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As it turned out, Nick and I were possessed of a basic incompatibility that we both gamely ignored in order to spend time with one another.
I laid him out under the willow and we had gotten each other half-undressed before I stopped, mostly to see what he would do. “I’m not easy,” I warned him. “I may be exactly this stubborn forever, or I might change my mind at any moment. What do you think of that?” “I hope you change your mind, but I like it when you’re stubborn,” he replied, and I laughed at him, kissing him because while I wasn’t easy, I realized he was.
I described it to him, and watched with fascination as a cloud of confusion, fear, and longing came across his face. It settled into a kind of stony wariness, and he sat back from me, shaking his head. “I don’t know why—I’m not like that.” I tilted my head to one side, examining him with a careful eye. We were having a nightcap at my place just past four in the morning. He was getting used to late nights, and making himself presentable in other people’s bathrooms, but now he looked more nervous than he had in a few weeks. “You’re not?” I asked, and he shook his head hard. “No. Absolutely not.
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I felt a rush of heat and pleasure when I looked down at all the people below me and knew, rather than suspected or hoped, that they were like me. Of course they weren’t, but that single moment left me speechless and almost in tears
People make such a fuss about home. Daisy talked in raptures about Louisville and Chicago, while Nick, when he had a few, could be quite a pain about Minnesota snow and the pale faces and gleaming eyes seen from the car in the cornfields. I listened, but I never cared all that much.
Then the man turned around, and I could see that it was Jay Gatsby, sharp as a razor blade in a pale gray suit, buttons undone and the color high on his cheeks.
He had done something, and the only comfort was that he hadn’t done more. He looked at me for a moment, blank-eyed, and then he smiled. His eyes got soft, and so did his mouth, and it came to me that he had such a beautiful mouth. It was something I liked on men and women, a beautiful mouth that might kiss me or whisper secrets in my ear or open and let me kiss them …
Sometimes, the only excuse for doing something stupid is knowing that you are doing it and being willing to accept the consequences.
“Does Nick know you’re here?” I asked, and he shot me a bemused look. “Of course he doesn’t. He wouldn’t want to hear about a place like this.” I could still feel Nick pressed against my shoulder, hear that soft please, and I shrugged. “You could bring him. He’d come for you.” Gatsby smiled disarmingly. “Oh he won’t do anything for me,” he said. “Nick thinks I’m a social climber. Very Minnesota of him. He can’t forgive people for their origins, and at the same time, he won’t forgive people for trying to overcome them.”
He sat up, leaning towards me and with the sensuality he had been wearing set aside. He didn’t seem to know what to do with me, which face worked best, which tone would melt me. Now Gatsby looked at me, a little blank, a little curious, and to my surprise, a little desperate. “I need Nick,” he said quietly. “I need him to get Daisy.”
I stared at him, because of all places to hear Daisy’s name, the Cendrillon wasn’t one of them. She might dance with a girl to cause a scene, but anything else made her feel funny. I would have taken it more personally if I didn’t suspect she felt that way about boys too, once the kissing and petting turned to something else.
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.
The night before her wedding, Daisy taught me that after the world ended, you still had to get up in the morning, and the things that you ruined would still be there, needing to be fixed. When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.
He looked genuinely shocked at that, looking at me as if unsure what kind of serpent he had brought to his bosom. This was a look I actually got a lot.
“What if I say no?” His eyes darkened, and his mouth firmed at that. This was something that he had considered, and he was angry with me for even bringing it up. “Then I hope you are prepared to run, Miss Baker,” he said, obviously sorry that I had to go ruining his polite intimidation.
I wondered if he was getting some inkling that his grand romance was involving an awful lot of underhanded threats. “This isn’t real,” he said abruptly. “What I have said here with you. It’s not real.” “It feels real to me,” I responded, and he gave me the most charming and oblivious smile.
With a slightly superstitious air, I crossed my fingers as the train surged through Willets Point in Queens, where all the city’s ash came to rest. Even this early in the morning, fine light white sediment billowed up from the ground in a feathery fury, curling up into the air like some kind of secret. Wind cut the tallest and broadest heaps with intricate desert-like ridges, making me think of the far-off deserts of the Sahara or the Atacama, and watching over all of this was a perfectly horrid, perfectly tacky billboard of some long-defunct spectacle maker, two great eyes staring down with
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As we pulled away, I saw an unlikely woman with flaming red hair dressed in lemon yellow. She came out of a garage door, a cigarette between two stiff fingers, and a dark fingerprint smudging of ash already on her skirt. She watched after the train with something I could only term a contemptuous longing, and I swore for a moment that our eyes met.
The room’s tall windows were open to the Sound, and I looked out over the water. From where I stood, I realized with some discomfort that I could easily see Gatsby’s mansion, the white walls gleaming even across the misty distance, the glittering gold beach and the pier that stretched out from it. He stands on that pier, I thought suddenly. He stands there, and he looks across the water, and he looks across the years to when she was his and when she will be his.
This then was why Daisy kept me. Unlike her other friends, I didn’t tell her that it would be all right or swear vengeance or offer her a way to be so beautiful he would never turn from her again. It wouldn’t be all right, there was precious little vengeance a woman like Daisy might have against her man, and she was already so beautiful. Instead, I offered her something else.
I came to a stop, because the story had run out for the moment, and I prodded her so she would finally sit up. She did so reluctantly, and to my shock, my complete and utter shock, her eyes were full of tears. “My God, my God,” she said in a fascinated whisper. “He loves me.” “I don’t know if he does,” I said. “There was … I don’t know, Daisy.” “He does,” she said, her hand tightening into small fists. “He does, he does.”
“Of course you can,” she said, and even without her beauty and charm, I nodded jerkily and took a firmer grip on the photograph and the shears. Daisy was beautiful, and Daisy was charming, but her beauty and charm were cheap, offered to everyone who came near, from the maid to President Wilson the time he came to Louisville on the campaign trail. This was a rare thing, and as far as I knew, she had only offered it to me.
I didn’t actually trace around the Daisy in the picture. Instead, working free-handed, I snipped a figure that approximated Daisy’s own out of the card stock. With Daisy whispering encouragement in my ear, with my eyes half-closed and a kind of instinct guiding me that I usually preferred to ignore, I cut out her entire figure, her bob, her neat hands, her love of the water, and her quick clever dancing. I made sure to cut out her narrow hips, her full lips, the way Christmas lights sparkled in her eyes as soon as the first of December rolled around, and how summer left her nearly stunned with
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Daisy’s soft voice in my ear sent shivers down my spine. She told me how good and clever I was, how absolutely sweet it was that I was doing this for her. She had absolute faith in me, she knew I could do it, so of course I could do it.
“It’s from Jay,” she said. “From Camp Taylor. You remember.” I swallowed. I did. I remembered pale eyes. I remembered a hand that reached out to touch Daisy as if he barely believed he could be worthy of her. I remembered how the heat of that summer two years ago put a haze over both of them, as if I were seeing something strange and a little otherworldly, something I wasn’t meant to be seeing. “He’s back. He lives. He wants me.”
“Daisy…” I said, because perhaps part of me wasn’t ready to give up on the fantasy of her and Gatsby. “You said you changed your mind…” “And then I changed it back,” she said, her voice brutally practical. “After all, all of the relatives have descended, haven’t they? All the hotels are full, and the hyacinth are coming at the very crack of dawn. Can’t disappoint, darling, never can … and that is all that Jay Gatsby will do.”
She felt almost unspeakably grown up then, nothing like the girl who had begged me to go into Fulbright’s for her. I wondered how she had done it, or if it had come down upon her all at once, like some kind of sacrament that I had forgotten to take.
At some point, I landed on my rear in the bushes. I wasn’t ill, but my eyes felt too dry and too hot. With my arms around me, I could only hear the refrain I shall live with this the rest of my life and God, is that a long time.
“Is this a game?” he asked with a slight and willing smile. “Of course it is, dear heart,” I lied. “Now shush and listen.” I told him three stories. The first was set in October of 1917, the time I had come walking down the road and seen, all unlooked for, Daisy with her arms around a dashing soldier, someone so poor and so unrefined that there was no way to predict the creature he would become. It had taken a war to change him, or a murder, or a deal with the devil, but whatever he was in October of 1917, he looked at Daisy as if she were his heart left his chest, as if he didn’t care where
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He wants you to bring her over so he can meet her there. Since you’re right next door, you know? He wants it to be … I don’t know. Some kind of beautiful happenstance. A chance meeting where they meet each other through luck and fate.” “Luck and fate that he asked us to set up.” I lifted my champagne glass to him in acknowledgment.
He was handsome when he wasn’t going on about his Middle Western manners and morals.
“Anyway, Daisy ought to have something in her life,” I said, looking away. “Will you arrange the meeting?” “Does she want to see Gatsby?” Of course she did. The moment I had told her he existed, the moment she knew he wanted her, she had been ready to fly to him. The only thing that stopped her was the fact that Gatsby wanted things done just so, fitting into some story that made me wary and intrigued Daisy.
I reached up to ruffle my fingers through his hair, making him laugh a little. “You’re going to make me look a wreck when we get out,” he murmured. “Good. I want you utterly ruined, completely wrecked.”
Nick grinned at me, looking quite debauched with his hair sticking up in all directions and his mouth red, and I decided that perhaps I did love him after all. “Wicked thing,” he said with some delight. “Of course,” I replied, pleased.
They were talking not just about the demons, I knew, but also about the soulless, though where they thought they could push them back to was unclear. The number of people who had actually sold their souls, I learned much later, was far less than what it was made out to be that summer. They were discerning, the men in dark suits who came through Jay Gatsby’s door. They liked power, they liked promise. The newspapers made it sound as if we were drowning in an infernal tide, and of course everyone knew someone who knew someone else who had done it. The temperance marchers, out their target after
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“Well, that’s a shame for Daisy, then. She ought to keep him in better line.” I thought sometimes that my aunt forgot about how big men were, how much space and air they could take up.
“I met with Nick today, the dear thing. He says that he will call to invite you to his place soon, and you can happen to meet Gatsby there.” “Oh but why?” she asked. “I could fly into his arms. I could do it right now, just get up on the widow’s walk and take wing, float to him across the Sound…”
Then it came to me that, no, there was no party at Gatsby’s tonight. The place buzzed with light, but that light wasn’t shining for anyone besides Gatsby, if he cared at all. It burned without illuminating or warming, and all of that emptiness made me a little ill, a little dizzy.
Sometime after one, we both heard a thin wailing echo through the house behind us. “A ghost,” Daisy said without interest. “No,” I said, tilting my head. “That’s Pammy. Listen, you can hear her nurse singing to her.” “I never wanted her. Tom may keep her after this. He gave me a diamond bracelet for her when the doctors told us she would live. I’ll give it back to him, and her as well.”
This was all uttered without rancor, but also without the thoughtlessness that accompanied so many of Daisy’s pronouncements. She said things, they lit up gold in the air, and then they fell to nothing like so much cigarette ash. This wasn’t something that floated around inside her head and then out her mouth. This was something she had put away somewhere dark, where the light wouldn’t fade it, where no one could talk her out of it.
The day when Daisy met Jay Gatsby again should have been beautiful, the same kind of day on which she had been married, or at least a crisp and dying summer day like the one where she had met the handsome young soldier. Instead silvery clouds hung overhead like wet rags out to dry, and when we stepped out of the car in front of Nick’s humble little place, we could both smell the rain, paused for the moment, but by no means gone. Back in Louisville, that high wet smell coupled with the uncomfortable prickling heat meant that a twister was on the way, crossing the flat cropland with a
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Then there was a step in the hallway, and when Jay Gatsby actually appeared, we both gave him an appalled look. I don’t know what Daisy had built up in her head, but I know that the picture I had come up with was beautiful. It was probably wrong, and like the wallpaper that had gassed all those people in London, probably poisonous, but it was beautiful.
This was why I preferred large parties to small ones. You couldn’t get away with being this unbearably odd at a large party, or if you did, no one would ever have cared.
“All right, Daisy, do you want to leave?” I asked, but she shook her head. “Of course not. That’s Jay Gatsby. That’s really him.” “At least it used to be,” I said. “I don’t know what he is now.”
Nick’s voice had a distant quality to it, telling me a story he had once been told. I had noticed before that he was good at telling other people’s stories.
“Oh I believe I love you,” he said, and I laughed again at that. I liked to hear it, I liked to laugh at it, and it made me wonder what Daisy would say about it when I told her later. I liked my secrets, but there were some that were for the telling, and I dropped a fleeting kiss on his forehead. “You hold that thought,” I whispered. “You hold on to it for dear life, all right?” He told me yes in a way that was half a dream and half a daze,
“I won’t thank you if you make a mess out of me,” he said, and I was a little disappointed because I realized that was exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to make a mess of him, to walk him back in front of Jay Gatsby all red-faced and shattered. In some strange and half-formed way, I realized, I wanted to do him that favor, of showing Gatsby that there was more to life than just him.
He paused when he looked down at my face, his eyes bright as the foil around a candy bar, his mouth a tempestuous red. There was my answer to if he thought I was as beautiful as Jay Gatsby, and it made me smile.
“No, come on,” I said, dragging him down towards the water. “When you can’t fix a thing, the best course of action can be to ruin it all so that no can see what truly happened.” Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.
Gatsby— What does it look like when a thousand-year hunger gets a taste of what it’s craved? His eyes were pale before, but now there was something blackened and charred about them, sending up wisps of steam that I could almost feel but not see.
