The Summer We Read Gatsby (12 page)

“Oh, look, there’s Laurie Poplin,” Hamilton cried out with enthusiasm as we walked back down the Samuels driveway. He waved his fan at a horse-faced woman in a minuscule tennis skirt that highlighted a God-given gift of impossibly long, shapely legs.

Laurie Poplin was a Rockette. Or had been. She was one of those tall-drink-of-water types who’d made a living off her legs. Now she was divorced and still using the legs, selling real estate, the kind of broker who advertises with photographs of their various listings in local magazines. Her ads included an image of herself, taken a good ten years ago, in a predictably tiny baby-doll dress. The headline on her double-page spread claimed LAURIE POPLIN IS THE HAMPTONS.

“This is the real estate broker,” Hamilton said as she drew closer to us.

She looked both Peck and me up and down in a competitive manner and appeared to determine she came out favorably. This decision allowed her to be friendly, and she waved one well-tended hand in our direction. Her hair was dyed an ash-blonde that might have been called “champagne,
”
and the tapered nails were painted solid pink to match her plastic-looking pink shoes.

“Laurie Poplin is here to help,” she exclaimed. We were to learn that she would often refer to herself in the third person with her full name. “If anyone can sell your place, Laurie Poplin can.”

Hamilton invited Laurie to come back to Fool’s House with us and take a look around, and she nodded vigorously. “I was just going to pop in here for a minute. And then I’m meeting Finn Killian. You know Finn, don’t you? For tennis and then lunch.”

A sudden wave of jealousy washed over me as she kept talking. What was Finn doing playing tennis and having lunch with such a woman, a woman with the plastic pink purse and shoes that matched her nail polish? “I can come back here later,” she was saying, as I quickly dismissed any thoughts of Finn. I wasn’t at all interested in him, I reminded myself. And even if I was, well, I wasn’t. End of story.

Laurie chattered away about all the houses she’d sold recently in our neighborhood, including the one now belonging to the Samuelses, as we walked back to Fool’s House, where Biggsy was diligently mopping the porch floor. Laurie extended her hand to him with a huge, ready smile that appeared to have many more large teeth than the average person’s.

“Laura,” Peck said, because she insisted on doing that, eliminating nicknames in an attempt to be charmingly old-fashioned. “This is Biggs. The current Fool-in-Residence.”

The Rockette was grinning at Biggsy, still holding on to his hand. “It’s
Laurie
, not
Laura.
And I’ve met
you
before.” She gave him an appraising look, like a cougar eyeing her prey.

“Did we date?” He smiled charmingly back at her. He was kidding, of course, but she appeared to consider the possibility. One got the impression Laurie Poplin had been on a great many unsuccessful dates. There was something poignant about her eagerness and her plastic shoes and the truly spectacular legs, as though she thought that if only circumstances had been
slightly
different, her life might have been a success. But she lived in Southampton because it was cheaper than Manhattan and there was a decent public school for her daughter, and not, as she would go on to claim repeatedly, because she
loved
the beach. And etched on her face was the unfulfilled potential and the many small disappointments that had led her to this place where she was forced by virtue of her own personality to pretend it had all gone exactly according to plan.

“Biggsy is a piece of art,” Peck called over her shoulder as she moved toward the front door ahead of the rest of us. “He’s
interactive
.”

Laurie was looking understandably confused as Biggsy shook his head. “I’m just an artist.” He’d told us he became an artist so he wouldn’t become a
criminal
. His work was about the search for identity, he said, how we find a sense of self without the benefit of context. He was most well-known in the gallery world as a video artist, he told us, although I suspected he was
well-known
in the same way that the previous inhabitants of the studio, Dick Montpelier and his unread novel and Rusty Cohen and his six nude masterpieces, were
famous
.

Peck led all of us through the house, giving Laurie Poplin the tour, while the real estate broker took notes with a dubious pursing of her pink-glossed lips. Hamilton added in a few comments of his own.

“You can’t sell this house to anyone who will tear it down,” Biggsy said to her as we traipsed back down to the living room, where the hook above the mantel served as a reminder of the missing painting. “Nobody appreciates architectural integrity any more.”

“Lydia wanted the house sold,” Hamilton added, repeating what he’d told us earlier. “She’d been wanting to sell it for the past two years.”

Biggsy looked horrified. “That can’t be true. She never said anything to
me
.”

Laurie Poplin gave a nervous giggle and then said she had a couple who were perfect candidates to buy the house. “Old money as opposed to new,” she explained, seemingly enjoying her sense of herself as astute master of social nuances. “Old money likes a place with a sense of history. They don’t want to spend too much and they can’t buy new. It has to have a pedigree.”

We started to talk about price, which made Biggsy roll his eyes in disgust and leave the room. “Pricing should be very aggressive,” Laurie said. “That’s the only option, if you absolutely have to sell.”

“We don’t absolutely have to sell,” Peck said. “Who says we
absolutely
have to sell?”

“Darling,” Hamilton intoned. “You do have to sell this house. It’s all right.”

Laurie Poplin was used to this kind of reaction. “It’s going to have to be a rock-bottom, too-good-to-be-true estate-sale price to get any action.”

This prompted Peck to cry out, “What am I, an aging hooker, that I need
action
?”

“I was under the impression . . .” Laurie said, drawing on her reserves of patience. This is why estate sales were such a pain in the ass, she seemed to be thinking. “Just to clarify? That we were trying to get this done as quickly as possible. That’s usually how it is when it’s a question of settling an estate.”

“We are,” I told her. “Thank you very much.”

She turned to me. “Well, this couple I have in mind, they know what they want. They’re in a position to move quickly. They love the location already. Location. Location. Loca—”

“Bring them by any time,” I said, interrupting her.

“Not
any
time,” Peck quickly protested. “What if we’re sleeping? What if we’re entertaining? What if we have
gentlemen callers
?”

“They’ll be out here all week,” Laurie exclaimed with the glee normally associated with an Oscar nomination. There were quite a lot of teeth involved. “They’re
houseguesting
.”

“Everyone has houseguests,” Peck complained to me. “
We
should have houseguests.”

When I didn’t respond she told me what my problem was. She was fond of telling me what my problem was. “You’re a terrible snob,” she would say. Inevitably Trimalchio would look up at me, as he did now, as if to say, “Me too, I’m a terrible snob. Although I prefer
discerning.
”

Now, apparently, my problem was that I was immature. “Literally,” she cried out. “You’re a
fetus
.”

“Oh, just the opposite,” Hamilton told her, coming to my defense. “Your sister is old beyond her years.”

“I’m not saying it like it’s a bad thing. She’s charmingly naïve,” Peck explained while they all listened. “But she lives in her own lala land in her head. Look at her, all curled up inside herself like a pill bug.”

“I’m right here,” I reminded them.

“Well, it’s true,” Peck said to me. “It’s time for you to grow up. You have to shed that protective layer and come out into the world. That’s the only way you’ll learn how it
really
works.”

The Rockette must have decided she’d heard enough, for she headed off, giving us a jaunty wave—“Laurie Poplin will get it done!”—as she let the screen door slam shut behind her.
Thwap.

5

 

 

 

 

T
wo days passed before Finn dropped by to play backgammon, not that I was counting. Not at all. Peck and I were busy. We spent those days arguing about what to do with the things Lydia left behind as we tried to sort through them. And I’d written a long e-mail to my editor outlining in comic detail my first few days in ze Hamptons. “Send more,” he’d commanded. “This may be a column. ‘My Summer Vacation.’ ” The locksmith we’d brought in to open the safe didn’t seem like he could crack even a barn door, let alone an industrial-strength safe, but he handed us a bill anyway. Miles Noble, according to the assistant who answered his phone when Peck called him, was “unavailable,” and would “return” when he was back in the country. And we’d found no clues that might explain why he or anyone else might have walked off with Lydia’s brown-and-white painting.

When I came across the backgammon board tucked onto the bookshelf, Peck and I agreed to take a break from our ineffectual organization of Lydia’s many belongings and play a few rounds. “I’ll bring out the iced tea,” she said. “You set up the board.”

I’d set up the game on the table on the porch and was waiting for her with Lydia’s hardcover
Gatsby
in my lap when the Fool-in-Residence appeared from across the driveway. He had a piece of paper in his hand.

“What are you reading?” he asked, in a congenial tone. I held up the book so he could see the title.

“
The. Great. Gatsby
?” He read the words as if he’d never heard the title before, as if this were just a book, and not required reading. “Any good?”

I nodded. “Some people say it’s the great American novel.”

He shrugged his shoulders, indicating that what
some people
say about books didn’t interest him one iota. As if books were one of those things, like buggy whips, for example, that are no longer relevant to modern living. “Don’t tell me what happens at the end,” he said. “I hate when people tell me what happens at the end of a book.”

Peck came out to the porch with a pitcher of iced tea. “What’s that?” She pointed at the piece of paper in Biggsy’s hand.

He held up what looked to be a letter from Lydia, a sheet of her distinctive stationery covered, front and back, in her flowing cursive. “The nuns used to beat it into us,” Lydia would tell us. “Penmanship is important.”

“I thought you might want to see this,” he said, holding it out.

Peck took the letter from him and started to read it aloud. “ ‘Dearest,’ ” she read. “ ‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed our weeks together. You are family to me, only better, for our friendship is unencumbered by the emotional baggage between blood relatives.’ ”

Here Biggsy interjected. “She kept talking about wanting to introduce me to you two, her nieces.”

The language was unmistakably Lydia’s. She mentioned a mille-feuille they must have shared somewhere and a debut novel she’d enjoyed while on the train from Hamburg. She was curious, she wrote, to know how the piece he’d shown her was received at the Basel Art Fair.

“ ‘They say you can’t choose your family but I say you can. You find family in the people who fill your world and bring you joy,’ ” Peck read aloud. “ ‘We must redefine the word to allow our gay and lesbian friends (I’m thinking of Hamilton as I write this) to marry, and we must allow it to include the close friends who, in the absence of a traditional romantic relationship, or perhaps in addition to it, are our loved ones.’ ” She turned the page. “She goes on to some details about a party she was giving and she signs it, ‘With fondest love, Lydia.’ ”

It certainly sounded exactly like Lydia. I’d received many such letters from her myself and had saved every one, often rereading them. She’d written in such a vein about Hamilton and about Finn, and also about a few of the women who had been such close friends they’d become family, but I’d never heard her speak that way about anybody by the name of Biggsy. Usually the person occupying the space above the garage only stayed for a summer and, with the exception of Finn, the son of her good friend, they were a transient bunch.

Peck and I had been the only people actually related to Lydia left in the world for the last twenty-five years. Her parents, my grandparents, were both only children. Her mother had died very young, when Lydia was twelve and her much younger brother, my father, was only a baby. Their father had done what he could to raise them, but he succumbed to lung cancer before my dad was out of college. There were no cousins, no elderly aunts or uncles, unless there were some Moriarty relatives still in Ireland.

So it had always made sense when Lydia would speak of family this way. I’d taken her advice, drawing around me a small band of female friends whom I adored at home in Lausanne. There was Kelly, the wittiest one, a half Irish and half Lebanese chef married to an American man who wanted to move back to Philadelphia. And Patrizia, my university roommate, had published several books about her family that became bestsellers in Europe, and had helped get me my job at the magazine. Tessa and Julie were both from New Zealand and had gone to hotel school. These were the women who helped me through my mother’s death and my breakup with That-Awful-Jean-Paul. I missed them suddenly, with a pang, especially Kelly. She would have had something funny to say about the absurdly good-looking young artist in our midst.

Biggsy folded the letter carefully and tucked it into the side pocket of the swim trunks he was wearing. He moved deliberately, like an actor trying to get the blocking right, with the grace of someone trained to use his body expressively. “Don’t you get it?”

Peck was shaking out one of her American Spirits from the pack and she lit it with a dramatic flick of a lighter shaped like a pig. She squinted at him, inhaling deeply before she asked, through the exhale, “Get
what
?”