The Summer We Read Gatsby (8 page)

“I wonder how they got the corn cakes to look like that,” Peck had mused, staring at the image in the magazine. There was something in her voice, a poignant note. She knew, didn’t she, that those freakishly grinning people toasting the model-slash-real-woman hired for the photo shoot to pose as the chef were all on the job, paid to sit around the table and raise their glasses over and over again as the light changed and the stylist angled the pasta salad just so? But she’d studied the aspirational glossy pages carefully and with yearning, as though they contained the exact formula for success.

My half sister was quite thrilled with her own social daring. She’d invited a hundred people at least, some of whom she’d never actually met. “This is how it’s done out here,” she informed me, when I’d wondered at the wisdom of inviting people who didn’t know her.

Peck said things like this with total seriousness, to the point where you would start to wonder if you weren’t actually the one who didn’t make sense. “Isn’t that a bit, well,
arriviste
?” I wondered aloud, speaking her language.

She waved away my suggestion with her cocktail, spilling some of it on her wrist. “You’ll thank me. Later, when you get invited to everything, you’ll be grateful.”

“I’m only going to be here a few weeks,” I reminded her. “I don’t need to get invited to
anything
.”

She frowned at me. “Could you be any more
boring
? Besides, I have a feeling you’re going to be here a lot longer than a few weeks.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “It was hard enough to take this much time off as it was.”

“This place grows on people.” She waved her cocktail at me. “Drink up.”

I’d been looking at the painting above the fireplace mantel, with its swirling movement and heavy layers of paint. “That one’s growing on me,” I said, gesturing toward it with the still-full drink in my hand. I had no intention of waking up with another hangover like the one I’d suffered through that morning.

If I thought Peck wouldn’t notice, however, I was wrong. “Would you please just drink the damn thing?” she grumbled.

I ignored her and gestured at the painting. “Do we have any idea who painted it?”

“Listen to you. Aunt Lydia’s body is hardly cool and already you’re trying to make a play for her stuff?”

I explained that I wasn’t making a play for it, just expressing my interest, and she put her drink down on the bar cart and pulled a chair over toward the fireplace. She stood on the chair to reach the canvas and pulled it down off the flimsy hook on which it had rested for years. She stepped down from the chair and flipped the painting over so we could look at the back. There, on the stretcher, scrawled in black marker, were the almost illegible words. She read them aloud. “ ‘For L.M. From J.P.’ ”

“Who’s J.P.?” I said.

She shrugged, gazing down at the canvas she held out in front of her with two hands. “The artist, I guess. Probably one of her friends. Or a Fool-in-Residence.”

She hung the painting back on its hook and took up her drink. “Let’s get dressed.”

I got up to my room to find Biggsy with a camera in my closet—a small walk-in crowded with Lydia’s overflow and other items I hadn’t yet gone through. “Oh, hi,” he said, as casually as if it were perfectly normal for him to be there.

“How did you get in here?” I hadn’t noticed him going up the stairs.

“I’m working on a new series,” he said, as if that explained it. He spoke earnestly, fixing his strikingly blue eyes on mine. “I hope you don’t mind. I’m shooting people’s closets. There’s an air of mystery, and also of history, to them.”

“Mystery
and
history?” I repeated.

“I’m using black-and-white film, very grainy,” he continued. “So there’s a sense of a long-buried memory, of the past, of encounters not quite remembered.”

He hadn’t moved yet, but I held the door to the closet open for him. “I have to get dressed for the party.”

“Sorry,” he said, slipping past me with his camera held high. He smelled distinctly of patchouli. “You’re very pretty, you know.”

I knew he was trying to win points with me, and it worked; the compliment distracted me from being bothered by his presence in my closet. I took a shower and got dressed for the party, sticking to jeans, because as my sister put it, I was “afraid to stick my neck out, playing the role of the foreign observer rather than participating in life.” Peck could sometimes be astute, but I wore my jeans anyway. Mostly because I hadn’t packed much besides the dress I’d already worn to the Gatsby party the night before. I wasn’t in the habit of going to parties at all, let alone on back-to-back evenings.

When I finished putting on makeup (lip gloss), I went to Peck’s room, where it looked like she’d tried on and discarded every single piece of clothing in the very extensive wardrobe she’d brought with her to Fool’s House, in three enormous vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunks, no less. Apparently she’d also poured herself a refill of the dressing drink in the process and was parading around in nothing but a mesh thong with “the twins” on full display as she held up different options for me to judge. “Come on,” she complained, when I told her they all looked fine. She fluffed out her hair and sprayed it with a product called, no kidding, Big Hair. “Offer a critique. This is what sisters do for each other. Haven’t you always wanted a sister?”

It was true, I had always wanted a sister. I’d kept a picture of the two of us from our first summer at Fool’s House, when I was nine and she was twelve, on my bedside table growing up, and went through a phase of talking about my half sister so often that my best friend at the time asked me to stop. So I did as Peck asked, offering a critique of the long orange dress and encouraging her to go with a short feathered number she swore was vintage Halston, “though the tag fell out,” and ignored her as she made a face when I refused to make more of an effort than my jeans and a gauzy top.

It did feel sisterly, our squabbling, and I found it enjoyable. I’d grown up in a quiet house, although there were often guests, and I spent a lot of time alone in my room reading. There was often music, bootleg Dead tapes and Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, but the homes—apartments, mostly—I’d shared with my mother had been peaceful and orderly. This was something I remembered from our summers at Fool’s House together, that it was fun to hang out in each other’s bedrooms, even if we weren’t getting along. In fact, in some ways I liked it even more when we were arguing, like real sisters.

“You know what I
want
?” Peck was one of those people who always asked if you knew what they wanted. She’d call me up at odd hours, when I hadn’t heard from her in months, forgetting, or ignoring, the time difference, to tell me she was craving truffles or “one of those dear little chicken pot pies.” Or she’d announce that what she wanted more than anything in life was to have an audience with the pope. Or to host a dinner where she invited only comedians, twelve of them around the table, and let them duke it out. “More than anything? I want to be on the Best-Dressed List in
Vanity Fair
magazine,” she announced, as we made our way out to the porch.

The porch was the best feature of the house, a wide, welcoming space both contemplative and gregarious that wrapped around the entire lopsided place, accessorizing it in overly grand style. One side of the porch we had draped in an enormous American flag, because that’s what Lydia had always done. At the other end was the warped wooden table where meals were taken on nice summer days. Now it was piled high with food.

Hamilton Frayn, aka Sir Ham, as Lydia liked to call him, was our first guest. He was my aunt’s best friend but anyone who referred to him that way, as simply a
friend
, was always quickly corrected. “He’s
family
,” Lydia would say. “Anyone who thinks you can’t choose your family never had a friend like Hamilton Frayn.”

Hamilton was gay and British and had spent thirty years of summers and weekends in a lavishly styled shingled house next to Lydia’s. He was a decorator—or an interior designer, as I’d been corrected—and his place was an advertisement for a Hamptons lifestyle that seemed otherwise to exist only in magazine spreads, all plump white cushions and pale green throw blankets tossed over fat chaises, books left spread-eagled on round tables set with glistening glasses of lemonade a shade or two paler than the casually draped cashmere.

Hamilton had organized Lydia’s funeral in Paris, which Peck and I had both attended, and a memorial service a few weeks later in Southampton for her many friends, but he’d been doing an installation at a client’s house in Nantucket and I hadn’t seen him since I arrived in Southampton. We gave each other a big hug and I thanked him for coming to the party.

“Darling, I go to
everything
. I’d go to the opening of an envelope,” he said. He had an awful lot of white hair combed into an elaborate sweep on either side of his face, and eyebrows so extravagant they looked like pets. He wore his customary uniform of an unsummery tweed blazer, as though he were out in the chilly English countryside after a foxhunt and not at a casual summer party on Long Island. He also carried a fan that he waved at his face all evening, despite refusing to take off the jacket, even after I suggested it twice.

“How’s your
writing
?” he asked, sounding exactly like Lydia. Hamilton was amiably ill-tempered and could be hilariously bitchy, but he always seemed to have a soft spot for Peck and me. “Your aunt always encouraged you to write.”

“She encouraged
everyone
to write,” I pointed out. This made him laugh.

“Of course she did,” he said. “But I hope you’re not letting that dissuade you. She’d be ever so disappointed.”

“You know what she used to love to say to me?” I asked him. “ ‘There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.’ That was one of her favorite bits of writing advice. But she was actually a pretty good teacher. She used to make her students read a passage from a great work and then write their own piece, using a similar technique, with a similar tone and mood, whether it was a third-person omniscient narrator, or first person. She did the same to me.”

“She told me you had talent, for whatever that’s worth,” he said. “Talent is one of those elusive concepts that is so maddening to understand. Anyway, it’s what you do with talent that counts.”

I fixed Hamilton a drink from the bar cart we had wheeled out onto the porch. We had picked four bottles of expensive aged scotch, he was pleased to see. “I’m a terrible snob about the stuff,” he said.

When we’d gone out to stock up on provisions for the evening, Peck had smacked my wallet out of my hand when I attempted to pay. “Your mussels are no good here,” Peck had said to me, as though she were the duchess of Fool’s House buying out the entire liquor store. “Mussels” was one of her oft-used euphemisms for money, a word she went out of her way not to use. “I know you’re
concerned
,” she said, implying that I was being tiresome about money again, the way I was when I tried to talk about selling Fool’s House because we couldn’t afford to keep it.

Actually, I wasn’t concerned. It was more that I was curious. Peck, who had no steady source of income, had always spent like she had stores of wealth at her disposal. She wouldn’t talk about the stuff—she carried herself as though she were embarrassed at having inherited a trust fund and thus could afford to find it rude to even discuss the topic—but she was the type who would pay more for things if she could, priding herself on her taste for the expensive.

She never actually said the word
money
if she could help it, although once, the last summer we’d spent together, I heard her saying to someone on the phone, in a weary tone, as if she were exhausted by the intricate management of a complicated inheritance, “Family and money, those are two words that should never go together.” I don’t know what she was talking about then, probably something to do with a family drama pertaining to the person on the other end of the line, but there was that subtle implication, a tiny spray of words that formed a slightly questionable impression. She prided herself mostly on her exquisite taste, and when it came to entertaining, she was quick to let me know, she was an expert.

“Maybe in Switzerland you can get away with a bottle of cheap red and a pot of
fondue
.” She pronounced
fondue
as if she’d grown up in a chalet on an Alpine ridge. “But in Southampton? There’s no point in having a party unless you’re going to do it right.”

This was her usual tone with me, peeved and impatient with my lack of either enthusiasm or understanding about the way things worked in this world into which she’d imagined she’d been born. I was the naïve newcomer and she was the native, and any time I presumed to behave otherwise—like when I suggested that nobody would ever open the bottle of Midori liqueur she felt was necessary for our “full bar”—it irked her. “After all,” she kept pointing out, “you don’t know
anyone
.”

Hamilton accepted the scotch gratefully. “Lydia would have adored this party. You girls have done a wonderful job. The Fool’s Welcome. The unofficial start to summer.”

Like most of our guests throughout the time we lived at Fool’s House that summer, he had an opinion about what we should do with the house we’d inherited: sell it, keep it, renovate it, rent it out. At the time I thought this was a very American thing to do, to offer an unsolicited and strongly felt opinion about something as personal as a home. But I’ve since come to realize that this is not an American quality so much as a New York one, and that the suggestions were meant to be helpful.

Hamilton kindly suggested we not feel guilty about selling Fool’s House. “If you can,” he added. “Price it to get out quickly. That’s exactly the way Lydia would have wanted it.”

“But that’s not good for the value of
your
home,” I pointed out. “If we sell it too cheap, just to get rid of it, won’t that make all the houses along here less valuable?”