Beach Lane

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.

“Liza!”

“Kit!”

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked before enveloping her in a bone-crunching bear hug.

Eliza ignored the question. “It’s great to see you!” she said, rubbing her fingers on his spiky hair and giving him a noogie.

“I forgot something—I just gotta run up and grab it. You goin’ to Amagansett?” Kit started jogging backward into the marble lobby. “Hey, you want a ride?”

“Sure!” she said, relieved. Good old Kit. Eliza let Duke put her bags in the trunk and settled in the front seat to wait for Kit.

“Damn, girl! I missed you!” Kit said when he returned. He fired up the engine and they cruised top down on Park Avenue. “You, like, went AWOL.”

“Yeah, well, after everything that happened,” Eliza said offhandedly, “my parents wanted to get out of the city to just relax, you know? So they decided to ship me off to boarding school. Quel drag.” Eliza found Kit’s Marlboros on the dashboard and helped herself to one. Her hands shook slightly as she rooted in the glove compartment for a lighter. “Lights out at eleven and the hall monitor is a tool,” she said, firing up a Zippo and inhaling.

Kit grunted in sympathy. “Dad threatened that once. But I don’t have the grades for Andover. So, uh, how are the ’rents, anyway?” Kit asked tentatively.

“They, um, spend all their time in Florida these days,” she improvised. Eliza knew what everyone had read in the papers, but no one knew just how bad it had gotten. The gossip pages and business section had lost interest after her dad got off without an indictment, and before long the Thompsons had feigned exhaustion and disinterest over all the hubbub and left Manhattan for good.

“I didn’t know you guys were down in PB!” He smacked the steering wheel, looking relieved. “We gotta hook up winter break!”

“Of course!” She felt sick to her stomach having to lie to one of her best friends. Especially since he automatically assumed the Thompsons had retired to Palm Beach. God, she missed their place by Mar-a-Lago.

It was all her dad’s fault. She felt an all-too-familiar bitter resentment welling up inside her. It just wasn’t fair. Her parents could hide out in Buffalo and avoid all their old friends. But Eliza was sixteen—not sixty—she had her whole life ahead of her. She wasn’t about to waste her chance. She wanted back in, no matter what it took.

“So it’s just you this summer?” Kit asked.

“Yeah, thank God I bumped into you! I thought I’d have to take the Jitney. Ugh. You know I got kicked out last time because I wouldn’t turn off my cell.”

Kit grinned. “I remember. It made the Post.”

“Anyway, I’m staying at my uncle’s place on Georgica,” she said. It wasn’t such a stretch, really—Kevin Perry was one of her father’s lawyers and after the last year, well, they were practically family. Eliza decided she was really just “helping out,” and if she got paid doing it, what was the harm? Come to think of it, she was really more like an honored guest. After all, she had grown up with his oldest daughters, Sugar and Poppy, who were twins.

“Cool. That’s not too far from our new place. Got any plans for tonight?”

“No, what’s up?”

“A couple of the gang are hitting Resort, there’s a party in the VIP room around midnight, then afterward there’s P. Diddy’s Red, White, and Blue soiree at the PlayStation2 House.”

“Sounds cool.” Eliza nodded. She knew the guys who ran the PlayStation2 House. A couple of New York club promoters had convinced Sony it was a good idea to fund a weekend party house to “market” their new games. In the Hamptons it was unofficially known as a model landing pad. Kind of like the Playboy Mansion but with nubile flat-chested eighteen-year-olds who were more likely to be found marching down a runway than spread-eagle in a centerfold.

“I’ll put you on the list.”

“Hey, have you seen Charlie around, by the way?”

Kit gave her a furtive glance. “Last I heard, he was dating some hoochie he met in summer school.”

“Huh.”

“I’m sure it’s not serious.”

“Kit, you’re too sweet.”

She remembered Charlie’s face, crumpled in disbelief, when she told him over Christmas that it was probably not a good idea for them to see each other anymore. For weeks afterward he had left her voice mails wondering where she had gone. She wasn’t at school. She wasn’t at Jackson Hole after school. She wasn’t at Barneys on Saturday mornings or at Bungalow 8 on Thursday nights. Then she changed her cell number to a local Buffalo area code (some luxuries are just necessities), and she stopped getting the messages. Eliza had thought it would be easier if she just disappeared—she knew that she might break down and tell him everything if she saw him, and that was a risk she simply could not afford to take.

The convertible inched its way out of the city, and Kit paid the toll at the Triborough Bridge. Eliza savored the freeway signs as they sped east, Long Island towns with funny-sounding names like Hicksville, Ronkonkoma, and Yaphank bidding her on her way, taking her back to where she belonged.

She relaxed for the first time that day. So far, so good. Kit had bought her story about boarding school and her “uncle,” she was already invited to some pretty fabu soirees in the Hamptons, and even if her ex-boyfriend was currently unavailable, Eliza loved him and she was coming back to retrieve what was rightfully hers.