“Don’t get me started. That was obviously the studio going to Eric behind my back. They probably knew I would’ve thrown down to defend him.”
Television personalities have come and gone during Susanna’s tenure at New Day, and few women sustain careers into their forties, but Susanna was practically an institution at AMC. She briefly served as lead anchor for the evening news several years ago, but decided she enjoyed the banter of entertainment programming instead. She was approaching sixty years old and was still beloved. On the other hand, no woman was immune from reality. The network had the decency to present Susanna and Eric as equal cohosts, but Susanna happened to know that Eric was twelve years younger, earned twice as much, and was treated as the heir apparent to the network brand.
I’d spent the whole morning pretending that everything was normal for Spencer’s sake, but now that I was alone, listening to my friend’s panicked whisper, my whole body began to shake.
“Did you see Jason this morning?” I asked. “He’s not returning my calls.”
“For a millisecond. I popped into the green room to say hey, but couldn’t stick around. He seemed totally normal. Then I heard some crew members yenta-ing it up outside my dressing room. That’s how I found out about the Post article, but I literally had no time before going on air. The next thing I know, Eric’s throwing him under the bus on live television. Is it possible Jason didn’t see the news before he got to the studio?”
It was more than possible. Jason’s morning routine was a paragon of efficiency. No time for newspaper or web browsing.
“I don’t know. And I have no idea where he is right now. I’m trying not to completely lose it.” I could hear someone speaking urgently in the background.
“Shoot. I gotta go, but I’ll call you when I’m off air.”
I took a cue from my son and kept myself from crying by searching for something funny to say. “By the way . . . You told that chef you always overcook your pasta?”
“Hypothetically, in my imagination. Ciao!”
I happened to know that Susanna never cooked anything. That’s how we first became friends. And it’s how I met Jason.
8
Full-time work on the East End is hard to find. To the extent that farming and fishing have been replaced by the construction of new mega-homes, it’s still work I don’t know how to do. The retail shops and restaurants are packed in the summer, but only hire part-time and often close altogether in the off-season. I was looking for a job at the age of nineteen with nothing to boast but a recently obtained GED—a “high school equivalence” degree in name, but apparently not in perception. And it didn’t help that my reason for not finishing regular school was the three years I had spent away from the East End. When I finally came home, I heard the not-so-quiet whispers about the “hell” I’d put my parents through.
I was finally hired at Blue Heron Farms, a third-generation family business where the men fish and farm, and the women cook and sell the food. What started as a side-of-the-road farm stand had grown into a posh summer market. Before the term “farm to table” became fashionable, Blue Heron had been providing delicious fresh food to Hamptons visitors eager to avoid cooking.
I started at the cash register. After suggesting a few recipes I’d played around with in my parents’ kitchen, I was added to the cooking staff. It was my idea to launch a side business of setting up homes for weekenders. Mom would clean the house. I’d make sure that it was freshly stocked with food and drinks. To find customers, I left flyers on the windshields of the fanciest cars at Main Beach.
Susanna was my first regular. By the middle of the summer, she was so happy with the food that I was preparing that she gave me a shot at catering a small cocktail party. I picked up more clients from there. And somewhere along the way, Susanna and I became something like caretakers for each other. I looked after her home. She looked out for me. She even offered the use of her guest cottage for the off-season.
Mom and Dad made it clear they didn’t want me to move. At first I wondered if they had their own motives. It was only natural they wanted to keep Spencer and me safe under their wing. And Dad was having what we thought were back problems, making it hard for him to work. We’d only find out later, after he died of a stroke, that the problem wasn’t his back at all. It was clogged arteries in his legs. But at the time, my extra income was helping to cover expenses.
In the end, Mom talked me out of it, saying it would make me too “dependent” on Susanna. “You can’t have your son growing up in the backyard of a stranger’s house, like Dobby the house elf.” She had a point.
I was used to guests hitting on me during catering gigs. I was in my early twenties, wore my dark-blond hair in long, beachy waves, and had the perfect tan for those little black cocktail dresses that the Hampton set prefers for their party staff. When they asked me what I was doing when I got off work, my go-to response was “Going home to my son.” Nothing like a kid to get rid of a man looking to hook up.
But Jason was different.
It was Susanna’s Memorial Day party, her biggest bash of the year. Two of my staff—a bar-back and a kitchen helper—had no-showed, one of the risks of hiring summer Hamptonites as supplemental workers. Their first priority was to party, and it was the kickoff weekend of the season.
The icing on the cake was the delivery guy from the party rental company, a local who didn’t like me for “acting uppity” since I came home. When he saw that I was the one running the fancy party, he decided to dump all the chairs and tables in the driveway, forgoing the usual custom of moving and assembling them for a tip. I did the work myself instead of telling Susanna that not everyone in town liked me as much as she did.
I was scrambling to make sure I didn’t let her down, but keeping up proved less impossible than I had feared. I’d turn around, and the platter of shrimp cocktail that was running low would suddenly be replenished. The stack of tasting plates accumulating next to the bar would be cleared. I assumed that one of the two girls I had hired to pass trays for the party had been pitching in, until I walked into the kitchen to find a man reaching into the refrigerator for a plate of deviled eggs topped with caviar.
He looked surprised to see me when he turned around. “Busted.” His grin suggested a combination of pride and guilt.
“I was about to get those. Sorry.” When you work summers in the Hamptons, you get used to apologizing for things you have no reason to be sorry for.
“For what? So far, you’re the best thing about this party.” I thought it was the beginning of yet another pass until he pulled the plastic wrap from the plate and popped an egg in his mouth, one full bite. “This food is heaven,” he said once his mouth was clear, “and these people are assholes.”
“And yet you’re here.”
“True.” The grin again. “So everyone here who’s not in the kitchen is an asshole. Except Susanna. Her . . . I love. I’ll be a good boy and won’t tell her I hate these people—well, except for the nice woman who’s working her butt off to feed all of us.”
He pulled the special deviled-egg tray from a stack of platters on the kitchen island. “I assume these go here?”
“Absolutely nothing else could possibly go there.”
We began moving the eggs over, two at a time, in silence. When we were finished, he grabbed the tray and left, giving me a little wink as he backed through the swinging kitchen door. “No one has spotted me yet. I feel like a ninja.”
When the party died down, he reappeared in the kitchen as I was packing up the leftovers for Susanna’s freezer. He even helped me carry my equipment out to the pickup truck I had parked behind Susanna’s guesthouse.