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cigarettes in the pocket of her robe and she pulled it out, lighting one of her American Spirits with a silver lighter. “So,” she said, blowing smoke directly at me. For someone who was obsessed with manners, she was cavalier about cigarette smoke and old-fashioned in her view of smoking as a glamorous pastime. “There’s a bit of a situation.”
    Trimalchio gave me a pissy look, as if he didn’t think I fully understood the severity of what Peck was saying to me. We have a situation, you hear? A situation .
    “What now?” I asked, rubbing my still-throbbing temples.
    “You really were overserved , weren’t you?” Her opinion of me seemed to have been raised thirty notches by my louche behavior of the previous night. I murmured my assent as she continued.
    “The situation is this.” She spoke as if the words had been scripted for her. In italics. Life for Peck was not a dress rehearsal. “He. Never. READ. It.” She paused, waiting for my reaction.
    “Never read what?”
    Peck rolled her eyes at my obtuseness. “ Gatsby ,” she said, one hand on her hip. “Miles Noble never fucking read it. Didn’t even know Gatsby dies at the end.” She stared down at me as if this were somehow my fault before explaining.
    Apparently the Gatsby theme had been concocted by a party planner with an unlimited budget and little guidance from a single male host with a new house he wanted to show off. The event coordinators hired to pull off the extravaganza had invited everyone on Miles Noble’s contact list as well as adding a few names of their own to yield the list of the five-hundred-something people who had ended up at his house that night. “He didn’t even know I was going to be there,” Peck said now. “I shocked the pants off him. And he didn’t remember giving me the book.” She seemed almost amused rather than saddened or offended by this unexpected revelation that her preconceptions of the evening had been so off base.
    “How could he not remember?” I asked.
    “Because, Stella,” she said, gesturing with her cigarette. “He’s an idiot .” She paused. “Not only that, I’m afraid he’s got horrible taste .”
    “You said the house was fantastic,” I reminded her.
    She shook her head and then presented a revised version of the prior evening. “God, no. I never would have said that. The man is downright vulgar. I mean, a monogrammed pool? Could we be any tackier?”
    “I thought you liked it.” I knew there was no point in even saying it, though. Peck now believed her sensitive taste buds had been offended and she would not acknowledge that she’d initially been impressed with Miles Noble’s obviously lavish spending.
    “The thing I can’t figure out,” she went on, “is how, and more importantly why , he could spend all that time with me back then talking about this damn book.”
    I nodded. I felt a pang of sadness for her, recalling that summer we spent together right after they broke up, when there’d been so many tears that the pages of her paperback stiffened. Even if some of them were crocodile tears, she’d experienced pain. “I’m sorry, Peck,” I said, handing her the Bloody Mary.
    “Don’t be,” she said, after a long sip. “Let it be a life lesson. We never know how big a role we play in someone else’s drama.” She paused, allowing her words to hang in the air like an edict. “Here I had built up this whole story about the two of us and our great love, and somehow I believed his version of the story would be the same. But, of course, that’s not how life works.”
    “He must have been happy to see you,” I said.
    She shrugged. “I guess he was. He kept saying, ‘You look fantastic. ’ Over and over again. And, of course, I couldn’t say, ‘So do you.’ So I asked him to show me around. He has a lot of art. A Jackson Pollock, a Warhol, an Ed Ruscha, stuff like that. No Jasper Johns, though. I told him about Lydia and how she came up with the name for