The Summer We Read Gatsby (4 page)

I think my mouth gaped open like a fish’s for a few seconds as I sought air. But then I helped myself to another martini, which I definitely did not need, and said, in a flirtatious tone that was totally uncharacteristic of me, “You’re very dexterous.”

“Dexterous, huh?” He smiled, intelligent eyes crinkling. He held the other glass up in a gesture of greeting. “Are you flirting with me?”

“I never flirt.” This was true. That-Awful-Jean-Paul was hardly the flirtatious type. His idea of words as foreplay had been “I’ll pay for lunch.” Of course, he said them in French. But flirting was not something I knew how to do. I was much more inclined to make sarcastic remarks that were usually misinterpreted.

This fellow, on the other hand, was clearly used to having people flirt with him. Most women would find a guy with a smile like his irresistibly attractive. But, I told myself in the stern tone that had become a habit, there must definitely be some kind of rule—like waiting an hour after lunch to swim—about waiting at least two years after a divorce before flirting with anyone.

“Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “I figured you as quite the subtle expert.”

I found myself saying something like, “If I were inclined to flirt, which I’m not, I certainly wouldn’t opt for such an obvious choice.” As I said, I wasn’t good at it.

He wasn’t beaten down the way men in their thirties could start to look, as they gave up their youthful dreams and settled into the reality of adult expectations. Not like my ex-husband, for whom life had been a series of disappointments, all someone else’s fault. “I’m an obvious choice, am I?” he asked, a smile playing at his lips. He had the loose confidence I’d always associated with people who grow up with many siblings, and he grinned at me like he knew exactly what I was thinking.

I took a sip of the drink he’d handed me, feeling wildly out of control, the alcohol taking hold. I was nodding and grinning and probably even blushing as I realized I was speaking words that did not seem to belong to me.

“What’s so
obvious
about me?” He had a unique voice, deep and raspy like sandpaper, and I felt it in my chest. It made me want to think of things for him to say, just so I could hear what they sounded like coming out of his mouth.

Another sip of the martini. “Well, for one thing, you’re overtly charming. Clearly something of a ladies’ man. So, an obvious choice for someone inclined to flirt. If I were that kind of person.”

Suddenly there was an explosion and I jumped. “What was that?”

He pointed to a riot of color in the sky. “Fireworks.”

People stopped talking and dancing and mingling and gazed upward, childlike glee on their faces. The handsome stranger whose name I never got and I watched together, standing side by side with our faces tilted to the sky.

We spent the rest of the evening together on the terrace. I couldn’t help thinking of Jordan Baker’s line from
Gatsby
, about liking large parties for their intimacy. He was extremely funny. Humor had always been important to me. My mother was quite the wit and she always said she fell in love with my father because he made her laugh. “Find someone who can make you laugh,” she’d advised me, as though it were that simple, as though comedians were just lurking about on the street corners waiting to meet young women and dazzle them with their funny lines. Instead I somehow ended up with Jean-Paul, whose ability to make me laugh existed only when I would repeat his more outlandishly selfish words to my friends, turning them into amusing anecdotes.

I hadn’t laughed as much as usual in the past year, but that night I made up for it, cackling like a hyena at this odd, funny man whose name I never got. Later, when it should have been time to find Peck and head home, there was a commotion. I heard splashing and a familiar guffawing and I turned. Peck was dancing in the fountain. She had Miles Noble’s Nehru jacket draped around her shoulders and she was kicking up shapely legs, doing the cancan and spraying a crowd of clapping spectators with the drops of water that flew off her feet.

“That’s my sister,” I said, as it dawned on me—slowly, the way things will
dawn
, after several martinis—that this was going to be a very strange summer.

2

 

 

 

 

I
t wasn’t just the pounding head, the sour stomach, and the paper-dry mouth that greeted me in the morning. There was also the attendant shame, the worst part of any hangover. I was in the bedroom I occupied every time I’d visited my aunt, wrapped in the white popcorn bedspread, wishing I could temporarily be put into a coma so I wouldn’t have to try to unglue my eyes. I vowed never to drink again.

Lydia’s house—I’ll always think of it as Lydia’s house, although it was now half
my
house—was what is generally referred to in real-estate circles as a
teardown
, a crumbling, shingled place that listed far to one side like an aging dowager at a cocktail party that’s gone on far too long. It was redeemed by its location in Southampton, a proper seaside town of manicured meadows that was part of the string of towns that stretch along the south fork of Long Island and make up “the Hamptons.” The house was in the desirable area “south of the highway,” close to the much larger and more elegant summer homes tucked behind the hedgerows that stand sentry along wide streets leading to the ocean. It was accessorized by a sagging wraparound porch that was far too wide and high for the scale of the little place. Legend always had it that Aunt Lydia won the house playing backgammon. According to my mother, my father, who was Lydia’s younger brother, never believed that version of the tale.

But Lydia, a renowned beauty with prematurely white hair, had always preferred a more engaging story to one that was true, and in her telling she won the house on back-to-back rolls of double sixes. In her version, the man from whom she won the house—one of her many lovers, she’d always implied—disappeared into the ocean one night and was never seen again, except when he appeared in the form of the friendly ghost who was known to move things around and finish backgammon games left unattended. She’d liked the ghost story so much she’d allowed it to be included in a book entitled
Spirits of the East End
, a copy of which still sat on the coffee table in the living room.

My bedroom, which Lydia had called the “white room” to differentiate it from the room Peck had always taken, which was the “pink room,” contained a wrought-iron double bed and two pieces of white painted furniture. There was a chest of drawers and a little desk at which Lydia had suggested I would write my “opus.” My room was minimalist and spare and had windows that looked out to the scraggly, weed-infested front lawn and a crumbling tennis court. Peck’s on the other hand was wallpapered in a lavish floral and featured a canopy bed with a pink quilted spread. Hers faced the wilted garden at the back of the house.

A knock forced my heavy eyelids open. “Room service,” Peck called from the hallway. When I didn’t answer, she swung open the door to my bedroom, brandishing a Bloody Mary, complete with tall celery frond, and her dog, a sanctimonious mutt with a pug face and a big-city attitude. In one hand she held the drink. The other hand was tucked under the dog, who was frowning at me most disapprovingly.

I was the dog’s “godmother,” if such a designation can be applied to a four-legged friend, and as such, I’d been offered naming rights when she acquired the little fellow. To be funny, because I, sadly, had always been one of
those
people, too eager for a laugh, I’d suggested Trimalchio. This was after the ostentatiously nouveau riche vulgarian in
Satyricon
that F. Scott Fitzgerald had used as the inspiration for the character of Jay Gatsby. One of the suggested titles for the book was
Trimalchio in West Egg
, and once I finished
Gatsby
, Lydia had given me a copy of
Trimalchio
, the first version of the book that Fitzgerald revised into
The Great Gatsby
. I never thought Peck would actually take the name for her dog. But she loved it.

Now she sashayed—Pecksland Moriarty was born to
sashay
—into my bedroom, in a silk paisley men’s robe with a velvet collar, like she’d raided Hugh Hefner’s closet at the Playboy Mansion, and dropped Trimalchio, who was now approaching late middle age in dog years, unceremoniously onto the floor, from where he gazed up at me in jaded fashion. That dog could really work an attitude.

Peck sipped the Bloody Mary that I’d assumed was intended for me and gave me her own disapproving frown. She never had much patience for hangovers, not being especially susceptible to them, although she did fancy herself an expert in the art of the cure. “Did you know the Bloody Mary was invented at the Ritz in Paris for Hemingway when he was married to his fourth wife, Mary? She didn’t like him to drink so the bartender invented this”—she stirred the drink with the celery stalk—“the odorless cocktail. He drank it and the next day, when the bartender asked him how it went, he said, ‘Bloody Mary never smelt a thing.’ ” She took another sip. “The eleven o’clock Bloody is a time-honored tradition here at Fool’s House.”

Of course the house had a name. Apparently all the best ones do. Lydia had named hers after the Jasper Johns painting. This was a gray painting featuring items from the artist’s studio: a broom with a wooden handle hanging by a hinge, a cup dangling from a hook, a stretcher, and a towel. Fool’s House was what Johns called that place where the art came to him. Peck always referred to the house by its full name,
Fool’s House,
just as she always referred to herself as Pecksland, and to anyone named Kathy as Katherine, or Lizzie as Elizabeth. Peck prided herself on being well-mannered, often to the point of rudeness.

We were an artistic and literary family, the name of the house implied, with its whiff of the bohemian Hamptons and all the creative souls who’d sought refuge and inspiration in the romantic landscape’s vast ocean and sky and wide, pale beaches. The ramshackle little farmhouse with its wide porch was not the sort of place one would expect to find in this part of Southampton. Or not anymore. Most of the smaller mildewed places had been torn down and replaced by oversized ones. But Lydia had made Fool’s House the center of the universe for a merry band of artistic souls, none of whom, to her surprise, ever became famous.

Fool’s House was
known
, my aunt would always tell us, for its creative energy, although the people who’d supposedly been inspired by it were mostly ones nobody ever heard of. “Dick Montpelier wrote all of
Fire at Sunset
here and John Tallucci finished the last twenty chapters of
Mister Nowhere
on my porch,” Aunt Lydia used to love to tell anyone who’d listen. “Oh, and Rusty Cohen and his muse, Esme, they lived in the studio for a summer while he painted all six of his masterpieces.”

Lydia couldn’t make art, she always said, so she supported it. She viewed herself as a patroness and a collector, although her taste ran to things that were produced in her presence rather than great works of art that, on a schoolteacher’s salary, she could hardly afford to buy at auction. I was not exactly a connoisseur, and I wrestled with paints and canvas and words on my own enough to know how hard it is to get any sort of beauty out of them, but the stuff that cluttered every nook and cranny of Fool’s House was some of the ugliest art I’ve ever seen.

Every wall was covered in bad paintings, hung salon-style, three and four high, mostly abstracts or thick oily seascapes and watery sunsets with too-round balls of orange and yellow at their centers. Lydia had never been able to find a cheap poster of the Jasper Johns painting entitled
Fool’s House
, but she did hang a reproduction, now torn and peeling, of his best-known work,
Flag
, in the dining room, where a warped round table surrounded by mismatched chairs had been the site of many raucous meals.

Above the mantel in the living room, enjoying pride of place, was an abstract piece, all dabs and dribbles of brown, black, and silver paint. Neither Peck nor I had ever asked about it and Lydia herself had never brought it up. There were also many framed photographs of the sharp-cheekboned Lydia at various stages of gray with assorted friends and lovers, images of her with groups of people at the many parties she hosted over the years. There were pictures of Peck and me, school photos sent by our mothers and snapshots of us, separately, with Aunt Lydia in Paris, or at the Coliseum in Rome, and together, from the summers we’d spent at Fool’s House.

Peck handed over the Bloody Mary with ceremonial seriousness. I took a medicinal sip as my prim conscience—that petulant voice of reason—suggested that more alcohol was the last thing I needed. Trimalchio eyeballed me in his judgmental way.

“Southampton has always been known as a cure-all,” she intoned, like a tour guide. “You’re going to enjoy the health benefits of being by the sea. The ocean air will fix what ails you.”

“I have a hangover, not a disease,” I protested, taking a sip as the previous evening’s activities came back to me. I’d never even asked his name, the handsome stranger with whom I’d so uncharacteristically spent most of the night flirting and acting silly.

“Sea air has the same components as lithium,” she announced. “That’s why you feel so good at the beach.” She stared me down in a knowing fashion before continuing. “You’re ailing, Stella. Anyone can see that.”

“I just drank too much,” I said in protest, not wishing to be analyzed. I knew she was right. I’d arrived at Fool’s House in a terrible state, seized with grief but also with the sense of opportunity. I’d been simply marking time, plodding along in detached and restless fashion, when the news of Lydia’s death dealt me a jolt. I took another sip of the Bloody Mary.

“Or someone slipped me something,” I added as she watched me, waiting for me to praise the drink. “Was it Ecstasy? Ludes? A roofie cocktail?”