We took the main road in, and Gatsby’s palace loomed up in front of us. From across the Sound, it looked like a ruin, a reminder of the wages of sin. Now, coming up on it before we veered to Nick’s house, it looked … normal. Just a building, though a beautiful one. It still gleamed as if at any moment it might burst like fireworks on a hot July night, as if it still had some kind of potential for glamour and for beauty. It likely still did, for it had survived Jay Gatsby, and now anything was possible. We all had.
For one horrid moment, I thought that Nick would take us to the mansion for some reason. I let out a held breath when we pulled into his own weedy drive.
“His funeral was today,” he said when he saw my relief. “His father is staying there now.”
“How was it?” I asked, and his mouth tightened.
“A pauper’s affair,” Nick said. “I’ve seen mass graves given better.”
“Is that why you were in East Egg? To see if you could shame Daisy into going?”
He blinked at me in confusion. He hadn’t been thinking of Daisy at all.
“No. I … I couldn’t stay there, and I couldn’t stay here. It was too much. I wanted you.”
“He never liked me all that much,” I said coldly. “I don’t think he always liked you either.”
Nick flinched from me as if I had struck him. I suppose I had. He gave me his hand out of the car. We ended up walking slowly through the rain to his door, as if neither of us wanted to remember the last time we had dashed from the water to his doorstep. We were different people now. We didn’t run through the rain together.
“You’ve forgotten a few dresses here,” Nick said. “You should change, you’re soaked.”
I felt a kind of bitter twist in my heart as I looked at him. I hadn’t forgotten them at all, and instead of being dresses I could spare, I rather liked them. He stood still dripping in the doorway as I changed into a pale orange dress of figured silk, too fancy for such a dull rainy day, but I hardly cared.
When I turned back towards him, he was watching me with a gaze that was nothing so much as exhausted.
“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.”
I felt as if I had been spun around several times and then encouraged to drink a champagne glass full of what turned out to be top-shelf whiskey. My mouth tasted like smoke.
“Who you slept with this summer?”
“That boy from Amherst, Grayson Lydell, Evelyn Bard. None of them could even … no one else compared.”
“How could they?” I asked, faint and appalled.
You must always be precise when commanding imps, Mrs. Crenshaw said in my memory. Never say wealth when you can say the precise number of dollars, never say eliminate when you can say murder.
And apparently, never say women when you should have been asking about people. No wonder the singed thing had snickered so upon telling me about the girl from Jersey City.
Nick finally looked up, and noticed my surprise. A red blush swept up his face, not embarrassed but exposed.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
“And you wouldn’t have told me if I didn’t.”
“No. God, you always seemed to know so much.”
“Not everything,” I had to admit. I suddenly felt very young and very lonely.
I sat on his bed, wiping my eyes. 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.
Nick stripped off his jacket and came to sit sodden and sad on the bed beside me. Two broken hearts, I thought with a kind of strange pleasure at it.
He touched my chin to make me look around, and he kissed me. This time, I was searching for it, and I could taste something pulpy and dry in his kiss, something I knew. A lion, a paper girl, and now a paper soldier. I would have laughed if it wouldn’t have hurt his feelings.
“Tell me the first thing you remember,” I said softly, and he kissed me again, open and gentle and searching. “That you really remember, I mean.”
“I remember muster at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin,” he said between kisses. “I remember hearing my name, my rank, and my service number.”
“And that was you, Nicholas Carraway, forever and ever.”
“Lieutenant Nicholas Carraway, five-two-seven-one-one-five.”
He felt good kissing me. I wondered again if I had always known, but then the question came back—always known what?
I pushed him back on the bed, straddling his hips as I bent down to kiss his throat. He watched me, docile not just because of the tingle in my fingers or the strange and new hunger I had for him, but because he had been made to be so. I wondered if the original Nick Carraway had been like this. I decided not, and that I probably wouldn’t have cared for him at all. I heard in passing that that tragedy that had kept the St. Paul Carraways from Daisy’s wedding was a car accident, and now I knew who the mysterious casualty was. What a blow it had been for his parents when he died just as the war was ending, all that work by their shameful foreign secret gone to waste.
No wonder they had sent this one east, this one made of paper, this one with a heart that he ripped to pieces and threw like trash in front of the worst people. This one was mine.
“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 laughed at him, and then I reached for the small penknife on his shabby nightstand, kept terribly keen through countless night watches of idle sharpening. His breath went soft and long, so long it seemed he stopped breathing entirely, and his eyes fluttered closed as I cut a long line from the base of his throat down to his belly.
Eyelashes wasted on a boy, I thought as I had years ago earlier this summer, and his hands fell lightly on my thighs, the fingers twitching slightly with a papery dry rhythm. He opened like a song; it occurred to me that I must have a talent for this. That pleased me, and it was strange to find any kind of pleasure on a day like that one.
I pulled out his heart so easily that I could see why he had been so free with it. His great-grandmother, out of some sentimentality, had cut it from a map of Minnesota and carefully glued to it a picture of the Carraway clan, two-dozen stern-faced Lutherans at some church picnic or another. I looked closely, squinting under the soft light from Nick’s lamp until I thought I found the ancestress herself, off to one side, hair as white as poplar bark, and a stern expression on her crabbed face. I traced her face, feeling an odd kinship with her. She had at least had the courage to choose a picture she was in rather than erasing herself entirely.
When I flipped it over, I saw a page from his yearbook at Yale, perhaps just pasted there to give him a little more sturdiness and strength, perhaps to give him some personality. It was the page featuring Yale’s football team, and I picked out Tom from the lineup of similar, serious, slab-faced men. What a mess.
Over all of this, inscribed with what looked like heavy grease pencil, were names, names written large and crude and without understanding of what such a thing would mean. Largest of course was Gatsby’s—not Jay, but Gatsby—and there were a few other men’s names scrawled there as well, men I thought he must have known in the war.
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.
“Poor love,” I said, looking down at him. His head was turned to one side, his lips slightly parted. He was lovely. I had always thought so.
I folded up his heart and slipped it into my purse, and from my purse I drew out my planner, which only let me see two weeks in advance. I used the penknife to cut one of the pages into a pretty heart shape, like the Valentines I had refused to cut in school. I looked at it, toyed with writing my name on it and taking up all the space so that it could not be taken up with any other, but I didn’t.
Instead, I only pressed a lipstick kiss to one edge, because I’ve never been so keen on being forgotten, and slid it back into his chest. A moment later, he shifted into a true sleep, and I climbed off of him, giving him another kiss on his forehead.
I put my shoes back on, and I found his car keys on the nail where he had left them.
I took one last look at his house, and when the door closed behind me, I heard the lock snap into place. 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.
I took Nick’s car and drove west towards the city. The sun set below the edge of the world, and the shadows came out, longer and sharper than they had been during the summer. I wished I had a few sips of demoniac to hurry things along, but it was past summer now, so certain things would be easier.
I pulled over at Willets Point and bought a candy bar from the general store. I nibbled it hungrily, because I hadn’t had anything since the start of the day, as I walked along the edge of the road. The rubber marks from the coupe’s tires were still visible, faint and dim, on the road, but then the sun sunk a little lower and they disappeared as well.
I didn’t have to wait long.
One moment I was alone on the slick grassy verge, and the next, Myrtle Wilson rose up out of the ditch beside me. Her pale face was perfect, her hair gleamed like a stoplight, her small feet were bare, and unless she left, she would be the Willets Point ghost for a generation or more. I was leaving. I didn’t see why she had to stay.
She started for me, a dire look in her eyes, but I shook my head.
“You want Daisy, and you want Tom, one or the other,” I said firmly. I sounded like Aunt Justine. “They’re going to Barcelona. You could meet them there.”
She looked at me, flat-eyed, pale, and dead. I reached into my purse and gingerly gave her a twenty-dollar bill. It wasn’t much, but it would get her started.
As I drove away, I saw her in the rearview window, gazing towards oncoming traffic, and thumb crooked for a lift.
As the city grew up around me, as the noise and the brutal indifference of it took shape, it hit me all at once that I would be leaving it soon, and for the first time, I had no idea when I would be back. The thought was like a broad hand slapped across my chest, but the pain after that sunk in almost comfortable, like something I could live with until I learned to banish it entirely.
Shanghai first, I thought, because after all, I had been invited, and then Vietnam. It was, I could already tell, going to be a journey full of awkward pauses, terrible humiliations, and so many places where I couldn’t be anyone but myself, but I thought I would survive it well enough. It was full dark by the time I made it to the city proper, and I stopped at a small drug store just as the weedy-looking young man was getting ready to close. I smiled and flirted until he opened back up for me, and as I made my way through the aisles for home goods, I wondered slightly giddily if this might have been one of Gatsby’s, where there might be anything under the cashier’s counter from demoniac to guns to other destructions no less seductive.
I overpaid for my purchase, and in the car again, I unwrapped it with care. Under the sodium streetlamp, I held a gleaming pair of delicate embroidery scissors. I admired them for a moment, their utter sharpness, their ladylike prettiness, and then I clicked them open in my hands.
I brought the blade to the pad of my left ring finger, and before I even felt more than a slight pressure, a dark drop of blood welled up from the cut. It was darker than I was used to seeing, and it ran molasses-slow down to my palm. I considered it for a moment, and then I lapped it up, tasting the copper, and under that the heat of something else.
I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or not, awake or not, but I caught a glimpse of something shining and gray just beyond my eyes.
I was on Gatsby’s pier in West Egg, and if I turned I would see the green light from Daisy’s dock. Instead, I stared at Gatsby’s beautiful house, which hadn’t fallen to pieces like everything else he touched. It stood, locked up and lonely, but I could see it wouldn’t always be that way.
The sky spun over my head, sun to stars, slowly at first and then faster. The grass grew, the roof fell in, people came to gawk and stare at the site of such a tragedy. Some children threw rocks through the windows; a pack of teenagers, the girls with their hair tied back and the boys in workman’s dungarees, forced the door and then ran out shrieking.
The sky spun and the stars shifted. The west side of the house fell down. The lawn grew even wilder, and sometimes deer and things that looked like deer picked their way across the grass, as sweet and dainty as the starlets that had once stumbled from the doors. A pair of men with still faces and long hands came to stare up at the broken windows, and they stood there, as still as I was on the pier, for seven turnings of the sky and were gone. The house was on fire. Burned. It was rafters and beams and char, and there was nothing gold in the black.
The sky spun. Someone came to cut the grass. Men came to measure the property, followed by an important-looking woman in trousers with her hair cut on a geometric angle, not that much unlike mine. They measured, they argued, and houses sprouted up, first one, then two, and then more, small and sleek and odd.
The sky went still, and far above, I could see foreign stars, stars that moved, stars that winked at me, stars that shot across the sky like comets. Under the wrack and wreck of what had come before, the sky was new, and I reached for it with a yearning eager hand.