My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [117]
Yet we’re going anyway.
After we get to the inn and unpack, I insist we go to the ocean. We’ve got parking passes to five different beaches, and since the beach pass costs us a (refundable) seven-hundred-dollar deposit, I’m not about to let it go to waste.
Before we hit the waterfront, we drive around downtown East Hampton for a while to get our bearings. What looks like any typical sleepy little beach town proves deceptive upon closer examination. In place of all the cheesy T-shirt shacks and penny-candy places and ice-cream shops are satellite stores of Catherine Malandrino, Coach, Tiffany & Co., Michael Kors, and Gucci. To be fair, you can still buy candy here at Dylan’s Candy Bar229 but you’d better have more than a handful of pennies.
I have no plans to shop because I don’t need any Theory or Alice + Olivia jeans.230 Regardless, this is the quaintest Main Street I’ve ever seen. The sidewalks are so clean they’re practically polished and almost every store is fronted by huge, blooming flowers. The Ralph Lauren store’s halfway hidden by gigantic white bead-board troughs brimming with violet-blue hydrangeas, each blossom as big as my head.
I feel like I’m on another planet as no one on the street is shouting or swearing loud enough for children to hear. Mostly I just see deeply tanned families, languidly strolling the boulevard under a canopy of mature trees. And they’re all wearing madras plaid.
I already love this place.
We drive to Egypt Beach, passing the kind of mansions one only sees in the movies. They really exist? And what, exactly, does one do with a twenty-thousand-square-foot beach house? More important, how’d they get it in the first place? That’s what I want to know.
We pass places I’ve somehow already heard of, like Further Lane, Lily Pond Road, and Montauk Highway. Right before we get to the beach, I see the Maidstone Club. Not sure how this name has become a part of my internal database, either. All I can figure is my subconscious watches Gossip Girl, too.
The second we get to the beach, I throw off my shoes and make a mad dash for the shoreline. I navigate around the beach grass and past the fencing and over the pale sand, and there it is, just like I remembered it. I maintain there’s nothing more majestic than the Atlantic Ocean, particularly right now, as the sky’s a dozen violent shades of gray and purple with a pending storm.
The beach is practically deserted at this time of day, which makes sense because the parking lot is tiny and permit only, plus each of the mansions out here is spaced a good tenth of a mile apart.
I breathe in the salt air and revel at the feeling of soft, damp sand between my toes. And I’ve soaked the cuffs of my capris in the surf before I realize that Fletch isn’t with me. Where the hell did he go? I scan the beach to the east and west and don’t see him. I wait a few more minutes, and when he doesn’t appear, I trudge back up the incline to the car, where I find him smoking.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m smoking,” he replies.
“Are you coming down to the water?”
He shrugs. “I’m not finished smoking.”
“Okay, so you’re here at the mouth of not only one of America’s most beautiful beaches, but also one of the most exclusive, and you’re all ‘Hey, look! Nature is one giant ashtray!’ Finish it up, don’t you dare leave the butt on the ground, and let’s go.”
“Nah, I don’t really want to go down to the beach.”
This exasperates me. “Why not? I’m sorry, did we not just travel nine hours? And now you don’t even want to take one look at the main attraction?”
He stubs out his cigarette and places it in a beach trash can. “I want to see the water, but I’m wearing Allen Edmund loafers. I don’t want to get them sandy.”
“I’m sorry, who are you, Simon Doonan? Giorgio Armani? Tell me, who wears Allen-fucking-Edmund loafers to the beach?”
“People who want to look