The Summer We Read Gatsby (33 page)

One of the Girls, Sasha, was there. I was mildly shocked to see her on her own. She had no context without Betts and Lucy and Peck and their collective opinion. It was like running into a teacher out of school. She greeted me with a shout and a warm hug and suddenly I felt that
I
had context, with a friend there of my own. She was with a date—a divorced dad with a four-year-old son who kept smearing chocolate all over himself—but he was busy keeping the boy from falling into the bonfire in his eagerness for more s’mores, so we hung out for a while and she filled me in on the backstories of the people she knew.

“He’s a pretty special fellow,” she said of Finn, her soft Indian inflection turning the words evocatively.

“So everyone keeps telling me,” I joked.

She gestured at the firelit scene with the ocean and the vast sky. “Clever idea too, giving you a taste of what could be. This is quite a sales job.”

“Don’t be silly. What would he be selling me?” Finn was on the other side of the bonfire talking to Tony, his hair thick and wild from the salty air. He caught my eye as I noticed him, and he smiled.

“All of this,” she said softly. “It’s like a dream, isn’t it?”

“Someone else’s,” I said. I knew what she meant, but I didn’t think it applied to me. “Not mine.”

At the end of the evening Tony wagged a finger at me. “Did you fall in love with me yet?”

“It’s your wife I’m in love with,” I told him as around us children were coming down from their sugar highs and the fire was getting low.

He groaned. “So
predictable
. She’s the easy one to like. I’m the acquired taste.”

“Was it a test?” I asked. “Or can I pick both of you?”

“It
was
a test,” he said, reaching into the cooler to hand me another fresh beer. “But
we
were the ones being tested.”

I took the beer and popped the cap while the parents with the younger children headed off, waving their good-byes. “So that explains why you’re all being so nice to me.”

“No. It doesn’t explain anything,” Tony said with a laugh. He’d taken a beer for himself and he clinked it against mine. “We were planning to terrorize you. We thought we’d get rid of you the easy way.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but then Finn came up behind me and Tony was pulled away by people saying good-bye. “Let’s hang out for a bit,” he whispered, once they were out of earshot. The planes of his face caught the firelight and I almost couldn’t resist reaching out and touching his smooth skin. “This is skinny-dipping weather.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, as I zipped up my sweater in response to the chill that grew more noticeable as the fire died down.

“Look how calm the ocean is,” he said, pointing. “Don’t you want to be able to cross that one off the list?”

I shook my head. “I’m not in a hurry,” I said as the breeze from the ocean picked up and it felt colder. “It’s getting arctic out here.”

As Tony and Cintra gathered their belongings and their children and headed off, Finn set about building up the fire, carefully piling several extra logs onto the coals.

“You’re very resourceful,” I said as I sat on a blanket and watched the flames quickly grow high. There was something achingly beautiful about the fragrant air, and the rhythmic sound of the ocean and the flickering firelight giving the scene a seductive glow.

“Didn’t you say I was dexterous too? Resourceful and dexterous. I must be quite a catch,” he said as he sat down next to me. We were alone on the beach now.

We chatted for a while, gazing at the fire, rather than at each other, and in no time he had me laughing so hard I could hardly breathe. I made him laugh too, sharing more stories of my peripatetic life with my mother and the summers I’d spent at Fool’s House with Lydia in the company of a wacky half sister who wasn’t sure she wanted to be related to me. I’d gotten so comfortable with him in the time we’d spent together, and I enjoyed how liberating it felt to talk freely about my family and the inconsistencies in my mother’s stories. I even shared the anecdote about my name.

“It could have been worse,” I said, repeating my mother’s line with the kind of aplomb I’d learned to copy from Peck. I was no longer the timid, sad creature who’d tiptoed up the porch steps at the beginning of July with my little wheely suitcase. I felt like something had awakened deep inside me, like a switch that had been suddenly turned on. “They could’ve played ‘
Bertha.
’ ”

Finn let out a soft laugh. “You’re funny, kid.”

“Glad you think so, Killian.”

He leaned back on his elbow and turned his head toward me. “So, what do you think? Does the ocean beckon?”

“I told you, I
don’t
skinny-dip.” I sounded like Peck again, I thought, as I made this declaration with Peck’s manner of emphasizing at least one word in every sentence.

“Just like you
don’t
flirt?” His face glowed in the firelight as he grinned up at me. “Come on, we’ll make it quick. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. One two three, in and out.” I wondered how he could evoke a thrill of excitement and a feeling of total safety at the same time. “I promise, I won’t look.”

He stood and pulled his T-shirt over his head. “Let’s go, fraidy-cat. You can do it. Face your fear.” He reached down and grabbed my hand. “I’ll be right by your side the whole time. We’ll make a run for it. A quick dunk and we’re out. But we can say we did it.”

“Suddenly I was game. “Okay, then. What are you waiting for?”

“We’ll never make it if we go slow,” he said, unzipping his jeans. “We’ve got to run and go all the way.”

“I thought you’d never done this before,” I said as I slipped off my sweater.

“Never naked,” he said. “Never with a beautiful woman.”

“You promised you wouldn’t look,” I reminded him, although I couldn’t help sneaking a glance at the very flat muscles of his stomach. His wasn’t the sort of body that comes from hours at the gym or from endless miles logged on a bicycle while wearing spandex, but it was lean and sexy.

He covered his eyes with one hand, pulling at his jeans with the other. “It’s kind of hard to get undressed like this.”

I pulled my jeans off my hips and tossed them on the sand, shivering slightly, but not from the cold. I didn’t even feel the chill in the air anymore.

He took my hand, carefully averting his eyes. “One. Two. Three.” We ran toward the ocean together, hand in hand. The icy water was a shock, but we dived in. It took my breath away at first, but once we were in, it felt wonderful. We swam a bit in the moonlight, allowing the waves to pull us along.

I wanted to feel his arms around me, to entwine our legs together. I’d never felt that way about Jean-Paul, I recalled, not even when we first met. There was always something businesslike about our arrangement and—I didn’t realize this until much later—I’d had to continually talk myself into believing it was right, even when I knew, of course I knew, it was wrong. I didn’t blame him when it all came apart, though it stung to learn he’d been unfaithful. We were simply not at all suited to each other, and I was just as much at fault for ignoring the signs. But with Finn, despite how much I’d been trying to talk myself out of him, there was something so right about him. And all I wanted him to do was throw me on the sand and kiss me.

He must have read my mind, because that was exactly what he did once we ran back up the beach to the fire and the blanket. He pressed his long body against mine and when our lips met it felt like coming home.

“I’m terrified,” he said with a smile, holding himself over me when we came up for air.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting his next words to be, but those were not them. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t be your friend, kid. I mean I can’t be
just
your friend.” His voice was gruff. “I’m in love with you, you know.”

Warmth suffused my body, despite the chilly breeze. “You are?”

“I think I’ve been in love with you since I met you,” he said.

“And that’s terrifying?”

His eyes met mine and my heart seemed to skip a beat. “It is. Because you’re going to leave in two weeks.”

I pulled him down to me to whisper into his ear. “Is that why you were so weird that night you took me for dinner at the Four Seasons?” He nodded, and I said, “You have to face your fear, fraidy-cat.”

He kissed me again and then we couldn’t stop. Time seemed to stand still and we stayed on the beach for a long time afterward. Eventually even the embers of the fire were completely cold and we got dressed and headed back to Fool’s House.

Before we even got to the stairs, he was kissing me again and his hands were all over me. We kissed all the way up the stairs to my room where, I was glad to see, I’d remembered to make the bed with its popcorn bedspread. The bed became quickly unmade as we fell on it and pulled at our clothes in another rush of passion. Afterward, our bodies fitted together like spoons under the old, soft sheet. We talked and laughed, and I thought I would never feel tired ever again, not in Finn’s company, but we did fall asleep eventually as the pink-gray light of dawn began seeping in around the curtains.

Later, Peck would tell me, and anyone else who would listen, about her weekend with Miles. “Did you know,” she would start by asking, “there’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald suite at the Ritz?” Often the person hearing her tale did not know this and she would continue. On the occasion when someone would know, she would ask the follow-up question: “Well, have you ever stayed there?”

She has yet to encounter anyone who had actually been in the suite, allowing her to describe it in lengthy detail, going on about the extravagant upholstery and the wood paneling and the fireplace. “It’s
impossibly
glamorous,” she would say, fixing her listener with a steady gaze. “And there’s a whiff of
history
in the air.”

She would pause and light a cigarette, and the listener—me—would feel as though there wasn’t any place in the world she’d rather be at that moment than there at the Ritz.

“History isn’t the only scent,” she’d continue. “The whole place smells spicy and mysteriously rich, like a perfume ad. I swear, they pump this fragrance into the air vents. And then it’s also in the body lotion and this cologne in your bathroom, acres and acres of marble.”

She’d go on about the special cocktails at the Hemingway bar until you were dying for one, and the thick peach terry-cloth robes and the pool with its spa and the club sandwiches. She would tell anyone who would listen about how if you’re a writer you can get your mail at the Ritz. “The Fitzgerald suite is where you
must
stay. It’s all red and gold, with brocade fabrics and overstuffed furniture and the most incredible high, fluffy bed you could sink into for
days
with hundreds of pillows on it. A mushy down-filled acre of silk and satin.”

Miles didn’t exactly ask her that weekend. To marry him, I mean. What he said was, “We could get married.” In the same tone, Peck told me, he might have used to say, “We could have tuna sandwiches for lunch.” Or “We should all get vaccinated.” Or “We could go to Morocco.”
Some day
.

“But I said, ‘Yes.
Some day
,’ ” she would say, neatly wrapping up her story.

17

 

 

 

 

P
eck came back from Paris with an enormous feathered hat she’d found at the flea market. “I’m afraid it may
have
fleas,” she said of the thing, which she insisted on wearing over to Hamilton’s house for our showdown with Biggsy three days later. “Or the avian flu. But isn’t it
fabulous
?”

Hamilton and Scotty certainly thought so. “It’s so risky,” Scotty decreed. “And thus,
frisky
,” Hamilton added.

We gathered Wednesday evening, the six of us—Peck, Miles, Scotty, Hamilton, Finn, and me—on the patio behind Hamilton’s house. This was the first time Finn and I had been in the presence of another human being since our night at the beach. I felt as though I’d been drugged for those three days, so distracted was I by the intensity of my feelings for him. He said he felt the same way and called in sick to the office. Afterward he said, “I didn’t lie, I
am
sick. I’m dizzy, weak, I can’t think straight. What have you done to me?”

I didn’t know that one could feel this way about another person. Romantic love had always seemed like an abstract concept to me, I realized, until these raw waves of emotion overtook me so strongly I felt like laughing and crying at the same time. I was taken by total surprise, not only by the feelings, but that Finn—Lydia’s Finn was how I thought of him—was the source of them.

We sat together in one of the enormous wicker chairs with navy cushions pulled up to a low table on Hamilton’s patio. The others all took their own seats but Finn pulled me down next to him with an arm around my shoulders, prompting Peck to comment that we should get a room. Hamilton had instructed Scotty on the proper preparation of the traditional Pimm’s Cup, and they passed around tall frosted glasses garnished with fruit.

“Are we certain it’s not still alive?” Finn asked, wrinkling his nose as he inspected Peck’s hat. “I think it’s
moving
.”

“It’s probably in horribly bad taste,” she explained in the self-deprecating manner that she adopted when she knew she was wearing something truly fabulous. “But I’d rather have bad taste than no taste any day of the week.”

“Oh, me too,” Scotty cooed. He was enamored of Peck’s outrageous fashion sense. “What does your beau think of it?”

“My beau?” she scoffed from under the mass of drooping feathers. “He
bought
it for me. And then he had to carry the thing on the plane. He almost had to buy it its own seat, didn’t you, Miles?”

Miles nodded distractedly, scrolling on his BlackBerry as he shoveled potato chips into his mouth. He spoke through a spray of crumbs. “When is that punk going to show up?”