by Leanne Shear
“Good day, Mr. Edmonton,” said a rotund, mustached man in a green suit jacket that made him look like he’d just won the Masters Golf Tournament.
“How are you, Roger?” James said. “This is my girlfriend, Cassie.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, miss,” Roger said, bowing his head.
“Roger is the general manager of the Maidstone,” James explained. Then he turned back to Roger. “Is my father here yet?”
“No, sir, he’s not. Why don’t you and Cassie have a seat at the bar, and I’ll seat you at your table when your father arrives.”
We left the dining room and walked to the bar, where I settled on a stool. (Funny how I already felt less anxious now that I was in familiar surroundings.) I took a deep breath and looked around. Everywhere I turned I saw spectacular views of the ocean.
“Cass, I’m going to run to the bathroom. Will you be okay here for a minute?” James asked, brushing a stray hair out of my eyes and momentarily warming my icy hands when he held them briefly in his.
“Sure.” I smiled.
“Can I get you a drink, miss?” the bartender asked. He was at least sixty years old and, like Roger, wore a green suit jacket.
“Hi,” I said cheerfully. “How are you?”
“Fine,” he replied tersely. “Would you like something to drink?”
“Uh . . . yes, please. Do you have Pinot Noir by the glass?”
“Certainly,” he said curtly, furnishing a glass. I decided that he probably wasn’t allowed to delve into personal conversations with the patrons. As I’d once overheard Martin Pritchard say, the best servants are invisible—you shouldn’t even know they’re there.
Billy had once told me about the time he’d trained for a job at the Soho House, a highly exclusive, invitation-only, private club in Manhattan based on the London club of the same name. “I trained there for one shift,” he’d said. “It was fucking hell. You’re not allowed to use the front entrance. You have to walk up seven flights of stairs—because you’re not allowed to use the same elevator as the guests—and you can’t use the bathrooms. If you have an emergency, you have to walk up another three flights and use this disgusting toilet in the stockroom. You’re barely allowed to look at the customers, and are allowed to talk to them only if you’re taking drink orders. You’re not even allowed to go near the place on your nights off, because you’re ‘the help.’ ”
I looked up from my glass of wine to see Mr. Edmonton in all his fit, silver-haired glory, striding up the stairs and heading in my direction. My first panicked thought was, Where the hell is James? but I quickly got control of myself and slid off my stool, doing my best to paste a warm, welcoming smile on my face.
“Hi, Mr. Edmonton, it’s nice to see—”
“Ed Hollinger, how the hell are you?” he asked, completely bypassing me and clapping a middle-aged man seated behind me on the back.
“Great, Jim, good to see you . . .” The small talk continued and my face burned in mortification. I was sure everyone had seen him ignore me. I wondered if he had done it on purpose but decided that was just too cruel. Was it possible that he didn’t remember meeting me at Finton’s? He was one of the richest lawyers in New York City, and I was willing to bet he had a pretty sharp mind. I sat there stewing until I saw James walking back toward the bar. I wanted him to hurry up and rescue me.
“Cass, did you say hi to my dad?” he asked, looking at the back of his father’s pressed golf sweater, confused. At the sound of his son’s voice, Mr. Edmonton turned around.
“Hello, Dad,” James said formally, offering his hand to his father. “Didn’t you see Cassie? She was standing right here next to you.”
“I must not have noticed,” he said coolly. “Why didn’t she say something?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Edmonton, you were in the middle of a conversation, and I didn’t want to interrupt—”
“Roger!” Mr. Edmonton cut me off, snapping his fingers in the air. “Is our table ready?”
James signed for my glass of wine. Seconds later James Edmonton III, James Edmonton II, and I were seated at a window-side table overlooking the ocean. Waves crested and broke into a rolling thunder in the distance, and you could just barely make out the bobbing heads of surfers waiting for a decent swell. Mr. Edmonton pulled out Friday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal and started poring over it. Apparently he didn’t like what he was reading. “Goddamn it! If the blue chips continue to drop like this I’m going to have Ray Sullivan killed.”
James said nothing, and I surreptitiously popped two Advils in my mouth and washed them down with a gulp of wine. My head had started throbbing the moment we entered the dining room.
A waiter approached our table. “Hello, how’s everybody doing this morning?”
“Ketel Bloody Mary and eggs Benedict,” Mr. Edmonton cut in, still immersed in his paper.
“Okay,” the waiter said. “And what can I get for you?” he asked me.
I hadn’t even opened the menu. “I’m not sure . . . Let me just look . . .”
“I’ll have the wild mushroom frittata,” James said. “And a coffee, black.”
The waiter scribbled some notes on his little white pad, while I frantically searched the menu. My eyes were moving so quickly I couldn’t focus on anything. “And for you, miss?”
In a panic, I blurted out the first thing I saw. “I’ll have the eggs Sardeaux, please.” I had no idea what I’d just ordered. The waiter removed my menu, and I sat on my hands to keep from biting my already unimpressive nails.
“So,” Mr. Edmonton said as he brusquely folded up the paper. “Did you and James meet at Yale?”
“No, I went to Columbia,” I said, hoping my teeth weren’t stained magenta from the wine and berating myself for not ordering a mimosa. What was I doing drinking wine at eleven in the morning?
“Did you grow up in New York?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where?”
“Upstate in a suburb of Albany.”
“How long have you been coming out to the Hamptons?”
“This is my first summer.”
“What brings you out here?”
His rapid line of questioning was making our brunch feel like an FBI interrogation. “I actually came out here to bar—”
“Cassie’s a writer,” James interjected. “She came out here for inspiration, hoping to join the ranks of Hamptons bohemians.” I tried to ignore the fact that this was the second time he’d stopped me before I made the mistake of admitting I was a bartender.
“Interesting,” Mr. Edmonton said. His Bloody Mary had arrived and he was slowly stirring it with a celery stalk. “What is it that you write? Novels?”
“Uh . . . well . . .” Stammering had somehow become my most frequently used mode of communication in the Hamptons. “Right now I’m working on a—”
“Have you ever been published?” he interrupted.
“Oh. Well, no,” I said, “but I’m hoping to—” My voice was silenced by the loud ring of Mr. Edmonton’s cell phone.
“Yes?” he barked, picking it up on the first ring. As he carried on a tense conversation with one of his secretaries, James put his hand on my knee under the table and offered me an encouraging smile. I tried to smile back, but I felt like the wine and nervous adrenaline had teamed up in my stomach to burn through my abdominal wall, resulting in the worst nausea and heartburn of my life. I needed to eat something. A fair-haired child to my left was munching on French toast with fresh berries, and my stomach rumbled with hunger.
“So did you go to high school up in Albany, or did you go to boarding school?” Mr. Edmonton asked as soon as he snapped his phone shut.
“In Albany,” I answered. “I went to Colonie High School.”
“Is that a public school?” he asked disapprovingly.
“Uh . . . yes. Yes, it is.” I said, trying to smother my shame. “So, how often do you get out to the Hamptons?” I asked him, hoping to reverse t
he line of questioning.
“I try to get out as often as possible. I like to play golf at least three times a week when the weather’s nice. Do you play?”
“No,” I said. “But I’d love to learn.”
Silence. I looked out the window and wished fervently that I was one of those surfers out in the ocean, swimming freely in the clean blue water. I glanced at James for some support. He put his hand on top of mine and squeezed it.
After what felt like an eternity, the food arrived. To my dismay, my plate was a gooey mélange of runny eggs and hollandaise sauce spread over some unrecognizable green mush. Mr. Edmonton ripped into his eggs Benedict, tearing the thin white membrane and causing the bright yellow yolk to bleed all over his plate. Both father and son dug in as I buttered a piece of whole-wheat toast, avoiding my pulpy egg pottage.
“So, Cassie,” Mr. Edmonton said after finishing his meal in under two seconds and resting his silverware on the edge of his plate. “What do your parents do up in Albany?”
I cleared my throat and swallowed hard. “My father’s a fireman and my mom’s a secretary at a law firm.”
More silence. I smiled like one of the mannequins in the windows of Macy’s, even though I felt more like a crash-test dummy. My head was still pounding despite the Advils, and I couldn’t even look down at the soggy remnants on my plate. I needed some air. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I’m going to use the ladies’ room.”
Both James and his father stood when I did. “It’s right down the stairs where we came in,” James said.
The second I was out of sight, I bolted back down the grand staircase and out the front door with as much decorum as I could muster. I took a few steps across the lawn and, steadying myself on an antique birdbath, breathed deeply, sucking in as much oxygen as possible.
“Nice day,” someone commented.
I looked up and saw a grandfatherly man, smoking a cigarette. He had soothing blue eyes, the color of beach glass, and a benevolent expression. “Yes,” I agreed.
“Too stuffy in there for you?” he asked, stressing the word “stuffy.”
“Yeah,” I smiled.
“Me too,” he said. “Cigarette?”
“Uh, sure,” I said, figuring that since my liver was already rotting, I might as well start damaging another set of vital organs. Smoking was another slippery slope. You started with one drag after a long night of work, then begin to associate smoking with winding down and de-stressing. The next thing you knew, you were smoking every time you were a little agitated or annoyed.
I put the cigarette in my mouth and he lit it with the signature Cartier lighter. “I’m Charles.”
“I’m Cassie,” I said, relieved that he hadn’t offered his last name, so I didn’t have to say mine and thereby disappoint everyone in the vicinity because my family lineage didn’t trace back to Queen Victoria.
“Having some brunch?” he asked.
“Yeah, some friends of mine are members here,” I said, taking a long, satisfying drag.
“What do you think of the Maidstone? It’s lovely, isn’t it? And all the members are theoretically lovely as well.”
“Theoretically?”
“Yes, theoretically,” he said, puffing on his cigarette. Then he leaned in with a devilish grin. “In reality they’re all a bunch of assholes.”
I laughed, nearly choking on the cigarette smoke. “Yeah, it’s a pretty tough crowd in there.”
“I used to be director of admissions of the club back in the sixties,” he said. “But when I told them my plans for opening the Maidstone doors to minorities, well, that was the end of my term. They like to keep it pretty homogenous. Most of them boast that they can trace their heritage back to the Mayflower.”
I looked around at the Aryan-looking members putting at the eighteenth hole and thought about all the fair-haired people dining upstairs and the fair-haired children bathing in the swimming pool. I imagined Adolf Hitler himself was running the Maidstone and only granted access to members of the master race. “It’s pretty WASPy, huh?” I asked.
“Well, that’s not entirely true,” he said. “We do have a token Jewish member and a token black member, and if you’re lucky, you might be able to see a Catholic or two.”
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled,” I said.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going down by the pool to buy myself an eight-dollar bottle of water.”
“It was nice meeting you,” I said.
“The pleasure was mine.”
I put out my cigarette on the birdbath and collected myself. I would’ve liked nothing more than to follow Charles to the pool and smoke cigarettes with him all afternoon, but James and his intimidating father were waiting for me upstairs. If I was going to salvage any semblance of a future with James, I knew I had to march back upstairs with a confident smile and try my hardest to win his father over.
I walked into the foyer where two little strawberry blond girls, about eight years old, were racing up and down the grand staircase with abandon. My first thought was worry that they would fall and break their necks, and the second thought was that my mom would never in a million years have allowed me to carry on like that in a nice country club. No one seemed to care what these two were up to, though, and they acted as if they owned the place. I guessed their nannies had the day off.
As I popped into the ladies’ room for a quick freshen-up, I suddenly desperately missed my mom. I felt entirely out of my element and was overcome with homesickness. I yearned for my comfortable, cozy kitchen at home and the plain old Bisquick pancakes with Log Cabin syrup and Oscar Mayer bacon that my mom made every Sunday morning. I looked around at the old-fashioned pink and turquoise “ladies lounge” with wooden lockers and plaques saying LADIES CLUB CHAMP, and wondered where James’s mom was, and why he rarely mentioned her and clammed up whenever I tried to ask about her. Martin had piqued my interest when he mentioned the divorce. Even a much younger girlfriend for Mr. Edmonton—a Lily or a Pearls Girl, some sort of potential female ally—would have been better than nothing.
When I arrived back in the dining room, James and his father were sipping coffee, not saying a word to each other. Mr. Edmonton had reopened his newspaper, and James was looking out the window. I couldn’t imagine sitting across a table from my father and not talking to him. Whenever my family got together we babbled on nonstop, practically fighting for airtime.
“Are you finished, miss?” the waiter asked when I returned to the table. Even though I hadn’t touched my eggs, I nodded and he took my plate.
“So, Mr. Edmonton,” I began, “how do you know Martin Pritchard?” I hoped that bringing up Martin, a mutual “friend,” would be a good way for me to start over.
“He sold me my first Rothko,” Mr. Edmonton replied, stone-faced.
“Oh, that’s great. I love Mark Rothko. Martin and Lily stopped into Spark to say hello the other night when I was bartending.”
“You’re bartending out here too?” Mr. Edmonton asked.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see James cringe, and I immediately knew I’d said something wrong. But I didn’t see how I could get away without answering his father’s question, so I forged ahead.
“Yes, I’m working two nights a week at Spark—”
“Let’s get the check,” James interrupted, silencing me. I looked down, utterly humiliated.
As we stood up to leave, I noticed a girl about my age having brunch with her parents at a table to our left. Her flaxen hair was pulled back with a black headband, making her look like a grown-up Alice in Wonderland. As she delicately picked at her Waldorf salad, the telltale string of pearls around her neck caught my eye. I imagined that she’d been coming to the Maidstone since she was born and was probably a skilled golfer and played lawn tennis with talent and grace. Her peaches-and-cream skin was flawless, and I noted with envy that there wasn’t even the slightest hint of darkness underneath her translucent aqua eyes. I thought about how earlier that mo
rning I’d come home from work with my skirt saturated in grenadine and grime underneath my chipped fingernails. Standing there with James and his father, I would have sold my soul to trade my disgusting share house, money woes, and grueling lifestyle for the life that that girl lived: manicured nails, brunches at the Maidstone, and pearls.
James and I walked to the parking lot in silence a grand total of forty-three minutes after we’d walked in. Once we were both in the car, I felt so claustrophobic I thought I was going to explode. I couldn’t take it any more.
“I can’t do this,” I erupted, my voice shaking.
“Can’t do what?”
“This. I feel horrible about myself. Your father won’t even talk to me. You got mad when I brought up bartending. What do you want me to say? I’m a bartender, James. I’m sorry if that embarrasses you.” I was verging on tears, but my last ounce of pride wouldn’t let the proverbial damn break just yet. I searched his profile for a reaction. Nothing. He made a left out of the Maidstone parking lot and started veering west on Further Lane. “Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer me. He swerved in and out of back roads I’d never known existed until we arrived at Main Beach in East Hampton, where we’d had our first kiss.
“Cassie,” he began. His face was red, and he looked incredibly frustrated. This is it, I thought. He’s going to break up with me and marry Amanda Hearst or Alice in Wonderland from the Maidstone. I sat there with a racing heart. His reticence stoked all the fears burning inside me. He turned to look at me and said suddenly, “I love you.”
“What?” I felt like I’d been shot in the gut.
“I love you. I’m sorry about my dad. He’s an arrogant asshole. He doesn’t even talk to me. Who cares about him? You’re the only person I want to be with.” I felt myself thawing, warming as his words sunk in. My anger melted away, and I couldn’t even remember what I’d been saying. He was still gazing at me. I smiled at him and thought, I love you too.
Thirteen
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