Shortly after my reunion with Nick, he betrayed me. I know he doesn’t think of it that way, but what else can you call it when your cousin accompanies your husband to meet his mistress? When Tom wandered like this—because this was now a pattern—I took a condescending attitude. Boys will be boys. It wasn’t the first time a husband had strayed.
But lately, it bothered me because I began to worry that one day he’d fix on some woman who’d become more than a passing fancy. He had obligations, to me and to Pamela, and I would protect us both… if I could figure out how.
So, while he and Nick were partying in New York with Myrtle and her seedy friends and relatives, I drove myself in Tom’s coupe, swathed in the softest white scarf, to meet Jordan to see a show. She was in town that day, staying with other friends as she got ready to head upstate for another tournament to play.
My attempts at matching her with Nick had met with only limited success. Or at least, no success they told me about. I knew she talked to him and had seen him for lunch in town, but little else. When I asked how things were going with him, she simply shrugged and said, “He’s nice. I have fun,” which told me nothing and everything. I determined to find out more during this excursion.
I loved the city. To me, it felt as if things were always happening there.
I decided to make it my own personal holiday. I booked a room at The Plaza, met Jordan for dinner, and off we went into the sparkling dusk to some musical revue I remember little about, except lots of dancing and colorful costumes and enough comedy that my face hurt from laughing when it was over.
The city night was filled with light, from cars, marquees, streetlamps, and the symmetrical rectangles of windows, where a thousand eyes peered at us from above. Those artificial stars would have to do. The real ones dimmed amidst all that light, as if allowing these pretend-cousins their chance to shine.
Though the weather wasn’t oppressive yet, the theater was warm, and once the show started, the two huge fans on either side of the stage were cut off so we could all hear the players.
The hall became a sauna, and I regretted wearing my blue jersey dress, for it clung to me like syrup, despite fanning myself with my program for the entire performance.
“I think I lost several pounds in there,” Jordan said as we made our way past the crowd into the cooler air outside the theater after the show. “I’d forgotten why I never go to the theater in summer.”
“Oh, it was divine,” I gushed, still happy from the laughter, fun, and sheer brightness of it all. Sometimes, I felt like a squire’s wife out in East Egg, leading a quiet life while others enjoyed “the season” in town. After the first exciting honeymoon days, I’d frequently felt that way. Tom seemed to prefer us both at home. Or me, at least.
“We need a cold drink,” Jordan said, stepping forward to hail a taxi.
“Do you know a place?”
She looked at me as if I were a child on her first outing into the big city.
“I know just the place,” she said as a cab pulled up to the curb.
Once inside, she gave the driver the address of a speakeasy—some new place on Bedford Street she’d heard was good.
At our destination, she paid the driver. And then we were making our way into the smoky interior, crammed with people, a jazz group playing in the corner, more excitement and fun, overlaying a sense of Prohibition naughtiness. We were disobedient children, up to impish fun.
“Here!” Jordan announced as she grabbed a table two lonely hearts had just vacated.
“What if they’re coming back?” I said as we slid slowly into the chairs.
“Well, they aren’t. Not when someone’s at their table!” she shouted over the hubbub.
Soon we had ordered and downed iced gin cocktails and laughed at how we each felt like limp rags.
“Or wet dogs,” Jordan said, pushing a strand of hair from my face. I couldn’t bring myself to look in my compact. I must have been quite a sight—dress clinging to me in the wrong places, damp hair plastered on my head.
“Woof, woof !” I countered.
“It doesn’t really matter here,” Jordan observed, as she lit a cigarette. “They must have imported this fog direct from London, and I’m sure we look like gauzy nymphs, all a blur, like in French paintings.”
I lit a cigarette, too, and we enjoyed the music along with the sense that we were doing something mischievous and decadent. “What’ll I do when you are far away?” some nasal-voiced singer bleated out.
“How is Nick?” I asked, keeping my promise to myself to find out more about their romance.
Her mouth quirked into a lopsided grin. “He’s fine. But you probably know more than I do. He’s your cousin.”
“Aren’t you still seeing each other?” I prodded.
She paused after our second round of drinks came and took a drag from her cigarette. “We see each other,” she said. “But he has someone else.”
My eyes widened. Timid Nick a double-timer? Oh, no. Had he followed my husband’s example? I felt sick.
Seeing my distress, Jordan went on. “Not someone he’s seeing. It’s a girl he left behind, out in California somewhere. She must have thought they’d marry. I don’t like worrying if she’ll show up bent on avenging their true love.”
At that, I smiled. I knew, from talking to Nick before he came to dinner, that he had broken off with a girl out west. He must have told Jordan the story, too, which made me wonder just how over the girl he was. Jordan was no fool, so I didn’t blame her for being cautious.
“Has he invited you to tea?” she asked.
“No, why? Was he supposed to?”
She shrugged. “He mentioned to me that he wanted you to see his place.”
After that brief exchange, the gin began to lift the heat and vexation off me. I had just about worked up my courage to go powder my nose and see what damage the hot theater had wrought when a familiar figure walked by—a broad-shouldered, long-faced man, not a hair out of place, in a tan, unwrinkled flannel suit. At first, I couldn’t believe who it was, and I stared at him at length until Jordan inquired if he was a gangster or someone on a Wanted poster.
“Edouard?” I said as he strode toward the bar. He turned. Yes, it was him, and my heart gave a little leap, even as my hand fluttered to my sweat-dampened hair.
He looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me, at which point I wished I’d made that trip to powder my nose earlier. When I’d known him, I was always well-dressed and well-coiffed and felt like the loveliest woman alive.
He, of course, was stunning; his blue eyes fixed on me as the corners of his sensual lips rose in an amused smile. At last, recognition seemed to dawn and he came over to our table.
“Cherie, is it you?” He leaned down and kissed me on both cheeks, and then I introduced him to Jordan.
“This is Edouard Janvier,” I said. “He flies airplanes. Tom and I met him in Paris last year when we did the Tour.”
Another man Tom felt inferior to, Edouard had been an aviator during the war and went on to start an airplane company. We’d met at a tea at some Frenchwoman’s apartment, an acquaintance of Tom’s family or something. It was a rococo flat with lots of cake frosting decorations on the ceiling and walls, and it felt so silly and formal when just outside the city were charred fields, lonely graveyards, and utter destruction.
I’d been horrified when Tom and I had taken a drive through the countryside. Tom, by contrast, had seemed unmoved, or at least stone-faced with resentment, muttering “What a waste” when I knew he secretly wished he’d been part of it, now that it was safely over.
Edouard had been there. If he had great charm, he also exuded great sorrow, and his eyes held a sadness that no smile could hide.
He had charmed me with his broken English and formal manners, and his refusal to joke about those battlefield horrors. He’d scolded Tom for making light of something related to the war with a quick question: Avec quel regiment avez-vous servi?
He told me he was impoverished royalty, that his father or father’s father had been a duke or maybe an earl, or perhaps they had just been peasants, but he never knew because he was raised by nuns after being orphaned. It had been a sweet and sad story, and I knew parts of it were an exaggeration, but his war record was not. We encountered several people who spoke of him with awe when I mentioned meeting him. Later, we danced at someone else’s house, on the veranda, a waltz, and at the end of it, he kissed me, pulling me to him as if he couldn’t resist me, his strong warrior hand on my back, his chest against mine, his wine-scented breath on my face.
I could have been his lover. He sent notes and flowers, and when Tom flitted off to ride horses with some old chums, I had the time and opportunity to take Edouard to my bed. But after a sunlit afternoon of drinks and strolling, holding hands, and sipping orange-flavored liqueur at an outdoor café, I ultimately kissed him goodbye. I was still devoted to my marriage then.
“Let me introduce you to my wife,” he now said, and before us stood a stunning brunette, with dark eyes and dark wavy hair she’d pinned at her nape to appear as if she had a bob. From every man in the room, she drew admiring looks. She wore a dark maroon dress that, with her hair and eyes, made her smooth porcelain skin all the more luminous. She was easily the most beautiful woman in the room.
“Patrice, this is…I’m sorry, but I have forgotten your married name.” He smiled more broadly, but I recognized the lie, and a deep disappointment draped over me. He’d forgotten my entire name, not just the Buchanan part. My face warmed anew, and I knew I now sported a red glow that probably added a feverish glaze to my swamp-rat look.
“Daisy Buchanan,” I said to the two of them. “Edouard and I met in Paris last year.”
Patrice nodded, smiled, and said something to him in French. Though I couldn’t quite catch it, I knew enough of the language to make out her question: Was I one of his “romances?” She said it in a light and breezy way, as if amused and unthreatened by his past, and he responded with a vigorous, “Mais non, non,” that humiliated me afresh.
“So nice to see you again,” he said to me. “You look well.”
I looked anything but, and his easy lies made me wonder how many of them I’d accepted as truth a year earlier, not just the fantastic stories of his childhood but his claims of devotion to me.
“And you,” I said. “Don’t let us keep you. It’s a madhouse here.” I waved him off, as if dismissing him, and this restored a little of my dignity, to be able to push him away. Again. I swallowed my disappointment.
Excusing himself to go to the bar, he put his arm lightly on his wife’s back to usher her safely through the crowd. As they stood waiting for their drinks, she leaned her head onto his shoulder. He glanced at her with a loving smile before kissing her thick hair. The gesture made me feel jealous.
“Tell all,” Jordan said, catching my gaze. “Leave nothing out.”
“He was a friend. That’s all.”
She barked out a laugh.
“If I’d wanted more, it could have been more, but I didn’t.” I nodded my head as I said this to emphasize I had been the one rejecting him.
She opened her mouth to comment but tactfully closed it before uttering a word. I could have provided the words myself. He certainly didn’t look like he’d wanted it to be more. Why, he barely remembered you.
After that, I did make that trip to powder my nose, and was relieved to see I didn’t look as bad as I thought. After a quick splash of water on my face, some powder, a comb through my hair, and a straightening of my dress, I felt my old self again, pretty and confident, and strode back into the room, ready to make every woman envious.
It was too late, however. Edouard and his bride had left.
When I sat down again, Jordan leaned forward. “You shouldn’t hold yourself back, dear…if you want to take a lover, that is. Men do it all the time.”
She knew about Tom and never seemed as upset about his affairs as I was. She accepted his behavior as the way of the world.
“I don’t think I could,” I said. “It takes up so much of one’s time.”
She laughed again. “Too much time or too much…courage?”
I frowned with irritation. I was a bold girl, always one to take risks and show both beaux and belles alike that I could swim farther, dive deeper, drive faster than anyone else.
“Not courage,” I countered. “The opposite. I think it takes more bravery to make a go of things.”
Jordan shook her head. “To what end? So you can both feel equally miserable?”
“Jordan!” I sat back. “Is that what you think marriage is?”
She didn’t hesitate. “To some… and for no good reason, if you ask me.” She leaned forward. “Keep your heart open to love, Daisy. I know you miss it.”
The music got louder, and our conversation ceased. It was just as well. Her words made me uncomfortable. Did she think I was a coward for not following Tom’s example? Did she think him a good example to follow? Was I the fool and Tom the wise one?
We stayed only a half hour longer, when I begged off, complaining of a headache.
Like a prophecy, it came true. My head was pounding by the time I crawled into bed after a soothing bath, downing a glass of bicarb and reading the latest copy of Vanity Fair.
In the morning, I awoke refreshed but troubled, and I ate breakfast alone in my room trying to figure out what vexed me so.
It wasn’t that Edouard had married.
It wasn’t even that he’d married such a beautiful girl.
It was that I had not occupied as great a place in his memory as he occupied in mine.
I stood and paced to the window, cigarette in hand. Perhaps all my memories of infatuated suitors were similarly false. In my fairy tale youth, perhaps I’d just imagined being more popular than I had actually been, and I began perusing my past for evidence that I’d not been fooled by a conspiracy of friends in order to mock me behind my back.
Once, at a country club dance, one of the girls’ fathers came over to me with a box of long-stemmed roses. I smiled and said, “For me?” as I reached out for the gift.
“Oh, just one. They’re for all the girls,” he said. Somewhat surprised, I flushed with embarrassment, made a joke of it, and took one rose.
Now I wondered if I’d thought of my beaux that way—as a carton of roses just for me when that wasn’t the case at all.
No, no, no. I shook my head, remembering: the many dance partners, the constant stream of callers, the men who tried to impress me with their athletic prowess, their daring, their looks, their money.
That hadn’t been a dream.
Even Edouard’s attentions hadn’t been a fabrication. Perhaps he was a gigolo. Perhaps he’d forsake his wife at some point. But when he’d paid attention to me, he had been my gigolo, and I became the one to forsake him.
This soothed me, and I moved on to the other thought that troubled me—Jordan’s suggestion that I needn’t be as faithful as I thought married couples should be.
You must not think I was a paragon of virtue. No, it was more that I loathed self-righteousness. I particularly despised religious leaders urging temperance in the most intemperate of tones. I despised hypocrisy, and that’s what bothered me about Jordan’s idea.
If I thought Tom was wrong for his adultery, how could I then turn around and engage in the same behavior without being a hypocrite?
Maybe that was all that was holding me back, though. It wasn’t that I clung to some unrealistic ideal of a perfect marriage, one where each spouse was as passionately in love years after the wedding as they were on the day itself. But I did cling to some small romantic notions, such as keeping one’s promise to stay true. I suppose I thought if you managed that single accomplishment, maybe the bigger romantic picture would become real, that the original passion would return, and you could once again revel in the warm, sweet days of first love.
I balled my fists as I thought about this, feeling once again as if I were a naïve fool. Tom would likely never return to faithfulness now that he knew he could sin with impunity. Ever since he had first strayed, I’d wondered if I should divorce him, take Pamela with me, and go far away… maybe even find another man who would stay true.
Marriage to the right man had been what had given me meaning in life. It had been the goal of every girl I knew. Once I attained it, though, any sense of greater purpose evaporated, and I felt adrift, constantly looking for things that would replace that original aim. Motherhood had briefly filled the space, but mothering was such an ongoing constant in my life it hardly felt like a goal. It was too easy. I needed something to strive for, something difficult. Maybe I had made fidelity that “something difficult.”
Jordan’s suggestion, however, was that I just accept marital affairs as part of marriage, that instead of waiting for Tom to change his ways, I should change mine.
What kind of life would that be? Could I be happy then?
I’d pondered these questions before, and had no answers, just as I had none now, so I finished packing up and left.
After a morning spent shopping, I then drove back home, enjoying the solitude in the car, the sense that I was in charge.
When I arrived, Tom was still away, but the maid told me that Mr. Carraway had called.
“Did he leave a message?” I asked, handing her my bag, gloves, and hat.
“No, ma’am. He said he would try again if he hadn’t heard back from you.”
With a puzzled frown, I started up the stairs, then stopped and called down to her.
“Tell Cook that Pamela and I will have dinner in my room tonight. Just something light. If Mr. Buchanan returns, tell him we’re not feeling well.”
Tom didn’t return that night, but Nick did call again, just an hour after I’d changed and unpacked. After some breezy chatter about the show I’d seen in town, he got to his point.
“I’d like to invite you to tea,” he said. “To show you my place. You would like to see it, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s my life’s goal,” I teased. So here was Nick’s tea invitation, the one Jordan had mentioned. I wondered if they were conspiring behind my back.
“Wonderful! I’d hoped it was,” he responded.
“You realize, though, you mustn’t disappoint me. I expect nothing less than service as if I were Queen. I’ve always wanted to be a queen. Or at least a princess.”
“You are, though, most definitely. The Queen of East Egg,” he said. Then, after a pause, “But don’t bring your king. Just you.”
“What king?” I replied. “This monarchy has but one ruler, and it is I, a woman!”
He laughed, and I went on: “Why not bring Tom? You’re not going to kidnap me and ship me to some savage country, are you?”
“Oh, dear, you’ve discovered my plan.” But after another pause, he said, “I just thought it might be nice to…to see you alone. We are family after all.”
It seemed odd, but I liked a mystery. Besides, after my encounter with Edouard, my spirits needed lifting, and maybe a gossipy afternoon with Nick would be just the ticket.
“Name the day and hour, and I’ll have my carriage at the ready,” I said.