Danielle Ganek

by The Summer We Read Gatsby (v5)

  “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?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  That’s when he burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he started to choke on what was in his mouth. “Dudes,” he managed to squeak out, sitting up and doubling over in spasms of hysterical guffaws. “You shoulda seen your faces.”

  At first we didn’t know how to react. We both just stood there, frozen, as he laughed at us. He took a deep breath and was able to contain himself enough to speak. “That was one of Lydia’s favorites.”

  “You just made yourself throw up?” I stared down at the very believable vomit on our floor. “And then ate it? Are you crazy?”

  “Literally? I almost threw up myself,” Peck exclaimed. I could hear her already turning this into an anecdote, shaping the story in her mind in order to repeat it.

  Finn looked unimpressed, as if he’d seen the vomit trick before, while he rinsed out the bowl he’d used for the eggs. Biggsy pulled aside his jacket and shirt to reveal what looked like a hot water bottle with a tube that he’d snaked up through the top of his shirt. “Cream of mushroom soup.” He sat back on his heels and nodded, a proud grin lighting up his face. “Among other things.”

  Trimalchio nuzzled up next to him, licking his face.

  “Trimalchio likes you, Fool,” Peck said to him. She seemed to have made a decision about the young artist. She always had a weakness for a pretty face. “And he doesn’t like anyone.”

  The dog looked up at her in agreement. True, not anyone, his expression indicated.

  “He does like soup, though,” I said, watching Trimalchio move on to the mess on the floor, lapping at it eagerly.

  “Let’s go, kid,” Finn said to me. “Show me the safe.”

  “Safe?” Biggsy glanced over at him. “What safe?”

  As Finn followed me up the stairs I could hear Peck telling the Fool-in-Residence about Aunt Lydia and the wording of the will, in which she spoke of finding a thing of utmost value. It occurred to me that it was bad form to talk about this with too many people. But it was only a brief flash of a thought, surprise that my half sister with her obsession with manners would speak so loosely about something that should be kept private, and then it was gone.

  3

  That night, as was tradition, we held the Fool’s Welcome. Our first party on the porch started as a summer vacation does, giddily hopeful. The early part of the evening, with its fragrant, darkening air, held such expectation, like the beginning of summer: this is going to be fun.

  First, there were dressing drinks. “It’s important to mark these moments in life,” Peck said as I joined her in the living room, where a brass bar cart had occupied its spot in the corner since Lydia had moved in to Fool’s House. For a few seconds I wondered what Lydia would be wearing for the party that evening, before I remembered in a rush of emotion that stung my eyes with tears that she would not be joining us. God, I would miss her. “Record this moment,” she might have told me. “Paint it with your words.” She loved to give me writing advice, little tidbits that were like expressions of fondness, coming from her. “Writing is rewriting,” she would say.

  Marking a moment, in Peck’s parlance, meant drinking a cocktail, so she was mixing up a batch of her “famous” Southsides, a minty concoction meant to be consumed while we dressed for the evening. “I coined that term, the dressing drink,” she said. “It’s the cornerstone of a civilized life.

  “Isn’t this so Something’s Gotta Give?” Peck asked as she held up a silver cocktail shaker like it was a trophy. This was part of her continued attempt to convince me we could keep the place. She was referring to the movie with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton in which a particularly spectacular beach home stirred house lust in its audience. The dank little Fool’s House resembled that light and airy—and large—house only in theory. Yes, they were both shingled and in Southampton. But Diane Keaton’s was on the ocean and surely didn’t smell like mildew. Fool’s House was close to town and reeked like an old shower curtain. Diane Keaton’s house didn’t have a pair of mannequin legs in one corner with silver platform shoes on the feet, or stacks of needlepoint pillows with sayings on them—A laugh a day keeps the doctor away, that sort of thing. It also didn’t have a floor covered in a blue-green-and-yellow floral rug so loud it could be heard as far away as Montauk. It wasn’t filled with stuffed sofas and chairs and lamps collected at the estate sales where Lydia went in search of treasures in other people’s junk. And I don’t believe it had a tiny closet tucked under the stairs, perfect for hide-and-seek or building forts, that was now jammed so full of old coats and pillows and boxes of things that it could not be opened.

  Our house had a doll called the Pink Lady. It was a relic of an earlier era at Fool’s House, before it had a name, when perhaps there was a young girl occupying the bedroom that was now mine, with its view of the tiny garden in the back. The doll had bald patches and hair that was supposed to be red but had faded to a punk shade of pink. She was missing an eye and wore an old-fashioned smock that had once been pink but was now a dirty mauve color. The Pink Lady was creepy, but she’d become the house mascot and sat on the edge of the second-floor landing looking down at the living room. There was a cocktail of the same name, and Lydia had been known to invite friends to parties allegedly given by the doll at which only these horrible concoctions—something involving gin and grenadine and raw egg created during the Prohibition days—would be served.

  The Something’s Gotta Give house didn’t have a leaking roof, a gas stove that looked and smelled like it was going to combust any minute, or a raging ant situation. But there was a certain zany joy to Fool’s House that the perfectly decorated movie set lacked, and I did love it, although I knew it was wise to keep my feelings in check. This was to be a brief summer fling, that was it.

  “More like Grey Gardens,” I said. “Without the cats.”

  There was something of Edie Beale’s uncensored dramatics to my half sister. When she was thirteen she’d been in a car accident that nearly killed her. She hovered near death—at least that’s the way she liked to tell it; “I hovered near death, for months, I tell you, months!”—and then, slowly, she recuperated. She missed almost her entire eighth-grade year, spending weeks and weeks of bed rest with old movies on television and gothic romances to read, followed by many more weeks of physical therapy. Like a color photograph coming into focus, she grew bolder and brighter and more intensely saturated as she grew stronger. This process had continued until she evolved, as an adult, into a full-fledged character who prided herself on being an eccentric.

  “Mum saw that play.” Her mother was “Mum.” Not “Mom,” or “my mother,” or even “my mum.” Just Mum. As though she were a universal British parent. But Peck was not British and, thankfully, Mum was not anyone else’s mother.

  Mary-Alice O’Sullivan was a reasonably attractive Irish housekeeper with red hair hired to clean my dad’s apartment twice a week, bac
k in the seventies, when he was a bachelor artist. According to my mother, who told the version she’d heard from Lydia, Mary-Alice had parlayed that assignment into a lukewarm love affair, and then into marriage the old-fashioned way, through pregnancy. They were both Catholic and my father had remained unmarried into his late thirties—“There were rumors he was gay, of course,” my mother told it—so it wasn’t too much of a challenge, and Peck was born six months after the wedding. It was the late seventies in New York and even if anyone had been interested enough to do the math, nobody cared.

  Once she was Mrs. George Moriarty she poured all her ambitions into her daughter. She called her Pecksland, a name she insisted had somehow been passed down through her family of potato farmers, and filled Peck’s head with fanciful notions about the proper way to live a well-mannered life. She bought her daughter clothes that were too expensive, fostering her love of fashion, and insisted on lessons in diction, piano, and acting. She fueled Peck’s fantasies about the life she would go on to lead, as a star of the stage or perhaps a fashion icon.

  While Peck was still a baby my father had gotten more interested in music, letting his hair grow and staying out late at concerts. He met my mother, a Smith College graduate working on a PhD in philosophy she never finished, at a Grateful Dead show in Virginia. She was only twenty-two and, to hear Lydia tell it, extremely beautiful, with long streaked hair down her back. My mother told me they fell instantly and passionately in love, and that it was a love so deep and true they were powerless to ignore it, despite the fact that my father was married with a young daughter. The intensity of their love allowed them to rationalize what happened afterward, when George behaved badly, abandoning his wife and child to follow the Dead with my mother, never looking back.

  Lydia was the one who used those words, behaved badly. My mother always told it as a straightforward love story, as though it was destiny that they should be together, previous wife and child or not. She’d leave out any judgment, or guilt, at their behavior. When she told the story, she used a lightly ironic tone, as though she herself were distanced from the emotions she described, as though God or some higher power had been at work and to refuse to go along with it would have been foolish. “Once in a while,” my mother would say, quoting “Scarlet Begonias,” “you get shown the light.”