The beach outing was cut short by afternoon clouds, which were threatening rain by the time Evelyn and Charlotte got back to the house after a stop at the UPS Store, where Charlotte had to mail some paperwork. Evelyn got out of Charlotte’s rental car, salt encrusted inside and out from the sea and the Terra Chips she’d been eating, and rubbed her hands over her bare arms; the air had dropped from warm to cold. Charlotte was typing on her BlackBerry in the car, and Nick’s car was in the driveway, as was an additional one, a blue Jaguar with the license plate BIGDEAL, making creaking noises that indicated it had just been used. Nick’s boss, maybe, over for drinks?
“Hello?” Evelyn called out as she dropped her tote by the door. “Nick? Are you here? Scot? Pres?” She hurried upstairs. If she ran the bathwater right away, she could be submerged in that good-looking tub by the beginning of the storm.
She was startled by a pile of laundry sitting in the hall, lumped over Nick’s Oriental runner. Then the pile took shape into specifics. That was her brown bikini with the tortoiseshell clasp. The white dress she’d hung in the bathroom, crumpled beneath the clay-covered sole of a Jack Rogers sandal. Her makeup case, open, with a tampon poking out indiscreetly. Her turquoise travel toothbrush, wet and splaying its bristles against the hallway floor. Was somebody doing laundry and had accidentally gathered Evelyn’s stuff? The toothbrush and makeup case, though? Had Scot—but he wouldn’t put her stuff outside, and certainly not without folding it. She approached the pile and saw that everything she had so carefully chosen for the weekend had been jumbled together in a furious mess. Scot’s suitcase—which he had not unpacked, and was still neat and intact—was behind the pile. Was Nick mad? What had she done wrong?
She peered into the bedroom she had claimed a day ago, looking for a clue. On the bench at the end of the bed, where her bag had been, was a tote with the pink initials CHR. She decoded them immediately.
“No, keep it in the C corp,” Evelyn heard from behind Nick’s door. “What? Because if we structure it this way we can use the tax loss carryforward. The tax loss carryforward,” he said again, with conviction. “Rich, get your act together, okay? We’ll talk again in a couple of hours and I want those numbers done.”
The door at the end of the hall opened. “Evelyn,” said Nick, holding his phone and looking at the mess. “I take it all that finery is yours.”
Evelyn realized she was not only squatting, but fingering the wayward tampon. She angled her arm to try to block Nick’s view of the tampon, and with her foot, pushed the cup of a bra away.
Nick gave her a strange smile. “Camilla decided to come out for a couple days. I guess she wanted the room you guys were in. Sorry about that.”
Evelyn blinked fast. “No, I’m sure it’s my fault. I didn’t know Camilla was coming. I shouldn’t have claimed a room.” As she said it, she thought it sounded absurd; should she have napped quietly at the base of the stairs last night?
Nick’s smile relaxed. “Yeah. Camilla came up last weekend and really liked the view from that room or something. Sorry.”
“Last weekend?” Evelyn had been at the PLU wine tasting and hadn’t heard a thing about Camilla coming up last weekend. She was already excluded, apparently.
“Yeah. If the rest of the rooms are taken, you and Scot can bunk in the den on the fold-out couch. Sheets are in the closet next to the kitchen.”
The den on the fold-out couch. Great. Camilla would probably be standing over her in the morning, pointing at the saliva crust that formed around Evelyn’s open mouth when she slept. “Will do. I just need my bag. It doesn’t seem to be here.”
Nick kicked at a neighboring bedroom door with his foot and located the duffel wedged behind the door. “Camilla has a good throwing arm, but her aim is a little off,” he said grimly, handing Evelyn the open duffel and loping toward the stairs. Evelyn shook out a shirt and began refolding her clothing slowly. When she heard Nick’s footsteps downstairs, she jammed everything into the bag. She clapped the Jack Rogers together with an unsatisfying thwack, and hurled the toothbrush down the hall so it bounced off the wall. If Nick had seen her stuff in the hallway, so had Preston, and Camilla had gone through all of it. The bloodstained period underwear that a thousand washings had made mud brown that she’d thrown in at the last minute. Her toothbrush on the germy hallway floor. All dumped in the hallway for everyone to see. What rule had she forgotten to study? What had Nancy Mitford forgotten to forewarn about American social mores in 2006? She took her bag downstairs to the small, dark den and sat on the couch as the sky outside got grayer. She kicked the bag. She knew what Nancy Mitford would’ve said: Evelyn shouldn’t have claimed the second-best room, certainly not in Nick’s house, where she was at best the fourth-ranked guest. She kicked it again.
“Fuck!” She heard Charlotte walking by the den, typing on her BlackBerry. “Why didn’t this fucking file attach?”
“Language,” Preston said from somewhere outside. Evelyn skulked into the hallway and looked out the glass doors to the backyard and pool. Camilla was indeed there, lounging in—Evelyn squinted—a fisherman’s sweater, bikini bottoms, and worn-down Top-Siders. Evelyn retreated to the den. She had to smooth over this thing with Camilla. Show her it hadn’t fazed her. She wriggled out of her caftan, leaving her bikini on, then faced the obvious question: Did Camilla have a bikini top under the sweater, or did that take away from the whole thrown-on effect? She buttoned up a thin green cardigan but it looked bizarre. She tried the bottoms with an anorak, but then she looked like a seafaring prostitute. Evelyn pulled on a long-sleeved T-shirt over her bikini, and hoped that was close enough.
Everyone was in conversation when she approached the door. Evelyn looked around the kitchen for, literally, something to bring to the party. There was an open bottle of red wine in the kitchen, but Evelyn vaguely recalled a rule about not drinking red before four o’clock. She saw some dark rum on Nick’s bar cart, and grabbed it, remembering seeing ginger beer in the fridge. She poured one Dark and Stormy, tasted it, wiped away her lip marks from the glass, added a lime, and then poured a second.
She walked outside, the ice in the glasses clinking. “Anyone want a Dark and Stormy?” she asked.
“Yes!” hooted Camilla from her chair. “Please.” She waved her hand at Evelyn, who promptly felt, clutching these slippery drinks, that her own swimsuit look was entirely off. “Evelyn! I didn’t know you were coming. I love my People Like Us page. Yesterday I posted a question about Gorsuch and got an answer in, like, three minutes.”
“Amazing.” Evelyn giggled, making a mental note to find out what Gorsuch was. “How funny. You’re a Dark and Stormy girl, too? There aren’t many of us. So good, right?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Camilla said. “You guys, this is too funny.” She had the weekend Journal spread out in front of her. The shade of Nick’s body fell over the newspaper.
“Private planes story,” Nick said. “Little do you know I forwarded that story around at ten A.M.”
“Little do you know I forwarded it at nine-thirty,” said Charlotte, clonking down her BlackBerry on the wooden picnic table. “Wireless Internet, gotta love it.”
“And that’s why you’re not married, Hillary,” said Nick.
“What’s the story?” Evelyn asked.
“It’s people refurbishing planes for their personal use,” Charlotte said. “Entire passenger planes. One hedge-fund guy uses his plane to transport his horses.”
“The weirder part is the lawyer who has the 737,” Nick said. “It doesn’t add up—the lawyer kicking the tires of this plane? What kind of lawyer has a plane? On, what, one-eighty bucks a year, he’s buying a 737?”
“If it’s a plaintiffs’ lawyer, they’re making a lot more than one-eighty bucks a year—a Big Tobacco case or something?” Preston tapped a pack of cigarettes on a side table. “Basically, our Parliament dollars are paying for this guy’s ride.”
“Pres,” Charlotte said sharply, nodding her head toward Evelyn.
/> “Oh, shoot. Sorry, Ev. I forgot about your dad.”
Evelyn smiled wanly and sat down at the picnic table.
“What about her dad?” Nick said.
“Dale Beegan, plaintiffs’ lawyer,” Preston said.
“You joke,” Nick said. “What firm?”
“Leiberg Channing, out of Wilmington. You haven’t heard of it,” Evelyn said. “It’s pharma cases, mostly. Where the companies didn’t do enough testing on a drug, that sort of thing.”
“Leiberg Channing,” said Camilla, of all people. “It’s a big firm?”
“Medium,” Evelyn said, willing the topic to die a quiet death.
“Nick, can I borrow your BlackBerry for a minute?” Camilla said.
Nick handed it to her as he said, “Pharma. I swear I didn’t know that. Wait, is that the one—”
“I can’t believe people still smoke,” said Charlotte loudly.
Preston stretched his lean body out in his chair and ran a hand over his curls. “This reminds me, fellows. We can’t sustain this train situation any longer.”
“You don’t like the feeling of being a Jersey commuter with the LI doubleR?” Charlotte said. “Wait, didn’t you guys take the Luxury Liner yesterday?”
“The Luxury Liner, my dear, is still a bus. Anything with four wheels and a tin toilet—not to mention anything that christens itself ‘luxury’—has nothing to do with the real thing. What we need to do, group, is upgrade altogether. I think we ought to take a helicopter out here next time.”
“So pretentious!” said Charlotte, laughing.
“Dude. Preston has forty g’s on his wrist and we’re sitting around a Bridgehampton pool—I think we passed pretentious some time ago,” Nick said, lifting his chin at Preston’s Patek Philippe watch. “I’m in for the heli. We’d get out here in half an hour. The helipad is about two minutes from my office.”
“Why must you say ‘dude,’ Nick? Your work trips to L.A. should not give you license to talk as if you were from California. Sorry, Scot,” Preston said.
“I’m from Arizona.”
“I don’t recognize Arizona.”
“What, like as a state?” Charlotte said.
“No, from a diplomatic perspective. Trade, reparations, that sort of thing. At any rate, the thing to do is not to rent a helicopter. Renting…” Preston smiled indulgently at the notion.
“We don’t want a helicopter,” Nick said. “My boss has a great twelve-seater. Keeps it in the private airport at JFK. Heliport to JFK, plane to the East Hampton airstrip. Half an hour, tops. When we get our bonuses.”
Camilla looked up from Nick’s BlackBerry. “Must you be so crass?”
“It’s not crass when it’s achievable, darling C,” Preston said.
“You guys are idiots. I like my bus.” Charlotte shifted her weight on the picnic-table bench.
“What about you, Scot? Where do you stand on this divisive issue of air travel to Bridgehampton?” Preston asked.
Scot, who was wearing blue swim trunks which needed to be so long to cover his thighs that they looked to Evelyn about the length of her inseam, cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, and Evelyn peeled a splinter of wood from the table, “mass transit is actually incredibly efficient, and air travel relies on fossil fuels and obviously gives off heavy carbon emissions. Beyond that, I’m not sure—” He looked at Evelyn, who was examining the splinter. “Sorry, am I being boring?”
“Not at all,” Nick said. “Please. The floor is yours.”
“Well, I guess you have to think about the issue of materialism. I think our generation is obsessed with too much. We keep wanting to trade up, and if you think about Schopenhauer, the futility of striving and the ultimate emptiness of human desires…” Evelyn looked at the group: Charlotte looking sleepy, Preston studying his watch, Nick evaluating the sky like a satisfied cat looking for a snack of birds, Camilla tapping on Nick’s BlackBerry. Evelyn had thought the weekend in the Hamptons, at Nick’s house that he owned and didn’t rent, with her friends who had gone to Sheffield and Enfield and St. Paul’s, Harvard and Dartmouth and Tufts and HBS, was enough. Yet she had taken the train when she was supposed to take the bus, and the bus wasn’t good enough so they were discussing a helicopter, and then the helicopter would be subordinate to a plane, and there was never enough, and nothing was ever good enough. Always, the more danced around, taunting her.
“Sorry. Um. I guess that’s heavy for the beach,” Scot concluded.
“I love Schopenhauer at the beach,” Charlotte mumbled, her eyes closed. The others were silent.
“Scot,” said Evelyn briskly. “Would you mind getting me some water?”
“Sure.” He jumped up, accidentally kicking the chair, which squealed loudly over the bricks and skittered to a halt. “Oh. Ha.” He strode inside with the focus of a man carrying out an important mission.
“Your boyfriend is a blast,” Preston said after Scot had shut the door. “I look forward to his evening lecture on geology.”
“Seriously, what the fuck was that?” Nick said.
Camilla was looking at the door that Scot had gone into. “I think he’s very smart,” she said simply, and handed Nick’s BlackBerry back to him. With that, the meanness evaporated and the mood was kind again, and Evelyn wondered if she’d underestimated Camilla.
“Can we work on dinner plans?” Camilla said. “I’d like steak. Grilled and with chimichurri. Nick, will you make me chimichurri?”
“I’ll make you anything you desire,” Nick said, his voice soft, pleasant.
“Ooh, let’s have tiny lobster-salad rolls to start! Isn’t that fun and beachy?”
“You got it.”
“We’ll go get supplies,” Camilla said, and then looked at Evelyn, who jumped up from the picnic table when she saw that Camilla was including her in the “we.” “I suppose I have to put on pants. I’ll meet you at the door in five minutes, Evelyn.” Camilla walked inside, handing Evelyn her empty glass as she passed her.
“So,” Nick was saying as Evelyn headed in, “I now have a Best Buy credit card because of this zero percent APR offer they were running when I bought the flat-screen. I’m thinking, time value of money, it’s a year of interest-free financing, I’ll take it. But it’s so bush league, having a Best Buy credit card in my wallet.”
Evelyn hurried to wash and dry the glasses, go to the bathroom, pull on some pants herself, and be waiting by the door within five minutes, as Camilla had instructed.
A few minutes later, Camilla knocked on the den door and walked in without waiting for a response. “Hi—oh. That was your stuff?” Camilla looked amused as she scanned Evelyn’s things, spilling out of the duffel.
Evelyn quickly slammed her hand down over the tampon. “Mine? Oh, yeah. It is.”
“I threw it out of the upstairs room.”
“Oh, that was you?” Evelyn said, she thought unconvincingly. “I figured it was just in the way, or something.”
“Oh, my God,” Camilla said, starting to laugh. “I saw that, like, spangly turquoise bathing suit and thought whoever Nick slept with last night must have left her stuff there. Nick and I hooked up the last time I was here, and Preston said there was some girl here last night, and I just saw those dresses hanging in the bathroom and I thought—well.”
Evelyn hadn’t thought the turquoise bathing suit was overdone at all and wondered what was offensive about the dresses—her clothes looked like they belonged to the random girl that Nick brought home? She had bought half of that stuff at Calypso, when that girl was probably shopping at Rampage. “Seriously, the den’s really cozy,” Evelyn said. “It’s fine.”
Camilla leaned against the door frame. “We’re hooking up. Nick and I. It’s truly, like, the least interesting thing. But FYI. My palmist says that I need to work on being more open, so I’m telling you. I’m just bored and need someone to mess around with.”
“Completely. Completely. I think that’s great. Nick’s a good guy, and—”
“I wasn’t actually looking for your opinion. I just wanted to be open and honest, and being open and honest is a practice rather than a quality, the palmist says. So that’s all.” Camilla seemed to be waiting for something. “Oh, I Googled your father.”
“My dad? Just now?”
“On Nick’s BlackBerry. I found some very interesting things.”
Was Camilla actually coming in here to haze her, like this was Dazed and Confused and she was a freshman piggy? Evelyn was trying her hardest with this girl, but this was getting ridiculous. She plopped on the edge of the fold-out bed, facing away from Camilla. “Look. It was a guy from years ago who’s bitter, basically, that started all this. They’re not going to find anything.”
“What guy?”
“The grand jury, Camilla. If you’re coming in here to let me know that you know that my father is being investigated, very good. Go tell it on the mountain.”
Camilla walked around the bed and tilted her head. “Your father’s being investigated by a grand jury?”
Evelyn looked at Camilla, unsure how to answer.
“You’re not worried, are you?” Camilla said.
“Camilla, it’s a federal investigation.”
She heard Camilla laugh, and it was a kind, tinkling laugh, not a cruel one. “Oh, my dear,” Camilla said. “It is so not a big deal.”
“What?”
“Darling, everyone who’s anyone is being investigated by grand juries these days. You’re not taking enough risks in your business if you’re not, truly. Two of the girls in my St. Paul’s class have had their fathers indicted in the last two months.” Camilla was nodding confidently. “First of all, no one ever goes to jail, and if they do, they go to, basically, camp for a couple of months. The wives love it; they get a break from their husbands. My mother just planned a trip with one of her best friends whose husband is going away for three months. The Amalfi Coast.” Camilla clapped. “I’m serious. You cannot be worried about it. It is not even an issue. By the way, I brought up your father because he sounds very real,” she concluded.
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