The Perfect Manhattan

by Leanne Shear

  “Two Sour Apple martinis and a Jack and Diet,” she commanded.

  I was too uncoordinated to locate a shaker, strainer, and the Sour Apple Schnapps. I could hardly see, and the neurons in my brain weren’t firing anymore. They had short-circuited in a sea of alcohol and emotion. I decided to ignore her and help another customer instead.

  “What do you want?” I asked a guy who was waiting near the register.

  “It’s about time,” he grumbled. “Gimme two red devils, three Long Islands, and one Long Beach.” He pulled out a thick wad of money, unclipped it, and started to count out bills.

  I stopped short and glared at him. “Listen to me,” I hissed sloppily, pulling him by the neck of his shirt in toward me. “I am not some punching bag or servant for you to walk all over. The least you could do is say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when you fucking order a drink from me, asshole.” I shoved him roughly away.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, you crazy bitch?”

  “What did you say to me?” I asked menacingly.

  “Everything okay?” one of the bouncers called from the doorway.

  “No. This guy was rude to me,” I said. I honestly couldn’t even remember our exchange from a minute before, but I knew I felt slighted by him. And for the first time all summer, I was determined to do something about these obnoxious, entitled Hamptonites.

  The bouncer dragged the customer out by his collar without another word. The guy’s face had turned purple and the veins in his face and neck bulged under the bouncer’s tight grip.

  “You’ll fucking regret this! I’ll slap a lawsuit on your asses so fast your heads’ll spin!” I could hear him continue to scream the whole way out.

  Waving a white bev nap over my head in surrender, I collapsed on the cooler, letting my heavy head droop onto my neck as if I’d just been hanged on the gallows.

  “What are you doing?” Jake demanded, poking me violently in the thigh. “GET UP!”

  I couldn’t muster the strength to speak or move. In quick succession Rosalind’s face, James’s face, the beach where we first kissed, the hours spent working at my computer, the angry Spark crowd, and James’s “I love yous” penetrated what was left of my conscious brain.

  At that moment, Elsie came up to the bar. “Hey, Jake! I need ten Red Bulls for one of my tables,” she called. And then, noticing me in a heap on top of the cooler, she said, “Oh my God! What happened to her?”

  “She’s fucking wasted.” Jake sneered. “I don’t fucking believe this.”

  Although it was strictly against the rules for a nonbartender or bar back to enter the sacred space behind the bar, Elsie climbed over and grabbed my face in her magenta-taloned hands. “Come on, baby, what’s the matter?”

  “Everyone’s being mean to me. I’m having the worst night of my life,” I sobbed into her ample bosom. Her silicone implants felt hard, like those inflatable stability balls at the gym. “I need to go home.”

  “Shhhhhhh,” Elsie soothed. She looked at me with such sympathy it made me cry even harder. “Everything’s going to be okay. Let’s go outside. You need some air.” She put her arm around my waist and helped me off the cooler. “We’ll be right back,” she called to Jake.

  If I wasn’t so drunk with tequila and heartache, I probably would’ve been shocked to find that crass Elsie had a nurturing side. “James wants to dump me and marry a fucking Pearls Girl, and he stole my screenplay,” I blurted as she dragged me through the thick crowd of hipsters. I struggled to make sense of the blurry forms, still maniacally keeping my eyes open for any member of James’s crew.

  We left the cool, climate-controlled environment of the club and headed to the netherworld of the employee parking lot reigned by two enormous Dumpsters. There really was nothing like the smell of restaurant waste in intense humidity. When the aroma of overripe fruits, discarded vegetables, moldy cheeses, and raw meats intermingle, the result is repulsive. Add the stench of rotting beer, stale rum and tequila, with a generous sprinkling of squirming maggots and flies the size of hummingbirds, and you had the sickening stench of the Spark employee parking lot. I immediately thought I was going to be sick, but it helped to be removed from the insanity inside. Elsie guided me through the garbage littering the ground to the far side of the Dumpster, shielding us from the view of any errant drunks, or the kitchen guys or bar backs, who were forever bringing out new bags of squashed plastic cups and empty beer and champagne bottles.

  The closeness of muggy summer air matched the thickness that had taken up residence inside of me. My blood seemed to coagulate in my veins, and my thoughts moved at a glacial pace.

  “How do you feel?” Elsie asked.

  “I feel like shit. I can’t go back in there. I’m exhausted.”

  “I know what you’re going through. Trust me, I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve been through this a million times. Men are scum. You’ll get over it.”

  Before I could object that I’d never get over James Edmonton, her words registered. She’s thirty-four fucking years old and still cocktail-waitressing? At the rate I’m going, I’ll be bartending at my own fiftieth birthday party.

  “Cigarette?” she offered. I took one and lit it with shaking hands.

  Then, out of her pocket, Elsie pulled a tiny ziplock bag, the kind that were ubiquitous at Spark. She produced a key and dipped it into the bag, covering the gleaming metal edge with a lump of white powder. Then, she cupped her free hand under the key, raised it to her right nostril, and sniffed deeply, closing her eyes briefly. She patted the bottom of her nostril with her finger to make sure she got every last bit. She repeated the steps for the other nostril. Carefully Elsie dipped the key into the bag a third time and handed it to me.

  Sixteen

  ____________

  HANGOVER

  I opened my eyes slowly and painfully. My head felt like it’d been flattened by a steamroller. Sharp shooting pains originating somewhere behind my eye sockets echoed in my head, sending tremors of nausea down my spine. Inside my stomach a tempest of acid, alcohol, and emotion raged. At some point earlier that morning, I’d gotten out of bed and made a dash for the toilet, but only got as far as the garbage can on the far side of the room before throwing up. I’d then staggered down the hall to the bathroom, where, after retching again, I lay with my cheek pressed to the cool tiles of the floor for about twenty minutes. Eventually I made it back to my bed and slept fitfully. I tried to keep very still as even the smallest shift in position caused shock waves of nausea to ricochet through me.

  Outside my window, another storm was gathering. It was as if Mother Nature herself were mourning the end of summer, causing the leaves to quiver on their branches and making the tall beach grass dance manically in the fields behind Animal House. Inside everything was ghostly quiet. A wraithlike calm had settled over the old farmhouse. Gingerly I heaved my body into a sitting position. My bones ached when I moved, and immediately my arms and legs were covered in a rash of goose bumps. I had the chills, the kind you get when you’re coming down with a bad case of the flu or after you experience intense déjà vu. All summer long I’d been abusing my body, and it was finally letting me know it had had enough.

  I imagined the fruits of the depravity from last night had collected in a pool at the base of the parietal lobe of my brain, where a lot of scientists believe the soul resides. I was pretty sure I was damaged permanently, and at the very least, my soul was scarred. When I tried to make it out of bed, I felt like I was inching through quicksand.

  I looked down at my dirty feet as I planted them on the musty wooden planks. I finally knew why they wouldn’t let us bartend in open-toed shoes. Last night in my rebellious stupor, I’d dared to wear flip-flops behind the bar. Each toe was now encrusted with sludge after marinating all night in the alcoholic sewer that existed behind the bar at Spark. My feet stuck to the dusty oak floor as I limped through the upstairs hallway.

  “Hello?” I called, my hoarse voice echoing through th
e empty rooms, until the sound was consumed by vapid silence. I hobbled down the carpeted staircase. “Is anybody home?”

  The house was completely vacant. There wasn’t a pizza box or PBR can in sight. Dust particles had already settled on the broken table in the dining room, and the rusty wind chimes sang eerily on the porch. The decrepit wall clock in the kitchen read 3:37. While I was passed out, everyone had packed up their summer gear and left for the city. For the first time since Memorial Day, the house was deathly quiet. Over the summer I’d gotten used to the grunts and roars of my Animal House–mates, and there had been something distinctly comforting about knowing they were always out in the backyard drinking beer and playing football. Just when I actually wanted to hear them egg each other on to do a keg stand, I was alone with my thoughts.

  After three months of happy oblivion, I’d finally had my first real insight into the Hamptons. I could finally sympathize with the Jakes and Elsies of the world. I’d been wrong to dismiss them as losers. I now knew exactly how they felt, drowning or blowing their problems away—even if the problems were as simple as not having any direction in life—in the oblivion of coke and booze. They woke up the next day at three in the afternoon, out of their skull with depression and coming down hard. The only light at the end of the black tunnel was going back to work and starting the eradication of their problems or unhappiness all over again. The cycle was born.

  I threw on a hooded sweatshirt, slipped on some flip-flops, donned my $12 huge, dark black sunglasses from TJ Maxx that hadn’t seen the light of day since my Gucci splurge a month and half ago, and walked outside, slamming the rickety screen door shut. All of the chairs on the porch had been folded up and piled neatly on the side of the house. The hundreds of empty beer bottles littering every available surface were gone, and someone had even swept up the cigarette butts and food wrappers. The tidiness of it all scared me—it was like a family had died and their long-lost relatives had come to pack up their belongings.

  Hoping food would calm the storm in my intestines, I started walking east on Main Street through Amagansett toward the Farmer’s Market. The entire town was jarringly vaporous—the gathering storm had brought the fog in off the water and the air around me felt damp and cold. I passed the Amagansett Ice Cream Club where I’d enjoyed many a cone and found that it was already closed for the season. A sign on the door read THANKS FOR A GREAT SUMMER. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!

  It took me a minute to adjust to what I was hearing: nothing. With the startling volume of the silence, I became conscious of just how quickly the Hamptons had emptied out. In the fifteen hours since the clock struck midnight on the last official day of the summer season, Amagansett had settled back into its position as a quaint, quiet seaside town. There was no traffic on Montauk Highway—all the Hummers, Porsches, and Jags had mysteriously vanished overnight. I half-expected tumbleweed to come rolling down the median. I passed the Talkhouse, which was always bursting at the seams with noise and activity, but the only signs of life were two stray cats feasting on bar trash piled in the alley beside the Amagansett hardware store.

  Even the Farmer’s Market had already downsized. They’d dismantled the mouthwatering outdoor display of locally grown produce and closed down the deli counter, cheese shop, and bakery. In the green courtyard, where tanned New Yorkers usually drank coffee and munched on chocolate croissants, there were now piles of stocked boxes and crates ready for winter storage. Eager for human contact, I smiled at the Bahamian cashier while she rang up my Poland Spring water, Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and saltine crackers.

  “It’s really quiet today.”

  “Yeah, it really clears out after the holiday,” she replied in her melodic island lilt.

  Clutching my remedies, I left the market and headed back through town. So many beautiful homes, and all of them were already closed up for the winter. I couldn’t believe people lived in them only three months out of the year.

  Witnessing the aftermath of the mass exodus out of the Hamptons, and being the only one left behind, I felt stranded and suddenly wanted to get off Long Island as fast as possible. It was September and I needed to get back to New York City where I belonged.

  I was nibbling on the saltines and sipping ginger ale as I walked, and placebo or not, they really helped my hangover. My mom had always given us crackers and ginger ale when we had upset stomachs, and as I munched on the salty wafers, I felt another sharp pang of homesickness. I wanted my mom. I wanted my family. I hadn’t gone home to Albany once all summer. I’d been too caught up in my glamorous Hamptons existence to be bothered to take the Greyhound up north.

  The rain started to drizzle the second I passed Gansett Green Manor, but I didn’t quicken my pace. The cool drops actually felt cleansing and soothed my headache as they moistened my hair and dripped down my face. With the charcoal sky as a backdrop, Animal House looked lonely and desolate when it came into view.

  I started to traipse across the soggy front lawn but stopped dead in my tracks. Parked in the driveway was James’s Range Rover. As the threat of an imminent confrontation entered my consciousness, my mind started reeling with questions. What was he doing here? What did he want? What am I going to say to him?

  Cautiously I approached the house. He was sitting on the porch looking the most disheveled I’d ever seen him. His hair was unkempt and, judging by the dark circles shadowing his eyes, I suspected he’d also had a rough night. The very sight of him made me feel like I’d been punched in the stomach by someone the size of a Spark bouncer.

  “Hey,” he said quietly as our eyes locked in an inexorable stare. I felt a phantom pain in my heart in the now-empty spot he had filled only yesterday.

  “What are you doing here?” I wanted to get in his Range Rover and run him over and drag his body down Montauk Highway, but at the same time I prayed that his presence on my porch was a sign that he really did love me and regretted everything that had happened the night before. There had to be a perfectly logical explanation for his behavior.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  “About what?” My voice was shaky.

  “Cassie, you need to let me explain . . .” he began.

  I stood there speechless on the lawn, the raindrops dampening my crackers and loosening the dirt on my filthy feet.

  “Come on, get out of the rain,” he urged. “I just want to talk.”

  “Then talk.” I climbed the stairs to the porch and leaned against the wobbly railing at a safe distance from him. I wasn’t about to let him touch me (even though more than anything I wanted to crumble in his lap and let his strong chest muffle the sound of my sobs while he stroked my hair). I became excruciatingly self-conscious in the truest sense of the word—I was painfully aware of every move I made, of each raindrop that slid down my face, of the rate at which I was breathing. So aware, in fact, that I swore I could actually feel my hair growing out of my scalp.

  It was a moment before he began. “Last night, before I picked you up for the clambake, I got into a fight with my dad. He told me I wasn’t allowed to see you anymore.”

  The force of his words rained down on me like nails. While this news shouldn’t have come as a shock, hearing it uttered by James out loud felt like being drawn and quartered on a scaffold by a skilled executioner. The kind of executioner who could pull your still-beating heart out of your chest cavity with his bare hands and show the pulsing muscle to a bloodthirsty crowd, all while you were wholly conscious of the electric pain and mortification that was consuming your body.

  “He threatened me with my trust fund. He actually told me he’d cut me off completely if I continued to date you. You have to understand—”

  “I’m sorry, James,” I interrupted, rage creeping into my voice, “but I don’t understand. I’ve never had a trust fund.”

  “That’s not the point, Cassie.”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “The point is . . . He’s my father, and . . . You don’t understand where he’s
coming from. You don’t know what he’s been through.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know anything about your father because he won’t even talk to me, even when I’m sitting across a table from him.”

  James took a deep breath. His eyes looked watery. “He doesn’t mean to be like that. He just—”

  “What?” I wailed.

  “My mother,” he said, barely audibly.

  “What about your mother?”

  An agonizing pause followed. I could hear every single suicidal raindrop meet its demise as it splashed onto the waterlogged lawn. Finally James spoke.

  “She was a counter girl at the Clam Shack when my father met her.”

  Confusion precipitated all around me. I tried to imagine an Edmonton, especially James’s mother, whom I’d always pictured as Princess Diana of Wales, serving fried clam strips and beer-battered shrimp at the dilapidated Clam Shack on Montauk Highway.

  “Are you being serious?”

  “They met when they were like eighteen. My father used to see her all the time when he summered out here. They fell in love and got married, even though my dad’s family was obviously against it. Anyway, she left right after I was born. And she took almost everything because my dad was too in love with her to ask her to sign a prenup. She even tried to take me, but my dad’s lawyers wouldn’t let that happen.”

  I felt like I was experiencing some sort of internal earthquake. The tectonic plates of my bones were shifting and colliding. James’s father had fallen for a counter girl at the Clam Shack who left him and took his money?

  I finally knew why no one else ever mentioned her. I tried to adjust to the image of Mr. Edmonton as a lovelorn victim. In my wildest dreams, I’d never imagined feeling sorry for the man, but suddenly I knew exactly how he felt.

  “How come you never told me about this before?”

  “I don’t like to talk about it.”

  I should have realized sooner that our relationship had a fatal flaw. We’d never talked about his obviously dysfunctional family history, and likewise he’d never asked me anything about my family beyond the few details and stories I’d volunteered.