The disconnect between her work and evening life was increasing. The more involved she became in the social scene, and the more she learned about what these people wanted, the less Arun and Jin-ho listened to her. They were pushing for huge growth, to the point that Jin-ho suggested Evelyn stop approving or denying members one by one and allow open registration. Evelyn maintained that that would wash away any market position they had. Meanwhile, she was regularly fighting with the ad side, like after they recently placed a giant Uggs ad in the center of the homepage, and the content side, which had started soliciting reviews of drugstore beauty products.
People Like Us still hadn’t gotten her an actual desk, and they’d hired some coder named Clarence to sit next to her at the long linoleum table. There were only a few unregulated inches between her and Clarence, and whenever Evelyn’s eyes shifted a tiny fraction from her computer screen, they’d land on his bulging white calf, broken up by thick, sparsely planted dark hairs. He had worn shorts to work every day since he started in August. Clarence sat typing with his tiny arms stretched all the way forward, his fat lower lip hanging down, breathing through his mouth. He sucked in air regularly, and his lip, shiny with spit, would bounce when he did. His feet, encased in thick black high-top tennis shoes, barely reached the floor. He would occasionally receive phone calls—one was about how insurance wouldn’t cover his Propecia prescription—and he’d continue typing as he talked, as if he were some all-important executive who couldn’t be distracted. Evelyn always felt like she was inside his bodily functions, his chest-shaking coughs that spewed forward onto his computer screens, his reverberating five-syllable yawns. She planted her iPod buds in her ear and turned up the Annie sound track as loudly as she could stand to try to drown out Clarence’s mouth sounds. “And maybe real nearby,” Annie sang in the hopes that her perfect life was out there. Meanwhile, Evelyn would get e-mails from Camilla—“spa day can you join?” or “heading to Q let know if you can go,” about her godmother’s place in Quogue—that made Evelyn’s work life seem even more drab.
Evelyn particularly hated using the work bathroom to change for a night out. The fluorescent lights made her eye whites look jaundiced and made it impossible to distinguish whether she was showing a dewy glow or just an oily T-zone. It was also degrading changing into her pretty evening dresses while she listened to the rip of a tampon wrapper from one stall over, and the stifled moans and plops broadcasting the digestive-tract issues of Ann, the HR woman, who was always in the bathroom at 5:00 P.M. How workaday Evelyn felt in that steel-and-linoleum bathroom with its pink liquid antibacterial soap; how much she felt like a tired secretary from some 1950s film who should be pulling off soiled stockings before taking the El to Astoria.
Generally, Evelyn would wait in a stall until she heard Ann heave herself off the toilet and out the door, and then would gingerly step out of her work clothes, balancing in the toe part of her Givenchy heels. Trying to keep everything from touching the floor, she’d end up with her toiletry bag squeezed between her elbow and her ribs, a pair of trousers slung around her neck, and a sweater clasped between her knees as she wriggled into her dress. Her shoes would already hurt; they were meant to be accessorized with a car and driver.
Evelyn would emerge from the stall to follow her prescribed freshening-up routine: a spritz of rosewater on her face, Touche éclat on her inner eyes, a blotting paper on her nose, shimmery beige shadow for her eyelids, classic Chanel pink for her lips, topped by ChapStick, a spritz of Perles de Lalique over the scent of Ann’s Perles de Bowel. All that didn’t erase the workday, though. She knew it was etched into her face as surely as coal dust would have been after a day of mining. There was no way to get the refreshed, rested, yoga-ed, blown-out look of the women who came from their Upper East Side apartments and with whom Evelyn had to compete at the evening events.