And if Sara was the black sheep, her replacement was a black swan.
Allison was almost grateful she and Brian had gotten to the house early that Friday in mid-June, to witness the colorful entrance. They were all lounging around on the couch, in typical just-arrived fashion, when they heard an atypical knock at the door. This was highly unusual, since share houses were diligently left unlocked at all times, and everyone simply barged in. Everyone except Sara’s startling substitute.
At barely five feet tall, swimming in a tank top and cargo shorts, and clutching only a knapsack, he pointed to his chest and introduced himself as “Jim.” Then, lingering awkwardly in the doorway, Jim timidly took in his surroundings.
“Can I help you?” Mark asked, convinced this interloper had stumbled upon their house by mistake.
“Jim,” he insisted again, to the cluster of bewildered faces. “I pay...,” he continued, frustratingly searching for the English words he hadn’t yet mastered.
“Buddy, do you know the address you’re looking for?” Rob chimed in, taking a break from the sandwich he was devouring on the couch.
Flapping his arms, Jim grew even more flustered. “No, no! Ten-eight-eight Montauk. I pay...Sara?”
Mark was about to usher him out when this registered. “Wait...you’re taking Sara’s share?”
As if Mark had just uttered the correct answer in charades, Jim nodded his head emphatically. Mark’s face remained frozen in disbelief.
Catching on, Allison shot Brian a disconcerted look, as if they’d just been informed that a murderer would be sharing the house with them. This was sure to go over well! However, leave it to Rob to find the humor in any situation. “Jimmy, my man, come on in!” he called out. Placing down his sandwich, he smacked the couch seat next to him. “Take a load off.”
Removing his backpack, Jim positioned himself upright on the edge of the couch and flashed the kind of smile that made you forget there was anything wrong in the world—that made Allison regret her premature judgment. And in a manner less mocking than eager for amusement, Rob continued to engage him.
“Jimmy, you hungry?” Rob gestured to the humongous hero he’d picked up from the Pork Store on his way.
Jim shook his head out of obligation. “No, no...”
Sensing this, Rob ripped off half the sandwich and graciously handed it over anyway.
“Thank you,” Jim said, bowing his head in gratitude.
As they watched Jim digging in, deriving from this sandwich the kind of all-encompassing satisfaction twentysomethings barely derive from anything, it was clear that Jim would be staying in the share house.
Only through excessive probing did they unearth that Jim, new to both New York and the Hamptons, was a student at NYU’s Stern Business School. (That, and an avid peruser of Craigslist, where they later learned he’d happened upon Sara’s quarter-share listing.)
Oddly content sitting around and observing the arrivals, Jim didn’t exactly know what to do in a share house. Which was just as well, because Mark didn’t exactly know what to do with him.
Perhaps it had been a little presumptuous of Mark to assume that Sara’s spot-filler would be a girl similar to herself. And, eager to accommodate her, he hadn’t inquired into the specifics. But as the individual responsible, he quickly made the necessary adjustments.
Instead of sleeping in Sara’s assigned room with the Midwesterners, Jill and Robin, he told Jim to take the empty bed in the room with Josh and Rich.
Josh, who’d been adapting to his breakup with Allison by visibly blocking out her existence, projected a resultant hostility onto everything share-house-related. This considered, his outburst was unexpected, even from him. “No way! If you put that random who just walked in off the street in our room, I want my money back.”
Everyone (including the random) turned to face him.
Allison was aghast. Was this the “sensitive” guy she’d spent five years of her life with? Forget the intimate vacations, the year of practically cohabitating, the four previous ones that were college...Sometimes it took a non-English-speaking, five-foot-tall...well, random to unveil someone’s true personality.
But before Mark could react, Brian spoke up.
“Dave’s away at a wedding this weekend. He can stay in the room with us,” he offered of the room he shared with Rob and Dave.
“You hear that, Jimmy? The party’s in our room tonight!” Rob roared, raising a triumphant fist.
Allison—who’d taken to sleeping with Brian in his room—was, um, thrilled.
Still, as far as anyone could tell, the Jim problem was solved. And no sooner had everyone make a mad dash for the bathrooms—to simultaneously primp for the evening’s festivities—than was Jim utterly forgotten. So it was only upon reconvening for the flip cup/-pre-gaming process that the even greater problem was revealed.
Jamie, whom Allison had filled in on the Jim situation the moment she and Rachel arrived, was the first to take notice.
“He can’t wear that,” she stated, referring to the wifebeater and shorts cloaking his teeny frame. Everyone looked at her as if she’d just insulted the style sense of a five-year-old. “No, not because there’s anything wrong with it!” she clarified. “It’s just, they’ll never let him in.”
They’d all totally overlooked this, instead perceiving his clothes as simply part of the oddity that was Jim himself. But it was now apparent Jamie was right.
“Dude, you can’t wear shorts or tank tops to nightclubs,” Rob tried to explain. He patted the knapsack Jim had once again fastened to his back. “What else you got in there?”
Unzipping it, Jim began digging through a mess of papers and books that flooded over the sides. Funny, it looked almost as if—on a last-minute whim—Jim had decided to hop a Jitney after finishing his final class. But the fact remained that Jim didn’t have a single thing to wear to a swanky, dress-code-enforcing nightclub. Nor did anyone imagine he’d ever been to one.
“Does he even want to go?” Josh snarled from across the room. Aware he wouldn’t so much as acknowledge her, Allison shot him a dirty look.
“Well, we can’t just leave him here,” Mark said, his intonation going up at the end as if he was tempted to make it a question.
But Allison, whose compassion was what had driven her to become a teacher, spoke in Jim’s defense. “Can’t someone lend him something?”
Every male in the room looked away. Apparently it was two entirely separate matters to give a stranger half a sandwich, and to entrust said stranger with your favorite pair of two-hundred-dollar designer jeans.
Lucky for them, as they peered uncomfortably around at one another, it became clear that every guy in the house that weekend was over six feet tall.
“I think he stands a better shot being underdressed than wearing clothes that are ten times too big for him,” Rob reasoned.
“Okay, then you be the one who takes him home when the door people start shouting ‘No tank tops, no shorts,’” Mark countered. “Why should we give them a reason to neg him?”
Jim, who’d been standing around sullenly while the room debated his fate, seemed more capable of cognition than anyone gave him credit for. Sensing this, Allison gave Brian her most sympathetic pout.
“All right, Jimmy, come with me,” he finally agreed. “Let’s see what we can do.”
Jim’s face lit up, though not half as brightly as Allison’s. And, with naive optimism, the three of them headed back to Brian’s room.
Rifling through his duffel, Brian handed over to Jim a pair of distressed Diesels. After being rolled up about five times at the cuff, and kept from falling to his feet with a thick leather belt...well, they still looked ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was how he looked in Brian’s oversize dress shirts, so—rummaging through Mark’s closet—Allison was pleased to come upon a child-size green T-shirt boasting I LOVE SOUTHAMPTON.
“Maybe we really should just let him go in his own clothes?” Mark said after viewing the
(hardly improved) result. But even if that had been a better option, the vans outside soon honked their arrival. So, ugly duckling or beautiful swan, Jim would have to go as is.
A nervous energy filled the share house residents on the van ride there, as if they were trying to sneak their own food into a movie theater. But once they debarked, their plan was executed flawlessly.
Basically, Jim stayed hidden from view behind the taller guys (read: all the guys) while Mark collected the group’s reduced-price tickets. Then, when Alex waved them in, Mark kept him occupied with small talk so the group encircling Jim could mass-migrate inside, garb unnoticed. Score one for 1088 Montauk.
Once they were within Pink Elephant’s gates, everyone rejoiced as fervently as if they’d just sneaked their underage sibling inside the club. As if they needed a reason, this called for some serious celebrating.
“Patrón, Jimmy?” Brian offered.
Jim refused to touch a drop of alcohol, but this was hardly evident from his behavior. The energy in the club had produced its own high, and, embracing the beats that pulsated so hard you could feel them in the floor, Jim appeared to be having a fabulous time.
His delight was contagious. That night the group all seemed to be experiencing the club through a newcomer’s eyes.
Except for those using their eyes to project their hatred.
Of course, Allison hadn’t expected Josh to be overjoyed at her developing relationship with Brian. And up until this point, she’d been surprised not to have sparked any type of reaction from him. But never in a million years did she expect him to react so spitefully. Or to do what he did next.
It started innocently enough. Taking the hand of Tara/Jocelyn (whose interest in him Allison had detected since Day One), Josh made a prominent show of pulling her out to dance in the aisles—being careful to glance back at Allison every so often. Naturally, she tried to ignore this, though it was an eerie feeling to look up and meet his concentrated gaze.
“You guys, he’s giving me death stares,” Allison whispered to her friends, wondering if she’d invented a good part of this.
“I know!” Rachel said without turning around.
“Ignore it,” advised Jamie (who, by choosing to bypass her usual frolicking to sit in a booth with Jeff, was exhibiting some shocking behavior of her own).
But despite her previous success at indifference, as much as Allison tried she simply couldn’t ignore Josh’s feature performance. Really, no one at the club could. For, at just the right moment, when he was certain he’d captured an audience, he leaned over and began making out with Tara/Jocelyn. Right there on the dance floor. In public.
“Whatever! That is so immature,” Rachel said, dismissively turning her back to it.
In a less discreet response, Jamie forged a gagging gesture. “What is he, like eighteen?” she shrieked. “That’s the most disgusting thing ever!”
Still, disgusting or not, it was like that bloody scene in a movie that made Allison instinctively cover her eyes...but she couldn’t help peeking at it through the cracks of her fingers anyway.
Sure, she expected him to move on! Sure, she knew watching it would never be easy! But even more disturbing to her was the emergence of so many awful qualities she’d never before seen. This viciousness, this cruelty, this spite! Where had it all come from? So sure, it shocked Allison to watch Josh making out with another girl. But, coming from someone she had loved so genuinely then, and had honestly believed she always might, was to Allison the most piercing surprise of all.
Thank goodness for Brian.
Sensing now hurt she was, he protectively reached out and grabbed hold of her hand, sandwiching it tightly between both of his. Almost as if she were a child who’d just fallen and skinned her knee and in a minute she’d let the hysteria fly.
“I have an idea,” Brian whispered, pushing her hair behind her ear. “Want to head back to the house? We’ll have my room to ourselves for a while.”
They’d been alone every consecutive day of the last few weeks—but because each minute she watched Josh somehow negated all this, Allison jumped at this opportunity.
Little did she know, she would soon jump again.
They caught a cab back to the share house, and as they stepped inside Allison embraced its vast emptiness. Not even pausing to put down their things, they scurried downstairs to Brian’s room and threw open the door.
And again, Allison and Brian discovered something neither expected.
To their absolute horror, there was a full-grown man asleep in Brian’s bed.
Opening the door wider, they revealed a woman’s figure buried beneath the sheets in Rob’s bed. And finally, there was good ol’ Jim, still sporting his borrowed jeans and Hamptons T-shirt, sprawled across Dave’s bed. (At least he’d gotten the sleeping assignments right.)
“Ahhhh!” shrieked Allison, instantly startling the sleeping people.
“Ahhhh!” echoed Jim, jumping alarmingly to his feet. In a desperate plea, he ran over to them. “These my parents!” he shouted, his eyes dilated in fear. “They visit from Canada and have no place to stay.”
Glancing from the grave gray-haired couple back to each other, Allison and Brian were too stunned to speak. Settling on reshutting the door, they attempted to contain all the strangeness in that one room and went upstairs until the rest of the house returned.
Conveying the story to a skeptical Mark (who believed it was a prank up until the moment he personally bore witness), they interrupted the family’s slumber just once more—to inform Jim that his parents could stay on the living room sofa.
And so they laid their heads that night in the same place where many a beer had been spilled, and many a sexual escapade had been implemented. Though come the next morning, any trace of Jim and his parents had vanished from sight (with the exception of Brian’s jeans, length restored, and laid out thoughtfully).
It was the most unexpected of all surprises, and afterward, those Allison told of the Jim fiasco never quite believed it. Though following that weekend’s episodes, anyone who set foot in the share house came to expect the black swan. Or rather, the swan(s).
Chapter Thirteen
Rachel believed life was a zero-sum game. To get one, you had to give one. 11 for 21. Total gains equals total losses. In other words, no one got something for nothing.
This translated effectively into the romantic arena as well, thus inspiring her to develop a finely tuned dating platform. A set of uncompromisable rules of etiquette, if you will, that she adhered to like a religion. And while inarguably conservative, this mutual system of give-and-take had always served her just fine.
Case in point: If a guy wanted to hook up with a girl, he needed to take her out to dinner. If he wanted oral gratification, he needed to (satisfactorily) deliver it up first. And if he wanted to pass go, you’d better believe that the relationship title needed to be adequately established.
A bit on the technical side? Perhaps. But dealing with dating game theory, where payoffs depended on the choices of two people, Rachel determined this an effective means to optimize both interests. To establish a long-run equilibrium.
That following Saturday, however, the guys in the share house were forced to acknowledge a different zero-sum principle: to get into the club, they had to first buy bottles.
While this was hardly novel in the world of New York nightclubs, the house had managed to avoid this huge expenditure by frequenting the places Mark promoted. Leading the pack like the Pied Piper, he could escort in a gargantuan group for a minimal cover charge—highly advantageous to guys, whose presence was about as coveted as fruit flies around alcohol bottles. So come that third weekend, when Jamie fought over comps with Mark and convinced a sizable chunk of the share house to split off to the new hot spot Dune, their vanload discharged to a less-than-warm welcome.
“Excuse me?” attempted several members of their group, striving to seize the attention of the oblivious gatekeepers.
They’d
have had similar luck with a bullhorn. Even though they’d arrived at the insanely early hour of ten thirty (at which time there wasn’t the slightest semblance of a line), they were left to fester outside for a good fifteen minutes—purely for show. During this lengthy interlude, the intimidating bald man overseeing the door (whom Jamie quietly identified as “Rich Thomas, from Marquee”) stood silently beside security and ignored their entreaties the way a celebrity might whistles from paparazzi.
When he was good and ready, he looked up.
“How many?” asked a voice already sounding annoyed. Under his discerning stare, Rachel began to think they had had a better shot of getting in before he granted them eye contact.
Dave, by virtue of being the nearest person to him (for better or worse), did a quick head count. “I think we’re just twelve,” he said, aware that just twelve sounded as much an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp.
“Two tables,” he pronounced without so much as a flinch. That settled, he raised a challenging eyebrow and began to reach for the rope.
“Wait...two bottles?” Dave asked, while various exclamations of shock mounted from the group behind him.
“Two tables,” he repeated, rolling his eyes and looking past Dave to the hordes of imaginary people coming at him from all ends. “Two-bottle minimum each.”
“What?” gasped several of the bottle-service novices. “No way!”
On cue, security then informed them to please move aside if they weren’t going in, so as not to hold up the “line” (of which they were currently the entirety).
Outraged by the prospect of being bullied into bottles, Ilana and posse decided to simply cab it over to Star Room (where a twenty-dollar cover was seeming more and more insignificant). And then there were nine.
“Do we really want to go in here?” Dave asked, feeling obliged to step up after being unofficially appointed ringleader. Which Rachel found amusing in itself, because in the short time she’d known him, Dave had proven to be much more the mooch than the spender. If pressed, he’d state his occupation under the ambiguous umbrella of “real estate,” though he often seemed to lack any disposable income—and what he lacked most of all was any sort of ambition. Given his decent looks, girls were eager enough to overlook this, but from rides to food to alcohol, his friends continually picked up the slack for him.
How the Other Half Hamptons Page 16
