All that Brad and Mrs. Richardson expected of Juan was that he would in the first days walk around the buildings at the estate-the house itself, the ancient potato barn mostly buried in the earth with its roof just above ground-level, the tennis court, and the gardens. Juan was to decide what needed to be done. It was important to Brad that Juan be a “self-starter.” Juan knew, and had been in America long enough to appreciate, that a self-starter was a guy who made up his own mind about what needed to be done, how to do it, and how to get it done, quickly.
“And,” Brad said, smiling, “we want you to spend some time each day with the dogs.”
Juan remembered two sleek dogs trotting from time to time down the hallway that connected Brad’s office with the gleaming kitchen. Their toenails had clicked on the burnished wooden floors.
The dogs were Borzois. Juan had never before seen or touched, fed or groomed, a Borzoi. In fact, he’d never heard the name of the breed. But he knew that no matter how elegant or inelegant a dog’s coat, muzzle, ears, legs, and tail were, all dogs responded the same way to love, discipline, attention and play-they became attentive, loving, obedient, sweetly dependent. Within a week, Felix and Sylvia, both of them benignly neglected during the two years they had lived essentially as trophies in the Richardsons’ homes, became Juan’s dogs. They followed him, waiting for him to play with them or feed them. They stayed near him as he worked inside or outside the house. He loved them.
And Juan also loved his work. He easily fell into the patterns of the Richardsons’ home-the treasures of the carefully constructed estate, the sloping expanses of the grounds so much like the nearby undulating golf course at the Maidstone Club, the needs of the seawalls, and the endless, repetitive sibilance of the ocean surf.
He also quickly fell into the patterns of the Richardsons’ lives. They lived with largesse and generosity, not just to their friends and Juan but to the furtive, cautious population of immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and Costa Rica. They learned through Juan that there were houses and small warehouses that collected donations of cash and food and clothes for the men, women, and children, a kind of underground support system designed to elude the surveillance of the immigration police. The Richardsons bought large quantities of clean, durable clothes-jeans and sweatshirts and Nike and Adidas sneakers for the men, shirts and blouses and slacks for the women, sweatshirts with popular names like Ecko and A &F for the kids. The Richardsons bought food. They even paid for doctor visits. Many of the people among whom Juan lived knew that he worked for a generous man and woman. Some people admired him for that. Others resented him.
There were other aspects of the Richardsons’ lives that Juan soon came to love, including the parties. Joan and Brad gave parties almost every weekend, some small, most large. Brad even called the Borzois-so sleek, so clean, so perpetually groomed-“party animals.”
And Juan became a “party man.” At the start of the summer, Brad Richardson asked Juan to work at the weekend parties as a greeter at the front door, in a tuxedo. Together with Brad, Juan even made a one-day visit to Manhattan, to the corner of Madison Avenue and 45th Street, to buy the tuxedo at the muted, elegant Paul Stuart store where Brad’s father had started shopping in the late 1940s when it opened and to which he started bringing Brad when he was nine and already a well-mannered preppy. When the other Mexican men Juan had once worked with learned that he now sometimes wore a tuxedo, they ribbed him that even more of the white women in East Hampton and Southampton would take Juan to bed. “You get rich someday, Juan,” they said. “You give it hard enough to them you get rich.”
During the party season, Mariana, a dark, comely woman with two kids with whom Juan started living just a week after he arrived in Sag Harbor, served food and drinks and helped to clean in the quiet hours of early Sunday morning as the parties slowly dissolved after hours and hours of music, dancing, conversation, drinking, and cocaine-inhaling by the Richardsons’ guests. Mariana was paid five hundred dollars in cash each time she worked. This was a staggering amount. And it was made even more staggering because Juan was given seven hundred dollars each time he, in his beautifully tailored tuxedo, acted as a greeter and guide, Felix and Sylvia quietly roaming around him.
5.
The party on the Fourth of July weekend was the largest and the most festive. Blond boys-boarding school and college-age children of the Richardsons’ friends-worked in white shirts and black slacks as valet parkers. From his vantage point at the main entrance, Juan watched them hand chips with numbers engraved on them to the guests arriving in their Mercedes, BMWs, Bentleys, even old MGs and Triumphs. So many guests came that the quick boys, always running and laughing, high on marijuana, had to park many of the cars on the richly green lawns Juan knew he would have to re-sod and groom after the weekend.
As Juan passed dozens of guests along to Brad and Joan Richardson, he witnessed and heard the never-quite-touching air kisses, the quick hugs, the hand-shaking, and the endlessly repeated words, “How wonderful to seeee you!” He heard some men referred to as “Senator” and “Congressman.” Juan knew that Senators and Congressmen worked in Washington and that they spent time with President Obama. He even thought that from time to time he recognized people whose images he and Mariana had sometimes seen on the television they shared with all the other people who lived in the crowded ranch house.
Brad Richardson was a generous host. Dressed in a blue summer blazer, white shirt, and linen slacks, Brad saw to it that the guests had drinks and food in endless supply. He introduced Juan as his “friend and assistant.” Always somewhat shy, Juan had learned that a few soft words and a smile could bring him successfully through every brief conversation he had in a noisy, diverse crowd.
Toward nine, Brad asked Juan to urge people to move in the direction of the terrace overlooking the Atlantic. Fireworks soon began to fly skywards from the dunes. They were reflected on the sparkling surface of the ocean water. It was a thunderous, exciting show, with several rockets unfurling the American flag over the Atlantic before its image gradually decayed. Voices shouted “wow” or “oh” or murmured “my God” as the half-hour-long fireworks display boomed from crescendo to crescendo and then gradually dissolved. Smoke from the explosions drifted and faded.
Joan Richardson had spent increasing amounts of her time speaking with, and standing near, a tall man with blond-and-gray hair everyone called the Senator or Hank. As Joan and the Senator walked toward the pool at three in the morning, she told Mariana and the other waiters and waitresses, cooks and caterers to start the process of cleaning the detritus and debris that crowds of partying people created: the used glasses smeared with lipstick and greasy fingerprints, desiccated lemon and lime peels, plundered dishes and plates with the remnants of food, empty bottles of wine and champagne, ashtrays blackened with cigarette and cigar butts and stumps of joints. Juan’s job was to guide weakened guests, debilitated by alcohol, drugs, or endless cocktail chatter, outside where the still-quick valets retrieved their cars. Juan was also, Brad told him, gently to persuade the remaining guests to come to the realization that the party was winding down. The objective was to be finished before dawn.