I shook my head and took a chair next to him. “No thanks.”
“Ah, you’re a teetotaler.”
“Not at all.” I laughed. “My roommate and I had quite a time last night at the Monte Carlo. Do you know it?” He shook his head. It was our favorite little speakeasy, just two blocks from our apartment. But it was deliciously dark and maybe a little seedy and probably not the kind of establishment where Tom and his friends would gather. “Anyway”—I wanted to change the subject—“tell me where you’re from, Nick. And how do you know Tom?”
“It’s… a… Tom and I… Well, we were both at Yale at the same time. I’m living out in a little rental in West Egg this summer, and Tom is in East Egg and we reconnected. But I was born and raised in Minnesota.”
“The Midwest.” I smiled at him, feeling a little more at ease. “Myrtle and I grew up in Illinois. So how’s West Egg treating you?”
“It’s a strange little place, but I like it all right.” He downed his whiskey, poured himself some more.
“I actually know a man out in West Egg.” I kept my voice light, nonchalant. “Jay Gatsby, you know him?”
Nick’s brown irises swam around, his pupils already glassy. “I do. He’s my next-door neighbor,” he slurred. Then he laughed a little and spit out a more sober sentence: “I mean, if anyone really knows Gatsby.”
I did. There were so many things I could tell Nick right now about Jay: the way the skin on his stomach felt soft against my fingers, like a baby’s, or the way he kissed me hungrily, like he was always searching for something I could never give him. Or perhaps, most notably, that he had an unhealthy fixation on Tom Buchanan’s wife. But with that thought, I bit my lip.
“You’ve been out to one of his parties?” Nick was saying now.
Parties? That’s what Jay was doing this summer now in West Egg, throwing parties?
“Sure,” I lied, not wanting Nick to ask any other questions about how I knew Jay.
Myrtle had finished kissing Tom, and she suddenly stumbled across the room and plopped drunkenly on my lap. She told Nick the same story she’d told me, about meeting Tom on the train. But she left out the part about anyone sending her there. She had rewritten it all in her mind, a truly, lovely romance, bounded by fate and destiny.
“Daisy’s Catholic, and she doesn’t want to give him a divorce,” Myrtle was saying to Nick now, her words stringing together in one drunken loop. “But she will and then we’ll go out west for a while until everything settles down.”
Out west? That was news to me, and it sank in my stomach, a cold, hard lump.
Myrtle and Nick were still talking, but I looked around the room. Voices rose and fell, drunken and strung together and tangled with laughter. I had the strangest, dizzying feeling that the entire room was upside down, swirling and drunk and smoky. I was the only one sitting still, right side up, the only one sober. The only one who would remember any of this tomorrow.
Myrtle kissed my cheek and then sashayed across the room to talk to Tom. She said something to him, and his face instantly reddened. “I don’t want you to say her name,” Tom yelled, his voice cutting above the din.
“I’ll say it if I want to,” Myrtle yelled back, drunkenly obstinate. “Daisy,” she shouted loud enough now that the rest of the room stopped talking. It got so quiet I could practically hear the rage simmering up inside of Tom. It was red hot on his face, and he arched his hulking shoulders, standing like a linebacker. “Daisy, Daisy, Daisy!” Myrtle shouted in his face.
What happened next came so fast that the motions were blurry through the haze of smoke. Suddenly Myrtle’s nose was gushing blood, and Tom stood there, his hand covered in it. And that’s when I realized he’d punched her in the face. He’d punched her in the face. He’d broken her nose.
This arrogant, rich, swine of a man had just broken my sister’s nose.
The room continued to be still, and the whiskey had made everyone slow, but me. I jumped up and ran to Myrtle, tilting her head back. “Jesus, what have you done?” I shouted at Tom.
“I didn’t… I didn’t… mean to…” Tom stuttered, staring at Myrtle’s blood all over his fingers, seemingly in disbelief that he had made her bleed. “Myrtle.” He reached out for her with his clean hand, but I slapped his hand away. She was sobbing now, and I pulled her to my chest, shushing her, rubbing her back, and trying to keep her head tilted back.