She heard the roar of the subway train come and go, and she was on the Fifty-ninth Street downtown platform, which smelled of bile, looking across to the uptown platform, jammed with people in bright blue-and-orange jerseys. Groups of threes and fours were bright clusters of Mets supporters, everyone with individual allegiances proclaimed—PIAZZA 31, ALOMAR 12, ALFONZO 13. Triple claps broke out, and the whole platform would join in, “Let’s go, Mets.” They were all welcome, all part of something, all hoping the Mets would make the play-offs. Let’s go, Mets. New York, New York.
Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment’s door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell’s Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the exhausted new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother’s grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.
The rattle of the train announced its approach, the headlights sweeping as it careened into the station. The whole platform of travelers on the other side of her stamped their feet in unison; let’s go, Mets; let’s go, Mets.
“Go New York!” someone shouted in a deep Brooklyn accent as the train opened its doors.
New York, New York, a helluva town
The lyrics were rushing through Evelyn’s head as someone jarred her backward. She was going to be late meeting Charlotte for the movie and wouldn’t have time to get popcorn. Char loved Milk Duds with popcorn. “Excuse me, the train is here.”
The Bronx is up but the Battery’s down
“Are you all right?”
The people ride in a hole in the ground
She heard the shriek of wheels on the train track as the song changed keys and crescendoed:
New York, New York
“Ma’am? The train has arrived. Ma’am, do you need me to call a doctor?”
She seemed to be sitting. It was so hot. Why was she so cold when it was so hot? The song was so loud she could hear it even over the industrial fan in her ears.
It’s a helluva town!
It took Evelyn a moment to discern that the words sounded so loud because she was singing them at full throttle. The blond woman—clematis, clematis—gave her a frightened glance. Evelyn gave her a wild-eyed look back, suddenly shooting out her fingers in a claw as if to attack. She didn’t know where she was, and there was nowhere for her to go, and for just one moment, sweat pouring down her face, she felt free.
Part Three
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Everybody Rise
Evelyn held the disc of grated old Parmesan, which she’d microwaved into a crisp, to the light. She had managed to get by for three weeks so far. The station attendant had insisted on calling her “loved ones,” as the attendant had put it, ignoring Evelyn’s insistence that she didn’t have any loved ones. The woman had held the train as she called the “Mom and Dad” listing on Evelyn’s cell phone to arrange for a ticket home and had the conductor load Evelyn onto the train and offer her water as she sweated and trembled; someone must’ve gotten her a taxi, and she woke up alone in her apartment two days later, the fever having passed. Under her door, she found another letter about the rent, this one giving formal notice that the company would pursue legal proceedings if Evelyn didn’t remit the past-due rent immediately.
But there wasn’t enough to remit. She had canceled her Internet and her cable. She’d gone through her closet, putting the dresses and the skirts and the shoes and the lingerie from that life that was now so far away into shopping bags. When she had bought the things, she had imagined the day when they would all sit in a proper and big-enough closet. The delicate silk items would be folded gently into lined wooden drawers and separated by tissue placed there by a maid, rather than rolled and stuffed into a fourth of one dresser drawer. The evening dresses she would have cleaned by Madame Paulette’s and prepared for storage, so that her daughter or some other fuzzy beneficiary, perhaps Camilla’s or Preston’s daughter, of whom she would be the godmother, would be able to wear it at a funny vintage party thirty years from now. Evelyn removed the clothes from their hangers and drawers and folded them into the smallest squares she could possibly make, slowly halving them and halving them again. When they were arranged in bags in tight packets, she took them to a consignment shop on upper Madison when it opened one morning.