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I tried to exchange a speaking glance with Nick—these people have all gone mad, and I am afraid that madness is catching—but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Tom gave him a scornful look, shaking his head, before he continued.
We all flinched from the theatrical sound of his voice. It was too much for people like us, too genuine and passionate. Some love could survive being put on show like that, but almost every kind of love that I knew would wither through it, curl up from shame and exposure and die.
It was like a romance out of the pulps, but he wasn’t a dime store hero, and Daisy was certainly no one’s pure and pale lady.
What have you got, Mr. Drug Store, Mr. Damnation?” “The rest of the world,” Gatsby said extravagantly, but Daisy was biting her lip, looking back and forth between them, as if suddenly realizing what was at stake and what she might lose. Daisy wasn’t used to losing, not at all, and I could feel the wind changing course around us, whipping first into one window and then into another.
“Daisy,” Gatsby said softly, holding her by the shoulders, his fingers digging into her pale arms before he remembered himself. “Tell him…” “I can’t,” she cried helplessly. “I can’t. If you can love more than one person at once, then why can’t I?” “I only love you,” Gatsby insisted in confusion, and without looking I laid my hand on Nick’s arm. I didn’t think he had been such a fool, but I would have believed it.
“You kept the party going for Hell and for New York. You opened the doorway to all the fun, and you turned an old-world tipple into big business, got it running like blood throughout the East and the Midwest. You became the linchpin holding Hell to Earth, and how they all loved you for it.” It was more than that, I realized, thinking over the nights I had spent at Gatsby’s. His house bridged the gap, and it was safe. It was safe for all of us, for me to kiss who I liked, for Nick to kiss Gatsby, for Gatsby to love Daisy, and for Hell to play its games.
He had sold his soul, and in exchange for the power to be a man worthy of Daisy Fay, he had created a way station for Hell, a little piece of the infernal in West Egg where the demoniac never stopped flowing and where no one ever noticed if someone disappeared and came back strange and hollow, or never came back at all.
He had never asked them for Daisy. He had instead built and baited for her a gorgeous gold and velvet trap, as much like Hell as Hell was like itself, and I knew that Daisy had seen it too.
sat up just as we passed beyond the sightless, spectacled eyes of T. J. Eckleburg, and I saw that rather than being wide and wise, they were now closed and refused to look any further.
I said, trying to tease, but he turned to me with a look that stopped just short of being fury. “I said no, can’t you understand?” he cried. I might have taken it better if he had been sorry immediately, stumbled all over himself with an apology for the terrible thing we had seen and for the conclusions we were all drawing. Instead he glared at me, and I glared right back. “Of course I understand,” I said coldly. “Good night, Nick.”
Gatsby looked like a plucked rooster, shoulders hanging and eyes cast up to Heaven—no, only to Daisy’s window, and if I didn’t remember what kind of thing he was, I could hate her for making someone look at her like that. I could almost hear the chorus, his only sin was loving her too much, and at the same time, I could hear the rejoinder in my own voice: his sin was in only loving her and nothing else.
The moment I stepped out of the car, I was in some dark land, separate as Park Avenue was separate from Chinatown. The few city blocks of Willets Point was its own kingdom entire. With a solemn face, I wandered through the tall ash palaces where the towers and the wings were always drifting away, only to be replaced by the burning of New York itself. Oh, I thought in sudden revelation, this is where New York goes when it is tired, when it is done.
The stars considered and then the ground in front of me lit up, the starlight catching on every bottle cap, scrap of metal, and lost bolt. Curious, I followed their winding path through the palaces of ash, and I came at last to the billboard west of Willets Point. T. J. Eckleburg disdained the glorious city of ash below his eyes. They were closed tight, and while a sensible part of me told me that I only misremembered, that they had always been closed, I knew that that was not true.
I glared up at the billboard, frustrated with its silence, and frustration opened up into a childish fury. “Well, come on,” I said loudly. “Speak. You see so much, what’s the point of you if you don’t speak?” The eyes stayed closed, but then I realized that I was trying to get water out of a stone.
I stripped down and fell into bed, leaving my white sheets smudgy with the ash that clung to my hands, my hair, the soles of my feet, and even my belly. I wonder what the world will be like when I wake up, I thought blearily. I woke up at noon. The Manchester Act had passed. Jay Gatsby was dead.
“You know, you weren’t so very nice to me last night,” I said finally. Nick snorted. “Because that’s what the world is about. People being nice to you.” I gritted my teeth until I thought they would crack. He was obviously new at this sort of thing, because otherwise he would have hung up on that. “It’s better than a world where they’re cruel and you stay anyway,” I said. “Keeping the line open for him, are you?” I hung up, and because it was all rather too much, I went back to bed. Two eyes, T. J. Eckleburg had told me, and in my shallow dreams, they opened and shut for me.
Nan Harper came back from Greece, and I had to break up with her, and then Aunt Justine wanted to speak to me about Shanghai. “It’ll be an adventure for you,” she said from the bed at Bellevue, and I scowled. “I don’t care for the idea of running away.” “My dear one, you are rich. You don’t run away. You go on retreat. You holiday. You take the waters, and when things are better, you return if you wish to do so.”
“Oh, darling, why are you being so cruel to me? It was an accident, of course it was an accident.” “Yours,” I said, and she shook my hand off to stalk down towards the water. “Of course mine,” she said, staring out over the water towards Gatsby’s mansion. Even from this distance, there was something hollow about it, something defeated and caved in. “It’s always mine, isn’t it?” Two eyes, T. J. Eckleburg had said, and then it had seen no more. Daisy couldn’t do that kind of thing, but I had a feeling that Gatsby could have.
“Daisy,” I said sharply. “Stop looking at that damned haunted house, and talk to me.” “Oh, why should I!” she said with a flash of temper, turning to look at me. “What does it matter now? Jay’s dead and gone, it’s over, why can’t you just let it be over?” “It’s not over to me yet. Daisy, just tell me.”
“She ran out so fast,” she said, her voice soft and dull. The sky rumbled thunder after her words. “She seemed certain we would stop. She shook the whole car when it hit her. I felt it all the way through my arms. The only reason I didn’t hit the steering wheel is because Jay threw his arm across and stopped me.” “She flew,” I said, remembering what I had been told. “Yes. Straight forward. In our headlights like a showgirl doing a tumble.”
“And then what happened?” “Oh Jordan, you won’t like me if I keep going.” I realized I didn’t like her now. Maybe I hadn’t for a while. The love might take a little longer to die out, but I could work on that. I waited. Daisy abhorred a silence.
“Oh darling, I’m so sorry,” she said, her fingers brushing over mine as she touched my cheek. The rain slicked her hair straight to her head, dripped off the delicate point of her chin. “I’m so sorry. This has been terrible for you, hasn’t it?” It had, and for a moment, I swayed towards her. “Come with us,” she said, her voice warm in spite of the rain. “Come with us. Why go to dirty old Shanghai when you can come to Barcelona with me and Tom? Barcelona’s a delight, and we can come back in October, just in time for the best part of fall, won’t that be grand?” I jerked back from her soft touch,
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If she stops me before I make it to the main road, I might forgive her, I thought, and it horrified me. She didn’t, however, and instead the car that stopped for me came from the opposite direction. It was Nick, dressed in a good suit I hadn’t seen before, his eyes red and hollow. “Oh it’s you,” I said as he pulled up in front of me.
“No. I … I couldn’t stay there, and I couldn’t stay here. It was too much. I wanted you.”
“Did you really love him so much?” I asked. He hesitated, and I saw the terrible moment when he realized he had nothing left to give me but the truth. He stared at the floor between us as if it held the answers. “I still do. I’m not going to stop. It was like no matter what I did, no matter who I met or slept with in France or this summer, it was just him, it was always him … Maybe it always will be him.”
Outside, Daisy’s storm had slowed to a kind of soft patter. I imagined tears pouring ceaselessly down her face as she sat at the dinner table. I shut the thought away because I did not want to think about Daisy Buchanan again.
“I like you best,” I told him, and he smiled at me, halfway happy. “No, you don’t,” he said. “You like Daisy best.” “Not anymore.” It would be true in a while. I would make it true. I would tear her straight out of my heart if I had to, and fill the hole she left behind with paper flowers. “Besides,” I said, “you never liked me best either.” “Oh, I love you,” Nick said regretfully as my hands tightened on his shirt. “It’s just that my love only goes so far.”
I was touched to see that my own name was written neatly and with care paid towards the shaping of the letters. He had written it more deliberately, perhaps with more purpose and with more duty and fear involved than with the others, but I didn’t blame him for that. It was still there.
The rain had stopped, leaving the sky a leaden gray, and I forced myself not to look across the Sound, where Daisy waited to be packed away like the good china and the delicate furniture.
