Sheets to the Wind: Down the State-of-the-Art Drain

August in the Hamptons is a scourge of elegance. As The Star’s Lady Columnist, countless invitations cross my desk, and deciding which glamorous event to attend and write about is a trial by ordeal. How long shall I writhe at the Watermill Center’s annual Time Bomb party in the woods, the 35th annual Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival benefit at the Atlantic Golf Club, the Ellen Hermanson Foundation’s “enchanted evening” at the Topping Rose House, the Judith and Gerson Leiber garden tea party, or the Gatsby-style gala at Blackman’s Plumbing Supply celebrating the launch of Franke’s Crystal Collection, “a state-of-the-art coordinating sink and faucet forged from a unique integration of the highest quality stainless steel and glass, boasting a striking aesthetic and providing added cabinet space under the sink through a corner drain”? 

At 5 p.m. last Thursday, the sun was still high and bounced off my red sequin flapper dress as I drove, turning the inside of my car into a private disco and likely blinding anyone who dared look in. The Blackman showroom is in Southampton, so I had to leave early to get there by 6 p.m.

I parked next to two women in a minivan applying last-minute mascara in the mirror, and made my way to the check-in desk, where I was outfitted with a name tag and given $100 of play money to use at the casino games set up inside among the hors d’oeuvres, flowing champagne, and D.J. Twilo (who most nights can be found at Maison Vivienne) spinning hits for a rotating band of dancing real estate agents and designers. Nearby, a man in white shirt and white shorts, topped by mirrored sunglasses, clutched his drink by the stem. 

No two writers have had a greater influence on the world of interiors than Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Do a quick Google and you’ll find dozens of chairs and living room sets named after Papa, while Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is apparently the first name on a plumbing provider’s mind. “Franke’s new Crystal Collection sink is like Gatsby because he puts on a show and makes everyone happy,” said Courtney Kozieja, a social media executive at Sharpe, straining to make the link. Another Franke rep turned on the faucet, noting the elegant glass backsplash, which Gatsby would totally have.

After so many fetes devoted to animal welfare and cancer research this summer, I was excited to attend a serious literary event at last. 

“If you could rewrite ‘The Great Gatsby,’ would you include more kitchen scenes?” 

“Definitely.” 

“If you could rewrite ‘The Great Gatsby,’ would you let him live?” I followed up. 

It was a stupid question in retrospect, as Fitzgerald’s story in our time has become less a cautionary tale than an aspirational one. Most people I spoke to, most at the party anyway, when they think of Gatsby don’t recall him lying face down in his swimming pool at book’s end, but as having made it. “Of course he should live!” Sort of like how “Sex and the City” went from being a gimlet-eyed look at sexual mores in modern Manhattan to a shoe-shopping/real estate fantasy in which the toxic bachelor reforms and gets down on one knee.

I wandered the showroom, weaving through some 200 guests, thinking about this revised book, the one where Gatsby lives and marries Daisy after she divorces Tom, before Gatsby throws her over a few years later for his yoga instructor. I ran my hand across an array of gleaming stainless-steel faucets, seeing in each a new life that I might buy. With the faucet goes a house, and with a house, a handsome husband, beautiful children, successful glamorous friends, the tent we rent to host a summer benefit for a wildlife charity, the elephant on the lawn on which I make my brilliant entrance, the billionaire washing his hands after pissing in our state-of-the-art toilet. Later, he pulls some strings for our daughter to work in the State Department.

Shopping and literature are not dissimilar; both deal in dreams. When you buy something, you’re buying the life you imagine goes with it. Buy a castle, a cape, and an arsenal of sex toys and you too can host an orgy written up in Page Six.

“Ivan’s here,” said a young woman I was chatting with. I’d first heard of Ivan and his rumored sex parties two years ago when a friend from the city was on the fence about spending the weekend at his castle. “He’s very generous, but I’m not sure I want to have sex with him. I don’t know. It’s a really nice house.” And then again a few weeks ago at Polo Hamptons after I’d wondered aloud, “Who are all these people?” The answer is always Ivan.

Though I’ve not yet met Ivan and the notion of orgies makes me despair, I admire his doing things his own way, his making a life in his own fashion. Why not a castle? “I delight in a moat,” as Isabel Archer says in “The Portrait of a Lady,” Henry James’s novel about the upside of having it all.

Most of the guests, however, were not there to buy. Like the guests at Gatsby’s lavish parties, we’d come for the food, for the champagne, for the music, and to see who else might come. “The invitation said this party was ‘exclusive’? Whom were you hoping to keep out?” I’d asked the publicist. “Is there anyone you don’t want to have this sink?” 

“We want everyone to have this sink!”

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I’d failed to dream of a party in a plumbing supply showroom, but it turns out it’s kind of a scene, especially out here where real estate has all but replaced fishing and potato farming as the primary industry, and Gatsby types come from all over trying to recapture, if not the past, then at least a healthy slice of the future. While the Hamptons is filled with people you’ve heard of, it’s also filled with strange new money possessed by individuals whose backgrounds you can’t quite place, all mixing together, making it a fairgrounds of millionaires, grifters, and the beautiful who attach to both. The ostentation is often so great, so exaggerated, it’s hard to know which is which, or if the difference even matters. The millionaires, some of them, might be the biggest grifters of all. But once you have the money, does it matter how you got it? Is there still any snobbish distinction between old and new money? Or is the only important distinction these days between more and less?

“There’s toilets everywhere, but hell if you can find the bathroom,” Maryann Aiello told me. Having read about the party in Dan’s Papers, she’d stopped by for a snack on her way to see Bruce Willis perform at Guild Hall. We were standing near the roulette table surrounded by glamorous guests in the toilet display center, when she told me she’d once rented a house in Southampton where the books were actually fake. I’d been talking about Owl Eyes, my favorite character in Gatsby: “The narrator wanders into the library during one of Gatsby’s parties and finds a guy with glasses, Owl Eyes, on a ladder inspecting the books, declaring with astonishment that all of them are real.” Our eyes went to the toilets, which we dared not flush.

A dapper man with sculpted eyebrows who used to run a plumbing supply showroom in Arizona told me about the three best plumbing parties he'd been to. One where there was a vodka luge, another where there was a flash mob dancing to "Thriller," and another, glassblowers —"you could take home your own bowl if you won the raffle." 

"Designers and real estate people are huge partiers," he explained. He had just relocated to New York and found a rental in Hell's Kitchen. The first thing he did was replace the faucet with something more elegant.

I wandered further, accepting compliments on my dress, which gleamed in the bright white room with its silver fixtures all artfully displayed, and allowed a servant to fix me a roast beef sandwich. Then, tired from standing in heels, I put the lid down on a toilet and sat down to eat. Next to me, a man sat on another toilet flipping through an issue of Blackman at Home, the new design magazine that the party was also celebrating, its cover featuring the model Ashley Graham (who'd just renovated her home) being blasted by a stream of water coming from a state-of-the-art showerhead.

I was about to leave when I remembered my unused play money, which I could potentially double or triple and then put toward one of the items in the silent auction. I was trying to figure out where to trade my money for chips when I ran into Jonathan, a smiling, bear-like man I'd met a few weeks ago at the Parrish after-party and whom I thought I saw on the far end of a yacht where I wound up one night. His physique, at the Parrish, was accented by an oxford shirt with an embroidered teddy bear where a polo player might be. "Ralph" gave me that, he said within two minutes of our meeting, before reciting a few highlights from his hardscrabble rags-to-riches story (music executive made good).

I smiled. He smiled. The light bounced off my sequin gown and back onto a light fixture, before bouncing off his diamond-encrusted watch and projecting into the air something like the bat signal for hoes. "Wow. Does that cut glass?" I asked, not wanting to appear gauche by asking outright about the carats. He nodded. "How often do you cut glass with it? It must be very hard for you to resist in here, surrounded by Franke's glass-bottom sink and other temptations." 

He claimed it was not. "I just like nice things. You should know that when a guy talks to you it's because he likes nice things," he said, giving me the five-over. 

I asked him where I could get some chips to gamble, and his friend, in a Hawaiian shirt with a gold anchor pendant, offered me his play money. "Look at that. He's giving you money and you don't even have to do anything," the teddy bear said, as if I were a streetwalker who'd lucked out when her lonely John wanted only to talk. 

He laughed. I laughed and said, "You know, you're what they call a real sleazeball," before his face fell and I felt guilty and mean. How was he supposed to know I wasn't a hooker? I exchanged my fake money for chips and blew it all on roulette. 

"Go big or go home!" the dealer called out to the group, each of us pretending we had something or nothing to lose. 

"Can't we do both?" I asked before sliding all my chips in.

Walking out empty-handed — all the gift bags had been taken — I thought about Gatsby. Driving east along 27, most of the big stores were closed now, and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of traffic. "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." . . . So we turn the faucets on, water against the glass-bottom sink, splashed back ceaselessly into our faces.