It Happens in the Hamptons

by Holly Peterson

  “I know you have a reputation for thinking you control this entire beach. I saw you are gunning for the town board.”

  “I am,” said Bucky. “I just had a meeting with the mayor, actually, which is why I’m standing on the beach with a dress shirt and my blazer here on my arm, just trying to keep Southampton in tip-top shape. There was a surfboard problem and now there isn’t a surfboard problem, Mr. Chase. I assume that’s how I address you? Your daughter was a little excited over that surfboard problem, but she and I have gotten to know each other this summer a bit—she’s a well-brought-up lady, by the way—kudos to you and your wife on that, and we have worked it out fine.”

  “Bull-fucking-shit you worked it out,” Jake spurted. Bucky took his sunglasses off and wiped Jake’s spit off, using the bottom of his shirt. Cro-Magnon in the flesh. No other word for it.

  “I can see my daughter’s upset,” Jake continued. “This caused me to come down here and ask one thing of you: tell me the goddamn truth about why she’s so upset. Do grant me that man-to-man honor, Bucky. Have the decency to treat others with honesty and uphold the values of your anti-anyone-who-isn’t-a-white-Wonder-Bread-guy-in-khakis club you run?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever been accused of and insulted like this . . . that’s just inaccurate hearsay about our membership policies, Mr. Chase.” But then, Bucky thought about being aggressive back, seeing as this man might pummel him if he knew his daughter had her tongue halfway up his asshole just a mere seven days before. Or was it five? Or was it yesterday, or was it the girl in New York who . . . anyway, one of them had her tongue halfway up his asshole for sure.

  Watching this occur halfway down the beach, Kenny had had it. He’d fallen off the wagon the night before (second time this month) and was hung over from too many Hopnotic India Pale Ale beers, a brand that got him wasted much faster than regular beer. Not a good day for some dickhead from the Seabrook to harass his campers.

  In front of the instructors out in the water sitting on boards (and rapt at the shoreline confrontation), a quarter of the membership of the Seabrook sitting on their tattered beach chairs, about thirty random local and city people who happened to be strolling on the beach that day, Kenny shoved Bucky so hard he fell on his ass.

  As Bucky wiped the sand off, he looked at Kenny and said calmly, “You messed with the wrong man. Say goodbye to your camp.” He brushed off his ass and put his blazer on, rounding his shoulders a few times to have it settle right on his large frame. He then stomped off into a sea of yellow-and-white umbrellas.

  Bucky’s loafers slipped in the sand as he returned to the warm Seabrook womb. And, to think he’d been put in such a terrific mood this very morning by that little nymph who lived next door to the 37 Willow Lane cottage. Imagine, he hadn’t even taught a thing to that Cynthia sitter next door. She’d come revved with a motor on her like a goddamn Ferrari. He remembered her tight legs wrapped around him, her little tits bouncing away. What a waste of a monumental lay to be put in a mood like this.

  Now, with Bucky all hot from their argument, which kind of weirdly turned her on, Alexa decided to twist her little body around and start marching up the dune. As she did, she loved that she could feel her large butt move with force in that same direction and then jiggle back to position.

  “Why was Bucky yelling, honey, what’s the real reason, really a surfboard problem?” asked Jake, ruminating over whether to tell someone to tell someone to off him.

  “He’s just a prick, Dad.” Alexa was over Bucky’s bullshit. “You gotta make sure he doesn’t shut the camp down.”

  “Honey, I don’t like girls using those words . . . and I think there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Her father wouldn’t understand that she just wanted to see if her technique worked on an older man, too. And, the club cabana shot was just too good for her @DIDITHERETOO Instagram account. Plus Bucky was beyond handsome. And a gentleman sometimes. Not like guys her age. So mature. Kinda cool. But her father probably would disagree on that.

  “Well, I learned the ‘prick’ word because you use it all the time. I left my iced tea cup on his beach yesterday. You know, and he got all mad about manners. Then I was kind of rude because I was sticking up for the instructors that he gives a hard time to. You have to help them by the way, it’s getting bad.”

  “I will help them, but you sure that’s it? That’s all you were talking about with him?”

  “Yep. Just a jerk.” She batted her big brown eyes back at her rich daddy. “We all hate him, all the instructors, me, too.”

  Jake walked back to the parking lot while his daughter spread her towel back on the sand, leaving her long wetsuit her mother had bought her in her bag, having no intention of doing anything in camp that day except talk to people and cool down from her conversation with Bucky. She took a good selfie of her body (anonymous, no face) in the awesome $378 dollar bikini her mother had bought her over Christmas break. She captioned the photo, #LAPERLAPRINCESS, and posted it on her anonymous @DIDITHERETOO account. It was important people knew what she was working with in those cabanas.

  Next, she posted a photo of Cabana Number Thirty-Two (where she’d blown Bucky) and had captioned it, #PreppyPorn! People would figure out it was the Seabrook—or, maybe they wouldn’t. Didn’t matter. It made people curious and horny, both good things.

  When Bucky got all mad, he got her insides all anxious in a juicy way. Maybe they’d have a psycho-sexual makeup session in his house. She knew that screaming at him would only entice him to beg for her super special circle-the-tip, then suck all the way down technique that made him explode, like a bucket full on her skin. It was kind of gross, but also, kind of okay. You could just rub it in because it’s supposed to be good for your face. Anyway, the huge amount that came out, like a month’s supply, proved one thing for sure: she was really good at it.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  They Don’t Make ’Em like This Anymore

  Katie bit into her crab salad, mushy with too much mayonnaise, the chunks bland from being canned and processed. The watery iceberg did not help much.

  “Take a Triscuit,” Poppy advised, smiling, her crow’s-feet creasing, handing her a red plastic basket filled with saltine crackers and white bread rolls (seven grain rolls would have been way too daring in their post 1970 modernity). “The crab is so summery on crackers. I eat this every day, have for about fifty years now.”

  “You are a creature of habit,” remarked Katie.

  “Then, of course,” added Poppy, as she blew kisses at Cricket Fitzgerald, who looked thinner than a famine victim, now with her sidekick, Bitsy Fainwright. Both women clacked along the cement deck area in heavy white golf shoes with a leather flap on the top, huge sensible visors on their heads, and tight pale peach-and-pale green golf shirts that didn’t do wonders for showing off their midsections (one with several rolls showing in the front and back fat bursting around her bra straps, and one with an undernourished concave chest and torso). “Good game, ladies?” asked Poppy.

  Bitsy placed her tray of chef’s salad a few tables away and yelled back, “Lovely to see you, Poppy! And you, Katie from out West! We only played the back nine. Cricket here shanked one off a tree on the seventeen and then holed out from a bunker to win the match!”

  “Excuse me, I didn’t mean to be rude,” Poppy told Katie. “I need to say hi to everyone here. It’s very important for the community.” She winked. “I know you don’t drink during the day, but one night you could join us for a ladies dinner with my friends, who are, honestly”—she leaned in—“a hell of a lot more fun than the Topper Tobins and Bitsy Fainwrights of the world!”

  Katie smiled. “Well, I was so happy to help them and I know it was important to Bucky, which I’ve decided now to call him as it seems everyone does. And yes, I did, several times meet them, but, yes, they are a little . . .”

  “Tedious?”

  “Well,” Katie answered, “they are lovely in their own constancy and
effort to help.”

  “No, they aren’t. But there’s some good women here, just a little hard to find with the boring ones everywhere.” Poppy waved her hand at a local seventeen-year-old kid from Southampton high school working as a waiter for the summer. He liked Mrs. Porter, but found her son’s beaver shots of young girls his age beyond the pale of horrible male behavior. (Henry had taken photos of Bucky’s phone when he’d charged it for him behind the bar and couldn’t help sharing his shock.)

  “Yes, Mrs. Porter,” he said, keeping a safe ten-foot distance. “Your second Arnold Palmer is on the way.”

  “Thank you,” Poppy answered. “Let me be clear with you, darling. I’m on the committee, or even I guess cochair, of the Patio Party only because my great, great aunt first . . . oh well, never mind with her, she was so drunk at the first event, she passed out in the rose garden and no one could find her!

  “What matters today, is with Bucky running for town board, the Patio Party has got to have a huge crowd. He’ll give a speech and remind everyone to vote. Like a politician, he needs his female companion by his side at this important event, and certainly around for the election.”

  “Well,” Katie said, “I’m here.”

  “I want you to do your committee work. It’s very important to the community we’ve built. You, linked with Bucky, need to set an example as a hardworking woman who gives back to our community and doesn’t just pose for society flashbulbs. I like that your son, Huck, is already working in the whaling exhibit in my attic . . . the labels that Bucky’s father wrote don’t stick anymore, but I’m intent on keeping them. Huck taping them nicely is a way to display my husband’s handwriting, now that he’s gone.” As Poppy got all excited explaining the uses of whale oil in 1692, Katie searched the beach again for Bucky. She would ask what on earth was going on down on the sand with Alexa. On top of that problem, she didn’t want him to bump into Luke.

  Poppy hit her glass with her fork. “You with me, Katie? Do you see why they had these huge homes in Nantucket with all those barrels of . . .”

  “Sorry, I was listening, I was just wondering where Bucky is.”

  “And I want you to know I appreciate your committee work on the party, but I don’t expect you to be friends with those women.” She winked. “Social swans in my day worked tirelessly to give back. Whether you toil away in the home, at a job, or for a cause, the work should be serious and intentional. And that, my dear”—Poppy smiled—“is why I respect you so much. Paying rent even though I didn’t ask for it, getting your hours set with the tutoring first week out, applying to the local school system, taking charge of your life as any woman should.”

  “Well, I think Bucky respected that in me as well.”

  Poppy adjusted huge white sunglasses she’d recently found that belonged to her mother in 1964. “I’m rooting for him to catch you as his very own, but regardless, you can stay in the cottage and pursue your career for years if you like. My friends and I are women supporters before anything. It’d be good for my son to work hard at earning your love; you’re a substantial woman.” And then Poppy’s face softened. “I love my son. But he does have some traits of his father, George Herbert Bradford Porter Sr.” She leaned in. “Too many of those passes in life, you know, ones George Sr. and I fought like the dickens over.”

  Katie looked down. “Well, Bucky seems to work very hard.”

  Poppy pulled her glasses down for this. “Bucky got handed the same things the same way his father did. And I never agreed with it one bit. Bucky had straight C’s in ninth grade, only for lack of effort, not brains. He should have gone to a local school that handled him right, not be pushed into Exeter and Princeton, the most prestigious schools in the country. It didn’t serve him. He’s a terrific man, he’s kind, but, you have to stand on your feet like you do.”

  “Well, I do because I have to.”

  “I have to as well now. One thing George the elder did for me was leave me in charge of the financial reins. He did respect me, and said I’d figure out the best way to handle any family trusts. There’s not much left in them, but still, there’s something there. A nice nest egg. Two cottages. We’ll see how Bucky handles himself in the coming years. Perhaps you can help him. Teach him a little something about accountability and drive.”

  Before Katie could verbally tap-dance around that request, Bucky approached the table, several beads of sweat pouring off his sideburns on what was an unseasonably coolish, August day.

  Right away Katie noticed something strange about him, starting with the fact that he didn’t sweat in street clothes ever. He looked unkempt, with trails of sand on the back of his khakis, his shirt not neatly tucked in (as it usually was), and his hair askew. He looked, frankly, like he’d had a little afternoon romp in the hay. Katie wondered about the times he didn’t call or check in. Was he with someone else? For the first time, she felt for sure he had been.

  “What’s going on, Bucky, all okay?” asked Poppy. “What on earth . . . where have you been, young man?”

  “Mother, I’m forty-three years old. I was at a town meeting for the election, kissing the mayor’s ass, if you want to know exactly.”

  “Bucky, please.”

  “That’s why I’m in slacks and a dress shirt in the middle of the day.”

  “How did the meeting go?”

  “Fine,” Bucky answered, curling his lips inward with such force that his mouth transformed into a tight, trembling line. The salt-and-pepper gray wisps of hair just above his ears were now stringy, dark with sweat. “Mother, we need to talk.”

  “I can go.” Katie started to stand. Bucky pushed her back down into the chair, a tad too hard.

  “Stay,” he said, and patted her hand. He then sat down and waved impatiently for a drink. “Jesus, these waiter kids turn into slackers by August.”

  “Well, then, she’ll stay,” offered Poppy, trying to diffuse the tension. “Your friend Katie and I have been having a lovely time. We’ve discussed the remarkable tutor hours she’s put in place. We’ve decided to continue to bring Huck to do his labeling work in the whale exhibit.”

  “Fine. Just. Fine.” Bucky shook his head. His mother gave her only son a frigid glare. Katie’s eyes darted from Bucky to Poppy. She thought this was exactly the kind of exchange mother and son must have had when he was five years old and didn’t want to sit for those Christmas card portraits, wearing this very same outfit.

  “Do you have a problem with Huck’s project?” Poppy admonished. “A young man working hard and showing appreciation?”

  “I do not,” Bucky replied firmly, rolling his lips in together again.

  “Well, then what is your problem right now?” asked the matriarch of the Seabrook.

  “Mother. Cool it. The problem will be solved.”

  Katie knew in the depth of her soul, as did mother and son, this “problem” was a big one.

  Bucky leaned back on the two back legs of his chair, and smacked his lips at the tartness of his fresh Arnold Palmer.

  “It’s a cool day, but I’m feeling warm.” He stood up. “I’m going to shed some clothes.” Bucky then took off his favorite blazer, the Lilly Pulitzer one with the pink-and-yellow gardenia lining, and folded it on the empty seat.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Trouble Leads to More Trouble

  Monday, August 21

  Luke, Kona, Kenny, Alexa, and a few of the other kids straggling after camp hung out by the coolers.

  “Anyone seen Bucky?” Kenny asked. “It’s been days. He must be plotting.”

  “He deserved it. Let it go,” Kona said. “He can’t be yelling at one of our kids. You were right to push him, he can’t . . .”

  “It’s going to cause us so much headache.” Luke shook his head, as his mind ricocheted between Bucky’s rantings and why Katie would even consider dating him. “I got a feeling Bucky’s onto more than he says. He’s got the bay constable watching us through the reeds. They delayed the legal meeting with the board
, probably just to hand us more summonses.”

  “Well, I want to thank Kenny,” said Alexa, standing up, twirling her body toward Kenny in that jiggly way and slapping him on his shoulder. “Bucky Porter was being a dick that day, as usual, so, you did the right thing to shove him, and I appreciate it.”

  Kenny nodded, noncommittal, feeling his actions might mess with the camp’s future again. It was one thing to beat up drunk assholes in bars; but he shouldn’t hit men on the beach. It was foul. They’d all agreed at the AA meeting he’d gone too far. He had to work on self-control.

  Alexa’s phone rang. She hit Ignore. It rang again. She hit Ignore. Six times more, the same deal. “My brother is so annoying.”

  “Can’t disagree with that,” Kona said.

  Alexa’s phone rang three more times. This time it was her dad.

  “Honey. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the beach, why . . .”

  “With whom?”

  “Uh, Luke, Kona, two kids you don’t know, Jack and Teddy. We’re . . .”

  “Put Kona on the phone.”

  Alexa exhaled. Life was so taxing. She handed her new Louis Vuitton iPhone case with a little purse on it to Kona. “My dad wants to speak to you. He’s riled up.”

  Kona picked up, his heart beating fast, reminding himself that Julia Chase had never come close to agreeing to drop her panties for him.

  “Yes? You want us to come? To you?” Kona raised his eyebrows at Luke. “Right now? She’s here. Yes, we can. Luke can, too. We’ll meet you there. We might get there way before you if you’re an hour away, but, yes, we’ll get some lunch, then be on our way to you. Just Luke and me.”

  Kona knew Kenny wasn’t jonesing for an invite back to the Chase estate. Right about now, Kenny was only thinking about the Sam’s deli “Chaz Special” he devoured every single day after paddling in waves for three hours: French fries in the base, topped with popcorn chicken, then chili and melted cheese.