Beach Lane (2 page)

She walked a block away from the taxi line and put two fingers in her mouth to blow an earsplitting whistle.

A cab materialized in front of her turquoise Jack Rogers flip-flops. Eliza smiled and stowed her bags in the trunk.

“Park Avenue and Sixty-third, please,” she told the driver. God, it was good to be home.

port authority, take two: mara is definitely not a new yorker

MARA WATERS CONSULTED THE GRUBBY PIECE OF PAPER
in her hand. Mr. Perry had said something about the Hampton Jitney, but as she looked around the Port Authority complex, she couldn’t find signs for it anywhere. She was getting anxious. She didn’t want to be late for her first day.

She still couldn’t believe she was in New York! It was so exciting to see all the flickering neon lights, the mobs of people, and to experience the brisk, rubberneck pace—and that was just the bus station! In Sturbridge the bus station was a lone bench on a forlorn corner. You’d think they’d spruce up the place a bit to herald the occasion of someone actually leaving that dead-end town, but no.

When the phone call came the day before, she just couldn’t believe her luck. There she was, dressed up as the Old School Marm at Ye Olde School House at Olde Sturbridge Village, sweating underneath an itchy powdered wig and shepherding complacent midwestern tourists through the nineteenth century,
when the news came. She’d gotten the job as an au pair! In the Hamptons! For ten thousand dollars for two months! More money than she could even imagine. At the very least, enough to pay for her college contribution and maybe have enough left over for the sweet little Toyota Camry she had her eye on from Jim’s uncle’s used car dealership.

Of course, Jim hadn’t been too pleased she was leaving him for the summer. Actually that was the understatement of the year. Jim had been
p-i-s-s-e-d.
It had all happened so quickly that Mara hadn’t even had a chance to tell him she’d applied for the job, and Jim wasn’t the kind of guy who liked Mara making plans without him, or plans that didn’t include him, or, really, any plans at all that he hadn’t approved of beforehand. This whole Hamptons thing had blindsided him. It, like, totally ruined his plans for the Fourth of July! He was going to show off his souped-up El Dorado at the local auto show. Who was going to help him polish the hood now that Mara was abandoning him?

She and Jim had been inseparable since freshman year. More than a few people had told her she was too good for him, but they were mostly related to her, so what were they supposed to say? Mara felt a twinge of guilt for leaving but brushed it away. She had other things to take care of at the moment. She walking up tentatively to a uniformed officer behind a ticket booth and rapped on the glass window.

“Yeah?” he asked curtly, annoyed at being interrupted.

“Hi there, sir. Could you please tell me where the Hampton Jitney is?”

“You wan’ da Longuylandrail?”

“No, um, it’s called the Jitney?”

“Jipney?”

“It’s a bus? To the Hamptons?”

“New Joisey transit ovah theh.” He shook his head. “You wan’ da Hampton, take LIRR on Eight Ave.”

A passenger waiting on line overheard and chirped, “You won’t find the Jitney here; it’s on Third Avenue.”

“But really, you’re better off taking the train. Less traffic,” piped a lady holding several shopping bags behind him.

“Forget the train. Jitney’s worth it.”

“I don’t know why anyone bothers to go to the Hamptons anyway.” The lady sniffed in exasperation. “It’s just inundated with all those horrid summer people. Woodstock is so much nicer.”

“I don’t know about that. You can’t get decent sushi anywhere in the Catskills,” the first guy disagreed.

The two began a colorful argument about the relative merits of the Hamptons versus the Hudson Valley, completely ignoring Mara.

“Third—Third Avenue, did you say?” Mara asked.

“Huh? Oh yeah, just take the one-nine over to Times Square, then take the shuttle over to Forty-third and walk two blocks up toward Lex; it’s on the south side.”

It was all Greek to her. She nodded dumbly, feeling more like a hick than ever.

“But I’m telling you, dear, the train’s much better!” yelled the lady with the bags.

Mara left the line and had opened the crumpled e-mail again to make sure she had read the directions correctly when she was caught off balance by a girl who tumbled into her, narrowly missing falling flat on her face.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, helping the pretty, long-haired blonde to her feet. Mara noticed a tennis racket slung over the girl’s shoulder and was about to ask her about the Jitney, but when she looked up, the girl was gone.

Squaring her shoulders, she decided a taxi was probably her best bet and joined the packed line in front of the station to wait for a cab. Mara looked around her happily. She was so thrilled to be away, it didn’t matter how long it took to get where she was going.

jfk baggage claim: jacqui picks up more than her luggage

KEEP LOOKING, A LITTLE BIT TO YOUR LEFT, UH-HUH,
these are real, all the way down, yeah, baybee, you like what you see? I know you do, pervert, three, two, one. . . .

BINGO.

The thirty-something guy with the slicked-back hair, faded jeans and sockless mocassins touched Jacarei Velasco on her arm. It was a soft tap—a mere flutter, really; he didn’t pat her arm as much as hint at the start of a caress.

“Manuela?”

That she didn’t expect.

“Qué?”
she asked, raising her wraparound shades to assess him further. Bronze tan. Oversized Rolex. Aviator sunglasses. The shoes were obviously hand-made. He’d do.

“Sorry, I thought we’d met somewhere before, Miami Beach maybe?” he said, smiling so that the faint wrinkles around his bright blue eyes crinkled charmingly. He shrugged and turned away. Well, if that wasn’t the oldest line in the book. But she
wasn’t about to let him get away that easily. “Maybe we have,” she called.

The guy turned. “The Delano bar? Last year?”

Jacqui shook her head, smiling.

“Ah, well. Rupert Thorne,” he said, shaking her hand firmly. “Those yours?” he asked, spying a matching pair of shiny black patent luggage on the ramp.

Jacqui nodded. “I’m Jacqui Velasco.”

* * *

He motioned deftly to a uniformed driver to pick them up.

“Where to?” he asked.

“The, ah, ’Amptons?”

“Exactly where I’m headed.” He nodded approvingly. “City’s no good in the summer. Fry an egg on that concrete. Not to mention the smell.” He grimaced.

“Are you from New York?” Jacqui asked, amused by his complaints.

“Originally. We’ve got a place up in Sag. But I’ve got the cross-country commute. I’m still on Malibu time.”

She smiled, letting him yap while her mind was elsewhere. She wondered where this was headed. In São Paolo she was so accustomed to being hit on by older men that figuring out how much she could get away with was a favorite pastime. As a salesgirl at Daslu, the most fashionable store in Brazil, she had zipped the country’s richest women into handmade Parisian ball gowns. She was no mere wage slave, either, more like a glorified stylist, as
the store only employed girls from roughly the same social class as its customers. Jacqui’s family wasn’t rich, but her grandmother sent her to a prestigious convent school in the city, where Jacqui was a middling student. At Daslu she was adept at conducting ongoing flirtations with many of her patrons’ husbands. Keep them entertained while the missus spent most of his paycheck on Versace leather pants and she picked up that sweet commission. It was all part of doing business.

And it came naturally to Jacqui: Ever since she’d started filling out her C-cup bikini top, men had noticed her. Their eyes lingered on her chest, her hips, her long black hair, and Jacqui had come to believe that being beautiful was the only thing she was really good at. It was certainly the only thing anyone ever paid attention to.

But her life changed when she met Luca. Sweet, earnest Luca. The American boy she met in Rio during Carnival. Luca, with his goofy grin and his omnipresent backpack. He was the first guy she ever met who didn’t hit on her immediately. Like many revelers, she was masked at the time, but unlike most of her friends, who were staggering on the cobblestone streets trying to hold their liquor, Jacqui had been content to stand on the sidelines. After all, every year was the same wild frenzy. She didn’t know then, but she was dying for a change. She found it when Luca, an American high school senior, asked her for directions and then walked away, even when Jacqui gave him her warmest smile. They’d only exchanged a few words, but when he turned to leave, something in Jacqui wanted to follow him. And she’d certainly never felt like that before.

Unlike the overly obnoxious wolf-whistling boys from her hometown or the salacious older men from the city, Luca didn’t even seem attracted to her at first—which certainly piqued her interest. Jacqui had no false illusions about her looks. Her black hair fell in long, inky waves down her sun-kissed shoulders, and as for her body, let’s just say Giselle would have wept. The only reason Jacqui wasn’t a model was because she’d tried it once and it bored her. The endless standing around, the vacuous conversation, the asinine flattery. She had better things to do with her time than play photographer’s mannequin.

Luca was spending his spring break backpacking through South America—hiking in Machu Picchu and the Aztec trail—and seemed totally unimpressed by Jacqui’s glamour. He listened to Jacqui like he really cared what she thought, and she was quickly charmed by his lazy smile and enormous backpack. They spent a wonderful two weeks together—hitting the samba clubs, downing liters of
cachaça,
climbing the peak of the Corcovado, sunbathing in Ipanema. He had even convinced her to go camping with him in Tijuca one weekend. They had snuggled in his sleeping bag, kissing under the night sky.

Luca had told her the sexiest thing about her was her brain. Their first night together, Jacqui couldn’t go to sleep. She kept smiling to herself, not believing her luck. She tossed and turned, clutching at her stomach, feeling happy and frightened at the same time. So this was what love was like.

Then, after an amazing week, he just disappeared. He left
without so much as a goodbye or a note with his e-mail address. She didn’t even know his last name. Jacqui was crushed. For the first time in her life, Jacqui was in love. The only key to his whereabouts was that he had once mentioned his family normally spent the summer in someplace called “the Hamptons.”

It was only two days ago that Jacqui logged on to the store computer and googled “the Hamptons” yet again. But this time she found something new: Kevin Perry’s classified ad for “the summer of her life” in East Hampton. She heard back from him almost instantly. (Jacqui’s head shot had that effect on people.) It was urgent; could she hop on a plane tomorrow to arrive in town by July 4?
Mas naturalmente!
She was convinced she’d find her Luca in the Hamptons somewhere. And if not, she could always fly back home. It wasn’t as if she
really
needed the job.

Rupert consulted his watch, breaking her reverie. “If we leave now, we’ll still have time to hit the beach before sunset. My car is waiting outside,” he said, pointing to the curb, where a stretch Hummer was waiting.

“Sure.” Jacqui shrugged. She didn’t have any concrete plans on how to get to the Hamptons. She just figured something would turn up like it always did.

Jacqui gave him her flashiest megawatt smile. The one that had always led men to promise chinchilla furs and hand over platinum AmEx cards. “Lead the way.”

eliza tells a couple of not-so-white lies

THE CAB DROPPED ELIZA OFF IN FRONT OF HER FORMER
building, an imposing prewar high-rise that was one of the city’s most sought-after addresses. Its bronze gilt doors shone in the bright sun. How she missed it. In Buffalo her family occupied the first floor of a row house. The bathroom had never been renovated, and Eliza swore there was mold behind the tub. Every time she showered, she felt dirtier than when she’d started.

Her old bathroom boasted a panoramic view of Central Park and a gleaming eggshell white tub that Eliza had personally picked out from the Bofi showroom with her mother’s decorator. Original paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hung in the hallways, heirlooms from Eliza’s maternal grandmother, a former debutante who hung out with the abstract expressionists in the fifties. Woody Allen had once scouted their living room as a possible location for one of his movies. The only movie Eliza could ever imagine being filmed
in her new home was something out of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Okay, so she was exaggerating. Slightly.

Cracking linoleum tile in the kitchen. Rusted aluminum siding. Wall-to-wall putrid avocado shag carpeting. A cramped six hundred square feet! Even their former servants had lived better. Her parents kept reminding her it could have been worse. Much, much worse. Dad could have ended up in—but Eliza couldn’t go there. Bad enough that it had even been a possibility.

The weekend doorman opened the cab door and recognized her immediately.

“Miss Eliza!”

“Hi, Duke.”

He tipped his cap. “Been a long time.”

“You’re telling me.”

“You guys back in the building?”

“Not exactly,” she said, trying to appear casual. She looked down the street. There was no sign of Kit’s convertible.

“Kit around?”

“Mr. Christopher?” Duke scratched his forehead with a black leather glove, which was part of the uniform—even in ninety-eight-degree heat. “I think he just left.”

She cursed under her breath. She couldn’t believe she’d missed her ride.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ashleigh are upstairs, though. I can ring up.”

“No thanks,” Eliza said, suppressing a temptation to gnaw her nails. What on earth was she going to do now?

Just then a familiar red convertible pulled up in front of the red canopy. An agreeable-looking guy with a blond crew cut hopped out of the front seat without waiting for Duke to open the door. He gasped when he saw Eliza.