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down and replaced by oversized ones. But Lydia had made Fool’s House the center of the universe for a merry band of artistic souls, none of whom, to her surprise, ever became famous.
    Fool’s House was known , my aunt would always tell us, for its creative energy, although the people who’d supposedly been inspired by it were mostly ones nobody ever heard of. “Dick Montpelier wrote all of Fire at Sunset here and John Tallucci finished the last twenty chapters of Mister Nowhere on my porch,” Aunt Lydia used to love to tell anyone who’d listen. “Oh, and Rusty Cohen and his muse, Esme, they lived in the studio for a summer while he painted all six of his masterpieces.”
    Lydia couldn’t make art, she always said, so she supported it. She viewed herself as a patroness and a collector, although her taste ran to things that were produced in her presence rather than great works of art that, on a schoolteacher’s salary, she could hardly afford to buy at auction. I was not exactly a connoisseur, and I wrestled with paints and canvas and words on my own enough to know how hard it is to get any sort of beauty out of them, but the stuff that cluttered every nook and cranny of Fool’s House was some of the ugliest art I’ve ever seen.
    Every wall was covered in bad paintings, hung salon-style, three and four high, mostly abstracts or thick oily seascapes and watery sunsets with too-round balls of orange and yellow at their centers. Lydia had never been able to find a cheap poster of the Jasper Johns painting entitled Fool’s House , but she did hang a reproduction, now torn and peeling, of his best-known work, Flag , in the dining room, where a warped round table surrounded by mismatched chairs had been the site of many raucous meals.
    Above the mantel in the living room, enjoying pride of place, was an abstract piece, all dabs and dribbles of brown, black, and silver paint. Neither Peck nor I had ever asked about it and Lydia herself had never brought it up. There were also many framed photographs of the sharp-cheekboned Lydia at various stages of gray with assorted friends and lovers, images of her with groups of people at the many parties she hosted over the years. There were pictures of Peck and me, school photos sent by our mothers and snapshots of us, separately, with Aunt Lydia in Paris, or at the Coliseum in Rome, and together, from the summers we’d spent at Fool’s House.
    Peck handed over the Bloody Mary with ceremonial seriousness. I took a medicinal sip as my prim conscience—that petulant voice of reason—suggested that more alcohol was the last thing I needed. Trimalchio eyeballed me in his judgmental way.
    “Southampton has always been known as a cure-all,” she intoned, like a tour guide. “You’re going to enjoy the health benefits of being by the sea. The ocean air will fix what ails you.”
    “I have a hangover, not a disease,” I protested, taking a sip as the previous evening’s activities came back to me. I’d never even asked his name, the handsome stranger with whom I’d so uncharacteristically spent most of the night flirting and acting silly.
    “Sea air has the same components as lithium,” she announced. “That’s why you feel so good at the beach.” She stared me down in a knowing fashion before continuing. “You’re ailing, Stella. Anyone can see that.”
    “I just drank too much,” I said in protest, not wishing to be analyzed. I knew she was right. I’d arrived at Fool’s House in a terrible state, seized with grief but also with the sense of opportunity. I’d been simply marking time, plodding along in detached and restless fashion, when the news of Lydia’s death dealt me a jolt. I took another sip of the Bloody Mary.
    “Or someone slipped me something,” I added as she watched me, waiting for me to praise the drink. “Was it Ecstasy? Ludes? A roofie cocktail?”
    Peck grinned, passing me two Tylenol she’d been holding in her other hand. She had a pack of