Dinner with Aunt Justine that night was a late affair at Christine’s with some of her friends. I affected a rather bored air whenever I was around them, women much older than me who occasionally said the odd deeply unfortunate thing about my race, but truth be told, I liked their company. I liked their independence, their wealth, the fact that they were so well-fed and poison-tipped, and they never cared who knew it.
In some ways, it was a version of the role I had played in Louisville to the older girls, pet and doll and charmer. In other ways, it was like being set adrift in a sea where I couldn’t drown, where all the monsters lurking in the depths rather liked me and wouldn’t upset my little craft.
After a rather good dinner of jellied chicken bouillon and a spectacular crown of lamb, the ladies lit cigars or their delicate hashish cigarettes according to their preference and got down to the real business of the day, which turned out to be the holy march that was setting up in Washington, DC, in just a few weeks.
“It really is too very bad that everyone couldn’t keep their eyes up front and their hands to themselves,” said Mrs. Crenshaw. “I tell you, if you had not had the foreigners campaigning for the vote and devils putting their fingers into politicians’ pockets … well, the fun might never have stopped.”
“I never thought it would last,” said Mrs. Wentworth, thumping her horse-head cane on the carpeted floor. She was a formidable woman who glared about her as if we were going to fight about it. “Demons, foreigners, one’s as bad as the other. By all rights, they should have been pushed back the first time we tried to quell the Chinese, begging your pardon, young Jordan.”
“Accepted, since I’m not Chinese,” I said with a light laugh, but Aunt Justine frowned.
“Really, Beulah,” she said. “I don’t see the Chinese or the demons making as much trouble as your average young hawk on the hill. I’m still not convinced the march needs my time or my dollars.”
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 Prohibition passed, came after the damned, and there had been meetings, marches, the whole song and dance.
I thought of what my aunt’s friends would make of Gatsby and his palace in West Egg. They had seen greater excesses at the fin de siècle, however, and they had also seen how that ended. As in, they might like to have their good time, but they also might have wanted to get well clear before the shooting started.
After dinner, I kissed Aunt Justine good-bye and asked her to have Lara pack up some of my good dresses and my nicer shoes and send them on to East Egg, care of the Buchanans.
“You’re getting along well with Daisy this summer,” she said.
“I am. She’s been a dear, having me stay before my matches and all.”
“And her man, is he behaving himself?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Of course not, Aunt Justine. But you know the type. A new girl every time he looks about and finds his arm free.”
“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. Even Nick did it sometimes, though he made up for it at other times by being little more than a shadow at the back of the clubs and in overfull booths. Tom was like a hulking stone that some great hand had set down in the world, and it was the responsibility of others to move around him.
That was too much to drag out on a Sunday night, so I only agreed, said my farewells, and gratefully took my aunt’s offer of the car and driver.
I dozed on the way over the bridge, not waking up until the first stars were coming out and the air was finally beginning to think of cooling down. Before I rang the bell, I looked out across the Sound to see that Gatsby’s place was lit up again, so bright that it shone a jagged path of light across the waves towards me. I wondered for a moment if it was possible to cross the Sound on that broken path, and at the same time, I realized that while I couldn’t, there was a better than average chance that Daisy might.
The butler opened the door for me with some slight resignation, and I was headed up to my usual room when I met Tom coming down the stairs. He was pulling on a pair of driving gloves with a distracted look. He gave me a rather befuddled look as we drew even on the steps.
“She call you already?”
“No, I’m just here to take advantage of your hospitality and your excellent food,” I said jauntily. “Why, should Daisy have called me?”
Tom sighed, dragging all ten fingers through his hair.
“She needs some sympathy,” he said, making a face. “I’m apparently being brutish again.”
“Oh, I see.”
He frowned when I didn’t immediately defend him to himself.
“Talk to her, make her see sense,” he said, a begging note in his voice. “You know how she gets.”
“Of course I do, Tom,” I said, sidestepping him. “Will you be back for breakfast?”
“No, some business is keeping me in the city,” he said. “Thank you, Jordan. You’re a star.”
I was, even if he had no reason at all to thank me. He went downstairs, and I went up, tired enough that I just wanted to strip out of my clothes and climb between my borrowed sheets.
Not so different from Louisville after all, I mused, and instead of going to bed, I continued on to Daisy’s suite, where I could see her shadow moving back and forth through the light from under the door. I tapped lightly on the door, and I was answered by a low wail.
“Oh do go away, I don’t want to see you,” she cried.
“I think you might,” I said, and she opened the door almost immediately, flying into my arms with a flutter of silk sleeves. In her hand-painted robe, she looked a bit like a magpie, the long bars of blue, black, and white calling to mind a rustle of feathers and the fan-spread of an elegant tail.
I let her hang on to me for a few moments, and then I pushed her back, bringing her back towards the light and turning her face this way and that by her chin.
“Do I just look too awful?” she asked, hiccupping slightly and offering me a nervous smile through her tears. “It’s not so bad, is it?”
I made a show of peering at her face, and then her throat and her shoulders. She was half out of her robe like a snowdrop unsheathed after the winter, fragile and more than a little raw. There was a small drinks cart where a small bottle of demoniac perched, and I shook a few drops onto my fingers, spreading them neatly over her eyelids and under her eyes. She freshened up right away, and I licked the demoniac from my fingers before I nodded.
“You look just fine, darling, just beautiful, I promise. And I saw that Tom is on his way out, so that will suit us very well.”
“Oh! Have you had word yet?”
I grinned, letting her take my hands in a surprisingly tight grip.
“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…”
I took a firm hold on her arm, because after all, there was a chance that she might have tried it. She had that edge to her that was revealed sometimes, when things got strange or hard.
There was a part of me that wanted to let her go. After all, it would all have been the same in the end. Even if I refused to let her fly, we could take her roadster south in East Egg, north in West Egg, and then we would be there. Outside, the rain pattered gently onto the concrete, onto the grass and the earth. I imagined her dashing from the roadster, the wings of her robe flaring behind her as her hair took on the raindrops like dew. She would ring the doorbell, and for some reason, he would answer it. They would look at each other, reach for each other, crashing together in a way that could have set the entire world deaf if they could only hear it.
I remembered Jay Gatsby’s request at the Cendrillon, however. I remembered the intent look in his eyes, his refusal to take any kind of shortcut, to act in any way like a sensible man, and I took a firmer hold on Daisy.
“He won’t want that,” I said with a helpless shrug, and the laugh she gave me was brittle with humor.
“I can’t be expected to wait,” she said. “Why dear, how deadly dull and proper!”
She was worn out after her fight with Tom, however, and I convinced her to come with me to her solar for a glass of champagne. We sent back down to the drowsy kitchen for a plate of crackers and cold salmon smothered with cream and dill, and we dragged the sofa to the windows, where the thunder had come to join the rain. One particularly powerful stroke lit up the world from Daisy’s lawn to West Egg and to the city beyond it. In that flash of brighter than bright light, I saw Gatsby’s mansion across the Sound, still lit up boldly against the summer darkness that draped down on top of us.
I thought of how the party-goers must be shrieking in the rain, how the gentlemen’s fine suits would be ruined, how the sleeting water would plaster silk dresses to their wearers’ bodies. 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.
Daisy stared into the rain, crushing a cracker into crumbs. After a moment, she picked up a strip of fleshy pink salmon with her fingertips, rolling it into a tight little bundle before setting it on a cracker and giving it to me. The salty richness of the fish and the buttery crispness of the cracker grounded me a little, and so I made one for her.
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.
I didn’t say anything, taking her hand in mine, and we watched the storm roll over the Sound.