Danielle Ganek Read online

  The summer of 2001 became the Summer We Read Gatsby. My aunt had assumed I’d already read it, and because she taught the book during the school year, it didn’t appear on the reading lists she gave her class. It was Peck who gave me the book. That summer, she introduced me to many things besides F. Scott Fitzgerald: the dressing drink, a topspin forehand, thong underwear, proper smoke-ring technique, and Woody Allen. Her introduction to Woody Allen took the form of Annie Hall and Manhattan, not literally Mr. Allen, but it was powerful all the same.

  Peck was twenty-five then, already plump and gravel-voiced, theatrically and obsessively recovering from what she called “the denouement of the greatest love story ever told.” Her recovery took the form of chain-smoking, devouring cupcakes, and mooning about pretending to read the copy of The Great Gatsby that Miles Noble had given her when they first met. “I’m obsessed,” she would tell me, waving her paperback. “I’m absolutely mad for this book. You know, a literary fetish is the new black.”

  Miles had read everything Fitzgerald ever wrote, he told her. “Like the Dylan song,” I said when she repeated this detail, telling the story of how they met. She didn’t get the reference. “Bob Dylan?” she’d muttered irritably. “What’s he got to do with the price of tea in China?”

  Her first words to me that summer of 2001 were “I hate you,” but she’d delivered them in a cheerful enough manner, which was confusing to the pale and fragile student I was then, still grieving my mother’s death, overwhelmed at the random nature of life’s ironies. She’d just finished at NYU—she hadn’t graduated, she’d simply finished—and was planning to become famous, and she held the page of her book with one finger and gazed at me with curiosity. “Just kidding,” she said a few seconds later. “It’s just that you’re so freaking skinny. And you look just like Daddy.”

  Daddy? He’d been dead for eighteen years. But I did resemble our father, or at least the few photos of him I’d seen. I had his dark wavy hair and brown eyes and I was angular, like him, while Peck took after her mother, with freckled Irish skin that burned easily and wide-set blue eyes.

  Miles Noble looked like Jim Morrison, according to Peck. He was brilliant, sexy, the funniest guy she’d ever known. His name had come to be a sort of shorthand for the perfect guy, an inside joke for half sisters who grew up separated by an ocean, without much in the way of inside material. When Jean-Paul, the now-ex-husband my friends referred to as “that awful Jean-Paul”—as though that were his full name, That-Awful-Jean-Paul—turned out to be so, well, awful, Peck said to me, “He was never your Miles Noble, was he?”

  Men were always falling in love with Peck, or so she would tell me. And she did have a regal air that seemed to bring out the passion in even the mousiest little creatures. But inevitably she’d come up with several reasons to be disappointed. A passion for cats, for example. Or ordering a salad for dinner. Or the wrong sorts of shoes. “Tasseled loafers,” she would whisper into the phone, as if such a thing were so awful it couldn’t be voiced too loudly. It explained everything. Afterward, she’d always add, “Well, he was no Miles Noble.”

  “For someone who wants to be a writer, you don’t seem to understand about this book,” she complained now as she slammed on the brakes at a red light. We were on Route 27, the traffic-snagged highway that runs all the way along Long Island to Montauk, making our way from Southampton to Bridgehampton. “You, of all people, should know when a book had this kind of significance, a person doesn’t just randomly send an invitation after seven years of nothing, with such a theme, if he doesn’t intend it to mean something.”

  “True,” I acknowledged. “But what does it mean?”

  “It means, I suppose, that he’s come to his senses and he wants me back. But it’s too late for that. And you know what? You were right.”

  Her words surprised me. Peck was not in the habit of telling me I was right about anything.

  “This morning.” She gestured at me with one hand. “When you implied I was only going so I could see the house. It’s true. To satisfy my curiosity.” She nodded, as though she needed confirmation. “I would never go through that again, that kind of love. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I wouldn’t even wish it on you.

  “It’s a sickness,” she continued. “That kind of obsessive, all-consuming, intense feeling, where you can’t eat and you can’t sleep. And God, remember how tragic I was that summer we broke up? Moping around a whole summer, reading and rereading The Great Gatsby, as though it contained all the answers to the mysteries of life.”

  I did. It had been rather impressive, a heaving performance of grief and self-pity that I’d witnessed with a combination of awe and amusement. I had always believed such intense displays of emotion to be the stuff of books and movies and songs and therefore purely fictitious. I didn’t think people could actually feel that strongly about each other and I viewed my half sister’s dramatic display as characteristic hyperbole.

  “So what do you think he wants?” I asked her, as a gut-wrenching sunset began to tinge the wide-open sky with pink, the famous “painters’ light” about which Lydia had spoken so evocatively and adoringly, and we turned off the highway in the direction of the former potato fields that had been transformed over a period of five years into Miles Noble’s fantasy of a country estate.

  “He wants what every man wants when he’s built a house. He wants to fill it,” she said. We fell in behind a long line of cars snaking toward the driveway that would lead to the house.

  “He’s been living in Hong Kong and Dubai,” she went on, her syllables rounded and carefully defined. “An international man of mystery, from the sound of it. Now he’s come back home to roost. There’s an apartment in New York too, I hear. A penthouse, all raw and ready to be designed. What he wants is a wife.”

  I’d always admired the way Peck could speak with such authority about the unknown wishes of others. She delivered her opinions as though she’d received some divine wisdom that told her she was right, despite any evidence or logic to the contrary.

  She tapped her fingers on top of the steering wheel in time to the music, the Grateful Dead’s “Eyes of the World,” from a CD I’d brought along. “I wonder what he looks like now.”

  Miles Noble lived, for just a summer, in what could only be described, in Fitzgerald’s words, as an incoherent failure of a house. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Also the ugliest. There were small windows in strange places and a huge arched door and two turretlike structures, one at each end, giving it the feel of a mad castle, and not in a good way. As we followed the line of cars down the driveway toward a gaggle of valet parkers, we both gazed up at the house before us in awe. The front of the house was lined with purple and pink hydrangeas and far too many wood chips, a whole garden store’s worth of bright reddish things. It rose awkwardly out of its landscaped acres of lawn like an ungainly pubescent girl uncomfortable with her sudden size and lack of beauty.

  “Isn’t this fantastic?” Peck asked breathlessly.

  I glanced over at her, assuming she was being sarcastic. I was about to say something about how I’d never seen anything more hideous when I realized her awe at the sight of the house before us was not the same as mine. There was reverence in her eyes.

  “It sure is big,” I said.

  She nodded. “Forty thousand square feet, at least. Indoor and outdoor pools. The gardens are modeled after a place in Ireland.”

  We stepped out of the car and a valet parker handed Peck a ticket. Then we were greeted at a long table by five or six very attractive women in tiny black dresses. Peck took my arm in excitement as she stated regally, “Pecksland Moriarty. And guest.”

  We made our way behind other white-clad arrivals along a path, lined with hurricane lanterns, that led to the back of the house. “I can’t believe Miles lives here,” Peck whispered to me, still holding on to my arm. “It’s out of a movie, isn’t it?”

  “The Shining?” I whispered back, but she was too exc
ited to realize what I meant.

  “Everybody’s here,” she said as we came around the corner to a vast terrace where a sea of people were already gathered. Everybody was obediently wearing white. And hats. Some of the people were smart and elegant. And some were hard and bored. On them, the white dresses and the dinner jackets appeared cheap. But, I couldn’t help noticing, they were, for the most part, an extraordinarily attractive group of people. So this is the Hamptons, I thought, as I allowed myself to be pulled along into the fray with my sister at my side.

  “Look at that,” I said to her, pointing at the lights that spelled out three letters on the bottom of the swimming pool. “What does that say? MAN?”

  “Those are his initials,” Peck exclaimed. “Miles Adam Noble. That’s cool.”

  “Very existential,” I remarked as we headed to one of several lit-up bars set up on the grass. Everything was blazing with lights, from the monogram in the pool, which was now changing colors, to the trees hung with lanterns and the tables set with candles. Even the flagpole in one corner of the back lawn was surrounded by at least four or five lights, shining upward from the base at the American flag flapping in the breeze.

  As we waited for a couple in matching white tuxedos and fedoras to select something from the many choices of cocktails, Peck shook an American Spirit from a pack she carried in the tiny white box she was using as a purse. She smoked the elegant, old-fashioned way that glamorous women used to smoke, her right elbow in her left hand and the long fingers of her right hand lined up flat against her face. She’d take a deep drag and then fling her right hand with its cigarette all the way out to the side.

  The His-and-Hers pair in the tuxes turned and waved their hands in front of their faces, ostentatiously fanning away her smoke. “How rude,” Peck exclaimed as they quickly moved away from us. She blew a stream of smoke at their retreating backs.

  She ordered two dirty martinis—and when I interrupted to change mine to a Coke, she exclaimed, “What are you, the mayor of Sobertown?” Peck turned back to the bartender, a pretty older man, one of those character-actor types in a white dinner jacket and bow tie, and clarified. “Make hers a double.”

  The bartender gave her a blank look as he poured the vodka. There were small signs on the bar indicating that the bar was “sponsored” by this particular brand.

  “She’s a divorcée,” Peck felt compelled to explain. She pronounced the word as though she were speaking French, with a rolling r and the emphasis on the last syllable—de-vorr-SAY.

  He handed us each a martini speared with three massive olives and winked at me as Peck clinked her glass against mine. “Big and stiff,” she proclaimed, making sure the bartender and everyone else in our midst could hear her. “Just the way I like them.”

  She introduced me to everyone, her arm encircling my waist as she showed me off. She bounced from cluster to cluster, sharing an entertaining tidbit of gossip about some person or a sharp observation about another. They were all immediately friendly to me, including me in the small talk that seemed to flow effortlessly from their mouths. Some of the guests whispered in judgment at the lavishness of the party, even as they fanned out to the tins of caviar on ice and mounds of Kumamoto oysters and what looked like sculptures of fresh shrimp on skewers, and lined up for the Nobu chef rolling sushi and the Chinese man in an extra-tall hat wrapping Peking duck in pancakes. There were tiny little cheeseburgers dripping juices and ketchup onto white silk and little slivers of toro, a fatty tuna so fresh it tasted like it had been caught that afternoon. There was foie gras on toast and smoked salmon with crème fraîche and a man in a white suit and a sombrero at a table with hundreds of avocados, mixing guacamole to order.

  Peck didn’t seem nervous at all, despite her professed anxiety about seeing Miles Noble again, and she drew admiration, particularly from the male guests, some of whom couldn’t help but stare adoringly at her magnificently cleavaged chest as she spoke.

  “This is my half sister,” she’d say proudly, as though this, a half of a sister, were a thing so special only she was fortunate enough to have one. “This is Stella Blue.”

  Technically this was true. My parents had named me after the Grateful Dead song. (That’s the sort of mother I had.) Stella Blue Cassandra Olivia Moriarty. Flows daintily off the tongue, doesn’t it? The Dead played “Stella Blue” the night I was born, or that was the story as told by my mother, the queen of the unreliable narrators. Her tales were always entertaining and always embellished. They just weren’t always true.

  They’d added the Cassandra Olivia because they wanted me to have options. I exercised those options at the age of four and encouraged everyone to call me Cassie. But Peck could never resist an opportunity to remind me of my hippie roots. To her, I was Stella Blue. Or just Stella. Often, she’d give it the full dramatic Marlon Brando delivery: STELLAAAH! Especially when calling on the phone from overseas.

  She wasn’t the only one who refused to call me Cassie. There was also That-Awful-Jean-Paul. He’d always opted for Cassandra and sometimes Cassandra Olivia because That-Awful-Jean-Paul was Swiss and didn’t believe in nicknames or names that Deadhead mothers pulled from songs.

  I became a Deadhead myself when my mother took me to see them in Germany. I was ten years old. And a few years later, I found a Web site that posted song lists from every show the Dead ever played. The shows were listed by year and I did find one in Hartford, Connecticut, on the date I was born. They played “Peggy-O.” And “Althea.” Both of which could inspire the naming of a female child, I suppose. But “Stella Blue” was not played that night.

  When I asked my mother about the discrepancy in her story, she said, “We take creative license with the fictional narratives that become our memories. Anthologized, these are the tales that become the story of your life.” Right. That was the kind of thing she would say, a too-broad elaboration of one of the many life philosophies she’d cobbled together on her spiritual quest, one that did nothing to alleviate how the slight falsities in her tales bothered me. But when I expressed my distaste for the name my mother always said the same thing: “It could’ve been worse. They could’ve played ‘Bertha.’ ”

  Peck and I were sucked into the crowd, greeting what seemed an endless stream of the same anxious men and gregarious women. There was kissing and squealing and handshaking and we were pulled along by the riptide of her acquaintances. We were on our second round of martinis and Miles Noble had yet to make an appearance when Peck launched into the story of how they met, for the benefit of a small crowd of listeners. Later I would look back at this moment as the beginning of what I would come to think of as a sort of awakening in me, the first in a series of shifts that led me to want to write a different story for myself.

  “The first time I laid eyes on Miles Noble,” she began, “I was about to be kissed.” I’d always known Peck could weave a good tale but now, as she entranced us with her words, I recognized that I could learn from her. She paused before delivering the next line. “By someone else.” Another pause. “And I knew. Immediately, I knew. It was the coup de foudre.” She pronounced the words coup de foudre in a thick French accent, her words now rehearsed and perfectly enunciated, as though she’d performed this script a thousand times, and gotten the timing and pronunciation and the blocking just right.

  “He wore a crisp white shirt, and he looked just like Jim Morrison. He had this thick wavy hair you could just run your hands through. And he was sinewy, with dark skin that would turn bronze in the sun. God, he was good-looking. But it was more than that. He had that thing, charisma, or whatever it is, that just draws you in. And after I was finished being kissed, by a freshman boy whose insignificant name I never retained, I saw that he was waiting for me. It was one of those parties where there’s a keg of beer and too many poets and actors in desperate need of haircuts. I said, ‘Do I know you?’ And he replied, ‘I’ve known you all my life.’ ”

  This was the point in the story when she let out a small, sty
lish laugh and lit up one of her cigarettes.

  As she exhaled a long, slow plume of smoke, I eyed the crowd, looking for Finn Killian. Peck had mentioned that this friend of Lydia’s, an architect who’d lived in the studio above the garage that summer I was twenty-one, might be there that night. We thought we would ask him if he knew how we might open the locked safe in Lydia’s closet. I hadn’t seen him since that summer right after my mother died, when I’d moved through a fog of grief. I hardly remembered him. He’d seemed a distant presence, appearing on weekends and then trying annoyingly to engage me in conversation when I was busy pretending I was Hunter S. Thompson, teaching myself to write by typing out all of Gatsby. (I’d read this somewhere, that Thompson had learned to write by copying Gatsby over and over again, and it was the kind of thing I had to try, if only because it seemed an awfully easy way to go about becoming a writer.)

  I didn’t like Finn that summer. I remembered that he seemed so much older than Peck and me. He had a beard and talked about wine. Later, I’d come to know him better as a character in Lydia’s many letters, always written in her distinctive Catholic schoolgirl cursive on crisp white stationery with a purple border and purple tissue in the envelopes. In them, she described Finn, this architect who was becoming a close friend, as wry. A quality that is uniquely underrated, she wrote.

  He was very tall; that much I recalled. He played the guitar, knew more about the Grateful Dead than I did, and always seemed to be going on about a cabernet that was astute or a Sancerre that was crisp. He called me “kid,” which I didn’t think was necessary. And he had a beard. Need I say more? What made men think women liked it when they grew that pubic-type hair on their faces? Did I mention that my ex-husband Jean-Paul grew a beard the last year of our ill-fated marriage? I later figured out this was right around the time he started the affair with the buxom office manager. He said he liked the way it—the facial hair—defined his chin.