That had given her enough cash to make it through these weeks, on Cup Noodles and milk and bananas and Grape-Nuts, mostly, and Chateau Diana—which looked like wine but was actually a four-dollar “wine product”—when she was feeling desperate. She would walk only east to bodegas now, never west, and wondered whether the bodegas closer to the park also sold “wine product” and she had just never noticed.
She had thought about work, but she didn’t have any real skills. What was she going to do, offer to introduce employers to all the right people, people to whom she was clematis? She had nothing to contribute. Nothing to offer. The New York rhythm was continuing without her, and she couldn’t quite hear the beat. She didn’t like to be on the street during the early morning or evening commute because it was so obvious she had no place among the people with jobs and purpose. She didn’t fit in during the late mornings, when the mothers would borrow their children from their nannies and take them to to the exclusive music class to meet other influential mothers. She didn’t fit in during the afternoons, when nannies would migrate east for Brearley and Chapin, and west for Nightingale and Dalton. She didn’t fit in during the evenings, when people were heading home from work and rushing out on dates.
Without a place to be, Evelyn didn’t want to be seen. She’d gotten one e-mail from Brooke before she stopped checking e-mail, demanding Camilla’s bracelet, but she’d deleted it. She thought of calling Charlotte, but she didn’t want to spark the lecture she was sure was waiting for her. Sometimes she looked at Preston’s number, wondering where he was, and whether he ever wondered what his old friend Evelyn was up to. Her parents had called her a few times after the Lake James train-station incident, sounding concerned, but when Evelyn had said that she had just been feeling faint and hadn’t eaten enough, they hadn’t inquired further. She didn’t want to call them, either; she assumed her father was angry with her after she’d ignored his guilty plea, and that her mother would just moan about how terrible her own life was. She did have some standby pals, the Barneys and the AmEx and now the Visa collection people, who had been calling daily, trying to trick her by calling from different numbers and at odd times, until Evelyn had powered off her mobile and unplugged her apartment phone.
Life was going to keep going on, that was the problem. She slept until eleven, then napped in the afternoon. At night, she sat up in bed, too panicked to go to sleep because she knew exactly what the next day would bring, more of the same, more monotony, and with each day she grew older, with each day she grew further from what she had wanted to be. Sometimes she pulled her hair back and forced herself to go to the dingy diner with Internet access around the corner, and she’d look through Appointment Book, seeing the parties she hadn’t been invited to attend. How had she been so close to it all? How had she given it all away?
Individuals and families streamed by her on the streets, the days turned as they had so many times, her bodily processes became repetitive and futile. With nothing to mark one day as different from the next, her mind hurtled and her waist thickened and the little money she’d gotten for selling her clothes dwindled. She never slept through the night anymore. She would half wake, reach for the reassurance of Scot’s forearm that wasn’t there, and toss in tangled sweat-streaked sheets that she hadn’t washed in weeks because she could no longer afford drop-off service and didn’t want to have to sit, exposed, at a Laundromat.
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.