Charlie Hawley was pulling close, taking advantage of the fight. Evelyn tried to speed up. “Why don’t you ask Brooke?” Evelyn said, but Brooke had turned to the side of the boat, apparently fascinated by Charlie Hawley’s advance. “Brooke, you’re not going to say it now? Fine. I’ll tell you what Brooke said to me. Everyone has something to say when you’re not around, Camilla, and it’s not nice. We say you use people and throw them out. I’m saying it, but we talked about it. We talked about it.”
“Brooke, did you say that?” Camilla said evenly.
Brooke shook her head miserably.
“I didn’t think so. Evelyn, these are just more of your fantasies,” Camilla said sweetly.
“I’m Evelyn and I was a debutante,” Phoebe said in a loud falsetto. “I’m Evelyn and I like to sleep with men who are way out of my league.”
“You’re eighteen!” Evelyn said, sucking in air as her strokes got shorter and shorter. “Shouldn’t you not be a major-league bitch just yet? Isn’t that something you should age into, like your sister?”
Camilla brought the motorboat so close that Evelyn had to yank her oar in so she didn’t hit it and get thrown off balance. She thought, for a second, that she had quieted Camilla, but then she heard, “Is that my bracelet?”
Evelyn shoved her oar back out into the oarlock and tried to row fast enough that Camilla’s view of the bracelet would be blurred.
“You stole my bracelet, you freak?” Camilla shrieked. “It’s been missing and I nearly fired our caretaker’s wife because I thought she took it. You crazy stalker. I should’ve known.”
Evelyn couldn’t catch her breath, and she was going faster and faster, and then her starboard oar was sucked down into the water and the oar handle kicked straight into her stomach, and as the phrase “catching a crab” sprang to the front of Evelyn’s brain and she realized that was what was happening, the water threw the oar handle over Evelyn’s head and she plunged into the water. It was a jolt of cold and she was in the lake, which was freezing, how was a lake this cold in summer, and then there was her boat upside down with its pink rudder sticking up obscenely. Her clothes were clinging and dragging and she bobbed around, trying to get her breath and her balance back, treading water, then dunking underneath to get a break from the motorboat’s surveillance. She looked toward the island’s shore, but it was too far to drag the boat there, and she couldn’t remember how to flip a scull. She clutched on to an oar, still fastened to her boat, that was floating innocently in the water like it had done nothing wrong when in fact it had ejected her. She had no idea what to do. She was just yards from the motorboat now, and Phoebe’s sneering face was hovering over her. Brooke looked like she was about to cry. Evelyn coughed out water and moved to the upside-down hull, her legs kicking on the surface of the freezing lake.
Camilla brought the motorboat to the edge of the capsized boat, looking over its carcass to where Evelyn was trying to stay afloat. Phoebe started to say something else, and Camilla cut her off. “Be quiet, Phoebe,” Camilla said. She looked at Evelyn, eyes glazed with fury. “My bracelet?” she asked.
Evelyn put her forehead down on the boat.
“Give it back,” Camilla said.
Evelyn fumbled for the bracelet, then Camilla said, “No, stop. Stop. You’re going to drop it in the water. Stop. Why did you lie about everything?”
“For me—” Evelyn looked up, her eyes stinging with lake water, one arm draped with a piece of lake grass, her other wrist bearing what was quite clearly Camilla’s bracelet, her socks heavy in the water, her grand plans upturned. “I wouldn’t have gotten here otherwise,” she said finally, and quietly. She wasn’t sure if Camilla had heard.
After what seemed like several minutes, she heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie. “Yes, it’s Camilla Rutherford. I’m watching the Fruit Stripe. There’s a capsized rower just off Turtle,” Camilla said. Evelyn kicked her legs. “The racer? Yes, she looks fine. No one I know. I can’t see a bib number, no.”
Starting to shiver, Evelyn pulled herself up so she was draped over the flipped boat and partly out of the water. As she did, she saw Camilla raise a hand in a combination of a salute and a wave, and the motorboat moved backward with a kick. Camilla twirled the wheel with one hand, and made the boat skip off toward other racers, other friends, other lives. Evelyn put her cheek on the cold fiberglass hull and waited for someone to come and pull her in to shore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Remaining Balance
Evelyn sat hunched in the train station, trying to work up the energy to buy her ticket on the 12:19. She had used up the little that remained of her willpower just now, as she’d forced herself to walk back to the Lodge at Lake James and pay the bill, which to her horror included a two-night minimum and came out to $3,936 after taxes. Once she’d withdrawn another $50 from the lobby ATM to pay for the lodge’s car service to take her to the train station, the ATM had spit out a receipt whose numbers were seared into Evelyn’s head: “Remaining Balance: $15.07.”
She observed her feet, toes still polished a peppy magenta but dulled by the lake water and ashy from yesterday’s long walk. It was so hot in the waiting room.
The door from the parking lot opened and shut, and she heard the wheels of a suitcase and the brisk rhythm of heels on the floor. “If you want to do the Hampton Classic next year, Geraldine, you have to take better care of your horse and not just depend on the stable to do it. Hold on for a minute. I just need to arrange my ticket. Fine. Fine. Good-bye.” In a different tone, one that sounded reserved for the working class, Evelyn heard “One to Croton-on-Hudson, on the next train, please. What time will that be?”
“That’s the twelve-nineteen,” the female attendant said.
“Very well.” Evelyn heard some beeps and papers shuffling, and then the woman was back on the phone, this time complaining about her assistant. Evelyn was trying to manage the uneasy feeling that this woman must be a friend of Evelyn’s friends, but the feeling was growing. Evelyn peered up, but the woman was facing away from her, and she could only see blond waves. The woman hung up on that call, and then was on another one, a very loud one. Someone across the aisle gave the woman a dirty look, but it didn’t have a quieting effect.
“So the girl invited herself up, and then wouldn’t even take the hint? Souse. It is somewhat amusing.”
Evelyn slunk down into her seat.
“Beegan? No, I haven’t. Have you? Where are they from? Beegan? That’s not a Baltimore name. Camilla’s calling her what? Oh, I see. Clematis. A climbing vine. Once these girls from outside the city get a taste of fame, or even, really, acceptance—well, what they think is acceptance—it’s just impossible. Of course, no one who’s actually from here cares at all about all this.” The woman had the tone of someone who’d given this advice time and time again. Conventional wisdom that applied to the thousands of kids from Duluth, from Mobile, from Detroit, who came to New York to try and rise above their stations.
Social clematis. That’s what Camilla was saying in the boat. Evelyn had thought she was meant to be a part of this scene, but her mistakes had piled up so high that complete strangers could detail them in the train waiting station. Jaime. A girlfriend. That the girl had played field hockey at Yale. Scot. Her father. Her mother. Credentials that Evelyn didn’t have. That Evelyn had just been faking all along.
“Train’s coming in ten minutes. Have your tickets ready,” the attendant said into a microphone.
Evelyn, feeling nauseated and still sweating, stood up and took the long way around the sitting room so the woman couldn’t see her face. “One to New York, please,” she said in a voice that finished in a whisper.
The attendant, pale with burst-capillary cheeks and a dyed red perm, typed in something. “That’s a hundred seventy-five,” she said.
“One-way?”
“Last-minute purchase. Only have business class available.”
Evelyn used her forearms to support herself on the cou
nter. Her head was whooshing so loudly she wondered if everyone could hear it. She opened her wallet and looked at the array of options that were no longer available to her. All these empty, useless cards filling her wallet.
The Visa Pewter. With the new terms she’d received. Maybe it would still work. She slid it across the counter. The woman ran it through and, as Evelyn had pretty much known she would, said, “Not going through, hon. Got something else?”
Something was wrong with Evelyn’s breath. Or her heart. Were they changing the lights in the station? It was so gray. She thought she heard Scot’s voice, and a hand extracted Evelyn’s AmEx, and she knew there was something about the AmEx that she should be worried about, then Evelyn was surprised to see that the person’s hand holding the credit card looked like hers. “Nope, not this guy, either. Hang on a sec,” Evelyn heard, but the words were floating and bumping, not arranging themselves in any logical order. She heard Camilla saying “Clematis, clematis.” Why had they turned off the air in here?
“The twelve-nineteen to New York City arrives in five minutes. Please gather your belongings and make your way to the platform for an on-time departure.” Evelyn heard, then, “You got anything else, hon?” Evelyn must’ve responded, though everything was shape-shifting now, because she heard the woman say something about Barneys from very far away. She remembered the subway station next to Barneys from when she’d first arrived in New York, so long ago, when she thought she’d go into Barneys to buy a purse and didn’t realize how expensive they were. She’d gone right back out, offended, and bought a purse from a street stand instead, a cute one, red, for something like twenty dollars, and had patted it as she’d gone to catch the N downtown to meet Charlotte for a movie.
She heard the roar of the subway train come and go, and she was on the Fifty-ninth Street downtown platform, which smelled of bile, looking across to the uptown platform, jammed with people in bright blue-and-orange jerseys. Groups of threes and fours were bright clusters of Mets supporters, everyone with individual allegiances proclaimed—PIAZZA 31, ALOMAR 12, ALFONZO 13. Triple claps broke out, and the whole platform would join in, “Let’s go, Mets.” They were all welcome, all part of something, all hoping the Mets would make the play-offs. Let’s go, Mets. New York, New York.
Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment’s door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell’s Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the exhausted new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother’s grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.
The rattle of the train announced its approach, the headlights sweeping as it careened into the station. The whole platform of travelers on the other side of her stamped their feet in unison; let’s go, Mets; let’s go, Mets.
“Go New York!” someone shouted in a deep Brooklyn accent as the train opened its doors.
New York, New York, a helluva town
The lyrics were rushing through Evelyn’s head as someone jarred her backward. She was going to be late meeting Charlotte for the movie and wouldn’t have time to get popcorn. Char loved Milk Duds with popcorn. “Excuse me, the train is here.”
The Bronx is up but the Battery’s down
“Are you all right?”
The people ride in a hole in the ground
She heard the shriek of wheels on the train track as the song changed keys and crescendoed:
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 dele
ted 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.
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