Recipe for a Happy Life: A Novel (9 page)

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The chicken does not overcook. It comes out of the oven perfectly done. And it turns out that we have more than enough time to take a leisurely swim, and then take quick showers to get ready for dinner. I set the table outside while my grandmother finishes off the coq au vin. She apparently didn’t think I was ready to master the rest of the recipe after my near-breakdown in the pool.

The table looks beautiful—my grandmother’s china is the perfect complement to the outdoor setting. A white bone china with delicate yellow flowers, it’s a nice contrast to the lush greenery outside. I set the glasses and silverware down on the table, but still, it looks like something is missing. I decide we need a centerpiece. I’ve never once before in my life looked at a set table and decided that it needed more, needed a centerpiece, but something inside of me is telling me that we simply cannot eat dinner without some flowers adorning the table.

I walk around the house toward the front lawn, telling myself that I’m just looking for some pretty flowers to pick. But I’m walking toward those hydrangea bushes as if I’m on autopilot. It’s not a conscious decision. One minute I’m thinking about a floral centerpiece, the next moment, I’m there. I’ve completely disregarded the rosebushes and sunflowers. It’s like I didn’t even see them there.

I stand before the hydrangea shrubs, mesmerized. All I can think about is the last time I stood in front of these bushes, the last time I was out here at the Mattress King’s estate. But life doesn’t ever work out quite the way you plan it, and back then I didn’t know how precious happiness was. How happiness shouldn’t just be assumed—you may have it, only to lose it in an instant.

In my head, I’m telling myself to cut a few branches of flowers for the centerpiece, just enough to put into that bright yellow Tiffany vase my grandmother has in the sunroom, but it’s as if I can’t move. All I can think about is him. How he knew I loved hydrangea, so he dragged that hammock, heavy brass stand and all, over to these bushes so we could lay here in the afternoons and stare at the flowers. How many afternoons did we spend in that hammock? I should remember that. But at the time, I took it for granted. I thought we could always come back here, always gaze out at the flowers, always spend a lazy afternoon together.

I don’t know how long I’m out in the front of the house. I’ve completely forgotten about my grandmother, and the coq au vin, and our plan to have a lovely quiet dinner together. When my grandmother comes to find me, I’ve completely lost track of the time.

“Are you ready to eat?” she says. Her voice startles me, and it takes me a minute to remember where I am, what I’m supposed to be doing.

“Yes,” I say. “Sure.”

“I brought you a glass of wine,” she says. It’s a glass of sparkling rosé. Sparkling rosé, my grandmother told me on my first night out here, is what everyone drinks in the Hamptons. I’ve developed quite a taste for it in the past week. I take the glass from her and take a sip.

We walk together to the backyard in silence. Now we’re both somewhere else, I suppose. My grandmother’s brought out the huge pot with the coq au vin. She removes the lid with a flourish and we enjoy the fruits of our labors.

Thirteen

“The key to a happy marriage is for the man to be more in love with the woman than she is with the man,” my grandmother tells me as we walk along the beach.

“Shouldn’t the man and woman be equally in love?” I ask.

My grandmother looks down her nose at me. She removes her sunglasses, and slowly says: “Not if the woman wants her marriage to last.”

I’m not sure what to make of this bit of advice.

I feel her eyes burning into me, so I turn to her. “You didn’t love any of your husbands?” I ask. “Not even my grandfather?”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she says. “I loved all of them. I loved each and every one of my husbands with all my heart. That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

“Then what are you saying?” I ask, but I’m not sure I really want to know.

“I loved them, but the truth is each one of them loved me more. Marriage can’t be successful if the man doesn’t love the woman more. The woman is the one who holds a marriage together, who works at it day after day, but she can’t do it if the man is not fully, completely committed. You can’t keep a man if he’s only lukewarm about you. Eventually the marriage will collapse. Eventually, he will leave.”

“And how would you know that?”

“I think I’ve been married enough times to know,” she says.

“Someone who’s been married seven times either knows quite a lot about marriage, or very, very little,” I say back, almost under my breath. Even as the words trip out of my mouth, I’m still not sure if I want my grandmother to hear them.

We’re walking along the beach in these enormous floppy hats (“A woman should never let her face get any sun after thirty,” she told me earlier), so it’s easy to let my hat fall and just block my face from my grandmother’s view. With the combination of the hat and the wind blowing, I don’t even think my grandmother can hear what I’m saying.

Except she does. “I’ve never been divorced, let me remind you,” she says. She tilts the side of my hat so that she can speak directly into my ear.

“Your first husband,” I say, turning to face her.

“That was annulled,” she explains. “Every other husband widowed me. As I said my vows each time, I truly believed that that was the man I was meant to grow old with.”

“Well, then, I guess you know quite a lot.”

“I know enough,” she says. “I think that you should just look for someone who is head over heels for you and give him a shot.”

“And Jaime wasn’t?” I say.

“He didn’t love you enough,” she says.

“And how, exactly, would you know that?”

“He didn’t delight in everything you said. His eyes didn’t follow you when you left a room. He didn’t particularly care if you stayed or went.”

“That’s because we had a normal, healthy relationship,” I say. “He wasn’t jealous. He knew if I said I was going home, I was actually going home. We didn’t have to be attached at the hip to show that we cared for each other.”

“A man should miss you when you’re gone,” my grandmother says. “He hasn’t even called you once since you’ve been out here.”

“I don’t want to play this game anymore,” I say.

“It’s not a game,” she says.

“We’re here,” I say, as we approach another beachside estate.

“Why don’t we keep walking?” my grandmother suggests. “I don’t think we’re done with this conversation.”

“We’re done,” I say, and walk onto the bridge that connects the beach to the house. A sign alerts us that the estate is called Easy Money. So tacky, but having class isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to owning beachfront property in the Hamptons.

My grandmother is friendly with the father of the owner of the house. She met Walter at a charity golf event right before I came out here. She wasn’t there for the golf, just the black-tie party that went on afterward.

And now there’s a party going on today.

As we walk along the bridge over the dunes, I can already hear the party. There’s apparently a DJ and he’s playing a remix of Justin Timberlake’s “I’m Bringing Sexy Back.” I look at my grandmother and she’s doing a little dance-walk with a broad smile playing on her lips. It appears that she is, indeed, trying to bring sexy back this very minute. And me, I’m just walking, as if I were a little kid going to take a test.

But this party is a test, isn’t it? Everything I do with my grandmother in the Hamptons is a test, it seems to me: how I dress, how I speak, how I act. It’s all a test to figure out where I am in my life. What’s going on with me. What I want. But I inevitably fail each one. How can you prepare for a test when you don’t know what the proper answers are?

My grandmother, still dance-walking, grabs my hand and leads me straight into the heart of the party. It’s like a scene out of a movie: there must be over a hundred people hanging out on the backyard deck. People are all over, dancing, holding frosty cocktails everywhere I look. The pool is filled with floating candles and the adjoining hot tub is filled with happy party guests. Waitresses flit about, carrying trays filled with tiny delicacies: mini hot dogs, mini hamburgers, mini bags of French fries. It’s as if we are at a party for a small child, only the birthday boy is actually a forty-three-year-old man. And it’s not his birthday.

Enormous lamps around the perimeter of the deck release a fine mist. It’s a hot day and I suppose the party would be a huge failure if any of the guests were to overheat. My grandmother has to bob and weave ever so slightly, so as to avoid the misters, lest they disturb her hairdresser’s handiwork, and since Jacques came to the house this morning in anticipation of this party, that would be a sin.

I have never been to a party like this. But clearly my grandmother has. She flashes a smile at the first man she sees and asks him where the bar is. I take a slightly different approach and avoid eye contact with virtually every party guest I encounter. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the man point to the bar and my grandmother takes my hand and drags me toward it.

I want to kill my grandmother for forcing me to wear this tiny baby blue bikini with white lace trim. I feel ridiculous. For starters, the salesperson told me that I shouldn’t really get this suit wet, in light of the lace. But more to the point, there is no possible way that I can suck in my tummy for the entire party. I edge the matching sarong up my hips and closer to my belly, but my grandmother catches me and readjusts my outfit. I wish I were wearing her little ensemble instead: a navy one-piece with detailing around the neck. Hers has a matching sarong, too, but it goes down to her ankles, as opposed to mine, which hits mid thigh. If I drop something, I will not be able to pick it up.

She can’t swim today, either, only it’s not because of her suit. It’s because she’s chosen to come to this party in full jewelry. She’s wearing emerald studs, not the most practical decision for a poolside party, and a chunky gold cuff bracelet.

She hands me a glass of white wine and we clink glasses. I consider asking her why we haven’t ordered frosty beverages—there’s an assortment of seven different coolers carrying every color of the rainbow—but I know what her answer will be. “Too many calories.” She also thinks that drinks like piña coladas and daiquiris are too down-market.

“Vivienne!” I hear a voice call out. We both spin around at the same time and see Walter waving at us from across the pool. He exudes Hamptons cool with his kelly green Bermuda shorts and white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He could have walked right out of a Ralph Lauren catalog. He runs a hand through his mess of gray hair and smiles at us. He’s got a mouth full of capped teeth, but on him, it doesn’t look ridiculous. It just looks handsome, like he’s a movie star. Walter also has a really deep tan, probably owing to his regular tee time at Southampton Golf Club, but his skin doesn’t look leathery. Everything about him says refinement.

He takes my grandmother’s hand and kisses her on both cheeks. I know that he is doing this because he is charmed by the fact that she is French, but since he, himself, is not, I consider this to be affected. My grandmother does the introductions and then Walter insists I meet his son, the owner of this house. I smell another fix-up.

Walter’s son approaches and I can barely catch my breath. Only it’s not that I’m swooning—it’s the Cuban cigar he’s smoking. It envelops us in a cloud of smoke, and I feel my eyes water. I look to my grandmother, but she doesn’t seem to notice. The smoke has no effect on her; she stands there composed and acts riveted by everything that Joseph says to us. I, on the other hand, can feel the eyeliner and sunscreen dripping down my face.

Joseph (“Don’t call me Joey”) is short and unattractive and doesn’t look like he belongs here at all. His skin is so pale he looks translucent. He speaks much louder than everyone else around us. His eyes stay planted on my chest, even as he speaks to his father and my grandmother. He has no hair on his chest or arms, but he has very bushy eyebrows. And that damned cigar.

“My sixth husband was a cigar smoker,” my grandmother says. My grandmother is never at a loss for conversation. “He puffed away until his dying day.”

She omits the part about the cigars being the thing that killed him. My grandmother will later tell me that it is in bad taste to say something like that in polite company.

Joseph explains to me that he owns tanning salons all across the Jersey area. I can tell by the way he describes his business that he looks down on his clientele, that he finds them to be classless and tasteless, and I hear my grandmother’s voice echo in my mind when I think to myself:
It only lowers you to speak unkindly of others, especially those who provide your lifestyle.

I smile and pretend to be engaged in the conversation, but my eyes dart nervously around the party. Perhaps if I find someone I know, I can excuse myself from this conversation and get out of this doomed fix-up.

But I’m really just fooling myself. I don’t have a ton of friends in the city, especially the types of friends who might come out to the Hamptons, so instead I end up looking like one of those rude people who talks to you while trying to find someone more important to talk to. But Joseph doesn’t seem to notice, since his eyes are still focused on my breasts.

“Hannah?”

I turn to see who has just called my name and through the throngs of people, I can’t really see his face.

He weaves his way through the crowd, and I’m instantly deflated. I was hoping that it would be someone I could ditch Joseph for, but it’s Nate Sugarman.

I hate Nate Sugarman. I loathe Nate Sugarman. I despise Nate Sugarman, and people like him. The men who act like boys by still wearing baseball caps and ironic T-shirts long after they’ve graduated college. The types of guys who still call one another by childish nicknames like Broseph or Animal or the more to the point, Beaver. The sorts of men who have so much family money they never really had to worry about making a living, so they rely on daddy’s dime and connections to carry them through life.