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The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young women in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.
It was one of Daisy’s moments of intense stillness, rare when she was a girl and growing rarer. It gave her pretty face a slackness and an odd hollowness that suggested that anything might have come in to nest behind her eyes.
but you wouldn’t know it by the way he sat as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
I wondered that Tom couldn’t seem to recognize the barbs in Nick’s words to him, barbs that made Daisy’s eyes glint a little. Acid under the good manners, and I liked that quite well.
Tom and Daisy returned, Tom like a storm cloud and Daisy with her hands fluttering like trapped songbirds.
Brief moments of sympathy and absent-minded kindness did not make a good man, but Tom was also good-looking in a blocky, vital kind of way. Sometimes he forgot that I wasn’t a Nordic like he was, and in that forgetting, he could be kind and thoughtful. There are women who will forgive a great deal for a moment of kindness from a handsome man, but Daisy and the other older girls who had taken me under their wings had taught me not to be one of them.
She sobbed just once, utterly miserable in the way that only a person who is capable of being utterly happy can be, but it had been a long time since she could be utterly happy. The thought of her happiness struck a chord, and now I remembered Jay Gatsby.
It all belonged to another country, because as I snipped around the lion’s jaws, I could feel its hot breath against my hands. It was weighted with a kind of feline impatience and I cut faster, my cuts growing careless and at the same time more smooth. The blades slid through the paper, parting along some curve that I couldn’t see but only felt instead.
As I said before, she was a woman of few and stingy words. Those words would be thrown like sharp rocks at me in the morning, but for now, she only turned to her guests, shepherding them back to the relief of the sitting rooms and the good port.
At Gatsby’s, the clock stood at just five shy of midnight the moment you arrived. Crossing from the main road through the gates of his world, a chill swirled around you, the stars came out, and a moon rose up out of the Sound. It was as round as a golden coin, and so close you could bite it. I had never seen a moon like that before. It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.
Once I got a tiny scarlet glass filled with something murky white that tasted of cardamom, poppy seed, and honey, the last wine Cleopatra drank before her date with the asp,
Her eyes were dilated to bright black shoe buttons and her hands fluttered like sparrows caught on a silvery wire.
When they asked where I was from, and when the first answer did not satisfy, I asked them where they were from; a question they weren’t used to and a sincere look spilled all sorts of things between us.
I wove my way through the crowd, calling to the people I knew, nodding at the people I didn’t know as if I did know them, and keeping an eye out for the man himself.
I wanted, as my aunt might have said, to examine the lion’s teeth, and of course the best way to do that was to stick my head in the lion’s mouth.
Long eyelashes, of the kind they say are wasted on a boy, but I never found them wasted. It made him prettier, and gave him an appearance of innocence I doubted he deserved.
Nick had apparently never seen anything like it, because he watched them, allowing Gatsby to watch him, allowing me to watch Gatsby.
Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him. I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.
I felt strange about it now, as if I was trespassing on territory that Gatsby had claimed with only that one desperate look.
In that moment, Nick was open to me too. Nick Carraway, who had gone to war and come home amid some strange family tragedy, who had blown east like an apple seed, and taken root, improbably, in one of the richest neighborhoods on the island. Nick wanted, so deeply, to be known and understood, and it was something that I couldn’t give him, even if I wanted to. But Gatsby told you with just his eyes and his smile that he did.
He called me careless because he didn’t have the words to sort out how jealous he was of my money and my freedom and how very few people in the world could act as I did.
The pastries were forgotten in the foot well, but their scent, sugary raspberry jam, rose up to mingle with the dried rose petals in Daisy’s pale pink cigarettes.
It didn’t matter if he knew or not, what he felt or not. In these matters, girls were almost always on their own.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, and I decided to pretend she said thank you.
I was an indifferent scholar. I got passing grades when I wanted to.
There was something exhausted in the air as we lay back down. Everything had changed or maybe only we had.
“Someday, I want you to cut me something grand, far bigger than that lion. Make me a house to live in, and a prince to come save me, and of course so many apple trees to scent the air, and a mountain to put it all on, far, far from here.”
Careful, we had to be so very careful all the time, and the reward was this, lying in the dark as if we were the same girls we had been the week before.
He looked, I decided, as if he had tried out several poses before the butler announced me.
Demoniac is meant to be drunk straight, a small amount taken for medicine, a larger amount for pleasure. I split the difference because I wasn’t with friends, and I held it in my mouth for a moment, letting it go partway to warm vapor before swallowing. It was strong enough that I would have coughed without that precaution, and even then I had to sit up very straight, my eyes focused on a spot on the wall opposite from me as the room gently tilted. It put a pull in my lower belly like falling in love, and I enjoyed it even as I reminded myself it was purely a matter of infernal machinery.
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn’t remember him, not in the least, but then he looked up at me. It spun me a little, because it felt as if he were letting me see all the way to the center of him, that empty room, and it wasn’t empty because there was nothing to fill it with. No, there was a mansion full of things and people waiting to fill it, and a legion of demons, likely, standing by to do the same. It was empty because he had refused to fill it, held off, barred the door. It was too easy to see how someone might stumble into such a place and be lost forever. A person could
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“I could find something you wanted. I could give you something you wanted. I’m good at that. I’m the best.” I tossed the rest of the demoniac down because I didn’t want to look at him being right, because he probably was. I hadn’t even reached the bottom of learning what I wanted, and even if he couldn’t give those things to me, maybe I liked that he wanted to try.
If he wanted Nick to know about who he was before, when he still had a soul, when he was only an ambitious young man who loved someone he couldn’t have, well, that was romance, wasn’t it?
You and I are made out of the same stuff, he seemed to be saying. Won’t we have fun? I knew it was a white lie at best, but as we passed through his golden halls, the strains of music drifting up from the garden and smell of money in the air, I realized that he might not think it was. My God, he thinks he’s sincere, I thought with wonder, and perhaps in that moment, I warmed to him just a little more. It was just a tiny crack in my defenses, but it was really all that was necessary.
He looked dubious, but I could tell that wouldn’t last. He had come to Gatsby’s party, he had eaten the food, he had fallen under Gatsby’s spell. It was already too late.
The grand glass doors with the late night behind them were a perfect mirror of the room. In their reflection, I saw Nick’s hungry eyes on me as I walked away, and I could see as well the moment they turned from me towards Gatsby too.
And then? The whole thing slipped my mind. At a distance, it might have seemed as if my entire summer was occupied with time at Daisy’s and a rather remarkable party at Gatsby’s. However, it was a crowded summer, and it was not until later, when I could thread the steps to disaster together like glass beads on a string, that those times stood out at all.
“What’s not to get?” I asked gaily. “I play golf. I go to parties. I like you.”
“Ah, that’s a nice one for you, Jordan,” cried Mrs. Crenshaw, who had after all killed her husband and replaced him with a soldier even prettier than Nick.
I closed the door behind me when I went, and it felt like there were bubbles in my chest and a champagne sweetness. My face was warm, and it had nothing to do with the drinks we had had or the heat that seeped into the apartment through the cracks, giving the whole building a kind of damp sogginess that made the walls swelter in the summer.
Aunt Justine once gave me some advice when I was newly come to New York. If I was going to be passing anything more than time in public with a man, I should always find out what happened when he heard no, whether it was from me, a taxi driver, a waiter, or his employer.
The future had never looked further away that summer. There was too much of the present built up in front of it, the entire city and its surrounding tributaries reaching up towards the hot blue sky. Who had time for the future in a summer like that one?
I smiled wide with my white sharp teeth, and I learned to laugh like the clink of champagne flutes, but even then I never had much interest in sweetness.
I didn’t care much about the map, but I suddenly wanted very much to stand by her as she spoke of mountains and city centers. It was as if kissing Thomas had laid me open to a world where anyone might be kissed, and standing next to Helen as she recited the names of those foreign cities, I became aware that she had a mouth as well.
He didn’t even dare look at Daisy until she called out to him, saying something silly about not being shy. Then he looked at her, and everything in the room just … stopped.
You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.
It was like the moon had settled on the water, casting shards of light on the broken waves. A man and a woman sat in a rowboat, no lantern on the prow, but a white glow charting their figures, the shape of the man’s profile, the softness of the woman’s arms as she reached for him. The darkness and the distance made it impossible to see who it was, even when they stood and kissed like something out of the old Shawnee stories about doomed lovers and descended stars, and all along the shore, the mischievous girls and dangerous boys of Louisville were silenced.
“I don’t care,” I said impatiently. “And if you do, fine. But if you want someone to talk to about morality it isn’t going to be me. I was rather hoping to go walking down by the willows.”
Sometimes, the only excuse for doing something stupid is knowing that you are doing it and being willing to accept the consequences.
I knew that there was something empty in him before, but now I could see that it wasn’t empty all the time. Now there was a monstrous want there, remorseless and relentless, and it made my stomach turn that it thought itself love.
