Everybody Rise (47 page)

“Since 1987, huh?” Evelyn kicked Charlotte's leg.

“I have a really specific memory. I remember thinking it must've started because all the traders were drinking themselves to death up there then. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”

“Vraiment.” Evelyn smiled sadly. “How long's he there for?”

“I think another month or so inpatient, then there's some extended outpatient treatment. I wish you two hadn't had your breakdowns simultaneously.”

Evelyn lifted her head. “I'm sorry.”

“Eh.” Charlotte shrugged. “I moved to Brooklyn in September. How's that for change?”

“To get away from my haunting memory?”

Charlotte laughed. “Sort of, actually. Manhattan was getting ridiculous.
Sex and the City
tour buses overtaking Bleecker and condos left and right. Poor Jane Jacobs. Brooklyn's great. Lots of creative types. Do you want the updates on the rest of your crew?”

Evelyn took a deep breath. “Hit me.”

“Nick and Scot's hedge fund is alive and well. Nick's greasing the palms for money, Scot's doing all the work. They're betting against subprime CDOs.”

“Nick is betting against Wall Street?”

Charlotte laughed. “If it makes him money, right? I saw the prospectus. Nick has access to all these rich kids with money to throw around, and then Scot is doing the actual work. I've got to say, it seems like Scot got in at just the right time. Alan Greenspan said last month he thought housing was actually a bubble. I think it's going to make them a ton.”

“Doesn't it ever stop?”

“On Wall Street? Not until it does, right? Anyway, if there is a crash, Scot and Nick are positioned to kill it.”

Evelyn flicked a bit of crust out into the water of the bay. “Is he dating anyone?”

“Scot? Yeah, Nick set him up with this girl Geordie. She went to Princeton, a few years younger than us. She works in publishing. I think it's pretty serious.”

“She's nice to him?”

Charlotte nodded. That hurt particularly badly; Evelyn did want Scot to be happy, and she knew they weren't right together, but she still missed him. After all her misplaced bets, it was Scot who was going to be a big winner, after all.

“What about Camilla?” Evelyn asked quietly. She still occasionally gave in to the impulse to Google Camilla and saw that there had been new additions to Camilla's social roster. She was dating someone from the Vanity Fair 100, a list of tech and media types, the founder of a voice-recognition start-up that Yahoo was rumored to be acquiring for a few hundred million.

“I see her here and there. She's gotten really into a couple of arts organizations, one with glass-blowing or something, and another with graffiti artists. It's pretty funny, actually. She's at downtown parties constantly now, and the last time I saw her she was saying she was going to move to the Meatpacking District.”

Evelyn bit an almond sliver in half. They had all moved on so quickly, after she had done so much work to care about and get to know the first—and what she thought was the ultimate—elite circle. Charlotte was describing a Camilla-hosted party on the Soho House rooftop for the emerging artist Tayeb Idrissi, who took posts from something called Twitter and made them into word maps. As Charlotte began detailing Tayeb's installation at Storm King, Evelyn felt the almond's ragged edge against her tongue and felt, suddenly, that she couldn't hear it anymore.

“You know what, Char? Sorry. I know I asked, but I don't want to know. It doesn't matter. If it's not Tayeb whoever, it'll be something else, and someone else, and I'd always be playing catch-up. I was always playing catch-up.”

Charlotte tipped her head back and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she asked, “What were you doing, Ev?”

“In New York?”

“In New York. You became sort of a bitch.”

“Tell it like it is, Char.” Evelyn flexed her toes.

“I'm sorry, but it's kind of true.”

“With Camilla and everything, you mean? I guess it was that scene we were in—”

“I wasn't really in it, Ev. That was all you.”

“Okay, fine. The scene I was in. It was just so much. The money it took. The competition over the invitations. The parties.” Evelyn ran her hands over the wooden bench, grasping for how to explain this to Charlotte, who wasn't fazed by this stuff. “It sounds ridiculous, saying it out loud, because it's just parties, but it mattered to me.” She was starting to sniffle, and wiped her nose and looked in some horror at the trail it left on her sleeve, then laughed. “New York made me crazy. I was just trying to make it.”

“You were trying to make it in Edith Wharton's New York, Ev. That barely exists anymore. Look at the
Times
wedding announcements. It's ‘She works at McKinsey and he's an economics professor.' It's all merit based.”

“It is not, Char. I know the
Times
wedding announcements, trust me. It's all ‘He's a director at Goldman and she's studying early childhood development at Bank Street School of Education and her father ran asset management at blabbity-blah, and they just bought a house in Cos Cob.'”

“Okay. There are a lot of bankers in there, but society isn't that closed anymore.”

“Isn't it? Go to a deb ball and tell me that.”

“Other people are throwing open the doors. The entrepreneurs and the artists and the whatnot—no, you laugh, but they make old money interesting. Why do you think Camilla's all of a sudden becoming a patron of the arts?”

Evelyn shook her head slightly.

“You wanted so badly to get in, when you should have been trying to get out,” Charlotte said.

Evelyn cast her arm forward, sending the last bit of the croissant into the water, and it plopped with a satisfying splash into the bay. A lone Canada goose quickly honked over, gobbled it up, and flew off. Finally, Evelyn said, “Get out to where?”

“I don't know, exactly. That whole Upper East Side life, though—it isn't the only version of life in New York. In Brooklyn, there are all sorts of interesting people, the kind that New York used to have, writers, and graphic designers, and beer makers.…”

“Beer makers?” The raindrops were starting to fatten.

“Ev, I think…” Charlotte looked at the water, searching for the words. “What you were trying to be, wasn't that all about your mother?”

Evelyn looked down at her feet, taking time to put together her response. “Without my mother to report to, without her ideas of it, I'm not sure it would have been quite as appealing, yeah. But it was me, Char. It wasn't her up there attending debutante parties and going to benefits and stealing bracelets.”

Charlotte pulled down her lower lip. “You stole a bracelet?”

“You don't know the half of it.”

“I guess not.”

“We don't even go to Cichetti's anymore, the grocery store on Main, because my mother is convinced that our fall from grace has tainted the neighbors' opinion of us so. She doesn't even see her old friends.” Evelyn looked out across the gray water, which was starting to splash up against the dock.

“What is the plan now, Ev?”

“What, my
Gilmore Girls
setup with my mom isn't appealing?”

“I'm serious. You're young, you're pretty, you have money—”

“No. I mean, first of all, twenty-seven isn't exactly ingenue age. But money I do not have. My parents had to pay off the mortgage on the house, and the proceeds from the house sale are tied up in the settlement with Leiberg Channing, and there was a nine-million-dollar restitution to the government plus the legal fees. My mother still finds it uncouth to talk about money, so, trust me, I've tried to figure it out, but I don't think there's any money, at least not judging from the way she's barely spending it. I'm on my own.”

“Wow. Well, at least you were down here to help out with the sentencing and all that.”

“I should've been down here more. Helping them pack up, and hanging out with my dad, but everything in New York was such a mess and it seemed like if I could just get a little more time there—” Her voice broke, and she felt tears coming, and as she started to blink them back reflexively, she wondered why. So she allowed them to roll, hot relief down her cheeks.

“Hey. Hey.” Charlotte threw an arm around her. “You're still here, kid.”

“I'm in Bibville,” Evelyn said as she took a big, snotty inhale.

Charlotte squeezed Evelyn's shoulder. “Why wouldn't you say anything? About your dad, I mean? I tried to talk to you about it, and you were so, I don't know. Like it wasn't happening.”

Evelyn looked at her friend, Charlotte's hair frizzing in the mist. “What could I have said, Char? I thought maybe no one knew or put two and two together. What good would it have done, really, talking about it?”

“Well, you might have fought a little harder to keep your job. And talking can lead to deeper connections. So my therapist said.”

“Don't tell the WASPs,” Evelyn said.

The raindrops started to spatter on the dock as Evelyn thought about the New York she had left behind, and the new New York that Charlotte, Camilla, and the others were discovering. She rose, and extended her hand. “Come on, Char. You're getting soaked. You're not used to the rains of the Bib. We'll get you a shower and a delightful Barbara Beegan monogrammed towel, and we'll have dinner at the Hub before you have to drive back. I'm rolling in money from tips and can afford extra garlic toast.”

“I would not say no to extra garlic toast,” Charlotte said, pulling her blazer tight. “Vámanos.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Northeast Regional

The train jolted Evelyn awake as it pulled past Trenton. She looked out the window for the passive-aggressive T
RENTON
M
AKES,
THE
W
ORLD
T
AKES
sign, but she had missed it this time. She had with her just a cheap red rolling suitcase, given to her as a going-away present from the people at the Caffeiteria. She was going back to Bibville the weekend after next, for another trip to Petersburg with her mother; she had promised to track down the e-mail address of a personal-finance guru whom Dale wanted to arrange prison seminars with.

About two months after Charlotte's visit, Evelyn told her mother she was leaving. Her library-computer excursions had turned up the addresses of several well-reviewed coffee places and restaurants in New York that might be hiring, and some Craigslist roommate-wanted postings that she could actually afford with a job like that. Preston's old cell-phone number didn't work anymore, and though she'd swallowed her pride and called Mrs. Hacking a few times, she'd gotten their answering machine and had just left messages that this was Evelyn and she hoped Mrs. Hacking would tell Preston she was thinking of him.

After being very cross on the drive to the train station and saying that she didn't have all day to chauffeur people around, Barbara had actually teared up when the train arrived. She patted Evelyn on the head and said that it had been wonderful having her little girl at home, that she didn't know what she would do without her.

“You know what? How many women, at your age, get a chance to start over? You're a free woman, for a little while at least,” Evelyn said.

Barbara had pursed her lips, then smiled. “Perhaps,” she said. She patted Evelyn on the head again.

“I'm just a train ride away if you need anything.”

“Your friends will be happy to see you again, Camilla,” Barbara said with a lifted eyebrow. Evelyn had been telling her gently, then insistently, that the friendship with Camilla was a thing of the past, but Barbara seemed to have decided not to hear it.

“Charlotte,” Evelyn said pointedly. “Not so much Camilla.”

“You shouldn't just give up friendships so easily, Evelyn.”

Evelyn tilted her head, looking at the sun peeking out from behind the platform's railing. “Mom?” Evelyn said. “You have to let me make these decisions, okay?”

“Don't be condescending.”

“I'm not, Mom. It's just my call now. Okay?”

Barbara looked around, as if she were going to see something that would change her daughter's mind, but she eventually looked back at Evelyn. “If that's what you wish.”

Evelyn's rueful smile turned into a laugh. “That is what I wish, Mom. I'm going to hug you now, all right?”

“As if I would object to a hug?”

“Okay.” Evelyn leaned in for a hug; her mother's breath felt warm on her cheek, and both of them pulled away quickly, patting each other's arms.

“Safe travels.”

“'Bye, Mom.”

“Good-bye, sweetheart.”

Evelyn had been surprised to see that her mother waited on the platform once the train arrived, despite the chill, and raised a gloved hand in a farewell wave. Evelyn waved back from the inside of the smeared window.

The train scooted toward Manhattan. Evelyn had planned to crash at Charlotte's place in Brooklyn—Charlotte was visiting some textile factory in Georgia—for a few days while she checked out Craigslist apartment shares and hit the streets. Google said Brooklyn Heights had several good coffee shops, and while she pulled double shifts, she could look for a longer-term job, something in magazines, maybe, or e-commerce. As long as she earned $31,000 a year, and spent it on little besides rent and groceries, Evelyn could stick to the payment schedule she'd made with her credit counselor.

When the train pulled into Penn Station, Evelyn got out quickly but then stood on the dark platform as people pushed by her and up the stairs to the station. Brooklyn. Cheese makers and beer designers, or whatever Charlotte had said. The same song in a different key; her trying to create a life that other people had deemed worthwhile, Evelyn fighting to prove herself once again.