The High Season

  “What bastards?”

  “The bastards who find things and put them on the Internet! Ask the bastards if they ever ate a chicken! What I can’t figure out is who got hold of it.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Gus,” Ruthie said. His face had gone red. His thick fingers picked restlessly at the buttons on his shirt, dislodging a small bit of tomato.

  “Somebody told me I’m trending on Twitter,” he said. “Some pretty young person who then patiently explained what Twitter was, like I was already dead. I’m sorry about the damn chicken, okay?”

  “I know.”

  “Come and see me, Ruthie, I’m doing new work.”

  “I’ll text you.”

  “Fuck you, text me, pick up the fucking phone and speak like a human.”

  “Okay, I’ll pick up the fucking phone.”

  “You won’t. You think my best days are behind me.”

  “Gus—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I like you anyway. I’m going to get myself another taco. I think there’s part of this shirt that hasn’t been stained yet.”

  * * *

  —

  MIKE STOOD APART, nursing a beer. It was his party stance, amiable, ready to chat, but you had to come to him. Why did that suddenly bother her? Or maybe it always had.

  Ruthie walked up in her silk and heels, tossing her newly tousled hair just a little bit.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “That’s because I’ve just lived through a work saga. Thanks for bringing Adeline.”

  “Wasn’t easy,” he said. “Catha freaked her out with cheese and exclamation points. Adeline asked why someone she didn’t know sent her such a haunch of manchego. And she has another party to go to. But she came.”

  “Did you fix the step?”

  “Yeah, but she found a couple of other things so I’ll be there next week. Don’t worry, nothing major, let me handle it, okay?”

  “Catha took the credit for Adeline coming.”

  “Shocker.”

  “You don’t like Catha, either?”

  “This is a thing with you. I never liked Catha and you always made us have dinner with her and Larry.”

  “Oh, come on, just because she said she strives to live counterintuitively that one time, you decided she was an ass.”

  “All that cultural omnivorousness. Did I hear the latest Moth podcast? Did I read the article on Gober in The New Yorker? Art passes through her like an enema. She doesn’t absorb anything. She’s a cultural high colonic.”

  “Hey, watch what you say around a taco truck.”

  “And don’t get me started on Larry,” Mike continued. “What a misanthrope. It physically pains him to be pleasant. Every word is a turd he has to strain to squeeze out.”

  “He’s married to a cultural laxative. There you go. Jack Sprat.” Ruthie hesitated. “The thing is, I think she might be after my job.”

  “What? That’s crazy. She’s your friend. And everybody loves you.”

  “Not everybody. They’re really leaning on me. I’ll tell you about it at dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Tonight. The Drift?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “You forgot?”

  “I didn’t forget, I just…Adeline invited us to this party. I was just going to tell you. It’s in the Hamptons. Roberta Verona is going to be there, and Jem’s dying to meet her.”

  “Oh.”

  Jem ran up, her face alight. “Did Daddy tell you? Can I go? Adeline said she’d introduce me to Roberta Verona! Is it okay what I’m wearing? Adeline said it was fine.”

  Smiling, Adeline walked up behind Jem. She put a casual hand on Jem’s shoulder. “Ruthie, I’m not kidnapping your daughter. You should come, too. It’s my friend Daniel, he’s sending a launch so we don’t have to take the ferry.”

  “It sounds great, but I can’t leave Spork until it’s over.”

  “Well, think about it. You can come when you’re done here. I’ll text you the address and leave word at the gate.”

  A party in the Hamptons. With a gate. And could “Daniel” be Daniel Mantis?

  “I might be able to get away,” she said.

  “Marvelous,” said Adeline.

  13

  DOE CRUISED DOWN the side street in Greenport and pulled into the ferry line. It was long, stretching into a residential neighborhood, but she’d expected it. You couldn’t make reservations, and locals knew better than to cross on a holiday weekend. She had no choice, and she had patience.

  Her gaze drifted to the side, to a tall, narrow shingled house in the middle of a renovation. The house reminded her of a New England that scared her, the one with narrow stairs and attics and cellars and ghosts. She’d grown up in Florida in a concrete block house with no surprises, just an occasional gecko in your shoe. This house was peaked, narrow, gray, with windows on the side that resembled the eyes and mouth of a human face. She hated being scrutinized, even by a house. Today a red towel hung outside a windowsill, a wagging tongue of a taunt.

  Guilty.

  Gus was a nice old guy, and she’d helped him out a few times with his computer. She’d been the one to organize his digital files, and she found the film. Weird, interesting, some art critic would call it transgressive. She made the mistake of showing a few minutes of it to Catha. Just a snippet, like a cat video on a dull day. She didn’t expect her to use it against Ruthie.

  It was a slow-motion train wreck, and Ruthie didn’t deserve it, but Doe knew that money ran over conscience like a semi ran over a skunk. Only the stink was left. Money like Mindy’s was the real deal. There was no board lady alive who would follow her conscience in the face of Mindy’s parents, who lived on Park Avenue and were on the boards of Lincoln Center and the Met.

  So Ruthie, who was excellent at her job and kept staff on the boil without even seeming to be in the kitchen, would be gone soon. Catha would make a terrible boss, but if Doe could monetize seekrit-hamptons by the end of the summer, she could achieve her dream of freelance freedom. She’d never make money working at a nonprofit. She believed in profit, all the way.

  She moved up on the line. She’d make the next crossing. There was a tiny stain on her Marc Jacobs seersucker sundress from the taco she had at Spork. She dumped water on it. The only straightforward advice Shari had ever given her? Blot, don’t rub. It beat Never buy a white bra by a mile.

  Doe had perfected the art of buying off-season. In the Hamptons the summer people gave to their housekeepers after Labor Day, and the housekeepers loaded up their Subarus and took the haul to the secondhand shops. That took care of clothes and shoes. She knew a Prius wouldn’t mark her as a plebe, just someone with a social conscience. She wore no jewelry except fake diamond studs—not even a Muffie could tell if studs were real—and she knew better than to wear a watch. She kept her hair short because no one would notice her lack of a blowout. She had a Tory Burch cover for her phone, and she had scored a Marni canvas and leather bucket bag for two hundred dollars, a price that she could not afford and was why she couldn’t afford to pay summer rates to the Doyles.

  Drive across Shelter Island, second ferry to Sag Harbor. On that ten-minute ferry ride she browsed through her bookmarks to calm herself down. She could do this. It could possibly be the biggest party she’d ever crashed, but she knew the neighborhood. She just had to skip out before Adeline showed up. Not that Adeline would recognize her, she was just the girl who took the pictures.

  Who was in the Hamptons this early besides the usual crew? She flipped through gossip columns and blogs. She was up on actors and models but she had trouble with athletes and moguls. The rich kids were the hardest, the ones with jobs like “app co-designer” or “style consultant.” They all looked the same to her, as though cloned from the same cells, and she had to work at it. She tossed th
e phone in the passenger seat as they bumped against the pier. She’d have her pick of the hedgie crowd, the media elite. Artists, too. Mantis’s daughter, Lark, was some kind of entrepreneur in something Doe couldn’t remember, financed by her father, Doe was sure.

  She found a space in town, which was lucky. Lift folding bike out of trunk, pedal toward the house, already researched.

  Doe had grown up in South Florida with no money, a mother with terrible taste in boyfriends, and a succession of dogs with names like Boo and Moon who escaped regularly and got run over. Her older sister got wise at the age of sixteen and moved in with her boyfriend. Her little brother had drowned in a pool. As soon as she could, Doe got out, working during high school as a towel girl at hotels for tips, making her way toward the glitter and swank of South Beach, where men had slipped hundred-dollar bills in her hand along with notes and numbers. She had come to understand how the hotel service industry had certain kinds of opportunities for advancement. Not one-night stands just for a handful of bills on a dresser, an occupation she felt, considering her background, she was destined for. But an honest living as a tipster. She got to know the bloggers, the photographers, and she tipped them off to the routines of celebrities—who went to which clubs, who would be at what restaurant when. Money was a constantly flowing river, from doorman to manicurist to pool girl to concierge. You got to know who was on the take and the make pretty early, and who you could almost-trust until you couldn’t trust them anymore. Most of the celebrities didn’t care; they actually wanted the photographers to dog them. Doe had financed a college education and a car on the proceeds. She had been making a decent living before she got mixed up with Ron.

  When she got fired from the hotel, she put on a black dress and found the international art crowd. She became one of the art girls who roamed Art Basel, and she met a dealer who gave her a job and entrée to the right parties. He never knew that she took covert photos of celebrities. With just an iPhone, it was amazing what she could do. Sometimes she’d use a camera and just pretend to have press credentials. People rarely asked.

  When she had to leave Miami, she needed to go far and fast. She took off with a surfer boyfriend to the Hamptons. He left for Costa Rica but she stayed, broke and freezing in Montauk in November. She walked the streets of East Hampton, took a look at the houses, some visible now, behind the wind-burned twenty-foot hedges. She saw a place to launch herself again. She found her way to the cheaper apartments on the North Fork and lucked into Tim and Kim’s garage apartment.

  Turned out she liked it here. She liked the quiet cold winters and the summers of opportunity. She had come to ground, she was digging in for a while, catching her breath and making plans. She invented a prep school past and a degree from Reed College—elite, but small and far away enough that she most likely wouldn’t run into any alumni—and talked herself into a part-time job at the Belfry. She knew after ten minutes that Ruthie would check her references but not her degree.

  When she first got to the North Fork she spent most of her time on tedious ferry rides to the Hamptons. She cultivated tipsters because she knew how to find them, just by hanging at bars in the off-season, making friends, and sleeping around: a manicurist, a waiter for the biggest society caterer, a dog walker, a party planner, some willing to part with information. If she read the local rags and tabloids and stayed alert, she could get lucky at least a few times a weekend with a good shot. There were so many outlets now on the Web, most not offering much, but seekrit-hamptons kept doubling and tripling followers.

  She folded up the bike and stashed it, pushing it into a thick hedge. Then she took the usual route to get to the beach, racing across a lawn and gardens of a house that she’d heard was tied up in some sort of litigation. No security and no one was ever there. In minutes she was off down the beach, swinging her sandals. She’d learned how to walk like she belonged.

  Nobody ever noticed her in the Hamptons. There were legions of tall blondes to ogle. She was small and could be mistaken for a twelve-year-old if you didn’t look very hard, and people at these parties rarely did.

  There would be security guys, but you could always count on a few people leaving the party to drink on the beach. That’s why she always arrived late. The house was behind the dunes, blindingly white with enormous squares of glass. She could glimpse the serene flat plane of the pool in the middle of green grass. The patio was crowded, and people had spilled out onto the lawn. Some people had already walked down onto the beach, but she could see the muscular boys in white pants and tight white Lacoste shirts keeping an eye out.

  She stopped to take a wineglass out of her purse. She swung it by its stem and walked toward the people on the beach. When she was a few yards away she waved.

  A small clot of young people turned to look at her as she strode toward them.

  “Hey, great party,” she said, ignoring the eye-roll of one of the girls, clearly not happy at being interrupted. “I came out here with Spencer and I lost my earring! Can you believe it?”

  “It happens,” one of the blondes said. She turned her back on Doe.

  But the gym rat security boys had seen her talking to the group by now, so she stepped back and trilled, “See you up there!”

  She climbed up the steps to the patio. A long bench had been set up with a galvanized steel trench full of ice in which pitchers of water and lemon were continually replenished. For feet. She poured the cool water on her feet and an attendant handed her a fluffy white hand towel. Doe dried her toes and slipped back into her sandals. After that Sultan-of-Brunei-ish operation, she simply walked into the party.

  She picked a virgin mojito off a tray and wandered across the lawn, scanning for celebs. It never failed to amaze her how uniformly fit and good-looking the people at these parties were. Good genes plus good doctors. Ugly men made sure to marry beautiful women, and their daughters turned out fine. Orthodontia and Botox, a twice-weekly hair appointment, clothes tailored to your body. They owned the world, and they looked that way. Sometimes she took the Long Island Rail Road to the city, and in just the walk from the train track to the subway in Penn Station she saw a variety of features—misshapen noses, shades of skin, moles, crooked teeth—that marked plainness or ugliness or hotness, didn’t matter, but it added up to something coarse and alive. Maybe that was why she had to work so hard to navigate this pretty world—there were no obvious physical clues. Character had been smoothed out. The codes were all word choices and accessories.

  The gigantic white house rising next to her looked barely tethered and ready to sail. A wall of glass faced her, and a cloud moved behind the sun. She could just see inside. In an almost empty room, a man sat with his back to her, cross-legged on a white leather bench. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood up. Now that she’d noticed him she couldn’t look at anything else.

  “You’re blocking my view.”

  Doe turned. A tall, bony girl a little older than she was stood looking at her. The sun was behind her, sparking her blond highlights. Doe recognized her immediately. Lark Mantis, Daniel’s daughter. Pretty, not beautiful, but dude, those legs. That style.

  “Sorry.” Doe didn’t move out of the way.

  “His hood is up,” Lark said. She gestured with a hand holding her cocktail glass. The other hand held a silver flask.

  “Yeah.”

  “When the hood is up, no one can interrupt him. It’s his Bat-Signal.”

  “So why does he sit where everyone can see him?”

  “That’s the whole point? He’s meditating or whatever?” She tilted her head and stumbled a bit. Doe realized she was half drunk.

  “Hey, I don’t know you.”

  “Doe Callender.”

  “Doe. As in ‘a deer’? Wow, we both have parents who are seriously bad namers. I’m Lark.”

  “Lark is cool.”

  “Well, it helps when you’re an apothecary to hav
e a spirit guide.” Doe could tell that this was a line she’d used many times.

  “Apothecary?”

  “I make potions. Like a witch.”

  “A good witch or a bad witch?”

  “Which would you prefer?”

  Doe hesitated. So they were flirting. “Bad. Definitely.”

  “Then I’ll be bad, just for you.” Lark smirked and poured liquid into Doe’s glass. “Boring virgin mojitos.” She leaned in close to Doe and took a sniff. “Nice. I’m going to guess.”

  “Guess…”

  “What you’re wearing. Your soap or lotion or perfume or whatever. I’m going to guess the dominant note. Can I…?” Lark didn’t wait for an answer but leaned in, and this time her nose touched Doe’s hair and the heat of her breath hit Doe’s earlobe.

  “Lemongrass. Am I right?”

  “Amazing.” Doe decided not to mention she used soap from the supermarket, soap she chose because it had no scent. “So you make…”

  “Essential oils. Lotions. I had a farm in Vermont where I grew flowers and herbs. My dad was totally not into it. Didn’t get it, whatever. Yale MFA, internship at MoMA, why am I picking daisies? Not daisies, I told him, calendula. For years he tells me to follow my bliss. Now it’s, Get a job. You have no idea.”

  Lark stared out at the ocean. She had all the money in the world and the eyes of a broken person. For Doe, always an irresistible combination. She took a tiny sip of her drink. She had a rule about no alcohol at parties.

  “So. Truth or dare?” Lark asked.

  “Dare.”

  “I totally knew you’d say that!” She leaned in closer, lime and rum on her breath.

  “Go in and interrupt him? Just get him to drop the hood. I need to talk to him. If you win, you get…you get…uh, me!” Lark clinked her glass against Doe’s. “Dinner at Sant Ambroeus. Here or the city. My treat. Obviously. Or,” she added, reconsidering, “lunch.”

  Doe felt the rum hit her almost empty stomach. She bit her bottom lip and squinted. “All I have to do is go in there?”