She puts on a suit and feels ridiculous, changes into jeans and feels less so, but keeps the blazer: happy medium. The buttons on the blazer hit in the wrong places: She buttons, unbuttons, rebuttons—office harlot or Orthodox Jew. She decides devout is better. She puts on her watch, puts on a necklace, then another, one a hammered silver pendant with an S on it, the other a simple piece of turquoise, unpolished, a gift from Lulu. She puts on shoes, they’re too high, so she puts on another pair. She considers herself in the mirror screwed into the back of the bathroom door. Fine.
The meeting is at Carol’s apartment uptown. She shouldn’t have taken her time with her e-mail. It’s not that she’s late, she’s just not early, and she dislikes this feeling that the commute can only take as long as it normally takes, that there’s no cushion, to account for the unplanned-for ambulance, the impromptu stop at Starbucks. Sarah checks her phone in the cab, more e-mails, reminders about this or that. She has a mechanical pencil and a little notebook and makes more notes. She remembers the things she needs to do better when she writes them down. She needs to e-mail her friend Stephanie, an art director at a big luxury goods maker, about a letterpress that she’s used, because she needs to get save-the-date cards and invitations. Someone told her you can order custom stamps from the post office now, printed with anything you want. There’s a picture of her and Dan from their trip to Istanbul that she’s always loved and thought would be a cute stamp, but she needs to see what the dimensions of the stamp are to be sure.
The meeting is somewhat productive. Carol is joined by an unpleasant graduate student named Eliza who has a meandering, exhausting way of speaking without ever making a point. They drink tea and talk about some of the city’s existing educational enrichment programs, most of which Sarah researched a few nights before, computer on her lap, on the couch next to Dan, computer on his lap. Sarah mentions a few organizations she thinks might be helpful, or that she thinks are good at what they do.
“See,” Carol says. “I knew you’d know. I knew she’d know. You’re a wonder.”
They talk for ninety minutes, eventually ignoring Eliza’s long-winded tangents, then Carol has to leave for a meeting at her son’s school, and Sarah has to leave for lunch with Fiona. She’s known Fiona since college, though Fiona had transferred away to finish her education at Parsons. Now she’s a jewelry designer, which is unsurprising, as she looks like the kind of woman who makes a living designing jewelry: aquiline in the very truest sense, with that nose and arms somehow very like wings, blond hair at once bedraggled and tidy, a penchant for dramatic dresses and statement fashion—a turban, a fur shrug, rings of every color on every single finger. Fiona works for a gigantic apparel maker, designing complicated multicolored beaded necklaces, faux-pearl and feather adornments for the hair. All one size fits all, assembled in Bangladesh then shipped to stores in this country where they sell for $98. Sarah wants to ask her to make their wedding bands.
Fiona has chosen a restaurant that’s not far from her office—she can only spare an hour, an actual hour, it’s that kind of office—and, when Sarah arrives, is perched on a bench in front of the restaurant. She wears a simple white button-down, but the buttons all hit in just the right place, the top one undone, so she looks like Katharine Hepburn instead of a woman trying to appear sexy. She stands, and Sarah is surprised again at how tall she is, how lovely.
Fiona somehow looks English, which she is. “Sarah,” she says. Her accent is wonderful.
“Hi!” Sarah reaches up, deposits a kiss on each cheek.
Lunch is a departure—normally, when she sees Fiona, it’s at a party. Fiona is a woman who’s reliably invited to a certain kind of party and remembers to extend that invitation to Sarah, at least a few times a year. A post–fashion show celebration for a mutual friend, also from college, now well known enough that her initials are embroidered on the tags inside asymmetrical dresses sold at Barneys; a genteel fund-raiser for an organization that plants trees in Costa Rica. Sarah relishes these invitations. Sometimes it’s fun to do something so frivolous, so glamorous, and Fiona moves through such parties with an ease that makes Sarah, too, feel at home. With Fiona, she feels like a different version of herself. She knows it’s silly, and knows it’s pretend, but she enjoys it.
There’s small talk about the men in their lives, about the rigors of work, but the clock is ticking—that hour, Fiona was clear about that hour—so Sarah broaches the subject of the wedding bands with her usual forthrightness.
No sooner are the words out of her mouth than Fiona claps, actually claps, once, twice, three times. “Of course, my God, what an honor, I can’t believe you’d ask,” she says.
“Really?” Relief. “I was worried you’d be insulted.”
“Insulted, don’t be silly.”
“Obviously, I’ll pay you, for your time, for the materials, for everything. I would just love to have something special, something unique.”
Fiona waves this away. “I know just what to do. Rose gold for you, a simple silver for Dan. Or platinum? Maybe platinum.” Fiona produces a small tape measure from her bag, wraps it around Sarah’s finger.
“I can’t tell you what this means to me,” Sarah says.