Everybody Rise (14 page)

Evelyn had reluctantly agreed to a first date with Scot when he'd called after the Lake James weekend. She had come to the date armed with four or five conversational topics but hurtled through these before the waiter even put down the bread basket. She was pulling the conversation, and the yoke was heavy. They traded sentences about themselves: he grew up in California, but moved to Arizona after his mother got remarried, and had always felt like he wasn't an Arizona guy, but hadn't really felt at home until getting his MBA at Harvard. She said that she grew up in a Chesapeake Bay town, and the water and the shore were beautiful. He talked about his college thesis on the overlap between Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, and she tried to stifle a yawn. So he changed the subject, or thought he was changing the subject, to talk about the capital-gains tax rate, but that led to an argument with himself over the inheritance tax. He was sweet, a nice guy, and when he kissed her after the first date and she rather obviously wiped the saliva from her mouth, she felt like a jerk. She also couldn't nail down a good reason not to go out with him again.

Evelyn prepared for dates like she was cramming for a test in a class she'd barely attended. For Harris Reardon, a dull McKinsey consultant she'd dated straight out of college, Evelyn had studied fantasy baseball until she had strong opinions on B. J. Upton's RBIs. For Jack Lynch, a friend of a friend of Charlotte's who was a research analyst at Bear Stearns, she'd tried to learn enough about wine that she could talk of the nose and the bouquet as pretentiously as he did. This was how she approached all men, figuring out which version of herself to present in order to get a guy interested in her.

Evelyn couldn't quite put her finger on why her dating life had never taken off. It had been slow from the start, in Bibville. The boy she had a crush on in middle school, Josh Meisel, had shown a brief and surprising interest in her in sixth grade, when he would call her on her private line during
Quantum Leap
to ask about the math homework, but at school Evelyn was too nervous to talk to him and, during their rare conversations, stared into the middle distance with an expression she thought looked European. It did not entrance him.

The world always said to just be yourself, but it turned out when Evelyn was herself, no guys were at all interested, so she was left with games of make-believe, expressing enthusiasm for whatever the men wanted to do, be it rock climbing or going to a cheese-beer pairing or a Knicks game.

As she walked west on Seventy-fourth, trying to keep thoughts of her father's case out of her head, she managed until a woman in a gray suit who had the sharp angles of a prosecutor gave her an unsettling second glance. Evelyn turned south. At Seventy-second, she started to wonder what papers the case had been covered in. By Seventieth, she worried that her father would go to jail. By Sixty-ninth, when she turned west, she thought that all her friends and her bosses at PLU might know already and were just snickering behind her back about it. When she finally stopped outside Le Charlot, her whole life was careening away.

She thought she had composed herself when she walked inside and saw Scot at a table sipping water. She walked over, and meant to open her mouth and say something light and happy, and instead she found that she was standing with an open mouth and with no sound coming out, and then she was crying.

Scot wriggled out of his seat and, to Evelyn's surprise, didn't hesitate, just pulled her into an enveloping hug. His chest was hard and warm, and his arms long enough to wrap her right up, and his cotton sweater was soft, and he smelled like Christmas, and for once he said the right thing by saying nothing.

“Do you want to walk?” he said, after a few minutes during which she soaked his shirt with tears. She nodded, and tried to dab at the dark spot she'd left on his sky-blue cotton, but he just said, “Shhh,” and guided her through the blurry restaurant. As he turned her onto Sixty-ninth Street, Evelyn started blurting out one-word attempts at explaining herself. Scot didn't force anything, just left his big, warm hand on her back and walked slowly with her down the block, across the street, down another block, across another street, occasionally circling his hand around her back, but otherwise just letting her cry. Finally, she sank onto a bench outside an optometrist's office and tried to subtly wipe away what must be pooling mascara from under her eyes as Scot sat down beside her.

“Sorry,” she said. “It's just family stuff.”

“Okay,” he said. She couldn't remember being so relieved at a word. No questions. No prying. Just okay.

“Okay?” she repeated.

“Okay.” He stroked her hair, and she felt that delicious soothing tingle she'd felt the few times she was invited to middle-school sleepovers and the girls braided one another's hair. “Do you still feel like eating?” he asked softly.

She shook her head.

“Do you want me to take you home?”

She shook it again.

“Should we just sit here for a while?”

She looked up and saw, through her tears, someone across the street who looked like a Sheffield classmate. It wasn't, but it was close enough that she just wanted to leave the area. “Why don't we go to your neighborhood?” she said.

“Wall Street on a Sunday? It's going to be quiet.”

“Quiet sounds good,” said Evelyn, sniffling. “Quiet sounds very good.”

Scot squeezed her closer to him, then rose and hailed a cab.

His apartment was in a giant tower on Gold Street, where all the buildings loomed over narrow colonial-era streets, making them feel dark and dank even on this early summer night. He guided her past the clanging and drilling from construction, the profiteers selling tacky postcards promising we would never forget, the tourists trying to figure out which one was Fulton. The building itself was typical Wall Street bachelor, with a pool in the basement and a giant lobby of black-and-white tiles and couches that no one ever sat in.

Scot's apartment, number 5G, was similarly huge and bare. The living room contained an enormous and hard-looking gray couch, a flat-screen TV, a sound system with giant silver speakers, and two stools lined up at a pass-through window to the small kitchen.

When Evelyn followed Scot into his bedroom, he turned on classical music, “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” and then sat on his bed. Evelyn wasn't going to have sex with him so early, but wanted more of that warmth she'd felt on the street. They began kissing, and she finally unbuttoned a few buttons on her shirt when it became clear that he wasn't going to. He responded by standing up, taking off his shirt, folding it, placing it neatly on a chair, then returning and waiting for her to proceed. She gave him a hand job while he rubbed at her, and though he grunted appreciatively the whole time, she had the feeling it was just as lame for him as it was for her. Afterward, though, when she made noises about leaving, he said, simply, “Stay.” And she did. She brushed her teeth with toothpaste and her index finger, washed her face with his Irish Spring, and wore one of his T-shirts that fell to her knees to go to bed. He wrapped his big arms around her and tucked his legs in behind her, and Evelyn stiffened at first, but then, there on that unfamiliar bed, Evelyn felt protected, and ran her thumb over his nice thick forearm and fell asleep to the strains of Grieg.

The next day, an e-mail from Nick: “So, I heard you held each other. Hot.”

 

CHAPTER TEN

South of the Highway

Evelyn was so absorbed in Nancy Mitford that, when the Long Island Railroad train pulled into Bridgehampton, she nearly missed the two-minute window for unloading. August was high season in the Hamptons, and the train was more packed than a subway car, with girls sitting and standing in the aisles for much of the three-and-a-half-hour ride. Evelyn had gotten a seat, and with the help of her books, the ride had gone by fast. She had decided that she needed to study if she wanted to continue her People Like Us success, and she'd been reading like a fiend: old Emily Post from the 1920s, before the etiquette adviser got too mass-market; Paul Fussell's
Class
; Mitford's “The English Aristocracy,” where the aristocrat laid out “U and non-U” speech. Evelyn had just learned that the frank “die” and “rich” should be used rather than the florid “pass on” and “wealthy.” She shouldn't say “cheers.” She was annoyed to find that monogrammed stationery was to be engraved, not printed; she'd just spent $300 on correspondence cards but they were printed, and now she'd have to reorder them. Camilla would absolutely know the difference.

Evelyn had been to the Hamptons twice before, an embarrassingly low count: once for a pool party hosted by her old boss in Westhampton, which didn't rank. Then last weekend for a People Like Us–hosted wine tasting she'd organized in East Hampton, where Evelyn had felt worker-bee wearing her laminated name tag when Preston and Nick had dropped by to say hi. She'd signed up fifteen new members out of it, which she thought was a good result, though Jin-ho felt like the few-thousand-dollar price tag on the tasting hadn't been worth it. Evelyn argued that just being the kind of site that hosted East Hampton wine tastings was good for the brand; you couldn't do a strict cost-benefit analysis on all of this.

“Ev! Look alive!” Charlotte was leaning out the window of her red rental in the parking lot.

Charlotte, to Evelyn's relief, didn't seem to know anything about her father. Evelyn didn't plan on telling any of her friends about those problems and regretted having broken down in front of Scot; weakness gave everyone else the advantage.

Evelyn got into the car, and Charlotte sped the short distance to Nick's house. Nick's place was south of the highway, though just barely, and as they drove, Evelyn saw why everyone made the south-of-the-highway, north-of-the-highway distinction in the Hamptons. One side was estates, hedges, money, privilege. The other was lacking.

Charlotte spun into the driveway and Evelyn was surprised by how attractive Nick's house was—she knew from Preston that it had cost $900,000 and was expecting something that was glass and chrome, not a sweet weather-beaten shingled house with white trim. That Nick owned a house at twenty-six was, as he would term it, NBD. Nick must have had more money than she thought; while banking paid well, an associate's salary wasn't enough to fund a starter summer house, and Preston said that Nick's parents hadn't helped him out with the place. It made her wonder if all her friends had some secret store of money.

Inside, in the living room, it was clear that a bachelor had bought the place—there was an overstuffed couch against one wall, a bar table against another, and a dining table against a third, with everything as close to the walls as possible. The place had just the mix of money, manhood, and a latent promise of domesticity to give every Jenna and Jenny and Sara-pronounced-Sahrah that Nick brought home from clubs a feeling that she could tame the house, and tame Nick; there was a steady parade of them, Evelyn knew from Preston. None made it back a second time.

Charlotte was three steps into the house when she announced to Evelyn that she was going to squeeze in a run, as she had to work that night. Nick was in town picking up charcoal, and Scot and Preston were taking an evening Luxury Liner. “Are we supposed to just claim a random room?” Evelyn said.

“I think so. I did. Not Nick's room, obviously, but there aren't that many people coming this weekend, right? So we don't have to worry about it.”

“I guess.” Evelyn took her bag upstairs to a narrow hallway that was flanked with bedrooms. Each bed was neatly made with linen-colored, linen-material linens that Nick had ordered, again showing remarkably restrained taste. The one at the end was marked as Nick's from the gigantic wooden sleigh bed there and two oil paintings of the forest; the rest had no wall decor. Evelyn ducked into one on her right, with twin beds, nice tall windows looking out on the lawn, and its own bathroom. It was too early to share a bed with Scot—she didn't want to deal with the comments from Preston and Nick, and the hooking up had not improved much—so the twins were a happy find.

*   *   *

The next morning, a cacophony of laughter and a high-pitched “Niiiiiiiick!”

The group had gone to the Jeroboam the night before after everyone finally arrived, a club that had sprung up on the edge of the Montauk Highway in a former run-down hotel and had instantly become the center of banker nightlife in the Hamptons. Nick had pulled some strings to get them all in, “even Scot,” as she had heard him telling Preston, which made Evelyn twitch. Scot's sweetness was appealing when they were alone, but in groups like this, his cloddishness made Evelyn so self-conscious that she couldn't enjoy herself, as she was gauging how harshly everyone else was judging her for being with him.

The Jero, as it was known, was basically a Twenty-seventh Street club deposited in the Hamptons. The club was hot and red inside, thumping and dark like an artery. Evelyn had followed Nick through a crowd, getting knocked by the hips of shaggy-haired men in button-down shirts. They'd waited for drinks in a line five deep and seven across, emerging with $15 Grey Goose and sodas quite a bit later. The drinks were small, and gone in a matter of sips. Charlotte was in hell—Evelyn knew this because Charlotte kept saying, with a clenched-tooth grin, “I'm in hell!” Evelyn didn't have the luxury of that point of view, though, so she decided she was going to like the Jeroboam. She downed two drinks very quickly and joined Nick and Preston on the dance floor, where a machine was spritzing something into the crowd. “Pheremones,” yelled Nick, pointing, as droplets misted over them, and Evelyn just wiped sweat from her forehead and kept on shimmying to “I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper).”

At some point later on in the evening, when the group had acquired a table and a group of random girls was dancing on it, Evelyn remembered blotting out cranberry juice from her skirt, and also an image of a bottle of Grey Goose in a bucket of ice; she had a bad feeling about the Grey Goose but couldn't say why.