Trading Up by Candace Bushnell Page A

everything into tiny categories, and then, like diamond sorters, examined and graded each particle. And this was most true of the Hamptons.
    The thirty-mile span from the towns of Southampton to East Hampton is considered most desirable; within that category the area “south of the highway” is superior to “north of the highway,” the highway being the two-lane road known as Route 27. From there, a hundred nuances could be employed to determine what makes one acre more favorable than another, from proximity to the ocean to the professions of one’s neighbors. Janey was acutely aware of these tiny distinctions, but there was one area in which she’d always disagreed with the general consensus: Secretly, she preferred the area north of the highway to that to the south. She loved the vast expanses of farmland and the familiar winding back roads, which she’d discovered the first time she’d come out to the Hamptons ten years ago. Driving these roads had always been her escape, the difference being that in the past, which really wasn’t more than a year ago, she’d had to drive them in a car borrowed from whichever man she was sleeping with at the time. And now, downshifting to third gear and taking the sharp turn by a farm stand at a good forty miles an hour, she took great relish in the fact that she was finally in her own car.
    Leaving her sister and Mimi in East Hampton, she had decided that it was a perfect day for a late-afternoon drive. There was a straightaway from Sag Main Road to Scuttle Hole Road, and Janey slid the stick shift into fourth gear and accel-erated to seventy. Her hair, secured in a ponytail, blew madly behind her; she loved the feeling of freedom speed gave her, and at that moment, she reflected that she could never go fast enough. But then she had to slow down to make the turn that led to the Two Trees horse farm.
    Smoothing back her hair, she eased the car down to twenty miles an hour (she swore she could hear the engine crying against such restraint), and scanned the mown field where several cars were parked. Sure enough, parked at the end on an 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 46
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    arrogant angle, so no other cars could park next to it, was Harold Vane’s black Maserati. She recognized it immediately, because three years before she’d been Harold’s girlfriend for the whole summer, and had spent far too much time in that car being driven around by Harold. Harold was too jumpy to be a good driver, but when Janey had pointed this out to him, he’d looked at her in alarm and had ground the gears, so she never mentioned it again.
    She steered the Boxster along a dirt track, thinking that dear, darling Harold, with his shiny bald head and his ever-shiny shoes, was really quite a show-off. But as he was so charming and kind (he’d loaned Janey money last summer when she was broke), it was difficult to fault him for anything.
    And now, Janey thought, checking her face in the mirrored sun visor and leisurely applying her trademark Pussy Pink lipstick, he had taken up polo! It was extraordinary, really, especially as Harold, who was little and neurotic (he was over fifty, but couldn’t keep still), was the last person she could imagine on a horse. But Janey had a “feeling” that polo was going to be very big this summer, and Harold was one of those people who loved being on the leading edge of the next stylish thing. And as he had supposedly made a killing in the stock market in the past two years, why shouldn’t he spend his leisure time as he pleased, no matter how ridiculous it might make him look?
    In the distance, tiny riders on tiny horses raced up and down a green velvet field, but they were too far away to make out their identities. Janey began strolling toward them, thinking about how pleased (and surprised) Harold would be to see her, and immediately found that there was a small impediment: It had rained in the past two days, and her