The Summer We Read Gatsby (6 page)

“Give Stella Blue that omelet,” Peck directed him. “
That
will cure what ails her.”

“I thought your name was Cassie,” the one whose name was not Sandra said to me. She was a petite and pretty Indian woman with a soft British accent.

Finn held out the omelet pan to Peck. “You know what the thing is?” he asked her. It was obvious he was enjoying being the male at the center of all these women’s attention. “About omelets?”

He moved with an athlete’s lanky smoothness. I assumed the pan contained an omelet for me. I was about to say thank you when he flipped the pan with his wrist and the omelet flew into the air, landing with a neat smack in the sink behind him.

“Hey,” I protested. “I would’ve eaten that.”

He took up a fork and pointed into the sink with it. “It was ice cold. And here’s the thing about omelets.” He lifted the rubbery omelet from the sink and dangled it in the air from the fork in front of Peck. “You can’t reheat an omelet.”

“Are you trying to make a point about our earlier conversation?” she asked, holding back a laugh. “You’re quite the expert on Miles Noble, I must say.” She turned to the Girls, who all spoke up in agreement. “You’re quite the expert on everything, my friend.”

He shrugged in a cheerful way. “Just some friendly advice.”

“About omelets? I can’t reheat Miles Noble? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” She laughed, gesticulating with her arms. “Well, let me tell
you
something. I think you
can
reheat an omelet. You can reheat it and make it better. But I don’t have any intention of experimenting. That egg’s gone bad for me.” She paused, suddenly thoughtful. “I mean, the level of deception that went into this charade of his, it’s not to be believed. This is a guy who stayed up all night talking to me about a book he never read. Does that sound like someone who should be reheated?”

The Girls all chimed in at once—“But you invited him to your party!”—as Finn slid a fresh omelet from the other pan on the stove onto a plate and handed it to me. I put my fork into the center and a delicious ooze of thick melted cheese poured out.

“I was just being
neighborly
,” Peck explained with an earnestness that belied her words. “I’m very charitable that way. You know that about me. He said he wanted to see our house. So naturally I told him to come see it.”

“Everybody out here always wants to see people’s houses,” Lucy said. “Isn’t that right, Finn? Aren’t you always showing people your house?”

“I’m an architect,” he pointed out with a smile, as though that explained it. I wondered if he was one of those tedious creative types who always had to be right, fussing about the light fixtures on a site or rejecting ten different stones for an office lobby. My dislike for him intensified. At the same time I couldn’t help but smile almost automatically in response.

“That’s just it,” Peck exclaimed. “Miles Noble just wants to make sure his is still the biggest. I may have neglected to mention that Fool’s House could fit in his dining room. I think he heard Southampton and inheritance and came to his own conclusions. He was always a terrible
snob
.”

“You’ll be sleeping with him within the week,” Betts predicted, and the others concurred with concern.

Peck shrugged. “Did you not
see
him? Besides, he has absolutely no taste at all. He could be the tackiest man in America. And now that I think about it, there was always something vaguely
criminal
about him.” She said all this as though none of it were that bad.

The Girls murmured their dissent until Peck interrupted them to suggest an outing to the beach. “Let’s slather ourselves with Bain de Soleil and get savage tans. My skin is the color of tofu.”

I pointed out that we’d planned to spend the day getting organized. I’d already started going through Lydia’s things and I wanted Peck to join me so we could make some decisions. We’d also talked about finding the code to the safe, hiring a real estate broker, and getting ready for that evening’s party, although the only item on that list in which Peck was interested was the party. She’d managed to wriggle away from any discussion of selling the house or even deciding what to do with all the stuff in it. Now she turned to the rest of them. “
See
what I’m dealing with?” She wagged her finger between us. “It is absolutely perplexing to me that we could possibly be related.”

“I’m as
perplexed
as you are,” I said with a smile.

“We should do a DNA test,” she continued. It was not the first time she’d brought up the subject. “I don’t see how the same father could produce two such different daughters. How do we know your mother didn’t meet some other hippies at one of those Grateful Dead shows? Maybe your real father is still out there, playing hacky sack at a Phish concert, lamenting the day Jerry died.” She laughed at herself. I’d heard this from her before and didn’t take it seriously.

“Let’s roll,” she said to the Girls. “The ocean beckons. Let’s buy surfboards.”

“Call a locksmith about the safe,” Lucy suggested as she headed for the door. She worked in fashion and was also apparently a genius at figuring things out, according to Peck. “Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do? Open locks?”

“There must be a code somewhere,” said Betts, helping herself to another cupcake for the road.

“What year was
Fool’s House
painted?” Finn asked me. “I mean the Jasper Johns.” The one whose name I suddenly recalled was Sasha stopped in the doorway to coo approvingly at him. “Oooh. Good idea.”

And then they were gone, out to the garage to gather the rusty beach chairs and striped umbrella for the beach. Finn and I were alone in the kitchen. I finished the omelet as he watched me, wearing the knowing smile I remembered from the previous night. Now it irritated me, smacking as it did of superiority.

“What happened to the beard?” I asked him.

He leaned across the counter toward me, his skin a rich, golden tan that caught the light nicely. “Beard?” he repeated, laughing. “What beard?”

“I remembered you differently.” I knew I sounded rude, but it was true. I’d filed him away in my brain as an avuncular older friend of my gray-haired aunt, not this young, good-looking guy with the sexy voice who was annoyingly confident. “You kept calling me kid, like you were ancient. And you had that
beard
.”

“I’ve never had a beard,” he insisted as he turned to rinse the pan in the sink. Fool’s House did not come equipped with such modern conveniences as a dishwasher. “You must be thinking of another guy.”

He’d had a beard, I swear. That was how I’d always told it, in my head. “It’s been seven years,” I pointed out grumpily. “Maybe you did have a beard, and you just don’t remember. Maybe you’re having a memory lapse?”

“Because I’m so
ancient
?” He laughed. “I remember everything about that summer.” And he stopped washing the pan and turned around.

“You could’ve introduced yourself,” I continued, wishing I didn’t sound quite so petulant. He seemed to bring out the worst in me. “You didn’t have to let me embarrass myself. I don’t normally . . .” Here my voice trailed off.

“Don’t normally what?” he interjected. “Guzzle martinis and throw yourself at strange men?”

“I certainly didn’t throw myself anywhere,” I protested. “And I was actually looking for you,” I tried to explain, unintentionally making it sound like a romantic statement. The man flustered me. “I thought you might know something about Lydia’s safe. And since that’s apparently why you’re here, why don’t you make yourself useful?”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. But she never mentioned it to me. I don’t even know where it is. Will you show me?”

We were headed upstairs to the safe when Peck bounded back into the kitchen like one of Charlie’s Angels, two hands up in the air, holding what looked, surprisingly, like a gun.

“Look what I found,” she cried out, pointing at us a dainty pearl-handled revolver, the kind generally thought of as a ladies’ gun, at least in movies and television shows. It was the sort of prop an elegant female spy might keep tucked into an evening clutch, but still, I imagined, it could get the job done.

“Is that real?” I asked, slightly nervous. Peck was not someone I wanted to see with a gun in hand. “Where did you find it?”

“That was Lydia’s?” Finn looked surprised. “You need a license to keep a gun.”

She blew on the end of it and posed for us. “I always wondered what it felt like to hold one of these things. It’s so light. Hard to imagine it could do any damage at all.”

“Where was it?” Finn asked her.

“I’m not so sure I should tell you,” she said coyly. I shot her a look. “I was looking for the beach towels.”

Finn reached for it. “It’s not loaded, is it? I don’t see Lydia keeping a loaded gun sitting around.”

Peck pointed the gun at the screen door to the back porch. “How do I check?” She was about to pull the trigger—“I bet it
is
loaded”—when a slouching figure appeared through the mesh.

The visitor was the inhabitant of the studio above the garage, the last in a long line of creative people Lydia called the Fool-in-Residence. They would live—as Finn Killian had done the summer we met him—rent-free, for a period of time that was usually no longer than three or maybe four months, in exchange for what Lydia called “creating and maintaining an artistic environment.” Finn had actually moved in as a friend of the family when the artist who was supposed to come that summer had landed in a prison in Thailand.

The current fellow went by the name of Biggsy. “Biggsy what?” we’d asked, naturally.

“Just Biggsy.” He drove a motorcycle and had moved in at the beginning of the previous September, when, according to Lydia, the prior occupant of the studio, a photographer whose oeuvre consisted entirely of black-and-white self-portraits (“Remarkable hubris,” she’d written in one of her letters), had moved out. Lydia had mentioned there was someone new, but nothing more. Peck and I had both assumed, if we’d given it any thought at all, that he’d moved out, as they all had, at some point during the desolate cold months when Fool’s House was practically unlivable. There was no instruction in Lydia’s will as to how we should handle such a person upon her death, and we were shocked to find him at the house when we arrived.

He was astonishingly good-looking, with the pronounced cheekbones and clear skin of those boys in the Abercrombie ads. He had very light skin that looked almost luminescent and his hair was the kind of streaky blond women spend hours at the salon trying to achieve. He was always wearing some sort of costume. That morning, it was a top hat and a seersucker suit, sized for a boy, so the ankle-length pants sat high over laced-up boots. His wrists were exposed by the too-short sleeves on the jacket, and the shirt underneath was buttoned tightly around his neck, although he wore no tie. His hair under the hat was disheveled, but looked like he’d used a hair product to get it that way.

Just Biggsy had shown absolutely no inclination to move out. When we arrived he’d greeted us with rum punches and hot hand towels and then helped us with our bags. Later he went to the grocery store, mowed the lawn, and mopped the kitchen floor. He had been careful, in the early stages of our acquaintance, to ingratiate himself with Peck and me, and after a few days he simply seemed to belong there. He was smart enough to know exactly how to do so, presenting himself as loving custodian to Lydia Moriarty’s legacy and as all-purpose household help.

“He’s like a
butler
,” Peck had declared giddily. “Only free.”

“Knock knock,” he muttered now, as though he could hardly summon the strength to speak or actually lift his hand to knock. He slumped against the doorframe, looking ill as Peck still pointed the gun in his direction. “Don’t shoot me. Please.”

Trimalchio scampered over to greet him, uncharacteristically spry. “Dude.” The Fool-in-Residence reached down to pet the dog weakly, as though he couldn’t stand straight.

“Come in, come in,” Peck and I said at the same time. “What’s wrong?”

Peck was still pointing the gun in his direction as she waved him in.

“Is that thing loaded?” Biggsy asked. His eyeballs danced in his sockets and he looked alarmingly sick.

“Of course it is,” she said. “So you, young man, had better behave.”

Biggsy swung the screen door wide and stumbled into the kitchen, clutching his stomach. “I don’t feel so good.”

I motioned for him to sit on one of the stools at the counter, but he shook his head—too ill to sit. He was hunched over with both arms wrapped around his stomach, and he paused before us. Peck and I both froze as Biggsy sank to his knees on the floor, still clutching his middle. I was surprised to see Finn roll his eyes, completely unsympathetic to the young artist who appeared to be about to throw up.

“I’m going to—”

I was concerned, assuming he was a salmonella victim or that there was some terrible stomach flu going around. Peck was more of an alarmist, screaming, “Stella! Do something.”

And then with a loud groan he threw up. A puddle of beige-and-pink chunky vomit splattered the floor.

Peck put the gun on the counter and pulled out her cell phone. “I’m calling 911.”

Biggsy rolled over onto his side and held up a hand. “Wait.” He lolled on one shoulder, looking down at the puddle of puke he’d deposited on our floor. “I feel better now.” Peck clicked the phone shut. “I’m so sorry,” he said, running one hand through his disheveled hair. “So sorry. I made such a mess. I’ll clean it up.”

We were all three staring down at him as he flashed us an insouciant grin and pulled a fork from the chest pocket of his jacket. He propped himself up on one elbow and held up the fork as we watched, completely bewildered. Then he lowered the fork to the pile of vomit on the floor, scooped up a big bite of it, and shoveled it into his mouth.

Peck and I exploded in disgust. “What the hell?”