The Exiles (6 page)

It was a potato chip.

So much glorious thought, all to promote a potato chip.

Bit by bit—first her head and then her gut and then the perpetual-motion machine of her heart—Emily began to deflate.
She’d knocked herself out for a potato chip. It wasn’t even her potato chip. She had neither conceived nor produced it. She had simply come up with a campaign. For a fried, processed runt of a root vegetable. A nothing. They were all nothings: the chip, the energy water she’d promoted last month, the breakfast pastries she’d guerrilla-marketed at the beginning of the year. None of these products were actually hers. And even if they had been? They were insignificant. When had she started to believe that these things mattered? She couldn’t remember. It had happened without her noticing.

She’d had two dreams when she graduated from college: financial security and the chance to play some small role in making the world a better place. This job was helping her accomplish neither. On the financial front, she’d seen where the creative directors lived—apartments only marginally more spacious than her own. Their walls were hung with cheap lithographs, reproductions or pieces done by their friends. (None of these creative directors had ever seen a real Rufino in person, Emily was sure of this! They’d certainly never owned one.) Their jobs were deemed creative and cutting-edge (the experiential being a new realm in advertising), as if creativity was the payoff, making the salary moot. These directors had reached the summit yet still lived paycheck to paycheck. After they had kids, they moved so far into the boroughs that they might as well have relocated to Delaware. And slowly their intellect was dying. This job had thoroughly entertained Emily, until she saw it for what it was: a derailment. Carlyle, Schopenhauer: Sometimes she imagined them as her contemporaries. They’d be ashamed of her.

The week after presenting the chip campaign, she lost interest halfway through storyboarding a corporate video for a whole-grain cereal. Three months after that, the act of monitoring client conference calls had become unbearable. Two weeks later,
she found herself pregnant. Finally, hardly a month into her maternity leave, she gave notice. She was long gone from the office by the time the potato chip campaign debuted—and received high praise from both consumers and industry analysts. Emily would go back to work, sure, but only when she found work that meant something. She thought hard about what that work might be, and she thought often of her mother’s career. Her mother had never made significant money (her mother had never, in her entire life, stayed in a top-flight hotel), but she’d been granted tenure, earned respect, and she’d put the bulk of her lifetime energy into researching, publishing, teaching. Despite her shaky start, her life’s work had meant something.

“Hey! There’s a DVD player,” Nate called to Emily from the living room of the Viking’s suite. “And a library of black-and-white classics.”

“There’s a DVD in here, too,” Emily said as Nate walked into the bedroom.

For work, Emily had once stayed in a room with an in-bathroom DVD player, nestled conveniently next to the bidet. The Viking’s suite wasn’t quite so high-tech, but aesthetically it was sumptuous, grand, beflowered. Expensive. It had a living room, a foyer, two couches. Emily tried to reframe the fact that there were no cheaper rooms available as good news. This was the last luxury they’d see for a long while. More important, nobody would suspect they were here. That was a bonus. Emily didn’t want to be found.

“His-and-hers media systems?” Nate said.

“That sounds almost dirty,” Emily said. Nate smirked.

Trevor lay sprawled across the bedspread, asleep. Next to him, Nate and Emily’s cash was haphazardly piled like the take from a roadside bake sale. Emily counted $84.16 total. It was all they had until Tuesday.

“Trevor’s beat,” Emily said.

“Me, too. And starving.” Nate picked up a menu from the nightstand. “Room service? We can do it up. It’s—”

“Free dinner,” Emily finished the thought. Free, meaning they could charge it to the room and it wouldn’t come out of their meager stack of greenbacks. Free, meaning the shock of the bill would be delayed for a week, at the least.

“Too bad we can’t charge diapers from room service,” Nate said. They’d counted eight diapers in Emily’s bag, enough to last them a day and a half. “They’ve got lobster lyonnaise, that’s an apt culinary introduction to Newport for Trevor. Oh, shit.” He looked at Trevor, and at the pile of money next to him, and paused. Then he continued, quietly. “I had a brand-new hundred that I left in the glove compartment. It’s sitting there in the Jeep.”

“For emergencies?” Emily said.

“Yeah,” he grinned. And then, after a pause, “Fuck.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. But it was definitely something. “Every time I think about the truck being stolen, it’s like a slap in the face. I should have left you outside to watch it.”

“To watch it? It’s an old Jeep.”

“An old Jeep stuffed with our shit, with a computer, an iPod, my emergency cash, our complete financial life laid out in sickening detail,” Nate said. He touched his ears, as if feeling for the ghosts of his lost iPod earbuds. “We could call someone to lend us money, just enough to tide us over,” Nate said. “It might be good to hear a voice from New York. They’ll all get a kick out of our Cherokee theft.” He paused. “It’s, like, proof that all hell breaks loose the minute you step off the island of Manhattan.”

The last thing Emily wanted was contact with New York. She’d been ignoring the messages on her cell—the calls from
Tania Osbourne, Cath Oberling, and finally Tricia Haynes, a compulsively social friend who’d probably been the last to leave the Barbers’ party on Wednesday. Emily first met all three women during her early days in New York, when they’d traveled the young-Manhattanite cocktail circuit together, carefree, adulthood barely breached, the social playing field still level back then. Tricia’s message today, like the others, was a breathless recap of what she’d heard about the Barbers’ art theft. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about the painting. The news was spreading without prejudice, like radioactive contamination.

Emily and Nate had arrived late to the Barbers’ apartment two evenings ago. Emily had been wary of showing up too early to the party, given that she and Nate barely knew Anna and Randy Barber—despite the dozens of dinners the four had co-attended, the relentless litany of holiday parties where they had crossed paths, discussed the dangers of mercury in sushi, critiqued the ethics of stealing wireless service. Still, Emily welcomed the invitation. The Barbers always threw a great bash and were generous with their guest list. They certainly had the funds for it.

On the phone, Anna had told Emily that Wednesday’s fete would be a low-key affair, nothing elaborate. Emily saw through that lie as soon as she walked in the Barbers’ door. The party was staffed with a full catering team. Two separate bars were set up, and the Barber children (apparently there were three, though Emily had never seen them) had been stowed at their grandparents’ for the night. Anna was draped entirely in jersey and had gold bangles stacked up her arm, turning her almost robotic in appearance. Emily was underdressed. She was always underdressed, it seemed.

“Our clothes are packed,” she told Anna at the door, hoping to justify her cashmere-tee and jeans combo.

“Don’t we all,” Anna said, and laughed.

“Excuse me?” Emily said. “Don’t we what?” But Anna was gone.

Inside the apartment, everyone asked about Nate and Emily’s Rhode Island plans—yet the minute they brought up the topic, the same people changed the subject, as if Newport might be contagious and spreading. Nate went to the kitchen for more ice, and Emily found herself wedged into a corner discussing Peter Harvey’s recent airstrip acquisition. Jules Denny said she’d developed a midlife fear of flying. (Peter had laughed:
midlife, my ass!
) Tristan Volk said he’d lost his laptop in Heathrow last week, his fifth lost electronic device in four months. Emily noted how merely attending parties like the Barbers’—drinking syrupy cocktails with friends who’d acquired airstrips and second homes—had once made her feel lucky, feel as if anything might be possible in her own life, but it was getting harder and harder to feel wealthy by proximity. At this last party, she heard the voices of her former coworkers in her head, deriding the trust fund/Wall Street crowd and their easy lives. Meanwhile, Tristan wouldn’t stop talking about his lost laptop, about how he might as well buy two at a time, at the rate he was misplacing them. Emily politely nodded, nodded, nodded her head. She wanted to care, she did, but she was stymied by this thought: If she and Nate had these people’s mere problems, if they had Anna and Randy’s spread, their collection of art and artifacts and family silver and a staff to keep it all in place, if Nate and Emily had the cash to buy even one new laptop, if they had any of this they wouldn’t have to leave the city. There would have been no Newport move for all of the Barbers’ guests to avoid talking about.

There was a time when Nate and Emily hadn’t needed these people, hadn’t jumped to accept their every invitation. When Nate and Emily were first dating, just a few months in but already
implicitly exclusive, they had wanted nothing but each other. That first summer they stayed in town on weekends while everyone else fled to the Hamptons (or Rhinebeck or inherited great-camps in the Berkshires). Manhattan felt palpably vacant on those Saturdays and Sundays, and sometimes during the weeks, as well. Restaurants sat empty and doled out prime reservations as if they were kittens in need of a home. The city was Nate and Emily’s playground. They ate out nearly every night and made a habit of regularly charging meals they couldn’t afford. That was excusable back then. They had no kid, no responsibilities; it would all work out in the end. New relationships were expensive, always, and Nate had paid most of the time anyway.

That summer had been dreamy, full of warm weather and ridiculous plates of food and giddy midafternoon sex and truckloads of we’ve-got-the-the-world-on-a-string attitude.
We had the world on a string,
Emily thought now as she eyed the nautical-print curtains in the Viking’s suite. Four years after that summer in the city, two days after the Barbers’ party, she and Nate were hanging on by a thread. She’d seen the looks of pity in the eyes of Anna and Randy’s guests. Poor Nate and Emily, financially evicted from Manhattan.

Nate leaned against the suite’s minifridge and flipped open his phone.

“Please,” she said, “don’t call New York.” They’d been gone from the city for less than a day. She felt dizzy and nauseous and closed her eyes briefly, trying to focus on the colorless void behind her lids. Sometimes she thought she should have kept her stupid job—the pay had been paltry, but it was something. Of course, post-tax, it would barely have covered daycare for Trevor. “Don’t call the city.”

“Really?” he asked, his phone still open.

“Really.”

He eyed her skeptically.

“Seriously, Nate. Don’t call. I mean, who are we going to contact? And to say what? ‘Hey, buddy, can you wire us a thousand bucks from your upcoming bonus so we can afford our stay at the Viking?’” Emily wanted to throw up at the thought. She imagined the gossip about their Jeep theft, their lack of cash, making the rounds with the same speed as the Rufino-theft news. Even Nate, who usually lay far out of the gossip loop, had heard about the painting. Sam Tully left him a message this morning and Nate picked it up when they stopped for gas outside New London. “I don’t get it,” Nate had said to Emily. “Someone took Randy’s Rufino.” Emily had nodded, said she’d gotten the same message from a few people already. “It’s not like Anna and Randy needed any more art,” Emily had said to Nate.

“I don’t think people wire money anymore,” Nate said now. “It’s done online.”

“Right,” Emily said, realizing, as she spoke, that a thousand bucks most likely wouldn’t be enough to cover their suite for three nights anyway. Of course the thing to do with that hypothetical thousand would be to
leave
the Viking, to buy new air mattresses and a change of clothes and the essentials they’d need to move into their new house—but the suite was so nice, and they could make it until Tuesday on $84.16 if they handled it right, and it wouldn’t bankrupt them (or bankrupt them more) to live in luxury so briefly.

“We look desperate already, moving here,” Emily said. “Could we at least save face and not alert the masses that, two hours in, we’re carless, homeless, and bankrupt?” She needed to take deeper breaths, to keep the oxygen coming into her lungs. They
were
desperate. “We’ve got eighty-four bucks. Add in whatever
we can charge to our room, and it’s more than enough for three days.”

“Okay,” Nate said. He sounded hurt. She’d implied that they were losers, that he was a loser for landing them in this state. Trevor rolled over and crushed a slew of one-dollar bills under his splayed legs.

“Em, you’ve got to stop doing this,” Nate said, picking up a wadded twenty-dollar bill. She had a tendency to crumple up her cash, condensing it into small balls. Nate’s bills lay flat and new, straight from the cash machine to his wallet to wherever they went next. It was like a symbol of their relationship, the kind of obvious trope that Emily would have derided as an undergrad. Technically she and Nate weren’t wed, and their finances were completely, visually separate.

“Here, hand it over,” Emily said, reaching for the room-service menu. Food would ground her. “I’ll call down and order.” She scanned the list of entrées as she walked from the bedroom to the living room, where she’d be able to talk on the phone without waking the boy. It was a miracle that he hadn’t roused already. “Oh God, these people love their hollandaise,” she said.

Nate groaned in assent from the bedroom. “Get wine!” he said, just loud enough to hear through the open doorway. “A bottle of wine.”

“Yes, sir!” Emily said. And as she picked up the phone to dial for room service, she noticed on the small desk the slim volume of Newport’s phone book. This was something else she’d loved during her corporate-travel days: the phone books in every room, each one like an old-fashioned gateway into an unexplored city. The Viking’s volume appeared new. Its perfectly aligned pages were as crisp and virgin as Nate’s dollar bills, and a pen lay in the open crease, making the scene appear like a still-life, a tableau
whose stylist had briefly stepped away to serve tea. She focused on the open pages that arched up off the table where they met the book’s spine. The pages were turned, she saw, to the BEs. It was as if, while Emily had been laying Trevor down to sleep and counting out their cash, Nate, who’d lagged behind in this living room, had passed the time by looking up his own last name.