The Summer We Read Gatsby Read Online Free PDF Page B

had called the “white room” to differentiate it from the room Peck had always taken, which was the “pink room,” contained a wrought-iron double bed and two pieces of white painted furniture. There was a chest of drawers and a little desk at which Lydia had suggested I would write my “opus.” My room was minimalist and spare and had windows that looked out to the scraggly, weed-infested front lawn and a crumbling tennis court. Peck’s on the other hand was wallpapered in a lavish floral and featured a canopy bed with a pink quilted spread. Hers faced the wilted garden at the back of the house.
    A knock forced my heavy eyelids open. “Room service,” Peck called from the hallway. When I didn’t answer, she swung open the door to my bedroom, brandishing a Bloody Mary, complete with tall celery frond, and her dog, a sanctimonious mutt with a pug face and a big-city attitude. In one hand she held the drink. The other hand was tucked under the dog, who was frowning at me most disapprovingly.
    I was the dog’s “godmother,” if such a designation can be applied to a four-legged friend, and as such, I’d been offered naming rights when she acquired the little fellow. To be funny, because I, sadly, had always been one of those people, too eager for a laugh, I’d suggested Trimalchio. This was after the ostentatiously nouveau riche vulgarian in Satyricon that F. Scott Fitzgerald had used as the inspiration for the character of Jay Gatsby. One of the suggested titles for the book was Trimalchio in West Egg , and once I finished Gatsby , Lydia had given me a copy of Trimalchio , the first version of the book that Fitzgerald revised into The Great Gatsby . I never thought Peck would actually take the name for her dog. But she loved it.
    Now she sashayed—Pecksland Moriarty was born to sashay —into my bedroom, in a silk paisley men’s robe with a velvet collar, like she’d raided Hugh Hefner’s closet at the Playboy Mansion, and dropped Trimalchio, who was now approaching late middle age in dog years, unceremoniously onto the floor, from where he gazed up at me in jaded fashion. That dog could really work an attitude.
    Peck sipped the Bloody Mary that I’d assumed was intended for me and gave me her own disapproving frown. She never had much patience for hangovers, not being especially susceptible to them, although she did fancy herself an expert in the art of the cure. “Did you know the Bloody Mary was invented at the Ritz in Paris for Hemingway when he was married to his fourth wife, Mary? She didn’t like him to drink so the bartender invented this”—she stirred the drink with the celery stalk—“the odorless cocktail. He drank it and the next day, when the bartender asked him how it went, he said, ‘Bloody Mary never smelt a thing.’ ” She took another sip. “The eleven o’clock Bloody is a time-honored tradition here at Fool’s House.”
    Of course the house had a name. Apparently all the best ones do. Lydia had named hers after the Jasper Johns painting. This was a gray painting featuring items from the artist’s studio: a broom with a wooden handle hanging by a hinge, a cup dangling from a hook, a stretcher, and a towel. Fool’s House was what Johns called that place where the art came to him. Peck always referred to the house by its full name, Fool’s House, just as she always referred to herself as Pecksland, and to anyone named Kathy as Katherine, or Lizzie as Elizabeth. Peck prided herself on being well-mannered, often to the point of rudeness.
    We were an artistic and literary family, the name of the house implied, with its whiff of the bohemian Hamptons and all the creative souls who’d sought refuge and inspiration in the romantic landscape’s vast ocean and sky and wide, pale beaches. The ramshackle little farmhouse with its wide porch was not the sort of place one would expect to find in this part of Southampton. Or not anymore. Most of the smaller mildewed places had been torn