Danielle Ganek

by The Summer We Read Gatsby (v5)

  It hadn’t been easy for Mary-Alice once my mother diverted her husband’s attentions. She was a single working mother—she’d gone back to school and become a nurse—but there were arrangements where she traded housekeeping and other services for things like singing lessons for her daughter, and there’d been scholarships, too, although those were harder to come by as Peck grew older and less interested in academic success. Peck had always taken small jobs to help out, babysitting and that sort of thing, but I knew it had been hard for her, growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan without money.

  But Peck never complained. She’d simply convinced herself that the upbringing her mother had struggled to give her (the 10021 zip code, the girls’ school, the many private lessons) was not a facsimile of a privileged existence (a one-bedroom rental on First Avenue, scholarships, and bartered agreements) but the real thing. She believed she was extraordinary and that her background, as she chose to view it, was exactly the way a young woman who would go on to be a woman of style and creative substance would have been raised.

  I wouldn’t call her pretentious, though some people, without understanding the nuances of her performance, might use such a word, thinking she was putting on airs. But she really wasn’t. She was always open about her mother and her background, and appreciative of the sacrifices “Mum” had made for her. She wasn’t a snob, either. But she was a Method actor and she’d immersed herself so thoroughly into the role in which she’d cast herself that she knew no other reality.

  If you asked her about this, as I once had, trying to reconcile the interpretations of the story of her life into one cohesive narrative I could understand, she would feign ignorance. But Peck was more astute than that, and I believed her refusal to grasp what I meant resided in a decision she’d made early on, that envy was far more palatable than pity. She viewed herself as a character and her upbringing as backstory. “If you need a subject,” she would say, impatient that I’d yet to write anything resembling a novel, “why not me?” And then she would add, “I’d write it myself, but who has the time?”

  From the bar cart Peck now chose two glasses and, with great flourish, poured the drinks into the glasses, garnishing them with two quarters of lime speared with plastic toothpicks from a collection in a small silver jar. The toothpicks had little figures on the end that were supposed to look like jesters, the kind of gift I suppose one would give to a person who named her home Fool’s House.

  The lemons and limes for the bar cart had been sliced by Just Biggsy. That afternoon he’d cut panini in the shape of hearts. He rolled chopped beef into meatballs and cut phyllo dough, sliced carrots, and shaved thin sections from the salmon that Peck had brought home from the market. He worked efficiently, his hands moving quickly, and he knew where everything was. I’d expected some jockeying for position within the house between Peck and me, without Lydia to mediate. But there were advantages to taking up temporary residence with a woman who envisioned herself as one television gig and a jail sentence away from being the next Martha Stewart; Peck was constantly preparing food and drinks and trying new recipes. And Biggsy, who was gracious and proper and deferential and treated us exactly as a long-serving butler would his royal charges, helped enormously. In those first days at Fool’s House the handsome young artist proved himself indispensable.

  The friction between my sister and me didn’t have its source in the upkeep of our shared house, although Peck could be ill-tempered when I wasn’t as quick with the compliments as she’d have liked. What we didn’t agree on was the future of the house. Peck kept dropping hints about expensive renovations we might undertake and how she wanted to turn Fool’s House into an artistic and literary retreat. She called me a “stick-in-the-mud” and a “nervous Nellie” when I pointed out that neither of us was in possession of money for such a plan. She even said, “Shut your piehole” when I suggested we schedule a meeting with a real estate broker.

  Now Peck lifted her glass and clinked mine. She’d gotten some of the recipes for the food for the Fool’s Welcome from a magazine article entitled, with absolutely no irony, “The Perfect Hamptons Party.” The instructions on how to host such an event were accompanied by heavily styled photographs of carefully cast models posing as guests, looking maniacally happy as they lifted their glasses in a fictional toast to the “chef,” a stout woman in a red taffeta dress.

  “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 sh
e 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.