The Perfect Manhattan

by Leanne Shear

  “Hey!” James said as he walked up to the bar. He was wearing yet another moniker of status—a perfect golden tan from a long day on the golf course.

  “Hey, baby!” I said, leaning over the bar to kiss him. “Are you guys gonna hang out down here tonight?”

  “No.” James sighed. “It’s Rosalind’s little sister’s twenty-first birthday, and they have a table reserved upstairs.”

  “Okay. Have fun!” I called after him, trying to sound positive, but feeling a tinge of jealousy as they were seated at a table right next to P. Diddy’s contingent. A few minutes later I saw Elsie bring them identical magnums of Cristal.

  My own champagne glass was empty, and I needed another drink. “Jake, are we allowed to drink champagne?”

  “Of course not,” he answered, laughing. “But we’re not allowed to drink Patrón either, so who cares. As long as you don’t get caught, you’re fine.”

  “I know, but they must keep track of the good champagne, and I don’t feel like drinking the cheap stuff.”

  “So the Virgin Mary wants to steal a bottle of Veuve, is that what I’m hearing?”

  “No!” I protested, looking around to make sure Shalina and Teddy hadn’t overheard Jake’s accusation.

  “Relax, I don’t care. I’ll split a bottle with you. We work hard. We deserve it.”

  “Okay, but won’t they realize a bottle is missing when they do inventory?”

  “You’d be surprised, babe. This place is run so bad. They don’t keep track of anything.”

  Minutes later Jake and I were raising our Veuve Clicquot, which we’d disguised as ginger ale by drinking it out of plastic cups, in a toast.

  After another hour or so had passed, there was a brief lull in the crowd packed around the bar, so I took the opportunity to check my cell phone. I had ten missed calls from Travis. Without even listening to the messages, I knew he was calling because he was standing outside and the doorman wasn’t letting him in.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said to Jake.

  I ducked under the bar and pushed my way through the crowd until I arrived outside at the velvet ropes. I scanned the masses of people waiting to get in, all screaming about how they knew “so and so” and should be granted access. Travis and the guys were nowhere in sight.

  “Hey, what happened with my friends?” I asked the doorman, fighting through the bottleneck of relieved recipients of the vaunted Spark plastic admission bracelet who were clustered around the doorway.

  “I did everything I could, but Shalina was at the front, and she wouldn’t let them in. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. It’s not your fault,” I sighed.

  I scanned the crowd one final time, and as I did so, my eyes landed on the man in the Gucci baseball hat who’d bought the four magnums of Cristal. He was standing next to a white limo Humvee idling in front of the ropes.

  “Are you ready?” I heard him say to two of his friends as they all shook up their bottles of champagne.

  “What are they doing?” I asked the doorman.

  Before he could answer, they all burst their champagne open with a loud POP! and, pressing their thumbs up against the mouths of the bottles, sprayed each other with the $1,000 foam, laughing uproariously the whole time and attracting a huge crowd of spectators. Champagne splashed across the entrance and the onlookers, who cheered as the sweet fizz landed on their faces and their clothes.

  “Holy shit!” I cried. “They just paid thousands of dollars for that champagne, and now they’re spraying each other with it!” Covered in the bubbles, I laughed to myself that it was the most expensive thing I ever wore.

  “That’s the Hamptons for you,” the doorman chuckled.

  Back inside, I poured myself a third glass of champagne and set about fielding drink orders. Soon the Veuve was gone, and I was drunk. I felt sexy and sparkling and full of life. I decided that I needed to see James immediately.

  “Jake, I’ll be right back,” I promised. Normally, I would’ve been worried about taking a break at all, but that night, after selling $4,000 worth of champagne, I felt confident that I was keeping up with Jake and the pressure to “sell, sell, sell” was dramatically reduced.

  I fought my way through the dancing bodies, past the VIP ropes, up the stairs, and into what many might have considered the most privileged social scene in the western world. The anthropological significance of P. Diddy and his entourage beside James and his posse was just too delicious to overlook.

  “Hey, what are you doing up here?” James said when I grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet.

  “Come with me,” I said, smiling and giving him my best bedroom eyes. I could almost feel champagne bubbles bouncing against the libidinal zone of my brain, and I already knew I’d definitely feel them the next morning—that’s the funny thing about champagne—you get a hangover while you drink it. Plus, I couldn’t resist flaunting my prize a little—here was this gorgeous man sipping Cristal in VIP, and he was all mine. He thought I was refreshing and beautiful and a brilliant screenwriter. And Rosalind and the rest of the girls could eat their hearts out.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “There’s a secret bathroom,” I whispered, looking around like a spy. I dragged him through the VIP area and into the vestibule that housed the office, which was empty, and the employee bathroom. Shutting the bathroom door behind me, I pushed him up against the wall and, taking his face in my hands, kissed him. I started unbuttoning his shirt, my lips moving down his chest.

  “Wow!” he breathed. “What’s gotten into you?”

  I was unbuckling his belt when Teddy burst through the door.

  “Oh my God!” I shrieked.

  “Oh, ah . . . sorry, guys.” Teddy backed away and closed the door behind him.

  I turned to James, who was standing there with his shirt open, flushed. “Who was that guy?”

  “He’s sort of my boss,” I said sheepishly, suddenly sober. “I guess I should get back to work.” I straightened my halter top and gave James a final kiss.

  “We’ll have to pick up where we left off later,” he said, grinning suggestively and tucking my hair behind my ear. I followed him back outside into VIP, where I walked right into Teddy.

  “Well, I guess we’re even,” he said, smirking.

  “Guess so,” I said, briefly musing that in the bizzare world of bartending, getting busted hooking up in the bathroom during a shift was perfectly permissible.

  I cast one last look at the scene in VIP, then I almost did a double-take when I saw Elsie, shirtless, straddling P. Diddy while his entourage looked on appreciatively. Wearing only a transparent pink lace bra, she had one arm around his neck and was pulsing up and down on his lap. P. Diddy couldn’t have appeared less interested as he gazed over her shoulder out onto the crowd.

  “What is this, Scores?” I remarked to Teddy, referencing the famed strip club in Manhattan known for its “high-end” clientele like Howard Stern.

  “What can I say?” he shrugged. “These girls know how to work it. That’s how they make their money.”

  Back downstairs, I quickly slid behind the bar. Jake was rummaging through the tip jar.

  “Jesus, there’s a lot of money in here,” he said, his eyes fixated on the folded stack of hundred-dollar bills.

  “Well, that guy who bought the Cristal tipped me a thousand dollars,” I said.

  “Cassie, this is insane,” he said, almost shaking with pleasure. “We’re gonna make sick money tonight. You know, you’re the only one I pool with.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’re the only one I share my money with, because you’re the only one here who knows how to hustle.”

  “But I thought we had to pool.”

  “We’re supposed to, but if somebody gives me a hundred-dollar tip, I’m not gonna throw it in the tip jar and share it. Everything bigger than a twenty, I keep.”

  “Well, that sucks, Jake. I share all my tips,” I sa
id, growing angry thinking of all the money I could have made if I’d kept my bigger tips to myself.

  “You didn’t pool all your money with Kyle when you worked the back bar, did you?”

  I could feel my face go red. I felt like an idiot. “Yes, I did.”

  Jake laughed incredulously. “How could you share your money with that dipshit?”

  “Because that’s what I was told to do,” I snapped.

  “Sometimes you gotta bend the rules,” he said plainly, “and look out for yourself.”

  For the rest of the night, I watched Jake like a hawk, making sure he deposited all of his tips into the tip jar. But my closer scrutiny revealed more than I bargained for.

  “That’ll be sixty-five dollars,” he said to a customer.

  The man handed him four twenties and said, “Keep the change.”

  Jake threw the entire $80 in the tip jar. No wonder I always made more money with Jake. Not only was he the fastest bartender in the Hamptons, he was also a rabid thief. Later on I saw him take $100 from a customer and then bend down pretending to tie his shoes, while he slipped the money into his sock.

  “Hey, beautiful,” James said a little after four, just as the bouncers were starting to usher everyone out of the club. “I’m gonna go get something to eat with these guys at the Princess Diner in Southampton. I’ll come back around five-thirty and pick you up.”

  “Okay,” I said, coming out from behind the bar to wrap my arms around him. He pulled me into his chest and nuzzled my neck.

  “Will you stay at my place tonight?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said, kissing him again. Teddy apparently knew what he was doing—secret trysts in the employee bathroom really got a person in the mood. Though we had hooked up plenty of times on the beach at sunrise, we still hadn’t had sex, and I had yet to spend the night at his house. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to sleep with him. But my crazy hours had made it tough to find long stretches of time alone together, and truth be told, the old-fashioned romantic in me was enjoying taking it slow. I liked the fact that he respected me. Especially given all the casual sex and debauchery that I saw firsthand all around me.

  “I’ll see you in a little bit,” he whispered, kissing me again.

  I bundled up my money, grabbed a beer, and settled in a booth to start counting out the tips. Elsie, who had finally put her shirt back on, was following a man in a bright turquoise, short-sleeved, silk button-down who looked like a shorter version of Antonio Banderas, through the club toward the exit.

  “So I’ll call you this week,” she said. Then she jumped up on him, wrapping her arms and her legs around his body and kissing him long and hard on the mouth. “Do you promise to come back next weekend?” she asked in a whiny baby voice, jutting her full lower lip out into a pout. “I’m gonna miss you.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be back next Saturday,” the guy said before patting her on the ass and exiting the club. Elsie walked over to a table, where she immediately threw a sweatshirt on over her tank top and pulled sweatpants on under her miniskirt.

  “Who was that?” I asked curiously.

  “He’s just some customer,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Oh. I thought maybe he was your boyfriend,” I teased.

  Elsie snorted with laughter. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’d never date that loser.”

  “Then why did you say you’d miss him?”

  “Because I want him to come back next weekend and sit in my section. He had a five-thousand-dollar tab, and he left me a huge tip. Most of these guys with money are such douche bags. If you give them a little attention, they’ll give you all their cash.”

  I couldn’t see how making out with a customer and giving him her phone number constituted “a little attention,” but then again, I wasn’t really one to talk. While I never gave out lap dances, I knew by this time that I was a lot more successful behind the bar when I flirted with men and women alike. As usual when I hopped on board this train of thought, I couldn’t help thinking back to Dan Finton. I wondered what the perks might include if I actually gave him everything he wanted. Not that that was a viable option.

  “So you must have done really well tonight,” I said. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much P. Diddy and his entourage left her.

  “Yeah, I did amazing. Cocktailing in the Hamptons is by far the most money you can make with your clothes on.”

  You didn’t keep your clothes on, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

  Twelve

  ____________

  SEX ON

  THE BEACH

  I peeled my sweaty lower back off the black leather seat of James’s Range Rover and settled in for what could easily be a forty-five-minute drive from his house to Animal House, even though the journey was little over a mile. On summer weekends, Montauk Highway was a never-ending snake of luxury SUVs with mountain bikes and kayaks bungee-corded on top. We drove down Hands Path where parents were loading kids, beach toys, umbrellas, towels, blankets, coolers, boogie boards, and Frisbees into Land Rovers bearing the coveted town beach pass stickers that allowed you to park a mere few feet away from the dunes and avoid the long schlep that we always had to make from our house. Looking out the window in my sleepy haze, I felt like I was viewing a silent movie.

  “I swear this intersection is busier than any intersection in Manhattan,” James said, bringing me back to earth and the heavily air-conditioned interior of the car, as he slowly crept up behind a yellow Lamborghini Spider. “I’ve been trying to make a left for twenty minutes. They should put a traffic light here.”

  I tried to imagine what a traffic light would look like in the heart of charming Amagansett. The quaint country town looked like the backdrop to Little House on the Prairie, and I was sure the summer residents would shun a run-of-the-mill traffic light that would mar the village’s old-fashioned ambiance.

  “Hey, are you okay?” James asked as he reached over and smoothed my hair with his hand. “You’re quiet.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little tired.” This wasn’t a lie exactly. I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since before Memorial Day.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m okay, I just want to get home. I still have my clothes on from last night and I need to shower.” I looked down at my stained and smelly Spark uniform. My hair, which the night before had been a perfectly tousled mix of ocean air and KMS Beach Head hairspray (made with genuine salt water), now looked more like a nest of seaweed. I felt disgusting.

  And there was another reason for my reticence. The night before, after James had picked me up from work, we went back to his house. Our steamy bathroom hook-up had provided the perfect overture, and we’d finally consummated our relationship.

  I know I’m pregnant, I thought, as James crept up another inch behind the Lamborghini. We’d used a condom, but the nuns at my high school had ingrained in me that some sort of punishment would immediately follow an act of premarital sex.

  “Finally!” James huffed, as the Spider peeled out and took a sharp turn off to the left. Impatiently James snuck out behind him, cutting off a Lexus SUV and causing its driver to flip us off.

  I looked over at James’s handsome profile and wondered why I felt so conflicted and weird. The sex with James had been amazing, by far the best I’d ever had in my relatively short sex life. I’d made a mental note of all the little details I had to tell Annie—finally I had something to share. He didn’t balk when I asked him to use a condom, and he certainly seemed to care more about my pleasure than his own. He was textbook perfect afterward too, snuggling naked with me and whispering in my ear about how beautiful I was and how much he cared about me. I was in heaven.

  But then I’d woken up with my usual early-morning anxiety—I haven’t written for days, I have to work tonight, I ate two cheeseburgers yesterday, I just had sex with the boy I hope to marry—and immediately felt like something was wrong between us. I was pretty sure it was all in my head, bu
t I couldn’t help feeling like a lost puppy as we drove along the back roads of East Hampton. He was obliviously singing along as Tom Petty played on 104.7 The Wolf. I looked in the mirror and swiped at last night’s makeup still crusted under my eyes.

  “Hey, do you want to stop at the Farmer’s Market for coffee?” he asked.

  “Actually I don’t drink coffee, only tea,” I said, my mind spinning a neurotic diatribe: If you knew me at all, you would know that. How could we have just slept together and you don’t even know that coffee makes me ill?

  I sat in stony silence for the rest of the ride. I knew I was overreacting, but I couldn’t help it. Having sex was a fairly big deal and I was hungry for reassurance. Was he taking me for granted? I’d been hoping to spend the day with him, but he’d rushed out of bed, saying he had to get ready for some benefit that evening that “everyone” was going to, and he hadn’t even invited me along. True, he knew I had to work that night, but he could’ve at least invited me. I wondered how many girls he’d had sex with. Given his bedroom skills, there must have been thousands. Was he on the verge of breaking up with me? I hated him.

  It was a little after twelve when we finally pulled into the driveway of Animal House. As usual, a couple of meatheads who’d been too lazy to walk to the ocean had set up a cooler of beers and some beach chairs on our lawn. In between them was a growing pile of empty Miller Genuine Draft bottles, indicating that Miller had been on sale at the IGA.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” James asked, putting the car in park.

  “I’m fine. I promise,” I said, forcing a smile.

  “You seem pensive.”

  “I’m just tired. I think I’m gonna try to take a nap before work.”

  “Okay.” He leaned over and kissed me on my forehead.

  “Are you going to stop by Spark tonight?” I asked.

  “I can’t. I have that benefit for Sloan Kettering at Shinnecock Hills, remember?”

  “Well, maybe you could swing by after?”