The Summer We Read Gatsby (9 page)

“Darling, don’t you worry about me. You couldn’t buy a hamburger at the 21 Club for what I spent on my place when I bought it. It was the
seventies
.” He grinned, as though remembering a particularly wild decade. “I have a broker for you. Laurie Poplin. She’s good. A little tall, if you know what I mean, but she can sell houses.”

“Tall?” I repeated.

“Tall women are always so keen on making one aware of their height, no?”

I nodded, and then told him we still hadn’t been able to open the safe. That morning, with Finn, we’d tried all different dates pertaining to Jasper Johns’s paintings but we hadn’t been able to open the door. I also went through more of Lydia’s papers on the cluttered desk but hadn’t been able to find anything having to do with the safe, which remained firmly closed.

“I don’t know why she had a safe. She never even locked her doors.” He rattled the ice cubes in his drink and his eyes clouded, as though he were remembering a specific moment with Lydia. After a pause, he added, “What would she have kept in there?”

“Jewelry?” I guessed.

He shook his head. “You saw the stuff lying all over the house. All costume, the bigger and more fun the better. She wasn’t the diamonds and emeralds type, was she?”

“What do you think she meant when she said she wanted us to find a thing of utmost value?”

Hamilton took an appreciative sip of his drink and said, “The thing she wanted you to find and the contents of the safe may not be the same. What she
valued
were not material things, remember?”

Peck had been fussing with the food and she came over to wrap her arms around Hamilton. “Thank God you’re here,” she said to him. “My sister is driving me
mad
.”

“Oh dear,” he said, raising his elaborate eyebrows comically in my direction.

“She’s already divvying everything up,” Peck complained. “Wants to just clear it all out, sell the house, and go on back where she came from, as if this place never even existed.”

“That’s really not true,” I protested. “I’m just trying to do what Lydia told us to in her will.”

Hamilton glanced from one to the other of us. “At least there are two of your father’s paintings. One for each of you.”

He was right. Two of the paintings hanging in the hallway had been painted by my father. They were both abstract landscapes, Lydia had explained to us the first time Peck and I stayed with her, although it was hard for either of us to see anything resembling the dunes and sky that Lydia insisted were miraculously conveyed in the murky colors. My mother had always called my father a genius. “Your father, the brilliant artist,” she would say, when she spoke about him, which was rare. It was my introduction to sarcasm, but it wasn’t until many years later, when sarcasm became my native tongue, that I recognized it. At the time I read into the resentment in her tone—“the brilliant artist”—her desire to have kept hold of him, rather than any commentary on his actual output. I thought she was alluding to the time and attention he’d put into his work, rather than into their short-lived marriage.

She’d kept several of my father’s paintings, large, murky abstracts that moved with us from Rome to Belgium and then to Switzerland. I hung them in the tiny apartment I shared with Jean-Paul after she died, and then in the tinier one I moved into when our marriage reached its inevitable end. I’d never had much of an opinion about whether they were “good” or not. They were art and they were my dad’s and they had sentimental value, if nothing else.

And even though I would go on to speak fluent sarcasm and therefore should have understood my mother perfectly well, I’d always continued to believe my father had at least some talent. He did sell some of his paintings. There had been a gallery in SoHo that represented him and I remember seeing a picture of my father and my much younger mother at an opening.

Aunt Lydia, on the other hand, infused no irony into the word
brilliant
when applied to her brother. She had a fondness for such terms as
masterpiece
,
stunning
, or even
genius
. When she used the same words as my mother to refer to him—“your father, the brilliant artist”—she meant them literally. But the two paintings in the hallway were not any better than the ones I had at home.

Peck didn’t have any of his paintings. “You can keep them both, if you like,” I said to her now.

She made a face. “I think they should stay right here at Fool’s House, where they belong,” she said, giving Hamilton a pointed look. “Anyway, Mum always told me our father was never a good artist. What he had was charisma. Which apparently I inherited in spades.” She patted me on the shoulder, indicating her sympathy that I, unfortunately, had not inherited any such qualities.

As the early guests made their way up to the porch, I was distracted by the sight of a figure moving slowly across the driveway from the garage. From my perspective it resembled an old-time traveling peddler, laden with items of odd, protruding shapes for sale. As he drew closer, though, I could see that it was Biggsy, with camera, lights, and cables draped over his shoulder, like a one-man Scorsese film crew, looking to set up a shot. He wore another variation of the shrunken suit, this one in a vivid shade of crushed purple velvet, had tied a floppy silk bow at his neck, and wore his magician’s hat at a jaunty angle. None of the other guests seemed at all fazed at the elaborately dressed person in their midst. In fact, they hardly seemed to notice him, which struck me as very blasé.

Only Hamilton had a comment about the costumed figure. “He’s still here, is he?” He pointed. “I thought he moved out over the winter.”

I noted the shift in his tone. “Biggsy? There doesn’t seem to be any point in forcing him to move out now when he’s going to have go as soon as we sell the place anyway.”

“I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” Hamilton said, as we watched the young artist set up his equipment. “I always told Lydia that. Though I do so enjoy the sight of a handsome chap dressed for a party.”

“Why wouldn’t you trust him?” I was surprised. Peck and I had both become somewhat enamored of the eager young artist in the four days we’d been at Fool’s House, or at least enamored of the idea of him. And he’d been so helpful.

Hamilton looked alarmed at the question. “Oh darling. Gone soft on the fellow already, have you?”

“He’s been cooking and cleaning since we got here,” I explained. “He mows the lawn, he chops the lemons, he helps with the laundry. Oh, and he pretends to throw up. Then he eats it. Which I hear is one of Lydia’s favorites.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that performance.” Hamilton shrugged, his eyebrows dancing up and down.

Peck was standing right near Biggsy, as though she were the director and he the cameraman, and I went over to see what was going on. “What’s he doing?” I asked her as the porch began to fill with chattering people, with more filing up the driveway in color-fully dressed packs, but none of them seemed at all bothered by Biggsy’s camerawork.

“I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t care. He says it’s art.”

She was puzzled by my lack of a cocktail in hand and immediately set about rectifying the situation by walking over to the bar cart and pouring me a Southside. “I’ve just had a text from him.”

“Who?” I asked, still watching Biggsy.

She paused, with a cigarette halfway to her lips, incredulous. “Barack Obama.” She lit the American Spirit and blew organic smoke at me in a perfect ring. “Who do you think? Miles Noble. Have you not been listening to a word I’ve said?”

I wouldn’t have been entirely shocked to learn she
had
extended an invitation to the presidential hopeful. She’d invited several high-profile people—social figures and a celebrity whom she’d spotted at the Golden Pear—in the hopes that they would come. And some of them had come, I was surprised to note. The porch was now full of people, with more gathered in clumps on the lawn, where we’d set votive candles on the tables Lydia kept in the garage just for parties.

In the mix—Peck prided herself on her mix—were beautiful pencil-thin women, like the Girls, as glossy and groomed as movie stars at awards shows, and homely ones in elaborate summer outfits who looked as if they’d been forced to develop their personalities. There were the sad young men, of course, and lots of good-looking ones and flamboyant gay ones wearing summer sweaters in sorbet colors. There were a few hipsters, artistic types in un-Southampton black leather, and one or two stodgy older women in very Southampton pearl chokers. There were Europeans with their cigarettes and their accents and their combination of disdain and awe for American summer traditions. There were writers and artists, and a couple of Russians. A movie star made an appearance. Someone brought a hip-hop mogul. There were chignons and dreadlocks and a particular kind of blonde that seemed to exist only here in Southampton.

It was quite a mix. What they all had in common, though, was that they all appeared to adore Peck. She was clever and witty, playing the role of the eccentric hostess—madcap heiress coming through, folks, pay attention—as though she’d inherited it from Lydia along with the house. The ramshackle old porch was soon stuffed to the roof with people laughing raucously and dancing. They seemed unabashedly unafraid to look silly, wiggling their hips and hopping up and down to the thumping beat of a song that exhorted all of us to
Be the love generation, come on, come on, be the love generation.
This invitation—
We got to love, yeah, we got to love
—seemed to be all the encouragement some of our guests needed to throw their arms wildly in the air and push up, raising the roof.

“I’ve arrived,” Peck kept telling people. And “
Je suis arrivée
,” because she was one of those women who insisted on “using” their French. (Never mind that her French consisted of about fourteen words, including the ability to order “
pommes frites
” at the McDonald’s along the Long Island Expressway, much to the bewilderment of the pimpled young fellow attempting to help us for his minimum wage.)

“He said he wasn’t sure he was going to make it,” Peck said, of another text from Miles. “And of course I couldn’t care less. I’ve got that Hamptons high.”

“I thought nobody calls it that,” I pointed out, as an ominous-looking black Escalade sped down the short driveway, spraying gravel. It had dark tinted windows and flashy tires and the license plate said MAN1.

“It’s my drug lord.” Peck threw her hands up in the air as if to say, Can this get any
better
?

And then there he was, stepping out of the backseat carefully, as though expecting to fight off the paparazzi. He had an unfortunate nose, through which he spoke. “Cute place,” he said as Peck glided over to him with a queenly air, giving the impression she’d half forgotten she’d invited him, but would draw on her innate good manners to greet him as warmly as she would any guest.

“Welcome to Fool’s House,” she said, with just a hint of frost to her smile.

I could see this was exactly the right note to strike with someone like Miles Noble. Peck seemed to know this instinctively, the way she would always know exactly what fork to use and when to ask for a favor. He appeared slightly cowed, as though she really had descended from a long line of artistic aristocrats, as she kissed him on the cheek as casually as she had all her other guests and offered him a drink.

I was admiring the way Peck easily pulled Miles through the crowd when Finn Killian appeared before me. “Hey, kid,” he said, and instantly I felt as jittery and alert as if I’d had four espressos. I’d never met anyone to whom I had such a physical response and I didn’t like it, that intense butterflies-in-the-gut feeling of nerves. Had I ever felt that way about Jean-Paul?

“I brought you something,” he said, handing me an envelope. “My mother let me take this for you. It was in an album of hers.”

I opened the envelope to find a crinkled photograph that seemed, from the way Lydia looked and the way she was dressed, to have been taken in the eighties. It was an image of a younger and very beautiful Lydia standing in front of the fireplace in the living room at Fool’s House, arm in arm with a woman I didn’t recognize. She had short brown hair brushed back off her forehead and a broad smile. The two of them looked like they’d just been laughing and had composed themselves briefly for the photo. “That’s my mom,” Finn said, pointing at her. “Did you ever meet her? She was at the funeral in Paris.”

Those few days had been a blur of tears and meeting people, hundreds of people, all of whom claimed to have been good friends of Lydia’s, and I stared at the woman in the photo, wondering if I could have met her. She looked fun and sporty and exactly the sort of woman to have given birth to five boys, several of whom, I would learn, became gifted college athletes.

“I was sorry I couldn’t be there,” he said. “I was in Asia on a disastrous site visit. But I went to the memorial service here.”

“And I was sorry I couldn’t be at that one,” I told him, still gazing at the kind woman who grinned up at me from the photo with her arm wound tightly around Lydia’s. “I took three days off when I went to the funeral. And then I’d already asked my boss about taking this month to come here, so I couldn’t exactly come twice.”

He too was looking down at the picture of the two smiling women in my hand. “How
did
you manage to take a whole month off?”

I gave a little laugh, recalling the face my boss, Guy, a persnickety Belgian editor, had made when I asked him about finally using some of the eighteen weeks of vacation I’d earned since I started working at the magazine. Until Aunt Lydia’s funeral, I’d only taken three days in the entire seven years I’d worked there, and that had been for my honeymoon. I told Finn about him and the month’s leave he’d begrudgingly granted me when I promised to send him amusing anecdotes about the place he’d never visited called “ze Hamptons.” “I suppose next you’ll be wanting to write a book,” he’d complained. “Like ze rest of my staff.”