I
Janey Wilcox spent every summer for the last ten years in the Hamptons, and she’d never once rented a house or paid for anything, save for an occasional Jitney ticket. In the early nineties, Janey was enough of a model to become a sort of lukewarm celebrity, and the lukewarm celebrity got her a part (“thinking man’s sex symbol”) in one of those action movies. She never acted again, but her lukewarm celebrity was established and she figured out pretty quickly that it could get her things and keep on getting them, as long as she maintained her standards.
So every year around May, Janey went through the process of choosing a house for the summer. Or rather, choosing a man with a house for the summer. Janey had no money, but she’d found that was irrelevant as long as she had rich friends and could get rich men. The secret to getting rich men, which so many women never figured out, was that getting them was easy, as long as you didn’t have any illusions about marrying them. There was no rich man in New York who would turn down regular blow jobs and entertaining company with no strings attached. Not that you’d want to marry any of these guys anyway. Every rich guy she’d been with had turned out to be weird—a freak or a pervert—so by the time Labor Day came around, she was usually pretty relieved to be able to end the relationship.
In exchange, Janey got a great house and, usually, the man’s car to drive around. She liked sports cars the best, but if they were too sporty, like a Ferarri or a Porsche, that wasn’t so good because the man usually had a fixation on his car and wouldn’t let anyone drive it, especially a woman.
The guy she had been with last summer, Peter, was like that. Peter had golden-blond hair that he wore in a crew cut, and he was a famous entertainment lawyer, but he had a body that could rival any underwear model’s. They were fixed up on a blind date, even though they’d actually met more than a dozen times at parties over the years, and he asked her to meet him at his town house in the West Village because he was too busy during the day to decide on a restaurant. After she rang the buzzer, he left her waiting on the street for fifteen minutes. She didn’t mind, because the friend who fixed them up, a socialite type who had gone to college with Peter, kept emphasizing what a great old house he had on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton. After dinner, they went back to his town house, ostensibly because he had to walk his dog, Gumdrop, and when they were in t
he kitchen, she spotted a photograph of him, in his bathing suit on the beach, tacked to the refrigerator door. He had stomach muscles that looked like the underside of a turtle. She decided to have sex with him that night.
This was the Wednesday before Memorial Day, and the next morning, while he was noisily making cappuccino, he asked her if she wanted to come out to his house for the weekend. She had known he was going to ask her, even though the sex was among the worst she’d had in years (there was some awkward kissing, then he sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing himself until he was hard enough to put on a condom, and then he stuck it in), but she was grateful that he had asked her so quickly.
“You’re a smart girl, you know,” he said, pouring cappuccino into two enameled cups. He was wearing white French boxer shorts with buttons in the front.
“I know,” she said.
“No, I mean it,” he said. “Having sex with me last night.”
“Much better to get it out of the way.”
“Women don’t understand that guys like me don’t have time to chase them.” He finished his cappuccino and carefully washed out the cup. “It’s a fucking bore,” he said. “You should do all of your friends a favor and tell them to quit playing those stupid girl games. If a girl doesn’t put out by the second or third date, you know what I do?”
“No,” Janey said.
He pointed his finger at her. “I never call her again. Fuck her.”
“No. That’s exactly what you don’t do. Fuck her,” Janey said.
He laughed. He came up to her and squeezed one of her breasts. “If everything goes well this weekend, maybe we’ll spend the whole summer together. Know what I mean?” he said. He was still squeezing her breast.
“Ow,” Janey said.
“Breast implants, huh?” he said. “I like ‘em. They should make all women get them. All women should look like you. I’ll call you.”
Still, when he hadn’t called by noon on Friday, she began to have doubts. Maybe she’d read him wrong. Maybe he was totally full of shit. It was unlikely, though—they knew too many people in common. But how well did anybody really know anyone else in New York? She called up Lynelle, the socialite who had fixed them up. “Oh, I’m so glad you guys hit it off,” Lynelle said.
“But he hasn’t called. It’s twelve-thirty,” Janey said.
“He’ll call. He’s just a little . . . strange.”
“Strange?”
“He’s a great guy. We have this joke that if I weren’t married to Richard, we’d be married. He calls me his non-future-ex-wife. Isn’t that hysterical?”
“Hysterical,” Janey said.
“Don’t worry. You’re just his type,” Lynelle said. “Peter just has his own way of doing things.”
At one-thirty, Janey called Peter’s office. He was in a meeting. She called twice more, and at two-thirty, his secretary said he’d left for the day. She called the town house several times. His machine kept picking up. Finally, he called her at three-thirty. “Little anxious?” he asked. “You called eleven times. According to my caller ID.”
They drove out to the Hamptons in his new Porsche Turbo. Gumdrop, a Bichon Frise with blue bows in his topknot, had to sit on her lap, and kept trying to lick her face. All the way out, Peter kept making his hand into a gun shape, pretending to shoot at the other motorists. He called everyone “a fucking Polack.” Janey tried to pretend that she thought it was funny.
In Southampton, they stopped for gas at the Hess station. That was a good sign. Janey always loved that gas station, with the attendants in their civilized white and green uniforms—it really made you feel like you were finally out of the city. There was a line of cars. Peter got out of the car and went to the bathroom, leaving the engine running. After a few minutes, the people behind her started honking. She slid into the driver’s seat just as Peter came running out of the bathroom, waving his arms and screaming, “You fucking Polack, don’t touch my car!”
“Huh?” she said, looking around in confusion.
He yanked open the car door. “Nobody drives my fucking car but me. Got that? Nobody touches my fucking car but me. It’s my fucking car.”
Janey slid gracefully out of the car. She was wearing tight jeans and high-heeled sandals that made her an inch taller than he was, and her long, nearly white, blond hair hung straight down over a man’s white button-down shirt Her hair was one of her most prized possessions: It was the kind of hair that made people look twice. She lifted her sunglasses, aware that everyone around them was now staring, recognizing her as Janey Wilcox, the model, and probably beginning to recognize Peter as well. “Listen, Buster,” she said into his face. “Put a lid on it. Unless you want to see this little incident in the papers on Monday morning.”
“Hey, where are you going?” he asked.
“Where do you think?” she said.
“Sorry about that,” Peter said after she got back in the car. He rubbed her leg. “I’ve got a bad temper, baby. I explode. I can’t help it. You should know that about me. It’s probably because my mother beat me when I was a kid.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Janey said. She adjusted her sunglasses.
Peter roared out of the gas station. “You are so hot, baby. So hot. You should have seen all those other men looking at you.”
“Men always look at me,” Janey said.