Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (3 page)

“So, a lawyer?” he says. “That must be interesting.” There’s a tiny speck of salad dressing on his lip, and I can’t take my eyes off it.

We’re at the Palm in East Hampton. I happen to love the Palm—it’s one of my favorite restaurants—but the company tonight is taking away from my enjoyment of my Gigi salad. I notice how different the décor in this Palm is from the one in midtown Manhattan, much airier and beachier with the ceiling fans and open glass doors, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that my date is a boor. He barely looked at me when we were introduced, and has been gawking at other women since we sat down at the table. My grandmother’s date, on the other hand, is quite charming. He looked me in the eye as we were introduced, complimented my outfit, and took my wrap so that it could be checked. I wish some of that had rubbed off on my partner for the evening. Still, my grandmother always taught me to be polite, so I answer the question.

“It can be,” I start to reply, but before the words are completely out of my mouth, he is already talking about his job in finance (and he’s one of those people who pronounces it finnance as opposed to figh-nance, which I detest). Seems the Boor is well bred enough to know he is supposed to ask me what I do for a living, but simply doesn’t care enough to listen to my answer.

My eyes float around to the rest of the dining room. It’s a sea of dull men, all of whom look like carbon copies of the Boor. Most of them are wearing pastel-colored chinos. Their companions are a more varied bunch, with one thing in common: they seem to have more interest in their cell phones than they do in their dates. Not that I could blame them. If I didn’t think my grandmother would pull me away from our table by my ear, I’d be playing on my cell phone, too. For a moment I wonder what someone looking at my table would think of me, but then I realize that an onlooker glancing at my table wouldn’t look at me at all.

They’d be looking at my grandmother.

Some people would be intimidated by having a showstopper of a grandmother like I do. They certainly wouldn’t agree to double date with her. (Although “strong-armed” is more like it.) But I love basking in my grandmother’s glow. I don’t care that I’m a plain Jane compared to her glamour-puss. I am, and always have been, happy to be in her presence.

I would just rather not be on a double date with her. But it’s not because she got the better date than me. It’s because I’d rather have her all to myself.

The secret truth, the thing that I don’t want anyone to know, not even my grandmother herself, is that I really like when she plays dress up with me. As much as I argue with her about going shopping together, I enjoy it when she tries to make me over in her image. Which is precisely what she did before we went out on this date. Everything that I am wearing tonight, from the borrowed gold hoop earrings down to the brand-new platform cork wedges, has been carefully vetted by my grandmother. She told me that I looked drop-dead gorgeous in the outfit she selected for me—a coral-colored tunic and white jeans. The perfect Southampton chic, she called it.

And still, everyone at the table—at the restaurant really—is fawning over her. It’s not just her humongous diamond stud earrings that get her the attention. (Four carats in each ear, given to her by her sixth husband, Dallas Jones. I know I said I didn’t want to mention his name, but something about the town of Southampton just makes you want to name-drop.) Nor is it her gigantic ruby cocktail ring, given to her by the Mattress King himself.

No, it’s something in the way she looks at you. It’s something about the way she always has a sly little smile playing on her lips, as if she’s privy to something that no one else is, but if you get into her good graces, she just might tell you.

It’s her aura.

“And what do you think, Anna?” my grandmother’s date asks me. My first thought is:
I have no idea what they were all talking about just now
. My second is:
Should I correct him and tell him that my name is actually Hannah
?

“Hannah, dear,” my grandmother corrects, her hand patting his gently.

“Oh, Hannah,” he says, unembarrassed. “An even
more
beautiful name.” I can see that my grandmother’s date has taken this embarrassing social situation and turned it into a way to compliment my grandmother. He leans into her when he tells her how beautiful my name is, as if to say: “You are so lovely that you managed to have a daughter who gave her
own
daughter a beautiful name.” But my grandmother isn’t looking at him. She’s looking at me.

I run a hand through my hair and then remember that my grandmother told me not to do that. Touching your hair at the table is rude, she said at lunch today. Personal grooming should be taken care of in the restroom, lest a stray hair end up where food is served. She furrows her brow and I can see in her eyes that she’s just realized that I haven’t been listening to the last five minutes of conversation. I just know that she’s about to save me from this awkwardness. In fact, now that the main course has been served, surely she’ll excuse us from this dinner and we can leave before dessert.

“I have an idea,” my grandmother says. I smile in anticipation. I blot the sides of my mouth with my napkin and place it on the table. Just as I’m about to thank my (humorless) date for dinner, my grandmother announces: “Why don’t you fellows come back to the house for a nightcap?”

Five

“Is the State of New York allowing you to be this far from the house?” my grandmother asks in her slight French accent, smiling, arranging herself on a chaise longue next to mine. Today she’s wearing a bright blue mailot. Her whole life, she’s managed to keep herself remarkably thin (probably owing to her lifelong ban on baked goods, enacted after the death of my grandfather). As usual, she looks fantastic. The blue brings out the color of her eyes and the cut of her swimsuit flatters her every angle.

“I’m not under house arrest,” I remind her for the umpteenth time. It comes out sounding angrier than I had intended. I never get angry with my grandmother, but she knows how upset I am about what happened in Manhattan, and I don’t think I’m quite ready to be so blithe about it. I feel her eyes on me, and I drape my right hand self-consciously over my tummy. “I spoke to Jaime yesterday and he’s not pressing charges. The officers told me not to leave the state while the investigation is pending, and we’re still in New York State.”

“Well, good,” my grandmother says, “because I don’t want any men in blue showing up at our party.”

My grandmother is always in the midst of planning a party.

And this week is no exception. To celebrate my arrival at the Mattress King’s estate, my grandmother has planned a Gatsby-esque extravaganza to which she’s invited two hundred of her closest friends. Which is to say, each and every family who lives South of the Highway got an engraved invitation.

My grandmother is a very friendly gal.

“Oh, darn,” I say, “then in that case, I’ll have to fire those strippers I hired for you. They were going to pretend they were cops before taking it all off. In a classy way, of course.”

My grandmother turns her head and regards me skeptically. She doesn’t have to tell me what she’s thinking. I know what she’s thinking. All my life, she’s been telling me: “Men don’t like funny.”

I’m often told that I’m funny.

But, I’ve never really had a problem attracting men, funny or not. Keeping them around is generally the rub.

I turn from my grandmother’s glare and stare out to the pool. It’s glorious. My grandmother explains to me that it is a “negative edge” pool, meaning that it gives the appearance of disappearing into the horizon. From our vantage point, it looks like it bleeds right into the ocean.

Also glorious is Sonny, the pool boy. He’s twenty-two if he’s a day, but what he lacks in age he makes up for in muscle tone. He is a perfect physical specimen, a striking contrast to the entitled rich kids you see running around the town of Southampton with their foreign cars and soft guts. Sonny looks up and catches me staring at him just a bit too intently, and I quickly look down and examine my nails. My grandmother insisted that I accompany her on her weekly trip to the nail salon this morning, so today my nails are light pink.

I am oogling the pool boy,
I think, staring at my perfectly manicured cuticles. How did I end up as such a cliché? I’m not even forty yet. Yet.

I sink into my chaise longue and can’t help but melt into the luxurious cushions, which are covered with thick Egyptian cotton towels, monogrammed with the Mattress King’s initials. The Mattress King’s estate in the Hamptons is nothing if not cozy. I slept like a baby last night on a king-sized bed with six-hundred thread count sheets. Of course the mattresses are comfy. But it’s not just the beds.
Everything
about the Mattress King’s estate is exceedingly comfortable. Even the carpeted runners going up the staircases are plush and tickle your feet.

The estate—five acres of pure unbridled beauty—was a wedding gift to my grandmother who had once casually mentioned that she liked the beach. The Mattress King spent an entire year building the main house, guest house, and a pool, each created with an eye toward making its inhabitants totally, completely, and blissfully relaxed.

It even has a golf cart to take you from one end of the property to the other. There are no tired feet at the Mattress King’s estate.

I’ve spent my life in equal parts between beautiful surroundings like this and more unsavory ones. You see, I grew up in hotels. Just like Eloise, only the hotels my mother and I stayed in were never quite as posh as the Plaza—our home base was a suite at the Hotel Chelsea, and when we traveled, the accommodations went downhill from there. Because my mother was a photojournalist, my childhood was a blur of jetting off to the latest news story. We were never in one place for very long.

The only time my mother left me behind was when she photographed a story in Nicaragua, which she felt was too dangerous for me to tag along. In November of that year, the Iran-Contra affair became public and my mother won a Pulitzer for her work.

It was the best summer of my life, a summer of firsts for me—my first kiss, my first period, my first real home. My grandmother and I lived in a house in the Caymans that was left to her by the Italian race car driver, and it was the first time I ever had a bedroom to call my own. My own room. My own bathroom. My own space.

I learned so much from my grandmother that summer. She would never tell me I was wrong or right. She would never say I told you so; she would never judge. If she disagreed with something you said or something you did, she would simply turn to you and say, “Well, darling, that’s not the recipe for a happy life.”

“Southampton doesn’t have strippers,” my grandmother finally says.

“Every town has strippers,” I say, making a mental note to find a strip club to lure my grandmother to. This will be a first in the life of Vivienne Brushard Goodman Finelli Worthington Rudolph Jones Morganfelder.

A night of debauchery. Actually, she’s probably had plenty of those. I should say: a night of debauchery that doesn’t end in marriage.

“What are you planning to wear to the party?” my grandmother says, turning onto her side and putting her head in her hand.

“I brought a sundress with me, so maybe that,” I say. “What are you wearing?”

“I’m not worried about what I’m wearing,” she says. “I’m worried about what
you’re
wearing. I don’t think there’s anything in that sack you brought that would be suitable for a garden party.”

First of all, I did not pack my things in a sack. True, I fled the city with record speed, but I tossed a few things into a very respectable tote bag, not a potato sack, as my grandmother seems to think. When she picked me up at the jitney stop, she asked the jitney driver to help me with my valise, and then, upon discovering that I had brought a tote bag and not a suitcase, tut-tutted about “you young people” all the way back to the house. I wasn’t sure which she was more annoyed about: that I was able to pack for an entire summer in one tiny little tote bag, or that the jitney driver had no idea what a valise was.

Second of all, she’s not throwing a simple little garden party. She makes it sound like she’s having an impromptu backyard barbecue with a few neighbors, when in fact, she’s throwing a huge extravaganza that required the acquisition of party and noise permits from the Village of Southampton. (Yes, in the Village of Southampton, you not only need a permit to party, but you also need one to be loud.) Not to mention the massive white tent that’s being set up to house twenty tables, three fully stocked bars, an ornate white wood dance floor, and the best twelve-piece orchestra on Long Island. And don’t even get me started on the flowers.

There will be a fifty-minute-long cocktail hour (“one hour is just a touch too long, darling”) on the front lawn during which seventeen different types of hors d’oeuvres will be served, followed by a five-course tasting menu under the tents. The valet parking station will be manned by a five-person team. But I guess, to a certain type of person, that’s just a garden party.

“I’ll wear the white dress we got at Georges Mandel,” I assure her. “I promise that I won’t embarrass you.”

“The only person who can embarrass you, dear, is you,” my grandmother says. “What I meant was … I just thought there might be some nice gentlemen at this party and so you should look your best.”

“Grandma, this time off isn’t about meeting someone,” I say.

“Then what is it about?” she asks. “It seems to me that the reason you came out here is because you are thirty-four years old; you no longer have a job and you no longer have a man in your life. In my experience, you need to have at least one of those. I can help you with the meeting-a-man part. Meeting men is a thing at which I excel.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” I say. “But I think that this summer’s really more about figuring out my life and what to do about a job.”

“So, no men?” she asks. She asks it like she doesn’t really understand how that can be the answer. As if she were Sir Paul McCartney and I’ve just announced that I have no interest in rock ’n’ roll.