Summer in New York goes by slowly until it goes by fast, and for the four weeks that took us out of July and into a sullen and ferociously fevered August, I could barely catch my breath. First there was Aunt Justine’s difficulty, where we ended up with a few sleepless nights and a live-in nurse, and then there was the riot that took over Brooklyn and Harlem for a full weekend over the Manchester Act, which would bar the way for all unwanted unworthies from a long list of places, while starting the repatriation of those who had, as so many of Aunt Justine’s friends put it so delicately, overstayed their welcome. Naturally it didn’t specify whether it meant the Chinese, the Irish, the Mexicans, the damned, or the dead that occasionally returned with them, so it was a terrible mess.
Nick asked me if I was worried, and I took him dancing at the Preston when I hate dancing at the Preston because I wanted to answer him even less. I told him that the Manchester Act had nothing to do with me, that I couldn’t even remember being from anywhere else, and his response—“Prove it”—made me so angry that I ran off the floor and went home with Jodie Washington. She kept me for a few days until her boyfriend came back from his European tour, and by then, I was ready to make up with Nick, so it mostly worked out.
We were becoming something of an item, written up when the gossip papers were having a slow day, which was pleasant. He was proving surprisingly resilient to the kind of pressures that had crashed me and Walter. Anyway, it helped that I had gotten myself kitted up with a cap through one of Aunt Justine’s friends, and that was at least one catastrophe I didn’t have to worry about any longer, though Nick, charming thing, told me he didn’t worry too much about what we did as long as he was doing it with me. I even mostly believed him, though I was making no further headway on bringing him to the Cendrillon. I wondered if, after Gatsby, he had outgrown that sort of thing, but I doubted it. I had never known of anyone who did, though of ones who said they had, plenty.
It was a beautifully clear night halfway through August when the whole city seemed to pull up roots and head for Gatsby’s palace. A ghostly little whisper suggested that we stay to enjoy the deserted clubs, but instead I followed Nick home with my new dress—white satin beaded with opalized beads in shivery blue—in the back seat along with some essentials. I had, willy-nilly, started to stay overnight at Nick’s, braving the disapproving looks of his maid and the unreliable water of his bathtub. We were playing house, we both knew it, but it was a good game when played with someone who could be as calm and as sweet as Nick was.
Gatsby’s mansion spilled light from every window, from every door, and that night, from every tree. Something at the heart of the trees on his property gleamed, and I saw more than one beautiful girl up in the branches, trying to grasp that sweet and lovely light with their hands. They came up empty, and while most gave up, a Black girl in a moiré silk dress remained up in the bare branches, her dress like a cocoon and her face stained with tears for seeing her desire so close and yet so untouchable.
By the water and in the tall grass were fireflies. At first, they made me think of the long slow nights of the Louisville summer, but when I looked closer, I could see that they were another species entirely. Instead of a sweet soft lime green, they glowed a deep red, and when I caught one in my hands, I saw a brassy metallic sheen to the wings and pincers that clicked at me threateningly before I let it go again.
Nick and I went arm in arm, and just inside the garden, we met Daisy, who was with Tom of all people. She wore a blue gown overlaid with a sheer fine net of crystal, and the crystals—teardrops and brilliant—were echoed in the tiara perched so sweetly on her head. Tom in black looked around aggressively, and I felt Nick stiffen next to me. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t like Tom either, but that could certainly wait for later.
I hadn’t really seen Daisy since that day at Nick’s. I tried once or twice, but she had made herself scarce, wrapping up in a kind of silken solitude that never suited her unless there was a secret someone there with her. She leaned over to give me a distracted kind of kiss on both cheeks, but when she addressed Nick, her voice was strained, and shaded behind the blue of her eyes was a small and animal worry. She took his hand and folded a green ticket into it with a tremulous smile as Tom looked on indulgently.
“Oh Nick, if you’d like to kiss me at any time tonight, simply come give back, won’t you? I’m handing them out tonight…”
I could see the green slips sticking from the clasp of her purse, see the absolute ease with which Tom regarded that exchange, and then Gatsby was among us like a fox among the chickens, a smile too wide and toothy on his face. The look he gave Daisy was so fond that I almost thought he would give away the game right there, but then he turned to Tom. He was coldly, vividly triumphant, and he spread his hands out as if to encompass the whole world that belonged to him.
“Welcome, welcome,” he cried. “Come look around, there’s bound to be so many people you know…”
“I think it’s quite marvelous,” Daisy said faintly. I caught her startled glance as if she were only now realizing that she had brought her husband to her lover’s house, and I gave her an aggressive little shrug because there certainly wasn’t anything I could do with men like Gatsby or Tom.
“I was just thinking that I didn’t know anyone at all,” Tom drawled, determinedly unimpressed. The easy arm he kept over Daisy’s shoulders looked like it got a little heavier. “I’m not so fond of parties where I don’t know anyone…”
“Oh well, surely you know her,” Gatsby said, pointing like a guide at the zoo.
We followed his arm to where Anna Farnsworth languished beneath the ghostly lights, the illumination giving her a flickering phosphor tint. She had just appeared in The Girl on the Strand, utterly scandalous. It was common tat around New York that an old wizard had made her from a whole garden’s worth of peonies. He should have made her out of something more sturdy, because she was looking wilted under the August heat.
We didn’t talk about that, of course, but Gatsby let on that the man standing over her and sprinkling her with seltzer water was her director. He led us deeper into the garden, pointing out that star or that politician. I hung back, letting them get ahead, and after a moment, Nick returned to me.
“All right?” he asked, and I plucked the green ticket out of his hand.
“Honestly,” I said, a little tartly. “No one’s giving out green tickets this summer.”
They entitled the bearer to a kiss, a talk, or a secret from the giver, and Nick’s hand had already become stained with the cheap ink of Daisy’s name. I tore it to little bits and dropped the bits into a half-empty flute of champagne sitting on the edge of a concrete planter.
“Jealous, darling?” asked Nick with amusement, and I waved my hand dismissively.
“Of course, painfully,” I told him. “Always. Anyway, that’s a strange to-do between the three of them tonight, isn’t it? I shan’t want to stand too close to that.”
It was true. There was something fraught in the air between all three of them, not just between Gatsby and Tom as might be guessed. I was worried about Daisy, but then none of my experience with her had anything in the world to do with stopping her.
Nick didn’t seem to share my opinion, looking after them as they walked towards the dancers on the canvas floor.
“I don’t know,” he hedged. “Are you worried?”
“Only for my own good time,” I said a little sharply, but I sighed when he looked back at me with some guilt.
“Go on if you are going,” I said to him.
“I won’t if you’re cross…”
I put my fingers to the corners of my mouth, lifting them up.
“No, no cross here, darling,” I said. “I shall entertain myself with these very entertaining people, and I shall come find you later. Though when I do find you next, I am sure that I will be perfectly demanding and in need of your attention.”
Nick smiled with some relief, lifting my hand to his lips in a brief salute.
“You’re a doll, Jordan Baker,” he said.
“Rather not,” I responded, but he was already gone.
I was a strange combination of bereft and relieved when he was gone. Even after all our time together, I hadn’t quite resigned myself to being a couple yet, half of an equation when the male half could somehow continue as a whole without me. He was gone, I felt more myself, and to celebrate, I downed a surprisingly strong French 75 and took another with me for company as I wandered through the playground Gatsby had made of his home.
I hadn’t been lying before. There’s no better place to be alone than a large party, especially when almost everyone around you was trying to be the biggest and most gleaming version of themselves. Through the crowd, I could glimpse Gatsby introducing Tom and Daisy to another famous movie star while Nick looked on in consternation. No, certainly not my scene that very moment, so I moved on.
I was ready to be delighted by Gatsby’s home, but there was something desperate about it. If hanging around in New York in the summer of 1922 taught me anything, it was how to nose out desperation, and Gatsby’s party reeked of it. Everything was just a shade too bright, everyone just a little too brilliant to be borne. There were tumblers darting through the crowd, human statues in the garden that the people could direct in an enormous chess game, and the usual ubiquitous lights that danced over us like angelic halos, but it all felt so very tiresome to me.
Or maybe I’m the tiresome one, I thought with a grimace. It had been known to happen, and the summer was wearing on like a runaway car or at a snail’s pace, depending.
I was just beginning to wonder if I should find a quiet ledge to play gargoyle when I came around a corner in the garden and nearly had my head taken off by a dragon.
Despite my earlier jaded thoughts, there was a moment when a rush of wind pulled my clothes awry, when I stared after a flash of light over gold scales, that I forgot everything except a startled wonder. For a moment, I thought some exotic bird had made its escape from the trees, but then I saw the dragon for itself, larger than a horse, long and slender as a lamp post.
It was a dragon, I knew that, even if it was like no dragon I ever saw in the fairytale books. The head recalled the wickedly blunt heads of the crocodiles that I had seen at the menagerie, while a pair of deer’s horns sprouted from its brow. The tail was the vast majority of its length, corkscrewing and curling as the dragon seemed to swim through the air, cat-like paws reaching out, toes extended for purchase.
The golden dragon twisted around to dance over my head, and I clapped at the display of skill and delicacy. It was a marvelous thing, one more wonder to add to Gatsby’s list, but then the dragon pointed its nose at the night sky above me and started twisting its way up, the tip of its tail weaving back and forth like a counterbalance.
I stood staring after it, craning my neck, and I saw the moment when it started to drop. First it was flying, then it was falling, and then it was doing some combination of the two and gaining speed as it did so.
The moment that I realized that it wasn’t going to stop was the same moment when I realized that I couldn’t do more than stumble back, likely landing on my rear. I had had cruel tricks like that played on me before, and I narrowed my eyes at the diving dragon. I wasn’t going to be bullied, and that was why I did quite a silly thing, looking back.
The dragon could have been anything. It could have been a clockwork wonder taken from a German workshop after the war, and it could have left scars in my arm from jagged metalwork teeth. It could have been a slight and narrow aerialist in some kind of enchantment with more daring than sense. It could have been a dozen and one other things that would have utterly ruined my night, but in the end, it wasn’t.
Instead it was paper, and I brought the blade of my hand up in an instinctive motion that let the dragon sheer in half from nose to tail tip, the ripping sound making goosebumps stand up on my skin and a prickle of something almost achingly familiar running up my spine.
I stood there in surprise as the two halves of the dragon, nothing but paper intricately cut and scrolled, drifted down to either side of me, and a delighted laugh rang out behind me.
“Rotten brat, that took two hours to make.”
I turned to meet the speaker with my chin up and my shoulders back, nearly losing my poise with surprise when I recognized him.
He was the boy in the gallery the day Gatsby had shown us his treasure house. Now he was dressed in a black skullcap and a red brocade robe, covered all over with dragons, though, I saw after a moment, ones that were different from the one that had flown at me with such aggression. A long black beard, neatly combed, had been attached to his chin with spirit gum, and a pair of green spectacles obscured his eyes. I shouldn’t have been able to recognize him at all, but I did, and I felt at once that sense of attraction and repulsion again.
“If it took so long to make, then you shouldn’t have sicced it on me,” I retorted.
He shrugged, unrepentant, folding his hands in his sleeves like a mandarin from the picture books.
“I can make another,” he said. “I’m Khai.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, looking him over as he looked me over.
“Jordan Baker,” I responded. “Have you been here all month?”
“Something like that,” he said. “The troupe performed here just a few days before you caught me. They were moving on to Philadelphia, and I don’t get on in Philadelphia, so I decided to stay until they came back.”
“Just found yourself a guest room, and pretended you had been invited?” I asked, and he gave me a curious look.
“What’s it matter to you? You’re one of Mrs. Chau’s girls, aren’t you? I heard she got some girls from Vietnam…”
A dull red heat came up on my face, and I felt as if my spine were turning to clear, cold ice.
“I’m not one of Mrs. Chau’s girls at all,” I bit out.
He gave me another look, up and down, speculative and curious. I realized that he thought my dress was a costume just as much as his own outfit was. He thought there was another world I lived in, like the one where he dressed in gray slacks, striped shirts, and braces. For a moment, I wondered what he imagined I wore in that other world, and I almost choked.
“Hey,” he started, but I was turning away. I decided I was bored, and he was tiresome.
“Hey wait,” he said, grabbing me by the arm. “Wait. I’m sorry.”
“Good!”
“Here, let me make it up to you. You cắt giấy, right?”
I had no idea what the words meant, and they felt like rocks dropped in the middle of his otherwise perfect English. Still they made me choke a little. I couldn’t have heard words like that since I started walking, and I wasn’t supposed to hear them at Gatsby’s party.
I stood as still and straight as a garden trellis and Khai must have taken that to mean that I cared what he had to say, because from his sleeves, he pulled out an elegant pair of shears and what looked like a thick piece of gold paper.
“All right, are you looking?”
He waited until I nodded, and he started to cut, the shears moving so quickly that they seemed to blur, throwing scraps of paper everywhere like a tiny blizzard. Something about the snick of the blades cutting through the thick card stock sent a chill up the back of my neck, made me want to hug myself for warmth even on the hot August night. I felt exposed, I realized. I had done what he was doing twice, once in my bedroom, once in Daisy’s, and he was doing it for fun, in front of God and Gatsby’s guests and everyone.
I started to tell him to stop, that I wasn’t going to be impressed, but then the shears disappeared and he was plucking at the edge of the card stock. With a single flick of his fingers, there was a bright orange chrysanthemum blossom in his hand, flecked with gold as the paper had been. He spun it up in the air, and before it had reached the top of its arc, there was another one in his hand, red this time, and up it went as well. In a moment, I was standing in a shower of flowers, and despite my reluctance, I looked around in wonder at the shower of red, white, orange, and violet falling down around me, brushing against my arms, my cheeks, and my shoulders.
At the end, Khai held a pure white chrysanthemum edged in with gold around each narrow petal between his fingers and presented it to me. I took it without smiling, but I brought it up to my face anyway, curious. I was disappointed when there was no scent.
“Of course there’s no smell,” he told me. “It’s only paper after all.”
“It feels real, though,” I said, plucking some of the petals and crushing them to a wet pulp between my fingers.
“Well, of course it’s real,” he said with a hopeful smile. “It’s just real and made of paper.”
I bit my lip. Somewhere in the back of my mind lived a paper lion and a paper Daisy, tottering on her high heels and grinning to make her babyish cheeks even rounder.
“But how real?” I asked, and he gave me a curious look.
He bent gracefully to pick up a yellow blossom.
“This real,” he said, brushing the petals over my cheeks.
“This real,” he said, splitting the blossom in half and letting a torn sheet of thin yellow tissue paper drift to the ground.
“Silly, really,” I said, but he didn’t seem to have the sense to be cut.
“Of course it is,” he said with a grin. “Silly is all we can do at a place like this.”
He spoke with a kind of scorn that made me catch a laugh in my mouth. People called Gatsby’s parties brilliant, de rigueur, the most exciting thing since M. Bartholdi and M. Eiffel raised first an island out of New York Harbor and then a gorgeous woman clothed in copper from the island. People also called it the new return of Babylon, surely a sign of the rotten heart of the twenties, and excess that would make us all ashamed if we had anything like a sense of honor to shame.
I had never heard them called silly before, and Khai grinned to see me surprised.
“Look, Bai is going to have my head if I don’t actually step up,” he said. “Don’t come to watch us right now.”
“Why not?” I asked, piqued, because that was probably the best way he could have gotten me to come and see.
“Because like I said, this is silly. Here…”
He produced a card from his sleeve, tucking it under the strap of my dress like some kind of reverse pick-pocketing.
“Come see us Tuesday,” he said. “I’ll put you on the list.”
“Well, I do like being put on lists,” I said, and with a slight grin, he turned and made his way across the lawn towards a troupe of people in similar clothing. I must have missed them when they were at Gatsby’s last. They were all Asian, all weaving around each other in the steps of some intricate dance, and then I saw them spread out an enormous sheet of paper between them, pale cream, and as it spun faster and faster, opening up into a lotus flower the size of a dining room table. The petals, the same cream as the paper, opened to reveal a slender girl no taller than a mailbox, and I turned away.
A while ago, I would have been as charmed as anyone, but after what Khai said, I could see it for what it was: cheap, showy, silly.
I ventured around to the pool, where Nick had swum a few times, but as far as he could tell, Gatsby, never. From his stories, I expected the pool to be an eerily silent place, but of course it wasn’t.
The pool was enormous, clad in marble tile with a mosaic of a beautiful woman covering her face at the bottom. The water was the turquoise you imagined the Mediterranean must be, almost silky when you slid in. Some people had brought along bathing suits, but more simply dropped in in their clothes when the spirit of the evening moved them. I watched the fun for a while, and as I did, I saw that the people who dove under the surface took on the long and sinuous shapes of enormous swimming carp, gliding through the water as if they were flying through air. They flashed green and copper and vermilion as they swam by, turning their round gold eyes towards those above as if we were wonders or gods.
When they rose above the surface, they were human again, offered towels and drinks by a small army of pool attendants standing by. I couldn’t tell if it was only a clever illusion or if something had changed their forms, and the swimmers themselves were unclear on the subject.
At the eleven o’ clock dinner, I held myself aloof, sitting on the balustrade above the dining area with a cocktail in my hand, watching the kingdom below me with interest. It was the place where Gatsby had stood often enough, waiting for Daisy, hoping for Daisy. It was where he had stood when he saw me and Nick the first night, and I wondered what he felt now, dragged into the common tumult with the rest, because I could see him sitting at the table with Nick and with Daisy.
A swift look around for Tom found him at another table nearby, using his bulk and his boyish smile to impress a silly-looking young girl who I thought must be the daughter of the cultural attaché from France. I could almost hear Daisy call her pretty but common.
Even from where I sat, I could see that Daisy wasn’t having a good time. She had put on that lolling, rolling manner of hers, the one that so many people simply assumed meant that she was drunk. Nick leaned close to try to snap her out of it, and I realized that at some point, Gatsby had disappeared.
“Another one of your mysterious phone calls,” I muttered to myself, taking a scornful sip from my drink.
“Well, yes.”
I choked, corpse reviver going down the wrong pipe, and Gatsby had to steady me with an arm around my waist so I wouldn’t go toppling off the staircase.
“You startled me,” I said, trying to brazen it out.
“You’re in my spot,” he responded good-naturedly.
“I don’t mind that,” I said, and then daring a little, “was I right? Was that another call with one of your drugstores?”
That was a story that I had heard more and more lately, that all of this glamour was paid for with headache pills, cheap glamours that were ever so much more dignified than paint, and boxes of school supplies. It wasn’t true, but it gave people who wanted something to believe in something to believe in.
Gatsby looked at me steadily, long enough to make me uncomfortable.
“You don’t like me,” he said.
“Is there a reason I should?” I asked.
“Well, you’re important to Daisy. We should get along, don’t you think?”
I laughed because it felt like such a quaint thing to say. One would almost think that we were normal people.
“I get along with everyone,” I said, and he decided to believe me. He came a little closer, close enough that I could smell his cologne, see the black nail on his left hand. Recklessly, I reached out to tweak his tie a little, straightening it. It surprised a laugh out of him. This close, I could see the tiny wrinkles at the corner of his eyes.
“I can be a very good friend to you too, just as I am to Nick,” he murmured quietly. “Nick likes me so much. It’s only Tom that doesn’t. Tom and you.”
“Maybe,” I said deliberately, “it’s because you like to fuck people who don’t belong to you.”
The smile froze on his face, jagged like slips of lake ice. I couldn’t tell where my recklessness had come from, only that the corpse reviver was strong enough that I didn’t regret it yet.
“I think you’ll find that I only fuck people who belong to me,” he said. “But think about it, won’t you? I’ve a lot of friends, here and in DC. It could be that in a short while you could use some friends.”
“Think about it yourself,” I said with a smile. “They don’t want you any more than they want me, or weren’t you paying attention?”
There was something raw in his gaze right then, something trapped, something that was suddenly aware that its camouflage was not nearly as good as it had imagined it to be. I had stepped on some secret, obviously, but he had no idea which one, and no idea that I had no idea either. He forced a shrug and a smile.
“Fine. Be that way. Shall we keep it civil for Daisy’s sake, or would you like to make your distaste public?”
“I don’t think of you enough to care about any of that,” I said. “And just because I don’t like you is no reason we shouldn’t be friends.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets, ruining the line of his slacks, regarding me with his head tilted to one side.
“You know, I had thought you a Southern girl,” he said. “Like Daisy, like so many others I’ve known.”
I pointed at my face.
“That speaks well of you,” I said. “No one thinks I’m a Southern girl.”
“And they shouldn’t. You’re some East Coast thing, aren’t you? Sharp and mean and cold. What a prize you are.”
“Don’t let on you like me like that,” I said. “People will talk.”
He grinned, boyish and easy.
“You think I don’t mean it, don’t you? You shouldn’t. I think you’re pretty wonderful, Jordan. Nick and Daisy sing your praises—”
“If you expect me to believe that either of them talk about me when they’re with you, I have a bridge to sell you,” I said. “It’s a very East Coast thing, selling bridges.”
“They do,” he insisted. “Daisy told me about Fulbright’s, you know. We’re not going to have any secrets from each other. And Nick’s going to marry you.”
His outrageous words made me snap my mouth shut. I sat up straight on the stone balustrade, my ankles twisted together. Gatsby drifted a little closer, setting one hand on the stone beside my thigh.
“Listen,” he said softly. “They adore you. I want to adore you too.”
“There’s nothing stopping you,” I said, shoving down off the stone. It put me closer to him than ever, and this close, it was impossible to ignore my attraction to him, the way he could drink all the light out of the room and present it to you as if it was a special gift, his to give.
“You could make it easier for me,” Gatsby said with mock exasperation concealing real exasperation.
“I could,” I said. “I might. But you do come off awful strong, you know.”
He laughed at that, shaking his head.
“That is certainly something I have heard before,” he said.
He didn’t touch me as I made my way around him. When I looked back, he was gone.
Whether he meant to or not, Gatsby got his revenge on me by keeping Nick until dawn. There had been some kind of scuffle with Daisy, more likely, with Tom, and when I was ready to leave, Nick came for me with a regretful kiss.
“Sorry, darling. Gatsby wants me to stay for a word after everyone’s gone. Sounds like he’s had a rotten night.”
“And you’re going to make it a little nicer?”
Nick scowled at that, and I reached out to stroke his arm.
“And why shouldn’t you? You’re sweet as sugar, and you always make things a little nicer for me…”
He could sometimes be jollied out of a bad mood if only I was a little sweet with him. The trouble was that I was so bad at being sweet on command.
“Would you like me to walk you back?” he asked, but I shook my head.
“Stay,” I said. “Who knows if you can even get back into this sacred space after you have left it?”
“You could stay too,” Nick suggested, and to my startled delight, he cupped a hand around the back of my thigh. “Plenty of open rooms…”
“You absolute monster,” I said, pleased.
“If I am, you’ve made me one,” he retorted. I let him kiss me for a little while, but then I stepped back with a sigh.
“Come back home as soon as you can,” I said. “I shall languish and fall into a life-in-death faint without you.”
“I’ll wake you up,” he promised me, and I made my way back to his humble little house.
Nick’s house was small enough that you could see into all the rooms if you stood in the hall and all the doors were open, but there was something about it that gave me the creeps. I was too used to living with people on all sides, even if politesse and good manners prevented us from acknowledging it.
At Nick’s place, you could be alone and lonely, and I went straight to his bedroom, firmly closing the rest of the house away. The moon—the real moon—was high in the sky, and I opened the drapes to let the silver light spill onto the bed. I toed my shoes off and hung my dress in the portion of the wardrobe that Nick insisted was mine. As I did so, the card that Khai had given me fluttered to the ground. I picked it up, rubbing my fingers over the characters I couldn’t read and the address that I could.
I told myself that I could just throw it away. I didn’t have to keep it. I didn’t have to do anything. That comforted me enough that I was able to slide it into my purse, deferring my decision a little while. That helped.
I had brought pajamas along—slim, silk, and with my initials embroidered on the cuff—but the night was too stuffy for that. Instead I stripped to the skin and stretched out on Nick’s mattress, hoping that he would be done with Gatsby soon. I wondered if he would bring back a touch of Gatsby with him, whether it was the scent of Gatsby’s cologne or the taste of Gatsby’s mouth on his own. I licked my lips restlessly, turning away from the moonlight, letting my eyes drift shut.
This summer is never going to end, I thought.