Don’t bring Tom. Of course, there was no tea party. Nick had orchestrated this whole thing; it had been a setup all along to bring me and Jay together. I’d thought Nick was my friend. He was my cousin. But, no, his loyalties seemed to be with Jay. I might be upset with him if I weren’t also so overwhelmed with nostalgia.
I sipped my water slowly, and my body calmed. I took a breath and looked up. Jay was staring at me, his gaze so intense that I felt strangely naked. Overexposed. “So, tell me, Jay, how have you been?” I asked, my voice teetering with awkwardness.
“Daisy.” He touched my arm, and his fingers were warm. I had the sudden memory of them trailing down my bare stomach.
“I’m married,” I said quickly. “I have a daughter.” I was a different person five years ago. A girl. Not a wife. Not a mother. Not a Buchanan.
He nodded. He knew all this. Nick must’ve told him everything he thought there was to know about me. Jay stood and grabbed a folder from a satchel on the bench by the door. “Daisy, he’s no good for you.” He handed me the folder.
“What’s this?” I asked, uncertain I wanted it, whatever it was.
“Proof that he doesn’t love you,” Jay said.
Proof? A laugh caught in my throat and rose up, turning into a strangled cry as I thought of Rebecca Buckley’s pink cherubic cheeks catching the midnight lamplight in the Lake Forest stables. Wasn’t that all the proof I’d ever need?
Jay opened up the folder, pulled out the photographs inside, and handed them to me. Unmistakably they showed Tom, on a train, huddled in close with an unfamiliar woman. She was stout and beautiful, with a maturity to her face that made me think she was older than me. God, at least she wasn’t a child. Jay probably thought these photographs would be a bombshell, but instead they were just a drop of rain in one of the giant puddles out front. I pushed the pictures away, closed my eyes, and sighed.
“He doesn’t love you,” Jay repeated. “But I still love you.”
I opened my eyes and focused in on the woman’s face in one of the photographs: Tom’s woman in the city. The one who called our house too many times during supper. She really was quite beautiful. I pictured Tom with her, holding her possessively, the way he once held on to me.
And then suddenly, I began to cry. I couldn’t help myself. I’d understood all summer Tom would be… Tom, even after I’d insisted East Egg would be our permanent home. But now the indignity of it, the continued humiliation of it, and experiencing those feelings, in front of this man I might’ve married once… I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks. They made Jay’s face blurry, almost ethereal. Maybe he truly was a ghost.
He reached his hand to my cheek, gently wiped away my tears with his thumb. His touch was familiar and unfamiliar, the past and the present colliding right here, in Nick’s floral living room. The past had a softness to it, an innocence that I’d lost long ago. That thought only seemed to make my tears multiply. “Don’t cry, Daisy,” Jay said gently. “Please don’t cry. I’m here now. We can be together again.”
“Five years is a long time,” I choked out through my tears. “I’m not the same girl I was, Jay.”
“I’m not the same either.” Excitement rose in his voice. “I have money now. A lot of money, Daisy. I can take care of you the way you deserve. And we can go back now to how we used to be. Just erase the last three years.”
Jay put his hand on my cheek again, pulled my face in close, and I had a sudden flash of us standing there in the middle of another rainstorm, lightning tearing across the sky, that first night we ever kissed in Louisville. Was he right? Could I go back to being that careless, carefree girl I was at eighteen, just like that? I’d been happy then, hadn’t I? And it had been so long since I’d felt such a lightness.
I could feel his breath against my lips, and I realized he was going to kiss me now, again, here, five years later. A lifetime away from that other night.
I knew I should stop him, push him away; I was a married woman, a mother. But my marriage vows had lost their meaning long ago, back in Santa Barbara before our honeymoon had even officially ended. They meant nothing to Tom. Why should they still mean anything to me? It thrilled me a little to think that I could be getting even. That Tom could run around with a woman in the city and I could be here, in West Egg, kissing another man. And if I were to recount this to Tom later, hint it to Tom even, he might turn red and scream and break apart at the seams. I smiled a little at that thought.