Danielle Ganek

by The Summer We Read Gatsby (v5)

  “Did you look up there?” Peck gestured toward the garage before turning to Miles. “He’s got pictures of me in his room. He’s been filming me.”

  “He kissed your fucking shoe. You’re hot, babe, what can I say?” Miles tied the robe more securely around his thick waist. “Now, can we get some breakfast? I’m starving.”

  “We should go up there again,” Peck said to me.

  Miles gave her an exasperated look and headed for the door. “If we don’t get some food first, you can forget going to Paris for the weekend, babe. I’ll be in a starvation-induced coma.”

  She grinned at me. “He’s always starving. I swear, the guy is all appetite.”

  “Paris for the weekend?” I asked, surprised at how quickly their newly reignited love affair seemed to be progressing. She nodded. “Miles is taking me to the Ritz. We’re staying in the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite.”

  Miles turned at the door and gave me a hangdog look. “I do what I’m told,” he joked, in the manner of a man who was used to having other people do what he told them and couldn’t quite figure out exactly how he’d gotten himself in this situation.

  14

  Peck had acquired, somewhere, an original Pan Am flight attendant’s uniform from the seventies, and this was what she was wearing two days later when I came out on the porch to find her waiting for me. “When on a quest,” she announced, handing me a cupcake, “it’s important to dress appropriately.” She eyed the shorts I’d pulled on quickly. “Or not.”

  Hamilton, never one to miss out on anything that smacked of an adventure, had orchestrated a day of what he called “sleuthing” for the three of us. I had a hunch he too would be dressed for our escapade and I wasn’t wrong. He strolled up the driveway wearing a safari-style jacket with loads of pockets, as though, should the occasion arise, he might reach into them to pull out tools or other necessities. He daintily clutched a small cooler from Petrossian Caviar in one hand like a purse. With the other hand he waved his fan. “Isn’t this exhilarating?” he called out to us as he approached.

  Biggsy’s motorcycle had not reappeared in the two days since he’d left the Bosley children outside, so Hamilton had not yet had a chance to execute the first part of the plan he’d concocted. But in the meantime we were setting out on a fact-finding mission, attempting to figure out if the painting in question could, in fact, have been painted by Jackson Pollock. I wasn’t sure exactly how we were going to accomplish this but I loved the notion that we were on a quest. This kind of thing needed air, and Peck and Hamilton together were the kind of people who would breathe life into a speck of an idea until it became something entirely different, the way a kernel of corn could become popcorn when hot air was involved.

  “First order of business,” she stated once Hamilton had stepped up onto the porch. Peck, whose favorite show was Law and Order, approached the day as though she were on assignment. “We go up to the studio to look for the Gatsby that Stella here thinks may be a first edition.” She pointed at the garage. “And we search for any other clues we might have overlooked the first time.”

  I led the way to the garage and up the stairs to the somewhat stuffy second-floor studio. I half expected to find the space cleared out, indicating that Biggsy had pulled up stakes and taken off with our painting, but it looked exactly the same as it had the first time we’d gone up there, Biggsy’s shrunken suits and collection of hats still in the small closet, the piles of photographs and papers all over the table.

  Propped up against a shelf along one wall was a large book, open to reveal an image of a painting on the well-worn page. “Check this out,” I said, closing the book to note the cover. “Jackson Pollock.”

  “There’s a clue.” Hamilton was out of breath after the climb up the stairs. “I’d say that’s a start.”

  I quickly flipped through the pages, many of which were marked with yellow Post-its or covered with ink where Biggsy seemed to have been making notes to himself in a scribbled handwriting that was impossible to decipher. I scanned the images to see if there were any that looked like ours, but none of them appeared to be an exact match, though there were some that seemed vaguely similar.

  While I was flipping through the pages of the book that Biggsy or someone had clearly spent much time with, Peck held up a sheet of stationery that appeared to be a letter from Lydia, covered with her same round schoolgirl handwriting.

  “Another letter?” I asked eagerly, closing the book and stepping closer to the page she was now inspecting with a frown. The sight of Lydia’s handwriting brought a swift pang to my heart as I reached for what I believed to be another communication from the aunt we’d all adored. And then the wrench of emotion turned immediately to anger when Peck showed me that what had appeared to be Lydia’s perfect penmanship was actually the same few lines written out over and over. Biggsy had copied them and then practiced them again and again to achieve the rounded letters and distinctive look of her handwriting.

  “This must have been a practice sheet,” Peck said, her hand shaking slightly as she held the paper for the two of us to see.

  “Damn that bloody snogger,” Hamilton exclaimed, now that he’d caught his breath and realized what Peck was holding in her hand.

  “I knew there was something off about the way he suddenly brought out that letter,” I said, now seething at the thought of Biggsy digging around Lydia’s desk to steal some of her stationery and then copying out a few sentences from a letter she’d written to someone else, one of us perhaps. “It was a fake.”

  “A good fake,” Peck pointed out, but she too looked angry. “Kid’s got talent.” She shook the sheet of paper as though trying to rid it of negative energy.

  “The kid’s a menace,” I added quickly. “He’s been nothing but trouble.”

  “Why would he create a fake letter from Lydia?” Hamilton wondered aloud. “Why go to all the trouble of perfecting her handwriting? Unless he was planning to falsify something else? A check, perhaps?”

  I looked over at Peck. “We should find out if there were any checks from her account made out to him.”

  Peck shook her head. “I don’t think that was it. I think he did it because he could. He wanted to lull us into a false sense of security. Like we’re all just one big happy family. But he’s going to rob us blind right under our noses and call it art.”

  “We’re going to have to confront him,” I said, sifting through piles of papers and things in search of anything that might shed some light. “He could be more dangerous than we realize. Especially because he’s obviously not going to leave this place willingly.”

  We didn’t find Lydia’s copy of The Great Gatsby or the painting or any other clues, and eventually Hamilton suggested we move along. “I don’t want to be in here when that chap comes back. He could be one of those violent types.”

  “If he walked in here now I’d kick him right in the balls,” I said. I was angry and I meant it, but Peck burst out laughing.

  “Listen to you,” she exclaimed as Hamilton let out a chuckle too. “Miss Tough Guy. Didn’t I say she was going to come out of her shell this summer?”

  “I’m rather afraid.” He made a comic face as he covered his crotch with his hands. “Balls. It sounds so . . .”

  “ ‘Kick him right in the balls,’ ” Peck repeated with a laugh. “I didn’t even think you knew that word.”

  “What?” I said. “Balls?”

  “Enough,” Hamilton cried out. “You’re making me want to cross my legs. And we must go.”

  “Okay, then.” I held up the practice sheet and waved it in the air. “I’m taking this with me. We’re going to have to get that guy out of here.”

  We filed back down the stairs behind Hamilton and came out of the gloom of the garage into clear sunshine that threw everything into sharp relief. In unison all three of us pulled our sunglasses back over our eyes to block the glaring light.

  We were all in high spirits, with snacks and outfits (at least theirs) c
arefully considered, and a sense of infinite possibility in the air as we got into the ancient station wagon. Peck slid into the driver’s seat, Hamilton took the passenger side, and I went in the back with Trimalchio on my lap. The dog, with his permanently jaded facial expression, was the only one who didn’t seem caught up in the adventure, and he peered out the window like one of those tedious city people who make a big show of hating “the Hamptons,” complaining about the traffic and the social anxiety and the crowds.

  “I’ve brought sustenance,” Hamilton said as he held up the cooler to show us before tucking it in between the two front seats. “But we shan’t fill up. I’m taking us all to lunch.”

  Peck gunned the old car into reverse. “Literally to Lunch,” she said over her shoulder in my direction, in the tone of the know-it-all forced to explain yet again. “It’s a place out on 27 toward Montauk. It’s really called the Lobster Roll, but the sign out front says Lunch and everybody just calls it that. They have the best lobster rolls.”

  Everything Peck liked was always the best. This was one of the ways she distinguished herself, by having the most discerning palate. She presented her opinions much the way an old-fashioned magazine editor like Diana Vreeland would have done.

  “Pecksland, you’re quite an expert on everything,” Hamilton noted drily. It was the sort of thing only he could get away with saying to her. From him she heard it as a compliment.

  We drove through Southampton on our way to East Hampton, to pay a call on an art dealer Hamilton knew who specialized in discreet private sales and who was the type of person who would know if there was an unauthenticated Jackson Pollock being shopped around and if the one we were missing was actually painted by Pollock or not. As Peck drove, Hamilton entertained us with stories of old Southampton, and how much better it used to be. This was a favorite theme, how it used to be the quietest old place where you’d just go to the beach and everyone knew one another and you’d get around on a bicycle.

  “On a regular bicycle,” Hamilton clarified. “Not like these idiots in spandex racing along Gin Lane like they have to get somewhere.”

  Peck agreed with him about old Southampton, as if she too had known it then, as if she’d grown up here. In some ways, of course, she had. We’d both visited Lydia several summers during the course of our childhoods. But to hear Peck talk, she’d spent every minute of every summer at a house in the country with a pony and a bicycle and lemonade stands at the beach. She never modified her stories in my presence and I would never correct her. I enjoyed them too much. In fact, that morning in the car, I almost believed she had grown up in Southampton.

  “It was so much better then,” she said, allowing a wistful tone to seep into her words. “Everybody knew one another. Nobody locked their doors. And the creativity in the air was so thick you could cut it with a knife.” She paused to look out the window. “You’d actually see people setting up their easels on the dunes,” she said in a pensive tone as she glanced out at the passing hedgerow. “Like in the days of William Merritt Chase and the Shinnecock School of Summer Art. People were painting everywhere. There were actors and writers and creative people doing their thing. There was all this spontaneity.”

  The privet hedges were intimidating, keeping sentry and offering total privacy for the denizens of the vast palaces, old and new, hidden behind them. We couldn’t see many of the houses from the street but Hamilton had juicy tidbits of information to share with us about each one, and he made Peck take a less direct route through what is known as the “estate section” so he could point out the places in question through the car window. He’d given this subject, the houses of the Hamptons, much passionate study and could speak with authority. He knew about the old places and also about the new ones, which shingled manor had been lost in a divorce, which stucco villa had been in a family for generations, which gargantuan new construction had been built with no regard to how a family would actually inhabit the enormous space, and which tiny, older house was slated to be ripped down and replaced. He knew prices and names and secrets. He knew about the clubs and their members, and he knew about the locals too and their equally messy lives.

  “Each one of these houses,” Peck said as she took her eyes off the road for far longer than felt comfortable, “is the realization of someone’s dream.”

  “Or someone else’s nightmare,” Hamilton added, pointing to a slightly dilapidated white place barely visible through an overgrown hedgerow. “I believe that’s the place Laurie Poplin was trying to sell when she first met Biggsy, who was then Jonathan.”

  “Finn said Lydia met him at Schmidt’s Market,” I said, as Hamilton passed around tiny blinis with sour cream and smoked salmon.

  “It depends on whom you ask,” Hamilton said, glancing back at me. “I once heard her say he just appeared at the end of the driveway one day. She told me he answered an ad on Craigslist.”

  “That’s so random,” Peck exclaimed, narrowly missing a bald-headed man in a tiny toy sports car. That morning there seemed to be a preponderance of miniature vehicles driven by follicle-challenged men on the road as we passed the farm stands and the cornfields and the cashmere shops.

  Peck changed the subject to one she’d been revisiting several times with increasing intensity: she wanted to turn Fool’s House into a retreat for creative people. “Kind of like Yaddo,” she explained earnestly.

  “Have you ever been to Yaddo?” Hamilton asked her, stretching the word—beeee-eeee-innn—into three syllables to enunciate how preposterous he found her idea.

  Peck was forced to admit that she hadn’t been to Yaddo, or anywhere like it. She didn’t even know exactly what Yaddo was.

  “Yaddo’s enormous,” he told her. “You could only house three or four artists in Fool’s House at a time. That’s not at all the same.”

  “We can add on some rooms,” she exclaimed with increasing petulance. “I just think we were meant to keep the place in the family, and I think we should find a way to do that. Now, I read something this morning on the Internet about a whole bunch of potential Jackson Pollock paintings that were discovered in a storage bin out here somewhere. But they weren’t signed. And the article pointed out that he always signed his work.”

  “Yes. In fact he rather famously insisted that his wife, Lee Krasner, sign her work, when she never had before,” Hamilton added. “Or it was a scene in the movie.”

  “Maybe ours was one he didn’t like,” Peck speculated. “And that’s why he didn’t sign it.”

  “He was known to throw canvases into the town dump,” he said as we snaked slowly along Route 27 behind an endless line of sun-baked cars. “Right in East Hampton. I doubt he would have signed those.”

  “It did say ‘From J.P.’ on the back,” she mused. “I wonder if someone could authenticate that.”

  It took a long time to get to East Hampton. The sun was high in the sky and it was hot by the time we pulled up to the neat shingled bungalow with window boxes where the art dealer—Giles Moncrief was his name—spent his weekends. Everything about the small place, including its owner, was well-tended. The paintings on the whitewashed walls were all small and abstract, subtle in hue. The furniture was stylish and subdued as well, and the effect was soothing. There was iced tea garnished with lemon slices in a tall pitcher and the very stylish Giles poured us each a glass.

  He wore narrow gray trousers and a fitted purple shirt and he looked only at Hamilton. Like Scotty, he appeared to be infatuated with our white-haired friend. He had a Masterpiece Theatre accent and a thin mustache that he kept touching as he fired questions at him. “Oil on canvas? Black, white, and brown abstract, you say?” he asked with a carefully contained eagerness that seemed at odds with his sleek demeanor. “Small? And it’s been missing how long?”

  I’d brought the photograph Finn had given me of Lydia and his mother in front of the mantel with the picture in the background, and I pulled it out to show him the painting we were there to discuss.

  Gile
s Moncrief sighed heavily as he held the photo as close to his eyes as he could, examining it carefully. “ ‘For L.M. From J.P.’? That’s on the back? And it disappeared when?”

  He spent quite a bit of time staring at the photograph and looked a few things up on a laptop computer while we explained what little we knew of the painting that had been hanging above the mantel at Fool’s House for so long, and about Biggsy, the artist whom we suspected of stealing the painting.

  “He lives there, rent-free, in exchange for fake vomiting on your floor?” he asked, looking up from his computer.

  “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that,” I tried to say.

  He nodded with an annoying smirk, but he seemed to be trying to get all the facts. “Yes, I suppose it is, as he may or may not be in possession of a painting that belongs to you that may or may not be a Jackson Pollock.” He looked for confirmation to Hamilton, who was happily fanning himself and enjoying his iced tea in one of the too-small chairs.

  “You’ve heard nothing more from him?” Hamilton asked him. “We’re certain this is the fellow who texted me?”

  Giles shook his head. “He hasn’t responded again. Very often stolen paintings never resurface, you know.”

  “How d’you mean?” asked Peck, growing more British by the minute.

  “People steal paintings for all sorts of reasons,” he explained. “It’s awfully hard for a thief to sell a high-profile piece. Certainly a potential Pollock, even one that could be impossible to authenticate, would attract a lot of attention. Not everyone wants that attention.”

  We talked for a while longer, but Giles could not confirm that the painting in the photograph could have been painted by Pollock. He could also not definitively say that it hadn’t. But he promised to let us know if he heard anything, and we left him gazing thoughtfully up at one of the paintings on his wall, no further along in our search for information than we had been when we pulled in. “I’ll text him again,” he said. “I’ll tell him I have someone interested.”