The Perfect Manhattan

by Leanne Shear

  The man signed and handed me the receipt. Next to tip, it read $150.

  “Jake!” I called out, after making sure the man had disappeared into the crowd. “That guy left me a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tip on a thirty-dollar bill!”

  “Did you see her tits?” he shouted back.

  I ignored his Neanderthal remark and started rooting around in the tip jar to gather singles to make change. We had almost instantaneously run out of small bills in the register, since everyone in the Hamptons seemed to pay with hundred-dollar bills. When I turned back around to face the bar, I noticed two attractive guys in matching mint-green Lacoste shirts smiling at me, waiting for drinks. They had identical athletic-looking physiques and neatly groomed sandy-blond hair.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling back at them. “What can I get for you?”

  “Two Jack and Cokes,” one of them requested.

  “And your phone number,” the other one added with a huge grin.

  Between the shots and the frantic physical activity of the night, I’d lost my ability to muster any sort of passable retort. I grabbed the Jack from the well and swiftly made their drinks, wondering if there was a class at Wharton or Harvard Business School where all future bankers and brokers were instructed to drink Jack and Coke.

  “Seriously, sweetheart, what’s your name?” one of them went on.

  “Cassie,” I said. “What’s yours, sweetheart?”

  “Ha-ha, I like this one,” he said with a laugh. “She’s feisty.” Then he added, “I’m Glen. And this handsome man is Tom.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “So tell me, did you two get together before you went out tonight to plan your matching outfits?”

  They both laughed. “No way!” Tom protested. “I was wearing this shirt all day, and I came straight from Cyril’s. Then Glen over here shows up an hour later in the same damn thing. Not that I mind—imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Glen refuted. “I’ve had this shirt since freshman year.”

  “Hey, Cassie, what are you doing tomorrow?” Tom asked. His cheeks were flushed and his expression hovered somewhere between a genuine smile and a drunken leer.

  “Recovering from tonight,” I said.

  “Well, we’re having a barbeque at our house. You can recover there. It should be fun. We’ve got a ton of liquor and steak and lobster.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In East Hampton on Further Lane,” Glen chimed in.

  The minute James had told me he owned a house on Further Lane, it had been imprinted on my memory like branding on the side of a cow. And that afternoon, when I’d finally awoken from a fitful sleep on the front porch, I’d called Alexis. Since my first weekend in the Hamptons, I’d been boring her with musings about James. As far as she was concerned, “marrying up” was exactly what I needed to put an end to my worries about money, and she’d encouraged my every rumination in the hopes that they would turn into reality.

  “Lex!” I’d squealed. “I kissed James Edmonton and I’m in love! He’s amazing. Amazing. And you’ll never believe this—he wants to start his own production company. And he’s the best kisser ever!”

  “Oh my God!” she cried. “That’s great! How did you find him?”

  “He came into Spark. He lives somewhere in East Hampton. He told me where, but I can’t remember, Far Away Lane, or Furthest Lane, or something like that.”

  “Further Lane?” she asked excitedly.

  “Yeah, that sounds right.”

  “Oh my God, that’s one of the most exclusive streets in the world,” she moaned enviously. “Seinfeld has a house there, and so do Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw . . . It’s like the Park Avenue of East Hampton. Further Lane and Lily Pond Lane are the only addresses worth having in the Hamptons. He must be loaded.”

  While this detail about James thrilled Alexis, it seriously intimidated me. I thought about my summer getaway, which was not only on the wrong side of Montauk Highway, but was also serving as the Hamptons chapter of the Fiji Fraternity. James, on the other hand, was not only living south of the highway in a house that he owned, but I imagined he also had the Hilton sisters over for cocktails on a regular basis. I thought back to his father’s tasteful custom-tailored suit, Chopard watch, and brutal brush-off. Anyone could see that I was playing way out of my league. I wondered if I’d even really registered on James’s emotional radar screen—maybe I hadn’t affected him at all.

  “You got a pen, Cassie?” Glen asked, interrupting my wandering thoughts.

  “I got one,” Tom said, producing a platinum-plated Mont Blanc.

  “Great,” Glen said as he smoothed out a bev nap and carefully wrote down their address and cell phone numbers, the ink bleeding into the tiny folds of the absorbent material. Bev naps were the papyrus of the bartending world. Soon after I’d first started working at Finton’s, my day planner had been rapidly replaced by reams of cocktail napkins that accounted for my grocery lists, to-do lists, attempts at budgeting, addresses and phone numbers of the people I was meeting, and screenplay ideas. “You can bring some friends if you want,” he added.

  “As long as they’re hot girls,” Tom qualified.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, folding the napkin and sticking it in my LeSportsac makeup case.

  “So, say around three?” Glen asked.

  “Sounds good,” I said, giving them a noncommittal smile and turning to take an order from another customer. The two of them continued to hover near the bar and soon started hitting on two “fake-and-bake” local girls who looked like they were about sixteen.

  I made what seemed like thousands of white chocolate martinis and Kir royales for a group of high-maintenance “desperate housewives,” and was pushing the hair back from my face when my heart suddenly stopped: James Edmonton had materialized a few feet down the bar. He looked like he’d stepped right out of the Ralph Lauren showroom, and I was nearly knocked off my feet by a surge of attraction. Still, I pretended not to see him, determined to show off my bartending finesse as I flirted with customers and skillfully shook martinis.

  After a few minutes, I glanced over and feigned surprise. “Jimmy! I didn’t even see you there.”

  “Jimmy?” He smiled as he leaned over across the bar to kiss my cheek. “No one’s called me that since the third grade.” As his chiseled cheek brushed mine, I caught the faintest whiff of his Bulgari aftershave. He smelled good enough to eat. “How’s your night going?” he asked.

  “Great!” I exclaimed. “Much better than last night. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Sure, I’ll have a—”

  “Jack and Coke,” I supplied. He smiled, flashing perfectly white teeth worthy of a Crest Whitestrips commercial. I didn’t usually obsess over a man’s teeth, but James’s really were that perfect—and like everything else about him, they added to his magnetic allure.

  As I started making his drink, the Burberry Plaid Man from the night before appeared at the bar, accompanied by the same group of scantily clad blonds.

  “What can I get for you?” Jake asked him.

  “If you don’t mind I’d like to order from her,” he said, pointing in my direction.

  “By all means,” Jake said.

  I walked over to the man after delivering James’s drink, hating that I couldn’t linger with him longer. “Hi, what can I do for you?”

  “Honey, there are a lot of things you can do for me.” He smirked, scanning my body up and down, even as his right arm twined around the girl at his side.

  “What can I get for you to drink?” I clarified.

  “Bottle of Goose.”

  I rang it into the computer and handed it over to him. “Three hundred fifty dollars.”

  “Wait . . . that’s not all,” he said, leaning in to confer with his fair-haired entourage. “Do you sell bottles of champagne?”

  I nodded.

  “Veuve?” he asked.

  “Yellow Label or Gr
ande Damme?”

  “Grande Damme, of course.”

  I rang it in and sent a bar back to grab a bottle out of the walk-in cooler. “Okay, your total’s six-fifty.”

  He pulled out a wad of hundreds and counted out ten. “Here you go, blue eyes,” he said with a wink. “Keep the change.”

  I did the math in my head. “Jake!” I shouted. “I just made a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar tip!” That was $500 in the last twenty minutes. I wanted to be sure James heard how much my customers loved me.

  “You’re on a roll tonight!” Jake hollered back.

  “Looks like we need another round of Jameson to celebrate!” I turned to James. “Are you interested?”

  “If you can handle it, so can I,” he laughed. I grabbed our hidden contraband and poured three shots.

  “Jake, this is James. James, Jake,” I said.

  “Salud,” Jake said, raising his shot.

  “Salud,” James and I said in unison. As I downed the shot, I reflected that Jake didn’t seem to mind switching from Patrón, to mind erasers, to Irish whiskey. He could knock back anything equally fast and without a problem. His system probably could have tolerated isopropyl rubbing alcohol.

  After slamming the shot like a pro, James turned around and summoned a bunch of guys over to the bar. “Cassie, these are some of my friends,” he said as he rattled off a laundry list of first names like Taylor, Christian, and Landon paired with last names like Duke, von Furstenberg, and Lauren. They were all handsome, WASPish, Thomas Pink button-down-wearing guys who looked like they had just finished eighteen holes of golf at Shinnecock Hills. “And these two—”

  “Are Glen and Tom,” I finished for him.

  “You know each other?” James asked.

  “We go way back,” Glen said, grasping my hand and kissing it. “Jealous, Edmonton?” James shot him a smirk.

  “We actually just met,” I said. “They were trying to convince me to come to their barbeque tomorrow.”

  “We figured we’d invite as many pretty girls as possible,” Tom explained. “I should’ve known this one belonged to you. How is it you know every single hot girl in the Hamptons?”

  “It’d be great if you came,” James said to me, ignoring Tom. “I was going to invite you myself when I saw you tonight.”

  “Cassie!” Jake called from the other end of the bar. “What the fuck are you doing? Get back to work!” I looked up and was terrified to see that an angry mob of thirsty patrons had formed, all of them wildly waving cash.

  “I’ll see you guys later,” I said hastily, returning to my station and taking as many orders as I thought I stood a chance of remembering.

  The night rolled on in a mad rush of drink-making, Jameson-shooting, and a series of quick interrupted conversations with James. Finally, a little after three, Annie came bounding up to the bar and held on to it for dear life. The magenta staining her lips and tongue indicated she’d been indulging in her favorite shot—a mix of So Co, Jäger, and cranberry juice, called a redheaded slut.

  “Hey, Cass,” she slurred slightly, “I just closed out my last table, so I’m running over to Southampton with Teddy. He wants to check out the scene at Jet and Tavern and make sure ours is hotter. And if they have any celebs there, he’s going to try to lure them out to us next weekend—even though Liv Tyler, Kirsten Dunst, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Uma Thurman were all sitting upstairs in VIP tonight! Can you believe it?”

  “I’m so jealous,” I groaned, wiping sweat from my brow, and ignoring the Pucci-clad woman to my right who was angling for a drink. “There’s no way in hell I’m getting out of here for at least another four hours.”

  I was in the middle of making my four-hundredth key lime martini when I heard Jake announce, “Last call!” Immediately afterward, he sprang up and over the bar and disappeared up the stairs toward the employee bathroom, getting lost in the sea of people trickling toward the door. I couldn’t believe twenty-four hours had catapulted by and my second night of bartending at Spark was almost over.

  “Do you want me to wait with you and give you a ride home?” James asked as one of the bouncers, a three-hundred-pound man in a cheap black suit with a face like a cartoon bulldog, loomed over his shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” I said to the bouncer. “He can stay. He’s with me.” I turned to James. “You really don’t have to wait. I’m going to be here forever. I have to clean up, cash out, and then wait for the waitresses, who are mentally impaired even when they’re sober. You’ll end up being here all night.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have another Jack and Coke, please.”

  “Seriously, you don’t have to wait with me.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “Somebody’s gotta drive you home.”

  “I can call a cab.”

  “I’m not letting you take a cab. Can I do anything to help?”

  I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  “You look so beautiful, tonight,” he said, leaning over the bar to kiss me. I could feel my face getting hot; the thrill of kissing him seemed to produce more energy than cold fusion. The surrounding bedlam of busboys mopping the mélange of liquids on the floor, waitresses prattling over credit card receipts, and drunk stragglers being forcibly removed by the bouncers faded into the distance.

  “Get a room!” Jake called from the balcony of VIP.

  I quickly pulled away from James and started randomly wiping down bottles of liquor and the coolers—anything to look busy. Jake returned and we bundled up our cash and adjusted our credit card tips. Just like the night before, Jake and I were cleaned up and closed out hours before the cocktail waitresses. So James and I settled into a quiet corner in the back of the dining room where we sipped Bud Lights as I waited for the waitress tip-out.

  “So tell me about this screenplay of yours,” he said, offering me the Yale sweatshirt that he’d grabbed out of the back of his Range Rover.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” I said.

  He gestured toward the group of waitresses struggling with basic math. “I think we’ve got some time to kill.”

  I glanced ruefully over at the girls. “Well, I was on my way home from a party a couple of years ago, and I saw this girl who I’m pretty sure was a prostitute get picked up by a Lincoln Town Car.”

  “Uh-huh,” he nodded, listening intently.

  “Anyway, it made me think,” I went on. “I complain about money or other stupid problems all the time, but relatively speaking, my life is pretty damn good. I mean, I’m sure I’ve had a million more opportunities than this girl. So on the train home to Albany, I just started outlining her story.”

  “So what happens to her?” James asked. His sincere interest made me feel like I was the most fascinating woman in the world.

  “That remains to be seen. I had my initial draft produced as a short by some film students at Tisch, but I want to work on how the story plays out and then expand the original script into a feature-length version. The problem is, lately I’ve been spending a lot more of my time making drinks than writing.” I shrugged.

  “Well, it sounds like a great idea. I’d love to take a look at it when you finish.”

  It was a beautiful morning when we finally stepped outside. The sun was rising clear and bright over Montauk Point, and I tasted a soft salty breeze as James opened the passenger door of his Range Rover.

  “It’s gorgeous out,” I said, gazing out the window at the slightly hazy air. It was going to be the first really hot day of summer. “I feel like skipping bed and going straight to the beach.”

  James smiled and, without saying a word, took the next right onto a rustic country road dappled with white picket fences and monstrous houses—the American dream filtered through the lens of the Hamptons—and we started driving southbound toward the ocean.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the beach,” he said. “My dad lives down there.” He pointed to an old carriage road that ran parallel to the shore. “That’s Lil
y Pond Lane.” I craned my neck to see if I could glimpse the historic mansions that lined the shore, but each estate had manicured hedges a mile high that concealed their grounds.

  Moments later we arrived at Main Beach in East Hampton. Cascading dunes sprinkled with tall spiky greenery impeded our view of the ocean as we pulled into the tiny parking lot—I wondered how the thousands of beachgoers managed to squeeze their Denalis into such a confined space. Maybe Hamptons beaches were like Hamptons nightclubs—entry was limited to rich, beautiful people who owned waterfront property.

  We walked clumsily across the dunes, and suddenly the ocean roared into view. As I idled near the surf, burrowing my toes into the cool wet sand, I felt like I was standing on the edge of the earth. James spread out the blue wool blanket he’d pulled from the back of his car while I opened the two Bud Lights that I’d embezzled from Spark on my way out. There was a slight chill in the air down by the water, and I pulled my arms inside his sweatshirt. James sat behind me and wrapped his arms around me, and I snuggled back into his chest.

  “Who knows, Cassie,” he said, pausing to take a sip of beer. “Maybe once my production company’s on its feet, I’ll end up producing your screenplay.”

  I turned around to smile up at him. “Sound good to me.”

  As the waves thundered at the shoreline, he leaned down and kissed me. I didn’t protest when he slid his hands up under the sweatshirt and lifted it up over my head, revealing my tiny halter top, which only twenty-four hours ago had made me feel embarrassed and self-conscious. But now, lying in James’s arms, my legs intertwined with his while the morning light crept across the empty beach, I felt amazingly sexy. He started kissing my neck and then began moving down to my shoulders. I ran my hands through his hair and held him to me, losing myself in the cyclone of our chemistry. But when he started to unbutton and ease off my skirt, I snapped to attention.

  “Wait,” I said reluctantly, caught off guard by a sudden surge of Catholic guilt. “We shouldn’t.”