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we floated above her like slightly rumpled guardian angels.
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.
while I was allowed to do what I liked best, which was to watch from a cool distance before I had to chance an engagement.
I wondered that Tom couldn’t seem to recognize the barbs in Nick’s words to him,
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.
This time he stayed in the wreckage of dinner,
Brief moments of sympathy and absent-minded kindness did not make a good man,
Despite being given nothing more than virtuous books to read, I was a child of ferocious imagination.
there was nothing in my mind that connected him with Lieutenant Jay Gatsby. That man was fresh out of Camp Taylor with a commission purchased with the very last of his money from Dan Cody and only one pair of decent shoes. The eager young lieutenant had a wondering hungry eye, and the beautiful man in the lavender suit pin-striped in gray had obviously never been hungry a day in his life. 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
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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.
The light had a particularly honey-like quality, something like summer in a half-remembered garden, illuminating without glaring and so abundant that you always knew who you were kissing.
The lights that draped the gardens twinkled as if Heaven had come down at Gatsby’s command,
and when he sang the first notes of Parama’s solo in L’Enfer d’Amélie, the air before his lips shaped itself into sinuous twists of golden light.
That moment, I felt, should have been edged with sable, marked for the disaster it would bring,
Up close, he was less handsome, more vital.
a second look that held nothing of want and everything of estimation.
Men had no idea how careless the women of their set weren’t allowed to be.
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, stockings shredded and calling for help from some dingy pay phone, she wouldn’t be the same girl who roared off in that unwise Tourister.
I existed in a kind of borderland of acceptable
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.
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.
“What’s the point of it all?” Daisy wondered. “What is the point of any of it?” “If there weren’t any point, we wouldn’t have done any of this,” I said,
he had a dreaminess to his eyes as well, as if he were somehow fundamentally unmoored from the world, perpetually startled by its sharp edges and small cruelties.
I’m afraid I can’t eat anything but moonlight and rose petals tonight,
an elegantly paneled door with a handle made of pure jade.
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 never fill that place. It would take a story.
My eyes felt too big in the dimness of the room, as if they were gobbling up all the light that they could to form an image of him.
wondered for a moment if he remembered the same conversation I did. I learned later that it was entirely possible that he didn’t.
then he was crouched down by the arm of my chair, looking up at me with those pretty eyes and absolutely no hint of Hell in him at all.
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
People are at their worst in transition, moving from one life to another.
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.
variously clever.
though I was never terribly diligent about it the good I did piled up willy-nilly like a careless mound of coins close to the laundry bin.
New York in the summer was a playful kind of purgatory.
Despite the lack of actual children, there was a childish, carnival air to the still summer months, of a breeze that would carry a hint of saltwater taffy and the soft shrill cry of a carousel carillon.
what is important to you in your great old age?”
“Being clever. Knowing things. Knowing myself best of all.”
my hands falling away from his like water.
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.
She had never had that much time for men, so Nick ended up chattering like a jaybird while she examined him like an exhibit in a museum
I attended church every Sunday, and when I was meant to be thinking of pious things, I sat in our front pew and pretended I was balancing teacups on my chin,
She could drown a delta city with her words, and I was swept up in it, tossed like a broken stalk of flowers into her tide
I learned to laugh like the clink of champagne flutes, but even then I never had much interest in sweetness. Eliza Baker was as sweet as candied almonds, and see where it got her.
I learned the trick of simply assuming I was welcome wherever I went, and for the most part, I was.
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.
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.
He liked being shocked by the extravagances of the city, but he was not ready for the people that came with the wonder, who lived shoulder to shoulder with wonder and thus grew immune to it.
and too soaked in Scandinavian gloom for words.
