credit card. Anyway, yeah, no idea about Gabe, we haven’t kept in touch.”

“But it was amicable. It was we’ll be friends.”

“That’s a thing people say,” Lauren says.

“I didn’t think it was a thing you’d say,” she says. “I liked Gabe. You liked Gabe. I’m just wondering.”

“We’re not all Sarah and Dan, you know,” Lauren says. She gestures for the waiter, but when he arrives, they realize they both intend to order the fish. They negotiate, retract, urge, then settle (fish for Sarah, steak for Lauren). The waiter brings their wine.

“I realize you and Gabe are not me and Dan,” Sarah says. She’s not done with this conversation. She’s not good at broaching conversational topics subtly. She knows this about herself. Huck raised her with a rhetorical style that brooks no disagreement. She’s a pundit. That’s her heritage.