“Beach.”
Flattered to receive a formal invitation, Ilana turned and consulted the (similarly brightly bandeau’d, equally prissy) brunette stick figures poised next to her. “Yeah, okay,” she agreed, despite the fact Jamie had been silently willing her to say no.
“Great,” Jamie coughed up. Let the games begin!
Which they did, only not quite yet. For also in the way of field trips, anything involving masses of people required extensive packing and changing and stopping for food at a variety of places, and consequently missing, like, two hours of sun. But at long last a huge lineup of cars (because no one wanted to have to stay at the beach a minute longer than desired) followed Jamie, Allison, and Rachel down the consistently clogged Montauk Highway. Having insisted on leading the pack (it was her idea, after all), Jamie did exactly as she was instructed: she turned off Montauk Highway onto First Neck Lane, and took the road all the way down. Until, believe it or not (and only upon discovering a sign bearing the aforementioned name did she), they made it to Dune Road. Following the traffic flow into a busy parking lot, Jamie pulled up to the gate and triumphantly rolled down her window.
That’s when the gray cloud settled over their party.
“Do you have a permit?” the gruff older woman manning the entrance barked after bending over to glance at her (sticker-deprived) windshield.
“No, how do I get one?” Jamie said.
The thick lines around her jaw hardened, and the woman began muttering to herself as if it wasn’t her job to inform people of these things. “Dune Beach is private,” she said, as calmly as she had in her. “It’s restricted to residents.”
“We have a house here.”
“But do you have a seasonal pass from the Town of Southampton? You have to apply for them with proof of ownership at the beginning of the summer. For a hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Oh, no.” Peering through the rearview mirror, Jamie noticed the cars piling up behind her. She leaned in closer. “Do you know where there’s a public beach around here we can go to?”
“A public beach?” The woman wrinkled her sun-damaged nose in disgust, like Jamie had just told her they wanted to lick the ground. But falling deep into thought, her disgust quickly gave way to confusion. “I guess Fowler?”
“And...where’s that?” This was like pulling teeth.
She spouted out elaborate instructions, throwing around street names like “Toylsome” and “Wickapogue” (which, unnervingly foreign, did nothing to instill confidence). And though Allison diligently took notes from her shotgun position, when Jamie pulled away and off to the side she’d obviously lost her previous sense of adventure. “This sounds too complicated. I vote you just call Mark.”
Hearing his name made Jamie cringe. Though they’d since come to coexist in the house peacefully, Jamie found him as haughty and insensitive as ever. But as the train of shareholders’ cars veered expectantly to the side behind her, Jamie imagined that this was no time for pride. And so, while Allison called Brian to start the explanatory phone chain, Jamie reluctantly dialed Mark’s number.
He sounded pretty surprised to hear from her, which only prompted her to describe her problem (really, it could have befallen anyone) that much more quickly and professionally. She explained how they’d mistakenly wound up at a private beach, and wondered if perhaps he knew of a quicker way to get to Fowler?
“Fowler? Never heard of it,” he said. “The only beach anyone goes to in South is Cooper’s.” He paused pensively. “Actually, you’re really close to it. Go back down First Neck Lane, make a left on Great Plains, and another left on Cooper Neck Road, and you should be good.”
“Thanks,” she spit out, eager to curtail the conversation.
“One more thing. Is it just one car of you?”
Jamie sighed. “No...why?”
“Because they charge daily rates for parking, thirty dollars a car. How many cars are you?”
She counted quickly, and in a small voice answered, “Eight.”
He let out an amused chuckle. “Let me guess. This was all your idea?” But before she could protest, he added, “I’m going to tell you how to get to a church around there with free parking on Sundays. Leave as many cars as you can.”
“Great, thanks.”
“Also”—was he trying to make her feel as retarded as possible?—“you should know that no beach in the Hamptons is really off-limits, even the private ones. That’s the big trick. Only the parking is restricted, so anyone can go to any beach if they walk or get a ride there.” His superiority clearly intact, he went on to give her directions.
Though she had to give him credit. Heeding his (however pompous) advice, they were soon parked, paid, and heading happily in the direction of the ocean.
“Look, Dave. You’re not allowed in from nine to six PM,” Jamie exclaimed. “It says NO DOGS.”
“Or alcohol or glass?” Rob said, pausing before the sign and hugging their rule-infringing cooler closer to his body. “Yeah, I can see why we left the house now.”
But once they made it to the sand, they actually did.
Spreading out on her towel and reveling in the breeze, Jamie decided that going to the beach was much like joining a gym: once you finally hauled your ass there and set yourself up, you wondered why you hadn’t done it a long time ago.
And unlike their overcrowded pool area—where you lived in constant fear of being thrown into the water, or having your lounge chair stolen in your absence—this was surprisingly peaceful.
Until something disrupted the peace. When the guys had made a beeline for the ocean the moment they arrived, Jeff asked if she would keep an eye on his wallet and cell phone (the latter of which was now ringing its unfamiliar ring off the hook).
Naturally Jamie fought the urge to look at it...at first. But when it stopped ringing only to start again, she dug the perpetrator out of her beach bag. Holding it far from her body, as if it could spontaneously pick up, she wondered, was it too much of a stretch that STACY was a guy? (And, after peeking at his call history, that Jessica, Alyssa, and Stephanie were, too?)
Jamie kept this to herself as her friends began babbling, conscious that she was no longer an active participant in the conversation. But this new piece of information bothered her. Obviously she had no right to be annoyed: they’d never defined their relationship, and while they hooked up exclusively with each other in the house, barring scattered calls and e-mails, none of that had translated outside the Hamptons. (Though Jamie wondered when he even had time to see anyone else, what with continually running out east every weekend!) Besides, hadn’t this always been her ideal situation? The kind of situation her words and body language unconsciously solicited? She was the one who hated ground rules! She was the one who’d never wanted any.
The funny thing was...later, when Jeff picked her up and carried her kicking and screaming toward the ocean—which she’d always been a bit afraid of—she didn’t mind his leading her into unknown waters.
Well, until the whole crab situation came about.
They were having this perfectly good time dodging the waves when Dave cupped some water in his hand and pointed out how, if you looked really closely, there were tiny baby crabs floating in it.
Horrified, Jamie shook her body free of invisible crustaceans (the way you immediately start to scratch when someone says they have the chicken pox). But Rob’s response to Dave’s discovery was far more...gastronomic.
“Eat one,” he said, looking Dave dead in the eye. “Fifty bucks.”
“I’ll eat one,” Brian said, shrugging. And in a fluid motion he scooped one up and swallowed it whole. Her stomach writhing in sympathy, Jamie wondered if Allison had yet witnessed Brian’s juvenile side.
But Rob was not to be outdone. On their way back through the sand, they stumbled upon a bigger, meatier crab, around the size of a silver dollar. Rob dove for it and clutched it ravenously.
“I’m begging you. Do not eat that,” Jamie pleaded.
“What, haven’t you eaten crab before?” He dangled his prey before her eyes.
“Are you crazy? You can get diseases from eating raw animals straight from the ocean!”
“I didn’t realize you were a marine biologist.” And despite her pleas (in fact, probably because of them), he popped the little sucker right into his mouth, shell and all.
“That is the grossest thing I’ve ever seen!” she shrieked, listening to the vivid crunching sounds and watching him gag it down. “Let’s see how much ass you get once every girl in the city hears about this.”
“Hey!” he garbled, locking his elbow around her neck, then setting her free once he’d swallowed. He flashed her a cautionary look. “What happens in the Hamptons, stays in the Hamptons.”
And stay in the Hamptons they did, at least until later on a Sunday than they ever had before. Pretending they all didn’t have work the next day, a big group of them decided to stick around after the beach and go out for dinner at Indian Cove, where Mark claimed you could get cheap (and yet still sanitary) seafood.
But speaking of cheap...
Jamie still wasn’t sure how this happened, but somehow Ilana wound up sitting next to Jeff on one side of the table while she was stuck sandwiched between the Dud and Mark—who’d met them there—on the other.
(Okay, fine, she sort of knew how it happened. It was because she’d insisted on stopping at a drugstore for a nail file—her chipped nail was getting caught on everything—and once they’d arrived everyone had already filled up one side of the table. But come on now, she was the one hooking up with him, wasn’t it obvious that she should be sitting there?)
Having no other conversation options (each of her friends had attempted to talk to the Dud at some point this summer, and each in turn had failed miserably), Jamie struck up some small talk with Mark. And—who would have thought—he was actually funny.
Actually, he was really funny. His brown eyes lit up contagiously as he relayed tales of shareholders past. For instance, the guy who’d invited twenty Resort strippers back to their house to party late-night. Or the one who’d borrowed a button-down shirt to wear out, only to turn around and sell it for a hundred bucks to some meathead the Jet door guy wouldn’t let in with his wifebeater. Overcome by laughter, Jamie was unsure whether the humor lay in the stories or their animated storyteller.
“That’s so funny!” she found herself saying again and again. And while that was often the phrase she used when she didn’t know what else to say, as she blinked back the tears, now she genuinely meant it.
Still, every time she heard Ilana’s trademark cackle, again and again, Jamie glanced over in annoyance. She tried to be discreet about it, but Mark eventually called her out.
“I know you don’t like her very much.”
“Who, Ilana? I like her just fine,” Jamie lied, taking some more shrimp from the seafood sampler.
Mark didn’t buy it. “She can come off kind of loud, like she needs to be the center of attention. But you should cut her some slack. I’ve known her a while, and she used to have serious self-esteem issues.”
Jamie watched as, in conversation, Ilana jovially placed her hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “Apparently.” Though just as she was going to change the subject (Ilana’s personal life was one area in which Jamie desired no further clarity), Mark went on.
“Her freshman year at Penn, she dropped thirty pounds because of an eating disorder and had to be hospitalized for a month. But don’t say anything,” he added quickly, “no one really knows about it.”
Jamie wasn’t sure if Mark liked her enough to entrust her with this information, or liked Ilana enough to want to defend her. But from the flirtatious way he’d been engaging her, she had a hunch it wasn’t the latter. “So what about you?”
“What about me?” He had this way of looking at her like he knew something about her no one else did. Or like he was constantly amused by a joke that only he was privy to. Perhaps that joke was life itself, something others in comparison took way too seriously (his work was just as lucrative even though he had a lax, entrepreneurial approach). Either way, there was a lot more going on behind his unkempt, beach-bronzed, unassuming exterior than she’d previously given him credit for.
“I just mean, no one knows a lot about you, either.” She took a sip from her glass and met his gaze head-on. “Like, is it the same girl you bring back to your room every weekend, or do you grant different members of your fan club the honor?”
“I wish. I haven’t brought a girl back to my room once this summer.”
Jamie stared at him incredulously. “So what is it you run home to do after you deposit us at the clubs?”
“Sleep.” He laughed, pausing to glance out the window at the spectacular seaside view. “I’ve already done the whole partying-till-five-AM thing. Plus, running a house is so much more work than you think. While you were at the beach all day, I had a ton of shit to take care of.”
Jamie didn’t mean to snort derisively, but this she didn’t entirely believe. “Like what?”
Turning defensive, he sat up straight. “Like deal with the cleaning people and the lawn cutters, and stock up on alcohol and food, and stuff for the Labor Day White Party, and repair that chair Rob broke the other week...”
“Sounds annoying.”
He attacked a lobster with a loud crack. “Try expensive.”
Unmoved, Jamie let out a theatrical sigh. “So now you’ll only walk away from the summer with fifty grand of our money instead of an even hundred.”
“Right,” he joked, strangely compelled to set her straight. “Listen, it’s not that black and white. With all this summer’s expenses, I’ll be happy if I come out on top.”
Jamie pushed the sexual reference from her mind. She rested her chin on her hands. “You could still throw us a comp once in a while. You know, just for good measure.”
Stunned, he merely looked at her—really truly looked at her. “Why do you think you’re so special?”
Jamie grinned. “Why are you in such denial of it?”
Proving to be a smart guy, Mark quickly surrendered. “You”—he pointed his fork at her—“are a handful.”
“Me? I’m like, the easiest-going girl ever,” she said, with a flip of her two-hundred-dollar-cut, blow-dried locks. “You just don’t know me that well.”
But as Jeff’s phone loudly beckoned from across the way, Jamie realized there was a lot at that table left unknown.
Was it Stacy? she thought. Or perhaps Jessica or Alyssa or Stephanie? She never did find out, even after the meal when she said good-bye to Jeff, setting him loose to do whatever it was he did during the week. But as she, Rachel, and Allison headed back toward Route 27—past the bagel store, the cigarette stand, the share house, and all the clarity that came with it—Jamie’s demystification effort was far from complete.
For things are all well and good when you’re hooking up with someone in the Hamptons. But once 1088 Montauk is left behind on Sunday night, what happens in the Hamptons sometimes really does stay there.
And anything else, everything else, falls into a gray area.
Chapter Eighteen
Every population in statistics has a mean: an average, expected value. All other samples in this population are then measured in relation to this mean—specifically, by exactly how many standard deviations away from it that sample lies. It follows that the margin of error, the deviance from this decided benchmark, comes to assume more importance than even the sample itself.
Thus, when Mark couldn’t make it out to the house one weekend, appointing his trusty second in command to stand in, Rachel supposed it only natural to compare Craig’s management reign with life as they knew it. To rank just how well he measured up against what was expected.
Not that comparisons didn’t run continuously throughout the minds of summer shareholders. Even before the season’s start, when first selecting a house amid the flurry of promoter e-mails (each boasting different-size “m
ansions,” in different locations, for different price packages), Rachel found comparisons to be both easy to draw and, later, difficult to forget.
Should she have done that house in ritzy, old-money-heavy East (which had been all over “Page Six” lately) rather than physically closer, younger/hipper South? And on days her butt felt glued to the pool, how about those free bagels one house promised every morning, and barbecues (not just burgers and hot dogs, we’re talking chicken and sides) thrown every afternoon? And, tiring quickly of her prospects, how much better was the crowd at the house professing hotter guys/“all girls”? (Surely you must have seen last summer’s photo album conveniently attached to the promotional e-mail? And of course all those beautiful bikini-clad people did actual shares in the house, and didn’t just stop by once for a cameo!)
At night was when the comparisons truly ran wild, as each house manager had a preconfigured weekly lineup that he was paid to follow (Mark’s being Pink Elephant on Fridays and Star Room on Saturdays). Friday was the less crowded night in general, and for this reason it left the nightclub owners more share-house-dependent. (Saturday brought with it a new spurt of scenesters, locals, and a less coveted hit-and-run crowd—who’d come out just for the night, only to sober up at the Hampton Bays Diner, then drive back at dawn.) But on those particular Fridays when Rachel found herself at Pink Elephant—congregated around the same booth with the same people, for what felt like the gazillionth time—she couldn’t help but envision the classier crowds, ample investment bankers, and either more or less crowded venues (each preferable in the face of its opposite) she was being deprived of.
Though, as Rachel abruptly learned, being deprived of a “good night out” would be far from this upcoming weekend’s paramount concern. Any of the share house’s inherent shortcomings—even the unnerving fact that Craig would be steering their ship solo—paled in comparison with the monumental source of worry that hit her all at once. Well, that actually serenaded her.
“Guess wha-aaat?” her sister had chimed over the phone line the previous Thursday.
How the Other Half Hamptons Page 22