The Summer Invitation Read Online Free PDF Page A

at our age, sharing a bedroom together. We were still girls. Clover was a woman.
    Other times, when Aunt Theo was in New York, the top floor was her bedroom. Clover only lived there when Aunt Theo was away on her travels. One time, we asked Clover where she lived the rest of the year.
    “Out of an orange suitcase,” she said, with that light little laugh of hers.
    “Why orange ?” said Valentine. I knew she was wondering that because Clover always wore blue.
    “It’s Hermès,” said Clover, and explained to us that orange was the color of the Hermes brand.
    I’ve noticed this thing about Valentine: she won’t let things be. I get it when grownups go silent. And I don’t mind filling in the blanks in my head.
    But not Valentine. She kept right at it. She said: “Why don’t you live here? You could sleep in our room, couldn’t you?”
    “Girls! You don’t understand. Aunt Theo believes in alone time. ”
    The way she believed in skirts but did’nt believe in trousers, the way she believed in letters but not e-mail … I was trying to keep track of it all so one day I too could understand.
    “And then,” Clover went on, “if I were here, how would she entertain her gentleman friends?”
    The phrase entertain her gentleman friends was quite beyond us, especially when we both knew Aunt Theo was well into her sixties by now, and even Valentine stopped pushing it. One couldn’t be interested in that side of life then; one simply couldn’t.
    The next afternoon when Clover was out doing some errands, Valentine yawned and said, “You know what I’d like to do right now?”
    “What?”
    “Go upstairs.”
    I was about to say, “Oh, Val!” But what I ended up saying instead was: “Me too.”
    We were giggling as we made our way upstairs. The banister was painted this bottle-green color but the paint was chipping. Well, that wasn’t unusual: most everything at Aunt Theo’s was chipping.
    “Do you think that means she’s very poor or very rich?” Valentine asked.
    “Neither,” I said. “It’s just her aesthetic.”
    “ Her aesthetic? Oh, Jesus. Who are you trying to sound like? Clover?”
    “No.”
    But Valentine had caught me. I was trying to sound like Clover, though I hadn’t noticed it before she pointed it out.
    We went up the green staircase till we got to a landing with the same brown-and-white diamond parquet floor as the lobby of the apartment building. There was a salmon-colored velvet cotton curtain you had to tug at to cross into the bedroom. I liked this odd little space. It made you pause. It made you wonder what the bedroom would be like, rather than you jumping into the bedroom right away. But Valentine pulled at the curtain impatiently and then, all at once, we were standing there.
    Aunt Theo’s bedroom was painted red but a red that had a lot of dimension to it, a lot of roses and oranges enfolded in it. A mysterious red, something I had never seen before, because I’d always thought of red being kind of obvious. On the floor was an Oriental rug that was all olive greens and golds. And on the bed itself was a leopard-skin blanket, soft and touchable and yet kind of dangerous looking at the same time.
    “Cool,” said Valentine, and I knew it was the leopard-skin she was referring to.
    As in the rest of the apartment, there were lots of old books and paintings, and the paintings were mostly of nudes.
    “Come on,” I said. “Let’s keep looking. Clover might be back any minute.”
    We got closer to the bed, where Clover’s pet turtle, Carlo, was snuggled up in a fold of the leopard-skin. We were surprised at first to see a turtle out of its a cage, but looked down only to notice his tiny cage at the foot of the bed.
    “Ah,” said Valentine, leaning over to stroke him. Then she said, “Hey, I think that one’s of Aunt Theo, isn’t it?” and pointed to the painting above the bed.
    It was yet another nude and showed the tall, willowy lines of a beautiful brunette captured in