The Summer We Read Gatsby Read Free Page A

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