Old Trees had ten bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, a pool complete with a poolhouse, tennis and basketball courts, a wing for guests, and a garage for six cars. In the last three years, Old Trees had been featured twice in Hamptons Cottages & Gardens magazine. Since then, Tom’s mother had redecorated. The new decor had probably cost her as much as the value of an entire house in Berlin.
From the moment she set foot in the entry hall, Zoe was informed of the Fiorino family history through framed badges, diplomas on rolls of parchment, and an almost endless portrait gallery. It reminded her of how the Museum of Natural History documented the evolution of man through chronologically ordered displays. At the very end of the gallery hung a photo of Tom’s mother, which showed her playing tennis on a grass court. Next to it was a picture of Tom’s father on a polo pony and one of Tom and his brother Nate in matching madras swimming trunks. They had their arms slung around each other’s shoulders and were grinning like twelve-year-old boys who think they are immortal.
Zoe stopped when she reached the kitchen. It was huge, but of course it still had a standard inventory: fridge, gas stove, dishwasher. At least in there she could pretend that she wasn’t in the mansion-turned-museum of an early-nineteenth-century railway tycoon.
Tom put his hands on her shoulder and played with her hair. “Do you like it?”
“It’ll do,” she answered, trying to sound blasé. “I somehow thought it would be bigger.”
“Oh, really?” he replied, laughing.
“Every financial advisor has at least ten bedrooms and twelve bathrooms.”
Tom twirled a strand of her hair around his finger. “Did you know I had a spectacular dream last night that took place in precisely this house?”
“Out with it!”
“In the dream, I was sleepwalking and ended up in a room with a woman.”
“You mean an unbelievably beautiful woman.”
“Exactly.”
“And of course she was extremely intelligent, too.”
“Of course.”
“And then? What did you do? With this woman? In the dream, that is?”
Tom lifted Zoe onto the kitchen counter and leaned in to kiss her on the mouth. Somehow it felt like he was doing it for the first time.
“I was doing something I want to continue, now,” he murmured next to her earlobe.
Zoe felt the cold marble countertop under her and Tom’s warm hands on her skin. “In the kitchen? Do you have an allergy to beds?”
“No.” Tom slipped a hand under her sweater. “I just don’t have time to get you to one.” Then he kissed her again.
“Ahem,” someone said. “Where would you like lunch to be served, sir?”
“Lucia! Hello!” Tom said, quickly pulling his hand out from under Zoe’s sweater. He turned around to face the kitchen door in one fluid motion. Zoe, whose face had gone brilliant red, was completely hidden behind him. “On the terrace, please.”
Zoe waved from behind him. “Hello from me, too!”
“Very well,” Lucia said, and disappeared to the terrace. Zoe and Tom giggled like two teenagers who had been caught making out in the equipment room behind the gym.
“At least it wasn’t my mother.”
“She wouldn’t have approved of some hanky-panky on her kitchen counter? What are the house rules here, anyway? Are unmarried female guests relegated to the back bedrooms?”
Tom just laughed and went back to concentrating on her earlobes—until Lucia reappeared in the doorway, clearly interested in taking over the kitchen for its originally intended purpose.
“Let’s go to the beach until lunch is ready,” Zoe suggested, feeling a little uncomfortable.
The Fiorinos’ backyard could have easily contained a nine-hole golf course. At the end of the lawn, a weathered gray boardwalk and a row of pampas grass and watery-blue hydrangea bushes divided their property from the dunes of the Atlantic. The wide beach was empty.
“The architectural monstrosity next door is Calvin Klein’s summer house,” Tom said, gesturing to an elongated glass box that reminded Zoe of the new parliament building in Berlin. “He had it built for $75 million. It has a subterranean garage and designer sand dunes, because he didn’t like the shapes of the natural ones. My parents are not amused.”
“You live in another world,” Zoe said, shaking her head.
“And now you’re living in it, too,” he answered. He put his arm around her, grinned, and pulled her head onto his shoulder, kissing her hair.
After lunch on the terrace, Tom chose a green Jaguar XT from the car collection in the garage. He wanted to show Zoe Southampton. After driving into town, they walked hand in hand down Jobs Lane, past shops like Chanel, Versace, and Saks. Even on the sidewalks the atmosphere felt like five o’clock tea at the Four Seasons. Walking along next to them were carefully coiffed, sparingly nourished ladies who wore fur coats over their designer suits. They were the kind of women who matched their hats to their handbags. In her jeans, sweater, and forest-green Hunter boots, Zoe suddenly felt underdressed. This all seemed so artificial for a little town on the beach.
At the edge of town, Zoe spotted Bentleys, Bugattis, and a few Mercedes. A boy who looked like he was about twelve, wearing a light pink, long-sleeved Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and perfectly ironed khakis, stood between an S-Class and an M-Class Mercedes with his hands on his hips. He examined them in disgust, as though they were cockroaches. Then he dramatically crossed his arms over his chest.
“Daddy, look!” he shouted, pointing to the cars. “All these Hampton Chevys! Ick!”
His daddy, who was dressed exactly as his son was, looked highly amused by his offspring’s cleverness. Smiling, he keyed open a lemon-yellow Ferrari, and the two of them got in and drove away.
Tom just shrugged. “Basically, the whole Upper East Side of Manhattan comes out here in summer and on the weekends. Maybe we should move to Montauk, or over to the North Fork.”
“Is it different there? I thought all of the Hamptons were snobby, more or less.”
“The surfers, painters, and writers hang out in Montauk, and the other side of the island, the North Fork, is where the wine lovers, artist families, and slow-food fans have settled—between the organic farms and the wineries.”
“That’s where I want to go!”
“No problem. Would you like to drive?” Tom asked. “Do you have a driver’s license?”
She nodded. Vigorously. Zoe Schuhmacher had a license, and she desperately wanted to drive. She had never even set foot in a Jaguar, let alone had a chance to drive one.
Zoe was a little embarrassed when she had to board the tiny, rusty car ferry to Shelter Island in her flashy ride. When they reached the north side of the island, they had to get on a second ferry to Greenport. There, they arrived in another world. Everything seemed to be three sizes smaller: the pastel-colored Victorian houses with their white garden fences, the cars, and people’s egos. The people themselves were three clothing sizes larger than their Southampton counterparts, and therefore had normal body mass indexes.
Route 25 twisted and turned past farm stands selling fresh autumn vegetables and brilliant orange pumpkins in every possible size. They passed pastures of horses, and endless rows of vineyards upon which thick bunches of grapes must have been hanging until very recently. They tasted wine at the Paumanok Vineyard in Jamesport. Later, Tom treated her to dinner at the North Fork Table & Inn in Southold, where they used only local, organic ingredients.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Tom asked, toasting her with a glass of Paumanok Festival Chardonnay.
“Very much,” she answered, smiling.
Tom and Zoe. Zoe and Tom. We come from completely different worlds, Zoe thought, but we still seem to appreciate the same thing: authenticity. Somehow Zoe felt secure with Tom Fiorino. Not because he had money or an important job. That
didn’t matter to her. It was because she could feel, deep inside, that he was a good person.
Zoe was only worried about one thing. “Are your parents really coming tonight? Isn’t it a little soon for the meet-the-family thing?”
“It’s actually much too late. I should have brought you home right after you set your apartment on fire. You’ll be able to wrap my father around your little finger within seconds, and my mother is always lost in her own world anyway, so don’t worry.”
The early-morning fog off of the Atlantic glittered in the silver-warm light of the rising sun.
“I love the way night drifts into morning here,” Tom said. “There’s that peaceful hour of stillness before everyone else wakes up. It makes you feel not only like you have the whole day ahead of you, but that you’ve also been given an extra hour that actually doesn’t exist.”
“I think the crack of dawn really earns its name.”
“Why is that?”
“Because anyone who’s awake at five a.m. usually has a shattering headache from having done something the night before that they’ll regret for the rest of the day.”
“For example?”
“Drinking that last glass of Chardonnay. The one that washed away any remaining sense of propriety.”
“Terrible, that.”
“Or going to bed without taking off your makeup.”
“Tragic.”
“Sleeping with a man whose parents arrived late the same night and are currently asleep in one of twenty-eight neighboring rooms.”
“Wantonly negligent,” Tom murmured, slowly caressing Zoe’s naked back and then running his fingers over her thighs and down to the backs of her knees, as though he was memorizing her body’s terrain.
Zoe hadn’t slept much, thanks to the extremely talented man who was sharing the guestroom bed with her. “Are you sure your mother didn’t peek into your room to say good night to her Upper East Side boy?” she asked.
“No, I’m not sure she didn’t.” He grinned and sat up. “That sounds like something she’d do, though.”
He pulled Zoe up and kissed her.
“Oh, God!” She envisioned Mrs. Fiorino finding the room of her firstborn empty, because he was having fun with his shameless, not-even-properly-introduced hussy houseguest. She fell back into the pillows theatrically. “I can’t wait to go down to breakfast.”
“Until then, my dearest, we have at least four hours.”
“Then we should use the time properly, if we’re going to be in trouble for amoral behavior anyway.”
“Don’t tell me you want to seduce me again at the break of dawn? Like that time you were lounging around in the hall wearing nothing but your underwear?” he said, slowly lowering his body onto hers.
When Tom and Zoe entered the sunroom at around nine o’clock, Mr. Charles “Chuck” Delano Fiorino was already sitting at the breakfast table reading The New York Times. With his graying temples and warm eyes, he reminded Zoe of Richard Gere.
“I’m so glad to meet you, Zoe!” he cried, jumping up and shaking her hand with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm. But who could tell with Americans?
“You’re from Germany? From Berlin? I have wonderful colleagues at the Charité hospital. Berlin is a wonderful city, with the Potsdamer Platz and the Spree River. Come sit down, and we can talk about it!”
Just as Zoe was about to sit down, Mrs. Katherine “Kitty” Whitney Fiorino floated through the door. She was petite and fragile looking, and was wearing her carefully bleached blonde hair in a tight chignon. There were at least ten thousand dollars’ worth of pearls draped around her no-longer wrinkle-free, suntanned neck. She graciously offered Zoe her bony hand. “Welcome, dear!”
They all sat down. Tom seemed completely carefree, and applied himself wholeheartedly to his tomato, spinach, and goat cheese omelet, while his father bit into a sesame bagel with cream cheese and lox. Mrs. Fiorino sipped green tea. Zoe was far too nervous to eat.
“And where did you go to college, dear?” Mrs. Fiorino suddenly asked. She studied Zoe with the cool subjectivity of a mother who had made it her business to vet all potential aspiring daughters-in-law.
Tom rolled his eyes. The trial had begun.
“I went to school in Munich, at Ludwig Maximilian University.” Zoe answered, sitting stiffly at the table, like a hostage whose plea for freedom was about to be recorded on video.
“Is that a private institution like Oxford or Cambridge?” Mrs. Fiorino’s perception of European education was apparently limited to the United Kingdom.
“Um . . .” Zoe began. How should she answer that question? Tom squeezed her hand reassuringly under the table. “No, it’s a state university.”
Mrs. Fiorino looked at her with concern, as though Zoe had just told her she’d received her master’s degree through an online program.
“But it has a very good reputation.”
“The German university system is organized completely differently than the British or the American system, Kitty,” Tom tried to explain.
But Mrs. Fiorino’s attention had long since flown to the Côte d’Azur. “And where does your family spend the summer?”
On their way back into the city on Sunday evening, Tom apologized again for his mother’s behavior. “Just because we have a nice house in the Hamptons doesn’t mean that we’re any less dysfunctional than other families. Sometimes I feel like I have to play the role of ambassador with them, like I’m a foreign diplomat or something.”
“Do you mean that you want to be on my side, but you want to please your mother, too?”
“Exactly. I always feel like an interpreter. I seem to be the only person on the planet who can speak both their language and the language of everyone else in the world.”
“And at the same time, you have to communicate with both camps . . .”
“. . . to avoid cultural misunderstandings from the start so they won’t have to be ironed out later.”
“Even between your father and your mother?”
Tom put an arm around her and pulled her close. Zoe hoped Tom’s driver wouldn’t look in the rearview mirror, which of course he was well enough trained not to do. Tom smelled gloriously of McNeighbor and salty ocean air. They were stuck in the Sunday-evening traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway among hundreds of luxury limousines, whose occupants surely wanted nothing more than to return to their Manhattan townhouses as quickly as possible. If it had been up to Zoe, the traffic jam could have lasted a lot longer. She cuddled close to Tom.
“My mother comes from another world. The Whitneys never forgave her for marrying a Catholic of Italian descent. Even though his family was just as well off as they were, and he was a respected doctor. They welcomed Charles, but they never accepted him completely.”
“Is that why your middle name is Prescott and not Charles?”
“Very perceptive!” Tom answered. He planted a series of kisses down the back of her neck. “I was named after my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Prescott Schuyler Whitney III.”
“So your parents married for love. Against all conventions of high society?”
“My father worshipped Kitty. He would have walked through fire for her, and he still would. She must have been the most fun-loving debutante of her generation. The family strife over the marriage hardened her, even if it’s long since passed.”
Tom worked his mouth slowly down Zoe’s neck toward her collarbone. “Would you like to go to the Snowflake Ball with me next Saturday? As my official date?”
At that point, Zoe would have answered any question with an enthusiastic yes. If Tom had asked if he could pull out her wisdom teeth without anesthesia, just for fun, she would have accepted. She even would have agreed to pay his income taxes for the year if he had asked.
Bureaucracy, or: How Does This Country Actually Work?
> Every now and then, the US is reminiscent of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. For example, the potholes in the highways and citizens’ willing patience to stand in lines for hours. Anyone who believes that the Germans invented bureaucracy will realize upon their first visit to a US municipal authority that the Americans have improved it to an almost Kafkaesque level.
(New York for Beginners, p. 11)
17
“Do you have an American driver’s license?” Zoe asked Eros first thing on Monday morning. “Do I really need one?”
“Why do you ask?” he inquired.
“Well,” Zoe began haltingly, “because I might have been driving illegally over the weekend.”
She wasn’t too keen on telling Eros how, and above all with whom, she had spent her weekend. Not because she didn’t trust him, but because she was a little superstitious. Just like you might not tell anybody about that great new job before you had actually signed the employment contract, she didn’t want to jinx things with Tom before it was official.
“Were you on a business trip?”
Now Zoe laughed. “Not exactly. But I was with our boss.” She couldn’t manage to keep that fabulously fantastic bit of information to herself. Then she gave in completely. “I was in the Hamptons with Tom.”
New York for Beginners Page 15
