Danielle Ganek

by The Summer We Read Gatsby (v5)

  It certainly sounded exactly like Lydia. I’d received many such letters from her myself and had saved every one, often rereading them. She’d written in such a vein about Hamilton and about Finn, and also about a few of the women who had been such close friends they’d become family, but I’d never heard her speak that way about anybody by the name of Biggsy. Usually the person occupying the space above the garage only stayed for a summer and, with the exception of Finn, the son of her good friend, they were a transient bunch.

  Peck and I had been the only people actually related to Lydia left in the world for the last twenty-five years. Her parents, my grandparents, were both only children. Her mother had died very young, when Lydia was twelve and her much younger brother, my father, was only a baby. Their father had done what he could to raise them, but he succumbed to lung cancer before my dad was out of college. There were no cousins, no elderly aunts or uncles, unless there were some Moriarty relatives still in Ireland.

  So it had always made sense when Lydia would speak of family this way. I’d taken her advice, drawing around me a small band of female friends whom I adored at home in Lausanne. There was Kelly, the wittiest one, a half Irish and half Lebanese chef married to an American man who wanted to move back to Philadelphia. And Patrizia, my university roommate, had published several books about her family that became bestsellers in Europe, and had helped get me my job at the magazine. Tessa and Julie were both from New Zealand and had gone to hotel school. These were the women who helped me through my mother’s death and my breakup with That-Awful-Jean-Paul. I missed them suddenly, with a pang, especially Kelly. She would have had something funny to say about the absurdly good-looking young artist in our midst.

  Biggsy folded the letter carefully and tucked it into the side pocket of the swim trunks he was wearing. He moved deliberately, like an actor trying to get the blocking right, with the grace of someone trained to use his body expressively. “Don’t you get it?”

  Peck was shaking out one of her American Spirits from the pack and she lit it with a dramatic flick of a lighter shaped like a pig. She squinted at him, inhaling deeply before she asked, through the exhale, “Get what?”

  Biggsy tilted his head in a cocky manner, holding up both arms to gesture at himself, and grinned at us the way he had after the vomit prank. “I think I’m the thing of value.”

  We must have both worn similar dubious looks because he added, “Think about it,” in the huffy manner of a person handing over an untruth. “What did Lydia value more than anything? She was always talking about wanting to introduce us and—”

  “She and I were like this.” Peck held up two fingers to show how close she was to our aunt. “We spoke on the phone at least twice a week, we wrote letters. She even had a Facebook page. And I didn’t even know you were living here. In the past all the fools stayed only in the summer. Lydia wasn’t here herself all winter. There’s no heat.”

  He shrugged, modest pride on his face. “I made do.”

  Here I interjected. “Did she even know you stayed here all winter? She told me when you moved in. And then she never mentioned you again.” I’d been trying to recall my more recent phone conversations with my aunt, replaying her words in my mind. But I was pretty sure I was right when I said she’d never mentioned him after the first time. There’d been other things to talk about, a show at the Pompidou she was excited to see, rereading Edith Wharton, which she’d done all winter, and certain dishes she’d had in her favorite restaurants. She always wanted to know what I was reading, what I was writing, and, in the year after my divorce, naturally, what guy I was dating. On two of the three of these, my answers—nothing, nobody—usually disappointed, which often led her to say something along the lines of “You are the sole author of the story of your life, my dear. Make it a good one.”

  “I have no family of my own,” Biggsy went on to say with a pleading look. “I was an orphan at a young age. Lydia was my family.”

  At the time, it did seem slightly odd that he brought out that letter when he did. We hadn’t asked him to leave. Lydia was gone, and with her went the tradition of the Fool’s House summer residency program, but all of it—her death, the inheritance of her house and her things, the talk of value, sharing a roof with a half sister—was new and overwhelming, and he seemed such a permanent part of the landscape, and so helpful and caring, that we didn’t think to ask him to go. Free butler service is hard to turn down. And if we didn’t exactly believe some of what he told us about his past and how he ended up there, we willingly suspended our disbelief. So his sudden presentation of this letter, after we’d been there almost a week, struck me as strange.

  He must have been able to read my mind. “I just found it,” he said quickly. “I was going through my things and it was at the bottom of a box. She sent it in a Christmas card. I thought you might like to see it.”

  “You know,” I said, as Peck sat down at the other side of the backgammon table, “you’re going to have to find another place to live. You might want to start getting prepared.”

  He nodded. “I know. I will.” He looked down at his feet. “But listen, can you spread the word, among your art-collector friends? I do commissions.”

  “I don’t have any art-collector friends,” I said.

  Peck looked up at him sharply. “You’re talking about Miles?”

  “Can you introduce me? I have an idea for a piece called A Fool and His Money. The fool, that’s me. Or is it? That’s part of the piece, which one of us is actually the fool. We trade places. The collector, or the person who buys the piece, will switch places with me, for a set amount of time, a night, a week. They go to the studio and make art. And I go live in their house, the way I do here.”

  “It’s brilliant,” Peck assessed. “It’s conceptual.”

  “I like the idea of trading identity,” he said, warming to his subject. “I’m very interested in the idea of appropriation.”

  “Appropriation?” Peck repeated with a laugh. “Isn’t that just an art term for stealing?”

  He pointed at her. “Bingo. I would film the whole thing, of course,” he explained. “And that video becomes the piece they keep. And also any work they create on their own.”

  “Conceptual art is very popular these days,” Peck proclaimed in that way she had of declaring things generally held to be common knowledge as though she had come up with a brilliant new idea. “And of course, Miles has very good taste. I’ll see what I can do.”

  One of Pecksland Moriarty’s great qualities was her enthusiasm. And when she fell in love—with anything, the onion rings at the Sip ’n Soda, the stray dog who became Trimalchio, the orange platform sandals in a store window—she fell instantly, and she fell hard, judgment and rational thought be damned. It was an aspect of her personality I admired, and often wished I could emulate, but one which was also cause for concern.

  “Now go away and let me beat the pants off this sister of mine,” she said, waving him off. Peck prided herself on her backgammon ability. My half sister was quite proud of many skills she did not actually possess. But either because of or in spite of Lydia, who was born with a talent for games such as bridge and backgammon and gin rummy, a talent she swore was hereditary and even more pronounced in our father, Peck imagined she was so good at the game she could take her backgammon prowess to Monte Carlo, where the real money was.

  “You can make a cool fifty grand in a few nights in that place,” she was telling me as I beat her soundly in the first game and we repositioned the pieces for another round. I wondered if Finn would show up.

  We played another game and then another as Peck kept screaming and cursing and standing up dramatically as though she was just going to walk away from the table in disgust. Evidently her losses gave her pause, because she reconsidered her desire to travel to Monte Carlo to make the money to keep Fool’s House and devised another plan. “Am I too old to become a hooker?”

  “Now there’s an idea we can use,” I said, stac
king up my men. “We turn Fool’s House into a high-end brothel.”

  She pondered the idea further. “With the money we make we can renovate the house. Make it super high-end. Hamptons Hookers, what a concept. I can’t believe nobody’s done it yet.”

  “Okay, stop,” I said, somewhat afraid she was considering this an actual plan. “I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to find I’m being shopped to one of your male friends.”

  Peck paused, and then burst out into an exaggerated fit of laughter. “You know, you can be funny sometimes.” She implied that this was a rare and unusual occurrence, preferring to think of herself as the comic one.

  “Momma needs a new pair of shoes,” she whispered into the leather cup, blowing on the dice. “Momma likes Manolo, so make it a good one.” She kept blowing on the dice, taking her time. “Momma needs a pair of those feathered ones with the jewels on them for evening. The flat sandals are fine for day. Or maybe the crocodile pumps.”

  “Just roll already,” I finally had to say.

  “Fuck,” she screamed when it was my turn again and I rolled a neat little pair of twos to take it home.

  “What’s going on up there?” a raspy voice called from the driveway.

  Neither of us had noticed Finn Killian pull up in his jeep with the cloth top rolled down and a surfboard hanging out the back. There was a Grateful Dead Steal Your Face sticker on the back of the car.

  “My so-called sister,” Peck called out with genuine resentment seeping into her words, “just beat me most ungraciously. The worst part is,” she continued as he hopped up the steps to the porch, “she doesn’t even care. She’s European.”

  As Finn strolled over to the table, there seemed to be a bounce in his step. He appeared so affable as he glanced down at our game with curiosity, without any of the arrogance I thought I’d seen in him. How had I remembered him so differently from that first summer? Was it because I’d actually had feelings for him I didn’t want to acknowledge and rejected him before he could reject me? Or was it just that I’d been in such a fog of grief over my mother’s death that I hadn’t been thinking straight?

  He stooped over us, checking out the board. He was so tall, his legs endless in his jeans, and he wore his height with a kind of casual elegance.

  “What’s with the Steal Your Face?” I asked him, more sharply than I intended. I really wasn’t good at this male-female interaction, sounding brusque when I was trying for flirtatious and charming. “Aren’t you a little old for that sort of thing?”

  Trimalchio jumped up at Finn’s side and he picked the dog up, scratching his neck as Trimalchio eyed him adoringly. His hair was wet and hung over his forehead. “My godson put that on there,” he said. “It’s supposed to be ironic.”

  “So you’re ironically not a Deadhead anymore?” I pulled the last of my men off the board, beating Peck again.

  “I’ll take winner,” he said. “And it is he, young Connor, who is ironically not the Deadhead. Calls it old people’s music. For aging losers like me who don’t know anything about cool rock ’n’ roll. Hence the sticker.”

  Peck relinquished her spot at the table, saying, “It’s cocktail hour somewhere, isn’t it?”

  “I should warn you, kid.” Finn took her place, sliding in across from me with Trimalchio on his lap. “I play for money.”

  I was putting the board back together and I didn’t look up. “That’s the only way.”

  “This was on Lydia’s list,” Peck called out as she headed into the house to mix up a batch of Southsides with the fresh mint Lydia had always grown off the kitchen side of the porch. “Play backgammon for money. And skinny-dip in the ocean, don’t forget that one.”

  He rolled a one and I threw out a six, so I went first. A lucky first move for me. I quickly placed my men and it was his turn. As we talked, Finn was shocked to learn that not only had I never been to a baseball game—“Understandable,” he said, “under the circumstances. Living abroad and all that”—but I’d never even watched one on TV.

  “It’s sacrilege,” he announced. “The New York Yankees are a religion.”

  “So I hear.” I knew Peck was a big Yankees fan because she’d had been threatening to drag me to a game while I was in the States. But she was a fan of everything.

  “Oh God,” he cried out a few seconds later, after another lucky roll of the dice for me and a terrible roll for him. He smacked himself on the forehead. I thought he was reacting to the dice, but he’d just realized that my lack of education about sports meant I also wouldn’t know anything about American football. “Now that’s a crime,” he said. “You didn’t watch the Giants win the Super Bowl?”

  “What’s the Super Bowl?” I asked, enjoying the look of mock horror that swept over his face. “I’m kidding. Of course I know what the Super Bowl is.”

  He mimicked me in a comic voice that was actually spot on. “I know what the Super Bowl is. What is it then, smarty pants?”

  “It’s a big football match,” I said, teasing, as he groaned.

  He shook his head back and forth. “Match? It’s not a match. No match.”

  “I know,” I said, neatly stacking my board. “I just said that to annoy you.”

  “You like that, do you? To annoy?” I’d flipped the cube, upping the financial stakes of the game, and Finn made a face as he realized I knew what I was doing. “How about some mercy? Didn’t I teach you how to play this game?”

  “Now who’s not remembering?” I said, recalling now a few lively games on the porch, with Lydia loudly cheering for me all those years ago. “I beat the pants off you.”

  It was a beautiful clear afternoon that grew slightly crisp as the sun moved across the sky, and we fell into an easy sort of teasing banter.

  Peck came back through the screen door with mint cocktails and fresh potato chips she’d made herself earlier in the day. “I’m famous for my Southsides. Try them, try them,” she insisted. We paused the game to sip the drinks.

  “Well?” she asked, demanding the compliment before we’d even gotten the stuff down our throats. We both pronounced them delicious and she pulled one of the rocking chairs over to the side of the table to watch. The conversation turned, naturally, to the missing painting.

  “It’s the one that was in the picture of your mom and Lydia,” I pointed out to him. “It was hanging there forever.”

  “Who do you think might have taken it?” he asked.

  “We know who took it,” Peck said, rocking back and forth. “It was Miles Noble, the first love, she says in a voice laden with irony.” She paused to ensure that we appreciated her witty words. “All we have to do is go over there and find it. Or get him to give it back.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Finn asked her. “Why would this ironic first love, a guy who’s apparently made a bucketload of money, come over here and steal a painting from you? It makes no sense. There were a hundred people here that night, all of whom could have taken it. How do you know I didn’t do it, just as an example?”

  She looked at him with comic suspicion. “Did you?”

  “I did not.” He pointed up at the garage. “But have you looked up there?”

  “Biggs didn’t take it,” she scoffed. “He’s an artist—why would he take another painter’s work? Besides, if he were going to steal anything from us, he could have taken it before we arrived.”

  Finn shrugged. “Why don’t you just take a look? Maybe there’s a clue?”

  “We’re not going to go snooping around in his room,” Peck said. She then attempted to claim Finn was being racially biased.

  “Racially biased? Biggsy couldn’t be more Caucasian,” I pointed out.

  “He’s got some Japanese.” She set her lips in a thin line, as though there were no arguing with the facts. But I was pretty certain there were no Japanese ancestors lurking in his past. Besides, there was nothing even vaguely Japanese about his blond, corn-fed looks. But this was the kind of contrarian conversation—
the sky is blue, no, it’s red—my sister thrived on. Eventually it was always best just to move on. “But I guess it couldn’t hurt to look up there. I’m insanely curious about him.”

  She gestured for us to follow her. “Come on,” she said. “He’s not there. He took his motorcycle and said he’d be back tomorrow. I didn’t ask where he was going.”

  I glanced at Finn and then we both stood and followed Peck.

  The space above the garage had been carved into two rooms, connected by an arched opening. One side was monastic, with a neatly made up twin bed, a simple wood bedside table, and a tiny refrigerator with one red apple sitting on top. The other side was utter chaos, a riot of colors, scraps of papers, camera equipment, and props. In the middle of the mess sat a small metal stool and a rickety worktable, nicked and covered in paint, piled high with books and pens and scanned images. Pinned to the wall above the table was a piece of handmade paper on which was written in gothic script: RUMORS OF MY DEATH HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED.

  Finn pointed to it. “Lydia told me he started those rumors himself.”

  “Maybe he wanted us to think he was the ghost,” Peck added, nodding her approval. “I really was starting to believe it. He’s so pale, you know.”

  We looked around, searching for a potential hiding place for a framed canvas, or a clue that Biggsy might have had something to do with the missing painting, but there was nothing at all like that in either of the two rooms.

  I felt slightly uneasy looking around Biggsy’s private space, and there was a part of me that expected to find something. But what?

  And then Peck made a discovery. From the photographs spilled on the table, she pulled out several of herself. The one she held up was slightly blurred, a still taken from video, and in it she was smiling at someone in the distance. “Do I have a stalker?” she asked, almost proudly. “I told you, it wasn’t him. And I was right, see? There’s nothing here. Biggs has a very pure relationship with art. He’s always saying we must revere the artists who came before us.”