Year in Palm Beach (12 page)

Dick is reading the Shiny Sheet. “There's another tree lighting tonight.” He pauses. “Actually, it looks like there're two.”

“Two?” I say. “Where?”

“One's in that park across from Café L'Europe. The other's on Worth. Want to go?”

“Sure,” I say.

We go back to our papers. But I can't concentrate. I'm trying to figure out why I want to go to more tree lightings. All the years Dick and I've been together, we've skipped this type of gathering. We avoid crowds unless it involves a basketball or baseball game. We don't do festivals. But last night's event was simple and quaint, and quite a contrast to the sophisticated restaurants and fancy Worth Avenue shops. It's like there's an old-fashioned small town here we never knew about, a Palm Beach secret. To my surprise, this old-fashionedness appeals to me.

I look up at Dick. “This is a little weird, isn't it? Going to three tree lightings?”

“I think last night's lighting tapped into something, for both of us,” Dick says. “Might as well follow it, see where it goes.”

We work all day. At five o'clock, we make the short walk to tonight's first tree lighting. It's even smaller than the one at Bradley Park. Again, a choir sings, and Santa and his wife arrive in a fire engine.

We take a seat on a bench in the little park. “This feels like Christmastime in the nineteen fifties,” Dick says.

“Yeah,” I say. “No crowds, no noisy kids, no gaudy decorations, no canned Christmas carols.”

I think over Christmases I've had as an adult. Dick and I have basically skipped Christmas unless Samantha was involved. Before I met Dick, I had a job that involved lots of travel, and sometimes I even traveled on Christmas Day. One Christmas, because of delayed flights, I ended up having five Christmas dinners on planes. I was so busy back then, fast-tracking up the career ladder. Now that feels like foreign times.

On both sides of us, couples and families are walking south along the sidewalks. The crowd grows thicker. “Think they're going to the Worth Avenue lighting?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Dick says. “Looks like it's bigger than the other two. We'd better get going.”

We join the parade. The sidewalks are full.

“I've never seen this many people in Palm Beach,” I say.

“Me, either,” Dick says.

The streets are far more crowded than they were at Thanks-giving. All the parking spaces are taken, even on the side streets, and drivers are searching for empty spots. By the time we get to Worth Avenue, it's closed to cars and holds a sea of people.

Shopkeepers offer glasses of wine and plates of hors d'oeuvres. The crowd is polite and festive. Although this tree lighting clearly draws people from across the bridge and from towns south and north, it feels like a local event. People know each other and I hear lots of “catching up on the news” conversations.

We follow the throng west toward the Christmas tree and find a space to stand. The tree is probably thirty feet high, at least twice as big as the previous two. Soon, I'm surrounded by taller people and can only see the top of the tree. I grab Dick's hand. The sound of bagpipes rises above the noise of the crowd.

“Can you see what's happening?” I say. Dick's almost a foot taller than I am.

“The naked lady from the sport fisher is leading a parade of naked bagpipers,” he says. “Just kidding.” He pauses. “Santa and Mrs. Claus are behind the bagpipers. They're close now. No fire engine this time. They're in the back of a Mercedes convertible.”

Everyone joins in the countdown chorus, and tiny white lights on the tree sparkle to life. We learn through the grapevine the fire engine Santa was supposed to arrive in had to go to a real fire.

“So,” Dick says, “three tree lightings in two days. Are we nuts?”

“I don't know,” I say. “But let's get out of here and go find a saloon.”

People are everywhere. We can't get near Bice or Taboo or Renato's or Pizza al Fresco.

“Let's try The Chesterfield,” Dick says.

We thread our way through the crowd and eventually get to the Leopard Lounge. The bar is already pretty full of the tree-lighting crowd, but we find two seats.

Lou comes over, bringing us a beer and a glass of champagne. The place is so busy there's no time for a joke.

Dick looks at me and says. “So, you and I don't like crowds, skip parades, don't do holiday events.”

“And we just went to three tree lightings, including one that was crowded, and wouldn't mind going to another one?” I say.

“What's going on?” Dick says.

“I don't know,” I say. “Something to do with the past. Simpler times, maybe.”

I wonder if this move to Palm Beach for a year will be more significant than I imagined.

Wednesday, December 2

It's another sunny, balmy morning. We're sitting by the pool reading the morning papers. I love being out here, looking at the tall seagrape trees and the thick border of ficus hedges. Duckie and Blanco are nearby in their outdoor cage, peering up at the family of doves perched along the roof of the guest cottage. Do our birds wish they could fly up and join the doves, I wonder.

The Shiny Sheet reports that a homeowner on Seaview told police his lawn was “damaged by a delivery truck.” Interpol may have to be notified.

We walk over to Worth Avenue around noon and see only the occasional pedestrian. I guess the craziness of Thanksgiving was just a blip. Maurizio warned us the other night that we hadn't seen anything yet, that Palm Beach would be much busier over the Christmas holidays. It's hard to believe today.

The workers are back in force. The residential streets are full of laborers painting and sawing and hammering and hedging. It's quite noisy. Trucks and vans are in all the parking spaces. The preparations and repairs for the winter residents continue. I'm curious about when they will actually arrive and stay.

This evening we walk to The Chesterfield for an early dance. There's little traffic. The restaurants that were slammed over Thanksgiving are not even close to full now. We take seats at the bar.

Two forty-something men in suits next to us are engaged in a heated discussion. One says, “Well, he doesn't live in Palm Beach year round. It's not his primary home.”

His friend says, “I know that. I'm not saying any of these team owners lives here all year. I'm just saying they own homes here. They have a Palm Beach presence.”

“Okay, okay, now which team owners are these again?” His friend takes out a scrap of paper and says, “Listen, the owners of the Steelers, the Giants, the Tampa Bay Bucs, the Packers, the Magic, the Patriots, the Browns, the Mets, the Islanders, the Red Sox, the Eagles, the Flyers, the Phillies, and the Sixers are all Palm Beachers.”

“Whoa, that is unbelievable.”

Dick looks at me. “I didn't know all those team owners had houses here.”

“Me, either,” I say.

Adam is entertaining tonight, and Dick and I dance to some slow songs, including “Lady in Red” and “Come Monday.” Then Adam switches to “Rolling on a River” and several other rock and roll songs, and Dick indulges me and we dance fast.

Back at the bar, Dick says, “Pasta at Amici tonight?”

“Sounds great.”

We walk in that direction. It begins to drizzle. We pick up our pace, but so does the drizzle. We run. As we reach Amici, a man who is leaving holds the door open for us.

We take a seat at the bar. Beth stands there, smiling.

“So?” she says.

Dick and I look at each other. “So,” Dick says, “what?”

“So, did you recognize your doorman tonight?” she asks.

“That guy who held the door? No, but it was nice of him, considering the rain,” Dick says.

Beth laughs. “That was Jimmy Buffett again.”

Are we idiots? Perhaps we need new prescriptions, more antioxidants, oat bran. I don't know.

Saturday, December 5

This morning, in the bedroom, I try to get a pair of jeans from a high shelf in the closet, and a pile of clothes falls down on me. I let out a few swear words, and Dick appears. He looks at the clothes lying on the floor.

“What happened?” he says.

“I was trying to get a pair of jeans, and everything came tumbling down.”

He picks up a pair of pants and says, “Here, I'll help you put it all back.”

I look down at the stuff around me. “No,” I say. “I'm not sure it all should go back. I'm going to just look through this stuff.”

“Okay, let me know if I can help,” Dick says.

I'm confused. Our house in New Smyrna has a space for everything. Here, in Palm Beach, we're living with much less, but there isn't room for what we have.

I think back to New York. Dick and I lived in several apartments much smaller than this cottage and it didn't fuss us. Of course, we were younger then, and had much less. I do remember being delighted, the first time we moved into a house, that we had a closet just for coats.

I pick up each piece of clothing, one by one. Some I fold and put back. Whatever I don't really need or wear, I put in several large shopping bags for The Church Mouse, the secondhand store where we bought the chest. The closet shelves look much more accessible now.

I ask Dick if he can help me carry the bags to The Church Mouse, and we walk over and make our donation. I make a brief pass through the women's section. Many items were bought just two blocks away, on fancy Worth Avenue. A year out of fashion, perhaps, but a tenth of the original price. I pick up a lovely teapot, put it back. We came here to get rid of stuff, not acquire it.

“Looks like this shop takes just about every kind of donation,” Dick says, looking around at the tables and chairs, china, linens, and paintings. “Maybe we'll just donate everything in our cottage. That'll solve the space problem.”

He's close to being right, I think. He often is when he makes these wisecracks.

Dick suggests we walk over to the town docks. “After all,” he says, “it's our job as DOPES.” We take a seat on a bench and check on the yachts. Only a few slips are empty, and it looks as if they might be all filled before Christmas. For the first time we see a mega yacht tied up at the end of a pier. It's too big even for the regular oversize slips.

“Did I tell you what happened at the gas station?” I say. “Yesterday, the attendant asked me if I knew how to pop the gas tank.”

“You mean because he thought you were a dumb blonde?”

“No. Be serious. He said many people who get gas there have no idea how to open their tank, so the attendants do it for them.”

Dick says, “I'm not sure those people should be driving.”

We sit for a while longer. There are actually people on some of the boats. I see a man hosing off a deck, another sanding a railing.

Two women walk by, and we catch a bit of conversation. One says, “No, no, no, you don't have to go to two doctors. My dentist gives me my Botox injections. I get my teeth cleaned and my smile fixed up at the same time.”

Dick looks at me. “Only in Palm Beach,” he says.

Tuesday, December 8

I've begun to notice holiday decorations on houses and in front yards. They're understated, just like the Halloween ones. Simple wreaths hang on front doors. Tiny white lights embrace hibiscus bushes, thread through ficus hedges, encircle trunks of trees. I catch glimpses of indoor Christmas trees, decorated with colorful lights and glass balls. We haven't put up a tree or holiday decorations in years. Now I'm trying to remember why.

Late this afternoon, on our way over to the tennis courts, Dick and I see two men wrapping strings of holiday lights around palm trees in a front yard. The printing on the side of the van parked in the driveway says the company buys, puts up, takes down, and stores holiday decorations. Dick looks at me and says, “That's a job our parents never told us about.”

We play tennis, finish up about six o'clock. As we walk off the court, two men dressed in tennis clothes are walking onto the next court. The first man says, “Yeah, I'd be happy to hit with you, but tell me, why the hell are you playing here instead of your own court?”

“Good question,” the other replies. “I was hitting at home on the ball machine late this afternoon, and Janie gets a call from our neighbor citing a Town of Palm Beach ordinance. You won't believe this, but in this town you can't use a ball machine after five o'clock.”

Dick looks at me. “This town must have tons of ordinances,” he says.

Thursday, December 10

All the windows along Worth Avenue are decorated for the holidays. We stop in front of William Eubanks, an expensive antique shop. A Christmas tree is in the window, decorated with beautiful white birds that look like Blanco.

“Let's go in,” I say.

Dick looks at me oddly. This is a shop where a lamp could cost $9,500, a pair of dining room chairs $15,500, a chest $51,000. “Sure,” he says.

We go in. I go look at the birds and see there are also grey birds that look like Duckie.

A woman appears. “May I help?”

“Well, yes,” I say. “Do you know how much these birds are?”

“I think they're seven-fifty,” she says, “I'll check.” Off she goes. I don't know where to put the decimal point. I can't imagine anything in this store costing only seven dollars and fifty cents, but seven hundred and fifty dollars seems a little steep. Maybe these birds are rare antiques. I take a careful look at one of the white birds. Now I'm afraid to touch it.

She comes back. “Yep, they're seven-fifty each,” she says. “So, that'd be fifteen dollars for both birds.”

I look at the tree. A quick count shows there to be about twenty birds. I consider buying them all, then remember we're trying to get rid of stuff, not accumulate it.

“I'll take these two,” I say and point to a white and a grey bird.