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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.
There was a briefly startled look on Daisy’s face, as if she had forgotten any world where we did not merely drift along the ceiling of her enormous house, and then she took my arm.
He looked like a polite man, though of course you can never tell.
Acid under the good manners, and I liked that quite well. More interesting by far than the war hero was someone with some bite to him, and I thought that rather a lot of people might not know that about Nick.
He looked after them for a moment, and you could almost feel sorry for the baffled look on his face. One got the idea that at some point, something in his marriage had gotten away from him, but damned if he could say what, or if he should miss it, or if he missed it at all.
I tried to keep myself from being touched, because it was easy sometimes, when it came to Tom. 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.
“In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing.” “Good night,” I called back, rolling my eyes. “I haven’t heard a word.” As if I needed Daisy’s help getting into the closet with a man who looked at me like Nick did. My history in closets was well established from Louisville, and in New York, with its wealth of cars, breakfast nooks, private balconies, and boathouses, I scarcely had to rely on them at all.
They had the same pale eyes, the same generous and mobile mouth, the same way of carrying their weight as if it were nothing at all, and yet you would never think they were related, let alone the same man. Of course, the young lieutenant from Camp Taylor still had his soul, and by 1922, Jay Gatsby of West Egg had no such thing.
“Death doesn’t come to Gatsby’s” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. Certainly ugliness didn’t, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home?
What Gatsby’s parties were was easy. It felt as if every wish you had while within his domain might be granted, and the only rule was that you must be beautiful and witty and bright.
Nick Carraway was twenty-nine that summer. He had been in the war and killed men, but there was something about the awkward angles of his body in his new white flannel suit, the lost look in his eyes that made me feel oddly soft towards him. I followed him through the crowd, almost at his elbow, eavesdropping as he sought first Gatsby, and then some sort of anchor that would stop him from drowning in the eddies and undertows of Gatsby’s entertainments.
That moment, I felt, should have been edged with sable, marked for the disaster it would bring, but of course it wasn’t, and I could say many similar things about other moments that were still to come.
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 was feeling the reflection of it rather than the thing itself, and I charged myself to remember it as well as the pit of cold wariness that had come to curl in my stomach.
It was only when Nick met his eyes that Gatsby smiled, and somewhere in the house, the clock chimed midnight.
I was a little more impressed with him. Every boy who came home was a war hero, but there was apparently something more to this one.
They were staring into each other’s eyes, clearly at a standstill in the conversation and not sure where to go next. If I left them like that, perhaps they would simply stare into each other’s eyes forever. Then the party would never end, and that would be dreadful.
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.
Lieutenant Gatsby with his one pair of good shoes had never been to Oxford, but we weren’t talking about him now. This was another creature entirely. I still doubted him, but, if you understand, in a different way.
He reclined on the steps, watching over the party not with an emperor’s pride but a boy’s possession. We were his garden, or his ant farm perhaps. He approved, for the moment, and God only knew what happened when he didn’t.
The fact that a man like him sat alone, no matter the rumors about him, was an unnatural thing. I was used to being alone, and apparently so was Gatsby, but he shouldn’t have been, not a man like that, not ever. There’s something wrong with him, I thought, clear as a bell.
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. I never gave him a real answer because the real answer wasn’t one that men got. Men had no idea how careless the women of their set weren’t allowed to be. They laughed at how fussy we were about which cars we got into, and they never wondered about the long stretches of bad road between glittering place and glittering place. It was a kind of darkness that could swallow someone whole, and whoever walked back, shoes in her hand,
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There are some kinds of careless that a girl in 1922, if she was rich, if she was pretty, if she was arrogant, could be. I was foreign and orphaned as well, and that added a few more.
Doors were closing against me that year. Walter Finley was still to come, but I could see patterns developing, growing up around me like the vines around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There were things I could do and things I couldn’t, and girls who had been my friends the year before cut me loose. Slowly but surely, I was being left off lists, pruned away as the girls of my class grew up and became gracious ladies.
I existed in a kind of borderland of acceptable and not, sometimes more on one side, sometimes more on another.
The Ohio River ran a full thousand miles before it fed its secrets into the Mississippi, and among them, every year, I thought, was a sacrifice of young girls lost and betrayed. Some of those girls had babies inside them, and others had broken hearts or broken heads, but they fed the Mississippi all the same, and I had no interest in being one of them.
Daisy kept her eyes morosely on her plate, but I watched insolently back. I had a bad habit of staring from the time I was a little girl, but it was fair, I thought, to stare back.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, and I decided to pretend she said thank you.
I saw a pair of men talking avidly under a bust of Antinous in an alcove.
It was too blunt for him, I could tell. He wanted something agreeable, something sweeter around the edges, but I was never very good at sweet.
I wondered for a moment if he remembered the same conversation I did. I learned later that it was entirely possible that he didn’t.
“Please, Jordan?” That hint of vulnerability again, and I sighed, because even then I knew I liked it too much. He was older than I was, more important in every way that the world cared about, and the fact that he had to say please to me sat in my heart like a warming ember.
“You remember me from before I shipped out, don’t you? When I was with—” “Yes.” “Tell him about me then.” That touched me unexpectedly. 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? I had seen little enough of it in my life that I smiled a bit wistfully at him.
Gatsby wasn’t showing me off, nor was he trying to impress me. Instead, when he leaned in closer to murmur something scandalous about that admiral or to tell me that a certain redhead’s dress would look much lovelier on me, I realized it was something otherwise. You and I are made out of the same stuff, he seemed to be saying. Won’t we have fun?
It was as if he was inviting me into his world, wanting to share all its pleasures with me. And with Nick, of course, but as I watched his hands tracing gleaming patterns in front of us and the shape of his lips around his grandiose words, I decided that if I were asked properly, I would not mind sharing so very much.
The party was winding down into a graceless mess, something that had always irritated me. People are at their worst in transition, moving from one life to another. All of Gatsby’s beautiful people were being revealed for the sloppy, irritable, wayward, and human creatures they really were. There was a fight going on in the drive, not even magic could get everyone into the same coats and shoes they had when they first showed up, and the light suddenly seemed to reveal all manner of blemishes where before it had hid them.
“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.
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. “You may decide what to do after that,” she said, “but most times, your course of action will be clear.”
“He’s not quite all there, is he, dear?” she asked after he left. “Something missing in the eyes.” “What he’s got is fine for me. It’s probably just for summer, anyway.” “Are you sure?” No, I wasn’t. I was different, as Walter Finley and Louisville had so emphatically pointed out, but Nick was too. I wasn’t really interested in making a go of it with anyone, no matter what Tom and Daisy were pushing, but part of that disinterest came from the place of a rather arrogant person realizing that she couldn’t. There was nothing as uninteresting as something I couldn’t have.
“You were my very favorite,” she told me in my earliest memories. “Just the very best baby. I could not leave you, I could not bear it.” Favorite among what, I should have asked, but I never did.
What a broken, brittle people, I thought, discreetly studying his face out of the corner of my eye, and I promised myself I would never be so easy to shatter.
He was dashing, with hair like pale gold, and there was an excitement in kissing him, though it came more from his nervy fear about being sent overseas than for his good looks. I kissed some of that fear off of him, and I thought there was a kind of pleasant bitterness to it, like dark chocolate or good tea. It was interesting, but I could never develop a taste for sorrow, so when he started to slide his hand under my lilac frock I pushed him away and ran back into the house.
After that, I became the most elegant kind of vagabond. I stayed almost three weeks with the Archers, who thought I was the most clever thing. Then when Helen and I fell out, I was only a few days at home before I finagled an invitation for a visit with the Featherstones, where Alicia Featherstone and I enjoyed almost a month together before I decided I could not stand her snoring. Under the auspice of his sister Paulette, I passed some time with Victor Reed before he was old enough to enlist, and he was a better kisser than Thomas, though less thoughtful than Alicia had been.
Being a guest suited me. I ate with the family and slept in the same beds with the girls I liked best, and as I went along, I was turning into a marvelous mimic. I copied the Featherstones’ polished manners, the Banners’ Mid-Atlantic accent, and the Wilkins’ easy command of those they deemed their social inferiors, which was to say, everyone.
I learned the trick of simply assuming I was welcome wherever I went, and for the most part, I was. I was clever enough to know that it was my exotic looks and faintly tragic history that made me such an attractive curiosity, and I was not yet clever enough to mind ...
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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. “Oh,” Daisy said, her voice small, and I could almost feel the breath catch in her throat as her hands fell into her lap. She looked dazed, and when I followed her gaze to the young lieutenant at the window, I could see why. 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
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Daisy and her lieutenant were the great secret of the summer, one that I was thrilled to be included in. I covered for Daisy, I watched them with bated breath because it was all terribly romantic, wasn’t it, and when he finally left for Europe with the others, Daisy wasn’t seen for days, locked in her bedroom and refusing food and comfort.
That year, however, enshrined her in my heart as something gleaming and shining, something whose touch was almost holy and whose heart could call down light.
I spent the war years hopping houses and hopping beds, restless in my own way and strangely comforted by the unease that soaked into everything we did. The world was on fire, but we could only smell the smoke.
Daisy had the world in her hands, but she was never what you would call worldly. Her pleasures were domestic, her disasters, similar. They always had been.
Demoniac was still legal then, and something of an old man’s tipple still, a remnant from an age more alchemical than mustard gas.
