“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