Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [88]
“I’m not married,” Lauren said. “But one of my best friends lives in a building very similar to this one, and they put up a wall to make a bedroom for their little boy. It might be hard to imagine what it would look like, but if you picture it over there you might get a better idea.”
“I think that would work nicely,” the husband said. “Don’t you?” He put his arm around his wife and squeezed her shoulder. He had been chipper all day. He felt guilty for making them move and was trying to make it up to his miserable pastel wife.
“If you want to see some bigger places, we could look in Brooklyn or maybe Hoboken,” Lauren offered.
The wife shook her head. “No,” she said. “We want to be in Manhattan. We told you that. Didn’t you listen?” She walked away and stood facing the wall with her arms crossed. Her husband gave Lauren a little smile and went to stand next to his wife. Lauren waited quietly while the couple stared at their imaginary baby’s imaginary room. Sometimes, she knew, people just needed a little time to be able to picture themselves in a new place, to see possibility in a blank space. And so she waited.
Lauren called Mark that night. She didn’t even mean to. Not really. She was eating take-out sushi and saw his card in her purse. She dialed before she could really think about it.
“Hi,” she said when he answered. “Mark?”
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s … hi, it’s Lauren? From the deli?” She realized after she introduced herself that she had never told him her name.
“Hi, Lauren.” He sounded not one bit surprised. He sounded like he’d been waiting for her call.
“So,” she said. “So, I decided to give you a call.”
“So you did.” He was silent and Lauren waited. She decided not to say one more word and just when she was about to give in, he asked her to dinner.
“Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.”
“It’s nice,” Mark said on their third date, “that you eat.” Lauren had just ordered steak. His comment made Lauren sure that he had only dated anorexic girls in the past, thin, waify people who only ordered salad. The whole idea made her tired.
They went back to his apartment that night. It was clean. No, not clean. It was OCD. There was almost nothing on the shelves. No magazines lying around the coffee table. No pictures or knickknacks. Nothing. It looked like an apartment after she’d staged it to be sold, wiped clean of all traces that a human lived there.
“It’s nice,” she said.
“I know,” Mark said.
His bed was low to the ground, with a plain, dark blue cover. He stood in the bedroom and started taking off his shirt, unself-consciously, as though they had been together for years. He hung it up in his closet and then took off his pants. Lauren stood there, trying not to watch but also trying not to have it be obvious that she wasn’t watching.
“Do you need a shirt to sleep in, or are you okay in your underwear?”
“A shirt would be nice,” Lauren said. Who the hell was this guy? He went over to his drawer and took out a perfectly folded T-shirt that said “Colgate” on it.
“Did you go to Colgate?” she asked.
“No, I went to Princeton.”
“Right.”
Lauren went into the bathroom to change, and for the first time that night got very nervous. She didn’t know this guy at all. She had never met any of his friends, had no idea if he was telling the truth about where he worked, or even what his name was. Lauren had just watched American Psycho on TV the other night, which was a mistake. She was short of breath. Had she even agreed to stay over? All he’d said was “Do you want to come back to my place?” This was pretty presumptuous of him, wasn’t it?
She took her phone out of her purse and sent Isabella a text message that she was at Mark’s apartment, and then she sent the address. At least someone would know where she was. Although, if she was dead, it wouldn’t help much, would it?
When she got out of the bathroom, Mark was sitting up in bed reading a thick book. “You are crazy,” Lauren told herself. “You are