Magic Hour Read Free Page B

shoulder blade.
    "You'd never think of a man like Sy as a victim of anything," Carbone mused. "He seems like the ultimate winner."
    "I know. Look at all this," I said, glancing around the pool area.
    White wood tubs overflowed with trailing ivy and deep-purple flowers that gave off a light, spicy scent: nothing too perfumy, nothing too obvious. The chaises lay back, deep, welcoming. Small stone tables were carved like diving fish. You'd put your drink on the tail. White umbrellas on bamboo poles stood tall, like giant parasols. Almost-invisible quadraphonic speakers peeked up from the velvet grass.
    "Ray, I bet your wildest fantasy isn't as good as what Sy actually had. What was missing that any reasonable man could want?"
    Carbone started mulling it over, probably thinking something like a cohesive family unit or self-knowledge.
    What I was thinking was: If Sy had stuck with kosher salamis and not had all his dreams come true, would he now be alive, dressing for dinner, buttoning a three-hundred-dollar sports shirt, or sticking his pinkie into the salad dressing to check whether his cook was using enough basil or chives or whatever this month's most fabulous herb was? Why, on this splendid summer night, was Seymour Ira Spencer, the Man Who Had Everything, playing host to a bunch of cops who were swabbing between his toes, tweezing fluff off his bathrobe and cracking Lindsay Keefe tit jokes over his dead body?
    Look at a map. Long Island resembles a smiley but slightly demented whale. Its head—Brooklyn—butts against Manhattan, as if trying to get into some hot party from which it was deliberately excluded.
    But unlike bubble-brained Brooklyn, the whale's body wants no part of the high life. Queens, Nassau and suburban
Suffolk
County
just swim, eternally, in the bracing waters between the Atlantic and Long Island Sound, yearning to reach mainland America. See how the whale's hump arches up in longing? All it wants is to be part of the U.S. of A., where life resembles a Coke commercial.
    Okay, now check out the rest of
Suffolk
County
, the whale's forked tail. The tail isn't swishing a salute to either Manhattan or Middle America. No, it's raised high to greet
Connecticut
and
Rhode Island
. The East End of Long Island is, really, the seventh New England state.
    See? On the North Fork of the tail, there are Yankee-style farms, fishing fleets and a few intensely quaint colonial villages that lack only a hand-carved "I am unspoiled" sign. And now look at the South Fork, my home. Our accents closer to Boston than the Bronx. Solid Anglo stock, augmented (most would say improved) by Indians, blacks, Germans, Irish, Poles and others. More farms again. More cute towns. But unspoiled like the North Fork?
    No, spoiled beyond comprehension.
    For over a hundred years, artists and clods, geniuses and jerks, have been coming out here with their ways—and their money. To the Hamptons. "We summer in the Homp-tons," they say. Do they even in oh-so-social Southampton, don't-say-rich-say-comfortable Water Mill, bookish Bridgehampton, belligerently down-to-earth Sag Harbor, show-bizzy East Hampton, home-of-the-boring Amagansett (I think the last truly interesting person to live in Amagansett died in 1683) and I-am-one-with-the-sea Montauk.
    This summer paradise isn't my South Fork, though; it belongs to men like Sy and to the legions of lesser New Yorkers who yearn to walk in his footprints in the sand. It is the Eden of the urbane: beach clubs, tennis clubs, yacht clubs, golf clubs; power breakfasts in the designated-chic local coffee shop, power softball games, power clambakes, power naps.
    But along this narrow strip of trendy whale's tail, there are also hamlets called Tuckahoe and North Sea and Noyack and Deerfield. And there are people who neither know nor care that the copper beech is the Tree of Choice and the Japanese maple is Almost Out, or that duck is a passe poultry. There are people who are here not to vacation but to live lives: