It's Hot in the Hamptons

by Holly Peterson

  “Just . . . keep it a surprise,” Annabelle answered, six cars behind him now, inching toward Southampton on Route 27. Her breasts were uncomfortable in her French balcony bra. She’d bought the La Perla set for her second time with Philippe, and it was a fortune. It wouldn’t be right to wear it with Arthur, would it? But she could wear it with Thaddeus, right? This infidelity pact had so many little details to consider.

  She took a moment to adjust her breasts for the fifth time since she’d left the house. She would burn the bra after she’d slept with Thaddeus. You could wear the same lingerie with two different lovers, but not if one of them was your husband. She nodded slightly at that solid rationale. The cost ($678) of the two-piece number could be amortized across two men this summer.

  When the light turned green, Thaddeus’s Jeep took off, his brown hair flying back, his neat left side part unfortunately now all messed up. Annabelle could hear the deep-throttled roar of its motor. Arthur’s German family had made engines for a century now, and he’d explained the exact whir and pitch of each to her endlessly.

  Thaddeus cradled the microphone of his headphones in one hand to block it from the wind. “I’m going to put gentle and firm pressure on all your special areas. You’ll become so wet . . .”

  Annabelle felt a definite ick-factor. Nonetheless, her foot remained on the accelerator. She’d heard for years that Thaddeus was deft in the sheets, and he had a masculine strut she’d found appealing since their Andover/Exeter days, not to mention just the right amount of graying chest hair peeking out from his blue Oxford button-downs. And he would keep quiet. She knew that.

  “And the soft, supple lips will part for my tongue . . .”

  “Please, just, can you not tell me?” she asked. She and Caroline would no doubt laugh about Thaddeus’s dirty talk; it was so off. She’d memorize his lame comments to share later.

  Thaddeus, oblivious, went on. “The touch and taste of your body, the hum of your breath as you exhale, my tongue teasing you, with wide, circular motions, reducing, then increasing pressure, pinpointing it to drive you mad. And then, at the same time, moving my fingers gently, in slow and deliberate motions. Your almond will be so . . .”

  Annabelle veered over to the right so hard, she almost caused an accident. Three cars behind her each honked as they had to brake not to swerve into oncoming traffic.

  My fucking almond? I can’t do this, Annabelle thought. This guy is a TOOL. My fucking almond? I’ll jerk my own almond off.

  Chapter 42

  Flip-Flopping at the Beach

  Caroline’s phone rang in the sand at the Navy Beach shoreline restaurant. She put her earbuds on and said, “Hold on, Annabelle.”

  She hoisted herself up on an elbow, feeling more than a tad buzzed after a glass of wine, and looked over at the kids. Theo was now awake, but still stretched out in his chairs, playing on the iPad, having demolished a basket of fried shrimp. The girls were playing tag with other kids by the shore, and, thankfully, showed no more signs of wanting to wade into the water. Caroline’s dinner was surely cold by now, but how could she eat when her nerves were careening toward Pluto?

  “I’m so glad you called. I need to talk,” Caroline said. “I have to tell you something really . . .”

  “Me first,” Annabelle barked.

  “No, Annabelle, my story. Two of them, actually, and they’re big.”

  “Okay,” said Annabelle, who was driving back in the direction of East Hampton, away from the Bay View Motel and from that preppy almond-fondler. “Go ahead,” she snapped.

  “Well, it’s kind of like this,” Caroline said and then she paused. “I need to prepare myself to tell you this.”

  Annabelle, now at a stoplight, put her car in park and revved the engine just to have something to do with her right foot. She picked up her phone and blocked Thaddeus’s number. Things would be awkward during club events for a while, but he’d move along and fuck someone else’s wife soon enough. “Tell me, Caroline,” Annabelle said. “Mr. Architect told his wife, and now you’re leaving Eddie and putting the kids into East Hampton Elementary?”

  “Hold on,” Caroline said, readying herself. She took another big gulp of wine and dunked the last two fries into the aioli. Then, she laid down again. “So, it’s like this . . .” And she paused again.

  “It’s like what?” Annabelle asked. “It sounds like you’re eating those disgusting fried clams again. We might have to get you to exercise for the second time this decade.”

  “Never again am I doing a Fred class at exhale,” Caroline said. “And about the news . . . actually, you know what, never mind. It’s not important.”

  “Never mind? Why are you being so crazy?”

  “Just . . . it’s really an in-person type of story,” Caroline said, knowing Annabelle would howl and cry once she heard the news. “So you go instead. Did you do the French playboy one more time? Or did you decide to delve into Preppyland?”

  “I actually just blocked Thaddeus Bradley’s number,” Annabelle said, relieved. “He’s going to be driving to the Bay View Motel, checking in, and then expecting me to meet him around the back.”

  “So where are you?”

  “Driving back to you,” said Annabelle. “Did you take the kids out? Where are you? Are you outside? I hear the wind through your phone.”

  “Navy Beach. So you didn’t fuck either one of them?”

  “I kind of did. I mean, Thaddeus is going to pay for the room and get blown off.”

  “Well, you’re right.” Caroline laughed. “That’s a form of fucking him. Fucking him over.”

  Chapter 43

  Oyster Fest

  Five days later

  The teakettle whistled, breaking the silence of the early dawn. The sunlight peeked through the flowering bushes outside Caroline’s window, and shadows danced across the breakfast table. Her brain raced in circles.

  Why hasn’t Joey come by the barn again?

  Or left a note?

  It has been too many days.

  Teeny fruit flies hovered around the fruit bowl. Caroline swatted them away and started to cut a peach, slamming the knife into the cutting board. Taking a bite—the August nectar was so sweet—she closed her eyes to savor it.

  The white hydrangea bush outside the window had grown fatter with each day of summer. The branches, heavy with succulent leaves and blossoms the size of a honeydew, flopped down. She’d cut a few later. Or maybe she should just let everything grow wild.

  Why would Joey want us to believe he had drowned?

  Where had he been? What had he done?

  Who else knew?

  Caroline poured hot water into a ceramic pot Gigi had painted for Mother’s Day, allowing the tart green tea to brew as she sat at the table. She had already organized all her design proposals by room, stalling a bit, hoping the routine might push the storms from her head.

  How could he do this to me?

  He knew it would kill a part of me too.

  She tapped the table so hard a piece of nail polish chipped off.

  To touch his face again . . . would it feel the same?

  Six design boards, three-by-three-feet wooden frames holding tan corkboard, beckoned Caroline. Using one for each project, she’d pinned photos from magazines, swatches, and paint chips for inspiration. With her ideas confined to neat squares, clients could better visualize the rooms. Eddie was in the city, and the kids would wake up in an hour. She had just enough time to tackle overdue work.

  She reached to exchange a magenta linen swatch that was too hot—cheerleader tacky, even—for an orange one. The ripe melon color would work well with the client’s dark wood floor. She’d tell them to imagine ripe cantaloupe and chocolate.

  Her next decision—to pick green instead of light blue for the library couch—felt like a small triumph. Sticking with the green, knowing it would pop, reminded her that she was capable of making choices, small and large, safe and risky, and building on them.

  Coul
d she announce to Eddie one day over a quiet breakfast, “We aren’t packing to return to urban stress. Gigi and Theo aren’t going back to prissy private school. We’re just staying right here.”

  She might do that, in the same way she might put this red-striped poplin in the corner of the McDermotts’ sunroom. That room had stumped her, the glossy white floor almost radioactively bright; now, at least she had an inspiration. There was so much more to do for these clients before the meeting this weekend, and it worried her. She had to decide on paint colors, blinds, and type of curtains, and that was on top of having to convince Mrs. McDermott that the white beadboard on the playroom ceiling would soften the room.

  Caroline pierced the red poplin swatch with a metal pushpin and added it to the board, next to a photo of a white wicker chair. She massaged the rough-hewn fabric with her fingertips, feeling the tiny clumps of cotton caught in the weave. The sunlight in the room would highlight its earthy texture. Maybe she should use natural wood beams in the ceiling instead of whitewashed ones; it would look more like a high-end surf shack than a Pottery Barn showroom.

  Caroline felt satisfied with her choices. She thanked God she had signed the kids up for East Hampton Lower School, online, way back when she’d first discovered Eddie’s iPad in his study. Gigi and Theo could mold clay in the same art studio where she had made mugs in fourth grade. On the forms, she’d left out the name of parent number two, so Eddie wasn’t getting emails about the start of school. She’d used East Hampton as their home address, and Eddie never checked the mail there. The week before, she’d gone to the school district administration building to tell the registrar, Mrs. Coley, an old friend of her mother’s, to keep their return quiet around town, and not to announce it to the teachers just yet.

  If the kids didn’t end up going, it would be simple enough to click a box online that meant “Never mind.” Yet she felt the kids knew something was up with their fall plans. Like horses, they could smell it in the air. Earlier in the summer, Gigi had asked if she could ever be in Rosie’s East Hampton class. Just the day before, Theo had told Caroline, “I like my room here better because I can see my jungle gym outside.” Caroline took both statements as confirmation that even the kids knew which life was better for them.

  A text came through.

  It’s Robert Smith the Upholsterer. I know it’s early, but is now a good time to talk about the curtains? It’s a Tuesday deadline, and I need to make a plan.

  She called Ryan. Before even saying hello, he said, “I want to take you for a paddle. And then to one of my favorite—”

  “We can’t go out in public together again,” Caroline said, interrupting him. “We’ve done it like three times. People talk. C’mon, don’t get careless on me.” A prickly and sudden headache spread its tentacles behind her ears. Theo had caught a terrible case of summer croup, and Caroline had snuggled him through his nighttime hacking. She’d lost hours of sleep thanks to three excursions to a steamy shower with him in hopes of loosening his congestion a little.

  “I’m not being careless or reckless,” Ryan said. “I just want to take you somewhere.”

  “You can’t take me anywhere,” she answered matter-of-factly. Ryan was someone else’s husband. Caroline exhaled loudly as if that might extinguish some of the self-reproach roiling inside her.

  “I know,” Ryan said. “I just had an idea of something fun. I like seeing you smile. Is that allowed?”

  “Yes, of course,” Caroline replied.

  “You smile in bed,” Ryan said. “And that makes me happy. I’m just trying to make you smile, baby.”

  “I don’t really,” she said, starting to feel a little uncomfortable. The guilt was hitting her hard now; she felt like a rag doll slamming against a brick wall. She felt bad for Ryan’s wife first, and Eddie second.

  Was that good or horrible?

  To release the tension now constricting her chest like a vice, she tried rationalizing: Ryan’s wife had cheated on him once. This is his payback, just as it is mine.

  “You do smile,” Ryan went on. “Like when I’m touching you, when you’re close and, you know, I stop everything, because I want you to go first. It’s better for me that way.”

  “Okaaay.”

  Should I end it now, before he gets attached, or was he already too attached?

  “You know, there are ways I could prolong that, that period where you’re about to. You can trust me. If you’d stop fighting me, you can just lay there and let me make it last so long that you won’t even know what’s happening to you.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said.

  “Maybe? I don’t know why you resist sometimes. It’s like you want to rush it.”

  “I don’t know, it takes me a while sometimes,” she said. “And when it’s finally about to happen, I do want it to.” What she didn’t say was that sometimes she felt bad it took her a long time to come, and she wondered if he was bored. She shook her head. What a stupid, womanly reaction, always worrying about other people rather than taking care of herself. At the ultimate moment of pleasure, she should be thinking only about her own enjoyment. “Maybe I just get impatient?”

  “No, no, no, that’s what you don’t understand; that’s when you let me prolong it,” Ryan said. “It’s not like we have that much time left.” His voice softened, sounding melancholy about autumn, and more about what it meant for them. “Caroline, you are so beautiful in bed, it just, it almost freaks me out.” She didn’t react. He asked, “You there?”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “What’s with you?”

  “You can’t get gushy talking about what my face looks like when I’m close and . . .” She stood up and paced. If she did live out here in the fall, she’d have to pretend she didn’t know Ryan if she bumped into him in town. Time to pour a little ice on this whole thing.

  “You have to promise me that you’re metal inside when it comes to me. Cold, hard, unfeeling,” Caroline said, tossing a bunch of swatches across the table. “I mean, I need our deal to be clean. Emotionally this just, you know, can’t be a problem.”

  “Call me Mr. Robot,” Ryan said.

  Caroline walked over to the window and stared at the jungle gym on the patio, splintered and weathered now. It had been bright red just a few years before. If they moved here for good, she’d splurge on a fabulous new one with a fort.

  “C’mon, it’s me you’re talking to,” Ryan said. “I’m going to miss you, but I respect what we have to do, the timeline. We’re in this together. I need the same, uncomplicated fun. I’m just trying to discover all the little gems inside you before, you know, fall.”

  This man she’d say goodbye to in a few weeks wasn’t an architect who built splashy houses in his own image, as monuments to himself. He was a caretaker of other people’s older homes, restoring them to what they were meant to be. That was his way in life. She let her guard down a little. “Okay, tell me your stupid story about my face.” Maybe he got it. Maybe he did only want to see the best in her.

  “You’re smiling. Finally,” he said. “I can hear it in the way you just said that.”

  “Possibly,” Caroline admitted, plopping back down in her chair.

  “Okay, it’s my favorite part about you,” he continued. “When you kind of surrender, you have this beautiful look on your face. That’s all I’m saying. Period. I could help you surrender more, you know.”

  “Sounds intriguing.” She grabbed a pile of red swatches and flipped through them.

  “You want me to show you or tell you now? A robot can’t do either,” Ryan said playfully. This guy had a Joey side, always game, teasing her like a girlfriend would.

  “Shut up,” Caroline said.

  “You wanna know how I can help you surrender?”

  “Yeah, just tell me.” She laughed a little. This guy was cute. She’d made a good choice.

  Ryan paused for a moment, then said softly, “A little silk around your wrists, not tied to anything, just together. It’d help
you not resist so much.”

  Caroline had never allowed a man to do that. And, for that matter, had never been asked. She nodded and swallowed hard. With her voice almost an octave higher, she asked, “And if I didn’t like it?”

  “If you pulled hard enough, you could get out. And it’s me, Ryan. You say you don’t like it, and I’ll try something else. No silk, just my body.” After a long pause, he added: “Hey, no pressure. Just a suggestion to help you let me put you into a whole other zone I know you can go to. And it’s for you, baby. Watching you in that state. Just know that while it’s happening, you’re exquisite, with your red lips and your dark hair surrounding your face like a halo. Really, exquisite.”

  “Hmm, hmm, thanks.”

  “You were smiling when you said that ‘hmm, hmm,’” Ryan said. “I can tell, even on the phone. You know, you’re allowed to actually like hearing what I say. And now that you seem to be in a better mood, I had a plan for today to make you happy at sunset. You up for that?”

  “Yes, I am actually,” Caroline answered, rummaging through a pile of swatches and finding a cherry paisley that would match the red-striped poplin for a throw pillow. She pinned it to the board with fortitude. Silk on her wrists? She wasn’t sure. This poplin, though, was perfect. “You’re right, enough of this going over robot rules. Fuck it; let’s do something fun. I need it.”

  “You in the mood for oysters?”

  “Of course, but where? We can’t go to the same fish shack again.”

  “Let’s do takeout oysters,” Ryan added. “The new house has an outdoor fireplace. We can eat them there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Caroline said. “Is there another out-of-the-way oyster place where we don’t know anyone? I . . . I don’t like takeout raw food. The ice melts so fast, and it gets all watery and gross.”