She was in full performance mode, pausing to assess her audience’s attention to her tale before she continued. “I was, of course, curious. He gave me The Great Gatsby, you see. Everyone’s favorite book. Right, Stella? Ask my sister.” She gestured toward me like Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune. “I gave her the book and she spent the whole summer copying it down.” Her eyes glittered, as though she too had partaken of the brownies. “Anyway,” she continued breathlessly, “you can see why I might have made certain assumptions.”
“A Gatsby white party to woo you back after seven years. That’s so romantic,” one of them said, sighing. He wore orange corduroy pants that he kept pulling at, as though they were too tight.
“That’s the thing,” she cried out, in preparation for delivering her punch line with a leading lady’s flair and comic timing. I could learn a thing or two about telling a story from my sister. “It wasn’t at all romantic. Because he didn’t even remember giving it to me.”
Scotty was on her other side and patted her shoulder. “Maybe he was just saying that. Maybe he got flustered when he saw you again. And he lied.”
I thought there might be some truth to Scotty’s version. It did seem too big a coincidence that Miles Noble’s first contact with Peck after seven years should be a Gatsby theme party invitation. But my sister shook her head. “He hadn’t even read it.”
There were big reactions all around. “That’s terrible,” said the one in the corduroy. He had perfectly feathered hair, like Jon Bon Jovi, one of Peck’s favorite singers.
“How rude,” exclaimed the third man. He wore stylish tortoise-shell glasses he kept putting on and taking off.
The sensitive Scotty made a compassionate face. “Unrequited love,” he said sympathetically. All night, I’d noticed, he’d been gazing adoringly in Hamilton’s direction while the older man ignored him. “The cruelest of life’s ironies.”
“It was rude,” Peck was saying, talking over him in response to the man with the glasses. “He has terrible manners. And now I find myself questioning what I always thought to be the defining story of my life. If I could believe myself in love with someone who could lie like that, to the point where he didn’t even read the book that became such a symbol of our relationship, then what else could I believe?”
She looked genuinely distraught, near tears. We were all riveted. But then a rueful smile indicated the shift to come. “Then he shows up at the Fool’s Welcome. And steals one of the paintings right off the wall!” She paused and looked around at each of us in turn, sharing her incredulity. “Was he sending a signal? I’m obviously no good at interpreting, since I thought the invitation to the party was a message, and that turned out to be dead wrong.”
They murmured their assent. “He’s definitely sending a message,” said the one in the corduroy. “He wants you to come after him.”
“Or is he just a thief?” she asked rhetorically. “Did he think it was worth something? What do I do?”
“Show up at his house,” the one in the glasses suggested. “Wearing nothing but a trench coat. And stilettos. Seduce him and make him tell you everything.”
“Invite him to lunch,” said the one in corduroy. “With some fabulous people. And then ignore him. You’ll drive him mad. He’ll be forced to confess.”
The glasses-wearer shook his head. He was heavyset, with a shock of gray hair. “Did you know?” he asked. “There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald suite at the Ritz in Paris. Suggest that he take you there, to make up for it. And then ask for the painting back.”
Scotty rubbed his chin. “I don’t think he took your painting. If he came to your house, what he wants is you.”
Peck caught my eye. “He’s our suspect, I’m telling you. I know it. I’m starting to find it a little bit sexy. Very Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney, you know? In that movie where she’s locked in the trunk with him?”
Scotty put an arm around her waist. “Just let him see you in this outfit with those false eyelashes, working those shoes, and he’ll fall even more head over heels. You’re fantastic.”
Peck wore a look of total glee as she basked in their attention. “Literally?” she cried out. “I’ve already forgotten about him. Miles who? I’m in love with all of you.”
She glanced around at them. “But isn’t it a funny coincidence? That he would hire an event planner who would suggest a Gatsby theme party? How could I ever have been in love with someone with such a lack of taste. I mean, aren’t theme parties totally gauche?”
This was greeted with a chorus of noes. A theme party was fine, as long as it was sophisticated. “Fitzgerald will always be immensely stylish,” Corduroy added with a benevolent nod.
All of a sudden, it hit me, in a pot-induced flash of clarity, the kind of thing that often is later revealed to be ridiculous: I knew the combination to Lydia’s safe.
7
To spend one’s childhood abroad as an American is to grow up with a permanent sense of yearning. There’s a place far away that is ours but it only seems knowable through movies, books, and the occasional television program dubbed in German or French or Italian.
I fetishized certain aspects of what I perceived as typical American life. I read obsessively, studying American novels as if they were textbooks, the keys to understanding a country I could know only through words. I specialized in stories about suburban teenage angst. And although I’ve since somewhat lost my taste for it, I adored root beer. As it was not a beverage option at the local café, it became an exotic treat that I was first introduced to at the home of an American friend, the daughter of a businessman who was transferred every two years. Her mother made us root beer floats, with big globs of vanilla ice cream in the glasses of root beer she poured from cans brought over after one of the visits back to the States they called “home leaves.” I had a thing for Kraft macaroni and cheese too, which horrified my mother, a whole grain and fresh vegetable lover. She couldn’t understand why the fake orange and chemical taste made me feel American. I didn’t understand it either.
But my mother had rejected her country without regret, turning her back, she always implied, on the pain she’d known there—like mine, her father had died young, and her mother never recovered, fading away in a haze of alcohol and grief—and the inescapable sadness of the loss of her husband, my father. It made sense to me, her wanting to stay in Europe and not go back. But I wanted to go, and so, every third summer or so, while Eleanor would go on a mission to Nepal or Thailand or Namibia, I went to stay with Lydia at Fool’s House, where I would drink soda by the six-pack, a habit my aunt willingly indulged. I stopped drinking root beer the summer Peck made me try a real beer—I was fifteen and of legal age to drink beer in Europe, as she pointed out, appalled that I’d never tasted the stuff.
I still had a thing for Tootsie Rolls, and when I got back to Fool’s House that night, with a case of pot-induced munchies, I ate through the fresh stash I’d picked up at the supermarket that afternoon before sitting down at my computer to test my instinct about the combination to Lydia’s safe. I was pretty sure I’d guessed correctly, recalling the long, languid conversations about Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton with Lydia on the porch. This would be after what Lydia would call “reading hour,” a spell of time, usually more like two or three hours at a stretch, after lunch, when we would take seats in the rocking chairs on the porch with our books and read happily. After reading hour, there’d often be writing hour, when Lydia would suggest a quick exercise, “just for fun, for the pleasure of the creative endeavor.”
Peck usually skipped reading hour, and always passed on the writing exercises, scheduling a tennis game or heading back to the beach to work on her tan. But I enjoyed sitting there with a good book and only the chirping of birds to break the quiet. Lydia felt strongly about the writer she called Scott, as though she’d known him, and she would often read me a line or two that she found particularly evocative.
I Googled F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was born on September
24, 1896. Finn had been right, I suspected, in his hunch that Lydia would choose such a number, a date relating to one of her favorite artists, as the combination for a safe, and we’d tried the dates that Jasper Johns painted Fool’s House (1962) and Flag (1954) and even his birth date (May 15, 1930) to no avail. But we hadn’t tried the birth date of one of her favorite writers. And this suddenly seemed very Lydia.
I kneeled before the safe on the floor of her closet, the overpowering scent of mothballs tickling my nose. I turned the dial, first one direction to 9, then counterclockwise to 24, and back around to 96. Nothing happened. I sat back on my heels, wondering if I’d been mistaken. I tried again, this time turning the dial several times before stopping at the 9. I tried 9, 24, 18, 96. But that didn’t work. I started to think I’d been wrong, that only someone who’d eaten a pot brownie would come up with such an idea. And with such conviction. But then I gave it another try, leaving off the 18, but spinning the dial twice past 0 first, and the safe door clicked open.
I pulled it toward me. I was about to look inside when it hit me: I should wait and do this with my sister. Even though I was almost certain she wouldn’t have waited for me—Peck has the patience of a sugar-addled toddler—if she’d been the one to figure out the combination, I knew I had to wait for her. It took all the willpower I had to close the safe back up again without looking inside it. Peck deserved to be part of the discovery process. Plus, she would throw a major hissy fit if she was left out of anything.
I let my imagination run wild, conceiving all sorts of scenarios: in the safe was a huge diamond, or a million dollars, or how about a signed first-edition Great Gatsby—wasn’t such a thing the most rare of collectible books? Or would it be a certificate of authenticity, or some other official piece of paper that might indicate that the painting now missing from our wall was actually some rare and valuable thing, desired by museums and art collectors who would pay up for such a piece? Or it could be nothing. I had to keep my expectations in check.
I shut the door. I left the safe locked and wandered through the house, gazing in fascination at the paintings on the walls, most of which didn’t look nearly as bad now. I was stoned. In fact, some of them looked pretty good. Even the two painted by my father no longer seemed so amateurish. I decided I would ask Peck if I could keep the one that had more pinks and purple, if she would agree to take the orange one.
I flipped through some of the books on the shelves, and stared at the photographs in silver frames that populated every free surface. There were images of Peck as a child in her school uniform and a few of me and my mother, her long hair always blowing, in India and South Africa, and, later, with Lydia on top of a mountain in Switzerland on one of her visits. I particularly loved the ones of Lydia and my father when they were younger, wearing bell-bottomed pants and shirts with big flowers on them in sixties fashion. I stared at my father’s face, the dark eyes, short, straight nose, and full mouth that I’d inherited.
Peck didn’t come home while I was still awake and eventually I dozed off with the light on in the bedroom. I don’t know what time Peck came in, but I woke in the morning to the loud rumble of thunder and rain pouring off the porch eaves. Fool’s House felt like flimsy protection against such a force of nature, the sky a mood-altering gray that wrapped the tiny house in a thick blanket of fog. The moisture seeped in everywhere and while Peck slept in, I strategically placed buckets under the places where the roof leaked.
It was hardly cold but the dark morning called for a fire and I piled up the wood in the fireplace to build a big blaze that radiated heat and filled the room with the smell of wood smoke and the glow of dancing flames. Even the cheap-looking art, not quite as fascinating as the night before, looked charming in the mellow lamplight. I waited for Peck in the living room with a pot of coffee and cupcakes for breakfast.
My curiosity about the contents of the safe was an itch I was dying to scratch. I suppose I could have woken my sister; she would be annoyed that I hadn’t. But there was something about the calm of the dark morning I wasn’t in a hurry to disrupt.
The quiet disappeared soon enough, though, when Pecksland Moriarty came down the stairs in a gold lamé dressing gown. This was the sort of attire she assumed most of the world would find totally normal but also unique and cool. She expected to be lauded for such style and when she came down the stairs with enormous dark glasses covering her eyes, moaning dramatically, she posed with an unlit cigarette held elegantly in a tilted wrist, waiting for me to remark on her “look.” I was reading The New York Times and did not offer a comment. This made her sigh and exclaim, “Good God, those boys can party.”
“I thought you didn’t get hangovers,” I said, pouring her a cup of coffee from the pot at my side.
She lifted her sunglasses to squint in irritated fashion at me. “Isn’t that exactly the point I’m making? I don’t. Normally.”
She made her way gingerly to the sofa, easing herself down onto the cushions. “Literally? Half the time you don’t listen to a word I say. You have ADD, Stella. And when you were hungover, I gave you a Bloody Mary, not some mangy little cup of coffee that’s going to do nothing for me.”
“Would you like a Bloody Mary?” I handed her the box of cupcakes.
She sighed. “No.” She took the box and helped herself to one of the cupcakes. “The clean living starts today.”
I waited until the sugar kicked in before telling her. As I suspected, she was annoyed I hadn’t woken her sooner. And annoyed too that she hadn’t been the one to figure it out. “I’m the one with the Fitzgerald thing,” she complained. “You’ve totally copied me. As usual.” She made a face indicating her impatience with me, looking me over as if seeking something else she could claim I’d copied from her. Finding nothing, she continued. “I suppose you think a literary obsession is extremely chic? Even, as in my case, when it’s predicated on falsehood?”
She paused, frowning at me, then stood. “Well, what are we waiting for?” She headed for the stairs, lamé rustling, holding the unlit cigarette in the air in one hand and the coffee in the other. “Are you telling me the truth? You didn’t even peek?”
“Wouldn’t you have waited for me?” I asked as I followed her.
She moved more quickly than one would expect from someone with a hangover. “No way,” she cried out as she scampered up the stairs ahead of me, spilling coffee.
We kneeled in front of the safe together and she clutched my hand in hers. “Oh God, I’m nervous,” she cried, at her most theatrical. “What if it’s empty?”
“I had that thought,” I started to say.
Peck interrupted me, shaking her head. “Of course you did. You’re so negative. Let’s think big, let’s think positive. Now open the damn thing already.”
The combination, 9, 24, 96, worked again, and the safe clicked open. We looked at each other with great anticipation before pulling open the door. Not all that surprisingly, the safe contained no big stash of money, no pile of jewels, and no first edition of Gatsby or any other collectible book. In fact, it almost appeared empty, although a closer look revealed a few of the usual papers: Lydia’s birth certificate, her Social Security card, and then what appeared to be a packet of letters, tied up with a neat ribbon.
Peck sat back on her heels. “I’m so greedy,” she exclaimed, laughing a little. “Expecting the thing to be full of dough. Or no, that’s not it. Actually, I expected a surprise. A surprise of utmost value.”
I sat back too. “I don’t know why, but I had this idea we might find a first-edition Great Gatsby hardcover with a dust jacket. Signed, maybe.”
“What would that be worth?” Peck asked, scoffing. “Nothing. Maybe a few grand?”
“Signed?” I reached for the packet of letters and untied the ribbon. “Those things are worth a lot to some people.”
“I can’t imagine anyone would spend much for an old book,” Peck was saying as I gazed down at the letters in my hand. In the upper-right-hand corner of each
of the envelopes, all the same pale blue tissue paper, was an address on East 51 Street, with no name, written in a neat print.
I held them up to Peck. “What do you think these are?”
She frowned, disappointment on her face. “Whatever they are, they’re not the thing of value. I just don’t know why Lydia had to be so confusing. I’m sure she’s up there chuckling away at us.”
I handed one of the envelopes to her, took one for myself, and we began to read. All the letters were, in neat little block print, addressed to Dearest Lydia from someone named Julian, who signed off each of them as Forever Yours, Julian, or, Impatiently and Infatuatedly Awaiting Your Response, Julian. And, more than once, Desperately Yours, Julian. They were in no chronological order and seemed to span a period of years in which Julian, married to someone by the name of Rita, claimed to be madly and irrevocably in love with Lydia.
“Julian?” I asked as Peck and I each read through the dense and perfectly formed words crammed onto the tissue-thin pages. Some of the letters were three or four pages long, filled on both sides with intense and overwrought proclamations of love. “I don’t remember Lydia ever mentioning that name.”
Peck didn’t look up from her reading. “It’s him. The ghost of Fool’s House.”
This Julian fellow was the original owner of Fool’s House. And yes, they’d played backgammon together. But Lydia didn’t win the house from him that way. She bought it from him, paying off her debt over a period of about a decade, from the sound of it, with money she’d carefully saved and invested wisely. He made it sound as if he had given her a very good price on it because he wanted her to have it, for it to be a place where they could be together and be free. They’d been friends up to that point, but then they fell in love. Or he did.
“Listen to him, he was absolutely insane for her.” Peck read some of the words aloud. “ ‘I can’t eat. Or if I do, I taste nothing. I can’t sleep. Or if I do, I’m tormented by dreams of you until I awake in a sweat, imagining you with someone else.’ ” As we read on, it became evident that Lydia was not waiting around for her married lover to be available while his wife wasn’t paying attention. Lydia had other company. A lot of company, from the sound of it. Not to mention some of those young artists and writers who took up residence above her garage each summer.
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