6. Sinclair
Sinclair
In a month’s time, I won’t be able to travel to Fairwater like this.
I’ll be back to a car and driver, crawling through Queens with everyone else.
But, right now, it’s still warm enough to take the family’s immaculate ninety-year-old Hacker-Craft Runabout up the East River and arrive at my favorite view of all: our summer cottage approached via the Sound.
Grandest of all, of course, is the main house, Fairwater itself, my parents’ domain.
It’s flanked by two smaller but equally flawless waterfront homes—one of which, The Lindens, fell to me on my twenty-first birthday—and two further edifices behind them.
Throw in all manner of tennis courts and swimming pools (carefully encircled with laurel hedges so as not to ruin the timeless view from the water) and you have quite the private playground.
I’m running slightly late. It’s intentional—I’m an excellent timekeeper—and, I’ve found, an effective way to protect myself against the worst of Mom’s machinations.
If I arrive as the lunch party is kicking off, I run a lower risk of general interference.
The downside is that I draw more attention to myself by arriving, Bond-style, from the water, but the scene that draws my eye as Stuart, one of our butlers and equally adept at driving a launch and a Lincoln, steers us in the direction of the house more than makes up for it.
It’s fascinating how a place can hold as much intrigue, as many ruthlessly suppressed scandals, and as many decidedly unhappy memories as Fairwater does and yet evoke such an uncomplicated feeling of pleasure in me when I take it in from the water.
The pleasure is entirely aesthetic: it sometimes feels as though Fairwater is the portrait of Dorian Gray in three-dimensional form, its facade lovelier with every skeleton my family bolts inside its closets.
As Mabel—that’s our Hacker-Craft—cuts cleanly through the water toward our jetty, I’m rewarded with an almost unbroken view of the property.
The jetty sits to the left of my view, a long, narrow reach of pale timber emerging from our private sand-and-shingle beach and punctuated with a weathered-shingle gazebo at the end.
To its right is the bulkhead seawall above which sits our vast lawn—less emerald than it was at the beginning of the summer, but still impressive—and, above that, the main house: its frame luminously silvered and trim white and roofline gabled, its offspring flanking it in perfect, pale symmetry.
Today, the only obstacle to enjoying the majestic sweep of Fairwater is the large white open-sided marquee in situ on the lawn, my parents’ guests milling about in a tasteful, turgid array of country-club pastels.
I was wrong. The sight of what awaits me—of an afternoon I’ll never recoup—is enough to dampen my pleasure all on its own.
I’m not often tasteless enough to envy our staff—I’m aware that my burdens come with ample amounts of privilege—but I rather envy Stuart, whose afternoon will be spent lovingly buffing Mabel with a discreet but ice-cold beer in hand and zero chance of anyone trying to ensnare his hand in marriage.
All too soon, he docks the boat by the jetty. It’s time to stop admiring the scene and become a part of it.
“Thanks, Stuart.” I hold out my hand, and we shake. “Appreciate it.”
“No problem at all, sir. Enjoy the party.”
“Doubtful,” I tell him with a sigh. I climb out of the boat and onto the jetty.
Time to face the ultimate WASP nest.
Marion Voss was deemed a society beauty back when she married Dad, and those looks are still in evidence today, even if her lifelong horror of appearing flashy causes her to shun most makeup and jewelry and the other accoutrements women favor.
(I’d be lying if I suggested that my siblings and I have inherited this allergy to flashiness.)
Mom wears turtlenecks nine months of the year: merino in fall and spring, cashmere in winter.
Today, she’s solved the conundrum of us being several weeks post-Labor Day and indecently warm with a sleeveless camel-colored turtleneck, which she’s paired with wide-legged cream slacks.
She’s skinny in the way many women of her class and generation are: driven as much by nicotine addiction as by a lifelong terror of saturated fat and trending toward a future of frailness if she’s not careful.
Cigarettes, coffee, and cocktails are not what sound bone density is made of, but try telling Mom that.
I stoop to kiss her on the cheek, an act made more difficult by the fact that she’s wearing an enormous, floppy-brimmed hat.
Under it, the sleek, dark hair that has earned her so many comparisons to Jackie Kennedy Onassis over the decades is secured in its signature chignon.
She takes some kind of perverse pride in the fact that, despite being matriarch of one of this country’s wealthiest families, the pearls in her ears are the very same ones with which her father presented her on the occasion of her cotillion.
I don’t even pretend to get it. Nowhere on the East Coast is there an heiress set to inherit fewer family jewels than my poor sister, Melissa.
“Happy birthday, Mom,” I say when I straighten up. “Ladies?” I address her friends. “You’re looking lovely. How are we all doing?”
Mom’s face is positively alight as she takes me in, standing before the circle of women in my navy blazer and chinos.
It’s an expression with which I’m all too familiar.
Boasting about any of your material possessions is decidedly déclassé in these circles, but when it comes to boasting about your offspring, the gloves come off.
“You’re looking so well, my darling,” she says for everyone’s benefit. “It’s so good of you to make the time for us. Sinclair is working so hard at the moment,” she tells her friends, and they nod sympathetically.
Mom has a strange relationship with the concept of working for a living.
She straddles the uneasy line between finding it plebeian that my generation feels the need to work at all and approving of our commitment to furthering the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.
After all, when your “old money” wealth dates as far back as the self-made scions of the Gilded Age and not a generation more, capitalism can be conflicting.
I share no such conflict.
“You know I wouldn’t miss your birthday lunch for the world—as long as you’re planning on serving the lobster ravioli, of course.” I wink at her, and she and her friends all titter as if I’m Jimmy fucking Fallon.
“Did you not bring a date, Sinclair?” Ginny Grace, an old crony of Mom’s from their school days, asks.
I incline my head graciously. “I did not. Didn’t want to cramp Mom’s style. You know it’s her favorite birthday activity.”
They all laugh again, delighted at my barb, because it’s common knowledge that my spot at lunch will be amidst a positive array of eligible Long Island socialites.
And, honestly, I don’t shun them all to be a dick or make a point.
If Mom could muster up one vaguely interesting woman, then I’d invite her to dinner, give her a shot.
I guess my main problem is that I’ve never had to work to get women.
One hundred percent of my potential wife traffic is incoming, and it’s as homogenous as a sea of yellow cabs, all of which means it’s seriously hard to give a fuck.
The irony, of course, is that in this sea, the sea my mother apparently wants me to fucking drown in, there’s one unforgettable woman whose face my brain refuses to serve me up every time I shut my eyes.
“He’s got your number, Marion,” Ellen Carnegie says.
“If he would have gotten himself married by now, or at least engaged, I wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Mom retorts, beckoning over a server. “Now, take a mint julep and go circulate. Please.”
“Are my siblings here?” I ask, accepting a drink in its sweating silver julep cup.
Instantly, Mom’s face goes blank: shutters down, armor on. “The younger two are around somewhere, but Sebastian has whisked Charlotte off for a last-minute weekend away. It’s very sweet of him.”
Subtext: Seb is paying lip service to making his arranged marriage work, even if I suspect it’s too little, too late. But it would never do to say so—even if my brother’s union would be Exhibit A in my rebuttal of Mom’s matchmaking plans. It’s not like she has great precedent here.
I nod. Message received. “Please excuse me, ladies, while I go say my hellos.”
Out of the frying pan… and into the fire.
Lunch feels less like a celebration and more like a feat of endurance, softened only by the fact of my sitting facing the sparkling Sound. The Spanish Inquisitor General had nothing on the socialites of New York.
“So, Sinclair,” Whitney Halsey asks from beside me, tossing her sleek curtain of golden hair over her shoulder, “are you going to the Fall Fashion Gala next month?”
“Oh yes,” Tatty Sedgwick cuts in from my other side before I can reply. “Rodarte is dressing the performers this year. They’re dressing me too.”
“Aren’t you a patron?” Whitney asks me, glaring daggers at Tatty across my body.
“My parents are.” Mom and Dad have supported the New York City Ballet for decades. “Hopefully I’ll see you both there,” I tell them. It’s the only way out. These women are relentless.
Fun fact: I fucked Whitney back when we were at college.
Popped her cherry that first Christmas I was back from Yale.
Having a Voss relieve you of your virginity was practically a rite of passage when we were growing up, and I understand it was the same during my father’s college years, too.
But you’d think that over a decade later she’d finally stop trying to land me.
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.
Let me tell you, once you’ve fucked one WASP, you’ve fucked them all. It is a thankless fucking task.
I endure the rest of the interminable lunchtime conversation as well as possible, but you’d never know I was suffering, of course.
I’m far too well trained in the social arts to be anything other than an engaged, and hopefully witty, lunch companion.
Anything less would be enormously disrespectful to my parents.
We have a name to uphold. The lobster ravioli is stupendous, thank God.
In a move intended to encourage socializing, dessert and coffee at Mom’s annual birthday lunch are served not at the long tables in the marquee but out on the lawn, where we can mill about and eat off the white-clothed cocktail tables.
It’s the perfect opportunity for me to do what I’ve been wanting to do for the past two hours.
I give the bloodsucking blondes the slip, swipe some tiny lemon meringue pies, and head straight for my refuge: my house, The Lindens.
If I weren’t so hell-bent on getting back to the city and overwriting the utter turgidity of today with some good old Manhattan-style debauchery, I’d consider staying here tonight.
I love this house. Obviously, Fairwater is as rich with good memories as with bad—the Vosses have imprinted both variations of their DNA onto our family home over the generations—and I had a superficially idyllic childhood here.
But The Lindens is mine, just as The Beeches, The Willows, and The Oaks are Seb’s, Melissa’s, and Xander’s.
As a twenty-something-year-old guy, I was just happy to have an escape, somewhere removed from the main house and my mother’s omnipresence.
But in the past two to three years I’ve seriously invested in The Lindens, commissioning a well-known Long Island interior design team to overhaul it.
The palette is far softer than in my Manhattan home, with beiges and creams and dusky blues that echo the colors of the Sound and the long grasses that grow by the inlets.
But it’s masculine and serene and, in a neighborhood that’s long on stuffed mallards and boating trophies and plaid wall colorings, intentionally under-furnished.
Idly, I slide my cell out of my pocket and glance at the screen as I cross the airy and blessedly quiet great room.
Mom would have had me thrown off the end of the jetty if she’d caught me checking my phone during the party.
I scroll through a number of notifications on the lock screen, mostly from my friends and probably making plans for tonight, before a name catches my eye.
Katrin Lawlor. From Alchemy. Instantly, I tap on the notification.
Check your email.
Please, Lord, please let this be what I think it is. I open my email app, and there it is. An email from Katrin entitled She’s in. Here’s the paperwork.
She’s in.
She’s fucking in.