Beach Wedding(10)

“Yes,” Nick said. “Yes, it is.”

“Noah Sutton’s place?” I said. “No way! We’re working a fricking Noah Sutton party?”

Nick nodded.

And my jaw dropped.

Because even I knew who Noah Sutton was.

Often called the Kennedys of the tristate area, the Suttons were a very large, rich and powerful, photogenic family who wielded massive amounts of political juice from the Jersey Shore to the Connecticut side of the Sound to the tip of Montauk.

There was a senator from New Jersey, a congressman who represented Greenwich, Connecticut, and two other congressmen from tony Westchester, one of whom was reportedly being groomed to run for president.

And just like their doppelg?ngers, the Kennedy clan from Boston, the Suttons were often getting into hot water.

Every six months or so in the tabloids, it seemed one of the Suttons was OD’ing or getting divorced or getting their pants sued off for paternity by angry pregnant nannies.

Most recently, I’d seen at the supermarket checkout line that one of the Sutton cousins, a young doctor from Palm Beach, Florida, who looked like a soap actor, had just beaten a sexual assault charge lodged by one of his patients.

But the house we were waiting to get into belonged to the Hamptons Suttons. There were four of them. Nelson Sutton in Sagaponack, Henry Sutton in Amagansett, Brooke Sutton in Sag Harbor, and Noah Sutton here in Southampton.

The four siblings were the most demure and apparently richest branch of the Sutton clan. The family business was some huge private chemical company called Cold Springs Chemical that their father, Stephen, had acquired in the sixties.

Cold Springs Chemical had something to do with the processing of oil. Or was it medicine? Fertilizer? All three? I wasn’t really sure.

Whatever it was, this Hamptons branch of the Sutton family wasn’t really involved in politics and never seemed to die on ski slopes or kill other people like their cousins up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

What the Hamptons Suttons were mostly known for around town was shelling out major bucks to local charities and causes. The spring before, they’d donated a whopping ten million to the town to create a new football field and science wing at the high school.

They were also known for throwing the biggest, most spectacular soirees of the summer. Their specialty was extravagant old-money-style affairs like polo matches and yacht races.

Noah especially.

He was the handsomest of all the handsome Suttons. He had blond hair and a bit of a James Dean thing going on, about as cool as you could get for a rich privileged fop. They said he had been begged to run for office by his political cousins repeatedly but refused. Why would he? Why run for office when you were already the world’s most interesting man?

Noah was especially popular with all the pretty society people, as well as the Hollywood crowd. The tabloids didn’t go by a week during the summer season without Noah being sighted with some A-list celebrity, actor, or director at the beach or at brunch.

The press had gotten really jazzed over him recently because of his surprise wedding to his former real-estate broker, some very attractive dark-haired number from the city who looked like a petite Cindy Crawford.

As I quickly remembered all this, I sat there dazzle-eyed as I imagined Noah and his wife coming over to the bar for a drink.

You seem like a real cool guy, Terry, I pictured Noah saying as he shot the cuffs of his white tux. Why don’t you put down that bar rag and come to the after-party. I’d like to introduce you to a few people. Like my wife’s little sister. She’s a model, too.

I grinned from ear to ear at the thought. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening. Five seconds ago, I was playing driveway b-ball and looking forward to maybe watching an afternoon rerun of Star Trek.

But instead I, Terry Rourke, was about to go into the Suttons’ magical never-neverland of a beach house party!

I snapped out of it as there was a diesel roar of the tractor-trailer guy finally getting his rig through the hedge gate without killing everyone.

Nick gave me back the shades.

“On second thought, leave them on, peach fuzz,” he said as he headed back for the van. “Maybe if the security guy squints, he won’t notice that you’re still in eighth grade.”



13

The first thing that tipped me off that I was no longer in the Hampton Bays happened straightaway when I pulled under the Alice in Wonderland–type green hedge gate.

Because I’d seen linebacker-sized security guys before.

Just never one wearing Armani.

“Beer’s here,” I said casually as the stylish hulk wrote something on a clipboard.

The guy mumbled something into his hands-free mike and rolled his eyes as he pointed down the steep slope of the driveway.

As I laid my eyes on a full frontal view of Noah Sutton’s house for the first time, I realized they didn’t call it the Glass House for nothing.

The flat-roofed glass building looked like a large piece of art. I didn’t know if it was the type of glass it was made out of or maybe the early evening light reflecting off the multiple pools that edged all the way around it, but it had a kind of hard and intense purity to it.

It didn’t even look like a house, I thought, gazing at it. It looked like a pristine iceberg somehow plucked from Antarctica, shaved into a perfect rectilinear slab and set down on a park of manicured grass beside the sea.