“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 deep drag and then fling her right hand with its cigarette all the way out to the side.
The His-and-Hers pair in the tuxes turned and waved their hands in front of their faces, ostentatiously fanning away her smoke. “How
rude
,” Peck exclaimed as they quickly moved away from us. She blew a stream of smoke at their retreating backs.
She ordered two dirty martinis—and when I interrupted to change mine to a Coke, she exclaimed, “What are you, the mayor of Sobertown?” Peck turned back to the bartender, a pretty older man, one of those character-actor types in a white dinner jacket and bow tie, and clarified. “Make hers a double.”
The bartender gave her a blank look as he poured the vodka. There were small signs on the bar indicating that the bar was “sponsored” by this particular brand.
“She’s a
divorcée
,” Peck felt compelled to explain. She pronounced the word as though she were speaking French, with a rolling
r
and the emphasis on the last syllable—
de-vorr-SAY
.
He handed us each a martini speared with three massive olives and winked at me as Peck clinked her glass against mine. “Big and stiff,” she proclaimed, making sure the bartender and everyone else in our midst could hear her. “Just the way I like them.”
She introduced me to
everyone
, her arm encircling my waist as she showed me off. She bounced from cluster to cluster, sharing an entertaining tidbit of gossip about some person or a sharp observation about another. They were all immediately friendly to me, including me in the small talk that seemed to flow effortlessly from their mouths. Some of the guests whispered in judgment at the lavishness of the party, even as they fanned out to the tins of caviar on ice and mounds of Kumamoto oysters and what looked like sculptures of fresh shrimp on skewers, and lined up for the Nobu chef rolling sushi and the Chinese man in an extra-tall hat wrapping Peking duck in pancakes. There were tiny little cheeseburgers dripping juices and ketchup onto white silk and little slivers of
toro
, a fatty tuna so fresh it tasted like it had been caught that afternoon. There was foie gras on toast and smoked salmon with crème fraîche and a man in a white suit and a sombrero at a table with hundreds of avocados, mixing guacamole to order.
Peck didn’t seem nervous at all, despite her professed anxiety about seeing Miles Noble again, and she drew admiration, particularly from the male guests, some of whom couldn’t help but stare adoringly at her magnificently cleavaged chest as she spoke.
“This is my half sister,” she’d say proudly, as though this, a half of a sister, were a thing so special only she was fortunate enough to have one. “This is Stella Blue.”
Technically this was true. My parents had named me after the Grateful Dead song. (That’s the sort of mother
I
had.) Stella Blue Cassandra Olivia Moriarty. Flows daintily off the tongue, doesn’t it? The Dead played “Stella Blue” the night I was born, or that was the story as told by my mother, the queen of the unreliable narrators. Her tales were always entertaining and always embellished. They just weren’t always true.
They’d added the Cassandra Olivia because they wanted me to have options. I exercised those options at the age of four and encouraged everyone to call me Cassie. But Peck could never resist an opportunity to remind me of my hippie roots. To her, I was Stella Blue. Or just Stella. Often, she’d give it the full dramatic Marlon Brando delivery: STELLAAAH! Especially when calling on the phone from overseas.
She wasn’t the only one who refused to call me Cassie. There was also That-Awful-Jean-Paul. He’d always opted for Cassandra and sometimes Cassandra Olivia because That-Awful-Jean-Paul was Swiss and didn’t believe in nicknames or names that Deadhead mothers pulled from songs.
I became a Deadhead myself when my mother took me to see them in Germany. I was ten years old. And a few years later, I found a Web site that posted song lists from every show the Dead ever played. The shows were listed by year and I did find one in Hartford, Connecticut, on the date I was born. They played “Peggy-O.” And “Althea.” Both of which could inspire the naming of a female child, I suppose. But “Stella Blue” was not played that night.
When I asked my mother about the discrepancy in her story, she said, “We take creative license with the fictional narratives that become our memories. Anthologized, these are the tales that become the story of your life.” Right. That was the kind of thing she would say, a too-broad elaboration of one of the many life philosophies she’d cobbled together on her spiritual quest, one that did nothing to alleviate how the slight falsities in her tales bothered me. But when I expressed my distaste for the name my mother always said the same thing: “It could’ve been worse. They could’ve played ‘
Bertha
.’ ”
Peck and I were sucked into the crowd, greeting what seemed an endless stream of the same anxious men and gregarious women. There was kissing and squealing and handshaking and we were pulled along by the riptide of her acquaintances. We were on our second round of martinis and Miles Noble had yet to make an appearance when Peck launched into the story of how they met, for the benefit of a small crowd of listeners. Later I would look back at this moment as the beginning of what I would come to think of as a sort of awakening in me, the first in a series of shifts that led me to want to write a different story for myself.
“The first time I laid eyes on Miles Noble,” she began, “I was about to be kissed.” I’d always known Peck could weave a good tale but now, as she entranced us with her words, I recognized that I could learn from her. She paused before delivering the next line. “By someone else.” Another pause. “And I knew. Immediately, I knew. It was the
coup de foudre
.” She pronounced the words
coup de foudre
in a thick French accent, her words now rehearsed and perfectly enunciated, as though she’d performed this script a thousand times, and gotten the timing and pronunciation and the blocking just right.
“He wore a crisp white shirt, and he looked just like Jim Morrison. He had this thick wavy hair you could just run your hands through. And he was sinewy, with dark skin that would turn bronze in the sun. God, he was good-looking. But it was more than that. He had that thing, charisma, or whatever it is, that just draws you in. And after I was finished being kissed, by a freshman boy whose insignificant name I never retained, I saw that he was waiting for me. It was one of those parties where there’s a keg of beer and too many poets and actors in desperate need of haircuts. I said, ‘Do I know you?’ And he replied, ‘I’ve known you all my life.’ ”
This was the point in the story when she let out a small, stylish laugh and lit up one of her cigarettes.
As she exhaled a long, slow plume of smoke, I eyed the crowd, looking for Finn Killian. Peck had mentioned that this friend of Lydia’s, an architect who’d lived in the studio above the garage that summer I was twenty-one, might be there that night. We thought we would ask him if he knew how we might open the locked safe in Lydia’s closet. I hadn’t seen him since that summer right after my mother died, when I’d moved through a fog of grief. I hardly remembered him. He’d seemed a distant presence, appearing on weekends and then trying annoyingly to engage me in conversation when I was busy pretending I was Hunter S. Thompson, teaching myself to write by typing out all of
Gatsby
. (I’d read this somewhere, that Thompson had learned to write by copying
Gatsby
over and over again, and it was the kind of thing I had to try, if only because it seemed an awfully easy way to go about becoming a writer.)
I didn’t like Finn that summer. I remembered that he seemed so much older than Peck and me. He had a beard and talked about wine. Later, I’d come to know him better as a character in Lydia’s many letters, always written in her distinctive Catholic schoolgirl cursive on crisp white stationery with a purple border and purple tissue in the envelopes. In them, she described Finn, this architect who was becoming a close friend, as wry. A quality that is uniquely underrated, she wrote.
He was very tall; that much I recalled. He played the guitar, knew more about the Grateful Dead than I did, and always seemed to be going on about a cabernet that was astute or a Sancerre that was crisp. He called me “kid,” which I didn’t think was necessary. And he had a
beard
. Need I say more? What made men think women liked it when they grew that pubic-type hair on their faces? Did I mention that my ex-husband Jean-Paul grew a beard the last year of our ill-fated marriage? I later figured out this was right around the time he started the affair with the buxom office manager. He said he liked the way it—the facial hair—defined his
chin.
I realized as I scanned the crowd looking for a tall guy with a beard that I didn’t have a very good memory of what Finn Killian looked like. Still, I said to myself, I would know him when I saw him.
“Pay attention,” Peck admonished me before she continued her story, through another exhale. “The room fell away. All those earnest college students, still so full of their
potential,
and we talked all night. Oh, I don’t remember what we said, but our eyes were glued to each other the entire time and when it was light out we walked the streets, all the way to the Hudson River and then north. There was a slight breeze and the smell of salt air.”
Here she paused. “That’s
him
?” she exclaimed.
I assumed this was simply an expression of how she felt that evening, walking up the West Side with a good-looking older guy, already successful compared to the college boys she’d been hanging out with. But Peck grabbed my arm with one hand and gestured with the other one, jabbing the cigarette toward the person who’d appeared on a balcony above us.
Later in life, had he lived, Jim Morrison himself wouldn’t have looked like Jim Morrison. But Miles Noble was, well,
ugly
. That sounds meaner than I’d like, but there is no other way to say it. He looked exactly like a frog. Everything about him except, unfortunately, his hair, was thicker than in the photograph Peck had made me look at four times just that morning.
He stood on the balcony surveying the lavish and increasingly loud party sprawling over the back terrace and lawn. He sported a white Nehru-style jacket, like something designed for a maître d’ at a hip Asian restaurant. Was that supposed to be a cool look? Or was he a fashion victim? I was in no position to judge, having been married to a European who wore brown socks with his man-sandals, but even I knew this guy was trying too hard.
The small crowd that had gathered around Peck followed her gesture and we all looked up at the man on the balcony. He didn’t appear to notice.
“I don’t think this was a very good idea.” Peck put the cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe and then tossed it into the flower bed. “We should just go the fuck home now.” But she threw back her shoulders and marched into the house as Miles Noble left the balcony above us. Our group dispersed as performers on stilts passed around test tubes of shots. I stood briefly alone at one end of the wide stone terrace with a fountain in the center, a shallow limestone pool with spewing cherubs and enormous dancing fish spraying water through thick unsightly lips.
As I finished my drink and contemplated another, I was approached by what I took to be a typically good-looking and boyish American with the healthy-looking carriage of a former athlete and the knowing and charismatic smile of the charmer who is certain he will be well received.
I was determined to be uninterested. But I felt his presence as something of a shock, an immediate and intense physical chemistry I’d never experienced before. My determination, in the face of the very strong drinks to which I was entirely unaccustomed, immediately fizzled as his eyes—the palest light brown, the color of caramels—fixed on mine and locked in.
He wore his white dinner jacket as though he’d been born in it, and he said he was sorry for my loss. He didn’t introduce himself but he’d known Aunt Lydia well, from the sound of it, and he expressed his sadness that she was gone. He had slightly long hair, lightened by the sun, that fell over his forehead and curled up where it met the collar of his shirt. But his presence was that of a courtly, well-mannered athlete, one to whom life had been kind. He carried himself with supreme confidence, only slightly bordering on arrogance, and he struck me as someone who’d always been cool, like he’d had one of those American boyhoods during which he’d always sat with the other sports stars at the right lunch table.
I’d always been too cynical to believe in love at first sight, or the “
coup de foudre
,” as Peck would carefully pronounce it. Besides, I was wearing that ridiculous hat. But when he looked at me, something clicked into place in a way that I’d never experienced before. It took my breath away.
He had two martinis in his hand and eventually he held one out to me. “Drink?”