Everybody Rise

by Stephanie Clifford

  She’d look out her window into the 3:00 A.M. darkness, which was filled with the kind of silence that can only happen on city streets, with a bodega clerk shouting in Korean over a pile of mangoes, and the beeping of a processed-meat delivery truck with a smiling pig face on the side. The worst part was realizing that the darkness would eventually be over, because that would mean another day was going to start soon. The sun just kept coming in the windows.

  That morning (or yesterday morning, they all seemed the same), she had received yet another letter from the apartment management company. Evelyn found the letter stuck into her door when she opened it to take her trash down the hall; she didn’t know how long it had been there, as she couldn’t precisely remember when she’d last left her apartment. It read “Housing Part” at the top and looked like a lawsuit. Evelyn forced herself to read it, and though she had trouble concentrating long enough to interpret it, it was her management company calling her to court the following Friday for some kind of judgment. She had no money for judgment. She thought about calling her father for advice, but it would mean turning on her phone and she didn’t want the credit-card people to be able to find her.

  The sludge in her brain wouldn’t let her think sharply. She reread the notice two more times. Friday. If she was gone by then, they couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t judge against her for not showing up at a hearing if she no longer lived here.

  *

  It was July 13, and Evelyn walked out that Friday having showered, which was something, though she didn’t have the energy to dry her hair or even put it back in a ponytail. She wore Delman ballet flats that were worn through at the soles, and had underdressed for the weather, assuming the city was still as hot as it had been the last time she’d gone out. Now it was cold, almost autumnal, despite its being the middle of July, and she ducked her head to block the wind as she hurried down Third Avenue.

  She turned right on Sixty-second, walking west to where the better town houses started. The skies were dark enough, with rain looming, that she could see inside the town houses clearly, stone-cold gray on the outside and inside the light, the parties, the drinks, the laughter, the figure in a suit moving purposefully from one frame of a window to the next, the tiny head of a child in an upstairs bedroom confiding in a doll. Her destination was the Colony Club on the corner of Park, and she stood across the street from it under some scaffolding that felt providential in its ability to cover her up.

  The wind sliced past her, and Evelyn stepped behind a pole as she saw a leg, two legs, in camel stilettos, and a white coat, and the flipping backward of the long sandy hair. Camilla emerged from a taxi and said something to Nick, who was jogging after her. Then the heavy gait of Scot, following them out of the cab. Evelyn pulled back into the shadows, but they did not look her way. After giving them enough time to get out of the lobby, Evelyn walked across the street and entered the club.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the concierge, who was sitting at his desk with the little board behind him and the different-colored pins that showed which member was on which floor, the guide to his world, the guide to the world Evelyn had once hoped to master herself. “The party tonight, for Camilla Rutherford’s birthday?”

  “Yes, you are on the list? Your name, please?”

  “No, I’m not,” Evelyn said. She didn’t think that they were going to welcome her back into the fold. She didn’t even know if it was a fold she wanted to be welcomed back into. She just wanted to explain.

  “Miss, if you’re not on the list—”

  “Just let me in for a minute, please.”

  “I’m sorry, miss, but it’s a closed guest list, so I’m afraid I can’t let you up.”

  “But I know all these people. They’re my friends. Were my friends.”

  “If you’d like to call Miss Rutherford and have her add you to the list, I’d be happy to wait.”

  A woman in a pink suit wearing a necklace of large amber jewels, her osteoporosis so advanced that the jewels seemed to be pulling her neck to the ground, pushed past Evelyn. “Hello, where is Mrs. Hudson?” she demanded, and the concierge turned to look at the name board. “She hasn’t arrived yet, Mrs. Bagley,” he said.

  “I can’t call her,” Evelyn said. “I mean, I can call her, but she wouldn’t pick up. Things went really, really wrong between us. Have you ever had that? Where things just go off the rails, and you kind of know it’s happening, but you don’t really know how to fix it, and you just get more and more involved?” She realized she’d barely spoken to anyone in days.

  He gave her a sympathetic look, but then inclined his head toward the exit. “Miss, if you will, I’m afraid nonmembers and nonguests are not allowed to linger.”

  The woman in pink returned. “I couldn’t find her anywhere,” she said, looking angrily at Evelyn. “There’s something wrong; maybe it’s tomorrow, but I can’t come tomorrow, it’s Saturday, and she knows I never dine out on Saturday. Have you seen her?”

  Evelyn, uneasy, didn’t answer. The woman listed back outside.

  “Please,” said the concierge, gesturing toward the door, giving no indication that anything unusual had just happened.

  Evelyn’s hand went into her pocket, and she started to say, “Could you just—” but the concierge was answering a phone call. Evelyn stepped back outside, freezing from the Colony’s air-conditioning, and felt the wind picking up.

  She smelled him before she saw him, sharp perfumed chemical notes, resin and the scent of black, and then Phil Giamatti said, “Beegs, what-what?”

  “Phil,” she said weakly. The lacquered banker whom she’d last seen at Sheffield-Enfield, back before any of this had happened.

  “You going in? It’s cold out here,” Phil said, slapping her on the shoulder.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “They want my firm to invest in the fund. Along with my excellent party skills.”

  “What fund?”

  “Nick Geary’s. And some dude who worked with Greenbaum at Morgan.”

  “Scot? Tannauer?” Evelyn said.

  “Think so.”

  “You know Nick and Scot?”

  “I bring the money, honey.” He rubbed his thumb against his index finger. “My former boss at Bear signed up as an investor, and he thought I should get in early, too.”

  “They’re starting a fund?”

  “What did you think this was?”

  “I thought it was Camilla Rutherford’s birthday party.”

  “Yeah, there’s some chick’s party mixed in, too. Social life and business mix these days, don’t you know? The fund’s gonna be H-O-T. Their angle is that the mortgage market’s gonna implode. I guess they’re trying to sign up rich widows here or something.”

  Evelyn shook her head. “There is—I want—can I just go in as your guest?”

  “As my guest?” He patted his stomach.

  “Please. Just tell the concierge I’m with you. I’ll be in and out in twenty minutes.”

  “That’s what she said,” he said. “My date’s coming any second. No can do, Beegs.”

  “I just want to—these were my friends,” Evelyn said pleadingly.

  “Never thought I’d see the day when Beegan came begging,” Phil said with a guffaw. “Not on the guest list? What did you do?”

  Evelyn saw someone with a purposeful stride coming from down the street and recognized Souse.

  “Phil,” she said, grabbing his hand. From her pocket, she took out Camilla’s Racquet Club bracelet. “Give this to Camilla for me. Please.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Something that was hers that I tried to take. It’s a long story. Please, just give it to her.”

  “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 D7, 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 D7, 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 CLOTHES—EVELYN 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 FOR SALE—SOLD 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.