It Happens in the Hamptons Page 3

  Katie tried to get the attention of the waitress behind the counter. “My change for the water? I, just, didn’t get . . .”

  “I forgot. Sorry!” the girl said. “I’m dealing with another order, give me a little!” The espresso machine gurgled as it steamed up milk.

  A woman in line behind Katie reached for a Fair Trade raw hemp bar on the counter, elbowing her in the ear, and screamed at anyone who’d listen. “An almond milk chai latte with Stevia and a wasabi tuna Swiss chard wrap! Do you mind dusting it with some turmeric?”

  Katie’s mom had always reminded her to find the funny in annoying situations. She wanted to bark out an order for a donut with pink frosting and sprinkles just to make a point, but she’d be just as likely to find a can of Spam here. Finally, the waitress placed her fourteen dollars on the counter.

  Before leaving the upscale Silver Apple with her son’s overpriced water, Katie looked back at the aggressively thin housewife pointing her finger at the local waitress. She was yammering on about the obvious difference between Stevia and Splenda and that they should really know to put turmeric in their food for its anti-inflammation benefits. She resolved to forgive the young woman who’d taken forever with her fourteen dollars.

  “Two bikes. Nothing fancy, just for us to tool around in, please,” Katie asked the distracted man behind the counter of the Gyrations bike shop, about six doors down.

  The store owner, Harry, looked over his reading glasses to estimate the cost of Katie’s shoes and bag. He didn’t need to look at her son’s Teva water sandals to discern this probably wasn’t his biggest sale of the day.

  “Not fancy? What do you mean by that?” the man asked, without bothering to glance up from the ledger.

  “I mean, just what I said,” said Katie matter-of-factly, not wanting to jump to conclusions about this guy. Maybe he was busy during a holiday weekend. “Like, three speeds at the most for me. And just anything for my son that rolls down a street safely.”

  “Uh-hmmm. So just two . . .”

  “Yeah. We’re two people, who need two bikes.” Katie bit her lower lip and squinted her eyes at the salesman. She wanted very badly to believe that all the Hamptons’ snobby-ness she’d been wary of wasn’t going to materialize on day two.

  The fifty-something Harry lumbered off his stool. “Well,” he muttered. “We are having a Memorial Day special.” He led her to the front of the store where a dozen, brightly colored three-speed bikes were lined up. “William, pull out a few, please,” he asked his employee, a kid who looked hardly old enough to be in high school.

  “Oh great, I don’t know if you have any sales if we buy two but . . .”

  Harry interrupted her. “Everyone who isn’t training to do triathlons, and wants a little three-speed clunker to drive around town in, takes this model.” He shook his head. “And I mean everyone. It’s called the Townie. Twelve colors, all pretty run-of-the-mill Easter-egg palette. We got dozens in the warehouse next door.”

  Katie figured that these people must know something if they are all buying the same model; it must rarely break down, or be easy to ride. “Well, okay. It looks like what I’m after.”

  Bang! The front glass door swung as if it had been blasted with a significant explosives cache. The wooden door molding almost clipped Katie’s nose, and the force knocked over a small biking glove display case. An almost visible cloud of gardenia-scented perfume nearly asphyxiated Katie and Huck.

  Helping to tidy up the gloves now strewn on the floor did not enter the mind of the forty-three-year-old Margaux Carroll. She moved swiftly, witch-on-a-broom style, her silky Calypso St. Barth’s–brand caftan flowing behind her. A floppy white straw hat hung out several inches farther than her shoulders and looked absurd on her skinny frame. It was as if someone had placed an entire beach umbrella on her head.

  She screamed to no one in particular, “Can I get some help, please? Hello?” (That “hello” pronounced as “what the hell is wrong with you people?”) Her enormous black round sunglasses made her look like an oversized insect in a horror film. The Botox and Juvéderm injections stretching every corner of her face in lopsided directions didn’t help.

  The owner, Harry, looked over Katie’s shoulder and yelled to the back of the store for the floor manager, “Roger! Customer coming in hot.”

  Katie continued on her task. “So this bike looks fine, my son needs a little one, too. What . . .”

  “I’m so sorry to do this to you,” Margaux said to Roger, who now sped to the front of the store. She played with the curls of a recent blow-dry. “I’ve got a thousand houseguests, and we all got this sudden, really fun idea to go on a bike ride. All together. We want to cruise down Beachwood Lane to the ocean before sunset.”

  Roger responded in a tone reminiscent of a meditation tape. “We have everything you need in stock, Mrs. Carroll, I’m sure.”

  “Can you send over a ton of the bikes?” Margaux spat back at him like bullets from an automatic weapon. “You know, the ones everyone . . . like the Old Schwinns we used to ride, the cute . . .”

  “You mean those in the window? The Townies?” Roger asked.

  “Is that what they’re called?” She snorted. “Oh, that’s so funny. Like, yeah, we’re townies. Helloooo?! If you could see two of my houseguests who are gay designers, definitely not townies, definitely very chic city people, but okay! That’s funny, I like it.”

  Margaux marched back over toward the window near Katie and the owner, banging Huck’s head with her Celine bucket “it” bag on the way. “Oh, so sorry, sweetie!” she said as if she didn’t mean it at all, and kept moving. “I really like it when houseguests match. My friends do that. They get bright printed sweatshirts with something like team carroll july 4th, 2017 waiting on their beds, and I always think to myself, I have to do that! Can I get like ten Townies or so? Maybe call it an even dozen?” She widened her eyes like a four-year-old wanting her way in a toy store.

  Katie pondered getting on the next flight back to her Hood River hamlet before her landlord rented out her old apartment. She watched Margaux fish into the bottom of her purse, her toned upper arms exhibiting the hours she’d spent all winter in power Ashtanga yoga. She whipped out her black American Express card, a metallic, thick, heavy purchasing machine with a credit line of over five hundred thousand dollars. Roger reached for it.

  “Just, can you just please write down the card number,” she demanded. “Could you actually, just, file it? Then I never have to wait for the little machine that takes forever?”

  Roger nodded. He knew summer lady invaders wanted total capitulation from shop people, cementing their serf-to-empress relationship.

  “Good. You sound like you can handle this,” Margaux said, as if Roger had an I.Q. of fifty-five. “My home is 325 Pridwin Lane. It’s got a really long driveway, I mean really long, you’ll get to the house eventually. I have to tell everyone that. The house is called Sailor’s Way.”

  Roger nodded. “Sailor’s Way?” He shot Harry a glance.

  “Yes. My daughter took a few sailing lessons the summer before we built it. Of course she stopped. But the name stuck,” explained Margaux. “And, oh . . . can I have these bike racks?”

  Roger had to pause. “Well they are part of the store display. We need them for . . .”

  “I need them all next to each other outside. Without the racks, they’ll tip over in the wind and . . .”

  “Harry?” Roger gave up all sense of reasoning to the boss.

  Harry walked from his less wealthy client, Katie. He had bought the racks in a retail supply catalogue for forty-nine dollars. “Mrs. Carroll, they do belong to the store. But I’ll give you a deal, you can have three for three-hundred dollars each.”

  “You’re the best!” Margaux pumped her arms hard as she stormed back into the middle of the store. “I need baskets. Those cute white ones . . . that hold, say, a towel and bottle of rosé? And you have orange plastic wineglasses? The kind everyone has around the pool?�
��

  “Mrs. Carroll, we are a bike store. Most don’t carry glassware. And I’d bet you would not like the plastic bottles the athletes use . . .”

  “Hideous. Never.”

  “Halsey Hardware has the plastic wineglasses in all colors. My buddy runs the store. I know they have them, aisle right off the counter.”

  “Do you think you could go get, say, twenty of them and throw them in the baskets when you deliver everything? I would really appreciate it.”

  Harry shook his head NO back at Roger, as he returned to Katie and found a small bike for Huck. He whispered to Katie, “You have to treat these women like toddlers and at some point draw a line.”

  Katie resolved to do the same should she ever encounter one at close range.

  Roger explained to Margaux, “I can’t go to another store and purchase glasses for you, that’s just—” He shook his head at her sternly as if she should know at some point not to ask certain things of her subjects. “That’s too much.”

  The cash register pinged. “Just so you know, the charge will be $13,843.53.”

  “Look, I’m not an idiot,” Margaux said. “I went to Dartmouth. How much of a markup are you making on the bike stands alone? Or should we calculate your commission on a fourteen-thousand-dollar sale, done in eight minutes of your time . . . and you can’t get me sixteen plastic glasses? Really?” Then she added, making quotation marks with her fingers, “From your ‘buddy’?”

  Roger wanted to smack this woman. But, on some deeply demented level, he knew she had a point.

  Margaux relented. “It’s fine. I’ll send my guy.” Then, her mood brightened with a brilliant inspiration. “Maybe I’ll tell him to get a dozen orange beach towels at that little Aerin Lauder store, one for each guest. It’ll be so cute when we get to the beach. Like a little orange sunset army announcing summer! We’ll just, you know, take off!”

  And that she did, into the purring Lexus LS sedan her chauffer had waiting for her outside.

  Katie took a breath and tried to remember the good folks back at the highway deli. “I’m sorry, can I ask again? How much is this sturdy Townie bike that everyone has?”

  “Eight hundred ninety-five dollars,” Harry answered.

  “Oh, that’s a lot. I just need a little . . .”

  “I’m sorry, you seem like a nice woman, but I can’t give you a deal.” He leaned in. “There’s a Kmart with a very good bike department. I know they have plenty of those Huffy brand bikes. They last years and cost only sixty-nine bucks.” He smiled.

  “Thanks,” Katie answered quietly, beginning to understand there were two distinct worlds with two distinct economies out here: one with meatball heroes and one with wasabi tuna Swiss chard wraps. “We only need a bike for this summer. I’ll survive if it isn’t a Townie . . .”

  “Mom,” Huck looked up at her and announced loudly, “I don’t like the bikes in this store.”

  Katie knelt down on her knees and smiled so hard she could feel her ears pulling backwards. She kissed Huck’s perfect forehead and thought, just maybe, she could alone raise a son with judgment, a gut for instincts, and good taste.

  Chapter Seven

  The Binary Beachfront

  Monday, May 29

  “I got four watermelons, a huge tub of Crisco, and nine dozen eggs,” Luke announced as he walked up to the instructors waiting for him at the patch of land between the sand and the public parking lot. “I figured it’s a beach games day.”

  “Good move,” Kona answered. “Look at the ocean. Flatter than my third grade girlfriend.”

  Memorial Day Monday marked the end of the first weekend of Kona and Luke’s Tide Runners Camp, where dozens of kids would show up and pay one hundred and fifty dollars for three hours of water sports lessons, rain or shine. Their friend Kenny, who worked at the camp part-time, busied himself inflating inner tubes for activities in the bay. “Luke, Kenny, you guys count the kids,” Kona told the instructors he’d assembled that day: men with no official training besides a lifetime in the water. “No waves, no surfing for sure. Slather up the watermelons with the Crisco and we’ll throw them in the water and they can try to hang onto them.”

  Tide Runners Camp offered surfing and ocean safety lessons on the Atlantic side, and their two dilapidated motorboats took small groups water-skiing and tubing on the bay side of the parking lot. Three rusted Jet Skis were available for lucky adults over eighteen.

  The instructors’ shoddy equipment and mellow surfer demeanor did not translate into reckless behavior. In reality, no one had greater respect for the power of the ocean than these men who battled it every day. And that was a good thing: their clients ranged from age four to seventy, many wanting to try out surfing for the first time.

  It was a simple fact as clear as Kona’s ability to “harvest pussy”: the locals respected the power of the ocean and the city people often did not. Their ignorance, hubris, and stupidity would lead them to walk into crushing waves they couldn’t handle, with riptides they couldn’t see. The guys figured their colossal estates weren’t enough to hold them over: these people felt entitled to own Mother Nature as well.

  By 9:00 a.m., the parking lot that led up to camp resembled an arms dealer convention in Kuwait City with expensive sedans, SUVs, and two-seater sports cars jamming in and out of tight spots. Kids piled out of the cars dragging wetsuits, plush Frette beach towels, and monogrammed tote bags loaded with coconut water and tubes of seventy-five-dollar Orlane Pure Soin Sun Cream SPF 30.

  “Do you know if Alexa will be at camp today? It’s nuts how girls from the city grow up too fast,” Kona told Luke, tying his hair back into a ponytail. “Julia Chase didn’t stop by the shop all weekend that I saw. I was hoping to cop a little feel of something.”

  “Julia is your whack concept of who you should be fucking, not mine,” Luke answered. “I haven’t seen her, but I also haven’t been on the lookout for a married mother in a see-through shirt.”

  “She usually brings Richie around to buy a T-shirt or some skim milk chick latte next door, but I haven’t seen her since we bolted that lame affair.”

  Of course they hadn’t planned on leaving the “Hamptons Festive” cocktail party so early that Saturday night. Unfortunately, the humiliation of a shell-encrusted toothpick rammed into Kona’s hand had forced them to leave without saying goodbye or ever nailing the older guy getting his way with a sixteen-year-old in the sea grass. On the silent ride home, neither man knew what to say to each other, except, “Fuck those people.”

  This morning, about ten women in the parking lot unloaded bags with young and teen children. Some of them headed to the Seabrook Club next door, while some nonmembers headed to the water sports camp meeting grounds at the top of the lot. All of them looked the same: toned figures draped in crisp Tory Burch tunics fresh out of the orange tissue paper for their virgin summer 2017 appearance. On their feet, they sported pricey-looking, beaded sandals they’d bought on their boozy girls’ trip to Mykonos the previous summer while their husbands slayed the market dragons on Wall Street.

  The housewives had emailed Kona and Luke early in the week, imploring them to occupy their children at surf camp for three hours to free them up to get their houses “weekend ready,” as if for an impending missile strike. Once the kids were happily at water sports camp, the moms could get after their staffs to iron the Porthault cocktail napkins, buy the farm-raised chickens at the overpriced butcher, and stuff the vases with extravagant bunches of peonies that played off the new curtain fabric.

  These women felt a huge sense of accomplishment knowing their houses would be functioning in order while the children were out a hundred yards in the rough currents of the Atlantic Ocean, monitored by a group of hungover guys, whose names they didn’t quite catch.

  Colette Spencer, her child terrified of waves, ran up to Kona. “I’ve got to do errands and then I have an exercise class. Can you keep Charlie out of the water?”

  Though a strange request for a water
sports camp director, this was not unusual. Kona knew these city women prioritized their Power Pilates classes over common sense parenting. “Mrs. Spencer.” He locked his dashing blue eyes on her. “He will be fine without surfing or water-skiing; we’ll keep your kid happy. Go take your class. We’ll teach them how to fix a boat motor or something.” Kona then glided his fingers up her arm. “Just, go on.” And he winked, signaling silently, I got this little butterfly fluttering technique with my tongue, so very light between your legs, it’ll drive you insane. “Trust me, I got this, or as we say on the Big Island, Malama pono. Take care.”

  “Well,” Colette answered, flustered by Kona’s ruthless stare, and aroused for the first time in at least three years. “Just, uh, no water anything for Charlie, please.” She kissed her miserable son on the forehead who would rather have been anywhere on the planet besides this camp.

  Just then, Jake Chase’s restored white 1977 International Harvester Scout that he’d bought from Billy Joel’s personal collection roared into the public beach parking lot. This vintage Scout gas-guzzler cost him about ninety thousand dollars, a vehicle pretty much every American surfer bum would give their left testicle to own.

  Jake possessed the same ability to handle his new Scout toy as a three-year-old boy would a bucking rodeo steer. This was, after all, a man who had no interest in putting his pinkie toe in the ocean. He knew there was a possibility he didn’t look legit peeking over the top of the wheel as he drove this ultimate surf vehicle, but he wanted to show it to the surfers anyway. Maybe their cool would rub off on him. Or, of course, vice versa.

  Jake figured he’d impress his local buddies first time out with the Scout by gunning it full speed onto the soft Hamptons sand.

  “Dad!” wailed his son Richie, who was already in camp starting an egg toss. “You can’t drive on this beach. It’s only down near the jetty you can drive!”

  The Scout made it about fifteen yards before it began to whip up sand that had the consistency of confectioners’ sugar. Soon the undercarriage chassis was sitting directly on the earth with the tires dug in so deep they couldn’t grab anything. The smell of burning rubber wafted down the beach, while the newly restored transmission (costing thirty thousand dollars) whirred at a screeching pitch as it headed to ruin. Jake stepped out and marched around to survey the damage. His gut protruded on his short frame, making his walk more a waddle than a stride.