The Summer We Read Gatsby (15 page)

“I remembered where I met that boy at your house before.” She was a bit of a sprayer, one of those unfortunate people who gather saliva in the corners of their mouths when they get excited.

I took a step back to avoid being showered. I was starting to feel stoned and the too-tall Rockette loomed over me, making me dizzy. “Biggsy?”

She nodded with great enthusiasm, the cords in her neck even more pronounced by such vigorous extension. “He wasn’t Biggsy then. He was Jonathan something or other. He lived in the pool house.”

I was trying to follow what she was saying while also backing away from her, but she kept getting closer. “Whose pool house?”

“I’m about to tell you,” she said. She could afford to be coy, now that she had my attention. “It was an estate sale. An old woman, real Waspy and elegant. The house had been in the family forever. You know the type?” She paused, as though she wasn’t sure, since I was so
foreign,
that I would understand.

I assured her I was able to extrapolate, given our location.

“She lived there totally alone all summer, except for this guy in the pool house,” she continued. “Not even the staff lived in; they all just came during the day. She was isolated. The family was gone, all except this grandson in Los Angeles, a hipster filmmaker.” She paused again, to be sure I was following her.

I nodded. Hipster. Filmmaker. Got it.

“One morning the housekeeper arrived to find the newspapers still in the driveway. And she knew something was up. The old lady always read the papers first thing in the morning.” Another nod kept her going. “She died under mysterious circumstances. An overdose of her regular medication, they thought. The police investigated. But nobody pressed charges and nothing conclusive was found. The thing is, this guy, Jonathan, the one who’s living at your place now? He wouldn’t leave. He moved into the main house—this was a major property, and I’d arrive for a showing and find him swanning about in a silk bathrobe, like the lord of the manor. It was creepy.” She stopped. “Sorry. He’s not related to you or anything, is he?”

I assured her he was not, as far as we knew.

“So, the kid who inherited the place, the grandson, he never came to see it. Just wanted it sold. The housekeepers moved on to other jobs. But nobody made the guy leave. He stayed there all summer. It was so weird. Finally the house got sold.”

“And then he left?”

She nodded impatiently, as though frustrated with my lack of attention. “We heard he’d
died
. I never saw him again. Until he resurfaced at your aunt’s place, having been there with another older woman who lived alone. Who is now . . .
dead
.”

“Aunt Lydia died in Paris,” I said. “It was a heart attack.”

“All I’m saying . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Well, you have to admit, it’s strange, that’s all. Especially when he was rumored to be dead himself. I heard he was hit by a car.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked. “Why did everyone think he was dead?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But you can imagine my surprise when there he was. Just like a ghost.” She looked around, her neck craning as she sized up the crowd. “So,” she continued. “I heard you saw Finn today.”

I nodded, picking up the proprietary tone in her voice.

“Played a little ’gammon, huh?” She waved her glass at me. “Did he win? He always beats me when we play, he’s just
too
good. You know he has a regular game with Jack Louis? The big IPO guy? That one never wants to pay his debts, either. Finn and I are having dinner tomorrow night. Maybe we’ll shake the dice a bit first. Or after—”

I interrupted her. “Excuse me,” I said, holding up my empty water glass. In my pot-addled state I didn’t feel the need to hear any more about Finn from her. I got it: they were together. She seemed intent on making that clear. And that was totally fine with me. Why wouldn’t it be? I wasn’t interested in him. I couldn’t be. I had too much to do and only three more weeks to do it in. “I’m going to get some water,” I said, moving away from her. “But you’re going to show the house, right?”

“Well, yes—” she was saying as I headed on toward the bar, where Peck was still entertaining three of the original admiring group of men that had surrounded her at the beginning of the evening, still audibly declaring her “fabulous” and “a piece of work.”

“Stella!” she cried out. “I’m sharing my tale of irony.” She pulled me close and continued speaking to the group with me at her side. “So here I’m thinking he’s throwing this Gatsby theme party for me. It seemed pretty specific, right? The book had become this symbol, I thought, of our love. We were
madly
in love, you know. For almost five years of my life.”

Every time I heard Peck tell the story of her love affair with Miles, the length of time they’d been together expanded. She was almost twenty-one when she met him. He was twenty-six or so, she’d told me. Within months they’d talked about getting married. But she had to finish school, she still thought. Later, after she’d dropped out and kept busy with acting class and auditions, he moved in with her for a while. They broke up after he went to Hong Kong and told her he’d met someone else. She lied and told him she’d met someone else too. She was twenty-five. So it was three years, to my calculations. But somehow in the telling it had become three and a half and then four and now five years of her life.

“This wasn’t some drunken one-night stand or anything,” she explained. I’d heard her use these exact words so many times. “For all these years I’ve told myself the same story. I once knew this great love. We can only go through that one time in our lives. Believe me, I would never do it again.”

She was in full performance mode, pausing to assess her audience’s attention to her tale before she continued. “I was, of course, curious. He
gave
me
The Great Gatsby
, you see. Everyone’s favorite book. Right, Stella? Ask my sister.” She gestured toward me like Vanna White on
Wheel of Fortune.
“I gave
her
the book and she spent the whole summer copying it down.” Her eyes glittered, as though she too had partaken of the brownies. “Anyway,” she continued breathlessly, “you can see why I might have made certain assumptions.”

“A Gatsby white party to woo you back after seven years. That’s
so
romantic,” one of them said, sighing. He wore orange corduroy pants that he kept pulling at, as though they were too tight.

“That’s the thing,” she cried out, in preparation for delivering her punch line with a leading lady’s flair and comic timing. I could learn a thing or two about telling a story from my sister. “It wasn’t at all romantic. Because he didn’t even
remember
giving it to me.”

Scotty was on her other side and patted her shoulder. “Maybe he was just saying that. Maybe he got flustered when he saw you again. And he lied.”

I thought there might be some truth to Scotty’s version. It did seem too big a coincidence that Miles Noble’s first contact with Peck after seven years should be a Gatsby theme party invitation. But my sister shook her head. “He hadn’t even
read
it.”

There were big reactions all around. “That’s terrible,” said the one in the corduroy. He had perfectly feathered hair, like Jon Bon Jovi, one of Peck’s favorite singers.

“How rude,” exclaimed the third man. He wore stylish tortoise-shell glasses he kept putting on and taking off.

The sensitive Scotty made a compassionate face. “Unrequited love,” he said sympathetically. All night, I’d noticed, he’d been gazing adoringly in Hamilton’s direction while the older man ignored him. “The cruelest of life’s ironies.”

“It
was
rude,” Peck was saying, talking over him in response to the man with the glasses. “He has terrible manners. And now I find myself questioning what I always thought to be the defining story of my life. If I could believe myself in love with someone who could lie like that, to the point where he didn’t even read the book that became such a symbol of our relationship, then what else could I believe?”

She looked genuinely distraught, near tears. We were all riveted. But then a rueful smile indicated the shift to come. “Then he shows up at the Fool’s Welcome. And steals one of the paintings right off the wall!” She paused and looked around at each of us in turn, sharing her incredulity. “Was he sending a signal? I’m obviously no good at interpreting, since I thought the invitation to the party was a message, and that turned out to be dead wrong.”

They murmured their assent. “He’s definitely sending a message,” said the one in the corduroy. “He wants you to come after him.”

“Or is he just a thief?” she asked rhetorically. “Did he think it was worth something? What do I do?”

“Show up at his house,” the one in the glasses suggested. “Wearing nothing but a trench coat. And stilettos. Seduce him and make him tell you everything.”

“Invite him to lunch,” said the one in corduroy. “With some fabulous people. And then
ignore
him. You’ll drive him mad. He’ll be forced to confess.”

The glasses-wearer shook his head. He was heavyset, with a shock of gray hair. “Did you know?” he asked. “There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald suite at the Ritz in Paris. Suggest that he take you there, to make up for it. And then ask for the painting back.”

Scotty rubbed his chin. “I don’t think he took your painting. If he came to your house, what he wants is
you
.”

Peck caught my eye. “He’s our suspect, I’m telling you. I know it. I’m starting to find it a little bit sexy. Very Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney, you know? In that movie where she’s locked in the trunk with him?”

Scotty put an arm around her waist. “Just let him see you in this outfit with those false eyelashes, working those shoes, and he’ll fall even more head over heels. You’re
fantastic
.”

Peck wore a look of total glee as she basked in their attention. “Literally?” she cried out. “I’ve already forgotten about him. Miles who? I’m in love with all of you.”

She glanced around at them. “But isn’t it a funny coincidence? That he would hire an event planner who would suggest a Gatsby theme party? How could I ever have been in love with someone with such a lack of taste. I mean, aren’t theme parties totally gauche?”

This was greeted with a chorus of noes. A theme party was fine, as long as it was sophisticated. “Fitzgerald will always be immensely stylish,” Corduroy added with a benevolent nod.

All of a sudden, it hit me, in a pot-induced flash of clarity, the kind of thing that often is later revealed to be ridiculous: I knew the combination to Lydia’s safe.

7

 

 

 

 

T
o spend one’s childhood abroad as an American is to grow up with a permanent sense of yearning. There’s a place far away that is ours but it only seems knowable through movies, books, and the occasional television program dubbed in German or French or Italian.

I fetishized certain aspects of what I perceived as typical American life. I read obsessively, studying American novels as if they were textbooks, the keys to understanding a country I could know only through words. I specialized in stories about suburban teenage angst. And although I’ve since somewhat lost my taste for it, I adored root beer. As it was not a beverage option at the local café, it became an exotic treat that I was first introduced to at the home of an American friend, the daughter of a businessman who was transferred every two years. Her mother made us root beer floats, with big globs of vanilla ice cream in the glasses of root beer she poured from cans brought over after one of the visits back to the States they called “home leaves.” I had a thing for Kraft macaroni and cheese too, which horrified my mother, a whole grain and fresh vegetable lover. She couldn’t understand why the fake orange and chemical taste made me feel American. I didn’t understand it either.

But my mother had rejected her country without regret, turning her back, she always implied, on the pain she’d known there—like mine, her father had died young, and her mother never recovered, fading away in a haze of alcohol and grief—and the inescapable sadness of the loss of her husband, my father. It made sense to me, her wanting to stay in Europe and not go back. But I wanted to go, and so, every third summer or so, while Eleanor would go on a mission to Nepal or Thailand or Namibia, I went to stay with Lydia at Fool’s House, where I would drink soda by the six-pack, a habit my aunt willingly indulged. I stopped drinking root beer the summer Peck made me try a real beer—I was fifteen and of legal age to drink beer in Europe, as she pointed out, appalled that I’d never tasted the stuff.

I still had a thing for Tootsie Rolls, and when I got back to Fool’s House that night, with a case of pot-induced munchies, I ate through the fresh stash I’d picked up at the supermarket that afternoon before sitting down at my computer to test my instinct about the combination to Lydia’s safe. I was pretty sure I’d guessed correctly, recalling the long, languid conversations about Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton with Lydia on the porch. This would be after what Lydia would call “reading hour,” a spell of time, usually more like two or three hours at a stretch, after lunch, when we would take seats in the rocking chairs on the porch with our books and read happily. After reading hour, there’d often be writing hour, when Lydia would suggest a quick exercise, “just for fun, for the pleasure of the creative endeavor.”

Peck usually skipped reading hour, and always passed on the writing exercises, scheduling a tennis game or heading back to the beach to work on her tan. But I enjoyed sitting there with a good book and only the chirping of birds to break the quiet. Lydia felt strongly about the writer she called Scott, as though she’d known him, and she would often read me a line or two that she found particularly evocative.

I Googled F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was born on September 24, 1896. Finn had been right, I suspected, in his hunch that Lydia would choose such a number, a date relating to one of her favorite artists, as the combination for a safe, and we’d tried the dates that Jasper Johns painted
Fool’s House
(1962) and
Flag
(1954) and even his birth date (May 15, 1930) to no avail. But we hadn’t tried the birth date of one of her favorite writers. And this suddenly seemed very Lydia.