Just like Ryan had said.
At that dinner, Caroline had been seated next to Linda’s husband, Henry, who boasted about all the employees he’d magnanimously fired. As he did, Caroline contemplated the meaning of Henry’s last name: Cockburn.
A fork clinked against a crystal glass. Linda, having interrupted six conversations around her table, took it upon herself to instruct the entire group that it was now time for “general conversation, people. New topic, people! How to vacation.”
Caroline remembered digging her fingers into her thighs. It was all she could do to remain silent.
“It’s all about Nicaragua now,” Linda said, closing her eyes as if contemplating the momentousness of her observation. “There’s the greatest new resort called Mukul, but to get there you have to fly private at the very least from the Managua airport to the resort, otherwise the two-hour drive is just torture!” And now, she was almost screaming her guidelines, “That’s how you have to do it. If you don’t have a plane, I’m telling you, saving you!, NetJet it.”
Caroline had considered announcing to her hostess that NetJet was a private plane rental company, not a verb.
And now, at the Sea Crest Stables party, Linda explained, “You know, yes, hire me next time. You can work in design with no degree or special experience!” she added, overlooking the fact that Caroline had spent a year in design school and had worked in the field for more than a decade.
The air in the tent was now sweltering, as more people crowded inside. Like those late-August peaches at the Hamptons farm stands, Caroline was feeling a little overripe, and overdue for change.
Chapter 14
High-End Home Life
Mid-June Weekday, 6:00 a.m., Fifth Avenue, Manhattan
Caroline’s family slept soundly. With school getting out at the end of the week, she would be moving the brood out east for the summer. Five large duffel bags stuffed with bathing suits, flip-flops, shorts, sweatshirts, sun hats, and sunscreen lay side by side next to the front door. Plastic bins were packed and ready, filled with kitchen items she liked to move back and forth (the juicer, the good blender, the bright pitchers she used to serve iced tea and sangria). She also packed up half-full bottles of the more expensive condiments. Eddie always teased her about her compulsion to never waste food: “Were you raised during the Depression?” Caroline preferred to stock the cabinets in the Hamptons house with staples she already had instead of buying new ones.
She’d packed until two in the morning. Now in the silence before dawn, she was awake again, sitting on one of the duffels and resting her face in her hands. She scolded herself for acting like this was the exodus out of Egypt instead of a temporary move from one apartment to a beautiful beach house. Annabelle would tease her about how she had changed more than she recognized, and about how silly it was to stress over packing half-empty jars of mango chutney and those cornichon pickles that Theo inhaled. Caroline shook her head and stood, resolved to get a grip and be done with obsessive organizing.
Her husband was still in bed snoring, an affliction that he had acquired after gaining ten pounds over the past few years. Caroline went to go check on four-year-old Theo, who was asleep in his usual position—crunched up in a ball. She sat on the edge of his bed and neatened his Sponge Bob sheets. His thumb was bobbing in his mouth with rhythmic sucking; she smoothed his curly blond hair, always wild. His hairstyle was a defiant screw you to the uptight matrons at his city school who didn’t understand or appreciate him. Theo didn’t care who “got” him and who didn’t. At school, he bounced between blocks and paintbrushes, oblivious to the teachers’ demands to “focus on one activity” and to stop being so “bouncy.”
Their forty-thousand-dollar-a-year nursery school had fed the little ruffian into the Buckley school for boys, where they were about to pay fifty thousand dollars for his upcoming, very high-end (as Eddie said) kindergarten. Caroline remembered that her science classes at East Hampton elementary were held outside, often on the beach, nature their lab. She imagined the scene of her schoolmates in blazers and yellow ties tussling in the sand, learning about turtles and piping plover nests. If they moved back home soon, there was still time for her kids to socialize with normal kids who skateboarded home.
In the next room, nine-year-old Gigi lay on her back in her pink bed, her head resting against the pillow like an angel, her brunette hair cascading down her shoulders. Caroline sat by her daughter’s side in the darkness, hoping she’d shed her natural shy skin as she grew older. Maybe, with a move to a more low-key school in East Hampton, she’d be more confident, speak her mind more, not let playdates push her around so much and dictate the activity.
After checking on the kids, Caroline made tea. She placed the pot and honey on a tray, and plunked herself on the navy-and-aubergine-purple-paisley couch in the library. A striped red and ivory throw lay beside her. As she sipped, she marveled at the blue, built-in shelves lining the walls. She herself had painted twenty square patches of different blues on the wall, attempting to match her favorite worn-out pair of jeans from high school. The room was her first real design success, modeled after Matisse’s palette in Nice with gemstone paisleys layered against thick stripes and an Oriental rug.
She had to admit one thing to herself (but never to Eddie): her design game was better in Manhattan. The city and all its aggressive competitiveness forced her to be better—more honed, tighter, clearer. New York City brought her more diverse clients and all the resources to please them, which, in turn, developed her own tastes. The apartment she’d designed was warm, stunning, and bold. And yet, even though the rooms she’d dreamed of in her first year of design school were now complete, paid for, and hers, she’d wander around the vast apartment on mornings like this, feeling something was off. What was it? Maybe that she’d never agreed to live in New York City in the first place.
Just last weekend, her mother had again tried to entice her and her family to return to East Hampton full time—as she and Eddie had initially planned. Her mother pushed the issue, even though she understood that Eddie had gotten sucked into the mad, moneymaking vortex of Manhattan. “Eddie,” she said, “New York City isn’t one big life-size Monopoly game: you don’t need to acquire anything and everything as fast as you can, and build on it. Let someone else have Marvin Gardens. When is enough enough, son?”
“Not yet,” Eddie said. He didn’t even look up as he jabbed at that hanger steak she always made with extra force. Though he told her he preferred a good New York strip, she never gave in, relishing serving him the cheaper, thinner hanger every time. “I have clients and partners. I can’t just walk out on them. It wouldn’t be right.”
This morning, as Caroline surfed between the maniacs on MSNBC and the lunatics on FOX News, she thought about the upcoming summer. Could she and Eddie be married and live separately if she stayed in East Hampton through the school year? She felt a rush of anxiety pulse through her as she sought out the hard-core truth: Would they even be married when Gigi hit middle school in two years?
They’d had a bad fight the night before. As always, something little would turn their anger nuclear. Eddie had read to the kids, as he insisted on doing as many nights as he could. Putting them to bed, he felt, made up for his absence during the day. He wanted to be the last thing on their minds as they drifted off. Caroline was in the kitchen making herbal tea, hoping for a quiet night. Like most moms across America, she was exhausted by the events and activities of the last week of school.
Eddie marched into the kitchen. Caroline could tell he was already at fever pitch. She hoped it was for a good reason, and not because of item number eleven on her improvement list for him: don’t panic over nonsense and infect the household with your demands. He roared, “My leather pencil holder for my desk. I had T. Anthony engrave a new one. See?” He put it two inches from her nose. “See? E. J. C.?”
“Eddie, I know your initials,” she said, pushing his hand away. “Don’t get all whacked out of shape over
the . . . we talked about prioritizing major versus minor—”
“What the fuck? You don’t care that these guys do shoddy work and rip me off? I mean, my whole desk sucks. You say it’s a little thing, but it isn’t. You know I can’t work if my desk isn’t right. I put the kids to bed, want a nice night with my wife, and you gotta be all aggressive?”
She was afraid he’d wake the kids. “I’m aggressive?” she asked. And then, very slowly, added, “Interesting.” Her calm tone reminded him of that first-grade teacher who had traumatized him. It only incited him more. Caroline knew what she was doing.
This was one of those moments they’d discussed in therapy: they drive toward a cliff, with ample time to step on the brakes, but instead accelerate, pushing the pedal to the floorboard.
“Look, my initials in gold?” Eddie held the pencil holder up against her nose again. “See on the E, the little leg on the bottom, it isn’t the same font as the little flipped up thing on the edge of the C? You know the little dangly thing on the edge of a letter, they call it ‘sans serif’ or something?”
“Sans means ‘without’ in French. Sans serif would mean a letter without a dangly thing. It’s just serif if it has a dangly thing.” Nothing made him angrier than when she took that teacher tone with him.
And from there, the dispute turned into a full-on flight into the Grand Canyon as they drove off the cliff at a hundred miles an hour. All because of a pencil holder.
And this morning, with the day’s sunlight beginning to stream through her steel, prewar windowpanes (that Ryan Miller would adore for their 1920s authenticity, she now realized), Caroline tried to keep her mind off the argument. She and Eddie had made up, sort of, before they went to bed. It helped that she apologized for comparing him to that “hedge fund asshole” who lived a floor above them.
Caroline nestled her elbow into the curve on the back of the library sofa, and faced the window. She poured herself more tea and cupped her hands around the mug as she blew across its surface, making it ripple. She’d have to make some decisions: Ryan Miller with the meaty thighs and kind eyes or no Ryan Miller; an affair with someone else or no affair with anyone.
Thank God she was half good at her job. Or more than half good. She’d still have a life if she left Eddie, a career, and a means to support herself if he lost his fortune or if he got crazy in a divorce. She watched as lights came on in the apartments across the interior courtyard.
Ryan had texted her the day after Memorial Day and she looked at the conversation on her phone now.
Great meeting you, or re-meeting you . . . after 20 years.
I had a nice time talking.
Really nice.
Caroline replied:
It was nice re-meeting you.
Then, three little dots had appeared, indicating he was typing. After a full minute or two, these words appeared:
I can show you when the wood beams are in place.
She had responded quickly—she didn’t want him to think she was worried about how her comments sounded—
I’d love to see the little cottage anytime.
Ryan answered:
Sure thing . . . that would be nice, really nice.
Chapter 15
To Cheat or Not to Cheat: That Is the Question
Same weekday morning, Manhattan
Caroline whispered Ryan’s text to herself: That would be nice, really nice. Maybe it meant something else.
It had been ten days and he hadn’t contacted her once since asking for the beams. Maybe he wouldn’t, but she’d been checking her phone often, wondering. Perhaps he was waiting until he installed the wood? This was all Annabelle’s damn fault. She was the reason Caroline found herself on her couch in the early morning, wondering about another man; Annabelle, her friend who could better handle an affair, was tougher than she was.
Caroline swirled a full teaspoon of honey into her tea. She should be focusing on Eddie and her marriage, not some guy who hadn’t texted in ten days. When she was in her twenties, it was much easier to hold on to the Eddie Clarkson roller coaster, but after so many years, her hands had become calloused from gripping so hard on the rail, desperate not to fall off.
Shit, Caroline thought, marriage is hard.
She closed her eyes and tried to summon real love for Eddie, to feel the way it once had. After Joey died, all she wanted was to feel strong arms around her and have a chance at a happy future.
Her memories drifted to the morning that had landed her on this couch. She was twenty-eight. It was late May. She and Eddie were at a small hotel in Greenport, on the North Fork of Long Island, celebrating the one-year anniversary of their first real date. They were staying in a beachfront room with an outdoor staircase that led from their porch to the sand. A view of the Long Island Sound flooded their windows.
At about eight in the morning, Eddie drew the curtains to send the room into total darkness again and grabbed the car keys. Caroline thought he was acting a little strange, so she pretended to have gone back to sleep as he gingerly left the room. The sound of someone scooping ice from the hallway icemaker at that hour gave her the first clue he was up to something. About a half-hour later, the sound of metal clanking against metal on the outdoor staircase that led to their balcony woke her.
She peeked through a crack in the curtains.
What the hell?
Someone was on her stairs in full medieval knight’s armor as if just arrived from a film set (or battle in Constantinople). Her crazy boyfriend inside struggled to hoist the heavy armor up each step.
A bucket of champagne under one arm, the knight grabbed the rail with the other. Each labored step came with a thunderous clang.
As the gallant knight finally reached the top, his cumbersome armor finally won the battle. He tripped, sending the ice and champagne bottle skyward. The bottle landed on the porch floor, unscathed, and rolled against the wall.
“Shit!” the knight said, the sound echoing inside his helmet. He was outside on his stomach now, his face still hidden under the armored helmet. Caroline watched him crawl across the balcony; he seemed to be searching for something. She jumped back into bed and closed her eyes, her heart beating madly and trying not to laugh.
She’d figured it all out way before the full ten minutes it took him to gather up the ice, now in a dirty pile on the floor, put what he could back in the bucket, place the champagne bottle in, and hide the diamond ring inside.
What woman could possibly say no to that?
And so, Caroline said yes through her laughing tears.
And today, Eddie was still barreling Caroline through life on that same surprising ride. Only now it was so much more work.
Fuck.
She placed her thumb and forefinger on the silk curtain trim and slid them up and down. Settling for an okay marriage to an exciting man didn’t feel right today. Maybe it never really did.
Caroline looked into the apartment across the interior courtyard. The beautiful woman in the apartment below hers had that lifeless stare when she said hello in the elevator. It couldn’t be easy living with her gnome of a husband, who barked orders at her in front of other residents.
Unlike Caroline, that woman was stuck in her marriage with no eject button. Unlike Caroline, she’d married that gnome when he was already rich. Caroline and Eddie had been broke in Chinatown, moving to East Hampton in a few years to live, what she had imagined, a nice, middle-class life, or maybe upper-middle-class at best. She reminded people of that often, just in case they viewed her as one of those women who worked every day, in soulless ways, for cash her husband earned.
But her neighbor had it so much worse: she didn’t have gainful employment outside the family like Caroline did, nor even a plausible roadmap to making a living on her own. They made small talk recently, and Caroline asked her what her hobbies were. The woman answered, the upkeep of two homes and a huge yacht took all day and all her energy. Park Avenue could be so dreary for those entrenched in it; Ryan
was right about people who’d married into big-time cash. It was now a life Caroline was trying to get out of, not land into.
She got up and walked down the hall toward the sound of snoring. Eddie’s alarm would ring in forty minutes.
She had plenty of time.
Eddie seemed more distracted lately. He was canceling plans with her at the last minute. He didn’t have many colleagues, but he was often “hung up” at the office for meetings.
There had been two periods like this before. There may have been more but she knew chasing after young children only boosted her ability for denial. No reason to shield her eyes anymore. It was almost the summer solstice, an excellent time to shed light on her future.
Caroline went into the study and took Eddie’s iPad out of his briefcase and entered the passcode: 3-6-1-6-3 7 . . .
She had nervously written the code on an index card after looking over Eddie’s shoulder the night before, right about the time he started complaining about his pencil holder. He changed his code every week. She’d never believed in reading a spouse’s texts, so she’d never tried very hard to follow his fingers on the screen.
As Caroline glanced at the bedroom from the corner of the study, her heart pumped so hard the blood pulsing in her brain gave her a headache. At first, she slammed the iPad cover shut, not sure she wanted to know after all. She tiptoed to the hallway. Eddie continued snoring like a grizzly bear. He’d never once woken before his 7:10 a.m. alarm. It helped that he’d had a vodka the night before. He always slammed the bathroom door when he went for his morning pee. She needn’t worry so much; she’d have to be braver and bolder. His routines would never change.
It's Hot in the Hamptons Page 8