Biggsy apologized, swearing he had no idea what had happened to the ball machine. He wore a look of false sincerity as he hunched his shoulders up around his ears in his best version of a suitably humbled and embarrassed accident-causer. He was a good performer, so his attempt at looking contrite appeared authentic enough. I could see the man in the coral sweater wanting to believe he was telling the truth. But the charms of Fool’s House appeared to be eluding the couple, as they stared up at our rickety little place with obvious distaste.
Laurie followed them into the house, gushing about a genius architect by the name of Finn Killian to whom she would recommend they speak about a possible renovation. “He would know exactly how to retain the old Southampton charm of this place while giving you the modern conveniences you need.” She spoke about him in a proprietary fashion I didn’t care for, and I wondered, for about the thousandth time, if Finn could possibly be involved with her.
Laurie made it sound as though she and Finn were a couple, which irritated me far more than it should have. She also made it sound like he was more talented than God, but even the promise of such a divine connection didn’t appear to be enough to win over the couple who would thereafter be known as the Cashmeres. They went back out to their car, a Volvo with a Princeton sticker on the back. Biggsy’s plan to annoy and disturb had worked.
“Not to worry,” our real estate broker said as they pulled off. “Laurie Poplin is on this. But next time, make sure your houseguest stays out of the way.”
“He’s not a houseguest,” Peck explained patiently. “He’s the Fool-in-Residence. You need to understand the difference, if you’re to understand this house. We have an artistic legacy to preserve. We can’t dump the house on just anyone who comes along.”
“Peck, we’re not exactly in a position to be selective,” I pointed out. “Last I looked nobody was lining up to hand us a check.”
Laurie nodded, like she was taking it all in. “A house out here is an identity. Most buyers have yearned for this for a long time. There’s almost an expectation that they deserve it. But it has to be the right kind of place. A house that reflects how seriously they take themselves. That couple? They’re not interested in artistic legacy. But someone else will be. And Laurie Poplin will find that someone for you.”
Before we headed into town to meet the Girls we told Biggsy to clean up the tennis balls.
“Any more of these situations and my baby sister’s going to kick you the hell out of here on your ass,” Peck called down to the tennis court, where he was bouncing one of the balls on an old wooden racquet.
The hedgerow was a blur of green as Peck sped into town. “We’re going to have to ask him to leave,” I said, gripping the armrest as we took the turn around the pond a lot faster than seemed safe.
Peck glanced over at my white-knuckled grip and made a face. “We can’t let him go until we get the painting back. What if it really is a Jackson Pollock?”
Our research the night before had proved inconclusive. We’d Googled images of Jackson Pollock’s work when we got home from Miles’s house and compared them to the painting in the background of the photograph Finn had given me. There certainly seemed to be a resemblance between some of them, but it was hard to tell anything more than that.
“I’m not so sure,” I said, repeating my words of the previous night.
“If we can sell it we might be able to keep Fool’s House,” she mused thoughtfully.
“Lydia never expected us to keep Fool’s House,” I reminded her.
“Lydia never expected to die when she did either,” she said softly, which quieted us both into contemplation until we reached town.
The parking lot behind picturesque Main Street, with its policemen ready to give tickets at the slightest infraction, was almost full, but we found a spot and pulled in next to an enormous man who glared at us from behind the wheel of what looked like a toy car.
“Don’t tell the girls about the painting,” Peck said as we strolled through town.
I was surprised at this. She was one of the earliest Twitter users, the type of person who would tell her friends, and anyone else who would listen, every detail of her life. “Why not?”
“We shouldn’t speak about an ongoing investigation,” she said, only half joking. “And they’re always so opinionated.”
We spent the rest of the day wrapped in a warm blanket of gossip, laughter, and fashion. I’d been sorely missing the group of friends I’d left behind in Lausanne—we’d been e-mailing back and forth, which wasn’t the same—but the Girls were very good company and Peck was at her imperious best. I never realized how much I would love having a sister. We had cheeseburgers and onion rings at the luncheonette and Peck ordered a lime rickey. I tried a root beer float for the first time in years. “Remember how you used to be obsessed with that stuff?” Peck cried out before turning to the others to explain. “When we were little we’d come out to stay at Fool’s House, and the first thing she’d do when she got there was go to the fridge and get herself a can of root beer. Lydia bought it by the case and she’d guzzle it down all day long. Never gained a pound either, which really pissed me off.”
I grinned at her, enjoying the memory. “Then you made me drink a real beer and I lost my taste for it.”
“I should hope so. You were, like, twenty.”
“I was fifteen,” I pointed out.
“Exactly my point,” she said. “You were far too old not to know how to drink.”
Real estate was, as usual, a major topic of conversation. The Girls, none of whom actually owned any real estate, had opinions about it nonetheless, which they were more than willing to share at high volume. Apparently they had opinions about me as well, and Peck presented their thoughts as a collective conclusion, as in “The Girls agree with me that you should move to the city.”
“Everyone should live in New York at least once,” Sasha said, nodding at me.
“We know everyone in the magazine business,” Lucy exclaimed. “We can easily get you a job.”
“Once you live in New York,” Betts added, “you’ll never live anywhere else.”
“That’s what happens to us New Yorkers,” Lucy said, scraping clean a bowl that had contained a triple order of fresh peach ice cream. “We can’t move. That’s why we’re all single.”
“It’s true,” Sasha added. “I let the love of my life leave because he moved to Düsseldorf.”
“And how about me with Miles?” Peck chimed in. “I let him go off to Hong Kong. He broke my heart clean in two.”
Betts waved her spoon in my direction. “Shut up, all of you, you’re scaring her. Now she’ll never want to come, or she might end up like us. We’re spinsters. All we care about is our careers and each other.”
“She’s not single, she’s a divorcée.” Peck could never say the word without the French accent, just as she could never refer to a Target store as anything but Tar-jay.
Betts shook her head. “Divorcées are leathery blondes on bar stools sucking down Absolut Bay Breezes. We’re all simply single. As in free.”
“I’m single and happy that way,” I clarified.
“We are too,” Sasha said, nodding in approval. “We don’t rely on men for happiness. Your girlfriends become your family.”
“God, listen to you. I’m going to throw up,” Peck interjected. “Besides, Stella’s gone on a couple of dates with Finn.”
“One date,” I said. “More of a business dinner.”
“I thought he was seeing that tall woman.” Lucy looked to the others for confirmation. “The former Rockette we met at Christian’s party?” She glanced at me and must have caught the alarmed look on my face. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s probably not even true.”
“No, it probably is,” I said. “It’s okay. I couldn’t be less interested. He’s not my type, anyway.”
Peck was staring at me. “Well, you’re his type.”
“You’re everybody’s
type,” Sasha said, patting my hand. “Smart, funny, natural. Forget about him.”
I did try—Finn who?—as we made our way down Main Street to deal with the fashion situation. But I couldn’t get the image of him out of my mind, first imagining I saw him on the corner, when we waited for the light to change, and then again across the street.
“Lucy’s the ultimate Fashionina,” Peck said more than once as we headed into one of the boutiques lining Main Street. Whatever she was, Lucy was good at it. The pale green chiffon dress she’d found was pretty and perfect and they found another dress for me that I also really liked. The second dress was black and too expensive, but it fit like it’d been made for me and I figured it was practical, as I could wear it anywhere. When I went to pay, Peck intervened.
“No, no,” she insisted, waving away my wallet. “This is on me.”
“I have money,” I said. I didn’t make much at the magazine but I hadn’t bought clothes in a long time. I took out my credit card.
“Listen to her, Miss Moneybags,” Peck cried out. “I want to buy this for you. It’s a present.”
The Girls were watching us. “You don’t have to buy me a present,” I said, trying to keep my voice low.
“But I want to,” she said, making no effort to keep her own voice down. “It’s what big sisters do.” She grabbed the pile on the counter, adding a beautiful subdued yellow dress she’d picked out for herself to wear that night, and thrust it at the saleswoman with her credit card. “Besides, when we sell our Jackson Pollock we’ll be rolling in it, Stella.” She whispered this last statement so the others wouldn’t hear her.
11
“Hey,” Miles called out to the group that was already gathered on what he called the observation deck, on the third floor of his house. “This is Pecksland Moriarty. The actress,” he said, appealing to her vanity. “And her sister, Cassie,” he added, gesturing at me. “From Switzerland.”
“I didn’t know you knew Miles Noble,” one of the women cried out to Peck. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, and she had on her tiny elfin hand a diamond so big it looked like she could hardly lift it to wave at us. She had ironed hair that looked like a wig, extensively highlighted with honey tones, and she was almost but not quite pretty in a carefully cultivated way.
Miles grabbed Peck around the waist. “She knew me before I was Miles Noble.” He seemed to want to present her in a certain light, as though he wanted to convince her and the others that she was special to him. Something in the way he pulled her toward him made me certain the invitation to his Gatsby party had not actually been the casual result of a thorough event-planning team.
“We were college sweethearts,” he was saying. “Well, she was in college. At NYU. I was poor and struggling, trying to make my way in the world. When she left me, I was such a mess I had to go all the way to the Far East.”
Peck made no attempt to correct this version of things. In fact, I could see her revising her own story on the spot. “Marni,” she cried out. “I heard you were going to be here. Miles said you were excited to see me.”
Marni looked startled to be reminded that Miles had told her Peck would be there, while a red-haired guy in a red shirt, whose name I was told was Ollie, bowed comically in my direction.
“I thought your name was Stella,” he sang out. “I met you at the Gatsby party. I was the one in the white dinner jacket.” He laughed at himself. He vaguely resembled Conan O’Brien. “This is my wife, Heather. We don’t live here. We’re permanent houseguests.”
His bottom-heavy wife sat in a lotus position on one of the director’s chairs positioned around the teak deck and she didn’t move to greet us as she spoke. “As long as you bring a nice gift and send flowers and a note afterward, you could spend the whole summer houseguesting.”
“But you must handwrite the note,” Ollie continued, holding up one hand like he was writing in the air. He had the air of an entertainer who knows he is expected to sing for his supper. “You can’t let the girl in the flower shop scribble something. And wine is always appreciated. We’re fond of the full bagel and smoked salmon breakfast from Russ and Daughters, aren’t we, honey?”
“I’m writing a book,” Heather announced airily to nobody in particular. “Houseguesting in the Hamptons.”
Miles had helped himself to two of the canapés on a tray and held them out to us. He introduced us to a few of the others—Marni was apparently the very recent third wife, as he whispered bitchily to us, of an older man who grunted at us—but not to three women clustered off to one side in cocktail dresses and inordinately high heels who looked like they’d wandered in from another party. The woman who’d ridden the helicopter with Miles was not among them.
“They have four kids,” Miles said of the houseguesting couple, through a mouthful of caviar on a slice of potato. He accidentally dribbled some of the caviar onto his shirt and then scraped it up with his finger and popped it into his mouth, leaving a little grease spot. He tossed three more of them into his mouth in quick succession.
Ollie looked up from his BlackBerry. “Four kids, four dogs, four nannies.”
“Four is the new three,” his wife added.
“I thought everyone was having five now,” Peck tossed out, which didn’t seem to please Ollie’s wife at all. Clearly four children was an accomplishment. Having four children trumped couples with three or two and especially oddballs with just an “only.” Four was status. Or it was, until all those damn people started having five.
Marni chimed in with “I have two stepchildren,” but that didn’t seem to count to Heather Bosley, because she turned her back and didn’t respond.
“He’s a major art collector,” Miles informed us about Marni’s husband, Gordon, the grunter who had lifted a weak hand in greeting. One didn’t get the sense that charm was the reason Marni had married him. He appeared seasick, slumped in his seat with one hand on his stomach. Marriage obviously agreed with him.
“We’re the newlyweds,” Marni explained while her new husband, jowly with a beefy belly, rubbed his concave chest. He looked surprisingly morose for someone who’d just tied the knot and was, theoretically, still on his honeymoon.
“You should see his Pollocks,” Miles added.
“And books,” the older man said, shrugging his shoulders. “First editions.”
“I keep trying to tell him he should collect jewelry!” Marni tossed out, laughing at herself. She was the only one. “But he doesn’t listen to me. Is that my fate as a married woman? Everyone keeps telling me husbands don’t listen to their wives.”
Her husband ignored her. He seemed to be regretting the rash decision that had led him to leave his second wife—of fourteen years, I would later learn from Peck—for this much younger woman.
“Ask him about your painting,” Miles prompted Peck. “He knows a lot about Jackson Pollock. He’s the one who told me to buy mine.”
“Weren’t you looking to buy another one?” Gordon Little asked Miles. He spoke in a monotone. “I heard you’ve been sniffing around.”
Miles held up a finger to shush him. “Don’t say that in front of these two. They thought I stole one from them.”
Gordon stared at him as though he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to believe Miles wasn’t the thief. “We weren’t going to tell anyone about that,” Peck told him in a dramatic stage whisper that made Gordon perk up with interest.
“About what?” he asked Peck.
She sighed, as though her hand were being forced, and then went on to explain about the house we’d inherited and the now-missing painting inscribed “For L.M. From J.P.” on the back, leaving out the part where she had suspected Miles of taking it the night of the party.
“It’s unauthenticated?” Gordon asked, sounding slightly more interested. “Not signed, obviously?”
“Except for his initials on the back,” Peck was quick to add.
He pursed his lips together and looked at Miles. “You think it’s
an early one? Like yours?”
“I never saw it,” Miles said, his interest picking up. “But it could be, couldn’t it?
“Do you have that picture with you?” Peck looked at me but I hadn’t brought the photo of Lydia and the painting with me. “The only image we have shows the painting in the background. It was there above the mantel for as long as I can remember.”
“You think your aunt knew Jackson Pollock?” Gordon asked us.
I shook my head. “That part doesn’t make sense. She would have been a child when he died.”
He went on to ask a lot of questions about Lydia and her art collection in his disgruntled fashion while the others gossiped and Ollie leaned over to engage me in our own conversation. He asked the question that always drove all the Europeans into fits. “What do you do?” That-Awful-Jean-Paul in particular always used to complain about it, perhaps because he’d never had a suitable answer.
I told him I was writing a novel—there was no need to mention that I’d been starting this book since I finished college and it currently existed only in the notes I’d been jotting down that summer—and he went on to reveal, eagerly and apropos of nothing, that he’d gone to Harvard.
The three women off to the side never sat with us or greeted us as the sun set. They stood together as the rest of us chatted, and then, as if on cue, they all filed up and kissed Miles on each cheek, one after the other, saying good-bye. “Behave,” he yelled after them as they clomped down the steps in their very high statement shoes.
Peck was still talking about Jackson Pollock and our missing painting with Gordon Little. “I’ll check in with some dealers too,” he offered as his wife listened carefully, eyes darting between Peck and her husband, who seemed to be directing his words at Peck’s twins. “If there’s a possible Jackson Pollock out there, I’m sure someone will know about it.”
Ollie said, for my ears only, “I studied art history at Harvard.”
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