Кэндес Бушнелл: Four Blondes

It was a small misperception that Janey had no intention of ever correcting.

The next year, Janey determined to get her own house for the summer. This would probably entail a certain amount of hardship, since the kind of houses she was used to staying in probably cost their occupants upward of a hundred thousand dollars for the season. Nevertheless, she had a strong feeling that it would be a much better "look" for her to be independent, even if it meant doing without a pool, a gardener, a cook, a car, and maybe even a dishwasher. But even this would be preferable to what she'd had to endure the summer before with Redmon and Zack. Something Zack had said kept repeating itself in her head like an annoying pop tune: "You're available. For the summer. Providing the man is rich enough." It was one thing to date rich men, but another to have people thinking you were a whore.

Someday (maybe soon), Janey would likely have to make one of these rich men her husband. She would have to be madly in love with him, but even so, it wouldn't do if this rich man heard that his future wife had a reputation for being a prostitute. Janey had learned that while most rich men thought women were whores deep down anyway, they didn't actually want you to be one.

And so, around about February, when it was time to start thinking about summer houses, Janey began putting the word out "I'm looking for my own house this summer," she said, flipping her long hair over her shoulder and standing with her hip pushed out, to the various rich men she ran into at restaurants and parties. "I've decided if s time to grow up." The rich men laughed and made suggestive comments like "Don't grow up too much," but not one of them took the bait. Janey was hoping that someone would say they had a carriage house where Janey could stay for free, but the only one who offered anything was Allison.

"You could share my house," Allison said eagerly. They had just arrived at a dinner for a European fashion designer who was trying to stage a comeback in New York.

"That’s not the point," Janey said, moving forward to allow the photographers to take her picture while Allison moved to the side; luckily, Allison had been on the scene long enough to understand that her presence in a photograph would likely render it unpublishable.

"I just don't know what kind of summer I want to have," Janey explained. "I might want to spend the whole summer reading books.”

Allison made a completely unnecessary gesture of choking on her cocktail. "Books? You? Janey Wilcox?”

“I do read books, Allison. Maybe you should try it sometime.”

Allison changed her tack. "Oh, I get it," she said, sounding hurt. "Why didn't you tell me you wanted to share with Aleeka Norton.”

"I'm not sharing a house with Aleeka," Janey said. Aleeka Norton was a beautiful black model whom Janey considered a "friend" even though she only saw her a couple of times a year at the fashion shows. Aleeka, who was Janey's age, was writing a novel, and when people asked her what she did, she always said, "I'm a writer, " like they were really stupid to think that she might be anything less, like a model. This approach seemed to get Aleeka a lot more respect from men. Joel Webb, the art collector, had actually lent Aleeka his little three-bedroom house for the summer so she would have a quiet place to work. And he didn't even want to have sex with her. True, the house was basically a shack, but the one thing Janey had learned after the Redmon summer was if you had to be in a shack, you were better off being in your own shack.

"Allison," Janey hissed, moving through the crowd. "Haven't you noticed? Something happens when you get into your thirties. People catch on to your shit. Especially men. It's important to look like you're doing something, even if you're not.”

"But Redmon wasn't like that," Allison said.

Janey looked at her. Poor Allison. She had a huge crush on Redmon, having read all his books and fantasized that deep down, Redmon was like the men he put into his novels: sensitive, misunderstood, and looking for the love of one good woman.

"Redmon lives in a dream world," Janey said. "He was nice to you. Really nice," Allison said. Janey smiled. She sipped her martini. "He was a loser," she said.

The Redmon summer, which was supposed to be the Zack summer, spent in Zack's amazing house, Janey thought bitterly, was one of the worst summers in years.

"Well, at least Redmon was better than Zack. You have to admit that," Allison said.

Janey took another sip of her martini. She kept her face impassive. Zack! Every time she heard his name, she wanted to scream. But it wouldn't do for Allison to know that.

"Zack Manners," Janey said. She smiled and waved at someone across the room. "I haven't thought about him for months.”

The very first thing Zack had done last summer, after Janey dumped him and went with Redmon, was to immediately begin dating some Russian model whose name no one could remember, but whom Zack insisted on practically fucking every time they were in public. Janey had consoled herself with the fact that everybody knew that the Russian "model" was really a prostitute. But then she screwed things up when she bumped into Zack coming out of the bathroom at a club. She was a little drunk, and she sneered, "I see you're with your whore.”

Zack laughed. "Yeah," he said, "but she's honest about it. She admits to what she is. Why don't you?" Janey had taken a step forward and raised her hand as if to slap him, but she stumbled a little and had to steady herself against the wall. Zack had laughed again and lit a cigarette. "Why don't you get a life, baby?" he said.

The summer went steadily downhill from there.

It was all Zack's fault. She and Redmon went to a beach party on Flying Point Road, and as they walked across the sand, they spotted Zack Manners sitting on the wooden steps leading up to the house. It was the fifth time they'd gone to a party and run into Zack. "That’s it," Redmon said on the drive back home. "I'm not going to any more parties. They're all filled with assholes like Zack Manners. The Hamptons," he said dramatically, "are over." After that, he swore he wouldn't leave the house, except to go to the supermarket, the beach, and his friends' houses for dinner.

This might have been bearable, if it weren't for Redmon's own house.

Even calling it a house was pushing it. Despite being a mere thousand yards from the beach, there was no getting around the fact that the "house" was nothing more than a dirty shack. But the weirdest thing about it was how Redmon didn't have a clue. "I think this house is as nice as any house I've ever been to in the Hamptons," he said one afternoon, when Allison had stopped by for a "chat.”

“If s certainly as nice as the Westacotts', don't you think?" he said.

"Ifs soooo charming," Allison gushed. "Ifs so hard to find these antique houses that haven't been completely ruined.”

Janey was mystified. The shack couldn't have been more than four hundred square feet (about the size of the master bedrooms in the houses she normally stayed in) and the roof looked like it was caving in. There was a broken window in the bedroom, which Redmon had taped over with a piece of newspaper from The New York Times—from August 1995. The galley kitchen contained stained appliances (the first time Janey opened the refrigerator, she had screamed), and the furnishings were sparse and uncomfortable—like the couch, which was one of those flat wooden-legged affairs that appeared to have been purchased at a tag sale. The bathroom was so tiny, there was no room for towels: When they came back from the beach, they had to throw their towels on the bushes outside the house to dry.

"Actually, Redmon," Janey said. "I would have thought you could do better than this.”