I do not like to make a habit of admitting my mistakes.
When I mentioned Gatsby in Daisy’s own house, in front of her own husband, 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 course, the young lieutenant from Camp Taylor still had his soul, and by 1922, Jay Gatsby of West Egg had no such thing.
It was only the year before when the society madcaps went about with a single nail painted slick black, the mark of someone with infernal dealings. It was so fashionable that Maybelline released Chat Noir, its deluxe black nail polish that promised a devilish long-lasting gleam. In the later part of 1921, it seemed as if half of Manhattan’s twenty-five-and-under set must have made some kind of infernal pact or another. In 1922, the fad was mostly played out, but a little bit of tackiness was permitted in the very rich.
So Gatsby was a fabulously wealthy man with a harmless affectation, or perhaps he actually was the one in a million who had sold his soul. No one knew, and that summer, absolutely no one cared when it seemed as if the legendary Canadian pipeline poured good whiskey straight from the solid gold taps of his French facsimile mansion. I was sick of the trend even before it showed up in McClure’s Magazine, a sure sign that its time was done, but Gatsby wore it well.
At Gatsby’s, the clock stood at just five shy of midnight the moment you arrived. Crossing from the main road through the gates of his world, a chill swirled around you, the stars came out, and a moon rose up out of the Sound. It was as round as a golden coin, and so close you could bite it. I had never seen a moon like that before. It 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.
Everything was dripping with money and magic, to the point where no one questioned the light that flooded the house from the ballroom and dining rooms to the halls and secluded parlors. 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. Some of the guests exclaimed at the magic on display, but I heard the servants marveling at it as well and learned that it was all electricity, the entire house wired at enormous expense to come alive with the flick of a switch.
The lights may have been money, but there was no lack of magic either. In the main hall was a mahogany bar stretching longer than a Ziegfeld Follies kick line, and guests crowded around four and five deep before the brass rail for a taste of … well, what was your pleasure? Once I got a tiny scarlet glass filled with something murky white that tasted of cardamom, poppy seed, and honey, the last wine Cleopatra drank before her date with the asp, and Paul Townsend of the Boston Townsends got stinking drunk on something from the nomadic party of great Ubar. These were no dusty bottles salvaged from desert digs; they were fresh from the vintners and brewers themselves, for all that they were long gone dust.
The sky above Gatsby’s parties was a deep blue, always clear and just barely garlanded with silky clouds to give it an air of mystery. Once, he had produced a troupe of aerial artistes who did their acts on invisible ladders far above our heads, giving them the appearance of true flight, their sequined costumes flashing tangerine, lemon, and lime from the lights beneath. As we watched, one young woman in chartreuse missed her grip and fell, plummeting towards the flagstones below. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friends cover their faces, but I couldn’t look away. There was a flash of light the instant she would have struck the ground, and instead of a broken little body, a still-faced man in black held her safe in his arms. There was a stunned look on her face. Her eyes were studded with rhinestone-like tears, and I saw a dark pink mark, mottled blackberry, crawling to cover the side of her neck like a port-wine stain.
He set her down gravely on the ground, and her hand flew to the mark, feeling gingerly for the bones that assuredly had been broken and mended. He took her other hand, and they both bowed to rapturous applause.
“Death doesn’t come to Gatsby’s” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. Certainly ugliness didn’t, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home?
The first time I ever went to Gatsby’s house, I went with Henry Conway’s set. I knew his sister from the golfing club where we were both members, and after a match early in May, dinner at L’Aiglon, and drinks at Tatsby, the cry went up that of course we must go to Gatsby’s in West Egg.
One girl, some cousin from Atlanta, squeaked that she didn’t have an invitation, and Henry Conway gave her an affably sharp look.
“Look, darling, no one needs an invitation to go to one of Gatsby’s parties. I don’t think he’s ever sent a single one out.”
The girl from Atlanta bit her lip, getting a smudge of inexpertly applied lipstick on her small teeth.
“But then, how do we know we’re wanted?”
I forgot who replied to her and how unkind they might have been when they did it, but just a few hours later, just five minutes until midnight, I saw her dancing madly under the harvest moon with some boy from Queens. Her eyes were dilated to bright black shoe buttons and her hands fluttered like sparrows caught on a silvery wire. She came out once or twice after that while I was still passing time with Henry and his crowd, but she disappeared soon after, back to Atlanta, probably, though of course there were the standard rumors of things far stranger.
She was right in the end, and we none of us were wanted, but you never would have guessed it then. The lights that draped the gardens twinkled as if Heaven had come down at Gatsby’s command, and the fruit borne in the delicate domestic little orchard by the house was like nothing I ever had before, something smaller than an apple and darker than a plum. When I plucked one down from curiosity, it was so ripe that my fingers bruised it, and licking up the red juice made me dizzy and slightly delirious. For a moment, I saw among the twisted branches a figure that looked like my own, back against a twisted tree and pushing someone down to kneel in the moss, but then I spat and the image was gone.
There was really no need to go picking fruit at Gatsby’s mansion. The food on the long white tables—baked ham glazed in sweet apricot, milky clam broth, delicately cut fruit that bloomed like flowers on their celadon platters—were so perfect that you thought it must have been magic rather than the machinery of more than four dozen waitstaff and caterers who made that kind of magic their business.
Gatsby never tried to hide the underpinnings of human work that aided in creating the wonder of his five before midnight world. It would have been gauche. It would have put him with the new money of Astoria, where every meal was whisked to the table by unseen hands and where every fire on the hearth was lit by a snap of the fingers. His servants were more than visible in their crisp black and white, more dignified, more sleekly dressed and more sober than his guests would ever be. For him, as in the hallowed halls of the elite from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, there would always be a human price for his luxury. Otherwise, I could see him musing, what was the point?
What Gatsby’s parties were was easy. It felt as if every wish you had while within his domain might be granted, and the only rule was that you must be beautiful and witty and bright.
I went first with Henry’s set, and then at the end of May with Coral Doughty. I liked going to Gatsby’s, the drive along the bridge and through the warmth of the setting sun to emerge into the sweet coolness beyond his gates, but there were other things I liked just as well. There were séances held weekly at St. Regis, a circus of gargoyles in Soho, and of course the delightfully endless round of dinners and soirees to be had if you had some money and just a touch of charm. There was plenty to do that summer, and I had started taking over the odd social responsibility from Aunt Justine as well. She was in no way weakening, she said, but thought it important that I learn to handle my responsibilities as befit my place in her world. We both knew, of course, that my place in her world was tenuous at best and only growing more tenuous the older I became, but she acted as if she could wave that all away with the force of her personality and will.
I was busy, but nevertheless, Gatsby threw a good party, one where I could secret myself in the corner with someone, nursing a drink while they told me what was in their heart.
I was a little crazy after secrets that year. I liked collecting them, and though I seldom told, I did gloat. I was years from who I had been in Louisville, some of those scars healed over to give me a kind of hard polish that made me more mean but less vulnerable. The shades of Louisville were worn away to a few stories that I told to entertain and to disarm. When they asked where I was from, and when the first answer did not satisfy, I asked them where they were from; a question they weren’t used to and a sincere look spilled all sorts of things between us.
One night in early June, I quickly realized that there were no secrets to be had from the undergrad with whom I had arrived. We were there with his older sister and her husband, and at first, their presence kept the undergrad from being too obnoxious. Then the music started, the first imported California starlet danced out onto the canvas that covered the garden green, and the taps opened. The sister and her husband had a taste for straight gin, and the undergrad was crossing the line from being obnoxious to becoming a serious incident. I sent him to fetch me something with a wedge of lime in it, and under the flickering, foolish lights and the strains of “Sweet Summer June,” I slipped away.
I liked being alone in the crowd. It was something that I had grown to find comforting, and I kept a drink in my hand to fend off someone unwelcome bringing me one. There was a famous tenor bullied by his friends to standing on the edge of the fountain, 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. He sang, and the golden notes came down to dance over the head of a pretty man in a cheap suit. He was a hustler from Queens or from Brooklyn or someplace worse, but with the tenor’s grace hanging over him, he was exalted into something else. I watched for a moment until the inevitable happened and someone pushed the tenor into the fountain. The notes went sodden and unhappy before dissipating altogether and then more people were jumping into the fountain, splashing the water as high as the head of the stone nymph who stood at the center.
I wove my way through the crowd, calling to the people I knew, nodding at the people I didn’t know as if I did know them, and keeping an eye out for the man himself. By then I remembered him, but Daisy had gone into a funk after that dinner, as she did sometimes. She went quiet and absent from herself, smiling at me in a vague way, as if she were a ghost or I was. In the end, there was nothing for me to do but return to the city. I had not been out to see her since that day, and I thought there might be a chance that I wouldn’t see her until the Fourth of July or after.
Still I wanted to look at Gatsby, sort out what kind of disguise he had created that had caused this change. I wanted, as my aunt might have said, to examine the lion’s teeth, and of course the best way to do that was to stick my head in the lion’s mouth.
So I was, in a lazy and undirected way, looking for Gatsby, and instead I found Nick.
Despite the slightly poleaxed look and the stammering introductions, he would not have stuck out at all if he had not kept asking if Gatsby were about. He learned better after the third or fourth time he asked, when people told him of course they had no business with Gatsby. It was one of those people who put the first drink in his hand, but Nick apparently didn’t get the hint and only wandered away with it, drinking it faster than he should have.
Nick Carraway was twenty-nine that summer. He had been in the war and killed men, but there was something about the awkward angles of his body in his new white flannel suit, the lost look in his eyes that made me feel oddly soft towards him. I followed him through the crowd, almost at his elbow, eavesdropping as he sought first Gatsby, and then some sort of anchor that would stop him from drowning in the eddies and undertows of Gatsby’s entertainments.
Finally, before he could actually embarrass himself—something he was working up to when he took a third cocktail—I dropped my drink behind the hedge and put myself on the stairs in his path. I knew he recognized me. There were a few foreigners in the place, someone’s Chinese mistress, a pair of rather beautiful Italian brothers, and a wild gorgeous woman whose dark skin and curly hair proclaimed her an exotic of some kind or another, but I was the only one he had been introduced to.
I spared him the trouble of coming up with a reason to talk to me, instead plucking the drink from his hand. It was a bijou, vermouth and gin flavored with absinthe; a strange choice for Nick if it was a choice he had made at all.
“Thank you.” I took a delicate sip. “I was hoping that someone would bring me something.”
“I’ll bring you anything you want,” he said, and I tilted my head at him.
“You ought not say such things to me,” I said gravely. “I might ask you for the moon, and what would you do then?”
“Get it for you, of course.”
I laughed at that, because something in his voice meant it. He didn’t sound like New York at all. The army and foreign travel had rumpled his broad flat northern vowels, but he was still marked out as different from the rest, more subtly than I was, but marked nonetheless. Even then, I knew it wasn’t just the place of his birth that set him apart from the crowd, but I could not say what else it might be.
I was just thinking about suggesting we go to the garden maze or perhaps into one of the intimate little rooms in the house when a pair of girls in yellow came down the stairs towards us. I saw them too late to turn, and they came up to us, their cheeks glittering with a dusting of mica and petroleum jelly and their teeth set in identical smiles. I had no problem with Ada, but of course wherever she went May came along, and May was terrible.
“Hullo Jordan,” May said sweetly. “So sorry about your match!”
I smiled, because anything else would have been a victory for her. I had lost in the finals, and I mentioned it to Nick, who nodded sympathetically.
“Do you remember us?” Ada said hopefully. “We met you here last month.”
“I do remember you,” I said. “You’ve dyed your hair since, haven’t you?”
I felt Nick startle slightly. St. Paul still had a deep streak of Protestantism that would see makeup, let alone hair dye, as more than a little morally suspect. He looked closer at Ada, as if to see what degree of fakery he could find in her. He would have found none; Ada and May were on the chorus line at one of the better theaters, and part of their stipend was time at a decent salon.
They asked us to come sit with them, and because it was easier to sit for a few moments and leave than to say no, Nick offered me his arm and we came down the stairs to the veranda. Someone had fished the tenor out of the fountain, and now, drip-drying, he had someone else’s plump and pretty wife on his knee as he burbled little amber notes for her. Behind him, still hopeful and a little pathetic, was the hustler from Queens or Brooklyn, but no one was paying any attention to him any longer.
At a table with the girls were three men whose names were deliberately obscured. One wore a black fingernail, but the chips in the finish told me it was only painted on. All three had the self-important air of men who I should know, but I didn’t know any of them. They knew me of course, and after the usual pleasantries, I turned to Ada, who was, besides Nick, perhaps the most tolerable of the lot.
“Do you come to these parties often?” I asked. The group’s eyes fell on her, allowing me to lay my hand gently over Nick’s. There was a minuscule flinch, and then he went still, as if he were afraid my hand were a butterfly he might startle away.
“We were here last month and met you,” she reminded me. “But I like to come. There are always so many wonderful people to talk to, so many things to see. Why, just a couple of weeks ago, someone brought a firespeaker from Borneo! She pulled the fire right from the torches and made them dance in wheels and whorls, big as anything. I barely noticed that a spark got on my dress and put a hole straight through the trim until later.”
She paused, and then like a bride flourishing her wedding band, she brought out the rest.
“You know, he saw? He asked after my name and address, and three days later, a man came from Croirier’s with a new evening gown for me!”
Something about fairy gifts and Trojan horses nibbled at the back of my head, something that Daisy’s own mother had told us when she walked in on us at play one afternoon. Her eyes were red from crying, and the velvet dressing gown fell half off of her shoulders, and I thought from the way her voice shook that she knew something about the family name of Fay and unlooked-for gifts.
“Did you keep it?” I asked. I wouldn’t have been so sanguine about taking gifts from someone like Gatsby, but she gave me an indignant look. Things were different where she came from, apparently, or perhaps she wasn’t so very bright.
“Two hundred and sixty-five dollars, gas blue with lavender beads? Of course I did!”
“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said May. “He doesn’t want trouble with anybody.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Nick’s sudden question reminded me of Daisy’s What Gatsby? That moment, I felt, should have been edged with sable, marked for the disaster it would bring, but of course it wasn’t, and I could say many similar things about other moments that were still to come.
May turned to Nick, triumphant under his polite regard.
“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”
She paused and obligingly we all leaned in.
“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
A speculative thrill went through all of us. It was a brush with the underworld, the ones run by the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews in the city and the ones run by the pale-eyed, still-faced gentlemen who all seemed to style themselves princes and dukes of the far reaches of Hell. Both, went the rumor, came to Gatsby’s parties, dressed in their best and hiding their natures under hats, gloves, and fine manners. Nick, likely the only one at the table who had actually killed someone, looked reluctantly intrigued. Ada shook her head.
“No, he was a spy during the war.”
“For the Germans or the Americans?” asked one of the men I was meant to know.
She shook her head and pursed her lips. She pointed discreetly down, towards other masters, and I saw her other hand stole into her pocket where she was likely rubbing a saint’s medal.
“He’s no spy, he’s one of them,” said another man, giving us a significant look. “One of their princes, you know, or the son of such. It was everywhere in Morocco last year.”
“No, he must be an American,” insisted May. “He was in the American Army during the war. You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. You can tell right away he’s killed a man.”
She and Ada shivered dramatically, and I stole a glance at Nick. His mouth was perhaps a trifle stern, but he didn’t laugh at her statement. I noticed that our voices had lowered. It wasn’t that we were afraid of being overheard, but rather because I wasn’t the only one who liked secrets. There was never a secret like Gatsby, and even if he was a public sort of thing, it still intrigued.
Supper was served after that, and poor Nick ended up joining me and the group I had come with. The sister and her husband were drunk and disgustingly in love, and they only had eyes for each other. The undergrad had not been improved by drinking at all, and as the soup course went and the appetizer course arrived, Nick’s responses were getting shorter and shorter, and my charming deflections were growing less charming and moving towards some kind of accident with the unused cheese fork.
“Great God, of course it doesn’t open sideways!” Nick finally cried, and I took that as my hint to pull him away. The undergrad slumped back down with a muttered word I decided not to hear, and when Nick might have said more, I tucked my hand into his arm and started walking.
“Come on, this is getting too polite for me.” When he hesitated, I offered, “We can go find Gatsby.”
That brought him along.
“What are you looking for him for, anyway?” I asked.
“Well, he invited me. You know. Seemed polite to thank him.”
“What? He never did! Show me.”
He drew the invitation from his jacket, and I turned it over in my hands. It was good paper, deep red as if dipped in blood, with gold lettering sunk into the card stock. It felt heavy in my hand with all the weight of an imperial summons. It was real, and I doubted more than one or two had ever been printed.
“He did invite you,” I said, handing it back. The uncertain look was back in his eyes. If he was meant to be the associate of a man who might be a prince in Hell or a German spy, I thought he rather needed to toughen up.
“I didn’t think it was so strange,” he muttered, just as we passed by a tall and gaunt man with pale eyes and still face talking with Anastasia Polari, the famous silent film beauty. Her eyes were as dark as holes burned in silver nitrate and as hungry as winter, and he held her hand in both of his. There seemed to be either more or less joints in his fingers than there should be. Nick stared, his footsteps slowing, and I pulled him forward, touching my fingertip to his lips.
“Shouldn’t stare,” I murmured, and he looked at me instead. Long eyelashes, of the kind they say are wasted on a boy, but I never found them wasted. It made him prettier, and gave him an appearance of innocence I doubted he deserved.
For a moment, I thought he might kiss me right there, but I turned and drew him briskly along. I liked the tingle on my skin, the blush and the way I could feel his gaze on the bare back of my neck, the indent of my waist and the sway of my hips. There wasn’t much there, but they did sway, and he followed behind. I liked the anticipation as much as the thing itself, and though I hoped Nick wouldn’t be one of those, sometimes more.
No Gatsby at the bar or on the veranda. No Gatsby in the music room or the armory or in the private dance that had sprung up in the blue parlor. We ended up in the library, where I had few hopes of finding Gatsby, but where I thought we might be alone for a while.
The library I later heard was a true Gothic miracle. It had burned down sometime in the 1500s, its ashes tilled under the earth. A rather pedestrian apartment block stood there now. Gatsby, they said, resurrected it the way he might resurrect a beloved dead ancestor. As we walked down the cavernous space, our footsteps echoed and the tall stained glass windows flickered with a hot orange light from beyond, a far cry from the cool twinkling stars that lit the party.
There were alcoves set between the shelves, and I had been back there before with Coral Doughty to find that the reading sofa was very comfortable. Nick looked a little sharper when we were alone, as if he had finally figured out what he was for.
“Jordan, wait a minute,” he said.
“Are you going to talk to me about your girl in St. Paul?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. It would have surprised me, but I could stand being surprised.
“Shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t get out of the city much,” I said, and slid my fingers down the lapel of his jacket. I didn’t touch his skin, not yet, but his breath stuttered.
“Come here,” I started to say, and then I had to stifle a yelp when a rumpled gray man sat up from the very sofa that I had had my eye on. He peered around, his eyes enormous behind thick owlish spectacles, and he squinted at us both before looking me up and down. He pointed at the books.
“What do you think?” he demanded.
“About what?” I snapped. I was still blushing, and I hoped it looked like anger.
“The books!”
He had made something of a nest for himself in the little alcove. There was a pile of blankets on the cushion, and a small table close to one side that held a glass of water and the remnants of a sandwich. A pair of slippers peeped out from under the sofa, and he had dragged a lamp over to light the whole affair.
“They’re real. They’re the real thing. About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained.”
Something in our faces must have suggested we were in the least interested, because the man rushed to the bookcase and came back brandishing a leather-bound copy of a Renaissance treatise on the machinations of the princes below. It was a gorgeous thing, a volume that I knew Aunt Justine would have coveted, and if it had not made such an obvious gap in the shelves, I might have considered taking it to her.
“See! It is a bona-fide authentic piece of demonologica. He fooled me at first. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn’t break the seals. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
He showed us the pages that were still shut with old wax and imprinted with the seals of Great Solomon. Terrible things could be learned from the pages underneath those seals, but they were as unbroken as the day they were made.
“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”
“He was invited,” I said a little spitefully, pointing at Nick, but the man bobbed his head knowingly.
“I was brought,” he continued. “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
“Has it?” Nick asked in a tone just a fraction off of mine.
“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”
“You told us,” I said with mock kindness.
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.
The dancing had started, and of course it was far too late for anyone who wasn’t a good dancer to begin with. Men walked girls much too young for them in awkward circles, and the famous couples competed for the best angles even while keeping in the dimmer reaches of the space in a half-hearted attempt at privacy.
“Should I ask you to dance?” Nick inquired.
“Another time,” I said absently, because something had caught my eye. We stood at the base of the steps. In front of us were the garden and all the pleasures that Gatsby had implicitly promised us, but the man himself was not down enjoying them. Instead he stood on the veranda behind us, and he was staring straight at Nick.
“Hey, it’s the girls from before,” Nick said, pointing towards the stage. Ada and May were doing their baby act, grown women toddling around with big eyes and singing nonsense songs in their high squeaky voices. It was a spectacle all right. Nick had apparently never seen anything like it, because he watched them, allowing Gatsby to watch him, allowing me to watch Gatsby.
I couldn’t believe more people weren’t watching Gatsby. He stood at the balustrade like an emperor overlooking his kingdom, but in this moment, the only thing he had eyes for was Nick. Everything else was faded for him, all sounds muted. It was almost indecent, and something in me responded to it.
He had the gravitational pull of the sun itself, drawing planets into his orbit even as he summoned up all of New York’s smart set for his parties. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if he turned that look on someone who saw it, but of course I could. He had looked that way at Daisy, and I knew what had happened to her.
Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him. I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true. I was feeling the reflection of it rather than the thing itself, and I charged myself to remember it as well as the pit of cold wariness that had come to curl in my stomach.
Nick clapped for the girls on the stage, waking me from my reverie. I avoided looking up at Gatsby, and instead took Nick by the arm. Somewhere, he had gotten another finger-bowl of champagne, and his smile was silly and a little puppyish.
“Where shall we go next, Jordan?”
“Right here,” I said, sitting him down at a table. I waved away a couple who wanted to join us, and I sat with Nick at the edge of the crowd, clearly visible from the veranda. There was a flushed look to Nick’s face, and I stopped myself from reaching to brush the dark hair out of his eyes. I felt strange about it now, as if I was trespassing on territory that Gatsby had claimed with only that one desperate look. It was irritating to say the least, but at least he didn’t keep us waiting.
One moment I was collecting a gin rickey for myself, and the next, the man himself was seated at the table with us as if he had been there all along. Up close, he was less handsome, more vital. I could see a faint scar at the point of his chin, old and white against his tanned skin, and his hair, cut so very short, made me think of an army man who had not quite acclimated to life at peace. He had eyes for no one but Nick, and when Nick’s head came up from a second finger-bowl of champagne—where was he getting them from?—he gazed at Gatsby with a kind of curious wonder. It might have just been the drinks, but I thought it was more than that. Even I wanted to scoot my chair closer to Gatsby’s warmth, touch his bare forearm where it rested on the table, and he wasn’t even looking at me.
It was only when Nick met his eyes that Gatsby smiled, and somewhere in the house, the clock chimed midnight.
“Your face is familiar,” Gatsby said, his voice low and warm, as if he had no idea who Nick was. “Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?”
“Why, yes. I was in the Twenty-Eighth Infantry.” Nick spoke automatically, eyes never falling from Gatsby’s. His hands, forgotten on the table, twitched as if still seeking a trigger.
I hadn’t known Nick’s division, but I had heard of the Twenty-Eighth. Everyone had. They had carried away America’s first victory in France, and that meant Nick was allowed as only a few other men in the country were to wear the insignia of the Black Lions of Cantigny. I was a little more impressed with him. Every boy who came home was a war hero, but there was apparently something more to this one.
“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”
“I would have remembered someone like you,” Nick said, attempting a diffidence he obviously did not feel. I couldn’t tell whether Gatsby was telling the truth, but Nick was, and I changed the few things I knew about him around a bit in my head.
They talked for a moment about some depressing little villages in France. Gatsby mentioned he had just bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.
“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”
Nick’s fingers curled as if they wanted to make a fist but had forgotten how. If he had had his gun there, we would all have been dead.
“What time?”
Gatsby laughed as if Nick’s sensible question was delightful.
“Any time that suits you best.”
They were staring into each other’s eyes, clearly at a standstill in the conversation and not sure where to go next. If I left them like that, perhaps they would simply stare into each other’s eyes forever. Then the party would never end, and that would be dreadful.
“Having a gay time now?” I asked, breaking the silence with a smile.
“Much better,” Nick admitted, and I felt a pang. He really hadn’t been until now, and I hadn’t noticed or I hadn’t cared to notice.
Nick turned back to Gatsby even as his hand reached over onto mine. I let him have it. I could have used the comfort too if Gatsby was looking at me like that.
“This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there”—he waved vaguely at the invisible hedge in the distance—“and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”
Gatsby stared, for a moment at a loss that anyone might not recognize him. He deflated, and in that moment he met my eyes, saw that I was witnessing his embarrassment. All of that charm and for a man who had no idea who he was.
“I’m Gatsby,” he said finally.
Nick jumped.
“What!” he exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”
He smiled, and just sitting close by, I could feel Gatsby’s warmth and earnest belief that of course Nick would forgive him any kind of small sin. In that moment, Nick was open to me too. Nick Carraway, who had gone to war and come home amid some strange family tragedy, who had blown east like an apple seed, and taken root, improbably, in one of the richest neighborhoods on the island. Nick wanted, so deeply, to be known and understood, and it was something that I couldn’t give him, even if I wanted to. But Gatsby told you with just his eyes and his smile that he did.
Gatsby’s smile was a rare thing, something I have not seen more than four or five times in my life, and it’s likely just as well.
A growing certainty came over me that I should let go of Nick’s hand before something terrible happened to him and I was pulled along. Before I could, a butler appeared to let Gatsby know that Chicago was calling him on the wire. Gatsby made a face.
“Business, business, business,” he sighed.
He rose, gave us both a small bow, and me a second look that held nothing of want and everything of estimation. It was an oddly sexless look, almost bracing after what he had been throwing around before.
“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he said to Nick. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”
The moment he was gone, Nick turned to me, blinking a little as if one of the girls walking by had slapped him and kept walking. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that, and to be fair, there was no expecting Gatsby in that kind of form at all.
“Who is he? Do you know?” he demanded.
I shrugged, taking my time and making him wait for it.
“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
It was at least the truth. It was better than bringing up any of the rumors we had heard before, whether they were true or not.
“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”
I sighed, because now he was looking at me almost desperately. I liked that, even if it wasn’t for me, and I remembered a conversation I had had with the man himself weeks ago. I was rather more drunk than I should have been, and I had somehow found myself talking to him beside the fountain. He stopped me from going in once, but his grin said there had been a chance he would just let me fall in and ruin my dress.
“Now you’re started on the subject,” I said. “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man. However, I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. I just don’t believe it.”
Lieutenant Gatsby with his one pair of good shoes had never been to Oxford, but we weren’t talking about him now. This was another creature entirely. I still doubted him, but, if you understand, in a different way.
“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” I said abruptly. There were deeper waters here than I wanted to go swimming in. It was too much to handle for Nick, who I after all had only known for a night, and Gatsby himself, it was clear, was too much trouble for anyone.
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” I said it defiantly, daring Nick to bring us back to our host.
Before Nick could answer that, thankfully, a bass drum boomed, and some little man in a tuxedo came up to introduce some music for us. It had apparently been a sensation, and half of the audience laughed in agreement and the other half laughed not to be left out.
The music started, and Nick turned entirely in his seat, looking up with the attention of a dog to his master at the steps where Gatsby now sat. He reclined on the steps, watching over the party not with an emperor’s pride but a boy’s possession. We were his garden, or his ant farm perhaps. He approved, for the moment, and God only knew what happened when he didn’t.
Nick saw, and I did too, how alone Gatsby was. No one came close. No one leaned their head on his shoulder or took his arm to pull him into a dance. The music was good, the moon was setting. It was after midnight with that tired charm that all parties on the downturn acquire. The fact that a man like him sat alone, no matter the rumors about him, was an unnatural thing. I was used to being alone, and apparently so was Gatsby, but he shouldn’t have been, not a man like that, not ever.
There’s something wrong with him, I thought, clear as a bell.
I didn’t have time to ponder that further when a butler—perhaps the same one as before, perhaps not—appeared next to me.
“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”
“With me?” I asked, glancing up. He had disappeared from the steps now.
“Yes, madame.”
I got up, exchanging a look with Nick. From him, confusion, longing, a little jealousy that was extinguished before he recognized it for what it was. I threw him a casual salute before I went off to follow the butler wherever he would lead me.