Everybody Rise (42 page)

“What am I supposed to tell her?”

“Tell her—” Souse was bounding down the pavement at an alarming speed. Evelyn snapped her head from Souse to Phil, and pressed the bracelet hard into Phil's thick hand. “Tell her that I'm sorry. Tell her that I…”

“That you what?”

“That I lost myself. Tell her that I lost myself.”

“You lost yourself?” Phil was saying, but Evelyn turned and started running, her flats slapping against her feet, running and running through the lights and through the honks and through the people. It was blue-black; the more reactive New Yorkers were already jamming their umbrellas up and out in anticipation of the first drops. Soon there would be sheets of rain that pummeled so hard it hurt. A swirling wind was picking up dirt from the street and hurling it at pedestrians' ankles along with leaves and Orbit gum wrappers. The wind whirled up and shook the tree branches, and the oblivious tourists continued walking in circuitous paths as the New Yorkers, who knew what was coming, crowded under awnings and behind the vertical plastic sheets protecting the fruit in front of bodegas, glancing at one another and at the troubled sky to measure how much time they had. A few kept moving, dueling with the umbrellas they had bought in the subway station from the Nigerian men who sensed the rain before anyone else did, as they hurried to wherever they were going so they could hurry to the next place after that. A single heaving drop of cold water burst on Evelyn's face, then another hit her knee. It went black, and the rain hit with a crash, slamming at her, her instantly soaked dress clinging to her legs and her shoes filling with water. She kept running. Sometimes she'd turn, when she hit a light, and several times she smacked straight into people who were running from the rain themselves, and she mumbled an apology and kept going.

Her lungs were filled with acid and she had big drops of water on her eyelashes when she stopped. She didn't know how long she'd been running, or what part of town she was in. She leaned over, hands on her legs, catching her breath. She needed a bathroom. She needed to dry off. She looked down the dark street: a closed nail salon, an open falafel place, and a red door with a neon sign overhead. A bar. That would be fine. She opened the red door.

The heat and the chord hit her at the same time. She knew those notes. Sondheim. It was the verse of—yes, now a man's tangy voice was singing it—Sondheim's “The Ladies Who Lunch.” Her eyes adjusted to the room below her. It was small and wooden, as though someone had picked up an oyster house from 1700s–era Pearl Street and dropped it here in wherever she was, Midtown somewhere. Christmas lights crisscrossed the ceiling though it was July. There was a bartender and a small clutch of people gathered on stools around a piano, outfitted with a bar around it, where a man with ginger hair and glasses played.

The man who was singing was plump, swollen faced, with small hands clasped together, and wearing a worn brown sweater, the kind of man Evelyn would not have seen on the street if she passed him, but his eyes were bright and he had a gentle smile as he wended through the song. Evelyn felt she must be actually giving off steam in this roasting place, but she stayed at the top of the stairs, not wanting to go but not wanting to interrupt the singing with her presence. As she nudged the first notes of the next verse forward in her head, the music stopped.

“A customer!” the piano player shouted.

“A customer!” the Sondheim singer echoed.

She took a step backward.

“No, no no no no no no,” the piano player shouted. “You! Come in!” He played a D
7
, a chord of expectations.

“Me?” she said.

“Don't just stand there dripping. We're not interested in wet girls, are we, boys?” He played a G, the resolution to the D
7
, as the people around the piano laughed. “Come. Here, the girls are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful—” Now he was plucking out the opening notes of “Cabaret.”

She took a few hesitant steps down to the wooden floor.

“His bark is worse than his bite,” the Sondheim singer said.

“My bite is delicious,” the pianist protested, his hands skipping along the keyboard with the “Ladies Who Lunch” chords.

“Do you know the words?” asked a man with a friendly long face, wearing a tweed newsboy cap.

“You can sit at the piano if you know the words,” the pianist said. “Otherwise, we banish you to the corner, where the straights and tourists sit.”

She looked at the room's perimeter, but there were no straights or tourists tonight to be seen. She took a breath. “I know the words,” she said.

“She knows the words!” the Sondheim singer said.

“She knows the words!” the piano player echoed. “You can stand here, next to beautiful boy number three.” This was a brown-haired man in a checked purple shirt and neat trousers, glasses, sipping a gimlet. “Please remember to tip the help, and I'll take requests if you make them politely and say ‘please.' Don't drip on the piano. Pick it up with the next verse, fellows.”

She did know the words and, for once, didn't care whether her voice sounded flat. She wanted to sing, and joined in with her clear soprano. She'd seen
Company
, a staged production with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and had found it moving, watching the protagonist try and fail to connect. She had puzzled over “The Ladies Who Lunch” in particular, which chewed up one group of New York women after another: the girls who play wife, the girls who play smart. But weren't they all trying? Evelyn thought as she considered the lyrics, feeling the scarred wood of the bar with her index finger. Going to museums or making dinner for their husbands or sitting back and making wry comments—weren't they all just trying to survive New York?

Only she, the Sondheim singer, and the tweed-cap guy were staying on top of the third verse. One would smile at her, the other would nod to mark the next line, and when she fumbled, thinking of Preston or Scot or Camilla, they raised their voices just a touch and carried her through it. The group went into the final verse. When the end of the song came with “Everybody rise,” to her surprise, all the men around the piano leapt to their feet, clinked glasses, and howled, “Everybody rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Riiiiiiise!”

Then there was silence.

“You're very wet,” the piano player said. “I don't think you'd want to touch the bar towels here. Why don't you—”

“Bathroom?” Evelyn said.

“Downstairs.”

The bathroom mirror was carved with initials and some remarkably decent line drawings, but Evelyn could still see herself well enough. The final words of “The Ladies Who Lunch” were repeating in her head. Everybody rise, everybody rise, everybody rise. That was exactly it, she thought. Upstairs, and outside, and in every street and every avenue of Manhattan, everybody was getting higher on a tide of money and ambition, swimming frantically and trying not to drown. And she? She didn't have the energy to even tread water anymore.

When she came back up, the men were singing “Skid Row,” from
Little Shop of Horrors
, and she bought herself two beers at once with the soggy $20 in her pocket, one of the final dribs of money she'd gotten from the consignment place. She allowed herself a few more songs around the piano as she drank, “Try to Remember” and then another Sondheim song, “Being Alive.” The words and music made her sit still and be for just a moment as the room glowed red from the Christmas lights and the cracked red-leather barstools. The Sondheim singer in the brown sweater let his voice soar, and she could see the sad apartment he must live in, with the creaking old radiator with wet socks drying on it, and the wood floor so slanted that any button that popped off a cardigan would go skittering to a corner of the room. Not the life he imagined he would have when he came to New York with that beautiful voice, she thought. Maybe not the life she had imagined, either, she thought, as she put her lips around the cold beer bottle. She had tried. She had fought. And she had lost.

She felt struck with tiredness. She made one final request, for “Corner of the Sky,” putting her last $2 into the pianist's jar and remembering to say “please.” She backed away toward the door as, softly, too softly for anyone to hear, she joined in on “Don't ask where I'm going; just listen when I'm gone.” She slipped out the door without anyone noticing.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Marina Air

“Evelyn.” Barbara didn't turn from her post in front of the coffee machine. “You're up early.”

“Yes.” The microwave clock read 6:05.

The only light in the apartment came from the dim bulb underneath the microwave. It was dark, and the Sheffield sweatshirt she had pulled from the box marked C
LOTHES—
E
VELYN
was on inside out and smelled of wood. Outside, in the parking lot of the Marina Air, a car's tires squealed.

Yesterday, after her train ride, bus ride, and taxi ride from New York to Sag Neck, she'd arrived at the house and seen it was as stripped as the Petit Trianon apartment she'd left behind, down to the dust balls and electric cords. There were light rectangles on the wood where the rugs had been and there was hair and dust detritus where the grandfather clock and tea table and chaise had been. Evelyn's room contained a sleeping bag, rolled up, and a shoe box full of old compacts and worn-down Lip Smackers that must have surfaced from some bathroom drawer. She looked into the front yard, which was when she saw the F
OR
S
ALE—
S
OLD
sign.

Her father had walked in the door soon after. He looked folded into himself, like a Snoopy balloon after the Macy's Thanksgiving parade, and had nearly screamed when he'd seen Evelyn at the top of the stairs. They were awkward around each other, her father not asking what she was doing there, she not discussing what had happened in her life. He'd tried to summon some of his old cheer, saying that the weather was fine and her mother was already settling in at the Marina Air apartment. He had been surprised that Evelyn didn't know what this was: the apartment they had rented on the edge of town.

He drove her over to the Marina Air that night, a two-story structure with exterior stairs and exterior hallways located where Main Street gave way to Route 33. Evelyn thought it must have been a motel before it was converted to divorced-dad rentals. Barbara was inside apartment 2L, a dark four-room warren, unpacking boxes.

“What are you doing here, Evelyn?” Barbara had said. She looked like she hadn't slept in a long time, either.

“I left New York,” Evelyn blurted. “I didn't call. I was just—I'm sorry.”

“You left New York? Why on earth would you do that?”

“I left,” she repeated in a small voice.

Dale indicated that she should sit on the couch, which took up most of the living-dining room. “Is this because of the case?” he said. “I appreciate you coming down, but there's no need to move here.”

“Yes. No.” Evelyn kept standing. “I was evicted from the apartment, or I think I would've been if I stayed. I lost my job. I lost my friends.”

Dale considered this as Barbara slumped down in a chair in the corner, facing away from both of them.

“Okay. That's okay, Evelyn. People get into trouble,” Dale said.

“I was trying to fix it all. Too late, I was trying to fix it all, but I was trying. I was always trying,” Evelyn said. She looked at her father, who had balanced on the couch's arm. “This way I can be here for the sentencing. That's good. It wasn't like I wanted it to come to this. I ran out of money, and did what I thought was best. Maybe it wasn't. I was just trying to get through.”

“It's all right,” he said, intertwining his fingers. “It's all right.”

Her mother stayed in the chair, and her father finally gave her a kiss on the forehead and said that she was always welcome, which was unexpectedly kind. Evelyn walked to the small bedroom that Dale said was to be the guest-bed-office-and-Evelyn's-room, where a framed Georgia O'Keeffe poster that Evelyn had bought at the Sheffield Shop her prep year, before she learned that all Georgia O'Keeffes were basically vaginas, hung a little askew. Evelyn wondered if her father or mother had hung it up.

The bedroom smelled of turpentine and Chinese plastic. Evelyn slept lightly and had been awake for an hour in the dark morning before she walked out to talk to her mother. Barbara still looked defeated, but at least she was speaking.

“You need help with the coffee machine?” Evelyn said.

Barbara swung the filter holder open and shut, and pressed a few buttons. “Your father always made the coffee.”

“When is he moving in here?”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Once he's wrapped things up at Sag Neck?”

“Is he wrapping things up at Sag Neck?” This was one of Barbara's favorite repartee games, feigned confusion.

“I think so, Mom. I don't know. I'm not really in the mood to deal with this. Is he waiting to move here until the sentencing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, is he waiting to move here until the sentencing? Do we have to do this?”

“Do what?”

“Mom?”

“Yes?” Barbara replied distantly, as though Evelyn were inquiring about tennis-court availability at the Eastern.

“Is Dad not living here?”

“No.”

“Like, not planning on it?”

“I couldn't say.”

“But you are? Here?”

“Evidently.”

“But Sag Neck is sold.”

“I am aware it is sold, Evelyn.”

“So I thought he would come here until he has to go to prison, if he has to go. I thought he was just temporarily at Sag Neck. There's room for him here, right?”