And for some reason I agree to try.
That night, I mention Amy’s party to Bruce. There’s no atmosphere my party-loving husband adores more than kegs of beer on tap, great music, and tanned ladies in cotton hoodies over short shorts. There’s nothing he likes less than the life he grew up with: overprocessed hair, Lilly Pulitzer clothes, real jewelry at the beach, and champagne with rose petals in it. I have no idea which end of the spectrum Amy’s party will be on and I tell him it’s probably somewhere in the middle but still, he says we should go.
I wrangle two high school students to watch our kids for a few hours on Saturday night. I promise myself to be as perfect to Bruce as possible, as close to the person who fell in love with Bruce years ago as I can be. I want to feel something tonight. I will laugh at his jokes, not mention kids, not allude to work or how much money I’m not bringing home anymore.
For the past seven years we’ve been renting an older, aluminum-sided house on the side of the highway away from the ocean. We’re pretty distant from the happening parts of Southampton and live among year-round residents. We have a yard that rolls down to a freshwater lake so we have no need for a swimming pool. Our lawn is brown for most of the summer and the few flowers that manage to bloom get eaten by deer the very day they do. When summers get rainy, moss creeps into the kitchen and up the walls and the place takes on an earthy smell, the smell of nuts and life and something that reminds me of tea. We call our house the Tea Bag.
As the people I worked with became rich, the Tea Bag House no longer felt like a place to invite them to. Many of them purchased palatial places on the other side of the highway, shingled, classic homes with quickly assembled interiors of wood and stone, soaring ceilings, and powerful air-conditioning systems that assure a constant seventy-two degrees. Their homes have names, painted on quaint wooden boards, posted on their automatic gate systems, names like Swann’s Way, Aspen East, or Meadowmere. We could have afforded the same if we hadn’t been saving for the suburban escape hatch. Anyway, we liked our old Tea Bag House.
As we drive over to Amy’s house share, I again get that almost-feeling of happy, the same feeling I got after selling most of our stock at that French Internet café.
We turn in to the estate section where the homes hug the ocean. Several of their owners are people I’ve either worked with or been on deals for IPOs with. I challenge myself to see if I remember who lives where and I point the homes out to Bruce. “Linda Wachner from Warnaco, the clothing company. Calvin Klein, designer, what a gorgeous house. John Paulson in that one, he’s a hedge fund manager, was short the market in this latest crash and made a billion with a b. George Soros, who is George Soros, Howard Stern, that radio guy, Bob ‘SFX Entertainment’ Sillerman, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Tory Burch designs clothes, and King McPherson is somewhere along here too.” I was pretty pleased with myself for being able to speak as fast as Bruce was driving.
“You should man a tour bus” was all Bruce said.
I glance at the even number of Amy’s address, which surprises me. The evens are the ocean side, not the bay. No house sells for less than $25 million on the ocean side. What sort of multi-gazillionaire rents his house out to be shared? We turn in to a graveled drive and a valet parker takes our car from us. Embarrassed, I chuck the Happy Meal toys stuck between the front seats into the back before I hand him my keys. I glance at poor Bruce in his surfer hoodie and Quiksilver shorts and compare his dress code to the white-jacketed waiters with trays of drinks standing at attention beside golf carts, ready to whisk us up the hundred yards to the starkly modern estate we can see from the bottom of the driveway. I sigh for Bruce. I married a regular guy who unstuck himself from the pretentious family he grew up with only to find himself in that world again. I think he just wants to have some fun and look where I’ve brought him.
“Well, you look nice,” he says generously as he smirks.
I’m wearing a simple cotton shift with a belt so tight I think it belongs to Kevin. At least it’s colorful.
“We don’t have to go,” I say.
“I don’t give a shit if your friend doesn’t know how to have fun. I’m happy to drink her beer.” He laughs in a crazy, unattractive way.