by Nghi Vo
Nick and Daisy came in just as I was finished reading, and I stood as they did.
“Ten o’clock,” I said. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”
Nick looked startled, and the penny finally dropped.
“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
I smiled, because I was. He knew my face from the photographs and the sporting magazines. If he was in contact with his gossip-prone Louisville cousins (or more likely, if his mother or aunts were), he might know more than that. Well, I didn’t care. It was up to him to decide what he might make of it.
“Wake me at eight, won’t you?” I asked, squeezing Daisy’s shoulder as I went by.
“If you’ll get up,” she said with a smile. She looked more normal, less desperate, and I nodded at Nick.
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” came Daisy’s voice, following me up the stairs. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing.”
“Good night,” I called back, rolling my eyes. “I haven’t heard a word.”
As if I needed Daisy’s help getting into the closet with a man who looked at me like Nick did. My history in closets was well established from Louisville, and in New York, with its wealth of cars, breakfast nooks, private balconies, and boathouses, I scarcely had to rely on them at all.
I fell asleep immediately, and didn’t dream. Daisy woke me up two hours later. She climbed into bed with me as we used to do, and as I rolled over to make room, she curled against my side. The moonlight streamed into my room, silvering her hair and shadowing her eyes.
“Tom’s asleep?” I asked groggily.
“Gone,” she replied, but there was nothing in her voice that cared for him in the least. Gone, and unlooked for, she might have said. She was still, except for her fingers playing restlessly with the ribbon on my camisole.
“Well?” I asked finally, and her face crumpled.
“I couldn’t,” she said, her voice small. “Oh Jordan, I couldn’t say anything at all, I couldn’t make myself say it—”
She sobbed just once, utterly miserable in the way that only a person who is capable of being utterly happy can be, but it had been a long time since she could be utterly happy.
The thought of her happiness struck a chord, and now I remembered Jay Gatsby.
CHAPTER TWO
One lazy summer evening in 1910, Daisy Fay sneaked up the stairs during a dinner party to find me. She made it past the extra servants Mrs. Baker hired for the occasion, the squeaking floorboards, and the insubstantial ghost of Anabeth Baker in the hallway, and she didn’t stop until she opened the door to my bedroom.
The house on Willow Street sold when I was thirty, and I went back one more time to see it. My room was untouched from the time I was a child, possibly from the time Eliza Baker, fatal fragile zealot, had slept under the lacy pink canopy and pored over her atlas of foreign places. The bed was always too large, soft like a peppermint marshmallow, and the furniture had a kind of bone-like dullness to it that the polished brass chasings could not alleviate. I was not sorry to see it all sold off in one job lot, destined for some other child to dread.
Mrs. Baker had gotten rid of Eliza’s atlases before I arrived, so all I had to entertain me were edifying texts about good girls and boys, eating apples, playing in creeks, and obeying their parents. I found, however, that the paper in these books was satisfactorily thick, just begging for sharp scissor blades to sink into the beige card stock. Since no one but me ever looked in the books, I could cut them up as I pleased, starting from the back to make my vandalism less noticeable. Some pages I cut into tiny triangles to hide in the winter boots that sat at the back of my closet, and some I fringed like the dress of a cowgirl from the Old West show I had been taken to see just the year before.
Tonight I was cutting a careful halo around the head of the industrious little girl with the sewing basket when the door creaked open and Daisy peered in. I froze on my bed, scissors guiltily still, and she slipped in like water through a grate, shutting the door behind her.
“Well!” she said in her oddly husky voice. “So you’re the heathen!”
I shoved the paper and scissors under my pillow, sitting up so my bare legs dangled over the edge of the bed. I wore a ribboned lawn nightgown, but Daisy was well turned out in a short dress of rustling mauve silk. Her neat black boots and dark stockings made me think of the fox kit I had seen in the backyard just a few nights before. Like the fox kit, she was utterly fearless, coming into my room, taking in it and me with an innocent avarice in her large blue eyes. That night she was ten years old, two years older than the age Eliza Baker had guessed I was, just my own age in truth, though it would be a long time before I found that out.
“I was hoping I might see you tonight,” she continued. “Mother said that you were no different from the ones who wash our clothes, but you are different, aren’t you? I can tell, you’re not like them at all—you’re something else…”
I wanted to put my hands over my ears to fend off her flood of words. Mrs. Baker was parsimonious with her speech, the judge even more so. I took my education at home with a tutor, and so I had never heard anything like Daisy’s chatter before. More to stem her words than from any eagerness on my part, I answered her.
“I was saved from Tonkin,” I told her. “Miss Eliza saved me. When I was little.”
Her eyes went as large and round as saucers. I saw the white all around them and I thought of a horse running mad. She crossed the small space between us as familiarly as if it were her own room, snatching up my hand in hers. Her hand was hot and soft. She smelled just faintly of citrus, pepper, pine, and musk, her mother’s Blenheim Bouquet dabbed modestly behind her well-formed ears. The scent made me pause before pushing her away, but in my imagination, it clung to me.
“Oh darling, you must tell me all about Tonkin! I was born in boring old Louisville, and I have never been anywhere at all! I’ve heard of Tonkin. Papa knows men who trade there, when the French let them, and it sounds so much more beautiful and elegant and fine than China. Tell me about it, please!”
“I was very young…” I said, but as the excitement drained from her eyes, I felt a surge of desperation, unformed and wordless but no less powerful. I clung more tightly to her hand. I did not want to be alone.
I remembered what Miss Eliza had said about Heaven, where there would be gold in the streets, but no one would care. She was unable to rise from her bed by then, but she whispered about Heaven as if she could see it just beyond the canopy of her bed, touch it if only she could sit up.
“It’s gold,” I blurted out. “The roofs and the walls and even the roads. At noon, we had to sleep because the sun made it shine so bright it might have blinded us.”
“A city of gold?”
If there had been any doubt or animosity in her voice, I would have cried at having been caught in such a lie. I didn’t remember Tonkin at all, or at least, I told myself I didn’t, but I knew that it had certainly not been leafed with gold.
Instead, there was nothing but pure credulous excitement in her eyes, and she leaned in closer, coming to sit with me on the bed.
“Tell me more,” she commanded, and so I did.
Despite being given nothing more than virtuous books to read, I was a child of ferocious imagination. As I told Daisy about flying men who chopped the heads off of screaming maidens, women who rode elephants, and two moons that rose up in the sky, I felt what dry earth must feel when it finally rains. She sat next to me, holding my hand absently and sometimes running her nails over the creases in my palm.
I finally ran out of breath when I told her about the great dancing lions, the ones the priests cut out of
thick red paper, so intricate that as the scraps of paper fell away, you could make out round bulging eyes, gaping mouths, and every tight curl on the heavy mane. I paused long enough for Daisy to consider, and she reached under my pillow, drawing out my scissors and my mutilated picture book.
“Show me,” she said, and I don’t know why I didn’t come up with an excuse. I didn’t tell her that making a dancing lion was the province of priests, or that I was too tired, too small, or too young to do so.
Instead, I continued my lie, living moment by moment as her blue eyes settled their demanding weight on my hands. Soon, I would have to give it all up, but not yet, not while there existed a fragile bridge of pure trust and wonder between us.
I flipped to a fresh page in the middle of the book, where George and Jane caught fireflies for their sealed jar, and I started to cut. I knew that it would all be over soon, even at that age. I would pull a flimsy, unattractive lion from the paper, and Daisy would know me for the fraud I was.
Only somehow, that didn’t happen.
Instead, as I roughed out the lion from the ingratiating smiles of George and Jane, my hands grew more sure, not less, and it seemed as if the light from my little reading lamp grew dimmer. I had seen a lion just once in my life, and it was a toothless and malevolent thing brought to town by a bedraggled circus. Two towns after the Louisville stop, it killed a child acrobat who had wandered too close, and I was deeply unsurprised. In my mind’s eye, I saw manes that curled like wisps of steam and at the same time I saw a rufous shock of fur, bitten and half-bald. What I cut from the thick nubby paper was somewhere between the two, as were the four paws delicately tipped with sharp nails, the tail that curved over the beast’s back, and the sinuous muscles of the lion’s flanks and shoulders.
I was aware of Daisy’s breath close to my ear, of the delicate ticking of the ormolu clock on the shelf, the distant chatter of the dinner party below. It all belonged to another country, because as I snipped around the lion’s jaws, I could feel its hot breath against my hands. It was weighted with a kind of feline impatience and I cut faster, my cuts growing careless and at the same time more smooth. The blades slid through the paper, parting along some curve that I couldn’t see but only felt instead. Once I was certain I had ruined it, but a long scrap curl fell from the figure, and the lion held its shape.
“Oh, how beautiful,” Daisy cooed when I held the lion up for her approval.
If it was only that, it would have been enough. But of course, it wasn’t.
Pinched between my thin fingers, the paper lion started to shiver as if in a breeze. It wiggled, it danced, and soon enough the four cut paws started to pedal in the air, churning for purchase before arching its rear legs up to scrape at my wrist. It was only paper and smaller than a kitten. It couldn’t have hurt me, but the way it moved made me flinch back, certain I would turn my arm and see four thin scrapes all in a row.
Daisy uttered a surprised cry while I bit down on my tongue. We watched as the lion fluttered to the ground, landing with more weight than paper should have had. It hesitated for a moment as if confounded by life in paper as we were, and then it gathered its four paws underneath it, turning several times. Something shifted, and it was more than just card stock and a child’s desperate urge to be adored. It was a memory of a murderous lion and a land far away, it was breath and resentment and longing. The hollows I had cut out so quickly were filling up with muscle and hair, and we watched with wonder until we saw that it was also growing.
“Jordan!” Daisy cried, clasping on to my arm. Her sharp nails dug hard into my bare shoulder, but I didn’t know what to do any more than she did. We stared at the twisting thing uncoiling beneath our feet, and we could both feel its hot and rancid breath in our face, smell the blood of an acrobat child who had flown over the heads of thousands of people but never slept in a proper bed.
In a panic, I threw my scissors down onto it, and when that did nothing, I slammed the book it came from flat on top of it. That had an effect: it burst into greedy flames, a roar of denial and rage whooshing up from the ground, causing us both to shriek in surprise.
We were perched on my bed now, and I was hanging on to Daisy as if this weren’t a mess entirely of my own making. I almost started crying but then Daisy reached over to my bedside table, where Thomasina left me a tall glass of water every night. She picked up the glass and to my eyes, she spilled the water almost by accident over the flames. The orange flames ebbed back down with a high and angry hiss, and dirty gray steam came up in pillowy clouds. Daisy and I had ended up holding hands tightly, our heads bent within inches of each other as we stared down at the smoldering mess that had been a walking, living paper lion.
“Sorry,” I muttered, half-tearful, but she gave me a game grin.
“It’s all right, it was just fabulous—”
Then the door burst open, Mrs. Baker and Daisy’s mother in front with a half-dozen well-dressed adults behind. I reached for something, anything that might have made them believe it wasn’t my fault, but Daisy was faster than I was.
She burst into loud shrieking tears, going from silent to a pained and tragic howl in less than a moment. Shoulder to shoulder, I could feel her shaking, and I realized with a kind of silent surprise that she was not faking at all.
There was a roar in the background, and then Mr. Fay was busting into my sugary-pink, smoky room like a bear into a beehive. He caught Daisy up in his arms, and she clung to him as tightly as he grabbed on to her. They murmured back and forth in a language I later learned was entirely their own, a cipher of shared blood and beauty, a remnant of some Victorian magery Mr. Fay had learned at Yale.
He bore the quaking Daisy from my room while Mrs. Baker bent down, putting fingers gingerly against the sodden mess of what had been my lion. My terror pulled back to reveal a surprising kind of grief—it had lived and now it was gone.
Mrs. Baker rose, wiping her fingers on one of my handkerchiefs lying by and giving me an impatient angry look. As I said before, she was a woman of few and stingy words. Those words would be thrown like sharp rocks at me in the morning, but for now, she only turned to her guests, shepherding them back to the relief of the sitting rooms and the good port.
Before she left, she turned off my bedside lamp with a hard click, and closed the door after, leaving me in a darkness that purred with fury, that smelled like soggy cotton and burned paper.
CHAPTER THREE
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 wh
iskey 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.