I did go back. In fact, I went back the very next afternoon. Tom woke up that day hung over, and once recovered from his over-imbibing, drove into the city again, maybe to pursue some of those new deals he was enthused about and maybe to see Myrtle. Likely both.
I didn’t care. I really didn’t. Not a wisp of vexation blew into my blue-sky happiness. Feeling light and wholesome, I hopped into our Ford and made my way over to Jay’s, as if this was the life I was meant to lead, going to a lover who had spent years trying to woo me, even if I’d been unaware of it. We were mending a cloth ripped open by war, stitching it together again, thread by thread, so this, too, felt like something greater than ourselves—greater, even than our own personal happiness.
Despite my joy, there was at first a strange awkwardness to our meeting that afternoon. The maid ushered me in, telling me to wait in a small parlor off the front door. I wasn’t convinced she would really fetch Jay, and I walked around the room looking at the objets d’art on various shelves, deciding to call out his name if he didn’t appear soon and then head home. Was that a Fabergé egg, a Japanese porcelain plate, a Meissen figurine?
In the corner was a plain wooden desk, the kind a schoolboy might use. Bending over it, I saw his initials carved in the corner, barely visible: JG. My hand floated over it, this remnant of a past of which I knew little.
When Jay had entered my life in Louisville, he had no past. He was one of many soldiers billeted nearby, and their uniforms created class equality. Rich and poor were identical. When he came to that dance at the local club, I was blissfully unaware of his social class. I only knew he was smart and kind and honest.
It seems strange to contemplate now how I almost missed this meeting. My feelings about the war had been part personal spite and part prescient foreboding. I thought it all silly and awful and wasteful. To voice those opinions was heresy.
But my mother knew how to gently push me into doing the right thing, whether I had the spirit for it or not, and maybe it really hadn’t been so hard for her to nudge me into attendance. I liked parties at the country club. I liked being on my own, seeing who I could flirt with, charm, entrance. I’d felt pretty that night, contrarily so, with my unbobbed hair and lack of much jewelry, with little decoration on my dress, and a scant bit of powder on my face, just enough to keep perspiration from making it shine.
My contrarian mood dimmed my spirits a bit as I tried to decide whether to give in to my inclination to have a good time or hold tight to my resentment at being forced to pretend support for a cause I didn’t believe in. Why were men always so eager to show they could kill and die?
Looking back, I see how that contrarianism served me well. It kept me out on the porch, ready for the moment when Jay arrived that night. If I had been inside, dancing, laughing, talking with friends, would he have noticed me or only seen me as one of the crowd of pretty girls?
And my contrary nature had kept me faithful to Tom all these years, even when I’d been tempted—by Edouard and a few others—to stray. No, not faithful to Tom, I decided. Faithful to the idea of the kind of love I’d shared with Jay. Now I had it again.
“Daisy!” Jay walked into the room, heading toward me with long strides. He kissed me immediately, holding my arms and looking at me, as if years had not parted us, as if it were the day after that country club dance, and our future together was settled. “You came!”
“You invited me,” I reminded him.
“Yes, yes,” he said and put his arm around me, guiding me toward a big sunroom at the back of the house. “I’m so glad you came.”
He seemed distracted, though. He looked over my shoulder. Was he expecting someone else?
“This is a bad time for you,” I suggested. I didn’t want to be humiliated, and I began to feel that once again I had dreamed up an affection that wasn’t as deep as I’d first imagined. I was new to this, after all, crossing the line Tom had a habit of hopping over.
“No, not at all,” he said as he closed a door to the sunroom behind us. “I just…I don’t want staff gossiping. I want you safe.” He reopened the door. “I will be right back.”
Then I heard him in the hallway telling a servant that everyone was off for the day, with pay. The maid, or whoever it was, protested she had a lot of work left to do, but Jay insisted they all be gone within the quarter hour.
“There,” he said, returning. He sat next to me on a cushioned settee. “We’re all alone.”
And we were. With a thrill, I realized the entire house was now our playroom, and it didn’t take us long to make good use of it. No hurried lovemaking on a guest room bed this time. He took my hand and led me slowly to his own bedroom, picked me up, carried me over its threshold, then laid me on crisp laundered sheets and told me he had never stopped loving me. And never would. Our lovemaking was slow and sensual, different from our first hurried sessions when we were young and had to steal moments in discreet places. These were different from Tom’s awkward beddings, where I sometimes felt the need to reassure him that he was doing all right.
This coming together was a dance of pure bliss, both of us enjoying each other, with nothing to prove.
We swam in his pool, too, naked and unashamed, and made love like sea creatures finding each other in the depths.
It was the first of many contented afternoons spent together. We danced, we talked, we laughed, we swam, we made love.
Oh, to be forever young! That’s how I felt on those serene days. Worries faded, even the future disappeared. Just those moments of joy remained, and it was like revisiting the past, those lovely days of feeling loved unconditionally by the world. Yet my pleasure was now a hundredfold amplified because I now knew just how rare it was to feel this way.
Jay’s parties ceased. Once he and I became lovers, he didn’t want the house full of strangers, no matter how star-studded the guest list might be. He told me he had sometimes found a stray guest in his home mornings after parties. He wouldn’t risk that.
That changed with us. So careful was he with my reputation, that he even changed his staff, hiring men and women Mr. Delacorte recommended to him, who knew, he told me, that their jobs and their lives depended on their discretion.
There would be no town gossip about us, and I was able to drive myself over to Jay’s place in the afternoons, often when Tom went riding or into town to make the many deals he now seemed to be fascinated with. I suspected Jay had something to do with those deals, enticing him into one meeting or another with men of finance and industry. Tom would have loved mingling with that crowd, feeling as if he were an agent of business and not an idler whose best years had faded behind him.
Tom had even started using Jay’s liquor supplier—an arrangement I wasn’t particularly fond of because I feared the bootlegger wouldn’t be as discreet as Jay’s home staff. So I made a point several nights in a row of reminding him how he’d criticized Jay’s champagne, complained of the taste of the gin, and groaned about the sourness of the wine, intimating it must have been cheap liquor labeled to look like top-shelf brands. I suggested to Tom that he might have been taken in by unscrupulous providers who knew he had the cash to throw around. That was enough for Tom. He stopped ordering, even stiffed the supplier on a bill for the last delivery, telling him he wouldn’t pay for goods that weren’t real. He didn’t stop his forays into business, though.
That left Jay and me in the clear, and the summer began in earnest as an idyll drenched in love. I felt as bright as the flickering fairy in the light at the end of our dock. I felt that my line about the longest day of the year being worth remembering, yet often forgotten, was true. The burst of light on that day was a beacon for the rest of the summer. For life itself.
It’s odd to think back now and realize that that summer was just a single summer, because it felt at the time as if it lasted a year, a decade, an eon, while the rest of the world raced forward without us.
I was lucky our first few weeks. Tom was often gone when I returned home, and, even when home, disinterested in where I’d been. I always had an excuse at the ready—I’d gone into town to look at clothes for Pamela, I’d taken a drive, I’d played golf with Jordan. I had a veritable book of excuses all ready to offer.
Sometimes, on those languorous afternoons, we would sit in his parlor listening to records—beautiful French music, new tunes, Broadway melodies, jazz groups. He’d silently get up to change the record, then come back to repose by my side, giving me a glance of understanding, intimating a strange kind of ennui that was part regret, part hopefulness.
For hours we’d lounge there, smoking and listening, not saying a word, just caressing each other’s arms when something particularly sweet would float into the room, immediately communicating that we understood the mood of the musical artist. It was a game, to wordlessly go long periods, to feel utterly understood in the slightest movement, tilt of the head, blink of the eye.
Sometimes, he took me on drives in his ostentatious car, on back roads so no one would see us, even though I enjoyed wearing dark glasses and hideous scarves, cultivating stories of who I was playing that day—a Russian spy, a deposed aristocrat, or a shopkeeper’s daughter on a lark. I joked that I might start wearing wigs of different colors.
“Your reputation will be ruined, Jay, but mine will be intact,” I said.
To which he replied, “No man’s reputation is ruined by being with a beautiful woman.”
Some days we went sailing, though I worried during those outings that someone from my house would spot us from our house. Jay always got us quickly out of the Sound, though, and we would sail until our houses disappeared from view, anchor in some quiet cove, and make love in the gently rocking cabin, the boat moving in time with our passion. We were the only beings alive.
It all passed as if a dream, and I felt, for the first time in years, young and hopeful, even if I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. It was how I felt as a girl, that the future held even more happiness, and each day would be like unwrapping a beautiful present selected just for me.
Jay shared that optimism. That’s why I’d fallen for him. He had not gone on to build all those things he’d wanted to build, he told me one afternoon, but he’d built other things. Business connections, deals. I knew he dealt in bootlegged liquor, but in those days, that was no sin. If anything, it was virtue of a contrarian sort, the kind I understood well. He had also made considerable investments in stock, he said. I asked him to teach me how to invest, and soon I’d set up my own account through Nick—so I could get in on the party.
If I was careful to have at-the-ready excuses for my afternoon absences, I was careless with my mood. Although I started the summer melancholic and slow, I couldn’t keep a smile off my face now, and I practically danced through the house with Pamela whenever we played together.
Tom commented on my change in mood one afternoon after I’d been giggling so hard with Pamela that I collapsed in tears after running races with her in the hall.
Tom stood and stared with narrowed eyes as I laughed uncontrollably on the floor.
“You’ve changed,” he said, and it wasn’t clear he thought it was for good or ill.
“I’m…I’m happy here,” I offered, and as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I worried I had misspoken. Tom seemed to yank things away from me if he knew I liked them. Though I had not fallen in love with Chicago, I hadn’t liked the idea of moving, unless it was back to Louisville. The more I’d argued for a Kentucky destination, the more committed he’d become to our relocation in New York. He had said it was for business, but Tom did no real business that I could see at that point of our lives. He enjoyed pretending he had his finger in this or that, just so he didn’t feel left out. That’s why Gatsby’s connections excited him so. He finally did get to be around the rulers of Wall Street, of commerce, and they treated him like an equal.
When we moved here, I’d heard the rumors. He had gotten us out of Chicago because of a mistress whose brother was a mobster or something comparable. I couldn’t keep all of his infidelities straight. Perhaps he thought prolonged absence and physical distance would tamp down her ire at his refusal to leave me for her.
I wondered sometimes how strongly he would feel about that over the years—not leaving me.
“Well, you’ve worked up poor Pammy,” he said, pointing to our daughter, who was out of my arms and jumping up and down for more foot races. “Where’s Nanny?”
I stood, dropped my smile, and called for our daughter’s minder, who came round the corner and grabbed Pamela by the hand, leading her to the nursery for her afternoon snack.
“You’ve worked yourself up, too,” he said, and I pushed an errant lock from my eyes. “You look feverish. Are you sure you’re all right?”
I was more than all right. I was gloriously, exuberantly happy. But obviously, those moods were not permitted in our household, at least not for me.
“I’m perfectly fine, dear. But you look a little peaked,” I said, walking toward the stairs.
“Maybe we should have Dr. Prinz come look in on you.” he called after me, with narrowed eyes.
So now I knew that Tom preferred me unhappy, or at least melancholic, and I would have to cover my gladness if I didn’t want to arouse suspicions. So I began pretending horrible headaches or other odd ailments from time to time. I also set up luncheons with family—Nick—and friends—Jordan and some of her golfing colleagues—where I could loll about as if everything was a bother and I was bored with all the world had to offer. I even talked of taking a cure somewhere, maybe in Europe.
That thought intrigued me. I longed to get away, to leave behind pretense and bask in a happiness I didn’t have to hide.
My life became what I’d imagined it would be long ago, filled with happiness and pleasure. Mornings I spent with wifely and motherly tasks. I planned meals with Cook, chose linens, picked place settings. Then I’d spend time with dear Pamela, taking her for walks when Nanny was occupied, reading to her, even teaching her to play some basic notes on the piano. Occasionally, I went on shopping sprees, buying her new clothes, even some jewelry, and treating myself to a new treasure along the way.
And the afternoons were just for me, golden times for a golden girl, sailing, lounging, making love with Jay, worshiped by Jay, adored by Jay.
For once, I was glad Tom had other temptations in his life and often went into the city, or went riding, or otherwise occupied himself. I didn’t know if he was still seeing the Wilson woman or some other wench. At that point, I cared so little about him that I didn’t even bother to ask Nick.
Nick and Jordan were the only two who knew of my affair with Jay, and though I sensed that Nick didn’t approve, he never said anything to me about it other than to comment that Gatsby’s new staff didn’t seem to keep the lawns as well manicured as before. Jordan, I knew, approved.
What you have to understand about Nick is that he could be something of a prude. In his telling of our story, I’m a sexless nymph, and you’re lucky if you can conjure up a flesh and blood image of me. I’m an alien creature whose daughter sprang fully formed from my rib at age three, I supposed.
But back then, it would have been shocking to say too much about the intimacies of married life, of lovers’ lives. So I can understand how in that first iteration of the tale, Nick pulled the curtain on details most audiences weren’t prepared to see.
So I will correct some of those omissions with this: Jay was a wonderful lover, gentle and eager and never going beyond what he sensed I wanted to do, yet still a manly partner with no inhibitions about his own pleasure.
I knew I was living in a dream, a paradise whose snake could soon offer someone an apple too appealing not to eat, tossing us all out into a cold and judgmental universe. I forcefully pushed that knowledge from my mind. I willed the summer to last forever. I willed Tom to leave me alone. I willed Jay to keep loving me.
Finally, as August approached, both the men in my life pulled me from the heights back to the ground, and as I floated down to my perch, I had to decide: Do I stay with Tom, or do I leave with Jay?