“You guys want to go to the Corner Gourmet for sandwiches?” Alexa asked, excited to be hostess. “We can charge it all to my dad’s account, no problem, and then just hang by the pool and wait for him. He’s always late. And, like, no one looks at the bills. We can order whatever we want.”
“Yeah,” answered Kona, anxiously. “I’m hungry as shit. Afterwards, I guess we’ll have to see what your dad wants.” What could it be? Flirting with his wife? Fuck!
As they walked to their cars, Kona said to Luke, “This is good on some level, I hope. Watch: maybe Jake is going to get onboard with the fight against Bucky and save our camp.”
“I swear to God, if you’ve touched Julia . . .”
“No way,” Kona answered, knowing he’d tried valiantly. Maybe he was even making progress.
At the fancy Corner Gourmet in Southampton, about twenty pissed-off city housewives and their kids waited in line to order their sixteen-dollar miniscule paninis (all thinking: Me? In a line? This sucks. I should be able to cut). Kona grabbed a wooden basket lined with yellow gingham that looked like it belonged to Little Red Riding Hood. He started piling in chocolates from Holland, biscuits in fancy painted British tins for high tea, and Saran-wrapped chunks of thirty-six dollar-a-pound truffle-flecked Asiago cheese.
“Enough,” Luke whispered, having just gone to the cheaper, local deli on his own. He looked into the basket of things Kona wanted to charge to the Chase account. “Not cool, c’mon. You’re gross. Stop.”
“Who notices the bills? She said no one even looks.”
“What are you gonna do, Kona? Add some espresso machines, too? Or these, whatever the fuck they are?” An array of mini Raclette makers stood on shelves for customers wanting that melted cheese and Boeuf de Grisons they’d devoured on the top of ski mountains separating Austria from Italy.
When the crew finally reached the checkout line to pay, the baskets were filled with six mini filet mignon carpaccio and watercress tea sandwiches for Alexa and Kona (sixteen dollars each); four bags of house-made red potato chips dusted with Mediterranean thyme in thick clear plastic bags with bright green ribbons (fourteen dollars each—even Kona didn’t have the heart to mention they all preferred Funyuns onion ring chips); six lemonade and hibiscus tea Arnold Palmers (nine dollars a pop) and Kona’s biscuit bounty. When the cashier rang up $278, Alexa signed her house account she’d had since she was eleven.
Luke looked at the ceiling fan, trying to pretend he wasn’t part of this crew. The sandwich he’d paid for himself from Sam’s deli was inside a white bag in his hand: boneless spareribs on a roll with barbecue sauce, pickles, onions, and cheese. His was called the “No Bones.”
Chapter Forty-Five
The Dog Days of Summer
Kona and Luke laid their lunch spread out before them on the sleek loungers while Alexa went to the poolside bar for plastic glasses. Luke whispered to Kona, “You swear to God you didn’t fuck Julia Chase?”
“I’m sure.”
“You don’t sound sure,” Luke probed.
“Okay, I tried to make a move. More than a few times.”
“Tried? How hard?”
“I took her in the Jeep to see a good place she could paddleboard with her friends. My dick was so hard out of my mind I was having trouble thinking straight. I just asked her if I could take her pants off. Told her I was masterful with my tongue.”
“Jesus, Kona! We need Jake badly on our side! What’s wrong with you?”
“What the fuck are you blaming me for? It took a lot not to fuck her.”
“Kona.” Luke held his hands together tightly. “Remember that Fool painting in his house, with the stencils?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“So, you dip-shit, maybe that’s Jake’s little joke. It’s meant for men who think they can fuck his wife.” Luke was incredulous. “You think she told him?”
“No way.”
“So, then why did he call us here?”
“No clue.” Kona nervously chomped an entire tea sandwich in one bite. There was hardly any meat on it. The watercress was too bitter. The dill mayonnaise sucked.
Luke pressed, “You think Jake is onto Alexa, that she isn’t his little girl anymore? That maybe she’s doing his guests in their stupid colored blazers at his own parties?”
Kona shook his head. “He wouldn’t want us to know about Alexa. But something’s up.”
The guys lay there ruminating, neither saying a word to each other. Kona, nervous Julia had said something, busied himself with his iPhone. He tried to figure out the probable cost, based on previous art auctions, of the inflatable Jeff Koons lobster raft hanging in the dining room.
Luke broiled in the midday sun, made worse by his long track pants. The clean, freshwater pool lured him in, but he didn’t have a swimsuit.
“You know, you guys just come here every day if you want,” Alexa said. She twisted her waist just a tad so that the fleshy part of her butt could rest on her ankle. She took another selfie of her bikini top and posted it on her Snapchat story. “It’s no big deal. You can order, like, perfectly copied Nobu food, or whatever you want.” She smiled. “Our chef is really good.”
“No. Thanks. The Corner Gourmet only for today,” Luke answered for both of them. “This is it. We’re here because your dad called, but most days we have to get a quick sandwich at Sam’s Deli and prep for the afternoon private lessons.”
Kona said simultaneously, “Yeah. Sounds good. Thanks. We’ll do that.”
Luke sneered at Kona. Kona kind of almost screwing the wife, the grab bag of fourteen-dollar chips . . . all this made Luke feel dirtier than the dried-up zinc oxide on his face and neck. He wanted to dive into the water and lie down in the deep end to shut it out.
The late August humidity coming off the sea and bay suffocated him in his nylon sweatpants like Saran wrap. Luke pulled up the pants above his knees, fed up with Kona’s grabbing “free” biscuits for later and Alexa’s boundless narcissism.
“Sorry, guys, I’m baking. It’s like I have heat stroke or something.” He threw his sandwich back onto the wax paper and stood up abruptly. “I think I’m going to go back . . . Kona, you took the call from Jake; you can talk to him for both of us.”
“I’ll get you a suit.” Alexa jumped up. “We have, like, a hundred. I’ll be right back.”
Alexa then flew, gazelle-like, across the patio to the enormous sliding glass doors. She pointed her toes with each quick stride, thinking how good a Vogue photo shoot of her legs outstretched would look.
She ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, and went straight to her daddy’s mahogany closet, which took up about fifteen percent of the house’s square footage. She began riffling through his clothes: blue jeans with an ironed seam like he liked; rows of black velvet slippers with embroidery on the top of his initials, and angels and demons on either shoe, and martinis. He never dared to wear the velvet slippers in public (but so wished he could because they reeked of an elite set that would never accept him). Next, more rows of JP Todd driving shoes in fifteen colors he wore to death, and his collection of ironed zippered sweatshirts from Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Lucien Pellat-Finet.
Alexa could see him in her mind’s eye pointing his little stubby finger near Edviane’s nose, telling her, “Everything. I mean every goddamn thing that is made of cloth gets hung in here, pressed ’til the creases could cut a steak, you got it?”
She rummaged through fifty brightly colored Vilebrequin bathing suits to find one that seemed more cool than flashy. It was important that the instructors not be intimidated by the bigness of the house. She was absolutely sure she could make the guys feel comfortable if she had the whole kitchen staff bring them pressed juice so they weren’t thirsty or anything. It wasn’t her fault that everything her father did at his job just made him, like, totally even more loaded.
She found a navy bathing suit with big sea turtles on it. Tame enough for Luke, she figured. Not pink; not preppy. She might even g
ive it to him. A free bathing suit would make him feel, like, more equal in the house.
Unfortunately, while Alexa was upstairs, her brother Evan was arriving and looking for the staff to bring him a homemade pink grapefruit spritzer to cool off. Evan cursed himself for leaving his father’s Loro Piana shirt back in the car. He wasn’t supposed to take his father’s clothes, and now it would be all wrinkled in the back, but he did not have the energy to go back to the driveway, open his car door, reach into the back (which would now be so hot), grab the shirt, and give it to the housekeeper to steam. He too had fourteen messages from his father that he chose to ignore. Parents were so outrageous that way; they could fucking wait.
He kicked his hot kelly-green, suede, Berluti driving moccasins off by the front door, and sashayed into his home. He could barely lift his feet out of exhaustion. He slid his feet along the shiny, waxed-up floors in the great expanse of the front hall to the living room, and then the deck. The floor cooled the bottom of his feet just like he liked.
It had been a taxing morning for Evan: he’d read the gossip pages of the New York Post in bed (looking for mentions on Page Six of his friends with hot chicks at clubs), and then had eaten a healthy protein-rich breakfast of scrambled eggs on red quinoa that Claudio made for him and his father. He had to listen to his father badger him for leaving too late on weekday mornings for his job, because “it didn’t show initiative.”
After that unjustified rampage, he’d had to go into town to get new tennis shoes (it was such a pain, you couldn’t ask someone just to get them, you had to go and get in your car and deal with parking it and then try them on . . . and wait because they don’t have your size). With all the activity before noon, Evan just wanted some chill time on his back deck to sweat a little in the sun and get his tan on.
Only when he got there, he didn’t expect to see the parade of world-class moochers lying around his deck.
“Oh,” Evan said, sniffing in briskly through his nose, trying to contain his disgust. Surely Kona and Luke didn’t make enough in a day to pay for the lunch they’d just charged to his family. “The Corner Gourmet.” He picked up a piece of yellow-checked wax paper and let it flutter to the ground.
“Hey, man,” Luke said, standing up, and wiping his hand on his filthy Nike sweatpants still rolled halfway up his thigh. “Sorry, your sister . . .” He didn’t want to apologize to this douche, but he did anyway, out of deference to God knows what lip service he felt he owed clients’ families.
“My sister what?” Evan figured the guys could muster a little sweat equity for the beef carpaccio charged to his family, the cost of which would, technically, be reduced from his future trust fund. So, in a sense, Evan had paid for the sandwiches.
“Your dad called us.” Luke felt so humiliated, he wanted to puke in the pristine infinity pool before him. “We haven’t seen him, but it was he who called us here.”
“He invited you? But he’s nowhere?” Evan asked, in his perfected schmuck tone. “I mean, it’s fine, I just was wondering if that’s true, why he isn’t here?”
“Yeah, thanks for hosting while your father is now forty-five minutes later than he said he’d be,” Kona had to say. “We, you know, keep your siblings alive in the ocean when they don’t understand currents and go flying into waves they can’t handle. We do that, oh, I don’t know, what is it Luke, like six times a week? Four summers now?”
Evan took a few steps backwards.
“Because, you see, Evan, for some reason Richie and Alexa aren’t the best listeners, no offense to the way they were raised or anything or the respect they were taught to give to adults in charge . . . but anyway, they jump in when we say they can’t. So anyway, yes, we are here in part because we keep saving their lives all summer long. Your sister knows that. And yes, in return, she bought us a sandwich.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t mean to sound like . . .” Evan turned and walked with soldier-like purpose back to his own lounger, about fifty yards down the patio.
He took his new Beats by Dre headphones he’d just bought in town for $149.99 (miffed since he’d lost a half dozen pair already this summer), and mashed them in his ears with equal purpose and determination. He found his favorite Nick Jonas song to zone out. He entertained the possibility, off chance that it was, that he’d been a real jerk just then.
Alexa ran back onto the deck, wondering where were the Vogue flashbulbs when you needed them. “Luke, here’s a swimsuit. You can, like, keep it,” she whispered. “My father won’t remember.”
“I’m going to take a quick swim and then return it,” Luke answered. Being around this craven excess made his body yearn for salvation in the cool pool.
Five minutes later, as his loose limbs sank down to the deep end, Luke found he barely needed to breathe. It felt safer and quieter splayed out at the bottom, watching his bubbles rise in the underwater oasis. After breaching the surface, Luke swam several underwater laps to drown out the fuzzy world above. And again, he floated on his back at the surface, then went under for meditation. Spreading his limbs, he let the air out of his lungs to slowly sink to the very bottom of the deep end.
When he was halfway down, splash!
Kona cannonballed right on his stomach. It knocked the air out of him. At the surface, Luke screamed, “You scared the shit out of me!”
“I only wanted to make sure you were okay,” Kona teased, stepping out at the shallow end and grabbing a plush Hermès periwinkle-blue towel with Maharaja elephants trim.
Luke tried again to sink far into his underworld. After several minutes of breaching for air and returning to the safety below, he jolted out from the deep end and onto the side of the pool in one graceful motion. He then sat on the edge, allowing the breeze from the ocean to cool both his body and attitude.
Water healed everything. He always knew that.
Except when it killed someone you loved.
Luke then dried off with his own plush $630 Hermès towel (from a basket of a dozen) and wondered if Jake would show before they’d have to leave for private lessons. He left the deck to put on his filthy sweatpants and get out of this creepy billionaire fun house.
Closing the door to the bathroom, he placed his hands in a pocket of the borrowed swimsuit and pulled out a small folded wad of hundred dollar bills, soaked and stuck together. He peeled twenty-five apart, then laid them on the sink. This cash represented weeks of work in a wetsuit that, no matter how many times he hosed down with Johnson’s baby shampoo, still reeked of his piss.
He thought about his father, Frank, and how horrified he would be if Luke kept the cash. But the thing was, Frank would never find out.
And didn’t he kind of deserve a good midsummer tip for making sure the Chase children were safe? And what about last summer, when the Chase family had booked about a hundred private lessons all summer and then went to Majorca for the last week of August? They’d skipped town and forgot to tip before leaving. So this wet, soggy cash was God saying, “Hey, just evening it all up as best I can . . .”
Luke sat on the toilet seat and put his head in his hands. He opened the door, resolved to keep the cash. He needed it; Jake didn’t. In fact, technically, Jake owed it to him. His heart raced faster than the Porsche in the multi-vehicle garage below.
He walked back to Alexa on the deck and sat on the lounge chair next to her. He handed her the twenty-five hundred-dollar bills and said, “I found this cash in the suit.”
“Dad will never know,” Alexa answered. “You should totally, like, just keep it. Think of it as a tip. I’m sure my dad hasn’t worn that suit since, like, last summer.”
Behind him, Kona, apoplectic, raised his hands in the air, what the fuck you idiot?
Alexa continued, “There’s, like, no way he knows that money was there. It got ironed into the pocket; he probably meant it for something last summer and just forgot.”
Luke thought to mention that, actually, last summer they got stiffed. And funny thing you say this Alexa, j
ust maybe that much cash was in his pocket to tip them. Maybe he had been rushing to the beach in this very suit, but his wife called him back to the house about packing for Majorca.
“I can’t,” Luke answered. “Are you crazy? Not that we don’t deserve good tips at the end of each summer. But, I can’t steal it, Alexa. He has to want to give it to me.”
“You’re the crazy one, Luke. Think of how many lessons that is. It’s so easy, so easy to just say okay.” She leaned over and squeezed her boobs together with her upper arms like a 1950s calendar pinup. “He would want you to have it.”
“You know, Luke, there have been a lot of times . . .” Kona added, “We could ask . . .”
Luke shot Kona a look. “Kona. Really?”
Kona shook his head, knowing that no matter how much he hoped to mentor and protect his younger friend who’d lost his mom in tenth grade, Luke would best him on morals at every turn.
Luke stood up. “Sorry, Alexa. I can’t wait any longer for your dad. I got a lesson.”
He walked the hundred yards or so back through the house, down the Egyptian tomb steps, to the carefully raked driveway, the nylon sweatpants sticking to his thighs.
It didn’t escape Luke that being in that forty million dollar house, lying on that eight thousand dollar lounger, wearing those three hundred dollar, dorky French swim trunks made him feel a lot grimier than he did now.
Chapter Forty-Six
The Plutocrat Has a Plan
“Yo!” Jake yelled out the window of his Range Rover. “Why are you leaving if we had a plan?”
Luke slowed his van down, while Jake reversed. The trucks stood parallel in the middle of the road, holding up traffic. “Let’s move to the side of the road,” Luke said.
It Happens in the Hamptons Page 26
