It was stunning, the amount of calculation that had gone into this, and in such little time, too. A few weeks earlier, just before Christmas, Jay and I had lain in my bed, naked and restless and hungry for each other. And now, suddenly, he’d used all his money to buy a house and a Rolls-Royce and god knows what else, to impress Daisy. I could hardly believe or understand it. “So you’re leaving the city then?” I asked, still trying to make sense of it. He nodded. “Is this good-bye?”
He leaned in and gently kissed my cheek. Tears stung my eyes, but they annoyed me and I tried to will them away. We’d both known this wasn’t forever. I just hadn’t expected it to end quite like this, with Jay Gatsby fleeing the city, choosing a ghost of a woman—a married woman at that—over me, all in the blink of an eye. “Good-bye, Cath,” he whispered.
And then just like that he was back down the fire escape, gone from my life forever.
* * *
AFTER I GOT drinks with Myrtle, I walked uptown with her to see her new apartment. It was the end of May. Jay was far away and hazy and back inside my chilly January bedroom. Now the air was redolent with flowers and trash seething out on the sidewalk for pickup. And I was sweating straight through my sundress as we walked arm in sticky arm uptown.
I’d had two gin rickeys as Myrtle had told me her story about Jay, and maybe it was the alcohol, or the way I’d just found myself caught up in my own memory of the last night I saw him, but none of it made sense. Even now as we walked, I still couldn’t understand it. Her man in the yellow car had to be Jay. But why had he paid her $100 to sit with Tom on a train? Had he felt some sort of wayward loyalty toward me after all, remembering the promise he’d made to help Myrtle? Had he known, somehow, that Tom and Myrtle would fall in love? That Tom would make her happy? Did he believe that Tom could do what Jay had promised once, pull Myrtle from her small, impoverished life in Queens? But how could he possibly have known that? It made no sense.
To hear Myrtle tell it, there’d been an instant attraction between her and Tom on the train. She’d sat across from him, touched the beautiful white silk of his shirt. Then she hadn’t been able to stop herself—she’d gotten off with him in the city and followed him into a taxicab, into a hotel, her body barely even realizing she’d left the train. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other, Cath. It was like he was my destiny.
A destiny orchestrated by Jay. But why?
“Did I tell you he’s a polo player?” Myrtle was saying as we walked into her new building now. It was one of those nice apartment buildings with a doorman and everything. My sister’s demeanor changed as she walked inside; she stood up straighter, held her head higher, and got a sly, entitled smile on her face I’d never quite seen before. It was almost an arrogant smile. “Did I, Cath?”
I shook my head and didn’t admit I wasn’t even exactly sure what polo was. Something with horses, a game rich people played, and I had never concerned myself with any more detail than that.
“Yes, in fact, Tom Buchanan is one of the best polo players on the whole Eastern Seaboard,” Myrtle bragged with pride now, like she’d invented both the man and the game herself. It was the first time she mentioned his full name and it rang a little funny in my ears.
Buchanan. Buchanan. Where had I heard that name before?
“Myrtle,” I interrupted her, as she was still going on about polo. “What did you say his wife’s name was?”
“I didn’t,” she huffed. “And why do you have to bring her up, Cath? He doesn’t even love her.” She pouted.
But suddenly it all made sense, and the reality of it swelled in my chest, the gin threatening to come back up right there in the beautiful marble lobby of Myrtle’s new building.
“Daisy,” I said softly. “Daisy Buchanan.”
Daisy June 1922
EAST EGG, NY
OUR HOUSE IN EAST EGG was lavishly grand, a four-story redbrick Georgian colonial. It felt excessively large, the same way the chateau in Cannes and the mansion in Lake Forest had. And I supposed wherever it was we Buchanans moved, an embarrassingly opulent house awaited us.
Like Cannes, in East Egg our yard backed straight up to the water. Only here, instead of the Mediterranean, it was the Long Island Sound. And instead of warm blue water and blue horizon as far as my eye could see, it was cool, gray-blue water that stretched only as far as the tip of West Egg on the other side. There, across the sound, I could see the small speck of dock, meandering out from a West Egg mansion. Sometimes, when we first moved in at the end of March, before I knew who lived there, I would sit out underneath the green light on our own dock and wonder. Was there a family in that house, just across the sound? It was always lit up and bustling and alive.