The High Season(24)
Her gaze drifted to the side, to a tall, narrow shingled house in the middle of a renovation. The house reminded her of a New England that scared her, the one with narrow stairs and attics and cellars and ghosts. She’d grown up in Florida in a concrete block house with no surprises, just an occasional gecko in your shoe. This house was peaked, narrow, gray, with windows on the side that resembled the eyes and mouth of a human face. She hated being scrutinized, even by a house. Today a red towel hung outside a windowsill, a wagging tongue of a taunt.
Guilty.
Gus was a nice old guy, and she’d helped him out a few times with his computer. She’d been the one to organize his digital files, and she found the film. Weird, interesting, some art critic would call it transgressive. She made the mistake of showing a few minutes of it to Catha. Just a snippet, like a cat video on a dull day. She didn’t expect her to use it against Ruthie.
It was a slow-motion train wreck, and Ruthie didn’t deserve it, but Doe knew that money ran over conscience like a semi ran over a skunk. Only the stink was left. Money like Mindy’s was the real deal. There was no board lady alive who would follow her conscience in the face of Mindy’s parents, who lived on Park Avenue and were on the boards of Lincoln Center and the Met.
So Ruthie, who was excellent at her job and kept staff on the boil without even seeming to be in the kitchen, would be gone soon. Catha would make a terrible boss, but if Doe could monetize seekrit-hamptons by the end of the summer, she could achieve her dream of freelance freedom. She’d never make money working at a nonprofit. She believed in profit, all the way.
She moved up on the line. She’d make the next crossing. There was a tiny stain on her Marc Jacobs seersucker sundress from the taco she had at Spork. She dumped water on it. The only straightforward advice Shari had ever given her? Blot, don’t rub. It beat Never buy a white bra by a mile.
Doe had perfected the art of buying off-season. In the Hamptons the summer people gave to their housekeepers after Labor Day, and the housekeepers loaded up their Subarus and took the haul to the secondhand shops. That took care of clothes and shoes. She knew a Prius wouldn’t mark her as a plebe, just someone with a social conscience. She wore no jewelry except fake diamond studs—not even a Muffie could tell if studs were real—and she knew better than to wear a watch. She kept her hair short because no one would notice her lack of a blowout. She had a Tory Burch cover for her phone, and she had scored a Marni canvas and leather bucket bag for two hundred dollars, a price that she could not afford and was why she couldn’t afford to pay summer rates to the Doyles.
Drive across Shelter Island, second ferry to Sag Harbor. On that ten-minute ferry ride she browsed through her bookmarks to calm herself down. She could do this. It could possibly be the biggest party she’d ever crashed, but she knew the neighborhood. She just had to skip out before Adeline showed up. Not that Adeline would recognize her, she was just the girl who took the pictures.
Who was in the Hamptons this early besides the usual crew? She flipped through gossip columns and blogs. She was up on actors and models but she had trouble with athletes and moguls. The rich kids were the hardest, the ones with jobs like “app co-designer” or “style consultant.” They all looked the same to her, as though cloned from the same cells, and she had to work at it. She tossed the phone in the passenger seat as they bumped against the pier. She’d have her pick of the hedgie crowd, the media elite. Artists, too. Mantis’s daughter, Lark, was some kind of entrepreneur in something Doe couldn’t remember, financed by her father, Doe was sure.
She found a space in town, which was lucky. Lift folding bike out of trunk, pedal toward the house, already researched.
Doe had grown up in South Florida with no money, a mother with terrible taste in boyfriends, and a succession of dogs with names like Boo and Moon who escaped regularly and got run over. Her older sister got wise at the age of sixteen and moved in with her boyfriend. Her little brother had drowned in a pool. As soon as she could, Doe got out, working during high school as a towel girl at hotels for tips, making her way toward the glitter and swank of South Beach, where men had slipped hundred-dollar bills in her hand along with notes and numbers. She had come to understand how the hotel service industry had certain kinds of opportunities for advancement. Not one-night stands just for a handful of bills on a dresser, an occupation she felt, considering her background, she was destined for. But an honest living as a tipster. She got to know the bloggers, the photographers, and she tipped them off to the routines of celebrities—who went to which clubs, who would be at what restaurant when. Money was a constantly flowing river, from doorman to manicurist to pool girl to concierge. You got to know who was on the take and the make pretty early, and who you could almost-trust until you couldn’t trust them anymore. Most of the celebrities didn’t care; they actually wanted the photographers to dog them. Doe had financed a college education and a car on the proceeds. She had been making a decent living before she got mixed up with Ron.
When she got fired from the hotel, she put on a black dress and found the international art crowd. She became one of the art girls who roamed Art Basel, and she met a dealer who gave her a job and entrée to the right parties. He never knew that she took covert photos of celebrities. With just an iPhone, it was amazing what she could do. Sometimes she’d use a camera and just pretend to have press credentials. People rarely asked.