There wasn’t much traffic and in no time we were standing in the plaza in front of the Seagram Building and Finn was showing me what he meant by curtain-wall architecture. He spoke as though he were addressing a class of students and my responses grew more and more sarcastic.
Then we were in the restaurant, which really was stunning, being fawned over by a maître d’ who either recognized and adored Finn or was just making him feel as if he did. He led us to a table next to the pool and presented it with a flourish, as though he knew it would please.
“Do you like it?” Finn asked me. He sounded doubtful, as though I were the sort of spoiled woman who might roll her eyes at his enthusiasm.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, resenting his implication. And it was, although I was confused by his behavior, especially when I saw the prices on the menu. The evening seemed awfully extravagant and yet not in the least romantic, and I couldn’t understand why we were there. He ordered a bottle of wine, and then asked if red was okay. Again, the question seemed phrased for another type of woman, one who would find fault with the choice of wine, who might even send it back.
We ordered our food and then spent the rest of the evening exchanging barbed remarks. I’m not sure who exactly I thought I was channeling, but something got into me that night, and I bantered with him like it was a sport in which I excelled. I did not, however, and I suspect I simply came across as rude. For his part, he seemed to have made some sort of unfavorable decision about me. This brought out the worst in me, and after a few sips of wine, I heard myself making fun of him for being an architect, accusing him of having poor taste, although I’d never seen anything he’d designed. If I thought I was flirting I was failing miserably.
“I designed my own house,” he said, and it sounded awfully pompous to me. That, I think, is when I pointed out that it was awfully presumptuous for a single man to assume a woman he might later meet would like it and want to live there, and the conversation went downhill from there.
He shrugged and took a sip of his wine. “Everybody likes it.”
I suggested that he was arrogant, like all architects, and he pointed out that I hadn’t seen his house. I said I’d never been invited and then he made fun of me for being formal.
“I’m not formal,” I said, sounding exactly like the type of woman he seemed to think I was, one who would be jaded by the Four Seasons and send back the wine and expect an engraved invitation to show up at his house. “I’m Swiss.” It wasn’t the kind of thing I would ever say and I blamed him.
He rolled his eyes and then he reminded me I was actually an American, and I told him I didn’t need reminding, and I believe the word Eurotrash came out of his mouth. By then I’d had a lot more of the wine than he’d had and we’d ordered coffee and dessert and I couldn’t imagine that we would ever be friends again, let alone anything else, after such a disastrous dinner.
“You’re quite a character, kid,” he said to me in a most infuriating way.
“Just because you are a character,” I replied, quoting a line from Pulp Fiction, “doesn’t mean you have character.”
“Really?” he said, making a face. “Movie dialogue, that’s what we’ve been reduced to?”
Dessert, in the form of an enormous puff of cotton candy, was placed between us before I could answer. “You ordered this?” I asked him, annoyed that he seemed to blame me for reducing the conversation when in my view it was all his fault that things were not going well. Why had he even invited me in the first place? And why had he misled me with all that talk of skinny-dipping on the phone? And by the way, I wanted to say to him, I wasn’t interested in being misled. I wasn’t interested at all.
He pulled a piece and popped it into his mouth. “Try it.” I did and it was delicious. The child-friendly dessert seemed to bring both of us back to our normal selves and we shared a couple of laughs as we polished it off.
The ride back to Southampton was a lot more conversational than our earlier trip, and it went quickly. We both seemed to have dropped our defenses, and we chatted easily. When we pulled into the driveway at Fool’s House, nearly all the lights were off. Only the light over the front door was on, creating a welcoming glow. Finn walked me up the steps and we stood facing each other. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll always remember this night.”
“Me too,” he said, grinning down at me as though he only half believed me.
This time I was pretty sure he was going to kiss me and I’d decided I would kiss him back, despite what I believed was my increasingly intense dislike for the man. I found myself tilting my head back slightly in anticipation. But rather than the passionate embrace I expected, he simply pecked me lightly on the cheek and said, “Good night, kid.”
I felt foolish as I slipped off the slightly-too-big shoes I’d borrowed from Peck and padded through the living room. I was disappointed that Peck wasn’t there and I quickly got out of the gray dress, hung it on her door, and got into my pajamas. I’d just gotten into bed with Lydia’s hardcover of The Great Gatsby when I heard the screen door slam. A few minutes later Peck swanned into my room in a long printed caftan, a bakery box in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. “Cupcakes and chardonnay. The perfect way to end an evening out.”
I’d never been so grateful to see her. I was so happy that tears pricked at my eyes. “I’m so glad you’re home.”
She paused to stare at me. Trimalchio had followed her and tilted his head to stare at me with much the same expression. “What’s wrong? And why are you even home? Why isn’t Finn ripping that silk dress off your body and throwing you down on the bed? Why aren’t you two fucking your brains out?” She put the bottle and the box on the chest of drawers and pulled a wine glass from each pocket. “But then, why aren’t I fucking the brains out of the very good-looking guy I met tonight? He was in mergers and acquisitions; isn’t that kinky?” She poured us each a glass of wine and sat on the edge of my bed. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” I said, swiping at my eyes. “I’m in bed.”
“I see that.” She took a sip of her wine and then a bite of the cupcake. “Mmmmm. How was your date?”
“It was fine. Only it wasn’t a date.” The tears were still coming despite my attempt to wipe them away.
“What do you mean? Of course it was. The Four Seasons Pool Room—what else would it be?”
I shook my head, shocked to find myself practically sobbing now. “He said it himself: it’s a tourist site. And I suppose I’m the tourist.” I gazed up at her, my cheeks wet with tears.
“You’re not a tourist.” She looked as horrified as if I had said I was a stripper, or a terrorist. “You were born at New York Hospital.”
“Well, he certainly acted like he was just showing me around, like you would a tourist. There was nothing romantic about it at all. In fact, he couldn’t have been more obnoxious.”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “He’s probably feeling guarded. You didn’t remember him. After he pined for you all those years.”
“Pined?” I scoffed at what I suspected was just her usual hyperbole, the tears stopping now. “He didn’t pine.”
“Oh, he pined, Stella.” She folded her arms and glared at me sternly. “He pined all right.”
“What do you mean?” I sipped the wine she’d handed me and then took a bite of the cupcake.
“Don’t play coy,” she said. “It’s unbecoming on you.”
“I’m not being coy,” I insisted. “I just didn’t think he liked me that summer, that’s all. We hardly talked. And after tonight it was more than obvious that he still doesn’t.”
“He talked. It was you who gave him the cold shoulder. He was mad for you. Totally smitten. Don’t pretend you didn’t know that.”
“I had no idea,” I said, warming at the thought of it: Finn Killian, smitten. With me. But then I quickly dismissed it. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. What’s the opposite of smitten? ’Cause that’s what he is.”
>
“He’s probably just reeling from the cruel irony,” she cried out, performing now. “You finally come back here, after breaking his heart by getting married, and you’ve conveniently disposed of the starter husband. He’s conveniently not encumbered by any of the replacement Stellas he’s tried to convince himself he should like enough to settle down with, and he’s all excited. He puts on that white dinner jacket and shows up at exactly the sort of party he can’t stand. And you don’t even remember him.”
I stared at her. “You’re completely crazy, you know that? It’s the Moriarty mental illness. It’s gotten hold of you.”
She pointed her glass insistently at me, spilling wine on my bedspread. “Not only do you not recognize him, all you do is talk about selling the house and getting the hell back home to Switzerland. Which puts a new twist on being geographically undesirable. So can you blame him if he’s a little careful?”
“Why invite me to dinner at all, if I’m so undesirable?” I protested. “Why bother getting dressed up, driving all the way into the city, eating that fancy meal?”
“Look, Trimalchio,” she said to the dog. “Stella’s getting peevish.”
She grinned at me. Trimalchio too seemed to be amused.
“I’m delighted to be the source of your entertainment,” I groused. “But I still don’t understand why Finn was so rude.”
Peck gestured with her wine glass again, sloshing the chardonnay around. “He’s thirty-five. We’re at that age.”
“We? You’re not thirty-five,” I pointed out grumpily.
“Women reach it by thirty. The age when it becomes imperative that we settle into a home life. And a man, when he builds himself a house without a wife already in place, immediately sets about trying to find one. That’s the stage Miles Noble has reached too. So why would Finn waste his time with you?”
“That’s my point,” I said to her. “Why? And more important, why would I waste my time with him?”
She sat at the foot of the bed and patted my leg through the blanket. “He probably should just stick with Laurie Poplin. And you? You can stick with those Eurotrash literary types you seem to attract like bees to honey.”
This caused a reaction in me, which, of course, was her intention. “Laurie Poplin? The real estate broker? Are you crazy?”
“What? She’s nice. They’ve gone out a few times. She’s mad about him. Thinks he’s a genius.” She was goading me. “Men like to be appreciated. And he always was a leg man.”
“He was not,” I said.
“How would you know? You didn’t even remember him.” She refilled our wine glasses. “All I’m saying is, you should give him another chance. I think you scared him. He was so blown away by how you looked in that dress he didn’t know how to act.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Anyway, there’s no need for another chance. I probably won’t see him again. And I think you’re right: he should stick with the Rockette. They could have tall children together.”
We stayed up until the sun rose, talking about everything and nothing. Not since university days had I spent this kind of late-night time with women, and I’d forgotten how much fun it was. I was falling in love with my eccentric half sister.
9
It was a scene straight out of Hitchcock, the wide sky filled with black birds, hovering above us like crows over a carcass. The birds were mostly of the Sikorsky variety, enormous helicopters flown by not one but two pilots, seating six or eight passengers, and they waited their turn to land on a tiny square patch of asphalt with a white painted H in the center, perched right up against the edge of Shinnecock Bay.
The small square hardly seemed big enough for the black chopper that landed in a froth of whitecaps and wind. As we watched, supposedly taking a break from a casual afternoon ride on ancient high-handled and rusted bicycles we’d found in Lydia’s garage, one of the pilots came around and opened the passenger door. We weren’t the only gawkers. The helipad on a Friday afternoon appeared to attract an audience. There were four or five cars of spectators in the parking lot and more than a few cyclists and walkers and older women with strollers watching the choppers maneuver into a landing. A black Mercedes with tinted windows rolled forward to pick up a dapper bald gentleman in a blue blazer emerging from the helicopter with a vase containing a fresh white flower arrangement in his hands and an attaché over his shoulder.
Behind him was an elegant woman in white holding a brown-paper-wrapped parcel under one arm and a purse on the other. She wore a straw hat she had to hold awkwardly to her head as she hurried to the waiting car, while the little man in a suit and a red tie who’d picked them up passed her to unload the rest of their things. The rest of their things included bags of groceries, a big red cooler, garment bags, golf clubs, endless small shopping bags, and four enormous matching suitcases that must have been heavy, for the little man could hardly drag them. They were the Hamptons version of the Beverly Hillbillies, and it took a very long time for them to get all their belongings loaded into the car. You could almost hear the people in the sky cursing down at them.
“Now that?” Peck shouted at me over the whir of the helicopter as she gestured toward the people overstaying their welcome on the helipad. “That’s bad manners.”
Finally the parade of weekend necessities was over and that bird was free to soar back up, allowing another one to buzz down. The landing looked terribly precarious, the copter tipping from side to side before touching down in a rush of wind and noise and rippling waves. This one took less time to unload, spilling out four golfers and their bags of clubs, each with one small overnight bag. These four didn’t have a ride, a fact that seemed to incense each of them, and they stood in the middle of the parking lot with the bags all around them, all four of them in the same pose, clutching one ear and screaming into the cell phones that were smacked up against the other.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I shouted at Peck as we waited for the helicopter that would dispense Miles Noble. “Some people don’t like surprises.”
“We’re not surprising anyone. We’re simply out for our afternoon bicycle ride. If we happen to bump into someone we know, well, that’s normal. Everyone is always bumping into people at the helipad.”
Three more helicopters landed and took off before Miles emerged from one of them with a phone to his ear. He wore a striped dress shirt with the tails loose over jeans. Just as Peck was about to sail forward on her bike to greet him, he turned and gave a hand to a woman stepping out behind him. She was tall and gorgeous and preposterously chic.
“Fuck,” Peck mouthed in my direction. “Let’s just go.” She looked around frantically. The only way out of the parking lot was in the direction of Miles and his lady friend, who were headed straight toward us as they made their way to an idling car, this one with the license plate MAN3.
“Pecksland Moriarty,” he called out by way of greeting, as if he had been expecting to encounter her there, on her bicycle. The helicopter took off in a rush of gravel behind him and he had to shout to be heard. “Waiting for me?”
“I’ve been waiting for you for seven years, buddy,” Peck cried out in a jocular tone as the helicopter flew away.
The girl—she looked familiar, as if maybe we’d seen her in a Ralph Lauren ad—at his side was checking her BlackBerry, a device my Belgian boss always referred to as “ze Crackleberry,” and seemed unfazed by this revelation. Miles too appeared unfazed. “Hey, I thought you were going to stop by,” he said, still talking loudly to be heard. “Why don’t you come now?”
The woman with Miles went around to the other side of the car and hopped into the backseat without saying hello as Peck explained that we were just out for a ride but we were also checking on the helicopter arrival of some friends.
“Really? Who?” Miles asked Peck.
“Houseguests,” she answered quickly, shouting over the noise. “My friend Nacho. Do you know him?”
“The polo player?”
&
nbsp; She smiled indulgently. “Another Nacho. And two of his friends.”
“There’s another Nacho?” he asked, glancing down at the BlackBerry that appeared fused to his hand.
“This place is infested with them.” At that moment, I adored my half sister. She seemed so brave, her spine erect, shoulders thrust back like an army cadet’s, chest magnificently on display, as she leaned against the old bicycle. Her acting skills might not be developed enough for a career in the movies, but they certainly could be put to enough good use in her everyday life. I could see Miles being drawn in by her. “They’re wild, those Argentines.”
“Well, if you want to come by now, I’ll be home in a little while.” He looked almost childishly disappointed at the thought that Peck and I were going to be entertaining some crazy party boys from Argentina, but he tossed this invitation out casually.
“Maybe we will,” Peck called out as another chopper hovered above us, making it difficult to hear anything.
He paused on the running board of the car, seeming reluctant to go, despite the Ralph Lauren model waiting in the backseat. “I can give you a ride right now.”
Peck shook her head. “No, no. We’re getting our exercise. But we’ll go home and then take a drive over, ourselves.”
The Escalade pulled out of the parking lot in a roar of dust and Peck turned to me, shouting, “I told you we should get some houseguests.”
The fictional Miles Noble, the well-read, well-traveled, well-off version that existed in Peck’s imagination, would have known there was an F. Scott Fitzgerald suite at the Ritz hotel in Paris. He would have been there. Many times. He would have sipped cocktails at the Bar Hemingway and known that it was there that the Bloody Mary was rumored to have been invented. But the real Miles Noble, Peck was surprised to learn, had never stayed at the Ritz.
She brought it up as we set out on what was to be a lengthy and detailed tour of the thirty or forty rooms in the house Miles Noble had built for himself. To hear her tell it, she’d practically grown up at the Ritz, but Miles misread his audience.
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