Though daylight savings hasn’t ended yet, it’s clear fall has arrived. This is how it goes, always: Labor Day is hot and sunny, then that Tuesday the morning air feels chilly, the evening sky looks so different, and the fashionable girls start wearing their boots. Though it was only days ago, summer feels like something forgotten, something that barely happened. Those ten days on the Vineyard, her skin changing from whole milk to almond milk, maybe, vanilla to French vanilla—faded now, the holiday forgotten. Fall is wonderful, but brief. Winter is a betrayal. Tonight they’re going out; just the two of us is the phrase they kept using in e-mails and text messages, just the two of us, a promise and maybe a lament.
This has become their way: Sarah asks, Lauren demurs. For a long time they were inseparable; for almost as long a time now they’ve been separate, and it’s mostly Sarah’s doing that they still see each other. Mostly, but not always. Sarah doesn’t mind it. She’s good at making reservations, coordinating schedules, developing a plan. Tonight, it’s to go back to a restaurant they went to a few months ago, a place not far from Lauren’s apartment, the kind of restaurant that’s become popular in recent years, pledging no fealty to any particular nationality, just cooking whatever strikes their fancy, sometimes in incomprehensible combinations, and often featuring ingredients you need to ask the server to identify even if you think you know them—the way you can know a word but not quite articulate its meaning, hesitate before using it in a sentence—things like salsify, or chicory, or epazote. That last time, Lauren had greeted the bartender with a familiar “Hey,” the hostess with a kiss on the cheek, so Sarah had gleaned that she was something of a regular and suggested it once more. Maybe it can be their place.
Sarah is on time, always is; in fact, she’s early, and after eleven minutes on the bench in front of the restaurant, she decides to walk to Lauren’s building and wait in the apartment with her while she finishes doing whatever she is doing. Sarah’s building has a Realtor’s office in its storefront level, its windows containing an elaborate display of picture frames suspended from the ceiling by wires, within each frame another portrait of another charming apartment. The apartments in this neighborhood are all lovely, and expensive. Lauren’s is lovely and inexpensive, a quirk. It’s very small, but delightful for its smallness, like a dollhouse. The floors aren’t level, the windowsills are black with soot, one of the living room windows’ top panes doesn’t sit right, sinks down an inch, and Lauren’s propped it in place with a broomstick. Door, living room, closet, fireplace that doesn’t work, two windows over the street, kitchen, fridge that hums too loudly, hallway that’s four steps long, bathroom too close to the kitchen, bedroom with exposed brick wall. It is, though, one specific kind of idea about a city apartment, done perfectly, even down to the mice that appear every summer. Sarah sits on the sofa and waits. Lauren would never ask her if she wanted water or a drink, would never play hostess, not for Sarah; she’s able to get her own drink of whatever is inside Lauren’s fridge.
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.”