by Leanne Shear
“Maybe, but it’s all the way in Southampton, and I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot of boozing going on. I’ll probably end up staying overnight.”
“Where would you stay?”
“Some friends of mine from Yale have a house right on the golf course, and I haven’t seen them in a while. I might play golf with them tomorrow morning. And if that doesn’t work out I can always crash at Rosalind’s uncle’s house.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to sound laid-back. But in reality I felt like reaching over and ripping his face off. So you’d rather spend the night with Rosalind and the Pearls Girls than with me? Fine. I’ll show you. You know how many men would die to have a girl like me?
I had started sliding down the slippery slope of neediness, and I wanted him to leave before I said something I’d regret. It was remarkable how the aftermath of sex with someone you really cared about could be so psychologically turbulent. When we’d gone to sleep, I’d felt so comfortable and close to him. But now that we were parting ways and resuming our everyday lives, I felt as though I were being abandoned. I chastised myself—he was going to a charity event to benefit kids with leukemia, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like he was forsaking me to spend the evening at some strip club.
I slammed the passenger door shut, and his tires crunched on the gravel as he slowly backed out of the driveway. “Cassie!” he called out his window.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t forget, we’re having brunch with my father tomorrow at the club.”
“I know,” I said. In reality, I’d been purposefully blocking it out of my mind all week, trying not to let my imagination run wild. In a nutshell, I was terrified of his father, and had been ever since he’d been so rude to me at Finton’s. “What time are you picking me up?”
“Ten forty-five. Brunch is at eleven sharp, because my dad has to get back into the city early.”
“Okay, I’ll see you then.”
James slowly pulled away from the house and inched back into the traffic.
“What’s up, Cassie?” the meatheads called as they shoveled Cheetos into their orange-dust–encrusted mouths. I was pretty sure there names were Todd and Brad and that they’d been at the house a couple of times before. Each had his own family-size bag, and they reminded me of two donkeys feasting on giant feed bags.
“Hey, guys,” I said, traversing the lawn. The grass was warm in the noonday sun.
“Want a beer?” one of them asked, dipping his chubby forearm into the cooler.
“No, thanks,” I said, climbing up onto the porch. The rickety wooden stairs creaked under my flip-flops.
“Hey, Cass,” I heard someone else call.
I shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand and saw Travis nestled in the chaise I’d used as a bed on Memorial Day, with the same petite blond girl Annie and I’d caught him making out with. She was wearing a short pleated tennis skirt and a pale yellow cable-knit cashmere sweater with a pink Polo icon on it.
“Hey,” I said, walking up to them.
“Hi!” Travis’s warm smile took the edge off my anxiety. “Cassie, this is . . .”
“Camilla Claremont,” the girl said with all the airs of Camilla Parker Bowles. She stretched out her toned arm, offering me a dainty hand complete with a perfect French manicure and a slender wrist decorated by a diamond Tiffany cocktail watch. Travis was still in his boxers and a T-shirt. Evidence of another sleepover.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Cassie.”
“I know, Travis told me all about you,” she said. “You work at Spark and you’re a writer, right?”
“Well, more like an aspiring writer,” I said ruefully. “And yes, I do work at Spark.”
“Well, that’s certainly the place to be this summer,” she said authoritatively.
“Yeah, it’s been really fun,” I said. I had to admit that I enjoyed the little boost of coolness Spark gave me.
“I’m surprised I haven’t met you before. You have a share here too, right?” I detected a faint whiff of a southern accent—a kind of WASPy drawl.
“Cassie doesn’t stay here any more now that she can sleep at her boyfriend’s mansion,” Travis joked.
“That’s not true,” I said. And then turning to Camilla: “As you can imagine, there aren’t exactly enough beds here for all of us . . .”
“Ew! I know. This place is so overcrowded and disgusting,” she said, making a sour face.
While I would normally have been the first to call the place revolting, I found myself feeling insulted. What right did she have to speak that way about my house?
“It’s not that bad,” I said.
“Come on, Cammie, you love it here,” Travis teased, grabbing her tiny waist and pressing her against him. She extended her neck to kiss him on the cheek, and a string of pearls peeked out from beneath her yellow cashmere to catch the light of the afternoon sun. I fought the urge to roll my eyes. I was beginning to think that Pearls Girls could be added to the list of local exports along with wheat, peaches, corn, and strawberries. They sure seemed to thrive in the Hamptons climate.
“So how is the mysterious James?” Travis asked.
“He’s fine.”
“Not James Edmonton?” Camilla perked up.
Oh, no, I thought. Camilla had slept with him too. I was just another notch on his Gucci belt. “Yeah.”
“Oh my God! James and my cousin Rosalind are like so close! I’m sure you’ve met her before, she’s tall, blond, completely gorgeous . . .”
“Yes, I’ve met her,” I said, cutting her off.
“My uncle Stuart, Rosalind’s father, and James’s father have been trying to get those two together forever! The family joke is that they’ve been engaged since birth!”
I’d heard enough. If I wasn’t already annoyed enough with James, I really hated him now. “I’m gonna go upstairs to take a nap.” I scowled.
“It was a pleasure meeting you,” she cooed.
Even though she’d inadvertently offended me, I had to admit that Camilla looked perfectly at home in Travis’s arms, snuggling in the chaise, and as I opened the screen door, a small green-eyed monster crept up behind me. I couldn’t believe it was “the morning after,” and James was off to a glamorous event with “everyone” but me, while these two were probably going to spend the whole day together. I walked through the house, stepping over piles of sand that looked like little ant hills, empty beer bottles, beef jerky wrappers, cigarette butts, and a tiny bag of weed, all the while questioning how salt-of-the-earth Travis had ever gotten involved with a Pearls Girl.
So you finally gave it up. Thank God!” Annie said later that afternoon. She was reclining on one of the mildewed lounge chairs on the porch of Animal House and sipping a cappuccino from the Farmer’s Market. “How was it?” she asked gleefully. “I want to hear every detail.”
“It was good,” I said with a sheepish smile.
“Good? You’re going to have to do better than that. And don’t tell me you were in the missionary position, or I’ll kill you.”
“Actually, I was in several positions.”
“You slut!” Annie yelled, and we both collapsed laughing.
“Heads up, girls!” Travis called out just before a football came spiraling toward my head. I ducked just in time, and the football sailed past me and knocked over Annie’s cappuccino. “Whoops, sorry!”
Annie picked up the overturned cup and threw it at Travis. “You owe me five ninety-five!” she joked. “Coffee’s not cheap in this town.”
“Nothing’s cheap in this town,” Travis agreed. “I took Camilla to Jean-Luc last night and spent three bills on dinner. Now I can’t eat for the rest of the week.” He grabbed the football and sprinted back out to the lawn to join the rest of his shirtless posse.
Travis’s comment made me realize with a start how far my life had deviated since the beginning of the summer. I used to scrimp and save just to eat Kraft mac and cheese in my tiny apartment—and now was set
to have brunch at the Maidstone Country Club with my wealthy boyfriend. Maybe Lily and I had more in common than I thought.
Cassie, shut off your alarm,” an irritated Annie grumbled from under her covers the following morning.
Sleepily I kicked the sheet off my tanned legs and sat up. My head was pounding, my ears were ringing, my lower back burned, my lungs ached, and I had a severe case of cotton mouth—all the symptoms I’d come to associate with a morning after working at Spark. This morning, however, I had an added cause for anxiety: the dreaded brunch with James’s father.
The previous night had been a blur. “I was in Vegas all week and I haven’t slept in five days,” Jake had boasted as soon as he walked in the door. His face was as gray as the ash at the bottom of the ancient hibachi at Animal House, and his eyes were rimmed with huge dark rings. Even his lips seemed to have been drained of all color. He looked like a crack addict with sickle cell anemia.
“Doesn’t your body go to sleep on its own? I read a study that said the brain just shuts down or something. I mean, don’t you need sleep?” I’d asked, fascinated.
“Yeah, idiot, most people do need sleep,” he said. “But not when you’re the Jake Man.”
I decided to ignore him for the rest of the night, save for the twenty or so Patrón shots we did together, starting at about ten. Jake had warned me at the onset that he needed to get really drunk—probably because it was the only way he could come down from all the chemicals I imagined were careening through his veins.
I kept checking my cell phone, but James never called me and didn’t make a Spark appearance. He’d told me that would probably be the case, but I was still disappointed. As I turned out what felt like millions of drinks, I pondered everything I was feeling about him. It was the mark of an experienced bartender: after all these weeks, I could finally hustle and “bang it out” while actually thinking about other things besides the ingredients in a margarita.
Around four he’d sent me a text message: “I miss you.” My heart warmed, and I’d decided right then and there to relax about the whole thing. James was crazy about me, and I was just plain crazy. Annie and I had arrived back at Animal House a little after six and, after removing a jock strap from our locked bedroom doorknob, had promptly passed out.
The alarm sounded again, and I turned it off. I crunched over stale tortilla chips in the hallway on my way to the bathroom. The one good thing about being up at the ungodly hour of 10:00 A.M. on a Sunday was that you could rest assured the bathroom would be free. Unless, of course, someone was passed out in the tub.
I turned on the water, stripped down, and looked at myself in the mirror. Truth be told, I didn’t look much better than Jake. My face was pasty, and my cheeks were sunken in. Dark circles swathed my eyes, and my body looked bloated from another night of excessive drinking. My stomach roiled. I couldn’t tell if the turmoil was from the shots or the anticipation of sitting with Mr. Edmonton for two hours and trying to find some common ground. James was picking me up in less than an hour to take me to the Maidstone, the most exclusive country club in the Hamptons, and I looked like I hadn’t slept or eaten a vegetable since before the war.
As the warm water trickled down my face, I reflected on the conversation I’d had with Alexis only the day before, when she’d called me on my way to work.
“Cass, I’m a little worried about you,” she’d said. “You seem so frazzled and burned out lately. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I think this whole lifestyle’s just wearing me down. I’m exhausted. It’s really hard to keep up, and then on top of all of it, I slept with James . . .”
“Well, that’s great! You really like him, right?”
“I know. But now I have to go to Planned Parenthood, because I want to go on the pill, and I don’t have health insurance. I just sometimes wish that I had a normal job, so I could go to a normal doctor like a normal person instead of the ghetto gyno all the way in Brooklyn.”
“But you have the best job in the world! You go to the beach during the day, you get to meet celebrities at night, and you have this amazing boyfriend who’s practically New York royalty . . .”
“I know,” I’d said. “I think I just want to know that I’m on some other path. I don’t want to be a bartender for the rest of my life.”
“Cassie. You’re not going to be a bartender for the rest of your life. I think you’re being a little dramatic. You’ve only been bartending for a few months.”
“But there’s no end in sight. And a lot of the people I work with are way older than me and they’re still bartending. The money is kind of addictive, Lex, and then you start spending and it goes so quickly that you feel like you need more and more. I’m so afraid I’m always going to be a bartender.”
“That won’t happen,” she’d said confidently. “You’re a writer, Cass, not a bartender. At the moment you have to bartend to pay the bills, but so what? And you’re having so much fun, right?”
I’d almost burst into tears. “I guess, but it’s all so overwhelming.” The floodgates opened: “Rosalind and those stupid girls are such bitches to me, so I bought a thousand-dollar dress to impress then, and they didn’t even see it, and my credit cards are maxed out, and I have brunch with James’s dad tomorrow, and he hates me.”
“Okay, slow down,” Alexis soothed. “Nobody hates you. His dad is probably like mine, just really busy so he comes off kind of gruff.”
“I don’t know, Lex,” I’d replied. “When he came into Finton’s he barely said two words to me.”
“So what? You’re not dating his dad. You’re dating him, and he seems to really care about you. And those girls are just jealous.”
During our conversation, I’d felt the first twinge of excitement over moving back to New York in September. I missed spending time with my best friend. She could always put things in perspective.
After a quick shower, I wrapped a towel around my torso and trudged back to our room to tackle a new predicament: what to wear. My mom had always told me that when in doubt, go dressy and classic. Unfortunately, between Annie’s and my paltry selections, there wasn’t anything dressy or classic. The day before Annie had agreed to lend me her white eyelet dress, but I worried it was too short. I put on her small CZ earrings, squelching all thoughts of running out to Tiffany and blowing last night’s $594 on the pearl choker I’d tried on earlier in the summer, slipped on tasteful Ann Taylor kitten heels—my sole pair of “grown-up” shoes—and went to work applying some color to my face.
When I’d finished my makeup, I looked down woefully at my ragged nails and wished I had thought earlier to get a manicure. It was impossible to keep your nails looking decent when you worked as a bartender. I’d have to remember to keep my hands in my lap. I picked up my beige clutch and walked down the rickety stairs.
“You look beautiful,” James said brightly when I opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. He pulled me close to him and kissed me. “I missed you last night.”
“I missed you too,” I said, all of yesterday’s neuroses evaporating in the warm sun.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m starving,” I said, thinking that a hearty brunch would help combat my hangover and set me straight. I’d heard that the Maidstone was leagues more sophisticated than the Southampton Country Club and couldn’t wait to see the spread that was awaiting me.
It would my first time at the Maidstone, which Hamptons magazine rated #1 on the list of the hardest places to get in to on the East End (Spark was #5 on the list, directly between Nick and Toni’s and Della Femina), and Page Six had cited the club as one of the most exclusive in the world. Allegedly there was a twenty-year waiting list to become a member; membership status was a privilege you had to either be born into or wait half your life for. While other Hamptons country clubs, like the Atlantic, had insanely high initiation fees (seven figures), the Maidstone’s membership fee was relatively low ($200,000)—obviously it was t
he admissions process itself, not the dues, that kept people out.
James avoided Montauk Highway, taking the back roads whenever possible. We finally pulled onto Further Lane and continued on past his driveway until the large clubhouse loomed in the distance, enveloped by the lush emerald green of the golf course. At the beginning of the driveway, a giant white wooden sign marked PRIVATE warned nonmembers not to go any further. When we arrived in the parking lot, I noticed that each spot had a member’s named stenciled on it. James maneuvered his Range Rover into the spot marked “J. Edmonton III.”
As we walked from the parking lot to the clubhouse, James waved and smiled at the people we passed, all of whom seemed to know each other: little girls in damp bathing suits, men in golf carts, women in perfectly pressed pants and Polo shirts on their way out to the first hole. A small tree-lined passageway led us into the outdoor part of the club—which housed its vast pool and 150 or so cabanas (also with names stenciled on the doors).
“Over there on the lawn is where they used to have high tea during the summer,” James said, pointing south toward the ocean.
“Where are the tennis courts?” I asked, rather impressed with myself for knowing that it was also a tennis club.
“They’re at another location. I’ll take you there later if you want. It’s mostly lawn tennis, but we have two clay courts.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a lawn court,” I said.
“It’s very British,” he replied.
“Oh.”
James smiled and squeezed my hand. “The Maidstone has a lot of British heritage. It’s named after a small city on the coast outside of London. Apparently a lot of the early settlers in the Hamptons were from there.”
We walked in the front door of the clubhouse and passed a small sitting room where two older women in wide-brimmed hats were sipping tea. Borrowed British culture was ubiquitous in the Hamptons, I reflected: polo matches, high tea, lawn tennis. If the Hamptons were a replica of England, I decided, then the Maidstone was Buckingham Palace.
We walked up the polished mahogany grand staircase to the dining room. Nervously I scanned the room for James’s father.