Nick tricked me.
Later, I found out Jordan had been in on the ruse, that she’d reached out to Nick to set all this up, this crazy romantic scheme. She knew of it the night she and I had drinks together, when she talked of infidelity as if it were part of the marriage vows.
The clues presented themselves immediately. As I walked up to his door, the scent of flowers was so overpowering that I wondered if he’d spilled some particularly poorly chosen cologne before my arrival. Rain seemed to amplify the smell, or maybe it was the umbrella acting as some sort of megaphone for rich perfumes.
Working out the details for this “tea,” I had suggested another day, but Nick had insisted on this one. When I pressed him for a reason, he replied with vagueness, mentioning something about perhaps getting a closer look at his neighbor’s manse, where all the festivities regularly occurred—he knew I was curious—and how this day was the best for his schedule because he was a working man, after all.
He’d repeated that I should come alone.
I’d begun to think he had some family issue he needed to discuss in private, and I imagined spending a pleasant hour sipping tea and eating sandwiches, hearing about some decrepit uncle or imprisoned third cousin, and we’d decide whether we should help him out or let him rot.
I even started looking forward to it. Before I married, I often had gossipy afternoons with girl friends, and I thought I’d come away from this encounter with some interesting dinner talk to amuse Tom with, stories of Nick’s work, or maybe even a war tale or two.
Now, as I walked toward the door, I had an odd sensation that something was off, something I hadn’t imagined or couldn’t even imagine. Perhaps this was the kind of fairy tale about ogres and monsters rather than princes and granted wishes. I became afraid, wondering if I should have sent the chauffeur away so soon. The quick patter of raindrops. The overpowering scent of flowers. My footsteps softly clicking on the stone path. The door ajar.
“Daisy, come in, come in,” Nick said nervously in the shadows. He disappeared as he opened the door more fully, revealing another man, standing with his hands clenching and unclenching by his side, nervous as a pony about to start its first trot around the track.
I couldn’t see his face, just the fine cut of an expensive white flannel suit with wide lapels, cuffed pants, crisp silver shirt, which seemed to shine like a beacon in the dim interior.
I approached, unsure of this surprise, now wondering how well I really knew my cousin and if his work had taken him into dark alleyways and evil intentions, if my joke about kidnapping had cut too close to the truth. I couldn’t seem to stop, though. As I neared the house, just ten feet away now, the man’s features came into focus.
I inhaled sharply and, on the cusp of leaving, halted, but how could I leave? Not now, not when I saw before me a relic of my past. Him.
Rain beat against my umbrella. I stood still, unable to move forward or back. This man…
This man who almost caused me to abort my wedding to Tom with a letter that scorched my soul.
This man…
As suddenly as it started, the rain stopped. It left a strange silence punctuated only by the thrum of water through a roof gutter and a brave chirp from a faraway bird.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even blink.
“Daisy?” He said it so softly that for a moment I wondered if he’d really spoken at all or if I had imagined the running water somehow pulsing out my name. “Why—why are you alone?” he asked as if he’d rehearsed it.
I felt a giggle rise in my throat. The first thing he’d said to me when we first met. The giggle would have turned into a sob if I didn’t act, so I moved forward.
As if in a slow procession, I propelled myself through the door, hypnotized, wanting to ask this ghost so many questions about what had happened to him.
Jay Gatsby.
I’d not known him by that name before he went to war. I’d known him as one of my sweetest and most ardent suitors, the one I might have married had the war not carried him away and Father’s change in mood had not sent me into a paralyzing spiral of fear.
He’d been one of those who’d stolen kisses from me, sometimes even on our front porch on warm evenings as golden as those here on the Sound. He’d been the one who’d charmed me—and Mother—with his talk of moving up in the world, of making something of himself.
The eagerness that had shone in his eyes—my, it took one’s breath away. You believed everything he said, and his desire for me wasn’t the same kind other boys bestowed on me—a combination of lust and awe and envy and pure greed that I’d come to accept as expected.
His was pure, a simple, driving longing to have what he wanted, and what he wanted was beauty and love and tenderness.
The same as me.
For a while, he had seemed like the only man in the world, and I his Eve. For a while…
“Oh…oh…” was all I could muster, and there was the same sweet hesitation from him, not borne of timidity but of affection. He wouldn’t make a move without my approval.
It was as if we had spent our lives waiting for this moment. I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting, but now I knew why I’d been so desperately unhappy. It was him. I had been aching for him.
For several long seconds, we just stood across from each other and stared, me on the threshold, him by the settee, surrounded by a dozen funerals’ worth of flowers, tea sandwiches and pastries on a polished silver tray wilting in the greenhouse atmosphere.
At some point, Nick must have taken my dripping umbrella and excused himself because all I knew was that I was suddenly alone with a man I’d been deeply in love with years ago.
“Daisy,” he breathed out, and I closed my eyes and remembered him whispering my name, as if it were a supplication to the heavens, and all he asked for was my favor. “Daisy.”
Truth be told, I never liked my name. The daisy is not a distinguished flower, and though it’s associated with a bright youthful sunniness I hoped I embodied, I wished I had been called something more romantic, less quotidian. Lenore, perhaps, or even Elizabeth or Beatrice, a name one could envision men fighting for.
But when Jay Gatsby said it, Daisy sounded like the only name on earth worth having, and I could imagine a ballroom full of women looking up and envying the girl announced with that moniker.
“Daisy.”
As if in a dream, I walked over to him and was about to let him embrace me—I saw his hands begin to move up and out—when lamplight caught my wedding ring, and a dancing glimmer of its reflected sparkle flashed a warning. I was married.
“Jay?” I said and sat in a chair across from the settee, the tea items spread between us like a chaperoning matron. “I didn’t realize…”
I didn’t realize it had been his house, his parties, his sailboat. I didn’t realize he’d become everything I’d wanted before marrying Tom—comfort, security, love, joy, and, yes, even money.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, to curse Nick or to thank him for setting up this rendezvous.
For the first time, I felt unsure of myself around a man. In my debutante days, I was always the one to put the fellow at ease. I was the one who enjoyed watching them preen and bow, flatter and twitch. I was never nervous, never at a loss for words.
Yet now I sat mute, a tentative smile on my face as I thought what I should say, if I looked all right, if the breeze had tousled my hair too much, if I’d sufficiently covered a blemish on my cheek with powder, if I’d applied too much rouge.
I was still smarting from my reunion with Edouard, and now I wondered if this, too, would lead to humiliation in some way, if I was being set up for disillusionment.
I thought of leaving, but instead I sat like a schoolgirl, legs crossed at my ankles, back straight as a board, hands demurely in my lap, and I nodded and listened. Or tried to listen. Jay was telling me of the war, how hard it had been, how he’d lost good friends, how he’d come out of it with two goals in mind—never to waste a day, and to live the life he wanted, no matter how difficult it was to attain.
“Daisy?”
He had asked me a question, and I’d not heard it. Instead, I was lost in that question that plagues so many after a certain time: What if?
“Yes?” I asked and smiled, drifting back to an earlier time.
Jay in his brown uniform, looking as if it were a size too big, his right cheek raw from a close shave, his straw-colored hair, as always, in need of a brush, or the stroke of my hand over a boyish cowlick that would never stay down.
Jay laughing at some silly thing I’d said, sipping lemonade on my porch, the sun angling across the land as if aiming right for us, turning us both golden with its rays.
Jay taking me in his arms the night before he was to ship out and telling me he’d always be true, and would I wait for him? Yes, he knew I would. He knew I would wait.
“Are you happy?” he asked simply, his brows coming together. He knew that was a hard question to put to someone.
“Very happy, thank you.” I said it simply and quickly, just as I would have, had I been meeting with any old acquaintance. “Tom and I have a daughter, a beautiful little girl, and he bought this house—the one across the bay—when business brought him to New York more and more, and it’s so lovely being here, so many things to do, especially in the city, and I absolutely love where we are, close to everything but far enough away to breathe, and… and… and I’m very happy, so happy…”
I bowed my head, bit my lip, and could not stop the tear that fell onto my gloved hands. The lie had torn me open.
He saw, and in an instant was by my side, kneeling before me, holding my hands.
“Oh, Daisy. Has it been hard on you?”
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded, and then he folded me into his arms. I had forgotten how muscular they were, and I cursed the gods for splitting us apart because of war. He dabbed at my eyes with a handkerchief of the softest silk, and we stayed there, though it must have become frightfully uncomfortable for him on the floor beside me. Yet, I knew that if we moved, it would only be even closer toward each other, and that had to be a conscious decision, not a hastily made choice when I was emotionally fraught.
At long last, a clock chimed, serving as the cue for us to part, so he stood, quick and careful, and pointed to the tea.
“Here, let me get you some,” he said, acting the servant as he poured me a cup. “Wish we had something stronger.”
He handed me the tea with a steady hand, though mine shook enough to make the cup rattle in the saucer, a beautiful china set I couldn’t imagine Nick owning. I usually took a dot of sugar in my tea, but I couldn’t bring myself to reach for it, too afraid I would spill my serving and embarrass myself even further.
The tea was the right choice, however, and after a few calming sips, I regained my composure enough to engage in real conversation.
“This is a good time to run into you,” I now said, affecting the light, teasing tone of my younger days. “I’m at a point where I need to get out more. With the move, we’ve not done much socializing except for family. Nick, you know, is my cousin. So it will be good to get to know more people. We have the most beautiful house—not as large as yours, of course—but a perfect setting for entertaining.”
“I do a fair amount of that,” he said, and I detected in his voice an eagerness blended with amusement. The very attitude I’d always had when entertaining suitors.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Then you’ll have to come to one of my parties. I throw one almost every night. Everyone comes. Show people, judges, stockbrokers, even a classical pianist or two.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“I enjoy the parade of them. I enjoy learning things I didn’t know.” Now he was back to his old self, the striving joyfulness that attracted me. The vast openness that assumed you’d not judge him for being ignorant as long as he strove to learn more.
After that, our conversation flowed with ease. I even managed to nibble at one of the watercress sandwiches, while he downed several, plus cucumber toast and petit fours galore.
We talked about people we had known, and I was distressed to hear of even more war deaths than I’d previously been aware of. We talked of my father’s passing, my mother’s worsened circumstances—I made sure to credit Tom for helping her financially—and my new love of sailing.
“We’ll have to go out together. I’ve got a fine big boat,” he said.
“I know. I saw you.” Warming, I looked down. I shouldn’t have let him know.
“Well then, it’s decided.” And with a clap of his hands, like a boy who’d just opened a present, he said, “Tomorrow at one? I could sail over to get you.”
“No, no. I…” I was about to refuse, but I thought of the boat, the water, the sense of freedom it gave me, and I realized that this was what I wanted right now, more than a party, more, in fact, than anything else. “I’ll come to you. I’ll sail to Nick’s little dock and see him, then walk over.”
The perfect excuse, one of many I was to make in the coming weeks.
Then Nick reappeared and Jay suggested we look at his house. Of course I wanted to see it. I wanted to know how he lived.
The rain stopped, and Nick said he didn’t need to come with us, but I insisted because I didn’t want to be alone in Jay’s big place with only Jay. I was afraid. Of myself.
Room after room of Versailles-like splendor, a library full of books no one could read in a lifetime, artworks I recognized as belonging in a museum. His suite was the most wonderful of all, not something big and grand, but lovely little rooms, and a gold hairbrush on his dresser so attractive I couldn’t resist running it through my own coiffure.
He seemed extravagantly pleased that I was pleased, and it touched me and saddened me all at once. It seemed he had stored all of this up for me, as if it were a huge gift he’d waited five years to present.
He opened his closet to reveal shelves of neatly folded colorful shirts and began to laugh and throw them onto the floor. I laughed, too, and picked one up, and then I cried because it was so beautiful. He so much needed me to say it was beautiful, and I felt, when presented with this great, awful gift of enduring love, I didn’t know if I was worthy of it.
I felt inadequate, as if I couldn’t muster enough gratitude for this stunning display. As if I couldn’t sufficiently demonstrate how happy I was for him, and for us that we’d found each other again. I ached with inadequacy.
When we finally walked out into the steaming sunlight, I felt wilted and old, as if seeing myself from a time far in the future, looking back at what I could have had. Here was that romantic ideal I’d held in my heart, a love who had stayed true.
I should have waited for him.