Appointment Book
Fall whirled by, orange-tinted afternoons and thick white envelopes holding party invitations. There was the Tuesday evening when Camilla invited Evelyn to dinner at the Colony Club, the old-money women’s club on the Upper East Side that Evelyn had walked by many times but never been inside before. Camilla, as she led Evelyn through the lobby, mentioned she always had her birthday dinner at the Colony on her exact birthday, July 13, and that she would’ve invited Evelyn to her most recent birthday party a few months earlier had she only known Evelyn better then. Evelyn was happy to be in the Colony at all, especially for a dinner à deux with Camilla, though she was surprised by how shabby parts of it were, with the lumpy old couches that would’ve been relegated to the cat in any new-money house but here were a marker of WASP thrift. The food was sub-country-club level, broiled fish and Waldorf salads served in a coral dining room. Evelyn saw women talking to the open air and realized they were used to addressing expectant servants.
There was the Thursday afternoon when Camilla insisted that Evelyn join her for the Met’s Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibit (for which, Evelyn noticed when reading one of the introductory wall plaques, Camilla’s grandparents’ family foundation had provided generous funding). Evelyn called in sick to People Like Us for the day to do it. Afterward, they went to E.A.T. for salads. Camilla, not wanting to use the bathroom there, insisted on going to Evelyn’s apartment instead. With each block east, Evelyn felt her dread rise; she couldn’t remember whether she had just hinted to Camilla that she lived just off Madison, or whether she’d said so definitively. As Camilla started to make jokes about the Orient, Evelyn grappled to explain how she had gotten stuck so far east: her father’s secretary had found the apartment and signed her up for a long-term lease. Evelyn ran into the apartment ahead of Camilla and, while Camilla was in the bathroom, sprinted around picking up the Mitford and Post and Fussell as if they were porn, shoving them under her bed, and throwing a blanket over her stack of twee Rodgers and Hammerstein CDs. Camilla found her in the bedroom, took one look at Evelyn’s floral-patterned bedspread, and said that Scot must feel like he was sleeping in a dollhouse.
Evelyn got highlights that made her a blonde for the first time and signed up for three-times-a-week blowouts with Camilla’s stylist so her hair could approach Camilla’s level of shiny perfection. The price struck her as high at first, but she found that, freeingly, the more she spent, the less she cared. Her mother had come up with a secret check from somewhere, giving Evelyn an extra $10,000 and telling her to spend it wisely, along with the difference in rent money for the “new apartment.” Evelyn understood that spending it wisely meant spending it on establishing herself in this scene. She bought a high-powered T3 hair dryer so her hair was always straight and voluminous, though she couldn’t use it at the same time as her window air conditioner without blowing a fuse. She navigated the main floors at Barneys and Bergdorf’s and Saks, picking up just the right toiletries: she bought the $23 hand soap from Molton Brown, scented with white mulberry and bay leaves. She bought the boar brush from Mason Pearson. She bought Perles de Lalique, in large part because Camilla liked the bottle, even though the perfume smelled weirdly of black pepper; she hoped she would become one of those women known for her classic scent, so when she stepped into the room people would say, “Ah. Evelyn.” At an antiques dealer in Soho, she bought an Art Deco sideboard for her living room to house the full set of silverware her mother had recently sent; Babs had enclosed a note saying Evelyn would need to start entertaining soon and might find it useful. After spending an irritating seven minutes with a jar of silver polish, Evelyn loaded the silverware into a tote bag and took it to the Indian restaurant three doors down, offering a Bangladeshi busboy $100 if he would wash and polish it. He agreed, and Evelyn now found it quite chic to breeze by on the way home and pick up her glimmering silver and some papadum.