1
A gull circling in the sea breeze banked into a clumsy slide, then settled gently on the tallest of the beach mansion’s brick chimneys like it wanted to be the weather vane.
At the far end of the back lawn where the sod became beach grass, I stood with my brother Tom, looking up at the massive castle-like structure, taking it all in.
At least trying to.
Tom, playing tour guide, had just explained that the Southampton summer dream house he’d rented was a proper traditional two-wing manor, built in the French Renaissance Revival style after a famous house of landed gentry outside of London. Past the sun terrace we’d just walked across, you could see the pool peeking out around the side of the thirty-thousand-square-foot house like a giant block of sapphire wrapped in travertine.
To say that Tom was a tour guide wasn’t even an exaggeration, as the place was literally about the size of a museum.
“So?” Tom said. “What do you think?”
I turned away from the white elephant of a house and took a sip of my drink, studying the private staircase of weathered teak that dropped down the windy bluff at our back. I looked south to where the wood slat fence wound along the dunes, and beyond it, the Atlantic’s infinite slate blue waves rose and curled and broke and crashed with a soft hiss as they washed up onto the private beach thirty steps below us.
Being from the poor man’s Hamptons, Hampton Bays across the Shinnecock Inlet, Tom and I had been more of the to-the-split-level-born class. The only exclusive club we’d ever been members of was that of the hustling townie contingent. Up until now, the only times I’d ever gotten within spitting distance of these Southampton eight-figure beach castles was by working events as a busboy or a bartender or a valet. I’d never even dreamed of actually staying in one.
“What do I think of this beer?” I finally said, holding up my bottle. “Exceptional, Tom, really. What is it? Craft stuff? Head and shoulders above the cans of Miller Genuine Draft in my beer drawer back in Philly.”
“Ha ha, dummy,” Tom said, elbowing me. “C’mon, really. What do you think?”
I turned, studying my brother. Tom usually looked pretty pale and stressed from his 24/7 Wall Street pressure-cooker managerial duties at Emerald Crown Capital Partners, the hedge fund that he had started. But he’d already been out here for a couple of days, and it had done him a ton of good, I saw. My dark-haired brother looked actually sort of relaxed for once, tan and handsome and happy in his preppy red shorts and half-unbuttoned cream-colored linen shirt.
“What do I think?” I finally said. “What do you think I think? It’s impossible, Tom. That’s not a house. It looks like a Park Avenue apartment building. I mean, where is Zeus staying now that you rented his house? Summering in the South of France? No, wait. Visiting Poseidon?”
Tom slowly put an arm around my shoulders.
“Zeus is right here, Terry,” he said, winking at me with a wide grin. “I am Zeus, come down to stand here with you stupid mortals. Right here before your very eyes.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, shouldering him away. “I remember all those times Zeus clipped his divine toenails into my Captain Crunch at the kitchen table like it was yesterday. And all the birthday punches. With one for good luck, too. Every time. The gods are so benevolent.”
As my brother cracked up, I smiled and took another sip of my beer.
Because I felt happy, too, then. Or maybe suddenly at ease was a better way to describe it. Truth be told, I’d been a little reluctant to make the trip up from Philly and all the way back home after all these years.
Actually, more than a little.
Even with the fact that my oldest brother was finally tying the knot.
There are reasons why some people leave the place they were born and raised and never come back. Usually, they’re very good reasons.
But maybe, I thought as I took in Tom and the billion-dollar scenery some more.
Maybe this wasn’t such a big deal after all. Time had passed. Quite a bit of it. And didn’t they say that time heals all wounds?
At least it wasn’t a big deal as far as Tom was concerned, I realized.
Despite his new ginormous pockets, Tom was still just Tom. Tom, who used to let me ride back home on the handlebars of his ten-speed from Little League practice when I was a kid. Tom, who let me read his comic books as long as I kept them neatly in the plastic covers. Tom, who hit a kid who was bullying me in the head with a basketball from half-court in the schoolyard that time.
Just Tom, I thought, looking at him as the summer wind scattered some more expensive sand across the back of my pale neck and knees.
Only with a couple of specks of white in his black Irish hair now and more than a couple of extra zeros in his bank account.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said then. “Only because I know you’re dying for me to ask. How much is it running you?”
“What? You mean with the staff and everything?” Tom said, comically wrinkling his brow.
Tom had already mentioned the chefs and the maids and the gardeners, and even the chauffeur and limo that the rental came with to heighten the full modern money-be-damned Great Gatsbyexperience.
“Yes, the whole kit and caboodle. Out with it, moneybags. How much?”
“Five,” Tom said, staring at me calmly.
“Five? What do you mean? Five what?”
He looked at me again silently for a beat before I got it. If I hadn’t already just swallowed my beer, I probably would have spit it all over him.
“That’s impossible! Five hundred grand? Half a million dollars for the season?” I said in shock.
“Oh, no,” my brother said, chuckling softly as he shook his head.
He gave me another wink as he brought his own beer to his lips.
“That’s just for July, Terry,” he said. “Just July.”
2
“Just for July?” my wife, Vivian, said.
It was half an hour later, and we were upstairs in one of the mansion’s dozen huge white-on-white Ralph Lauren photo shoot bedrooms.
It seemed like everything in the interior of the massive beach house was a blazing brilliant white. I’m talking everything. The ceilings, the walls, the couches, the intricate millwork, the slender Euro chairs.
And just when all the blazing whiteness wasn’t done with you, your mind had to try to wrap itself around the size of the rooms. Because it just didn’t compute. Even upstairs, the ceilings had to be fifteen feet high.
If the house were a museum, it was as if we now had the Egyptian section all to ourselves.
“Just for July?” Viv said for the second time.
“That’s what the man said,” I told her from where I was lazing back shirtless and barefoot in the center of a huge bed that had perhaps once belonged to Henry VIII or maybe Genghis Khan.
“But that’s like—”
“Sixteen thousand one hundred and twenty-nine dollars,” I said, having already done the math on my phone. “A day.”
“Oh, my goodness! How? How, Terry?” Viv said in a frantic whisper as she carefully closed the top drawer of the priceless-looking white bureau she was unpacking our stuff into.
I smiled over at my wife. Just out of the Carrara marble cave of the shower, she was in a fluffy bathrobe, her golden blond hair up in a towel. She was six months pregnant with our second kid, and the bathrobe in the front was having its work cut out for it.
“Tom’s this rich?” she said, waving around some electric hair wand thing at our soaring royal slumber chamber. “But this is like billionaire rich, right? I mean, is he on the Forbes list now? Wouldn’t your mom have told us? She sends us the link every time he’s on CNBC.”
“Hey, who knows?” I said, leaning even farther back into the posh wilderness of throw pillows with a yawn. “Maybe it’s business or something. Maybe he needs to impress his Wall Street buddies and clients. How many people are going to be at this wedding? What did my sister say? Three hundred?”
“Four hundred and fifty,” Viv said, biting at a nail.
“Four hundred and fifty? That’s not a wedding, that’s a college graduation ceremony! We had what?”
“Fifty-four maybe?” my wife said with a shrug.
“Exactly! A human amount of people. My goodness. Four hundred and fifty. I told you Tom is crazy. But I guess he knows what he’s doing. At least I hope so. In the meantime, I have no problem playing along. Pass the champagne and lobster, lovey darling, would you?”
“We’re out of champagne, my liege, but will this do?” my wife said, removing a bottle of the superb craft beer Tom had introduced me to upon our arrival from a mini fridge beside the writing desk in the corner.
Tom really had thought of everything, I realized as I settled the cold soothing glass over my belly button.
“Do you think the car is parked okay where it is?” Viv said, frowning toward the sliding doors of the suite’s ocean-view terrace.
“It’s fine, Viv. I’m sure the staff buried our Honda CR-V real deep,” I said as I cracked open the beer with the opener Viv handed me.
“I’m sure they’ve been around the block a time or two,” I said after a cold sip. “They must know that sometimes the have-nots arrive from the lower classes. I’m sure these frightfully embarrassing things happen from time to time.”
I laughed as Viv stuck her pretty little tongue out at me.
What was really funny was that right at that moment as I lay there, I actually was quite content with my life. I had a great, beautiful wife of five years. We had the world’s cutest three-year-old daughter, Angelina, sleeping in the adjoining room, along with another kid (that I was hoping hard was a boy) on the way.
As the lead sergeant of the Philly police department’s busiest street crime squad, I even had a challenging, exciting, meaningful day job.
I was thirty-nine, happy and healthy, with good hard-charging work to do and several drop-dead cute someones to love. I mean, what the heck else in the world was there?
But I understood where Viv was coming from. I, too, being one of those mere mortals with a less than seven-figure-a-year salary, had thought I might feel envious or competitive or at least somewhat insecure about Tom’s Southampton wedding extravaganza.
But as I sat way back on the California king-size bed, hand-crafted probably from some special species of thousand-year-old endangered wood, I was suddenly oddly cool with it.
This was Tom’s life, I decided, lazing there like an extra in an overpriced perfume commercial. We were just visiting. There was beer and sunshine. It was fine.
I was just going to roll with it, I decided, sipping some more beer to help in the flowing of the power of now.
“Wait. When are the others getting here? This afternoon, right? Your mother, too?” Vivian said a moment later, insisting on ruining my chi.
For his wedding, Tom had invited everyone in my sprawling Irish-American family to stay here together for a Rourke family reunion. And I mean all of us. Three generations were going to be playing millionaire beach house together for the next several out-of-control roller-coaster weeks.
“Yeah, my mom texted when you were in the shower,” I said. “They’re coming around four. Stop worrying. By the way, how’s Miss Snuggle Bunny Princess? Did you check on her? You need to. If she gets out of her room and starts wandering around the halls of Hogwarts here, we may never find her again.”
“Don’t worry. She’s still sleeping. She’s wiped out after that crawl up 95. You have to see her in her bed, like the princess and the pea. It’s so awesome that Tom gave us this jack-and-jill setup.”
“Exactly. It’s all awesome. Now you’re getting it. Stop worrying.”
“I’m worrying!” my wife cried, letting slip a little of the South Philly Italian moxie that occasionally soundtracked our whirlwind romance. “What about you?”
I patted at the bed beside me.
“Come on, would you?” I said. “Stop making sense and come up here, Jill. Jack needs you up here on the hill.”
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