Everybody Rise (41 page)

New York, New York

“Ma'am? The train has arrived. Ma'am, do you need me to call a doctor?”

She seemed to be sitting. It was so hot. Why was she so cold when it was so hot? The song was so loud she could hear it even over the industrial fan in her ears.

It's a helluva town!

It took Evelyn a moment to discern that the words sounded so loud because she was singing them at full throttle. The blond woman—clematis, clematis—gave her a frightened glance. Evelyn gave her a wild-eyed look back, suddenly shooting out her fingers in a claw as if to attack. She didn't know where she was, and there was nowhere for her to go, and for just one moment, sweat pouring down her face, she felt free.

 

Part Three

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Everybody Rise

Evelyn held the disc of grated old Parmesan, which she'd microwaved into a crisp, to the light. She had managed to get by for three weeks so far. The station attendant had insisted on calling her “loved ones,” as the attendant had put it, ignoring Evelyn's insistence that she didn't have any loved ones. The woman had held the train as she called the “Mom and Dad” listing on Evelyn's cell phone to arrange for a ticket home and had the conductor load Evelyn onto the train and offer her water as she sweated and trembled; someone must've gotten her a taxi, and she woke up alone in her apartment two days later, the fever having passed. Under her door, she found another letter about the rent, this one giving formal notice that the company would pursue legal proceedings if Evelyn didn't remit the past-due rent immediately.

But there wasn't enough to remit. She had canceled her Internet and her cable. She'd gone through her closet, putting the dresses and the skirts and the shoes and the lingerie from that life that was now so far away into shopping bags. When she had bought the things, she had imagined the day when they would all sit in a proper and big-enough closet. The delicate silk items would be folded gently into lined wooden drawers and separated by tissue placed there by a maid, rather than rolled and stuffed into a fourth of one dresser drawer. The evening dresses she would have cleaned by Madame Paulette's and prepared for storage, so that her daughter or some other fuzzy beneficiary, perhaps Camilla's or Preston's daughter, of whom she would be the godmother, would be able to wear it at a funny vintage party thirty years from now. Evelyn removed the clothes from their hangers and drawers and folded them into the smallest squares she could possibly make, slowly halving them and halving them again. When they were arranged in bags in tight packets, she took them to a consignment shop on upper Madison when it opened one morning.

That had given her enough cash to make it through these weeks, on Cup Noodles and milk and bananas and Grape-Nuts, mostly, and Chateau Diana—which looked like wine but was actually a four-dollar “wine product”—when she was feeling desperate. She would walk only east to bodegas now, never west, and wondered whether the bodegas closer to the park also sold “wine product” and she had just never noticed.

She had thought about work, but she didn't have any real skills. What was she going to do, offer to introduce employers to all the right people, people to whom she was clematis? She had nothing to contribute. Nothing to offer. The New York rhythm was continuing without her, and she couldn't quite hear the beat. She didn't like to be on the street during the early morning or evening commute because it was so obvious she had no place among the people with jobs and purpose. She didn't fit in during the late mornings, when the mothers would borrow their children from their nannies and take them to to the exclusive music class to meet other influential mothers. She didn't fit in during the afternoons, when nannies would migrate east for Brearley and Chapin, and west for Nightingale and Dalton. She didn't fit in during the evenings, when people were heading home from work and rushing out on dates.

Without a place to be, Evelyn didn't want to be seen. She'd gotten one e-mail from Brooke before she stopped checking e-mail, demanding Camilla's bracelet, but she'd deleted it. She thought of calling Charlotte, but she didn't want to spark the lecture she was sure was waiting for her. Sometimes she looked at Preston's number, wondering where he was, and whether he ever wondered what his old friend Evelyn was up to. Her parents had called her a few times after the Lake James train-station incident, sounding concerned, but when Evelyn had said that she had just been feeling faint and hadn't eaten enough, they hadn't inquired further. She didn't want to call them, either; she assumed her father was angry with her after she'd ignored his guilty plea, and that her mother would just moan about how terrible her own life was. She did have some standby pals, the Barneys and the AmEx and now the Visa collection people, who had been calling daily, trying to trick her by calling from different numbers and at odd times, until Evelyn had powered off her mobile and unplugged her apartment phone.

Life was going to keep going on, that was the problem. She slept until eleven, then napped in the afternoon. At night, she sat up in bed, too panicked to go to sleep because she knew exactly what the next day would bring, more of the same, more monotony, and with each day she grew older, with each day she grew further from what she had wanted to be. Sometimes she pulled her hair back and forced herself to go to the dingy diner with Internet access around the corner, and she'd look through Appointment Book, seeing the parties she hadn't been invited to attend. How had she been so close to it all? How had she given it all away?

Individuals and families streamed by her on the streets, the days turned as they had so many times, her bodily processes became repetitive and futile. With nothing to mark one day as different from the next, her mind hurtled and her waist thickened and the little money she'd gotten for selling her clothes dwindled. She never slept through the night anymore. She would half wake, reach for the reassurance of Scot's forearm that wasn't there, and toss in tangled sweat-streaked sheets that she hadn't washed in weeks because she could no longer afford drop-off service and didn't want to have to sit, exposed, at a Laundromat.

She'd look out her window into the 3:00
A.M.
darkness, which was filled with the kind of silence that can only happen on city streets, with a bodega clerk shouting in Korean over a pile of mangoes, and the beeping of a processed-meat delivery truck with a smiling pig face on the side. The worst part was realizing that the darkness would eventually be over, because that would mean another day was going to start soon. The sun just kept coming in the windows.

That morning (or yesterday morning, they all seemed the same), she had received yet another letter from the apartment management company. Evelyn found the letter stuck into her door when she opened it to take her trash down the hall; she didn't know how long it had been there, as she couldn't precisely remember when she'd last left her apartment. It read “Housing Part” at the top and looked like a lawsuit. Evelyn forced herself to read it, and though she had trouble concentrating long enough to interpret it, it was her management company calling her to court the following Friday for some kind of judgment. She had no money for judgment. She thought about calling her father for advice, but it would mean turning on her phone and she didn't want the credit-card people to be able to find her.

The sludge in her brain wouldn't let her think sharply. She reread the notice two more times. Friday. If she was gone by then, they couldn't do anything. They couldn't judge against her for not showing up at a hearing if she no longer lived here.

*   *   *

It was July 13, and Evelyn walked out that Friday having showered, which was something, though she didn't have the energy to dry her hair or even put it back in a ponytail. She wore Delman ballet flats that were worn through at the soles, and had underdressed for the weather, assuming the city was still as hot as it had been the last time she'd gone out. Now it was cold, almost autumnal, despite its being the middle of July, and she ducked her head to block the wind as she hurried down Third Avenue.

She turned right on Sixty-second, walking west to where the better town houses started. The skies were dark enough, with rain looming, that she could see inside the town houses clearly, stone-cold gray on the outside and inside the light, the parties, the drinks, the laughter, the figure in a suit moving purposefully from one frame of a window to the next, the tiny head of a child in an upstairs bedroom confiding in a doll. Her destination was the Colony Club on the corner of Park, and she stood across the street from it under some scaffolding that felt providential in its ability to cover her up.

The wind sliced past her, and Evelyn stepped behind a pole as she saw a leg, two legs, in camel stilettos, and a white coat, and the flipping backward of the long sandy hair. Camilla emerged from a taxi and said something to Nick, who was jogging after her. Then the heavy gait of Scot, following them out of the cab. Evelyn pulled back into the shadows, but they did not look her way. After giving them enough time to get out of the lobby, Evelyn walked across the street and entered the club.

“Excuse me,” she said to the concierge, who was sitting at his desk with the little board behind him and the different-colored pins that showed which member was on which floor, the guide to his world, the guide to the world Evelyn had once hoped to master herself. “The party tonight, for Camilla Rutherford's birthday?”

“Yes, you are on the list? Your name, please?”

“No, I'm not,” Evelyn said. She didn't think that they were going to welcome her back into the fold. She didn't even know if it was a fold she wanted to be welcomed back into. She just wanted to explain.

“Miss, if you're not on the list—”

“Just let me in for a minute, please.”

“I'm sorry, miss, but it's a closed guest list, so I'm afraid I can't let you up.”

“But I know all these people. They're my friends. Were my friends.”

“If you'd like to call Miss Rutherford and have her add you to the list, I'd be happy to wait.”

A woman in a pink suit wearing a necklace of large amber jewels, her osteoporosis so advanced that the jewels seemed to be pulling her neck to the ground, pushed past Evelyn. “Hello, where is Mrs. Hudson?” she demanded, and the concierge turned to look at the name board. “She hasn't arrived yet, Mrs. Bagley,” he said.

“I can't call her,” Evelyn said. “I mean, I can call her, but she wouldn't pick up. Things went really, really wrong between us. Have you ever had that? Where things just go off the rails, and you kind of know it's happening, but you don't really know how to fix it, and you just get more and more involved?” She realized she'd barely spoken to anyone in days.

He gave her a sympathetic look, but then inclined his head toward the exit. “Miss, if you will, I'm afraid nonmembers and nonguests are not allowed to linger.”

The woman in pink returned. “I couldn't find her anywhere,” she said, looking angrily at Evelyn. “There's something wrong; maybe it's tomorrow, but I can't come tomorrow, it's Saturday, and she knows I never dine out on Saturday. Have you seen her?”

Evelyn, uneasy, didn't answer. The woman listed back outside.

“Please,” said the concierge, gesturing toward the door, giving no indication that anything unusual had just happened.

Evelyn's hand went into her pocket, and she started to say, “Could you just—” but the concierge was answering a phone call. Evelyn stepped back outside, freezing from the Colony's air-conditioning, and felt the wind picking up.

She smelled him before she saw him, sharp perfumed chemical notes, resin and the scent of black, and then Phil Giamatti said, “Beegs, what-what?”

“Phil,” she said weakly. The lacquered banker whom she'd last seen at Sheffield-Enfield, back before any of this had happened.

“You going in? It's cold out here,” Phil said, slapping her on the shoulder.

“What are you doing here?”

“They want my firm to invest in the fund. Along with my excellent party skills.”

“What fund?”

“Nick Geary's. And some dude who worked with Greenbaum at Morgan.”

“Scot? Tannauer?” Evelyn said.

“Think so.”

“You know Nick and Scot?”

“I bring the money, honey.” He rubbed his thumb against his index finger. “My former boss at Bear signed up as an investor, and he thought I should get in early, too.”

“They're starting a fund?”

“What did you think this was?”

“I thought it was Camilla Rutherford's birthday party.”

“Yeah, there's some chick's party mixed in, too. Social life and business mix these days, don't you know? The fund's gonna be H-O-T. Their angle is that the mortgage market's gonna implode. I guess they're trying to sign up rich widows here or something.”

Evelyn shook her head. “There is—I want—can I just go in as your guest?”

“As my guest?” He patted his stomach.

“Please. Just tell the concierge I'm with you. I'll be in and out in twenty minutes.”

“That's what she said,” he said. “My date's coming any second. No can do, Beegs.”

“I just want to—these were my friends,” Evelyn said pleadingly.

“Never thought I'd see the day when Beegan came begging,” Phil said with a guffaw. “Not on the guest list? What did you do?”

Evelyn saw someone with a purposeful stride coming from down the street and recognized Souse.

“Phil,” she said, grabbing his hand. From her pocket, she took out Camilla's Racquet Club bracelet. “Give this to Camilla for me. Please.”

“What's this?”

“Something that was hers that I tried to take. It's a long story. Please, just give it to her.”