The Perfect Manhattan

by Leanne Shear

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Gorgeous evening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is!” Annie smiled. She never had her guard up, especially when it came to men.

  “I’ve see you two around everywhere, and I thought I should introduce myself. My name’s Roy, and I wanted to invite you beautiful ladies to a party I’m throwing in the city this week,” he said, producing two business cards and handing them to Annie and me. The cards read: ROY FOX: SOCIAL PARTY THROWER AND MATCHMAKER. “Are you girls going to be in the city Tuesday night?”

  “Maybe,” Annie said. “Where is it?”

  “It’s going to be at my apartment on Park and 74th.”

  “Sorry, we never go north of 14th,” I quipped. “We get nosebleeds.”

  “Well, I beg you to reconsider,” the man urged.

  “What kind of a party is it?” she asked. “Are you a promoter?”

  “Not exactly. I throw parties to help some older gentleman clients of mine meet beautiful women like yourself. They’re a lot of fun. Why don’t you girls give me your numbers and I’ll call you with all the details?”

  My antennas went up. “Social Party Thrower” that matches up older gentleman with young women? I wondered if Martin Pritchard was one of his clients. Images of threesomes and other sexually deviant behavior by eighty-year-old men flashed in my mind. “Thanks, but how about we call you?” I suggested.

  “Whatever makes you more comfortable,” Roy said. “You have my number, and I already have two great men in mind for you two. I hope you can make it.”

  James and Tom breezed through the front door, prompting Roy’s speedy exit. “Ladies!” Tom called, kissing Annie on the cheek and throwing his arm around her shoulder.

  “Hey, beautiful,” James said, giving me a lingering kiss on the mouth that made me melt like a frozen margarita in the sun. He was wearing a white button-down shirt paired with Diesel jeans and flip-flops. I couldn’t resist tousling his hair, which smelled faintly of Aveda shampoo.

  “Sorry we’re late. The traffic was horrible!” he said. “It took us over an hour to get from Bridgehampton to our house. Even the back roads were bumper to bumper.”

  “Sounds like you need a drink,” I said, smiling.

  “Exactly,” he said. “And a Blue Parrot margarita can cure just about anything.”

  The bartender returned and furnished us all with margaritas, which the Blue Parrot served in mason jars. “It’s good to see you,” James whispered, his nose nuzzling my ear ever so slightly.

  “You too,” I said, smiling up at him. The previous night’s trauma with Alexis had completely disappeared from my memory. I felt electrified just being next to James—as though I’d drunk five espressos in quick succession.

  We were sipping our drinks and trading war stories about our weeks when a pretty redhead in a ruffly, floral Narciso Rodriguez ensemble suddenly pranced over to us, calling out “James? James Edmonton?”

  James looked confused but forced a smile.

  “James, it’s me! Caroline!” she sang. “We met in Aspen at Caribou Club last winter. My father’s Graydon Mitchell, he works with your father at—”

  “Oh, Caroline!” James said, his eyes lighting up. “How are you?”

  “I’m great! How are you?” she gushed, tossing her tresses from side to side.

  “Doing well, thanks. How’s your father?”

  “He’s wonderful! Busy as usual. It’s so crazy that I ran into you, because a friend of mine is putting together the Black Book this year,” she began. Alexis had told me that the Black Book was the storied annual issue of Hamptons magazine that profiled all the eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in the Hamptons, cataloging them according to profession, party personality, and level of coolness, among other creative distinctions. More often than not, the “occupations” of the chosen were listed as “socialite” or “heiress,” as if those were actually all-consuming, important vocations. Needless to say, the “it” people in the Hamptons waited with bated breath to see who made the cut.

  “Anyway,” Caroline continued, “they asked me to be in it and asked if I could recommend anyone else, and I was thinking you would be perfect for it, and here you are! The photo shoot is next weekend, if you’re interested. Rosalind’s going to be there . . .”

  I scowled inwardly at the mention of Rosalind’s name, but I vowed to try to be mature about it. After all, James wasn’t even my boyfriend yet, and he was allowed to be friends with whomever he wanted. Still, I waited eagerly for his reply.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he demurred.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun!”

  “I’ll think about it,” James said. I shifted on my bar stool wondering if he was going to introduce the rest of us to his ruby-haired friend. She hadn’t so much as glanced at Annie and me.

  “Fabulous!” she sang. “This is fantastic. I was literally just thinking how perfect you would be for this!”

  James produced a black leather wallet and pulled out one of his business cards. “My work number’s on here, or you can e-mail me.”

  “Perfect! I’ll call you next week!”

  “Take care, Caroline,” James said as she flitted away.

  “I had no idea you were among the most eligible bachelors in the Hamptons.” Tom smirked. “I can’t believe she didn’t ask me. Glen’s in it again this year too.”

  “Yeah, but doesn’t Glen’s dad own Hamptons magazine?” James asked.

  “Actually, no,” Tom said. “I think it’s the one magazine in America that he doesn’t own.”

  “So, are you going to do it?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Are you kidding? No way,” he scoffed.

  “I think it could be fun,” Annie said, her mouth full of chips.

  “I don’t know. It’s not exactly my idea of a good time,” James said, much to my relief. Caroline, like the Pearls Girls, struck me as about as genuine as the Rolexes sold on Canal Street. Perhaps deep down James was made more of my mettle than theirs after all. My amorous feelings intensified a notch.

  “Yeah, but Charlotte Freund is kind of hot.” Tom guffawed. I’d learned the prior weekend from Hamptons magazine that Charlotte Freund was yet another teenage heiress who dated Nicky Hilton’s ex-husband Todd Meister. The wealthy playboy and playgirl world of the Hamptons was small indeed.

  “Tom, she’s jailbait,” James remarked.

  “Yeah, but we see her out every night,” Tom countered. “She’s fair game.”

  When we were on our third round of margaritas—interspersed with Patrón shots for the boys—I happened to catch a glimpse of James’s Tag Heuer watch and almost had a heart attack. It was nine-eighteen: The realization that I had to be at work in almost ten minutes hit me like a Mack truck. I grudgingly grabbed my bag and hoodie and tapped Annie on the shoulder, interrupting her repartee with the bartender.

  “Hey, we’d better get going, it’s after nine,” I told her.

  “Nooooooo, I don’t want to go to work!” she wailed dramatically.

  “Me neither. But think of the money we’ll make, and maybe you’ll get to see Ryan Cabrera tonight at the Jessica Simpson party,” I said, trying to look on the bright side, though the last thing in the world I felt like doing was tearing myself away from James, who had his arm around my shoulders and was absentmindedly playing with my hair.

  “Where do you girls work?” the bartender asked.

  “Spark,” I replied proudly.

  “It’s been busy over there, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty nuts,” Annie agreed.

  “You want one more drink? It’s on me. I know what it’s like to need some prework cocktails to take the edge off,” he said with a wink. Sometimes being a bartender felt like being part of a secret society—admission was difficult and the hazing was grueling, but once you were initiated, all the members looked out for one another. Without waiting for our reply, he placed a pink shot in front of each of us that smelled like Ha
waiian Tropic tanning oil.

  “Thanks,” I said. Then I turned to Annie. “I’ll call us a cab.”

  “You guys can take my car,” James offered, taking out his keys. “Tom’s got his car here. Then we’ll all meet up later.”

  “Perfect!” Annie exclaimed.

  “I don’t know if I can drive,” I said to James. “I’m a little buzzed.”

  “I can drive!” Annie volunteered.

  “Annie, you’ve had as many drinks as me, and you don’t even have a license in this country!”

  “Cass, we’ll be fine,” Annie pleaded. “We’ll just drive really, really slowly. You know how Shalina is about getting there on time.”

  I weighed our options. By the time a cab got here and took us to Spark, it would be at least ten, and we’d both be fired. Plus, I had to admit I was more than a little enamored with the idea of pulling up to Spark in James’s Range Rover. I slurped down some water, popped some Extra Wintergreen gum in my mouth, and took the keys from him.

  Thirty minutes later, we were caught in one of the East End’s famous traffic jams. The single-lane highway was totally congested with Porsche SUVs, Jaguars, Beamers, and, of course, Range Rovers. When we finally pulled into the Spark parking lot, I cringed as I saw the time, 10:03, lit up on the three-dimensional control panel.

  “Holy shit, look at the line to get in,” Annie said with a tone that approached reverence. There was a swarm of about three hundred people spilling out of the parking lot and onto the highway, pushing and shoving to join the line to get in the club, which culminated at the ominous-looking clipboard-armed doormen and velvet ropes. Usually Spark didn’t fill up until after eleven, but the parking lot was already packed. Then it hit me.

  “Annie!” I cried, my heart stopping. “We were supposed to get to work at eight-thirty for that party tonight—not nine-thirty! I totally forgot!”

  Annie’s face turned white. “Oh my God,” she breathed. Instead of being just a half an hour late, we were over an hour and a half late.

  I panicked. I’d already been demoted to the back bar and was terrified that Teddy and Shalina would fire me on the spot. With growing horror, I imagined spending the summer back at Finton’s—no Hamptons, no $350 tips, and, worst of all, no James.

  “Okay, calm down,” Annie said. “Pull around to the back.”

  The employee parking lot was located behind the club by the Dumpsters. James’s glistening Range Rover stood out like a sore thumb amid the beat-up Honda Accords circa 1983. Annie and I changed into our uniforms in the car and then sprinted to the entrance. Shalina blazed up to us, blocking our path. “Where the hell have you girls been?” she snarled. “You were both supposed to be here almost two hours ago. If I didn’t need you so much right now, I would fire you.”

  “Shalina, we’re really sorry . . .” I could feel my lower lip quiver.

  “Do you know how many girls would die for your job?!” she demanded. “This is the most irresponsible, unprofessional—”

  “We got into a car accident!” Annie blurted out with a convincingly wounded expression. Startled, I turned around to look at her. There was no choice for me but to play along.

  “What?” Shalina asked.

  “On Montauk Highway,” Annie continued. “Cassie and I got rear-ended by a Hummer. It was really scary, but thank God we’re okay. We know we should’ve called, but we were so shaken up by the whole thing, and we had to wait for the police to show up, and . . .”

  “Are you all right?” she asked, her hawklike features almost softening.

  “Yeah, we’re okay,” I said.

  “Just very shaken up,” Annie added.

  “Annie, I know you’re supposed to work the patio,” Shalina said, “but we need you in VIP. We’re very short-staffed.”

  “VIP?” Annie asked, her eyes lighting up as if she’d just won a Daytime Emmy.

  “Yes, and I’m sorry, what’s your name again?” Shalina asked, turning to me.

  “Cassie.”

  “Cassie, right. You’re at the back bar with Kyle. Get there as soon as you can. He’s really backed up.” She threw my thick bank envelope of cash at me and walked away. Apparently she didn’t plan on firing us—at least not while she needed us for that night’s shift. As we hurried inside, I was still dizzy with anxiety.

  Hundreds of sweaty dancing bodies thrust into me as I pushed through the dance floor to get to the back bar. It must have been about a thousand degrees hotter back there, because my fellow bartender Kyle looked positively feverish. His classically handsome face, framed by Olivier Martinez–type dark hair, was dripping with sweat and his shirt was already soaked through. He was agitatedly making drinks for the hordes of customers already six deep.

  “Kyle?” I asked, jumping behind the bar.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking like a deer caught in headlights. He kept knocking drinks over, and the bar was covered in liquid and ice.

  “I’m Cassie,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.” Immediately I was bombarded with drink orders. I struggled to count out the money in my bank envelope as quickly as possible, but my hands were shaking, which I attributed to the Blue Parrot margaritas, coupled with a liberal dose of Shalina. I was already feeling hungover and the night had barely even begun. “I got in a car accident on the way here,” I explained, hoping that in the midst of all the chaos he wouldn’t notice my face, which always turned the color of maraschino cherries when I lied. I quickly poured ten “vodka tonics with a splash of cranberry and lemons not limes” for a guy who looked like he was about sixteen. Luckily, at Spark, the bartenders weren’t responsible for carding like we were at Finton’s.

  “A hundred dollars,” I said to the customer, already wiping sweat from my brow and looking on in amazement as Kyle stopped making drinks for a full two minutes and chatted with two pretty girls, somehow able to tune out the rest of the screaming customers. I tried to kick my performance up a notch, mixing as fast as I possibly could, all the while groping around for the basics—the bottle of triple sec, the house champagne, the martini glasses. The back bar was like a foreign country, and I cursed as I realized that Kyle had set the well up haphazardly, not in any discernable or logical order.

  “So, Cassie, what do you do?” Kyle shouted over Jay-Z ten minutes later, while he poured out twelve shots of Patrón.

  “I’m a writer,” I yelled back, grabbing six Amstel Lights. “And you?”

  “I do a lot of modeling,” he said with a self-congratulatory air. “But my agent’s trying to help me break into acting.” He turned around to grab cash from a customer and knocked over ten of the twelve shots. He took his time getting a rag and cleaning up the Patrón puddle, before starting to repour the shots.

  “Three Jack and Cokes, Two Ketel sodas, a Stoli-O and tonic, and Four Captain gingers,” a customer hollered at me. I grabbed ten plastic cups and started filling them with ice.

  “Kyle, where’s the Jack Daniel’s?” I asked, before noticing that he was crouched down below the sink. “Are you okay?” I bent down to his level.

  “You want some?” he asked, offering me a key and a tiny ziplock bag of white powder. His eyes were bloodshot and he had traces of white around his nostrils, which looked red and inflamed. “We got it as a tip from that guy over there.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. I felt culpable as it was coming to work after a few margaritas. And yet here was Kyle doing coke right behind the bar.

  I found the bottle of Jack hidden behind a case of Grey Goose and finished filling the drink order. Kyle had again “taken a break” from serving customers and was helping himself to a Red Bull. No wonder Shalina said he was backed up, I thought bitterly.

  “Kyle, can you get those guys down there?” I asked, collecting money from a customer and ringing the order through the register.

  “Yeah, in a minute,” he said.

  “Kyle, where’s the Maker’s?” I shouted at him.

  “Oh. Um, here,” he said, tossing me an icy bottle. I had n
o idea why he was storing bourbon in the ice bin, but I didn’t have time to ask.

  “You sure you don’t want a bump?” he asked a few minutes later, again proffering the tiny bag of cocaine. I looked at him and felt like I was in an after-school special that dealt with peer pressure. I had always aligned coke with the high hair, acid-washed jeans, white pumps, and utter financial gluttony and extravagance of New York in the ’80s. I hadn’t realized that twenty years later it had trickled all the way down to us, the lowly serving classes.

  “No, thanks,” I said for the second time. “I was drinking before work, and I’m trying to get rid of my hangover.”

  “This’ll do it. Trust me,” he said, trying to hand it to me. I briefly wondered if he was an undercover cop.

  “No, really I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

  For the next hour and a half I toiled behind the bar, struggling valiantly to make a dent in the crowd and turning out thousands of drinks until my fingertips turned to prunes and my lower back ached from bending down to get ice. Kyle served customers sporadically when he wasn’t snorting coke, chugging Red Bull, imbibing shots of Cuervo, or getting girls’ phone numbers. The private party finally ended at midnight (I didn’t have time to look up from the bar for so much as a glimpse of Jessica and Nick), and after the guests filed out, there were a few moments of much-needed downtime before the club was reopened to the public.

  “Let’s do a shot,” Kyle said, grabbing two rocks glasses and filling them halfway up with Cuervo.

  “That’s a really big shot,” I said, reluctantly accepting his offer.

  “Cheers,” he said.

  I choked down the shot, and Kyle refilled the glasses.

  “One more time,” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said, wiping my mouth.

  “Yes, you can,” he said, handing me the glass. I silently apologized to my stomach as I drank it down, longing for last weekend when I’d drunk five-times-distilled tequila with Jake, a competent bartending partner.

  “Is this your first night at Spark?” Kyle asked.