Everybody Rise

by Stephanie Clifford

  Sitting, he pulled at his napkin, tenting it into an odd shape before she reached over, shook it out, and placed it in his lap.

  The waiter came to take their orders, and Evelyn saw that Scot had brought the napkin back up to the table and was twisting it into a rope. When the waiter left, she asked him about his day, but he didn’t respond, just twisted the napkin into a rope in the other direction. Scot excused himself and walked toward the bathroom. When he returned, he was scratching his hairline, then tugging, hard, at tufts. He sat up straight and looked at Evelyn. Scot, despite his layers of social awkwardness, had been an excellent debate-team member in college, and Evelyn knew that when he had anything important to say, he practiced it carefully ahead of time and sounded fluid and confident, an effect he could never mimic in casual conversation.

  “I need to talk to you about something, and it’s been mounting,” he said. “The timing isn’t perfect on this, but timing is often imperfect.”

  She stayed very still, her hand spread out on the table. “Yes.”

  “I had heard something. I’m not a big believer in rumors, but I just need to hear from you that it’s not true.”

  Evelyn’s fingers gathered in a fist.

  “It’s about Jaime, at Lake James,” he said.

  Evelyn’s breath was short, but she knew she could not show it, and she tried to keep her chest from rising. “Jaime?” she said, inflecting her voice to suggest she was trying to place the name.

  Scot pressed on the tines of his salad fork, and it flipped up and tumbled over. “I heard some things that I don’t believe, but I wanted to ask you directly about them.”

  “What could you have heard?” Her laugh, meant to sound lighthearted, was shrill.

  “It’s an ugly rumor, I’m sure. I’m sure it’s not true, but what I heard was that something happened between you and Jaime. After I left Lake James.”

  Breathe in through the nose, breathe out through the mouth. “I don’t know how to respond to that. It’s patently absurd,” she said. “When exactly would something have happened? And just after you left? Of course not. Of course not.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” he said, almost shyly.

  “You know me better than that,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  He exhaled a huge breath through his heavy lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ev. I shouldn’t have asked. I just—I was worried. Can you understand that?”

  She pressed her wrist against the table to stop her hand from shaking and clasped her fingers around his. “Scot. I’m here with you. Please. Let’s enjoy our dinner and forget about all of this, okay?” She squeezed his hand, but she couldn’t tell if he was squeezing back or pulling away.

  “Okay,” he said. After a few moments, he started to talk about some banking thing he and Nick were thinking about working on, involving credit-default swaps and the CDO bubble, but Evelyn’s head felt filled with cotton balls and she couldn’t follow. She couldn’t seem to bring her heart rate down during dinner or all through the night, even when she was supposed to be sleeping.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  10:15 Adirondack

  There was just one train to Lake James on Fridays, the 10:15 Adirondack. Evelyn brought her duffel and, wanting to ingratiate herself with Camilla, two grocery bags packed with party supplies for the Fruit Stripe: cellophane bags, special-ordered from an online party supply store; bulk candy in yellow, green, and red, for which she’d had to make a trip to the Lower East Side; packs upon packs of Fruit Stripe gum. She also had her gear for the Fruit Stripe, which this year, Souse had decided, would be rowing, something Evelyn was actually decent at. She had called Camilla three times in the last day to see if there was anything else needed, but Camilla hadn’t called back.

  Evelyn hadn’t slept at all after seeing Scot, and barely slept the next night, and was so tired that everything struck her as funny and terrible at once. When the conductor came through the train car, Evelyn started cry-laughing because she thought he looked like a robot, close to peeling off his face to reveal his alien visage. Visage, visage, she thought as the train scooted north and the Hudson widened, and the ground looked like it was lifting off and mixing with the sky. Her phone rang, the blocked number again, and she stuffed it into her duffel pocket, where her fingers ran against Camilla’s racket bracelet. What was she doing? What had she done? The phone rang again, and this time it was the number for the AmEx collection agency. Why were they after her? Her gut began gurgling and panging as her heartbeat quickened and her throat felt tight and scratchy. Her breath was coming too fast yet never fast enough, and by the time the panic reached her brain she had lost any control over it. She sat in her train seat with widened eyes and shallow breath, reviewing everything she was trying to control. Her father, the case, Camilla, Preston, the calls from Barneys and AmEx—they were among so many bills, bills she hadn’t even opened and didn’t know the contents of. The rent, the $25,000 donation, Scot finding out about Jaime, how did Scot know about Jaime? Who else knew about Jaime? She tried to close her eyes at one point, but the sleep she found was too brief and dotted with unsettling dreams that left bare wisps when they were over. Wisps of failure, of reaching, of falling, and she woke up sweating, with an acid mouth, when she heard the conductor say, “Lake James, coming up.”

  “All passengers for Lake James,” he repeated. Evelyn sat fixed in her seat, wondering what would happen if she stayed on the train north into Canada. But the conductor picked the punch card from her seat as the train slowed to a stop. “Your destination,” he said, and cheerfully tugged her duffel to the aisle.

  As Evelyn walked into the station house, she felt her phone buzz, and her heart shot up and then down. Of course everything was fine, and she was just being insane. She had handled things perfectly with Scot. She just needed some sleep, that was all. Just a little sleep. With a smile and a shake of her head, for the benefit of the station attendant reading Buckmasters magazine, she pulled the phone out of her bag, but there was no text, no new voice mail. She must have just jostled it.

  She placed her duffel on a clean spot of floor and carefully sat on it. She waited for ten minutes, twenty, and then got up to pretend to examine a stack of brochures about various train destinations.

  “Boston?” the man said abruptly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The brochure you’re looking at. Good city.”

  Evelyn looked down, and, indeed, she was holding a bent brochure, Boston—the City on a Hill, with a picture of a quiet-looking city at night, gentle yellow lights illuminating a brick church. It reminded her of her senior year at Sheffield, when she and Charlotte would visit Preston at Tufts, eating in Back Bay restaurants and getting served wine because Preston brought cigars to dinners and thus looked like he was about forty when he was nineteen and never got carded. She, they, were happy then. “It is a good city,” she said.

  The attendant ran his finger around the brim of his USS Kearsarge cap as he looked at Evelyn. “Sometimes it’s good just to take a train somewhere else,” he said.

  There was a screech from the parking lot, and Evelyn looked out to see the navy Jaguar with the BIGDEAL license plate. She stuffed the brochure back into the display, and the attendant said something in response, but Evelyn was already out the door, not wanting to make Camilla wait. Evelyn opened the back door to place the bags of party supplies there when Camilla vaulted out of the driver’s seat and put a hand out to stop Evelyn, like she was a little kid who needed to be prevented from wandering into the street.

  “Evelyn, there’s a problem,” said Camilla. “Look, this is sort of awkward. I wish you had called or something before you got here. I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  Evelyn stood up. “What’s not going to work? I did call.”

  “You, here, this weekend.”

  Evelyn gave a half laugh, hoping this was one of Camilla’s jokes, but Camilla was standing steady, her sunglasses on.

  “I’m already here
,” Evelyn said, dimly.

  “Well, you should have double-checked before you got on the train.”

  “I texted you.”

  “Did you? I didn’t get it, I guess.” Camilla flipped the car-door handle a few times, letting it thunk against the glossy navy of the car. “Look, Evelyn, maybe you should watch what you do, okay? Prancing around the ball and Jaime de Cardenas, but I guess you already know his last name. It’s probably in your file on him or something.”

  Evelyn pulled on her earlobe so hard she almost dislodged her earring. “Jaime,” she said faintly. “How is he?”

  At this Camilla took off the sunglasses and looked directly at Evelyn. “Yeah, I didn’t really think you two had kept in touch after your whatever it was. Jaime’s girlfriend is a great girl. A great girl. She was captain of the field-hockey team at Andover and played at Yale and has a Fulbright.”

  Evelyn stayed very still. An Andover-Yale field-hockey player? Jaime must have thought—she was just a joke all along—

  “And, I have to say, Nick isn’t exactly thrilled that you were throwing yourself at poor Jaime while you were dating Scot,” Camilla said.

  “How does Nick … Oh, God.”

  “What about you promising that your father would support my event basically just so you could embarrass me? You were never going to get him to give that check, were you? Your father’s going to prison, so, um, I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t know why you wanted to do that to someone who has never been anything but nice to you, and who gave you a hand and lifted you into this world. I’ve been working with my therapist on being direct, and he thought this would be a good experience for me to come here and tell you this myself. It’s not easy for me.” Camilla swished the sole of her flip-flop against a speck of gum ground into the parking lot. Evelyn looked down to the grimy gum, now almost as flat and gray as the asphalt with all the dirt and shoe mud it had absorbed. Back, forth, back, forth went Camilla’s toe, unpainted and rather gnarly.

  Back, forth. Jaime had a girlfriend. Camilla and Nick knew, and therefore they knew that Jaime had wanted nothing to do with her after their hookup, and the stuff with her father was coming out at last, too late for her to do anything, and her class was stamped on her as obviously as a tattoo. Maybe Scot; maybe she could still get to Scot before everyone else did.

  “Nothing really happened with Jaime,” she said finally.

  “Look, Evelyn, I don’t really need details, okay? It’s just better if you go home.”

  “There’s only one train back on Fridays and it was at noon. I have all this stuff.”

  Camilla looked it over. “I’ll take the party stuff,” she said.

  “But—”

  “I’m sure you’ve wormed your way into some other families up here. Surely one of them will take you in.”

  “Camilla, this is just a misunderstanding. Your mom wants me to race tomorrow.”

  “Evelyn, it’s not a misunderstanding. And you’re not racing. Back down. For once.” With that, Camilla hopped in the car, shut the door with a firm click, and hit the gas. Evelyn realized then that Camilla hadn’t even turned off the motor to talk to her.

  Evelyn, glancing back to make sure the station attendant hadn’t been watching, took her duffel and walked to the service road behind the strip mall next to the train station, so no one driving to or from town would see her on the main road. She walked by the unadorned backs of the grocery and the video-rental shop, both of their Dumpsters bursting. She walked by the touristy furniture stores and the motels and the boat-repair shops with their propped-up hulls. As town got closer, she walked by the ice-cream parlor, and the motel, and the hotel that was a step up from the motel, and the flower shop where all the summer brides ordered their bouquets. From this side, they were all the same, with giant garbage bins and cigarette butts and cars parked at odd angles in lonely lots.

  Evelyn felt that if she could just keep moving, it would be all right and she could keep these things at bay. Camilla would backtrack; Jaime never mentioned a girlfriend, so something must have been amiss between him and this girl already; Scot didn’t necessarily know for sure yet, and she could convince Nick and Camilla not to tell him; she’d see Preston and he would see she was sorry; her father, her father, they couldn’t all know about it, it wasn’t possible. But it was possible.

  After she had walked for three-quarters of an hour, a small hill demarcated the start of town from the strip-mall outlying parts. Evelyn pitched down it, hot and smelly, with a sore shoulder from where the stiff leather duffel strap had been digging in, looking for somewhere to land. After checking that no one she knew was in sight, Evelyn took a break next to the marina. So she had lied a couple of times. So she had violated Camilla’s rules. She had worked hard to get here and deserved to be here and wasn’t going to be defeated because Camilla decreed it so.

  The marina was lively for that time of day on a Friday and, in preparation for the Fruit Stripe, was crowded with trailers holding single sculls, double sculls, fours, and eights. Some collegiate crews had shown up; a foursome carrying a boat down to the water for an evening row wore Yale jerseys. Evelyn remembered crew at Sheffield, the races on the Schuylkill and on Quinsigamond where they’d sleep in motels the night before and carbo-load. Two people were stringing up a banner: FRUIT STRIPE REGATTA 2007—HEAD OF THE FRUIT STRIPE. Evelyn was just under the Lake James Marina wooden arch when she saw Scot.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, tired, happy, relieved. She ran to throw her arms around him. “I’m so happy to see you. You don’t even know.” She shut her eyes and pressed her ear against Scot’s beating heart, so glad he was there, so solid and warm, as if she’d summoned him, and it was three blissful seconds before she wondered why and how he was there.

  “Jesus,” someone said, and Evelyn looked behind Scot to see Nick, arms crossed.

  “Nick?” she said.

  “I think I can say with some confidence that Scot doesn’t want to see you right now,” Nick said, stepping out from behind Scot’s shadow; Scot was gnawing at his thumb. “Camilla said you weren’t coming.”

  Her stomach started to simmer and pop. “Scot’s going with you? To Camilla’s?”

  “That’s the plan.” Nick began to steer Scot off toward the motorboat dock, until Evelyn grabbed Nick’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Nick, but I’m allowed to talk to my boyfriend. You’re not his bodyguard.”

  “No, Evelyn, I’m his friend. You need to go home.”

  She was a few inches shorter than Nick, but she managed to force him back and squeeze in between him and Scot, who looked like he had been teleported from apartment 5G. Nick moved toward her, but Evelyn put both hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. “I’m sorry. You understand.”

  “What the fuck?” Nick said as Evelyn guided Scot to a bench by a garbage can.

  Scot sank onto the bench, still not making eye contact. She tiptoed to him, her hand hesitating until she rested it on his back. He flinched and moved his body away. He was not looking at her and had raised one hand to shield his eyes. She put her hand on his back again; it was warm. His hand now shot down from his face and chopped her arm away.

  On the shore, she heard a cheer of “Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow, wow wow!”

  “You should leave,” he said. His voice was low, lifeless.

  “I can’t leave,” began Evelyn, who was focusing on the dark line where the bench met the hedge behind it. The sentence hung there as the idiot Yalies on the shore shouted, “Eli, Yale!”

  “I don’t want to see you.” His head was in his hands, and his voice sounded too low and too empty.

  Evelyn wrapped her arms around herself when she heard him and asked a question she knew the answer to. “What’s this about? Can you just tell me that?”

  “It’s about you sleeping with Jaime.”

  She pulled her arms tighter, digging her nails into her upper arms, and moved back from him. “Okay. Okay. We talked about that already. So you
’re just going to believe a rumor about me?”

  “Don’t.” Now his voice was filled with fury. “Don’t do that.”

  She felt like each word, if chosen wrong, could leave a lasting liability, and left long gaps between them. “I’m not … I…” She covered her mouth with her fingers, pinching her lips as though that would massage out a response. “It wasn’t what it sounds like. I was … we were…”

  “What? You were what?”

  She couldn’t find an end to this sentence, and the sun shone brighter and brighter.

  “I was so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said finally.

  “You’re lying. I defended you, like a naive idiot. I nearly punched Nick.” He pulled his knees in now; his huge body curled into a ball looked too vulnerable, and she had to look at the lake again, where someone was waving a Yale banner. “Why?”

  “It was dumb. It was so dumb. Scot, things were, are, falling apart with my family, and I thought—” She put a tentative hand on his upper arm and he flung it off.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  The silence between them was now beating, threatening to grow, even as the cheering onshore intensified. “I just—I did something dumb, and I don’t want to ruin things between us—”

  She saw something fly; he had kicked off his shoe. “Get out of here.”

  “Scot. Please.” Her voice was high now, pleading, like a child’s. “Please. We can figure this out.” She didn’t know what to say next. “Scot, you’re wonderful. You’re so smart. And so kind. Please.” She had to find something to say that would pull him out of this awful posture.

  “So smart? You didn’t even think I knew about your father, did you? You thought I was just that stupid? Such a rube? I knew, Evelyn. I was trying to give you time and space to tell me.”

  “I would’ve told you. I did. I tried. Camilla said that investigations, that indictments, that they weren’t, that it wasn’t—”

  “Stop it. Stop. Leave. I was at Sachem. That morning. When you…” He swallowed. The noise roared around her, the sound of a conch shell at the ocean. She was desperate for him to crumble, for him to hug her and let her wet his shirt with her tears.