The apartment was dark with the shades down when she returned and had a sour smell to it. Barbara’s door was closed. Evelyn walked to the living room window overlooking the alley and yanked the cord to pull the blinds up. She unlocked and shoved up the window, and moved into the kitchen to push open the tiny window there, to give the place some natural light and a little bit of air and outside sound. She cracked open the door to get a cross breeze going.
On Friday morning, after her alarm went off at the unbelievably early hour of 4:45 A.M., she was almost late because she kept swapping out outfits, having never noticed what people who worked at coffee shops wore. It felt good to shower and dress for work, and she chose a white tunic dress and sandals with kitten heels. By the time she got down Main Street, her feet were already hurting, and standing on those heels all morning made her feet scream.
Mia wore black pants, clogs, a nose ring, and a knit cap, and was clearly annoyed that Evelyn was such a novice that she didn’t even know to cover her hair. Mia gave her a choice of disposable hairnet or dish towel; Evelyn went with the latter and thought that, paired with the white tunic, she looked like a manic midcentury nurse. As Mia made Evelyn grind beans, and as Evelyn then spilled ground beans all over the white dress and found that dusting it off just smeared in the mess, she wanted to throw the beans at the wall and run home, but running home would just mean Barbara in the dark. Evelyn stuck it out through her shift, limping up Main Street when it was over. Her left foot was bleeding by the time she got back.
In her room, Evelyn pulled out her bottle of Perles de Lalique, running her thumb over the smooth glass and the jeweled stopper. She spritzed it on her wrists and the back of her neck, smelling the pepper and dried-rose notes it always gave off at first. A few hesitant drops of rain tapped at her window. She could almost be back in New York, far away from the Marina Air and from any of this. Her iPod was in her night table, and she pulled it out and put on Judy Holliday. “‘They’ve burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away,’” Evelyn mouthed as Judy sang. She shut her eyes and sniffed her wrists.
Someone at the Caffeiteria this morning had mentioned the stock market was moving higher and higher and New York was celebrating. She wondered if it was raining in New York, too. She could see what all her friends would be doing. In Greenwich Village, Nick would be walking down Barrow Street, thinking with some glee about his fund with Scot. When a car came by, Nick would leap up onto a town-house stoop with the precision of a ballet dancer, sensing the exact moment he would need to move, as a thigh-high spray of water would hit the woman walking behind him. The woman, dripping, would let go of her cheap black umbrella, its metal prongs sticking out like an injured robot arm, a device unable to make it through even a single New York rainstorm.
In her living room, Camilla, who’d have zipped home from her reflexology appointment at the first sign of rain, would sip from a cup of tea and look at the Central Park Zoo below as the seals flopped around in the rain. The Style channel playing fashion shows might mention the stock market, and if it did, Camilla would turn it off. What did the fluctuations of the stock market matter to Camilla?
Scot was easy: He would be working at his hedge fund, whatever a hedge-fund office looked like, doing whatever people at a hedge fund did. Making money. Doing research. Getting frustrated that Nick was never around. Done and done, as Preston used to say.
Charlotte was easy, too: She’d be in an interior conference room packed with lawyers and would never know it had rained. She wouldn’t leave work that night—she would barely sleep eight hours over the next three days—as her boss would’ve told her they couldn’t time the markets, and if they didn’t close this deal by the end of the week, it wouldn’t happen at all.
Preston, where was Preston? He had tried to be a loyal friend to her, to warn her about the dangers of the circle she was trying to crash, the people she was trying to befriend: Bridie Harley, Gemma Lavallee, and, yes, Camilla Rutherford. She had repaid him by ripping him open, by making him feel like he couldn’t rely on even his old friends.
She wanted to imagine Preston happy, so she placed him at the Greenwich Country Club on the eighth hole, carefully lining up his chip shot, wanting to finish the nine before the rain got up to Greenwich. A click, an arc, and his ball would drop cleanly onto the green. He would probably use the stock market high to buy more Florida condos or whatever it was he was doing for work. He would dart inside the clubhouse as soon as the rain really started, putting his spikes in his locker and changing back to his loafers, then sitting with his gin and picking pith off his lime slice as he watched the rain darken the course from the clubhouse’s window. Was he lonely? Was he happy? Would he even know the difference?