Jen and Lauren are already seated by the time I arrive at L’Artusi, which is an unremarkable observation unless you are dining in New York City, where no restaurant will seat you until your entire party is present. A rule designed to keep your own illusions about yourself in check, I imagine. You’ve seen the original Hamilton—with Leslie Odom Jr.!—and you’re wearing the Gucci loafers that are on back-order until next fall? Please let us know when your entire party has arrived.
Celebrity doesn’t help. I’ve seen Larry David pacing the corridor of Fred’s and Julianne Moore told it will be an hour-and-fifteen-minute wait at the original Meatball Shop, before the Upper East Side expansion robbed it of its kitsch mystique. So it’s genuinely remarkable that when I arrive Jen and Lauren are seated, and it’s genuinely a shame that it has nothing to do with the show, and everything to do with Jen Greenberg’s mother. Yvette Greenberg isn’t a celebrity, she’s a cause.
I am self-conscious about the sneakers as I tail the hostess through the restaurant. I’m used to turning heads at this point, but before, I was half-defensive about it, feeling like people were gawking for the wrong reasons. No woman in New York would admit to reading my books before this year. Opening Didion or Wallace on the subway is as much a part of the dernier cri as the bedhead hair and the jeans that asexualize your butt. What are those about, anyway?
Up the stairs we go, to a table in the corner, where Lauren Bunn and Jen Greenberg are sitting shoulder to shoulder, facing me as though schoolgirls on a school bus. I am breathless to discover that they’ve left me the outside seat. It’s customary for celebrities to sit with their backs to a restaurant, so that no one can snap a picture while they’re sipping wine with one eye closed and sell it to In Touch to be strung up with the headline Rehab for Reality Star! When the Diggers dine out together, it’s always a passive-aggressive tango for the outside chair, and it almost always ends up sagging beneath the weight of Brett’s big butt. To have it reserved for me will go down as a flash point in our history. That isn’t a chair; it’s a throne.
Lauren rises when she sees me. “Rock star!” she cries, the way townsfolk would charge witch in seventeenth-century Salem. Witch! Witch! She flings her arms around my neck and I note the empty martini glass over her shoulder. Jen holds up two fingers. It’s her second. We need to move fast.
She pulls away and holds me by the shoulders. “You are a rock star!” Her $250 micro-bladed eyebrows come together as she studies me up close. “You even look different.” She pats me down, her hands finishing on my rear end, which she pumps and jiggles, her platonic expression that of a doctor performing a routine checkup. “You feel different.”
“All right, all right.” I laugh, removing her hands. Blond and oversexualized is Lauren’s beat. She’s like the poor man’s Samantha Jones—too drunk to enjoy all the sex she has. “And what’s different is these.” I kick up the septuagenarian sole of my sneaker.
Lauren expands a hand over her breast and becomes momentarily Southern. “As I live and breathe.”
Jen does not get up and fawn all over me, but she does provide me an excuse for my tardiness. “Traffic?” she asks, as I take my seat and spread a dinner linen over my lap.
“FDR was a mess,” I tell her, even though it wasn’t. Late is just another outside chair. Late is a muscle, flexing.
The waiter appears, one arm folded behind his back.
“The Monfalletto Barolo,” Lauren says, before he can greet us.
“Excellent choice,” he says, giving Lauren a little bow. She appraises his backside as he walks away.
“He’s not even cute,” Jen complains. Her brown eyes don’t narrow, they just are narrow. Jen looks like the angry stepsister of a Disney princess, a TV critic once described her perfectly on Twitter.
“I don’t like the cute ones.” Lauren closes her lips around the toothpick in her drink, removing an olive with her front teeth. “You don’t have to worry about me around your husband, Steph.”
“Nice,” Jen quips.
Lauren’s mouth pops open. “I said Vince is too good-looking for me. It’s a compliment!” She reassures me, the tiniest bit of fear in her eyes. “It’s a compliment.”
I don’t smile but I do make a joke. “Where’s the option on SADIE for women who like uggos?” Lauren is the creator but no longer the CEO of a dating website that is, depending on whom you’re speaking to, a bold challenge to the status quo or a rich girl’s vanity project. If you are told the latter, you’re speaking to Brett.
A clever phrase materializes. “Hots and nots,” I suggest, feeling funny when Lauren’s boisterous laugh stops the conversation at the table next to us. Funny was always Brett’s thing. Now, all it takes is the palest attempt at humor, a small miracle given the fact that I was at the end of the couch at the last reunion.
The waiter returns, holding three gorgeous air-blown wineglasses. I do not stop him before he can place one in front of me, and Lauren notices, elated. “She’s drinking!” she exclaims to Jen, with the momentous pride of a lesser woman who has just called up her family members to share that the baby is walking, something every baby ever has done since the dawn of time. I don’t drink much or like children. I have my reasons for both.
“Unlike you,” Jen says crisply to Lauren, “she has something to celebrate.”
That was not said with love, but Lauren giggles anyway.
The server appears again, splashing Lauren’s glass with a taste of the wine. He places the cork next to her fork for her consideration, a little blood-bottomed thumb.
“Excellent,” Lauren concludes, tossing the whole thing back without really seeming to taste it.
“That’s about all I can handle,” I tell the server with self-effacing cheer midway through his pour. He rights the bottle and wipes its neck with a white dinner napkin.
“To season four,” Lauren says, raising a glass. “And to the Oscar-Nominated Female fucking Director.”
“Keep your voice down, crazy woman,” I say, clinking Jen’s glass lightly and waiting for someone to wag their finger at me, only no one does. Rule number two of Goal Diggers of New York City, no one is ever nuts, batshit, insane, sensitive, or emotional. No one overreacts. “Crazy” and its derivatives are words that have been used to shame women into compliance for centuries. The outside chair and a Chinese ducket on the word “crazy.” Toto, I’m not at the end of the reunion couch anymore, which is where they stick you right before they fire you.
I make eye contact with Jen first, then Lauren. “I just need to say something.”
“Speech.” Lauren thumps a fist on the table. “Speech.”