Everybody Rise (26 page)

Evelyn particularly hated using the work bathroom to change for a night out. The fluorescent lights made her eye whites look jaundiced and made it impossible to distinguish whether she was showing a dewy glow or just an oily T-zone. It was also degrading changing into her pretty evening dresses while she listened to the rip of a tampon wrapper from one stall over, and the stifled moans and plops broadcasting the digestive-tract issues of Ann, the HR woman, who was always in the bathroom at 5:00
P.M.
How workaday Evelyn felt in that steel-and-linoleum bathroom with its pink liquid antibacterial soap; how much she felt like a tired secretary from some 1950s film who should be pulling off soiled stockings before taking the El to Astoria.

Generally, Evelyn would wait in a stall until she heard Ann heave herself off the toilet and out the door, and then would gingerly step out of her work clothes, balancing in the toe part of her Givenchy heels. Trying to keep everything from touching the floor, she'd end up with her toiletry bag squeezed between her elbow and her ribs, a pair of trousers slung around her neck, and a sweater clasped between her knees as she wriggled into her dress. Her shoes would already hurt; they were meant to be accessorized with a car and driver.

Evelyn would emerge from the stall to follow her prescribed freshening-up routine: a spritz of rosewater on her face, Touche Éclat on her inner eyes, a blotting paper on her nose, shimmery beige shadow for her eyelids, classic Chanel pink for her lips, topped by ChapStick, a spritz of Perles de Lalique over the scent of Ann's Perles de Bowel. All that didn't erase the workday, though. She knew it was etched into her face as surely as coal dust would have been after a day of mining. There was no way to get the refreshed, rested, yoga-ed, blown-out look of the women who came from their Upper East Side apartments and with whom Evelyn had to compete at the evening events.

The worst part was carrying the toiletry bag to and from the bathroom, so all these losers could smile at her in solidarity. She wasn't some
Redbook
-reading working girl who thought adding a scarf and punching up her look with some jewelry would accomplish a day-into-night transformation. She knew better. Since people at the events would know she was coming from the office, she always changed into clothes that she could plausibly have been wearing at work. She didn't want them to think she'd actually changed in a work bathroom stall.

But at night, once she left PLU, it was like she stepped into an enchanted world. She knew the codes now; she could step up to a bar and order a Cockburn's port and pronounce it “Coburn's,” and get an impressed look from the bartender. She said “cottages” for Maine and “cabins” for Jackson Hole (which was just “Jackson”) and “camps” for the Adirondacks. She met Preston for Met premieres and went to dinners at the Knickerbocker Club, where she gave clever toasts celebrating the birthday boy or the newly engaged couple. She ducked into La Goulue, where the maître d' now knew her and sat her at almost the best table. She swanned into parties and laid a polite and appropriately intimate hand on hostesses' arms. She was part of the group she used to wonder about, one of those being ushered upstairs or downstairs into restricted parts of already-restrictive clubs and restaurants, nodding respectfully when she saw the older versions of herself, who nodded back politely, for they had been young and privileged not so long ago. Evelyn was twenty-six, and for the first time in her life, she was seen. Recognized. It wasn't that heads were turning—she wouldn't ask that much—but just for a moment, one man would hold her gaze a little longer than he should. Or a woman's eyes would flick over her dress with jealousy. She could now be a missed connection on Craigslist, a fragment in a song lyric, the inspiration for a girl in a musical. She was walking down grand staircases, made to feature women at their best, and looking down at a crowd looking up at her. Her mother was approving for the first time in her life. She was invited to Newport for the weekend; Newport! Stepping into history with those marble sinks, those copper fixtures, those beds with their high posts, that town that had been society's center. The stresses of modern life—the dirty streets, the trash, the expenses—melted away into her stage set. She felt like she practically had a chorus line behind her, kicking up and shimmying as they cheered her on.

*   *   *

“Miss Evelyn, you are getting so much in the mail these days. The mailman left all this for you because he could not fit it into your box.” The weekend doorman—Randy? Andy?—handed Evelyn a bundle of letters with a large rubber band straining to hold them together. She saw right away that there were enough thick square envelopes and textured black ones, standing out from the rectangular bills, that this was an excellent invitation haul.

To open her mail, Evelyn dimmed the lights in the living room, put on Judy Holliday singing “The Party's Over,” and poured herself a glass of wine. She placed a round silver tray on her coffee table to hold the invitations, opened her red Smythson, and took out her favorite chiseled brown Sharpie, writing down the title of each invitation, followed by its sponsor. The pages of the Smythson daily diary were starting to droop with the weight of the multiple inscriptions each week:

Dinner New York Antiques Show—MAYBE? (See if Pres going)

Chanel documentary premiere, Paris Theater, afterparty, Bergdorf's—YES—CHR dinner before

Pediatrics dinner New York–Presbyterian—√ red Ungaro

Annual fund-raiser lunch Sloan Kettering—√ white Milly jacket

J. Mendel shopping benefit, New Yorkers Fight Lupus—NO

Ivari (Jessa Winter's jewelry line) launch party Barneys—(maybe? Conflict w/Chanel docu)

ArtBall @ Studio Five, Chelsea—YES—CHR table—confirm Scot can go?

As usual, she separated the good stuff from the bills. She went through those as quickly as she could, edging them out of their envelopes and looking only for the monthly minimum and not the full amount due. She scrawled out checks, then shoved the bills together and deposited them at the back of her silverware drawer, where their accusatory statements belonged.

Then she could relax again. She turned up Judy Holliday with her remote control and reviewed the invitations once more. This was the best part of the whole thing, the anticipation. Getting these invitations meant that someone had sought her out and tracked down her address. Someone had wanted her.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Silent Night

Evelyn opened the door to Sag Neck, a decaf skinny gingerbread latte in one hand, noticing her parents hadn't even put a wreath up this year. Usually, Barbara Beegan's forced holiday march started with a Christmas Eve service, Christmas Eve dinner (turkey with oyster stuffing and a side of fried oysters), Christmas-morning coffee cake and stocking opening, followed by presents, then carols, then a late lunch of roast beef, then pie and more carols. Evelyn liked all of it, even the ribbon-wrapped Mason jar of pickled peanuts—slime in brine, as her father called them—that Sally Channing left at their front door every year.

She and Scot had celebrated the night before she left New York. It was just the two of them, and he took her hints and booked a dinner at Daniel and got her the triple-gold Cartier ring she wanted. Throughout the fall, she'd been trying to change the Scot that was into the Scot that could be. She'd sent him to get a bespoke suit, the precise hand stitching visible on the lapel, and made him switch his outlet Polo shirts for Lacoste. He seemed eager for her compliments, and would always wear the selected clothing when they went out, which made her feel weirdly guilty. She worked on his manners, too, trying to lightheartedly correct his knife placement and his revolving-door etiquette. When they were alone, she liked him, liked his slight nerdiness and his sweetness, but when they were in a group, all she could do was note that his shirt still looked off the rack and his laugh was too loud.

When one November Sunday morning Evelyn was leaving 5G and she heard Scot whisper, “I love you,” she pretended she hadn't heard and kept walking toward the elevator. How, she wondered, were you supposed to know when something was right and when it wasn't?

It was Camilla's number that she put at the top of her phone's favorites list.

The Cartier ring was perfect, though, substantial in its three types of gold, and Evelyn wore it on her middle finger and angled it to catch the light for about half the train ride home. She pulled out Scot's card every now and then, too: “Dear Evelyn, you have made this year wonderful. Merry Christmas. Love, Scot.” The handwritten card gave her the feeling that a middle-school mash note from a real live boy did: Someone likes me.

She had left at her apartment the gag gift that her friends had given her at the hot-toddy-fueled Christmas party they'd held at Camilla's. Preston had picked it out: a plastic tiara, as, he said, Evelyn was now queen of New York. By the end of the evening, Camilla was wearing the thing.

At Sag Neck, not only was there no wreath, but there was no tree. (Cleaning up all those pine needles for one day of celebration wasn't worth the hassle, her mother said.) Her parents no longer hung woolen stockings from the wooden rods of the banister. For Christmas Day, her mother had made a reservation at the Eastern Tennis Club to use up part of their mandatory monthly food minimum, and the Christmas Eve plan was cold sandwiches. There were no Sally Channing pickled peanuts deposited at the door this year. That part, at least, wasn't a surprise to Evelyn.

Her father was upstairs in his study, and her mother was sitting at the piano, though Barbara was not playing, her hands suspended over the keys as though she were waiting for a marionettist to pull the strings.

Evelyn tossed down her purse in the hallway and walked upstairs, pushing open the door to her father's office as she knocked. He was sitting at his desk with a glass of bourbon, a thick book open in front of him, excavating dirt from under his nails with a file.

The study had been largely decorated by Barbara, meaning wooden oars and wooden skis and a letter to the secretary of the navy signed by William McKinley and addressed to “My dear Pots.” (Evelyn had long ago deduced that this had nothing to do with her mother's family at all.) To this Dale had added his own ephemera: a UNC pennant, books on epidemiology and chemistry and biology, and
Inside the Jury
. One shelf was filled with crystal pyramids and metal paperweights testifying that Dale Beegan was B
OARD
M
EMBER
E
MERITUS,
A
TTORNEYS AND
A
ID
and T
AR
H
EEL
D
ISTINGUISHED
A
LUMNUS,
1999, and V
ICE
P
RESIDENT,
D
EL
M
AR
V
A
T
RIAL
L
AWYERS,
1995.

He put down his nail file and gestured for Evelyn to have a seat.

“No, that's okay, Dad. I just wondered if we couldn't figure out something for a Christmas Eve dinner. The cold sandwiches Mom got are depressing.”

“They're from a new sandwich shop in Easton. I don't think they're too bad.”

“That's what Mom said. The point is that I don't want to eat a cold sandwich on Christmas Eve. I mean, you guys aren't doing stockings, you're not doing a tree, and we're not cooking anything. It's not very festive.”

“If you want a tree, go get a tree.”

“That's not the point.”

“Bourbon?”

“What?”

“Do you want some bourbon? You like it, don't you?”

“Not particularly.” She held up her coffee cup.

Her father splashed bourbon into a glass for her anyway, as the voice from his record player crooned, “Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene.”

“I've got something to tell you,” he said.

“Is it bad?”

Her father didn't answer and waited until Evelyn had put down her coffee and stuck her tongue into the bourbon. She made a face and switched it for coffee. “How much have you been reading about this whole thing?” he asked.

“Nothing. I thought it was best to stay away from it. You said there hasn't been much written.”

He refilled his glass and carefully wedged the top back on the bottle. “Did I? Well. That's right. There hasn't been, much. Well. It's going to be a pretty long Christmas vacation for me, as it turns out. I decided to take a leave of absence from the firm.”

“You barely take vacations.”

“I think it'll help clear up some of the issues and help calm down the government.”

“Dad, doesn't that kind of implicate you? If you're leaving the firm in the middle of this big investigation?”

“I'm not leaving the firm. I'm just taking a leave.”

“Nothing's happened, right? The grand jury hasn't found anything?”

Dale tapped the nail file against the desk. “Not to my knowledge, no.”

“So isn't this asking for it? Shouldn't you just carry on as if nothing's wrong?”

“My lawyer and I think it's best.”

“Dad, grand jury investigations are not that big of a deal. It's how you handle it that matters. Taking a leave will make people talk. I'm serious. Taking a leave will make people wonder if you did something wrong. You should just go on and pretend like everything's fine.”

“Why don't we entertain the notion that I know more about the law than you do?” Dale said. He tapped the file against the desk several times, then placed his hand on a thin beige volume that was open to a page of black-and-white photos. “Do you know what this is?” he said.

“No.”

“Take a look.” He stood up and walked the book, yellowed around its edges, to her. His hair was speckled with gray now. Evelyn tried to remember when it hadn't been, when he had last had a full head of brown hair, but she couldn't. When does the body start to bend forward, the tics become strange old-man habits? Dale cleared his throat as if to answer her, and the clearing turned into a heavy, phlegm-filled hack.