The Summer We Read Gatsby Read Online Free PDF

of person.”
    Suddenly there was an explosion and I jumped. “What was that?”
    He pointed to a riot of color in the sky. “Fireworks.”
    People stopped talking and dancing and mingling and gazed upward, childlike glee on their faces. The handsome stranger whose name I never got and I watched together, standing side by side with our faces tilted to the sky.
    We spent the rest of the evening together on the terrace. I couldn’t help thinking of Jordan Baker’s line from Gatsby , about liking large parties for their intimacy. He was extremely funny. Humor had always been important to me. My mother was quite the wit and she always said she fell in love with my father because he made her laugh. “Find someone who can make you laugh,” she’d advised me, as though it were that simple, as though comedians were just lurking about on the street corners waiting to meet young women and dazzle them with their funny lines. Instead I somehow ended up with Jean-Paul, whose ability to make me laugh existed only when I would repeat his more outlandishly selfish words to my friends, turning them into amusing anecdotes.
    I hadn’t laughed as much as usual in the past year, but that night I made up for it, cackling like a hyena at this odd, funny man whose name I never got. Later, when it should have been time to find Peck and head home, there was a commotion. I heard splashing and a familiar guffawing and I turned. Peck was dancing in the fountain. She had Miles Noble’s Nehru jacket draped around her shoulders and she was kicking up shapely legs, doing the cancan and spraying a crowd of clapping spectators with the drops of water that flew off her feet.
    “That’s my sister,” I said, as it dawned on me—slowly, the way things will dawn , after several martinis—that this was going to be a very strange summer.

2
     
     
     
     
    I t wasn’t just the pounding head, the sour stomach, and the paper-dry mouth that greeted me in the morning. There was also the attendant shame, the worst part of any hangover. I was in the bedroom I occupied every time I’d visited my aunt, wrapped in the white popcorn bedspread, wishing I could temporarily be put into a coma so I wouldn’t have to try to unglue my eyes. I vowed never to drink again.
    Lydia’s house—I’ll always think of it as Lydia’s house, although it was now half my house—was what is generally referred to in real-estate circles as a teardown , a crumbling, shingled place that listed far to one side like an aging dowager at a cocktail party that’s gone on far too long. It was redeemed by its location in Southampton, a proper seaside town of manicured meadows that was part of the string of towns that stretch along the south fork of Long Island and make up “the Hamptons.” The house was in the desirable area “south of the highway,” close to the much larger and more elegant summer homes tucked behind the hedgerows that stand sentry along wide streets leading to the ocean. It was accessorized by a sagging wraparound porch that was far too wide and high for the scale of the little place. Legend always had it that Aunt Lydia won the house playing backgammon. According to my mother, my father, who was Lydia’s younger brother, never believed that version of the tale.
    But Lydia, a renowned beauty with prematurely white hair, had always preferred a more engaging story to one that was true, and in her telling she won the house on back-to-back rolls of double sixes. In her version, the man from whom she won the house—one of her many lovers, she’d always implied—disappeared into the ocean one night and was never seen again, except when he appeared in the form of the friendly ghost who was known to move things around and finish backgammon games left unattended. She’d liked the ghost story so much she’d allowed it to be included in a book entitled Spirits of the East End , a copy of which still sat on the coffee table in the living room.
    My bedroom, which Lydia