The Summer We Read Gatsby (5 page)

Peck grinned, passing me two Tylenol she’d been holding in her other hand. She had a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her robe and she pulled it out, lighting one of her American Spirits with a silver lighter. “So,” she said, blowing smoke directly at me. For someone who was obsessed with manners, she was cavalier about cigarette smoke and old-fashioned in her view of smoking as a glamorous pastime. “There’s a bit of a situation.”

Trimalchio gave me a pissy look, as if he didn’t think I fully understood the severity of what Peck was saying to me. We have a situation, you hear? A
situation
.

“What now?” I asked, rubbing my still-throbbing temples.

“You really were
overserved
, weren’t you?” Her opinion of me seemed to have been raised thirty notches by my louche behavior of the previous night. I murmured my assent as she continued.

“The
situation
is this.” She spoke as if the words had been scripted for her. In italics. Life for Peck was not a dress rehearsal. “He. Never. READ. It.” She paused, waiting for my reaction.

“Never read what?”

Peck rolled her eyes at my obtuseness. “
Gatsby
,” she said, one hand on her hip. “Miles Noble never fucking read it. Didn’t even know Gatsby dies at the end.” She stared down at me as if this were somehow my fault before explaining.

Apparently the Gatsby theme had been concocted by a party planner with an unlimited budget and little guidance from a single male host with a new house he wanted to show off. The event coordinators hired to pull off the extravaganza had invited everyone on Miles Noble’s contact list as well as adding a few names of their own to yield the list of the five-hundred-something people who had ended up at his house that night. “He didn’t even know I was going to be there,” Peck said now. “I shocked the pants off him. And he didn’t remember giving me the book.” She seemed almost amused rather than saddened or offended by this unexpected revelation that her preconceptions of the evening had been so off base.

“How could he not remember?” I asked.

“Because, Stella,” she said, gesturing with her cigarette. “He’s an
idiot
.” She paused. “Not only that, I’m afraid he’s got horrible
taste
.”

“You said the house was fantastic,” I reminded her.

She shook her head and then presented a revised version of the prior evening. “God, no. I never would have said that. The man is downright vulgar. I mean, a monogrammed pool? Could we be any tackier?”

“I thought you liked it.” I knew there was no point in even saying it, though. Peck now believed her sensitive taste buds had been offended and she would not acknowledge that she’d initially been impressed with Miles Noble’s obviously lavish spending.

“The thing I can’t figure out,” she went on, “is how, and more importantly
why
, he could spend all that time with me back then talking about this damn book.”

I nodded. I felt a pang of sadness for her, recalling that summer we spent together right after they broke up, when there’d been so many tears that the pages of her paperback stiffened. Even if some of them were crocodile tears, she’d experienced pain. “I’m sorry, Peck,” I said, handing her the Bloody Mary.

“Don’t be,” she said, after a long sip. “Let it be a life lesson. We never know how big a role we play in someone else’s drama.” She paused, allowing her words to hang in the air like an edict. “Here I had built up this whole story about the two of us and our great love, and somehow I believed his version of the story would be the same. But, of course, that’s not how life works.”

“He must have been happy to see you,” I said.

She shrugged. “I guess he was. He kept saying, ‘You look fantastic. ’ Over and over again. And, of course, I couldn’t say, ‘So do you.’ So I asked him to show me around. He has a lot of art. A Jackson Pollock, a Warhol, an Ed Ruscha, stuff like that. No Jasper Johns, though. I told him about Lydia and how she came up with the name for Fool’s House. He was very interested in all that. Especially her
collection
. Said he wanted to come see
my
house. So I invited him to the party.” I remembered through my haze that we were to host our first party of the summer that very night.

Lydia had always held a party when she arrived in Southampton. (The first party of the summer was called the Fool’s Welcome, while the last one would be, for obvious reasons, the Fool’s Farewell.) On this, her will was more than clear: Lydia wanted us to spend at least one summer month living together in the house while we settled her estate and sold the house, and she fully expected us to continue all the traditions during this time.

Aunt Lydia had died in Paris. This was a detail in the story of her death she would have enjoyed, that it happened in her favorite city. Paris had been Lydia’s “spiritual home” and a constant conversational reference point. If something was expensive, for example, “you could spend a week in Paris for less,” and if she wanted to describe something she didn’t like, it was, “Well, it’s not Paris in the spring, that’s all I can say.” As sad as I was that this dear, funny woman was gone, I was happy to know she would have appreciated the way her story had ended. She died in an out-of-the-way tea shop on the Left Bank she always said was worth the detour. And I’m sure it was, unless you were Lydia and you keeled over at your table while finishing a pot of Darjeeling and were pronounced dead at the scene. Or
morte
at the scene. I’m not sure it was worth that much of a detour, although she’d always said the napoleon there was unparalleled. I knew she would have said she left this world as she lived in it, enjoying every single second as much as she could.

Her will had been crafted in the same elaborate language she’d used in the letters I’d saved all my life. Lydia liked flowery words. She wrote that she “bequeathed” her house and all its contents to Peck and me, her “beloved” nieces. She was quite specific in her direction that we spend a month in Southampton together, “should the timing of my passing allow for a summer vacation,” while we prepared to sell the house and that we use the proceeds from the sale to check off items on what she called “Lydia’s list.”

Lydia’s list was a roster of things she wanted us to do while we were still young enough to enjoy them: travel to every continent, have an affair with a man who spoke no English, read the classics, play backgammon for money, skinny-dip in the ocean, that sort of thing. Very
Bucket List
, but hers had been composed in 1999, when she’d had a cancer scare, and mostly included things she herself had already done.

In her will, which had not been changed since 1999, she also expressed her “fervent desire” that Peck and I seek a “thing of utmost value” from within this cherished place she was leaving us. She gave no clues as to what this
thing
might be. We’d never discussed the will with her, although over the years she’d occasionally mention that she would be leaving the house to us. She didn’t own her apartment in New York, so this was her only real estate. We’d never had any conversations with her about anything valuable that she might have owned, nor was there anything in her letters about a piece of jewelry, perhaps, or one of the many paintings covering the walls of her house, that might be considered a thing of value. There was only a safe.

“A goddamned locked safe,” as Peck put it. The safe was old and squat, an industrial-looking thing tucked into a corner of her closet, behind masses of mothball-and-lavender-scented clothes. There was the traditional dial at the front and a large wheel that would turn to open the door only with the correct combination of numbers. Simple enough. Except we didn’t have the code. There’d been no mention of a combination to the safe in the will, or any indication of what it might contain, other than, possibly, “a thing of utmost value,” and the lawyers didn’t know anything about it, least of all how to get it open. In our first three days at the house we had not come up with any combination of numbers that might have opened it. We tried the obvious ones—her birth date, the date she bought the house—but the safe remained obstinately locked.

There were, besides the safe, paintings and books and papers and collections of things—an entire lifetime’s worth of things—to figure out, divide up, give away, or sell. We couldn’t agree on any of it, partly because we were total and utter opposites and didn’t, by nature, agree on anything, and partly because we did not see eye to eye on what to do with the house itself.

The one thing we could agree on, at this stage, was that the Fool’s Welcome had to go on, and we’d planned it for that evening, our first Saturday night in the house.

“Is he coming?” I asked Peck. I wasn’t surprised to hear that she’d invited Miles Noble to the party. She’d invited everyone she knew and many she didn’t know. She was the kind of person who made anywhere she was seem like the only place to be, and she made an invitation to the Fool’s Welcome sound like a most desirable summons.

“Of course he is,” she said, irritable that I even had to ask. “
Everyone’s
coming.”

From downstairs, suddenly, there was laughter and the clanging of pots and pans. “What’s going on down there?”

“The Girls are here for breakfast.” Peck always referred to all her friends as the Girls. They were always the Girls and they always only had one collective opinion. As in “The Girls say we should do everything we can to keep Fool’s House.” Or “The Girls think there’s a locksmith in town who can crack safes.” The Girls were all generally, and surprisingly, single, although they were all remarkably attractive and effervescent, and intensely groomed, with shiny, well-cut hair, manicured nails and toes, and interesting jobs in creative fields, particularly fashion. Only Peck didn’t have a proper job, since she was the actor in the group and not expected to have full-time employment.

“Finn Killian’s cooking omelets,” Peck added, as she stood and extended a hand to help me out of bed.

“Finn Killian’s here?” I suddenly remembered Lydia mentioning Finn and his omelets in one of her letters. “Why is he making omelets?”

“He’s
famous
for his omelets,” she announced, somewhat irritably, as if this were a detail one was expected to know. “He used to make them for Lydia all the time.”

“He came over here to make us breakfast? I thought you said he was going to be at the party last night.”

She made a face. “He
was
there last night. Didn’t you see him? He came over this morning to help with the safe. But then the Girls remembered about the omelets and pressed him into service.” Peck sucked down the rest of the Bloody Mary as she headed for the door in a rustle of silk. “You might want to think about a
shower
. You look like you’ve been on a bender.”

Ten minutes later I came down the stairs, looking, I’m fairly certain, like a drowned mole, all wet hair and pasty skin and red-rimmed eyes, to find the tiny kitchen full of people who all seemed to be talking at once. Peck, Finn, and several of the Girls—Lucy, one named Elizabeth everyone except Peck called Betts, and another one whose name I kept thinking was Sandra—were all offering their opinions on how to get the safe open.

When I paused in the doorway, they all stopped and stared.

Finn Killian had his back to me, at the stove. When the loud talking ceased, he turned and I caught my breath. Wait.
This
was Finn Killian? It was the good-looking guy with the big grin from the night before. How was that possible? I remembered him as old and kind of ornery. Misanthropic, that was the word that always came to mind. But surely I would have remembered those caramel eyes and that voice. And where was the beard?

His hair was wet and he had an omelet pan in one hand. He smiled at me as though we were the only ones in the room. “You didn’t recognize me, did you?” he said, in a knowing, teasingly arrogant way. Instantly I hated him. He’d obviously enjoyed keeping me in the dark all evening about his identity when it was clear I had not remembered him. Cut me some slack, I wanted to say, it had been seven years. And that was the year my mother had died, when I’d been blind with grief. But I didn’t say anything. How could I hate someone I found so physically attractive? It was infuriatingly confusing.

It was also annoying that he appeared so crisp and refreshed, as though he’d slept ten hours and then already gone for both a jog and a dip in the ocean, which was probably the case. He was one of those people who always looked, and smelled, like he’d just gotten out of the shower.

“How do you
feel
?” he asked in a tone that indicated that he knew exactly how awful I was feeling and that he found it totally amusing. God, he was arrogant. I remembered now why I didn’t like him that first summer we met.

“She needs to go to the Sip ’n Soda for a cheeseburger and a lime rickey,” Peck said to him. “That’s how she feels. And the onion rings. Best hangover cure there is.”

“No, no. Sweat it out,” one of the Girls, the tall one named Lucy, suggested. “A four-mile run. That’ll cure you.”

The sporty one called Betts shook her head. “The hair of the dog that bit you. That’s the only solution.”

Trimalchio let out a huffy little noise as though he found the talk of dog hair offensive. Peck opened a bakery box. She insisted on keeping a kitchen well-stocked with cupcakes. Cupcakes were what she considered
staples
. “Here’s a hangover cure for you. A sugar rush.” They all laughed as if this was very funny.

The kitchen at Fool’s House had not been renovated. Ever. It still had a fat retro refrigerator and enamel cabinets that had probably been installed in the forties, before Lydia acquired the place. It was a sunny, cheerful space, however, despite the dingy linoleum floor, and that morning it was filled with light. Light and noise. They were
loud
, this bunch.

Finn poured milk into a cup of coffee and slid it toward me. I could hardly look at him. “Thanks,” I said. It came out as a whisper.