The Summer We Read Gatsby (2 page)

I opened the window. Air rushed in, smelling intoxicatingly of salt and honeysuckle, and something else too, something like ambition. I breathed in deeply.

“Watch the hair,” Peck warned. She had fantastic hair, a red-gold cascade she liked to wear fluffed as big as possible around her face. “Otherwise I look like a pinhead,” she’d say, in the self-deprecating manner specific to the truly vain.

A Philip Treacy hat—I knew it was Philip Treacy because she kept telling me, dropping the name as though it might mean something to me—was pinned precariously into her curls, and she had on a low-cut vintage flapper dress. It was white, of course, and showed off her spectacular cleavage—she referred to her breasts as “the twins”—to advantage. “God, I look a wreck,” she complained, although of course she didn’t at all. She’d made an effort and she looked magnificent, regal and cool and stylish at the same time.

“Look at my nails,” she cried out, flashing a hand in front of my face. “I’ve bitten them all down to the quick with nerves. And of course this dress is wrong. All wrong.”

Peck is what she likes to call a Fashionina. “I coined that term,” she’d explain, whether you cared for an explanation or not. “Everyone calls people like me Fashionistas. But the
Fashionina
is an entirely different creature.” According to Peck, a Fashionina is more elegant than a Fashionista; a Fashionina knows about taste and style, whereas a Fashionista is all about trends. She described her fashion sense as “rock ’n’ roll Auntie Mame.” She took such things seriously, as befitted a fashion diva, and over the years her style had evolved into full-fledged glamour with a vintage 1930s flair. It was ill-mannered, she liked to tell me, not to make an effort.

Of
my
dress—a long white cotton thing—she’d sniffed, “Hippie chic.” And then, “You really should do something with your hair,” because I’d emerged from a shower with it wet and hanging down my back. I was sure I was the one who looked “a wreck.” I felt haggard and exhausted and my nails too were bitten to the quick. “Actually don’t.” She’d reconsidered. “I’m just jealous. I’ve always been
insanely
jealous of you. I wish I could waltz down here with no makeup, in an old nightie and with stringy wet hair, and look like that.”

It was the kind of thing she said but didn’t really mean. Or meant only halfheartedly. She may have carried a tiny bit of residual resentment of the fact that our father left her mother (and her) for mine (and, a few months later, me). But our dad had now been dead for twenty-five years, and she wasn’t jealous of me at all. After all, as she’d pointed out more than a few times in the past few days, there wasn’t any reason for anyone to be jealous of me. I had a boring job in a boring country that wasn’t New York. (Switzerland is a place she and other people often confuse with Sweden.) Peck, on the other hand, was an actor. (She was one of
those
theater people, the ones who tell you about their craft and never, ever stop believing in themselves.) And she lived in Manhattan, or “the greatest city in the world,” as she usually put it. (Yes, she was one of
those
New Yorkers.)

“Maybe you shouldn’t read too much into this party,” I cautioned as we passed the field where I remembered picking strawberries with Aunt Lydia the first time I visited Southampton. I was trying to be conciliatory, but like many of my attempts at communicating with Peck it came out all wrong. She’d read Miles Noble’s calligraphed invitation as a summons, a call to destiny from her past. I had a tendency to be more cautious about people and their intentions. Far too cautious, she would tell me.

“Maybe it’s just a theme,” I went on. “You know, white dresses, green lawns, finger bowls of champagne that change the scene before your eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.” I was paraphrasing from the novel because that was the sort of annoying thing I did when I was nervous, but she didn’t seem to notice. “
Gatsby
is that kind of book.”

To this she sputtered, “Don’t tell
me
what kind of book it is. You hadn’t even
read The Great Gatsby
until
I
gave it to you.”

This was true. I was twenty-one that summer I read
Gatsby
for the first time. It was 2001, and I’d arrived to spend what would then be my third summer at Aunt Lydia’s house with the older half sister who intimidated me. Twenty-one is late to encounter the story of James Gatz and his love for the elusive Daisy, but I’d spent a peripatetic childhood in Europe, and this classic American novel had not been on the curriculum at any of the schools my mother had found for me.

I would have missed many of the American classics had it not been for my aunt Lydia, an English teacher at an all-boys academy, Saint Something’s, in Manhattan. Lydia was the first person to encourage me to write. “Start early,” she’d advised. “Get a first novel under your belt now.” I was nine years old, spending my first summer with her in Southampton. After that, every year she would send the summer reading list she always gave her class, and a box of books. Occasionally she visited and brought the books and the list in person. I got used to cataloguing my summers according to the books she gave me. There was the Summer We Read
Nancy Drew
, the Summer We Read
The Catcher in the Rye
, the Summer We Read Edith Wharton, and the Summer We Read
Catch-22
.

The summer of 2001 became the Summer We Read
Gatsby
. My aunt had assumed I’d already read it, and because she taught the book during the school year, it didn’t appear on the reading lists she gave her class. It was Peck who gave me the book. That summer, she introduced me to many things besides F. Scott Fitzgerald: the dressing drink, a topspin forehand, thong underwear, proper smoke-ring technique, and Woody Allen. Her introduction to Woody Allen took the form of
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan
, not literally Mr. Allen, but it was powerful all the same.

Peck was twenty-five then, already plump and gravel-voiced, theatrically and obsessively recovering from what she called “the denouement of the greatest love story ever told.” Her recovery took the form of chain-smoking, devouring cupcakes, and mooning about pretending to read the copy of
The Great Gatsby
that Miles Noble had given her when they first met. “I’m
obsessed
,” she would tell me, waving her paperback. “I’m absolutely mad for this book. You know, a literary fetish is the new black.”

Miles had read everything Fitzgerald ever wrote, he told her. “Like the Dylan song,” I said when she repeated this detail, telling the story of how they met. She didn’t get the reference. “Bob Dylan?” she’d muttered irritably. “What’s he got to do with the price of tea in China?”

Her first words to me that summer of 2001 were “I hate you,” but she’d delivered them in a cheerful enough manner, which was confusing to the pale and fragile student I was then, still grieving my mother’s death, overwhelmed at the random nature of life’s ironies. She’d just finished at NYU—she hadn’t graduated, she’d simply
finished
—and was planning to become famous, and she held the page of her book with one finger and gazed at me with curiosity. “Just kidding,” she said a few seconds later. “It’s just that you’re
so
freaking skinny. And you look just like Daddy.”

Daddy? He’d been dead for eighteen years. But I did resemble our father, or at least the few photos of him I’d seen. I had his dark wavy hair and brown eyes and I was angular, like him, while Peck took after her mother, with freckled Irish skin that burned easily and wide-set blue eyes.

Miles Noble looked like Jim Morrison, according to Peck. He was brilliant, sexy, the funniest guy she’d ever known. His name had come to be a sort of shorthand for the perfect guy, an inside joke for half sisters who grew up separated by an ocean, without much in the way of inside material. When Jean-Paul, the now-ex-husband my friends referred to as “that awful Jean-Paul”—as though that were his full name, That-Awful-Jean-Paul—turned out to be so, well, awful, Peck said to me, “He was never your Miles Noble, was he?”

Men were always falling in love with Peck, or so she would tell me. And she did have a regal air that seemed to bring out the passion in even the mousiest little creatures. But inevitably she’d come up with several reasons to be disappointed. A passion for cats, for example. Or ordering a salad for dinner. Or the wrong sorts of shoes. “Tasseled loafers,” she would whisper into the phone, as if such a thing were so awful it couldn’t be voiced too loudly. It explained everything. Afterward, she’d always add, “Well, he was no Miles Noble.”

“For someone who wants to be a writer, you don’t seem to understand about this book,” she complained now as she slammed on the brakes at a red light. We were on Route 27, the traffic-snagged highway that runs all the way along Long Island to Montauk, making our way from Southampton to Bridgehampton. “You, of all people, should know when a book had this kind of significance, a person doesn’t just randomly send an invitation after
seven
years of nothing, with such a theme, if he doesn’t intend it to mean something.”

“True,” I acknowledged. “But what does it mean?”

“It means, I suppose, that he’s come to his senses and he wants me back. But it’s too late for that. And you know what? You were right.”

Her words surprised me. Peck was not in the habit of telling me I was right about anything.

“This morning.” She gestured at me with one hand. “When you implied I was only going so I could see the house. It’s true. To satisfy my curiosity.” She nodded, as though she needed confirmation. “I would never go through that again, that kind of love. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I wouldn’t even wish it on
you
.

“It’s a sickness,” she continued. “That kind of obsessive, all-consuming, intense feeling, where you can’t eat and you can’t sleep. And God, remember how tragic I was that summer we broke up? Moping around a whole summer, reading and rereading
The Great Gatsby
, as though it contained all the answers to the mysteries of life.”

I did. It had been rather impressive, a heaving performance of grief and self-pity that I’d witnessed with a combination of awe and amusement. I had always believed such intense displays of emotion to be the stuff of books and movies and songs and therefore purely fictitious. I didn’t think people could actually feel that strongly about each other and I viewed my half sister’s dramatic display as characteristic hyperbole.

“So what do you think
he
wants?” I asked her, as a gut-wrenching sunset began to tinge the wide-open sky with pink, the famous “painters’ light” about which Lydia had spoken so evocatively and adoringly, and we turned off the highway in the direction of the former potato fields that had been transformed over a period of five years into Miles Noble’s fantasy of a country estate.

“He wants what every man wants when he’s built a house. He wants to fill it,” she said. We fell in behind a long line of cars snaking toward the driveway that would lead to the house.

“He’s been living in Hong Kong and Dubai,” she went on, her syllables rounded and carefully defined. “An international man of mystery, from the sound of it. Now he’s come back home to roost. There’s an apartment in New York too, I hear. A penthouse, all raw and ready to be designed. What he
wants
is a wife.”

I’d always admired the way Peck could speak with such authority about the unknown wishes of others. She delivered her opinions as though she’d received some divine wisdom that told her she was right, despite any evidence or logic to the contrary.

She tapped her fingers on top of the steering wheel in time to the music, the Grateful Dead’s “Eyes of the World,” from a CD I’d brought along. “I wonder what he looks like now.”

Miles Noble lived, for just a summer, in what could only be described, in Fitzgerald’s words, as
an incoherent failure of a house
. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Also the ugliest. There were small windows in strange places and a huge arched door and two turretlike structures, one at each end, giving it the feel of a mad castle, and not in a good way. As we followed the line of cars down the driveway toward a gaggle of valet parkers, we both gazed up at the house before us in awe. The front of the house was lined with purple and pink hydrangeas and far too many wood chips, a whole garden store’s worth of bright reddish things. It rose awkwardly out of its landscaped acres of lawn like an ungainly pubescent girl uncomfortable with her sudden size and lack of beauty.

“Isn’t this fantastic?” Peck asked breathlessly.

I glanced over at her, assuming she was being sarcastic. I was about to say something about how I’d never seen anything more hideous when I realized her awe at the sight of the house before us was not the same as mine. There was reverence in her eyes.

“It sure is big,” I said.

She nodded. “Forty thousand square feet, at least. Indoor and outdoor pools. The gardens are modeled after a place in Ireland.”

We stepped out of the car and a valet parker handed Peck a ticket. Then we were greeted at a long table by five or six very attractive women in tiny black dresses. Peck took my arm in excitement as she stated regally, “Pecksland Moriarty. And guest.”

We made our way behind other white-clad arrivals along a path, lined with hurricane lanterns, that led to the back of the house. “I can’t believe Miles lives here,” Peck whispered to me, still holding on to my arm. “It’s out of a movie, isn’t it?”

“
The Shining
?” I whispered back, but she was too excited to realize what I meant.

“
Everybody’s
here,” she said as we came around the corner to a vast terrace where a sea of people were already gathered.
Everybody
was obediently wearing white. And hats. Some of the people were smart and elegant. And some were hard and bored. On them, the white dresses and the dinner jackets appeared cheap. But, I couldn’t help noticing, they were, for the most part, an extraordinarily attractive group of people. So this is the Hamptons, I thought, as I allowed myself to be pulled along into the fray with my sister at my side.