Summer in the Hamptons
by Robert Granader
part 1
I’m here. But they don’t see me. They ask me for things like a glass of wine or a handful of canapés. They want napkins for their faces and towels when they spill.
But they don’t know my name, and they don’t know where I’m from unless they spot the accent. And when they do, they regale their friends with stories of their vacations in my country or of the swear words they learned in my native tongue.
I am standing against a wall, military-straight and holding a silver tray with six glasses of white wine. Most hosts here in the Hamptons don’t allow red wine. One drop and the rug they bought at auction is ruined. They pay no mind to the fact that they have three of the world’s tiniest dogs running races over these shags with bladders the sizes of thimbles.
These people are rich. And by this time of the night they are drunk. They are safe. They laugh at the hosts’ jokes. They arrived here humorless. And in a couple of hours they will leave bitter.
I came to this country ten years ago through the southern border. I walked across holding hands with my best friend, Lulu. We were fourteen.
We made our way to the middle of some small town and marveled at all the people ignoring us while they ate their hamburgers and drank their Cokes. There was so much food, and they could all afford it. To me, everyone in this country was rich.
But soon I learned there is a rich and there is wealthy. I wanted to be part of that world, the world of people who don’t wake up worried about rent. They wake up worried, but not about the things that occupy the minds of most people, things way down on the Maslow hierarchy. And now my life is what they would call adjacent to the lives of people with an amount of money so absurd that it cannot be explained, only experienced.
So I listen.
Sometimes their stories come in snippets. By the end of my summer in the Hamptons I have heard them so many times I can piece them together.
“This room?” the guest asked.
“Yes,” the host and owner of the house said.
“Like a replica?” The guest didn’t understand.
I could mouth the words of the response the owner would utter because I’d heard the setup and the pitch a dozen times by August.
“This actual room came on a boat from Italy,” he said. “We bought it at auction.”
“On a boat?” the guest repeated. “At auction?”
He was asking these questions as if he were a late-night talk show host trying to coax a story he already knew was coming.
A crowd began to gather
“So, all over Europe there are these really rich dukes and duchesses with their grand homes they inherited,” the owner continued, more excited as the story stretched. “But they haven’t worked in like a hundred years, so they can no longer afford the maintenance, the gardens; it’s all too much, but they are too proud or too stupid to sell.”
“So they sell it off in pieces?” the guest asked with the eagerness of a child.
“Instead of enduring the humiliation of being the one to sell off the family estate, someone came up with their first good idea in two hundred years: they sell a room.”
“Seriously? A room?” the guest asked.
“They look around and they don’t want to sell their art, although they’re doing that now, too, they really have nothing left of value and so someone said: ‘I never use the parlor,’ and boom, they sell it to me and now you’re standing in it.”
“But how did you find it?”
“Christie’s,” the owner said.
“This whole room,” the guest said looking up at the ceiling, the fixtures, the ancient wood beams, “was bought at auction, and then they sent it on a boat to New York, where it found its way to you. And then who puts it together?”
“Oh yeah, assembly required,” the owner said with a small laugh, although he wasn’t really laughing because I’d heard him laugh at that exact spot all summer. “So our builders got it at the port and brought it here, where they reassembled it.”
“Everything.”
“Well, not exactly as advertised,” the owner added as if he were going to tell some inside story of woe. But it had a happy ending. “There were missing panels here and there, and then my wife wanted an extra piece up there, and on and on.”
“So this room looks better than the original?” the guest asked.
“A lot better.”
Nobody wants my opinion on this. The super wealthy don’t want anybody’s opinion on anything; they just want to tell their story and have people laugh in all the right places, be impressed by the ingenuity they used in spending money or avoiding taxes.
So I say nothing. And most of the guests say nothing except “wow.” I think most people in this elevated world do these things, these crazy extravagances, exclusively so they can tell their friends about them.
In the corner where I stand, I am careful not to rub up against the wood or the wallpaper. My arms and my back hurt as I hold up the tray and mumble truths to myself: “It would’ve been cheaper to... Wouldn’t it have been easier if... Wasn’t it a waste of time to...”
Since the thought of how stupid it is to buy a room was obvious to me, I assume it struck some of the guests who heard this story the same way. I mean, if they needed to create extra panels and add wood in various places, couldn’t they have just copied the whole room from photographs? If you’re copying part of it anyway, just copy the whole thing. Is it worth it to pay for all that work and shipping and fitting for the wood from the actual place, when a room that “looked” like the other room would have been basically the same?
Nobody would have known. Isn’t that still a good story? I guess not.
As the minutes pass and I refill my tray of drinks more quickly, the stories get grander, and the responses get more glowing, until something happens.
For the first time in a hundred tellings a guest actually brings it up. My idea. This guest, who I call Red, went through the same analysis I did about saving a lot of time and money by just building the whole thing from scratch. From across the room, as if she were listening to every conversation at once, the hostess shot back: “That would be a fake, not a replica.”
A little piece of me triumphed at the outbreak of honesty, but another piece died because I wasn’t the one to do it, and the idea was strangled in its infancy.
Back in the kitchen we retell stories from the front, like kids who’ve stolen candy from the corner store. We meet up, share our bounty and try to make sense of it all. At any given moment, the kitchen is filled with cooks and cleaners, sous-chefs and sommeliers, preparing, refilling, washing, topping up.
“If you’re into the whole buying-a-room-from-a-European-castle thing, then you want the real thing. It’s like buying one of those fancy bags from the store instead of the street corner,” Lulu said as she dried wine glasses. “Of course, you don’t understand the need to spend money on these things. You’re not from this world.”
I shake my head and take out a tray of small white towels. For some reason I am stationed by the bathroom, ordered to clean it every time someone comes out. It’s an easier job than holding a tray of food; towels are lighter. I stare at a large chunky silver picture frame which outshines the picture it surrounds. The hosts’ family is on a bike trip in a place that looks like my home in Central America, and I think about my parents who could never imagine that one silver picture frame would cost more than I would make all summer. More than they would make in a year.
“I am like you,” someone says, and I am startled, because I can’t recall being spoken to.
It was Red. I call him that because I assume by his freckles and his gray/orange hair that he used to be a ginger. I hadn’t noticed him coming out of the bathroom, this man in his sixties with little hair in front, but long and curly and heavily conditioned in the back, telling me he isn’t from this world.
“I feel like this room,” he says.
Somehow he thinks I don’t understand, but I do. I understand deeply. But does he know I was trained not to talk to the guests?
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been shipped here from another world and reassembled with a few pieces missing,” he says.
Am I allowed to respond?
It is late August and there is a big bonus if you make it to Labor Day, and I really don’t want to get fired before that. But I want so badly to tell him that I hear him. That I, too, see what he sees.
“That room they bought from Europe is so misaligned they can’t open the windows to hear the ocean,” he says. “The ocean. That’s the big body of water out there, the main driver of the price of this house, the thing they paid so much to be near.”
I want to tell him that I know what he is saying, but I utter nothing until I am told to return to the kitchen to fetch a fresh bottle of wine because everyone agrees that the one being poured tastes “oaky.”
Copyright © 2025 by Robert Granader
