The Summer We Read Gatsby Read Free Page B

designed. What he wants is a wife.”
    I’d always admired the way Peck could speak with such authority about the unknown wishes of others. She delivered her opinions as though she’d received some divine wisdom that told her she was right, despite any evidence or logic to the contrary.
    She tapped her fingers on top of the steering wheel in time to the music, the Grateful Dead’s “Eyes of the World,” from a CD I’d brought along. “I wonder what he looks like now.”
    Miles Noble lived, for just a summer, in what could only be described, in Fitzgerald’s words, as an incoherent failure of a house . It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Also the ugliest. There were small windows in strange places and a huge arched door and two turretlike structures, one at each end, giving it the feel of a mad castle, and not in a good way. As we followed the line of cars down the driveway toward a gaggle of valet parkers, we both gazed up at the house before us in awe. The front of the house was lined with purple and pink hydrangeas and far too many wood chips, a whole garden store’s worth of bright reddish things. It rose awkwardly out of its landscaped acres of lawn like an ungainly pubescent girl uncomfortable with her sudden size and lack of beauty.
    “Isn’t this fantastic?” Peck asked breathlessly.
    I glanced over at her, assuming she was being sarcastic. I was about to say something about how I’d never seen anything more hideous when I realized her awe at the sight of the house before us was not the same as mine. There was reverence in her eyes.
    “It sure is big,” I said.
    She nodded. “Forty thousand square feet, at least. Indoor and outdoor pools. The gardens are modeled after a place in Ireland.”
    We stepped out of the car and a valet parker handed Peck a ticket. Then we were greeted at a long table by five or six very attractive women in tiny black dresses. Peck took my arm in excitement as she stated regally, “Pecksland Moriarty. And guest.”
    We made our way behind other white-clad arrivals along a path, lined with hurricane lanterns, that led to the back of the house. “I can’t believe Miles lives here,” Peck whispered to me, still holding on to my arm. “It’s out of a movie, isn’t it?”
    “ The Shining ?” I whispered back, but she was too excited to realize what I meant.
    “ Everybody’s here,” she said as we came around the corner to a vast terrace where a sea of people were already gathered. Everybody was obediently wearing white. And hats. Some of the people were smart and elegant. And some were hard and bored. On them, the white dresses and the dinner jackets appeared cheap. But, I couldn’t help noticing, they were, for the most part, an extraordinarily attractive group of people. So this is the Hamptons, I thought, as I allowed myself to be pulled along into the fray with my sister at my side.
    “Look at that,” I said to her, pointing at the lights that spelled out three letters on the bottom of the swimming pool. “What does that say? MAN?”
    “Those are his initials ,” Peck exclaimed. “Miles Adam Noble. That’s cool.”
    “Very existential,” I remarked as we headed to one of several lit-up bars set up on the grass. Everything was blazing with lights, from the monogram in the pool, which was now changing colors, to the trees hung with lanterns and the tables set with candles. Even the flagpole in one corner of the back lawn was surrounded by at least four or five lights, shining upward from the base at the American flag flapping in the breeze.
    As we waited for a couple in matching white tuxedos and fedoras to select something from the many choices of cocktails, Peck shook an American Spirit from a pack she carried in the tiny white box she was using as a purse. She smoked the elegant, old-fashioned way that glamorous women used to smoke, her right elbow in her left hand and the long fingers of her right hand lined up flat against her face. She’d take a