A bottle of whiskey opened, and the two of them drank and started going at each other. I heard them bickering, but their voices sounded very far away, and I could barely make sense of what they were saying. I felt groggy and it was too hot to argue. Didn’t they know?
There was a party in the ballroom down below us, and suddenly the sounds of the wedding march floated up through the floor.
“Remember when you got married,” Jordan exclaimed. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to change the subject or to inflame the men even more. “It was a heat like this, wasn’t it, Daise?”
Tom and Jay stopped going at each other for a moment. “Someone fainted,” Tom said. Maybe I should faint right now? Would it put an end to this dreadful day? “Biloxi. Blocks Biloxi, and he made boxes, wasn’t that right, Daisy?”
I remembered a man fainting straight out in the middle of the church, but I couldn’t remember much else about him. Only that Jordan had come to the rescue, carried him away. Jordan was always saving me. She was trying to save me now. “Is that right, Jordie? Blocks the box salesman?” I turned to look at her, and her face had gone a strange putrid shade of gray.
She nodded. “We carried him into my house because we lived just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks until Daddy told him he had to get out.” She paused and cast her eyes into her whiskey. “The day after he left, Daddy died.” She downed her drink, then added quickly, “There wasn’t any connection.”
I never knew the details around when her daddy died, only that he had while we were on our honeymoon. When I was still blissful and stupid in the South Seas.
“He gave me an aluminum putter,” Jordan added. “I still use it to this day.”
Tom didn’t seem to notice Jordan was still talking, or her sad, scrunched-up face. He was telling Nick about Biloxi, and then he started going back at Jay, something about Oxford.
I stood and walked to the couch where Jordan was already sitting. I sat down next to her and smothered her with a hot, full-bodied hug. “I’m sorry,” I whispered into her neck. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The last days you had with your daddy you were picking up the pieces of some stupid box salesman from my stupid wedding. And I never even knew until now.”
“You’re drunk, Daise.” Her words tumbled hot into my hair.
“I know I’m not as popular as you,” Tom was shouting, shouting, at Jay now.
“Why don’t you calm down, old sport. There’s something I need to tell you,” Jay said.
“Tom’s so jealous, isn’t he?” Jordan whispered, sounding annoyed.
I looked at him again, and his face was red, bursting with anger and a sense of entitlement, a sense of possession. He looked like Pammy when you took away her favorite toy. Jay was angry now, too, his pupils flaring from the whiskey, his voice rising. The two of them, they both looked like a pair of drunken goddamned fools.
“I always thought it was us women who were the fools,” I whispered. “But I was wrong, it’s been the men all along, hasn’t it?”
Jordan giggled a little and clung to me, planting a sloppy, drunken kiss on my cheek. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. My daddy always used to say that.”
“Maybe we should all go back home,” Mr. Agreeable Nick interjected from across the room. He was eyeing me and Jordan with trepidation, while trying to calm the other two men down.
Tom glared at Nick. “I want to hear what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me,” Tom flamed, daring Jay, his voice even more agitated.
“Daisy never loved you!” Jay shouted at him.
I heard my name, and I leaned back against Jordan and closed my eyes. She wrapped her arms around me and held on tight. Sometimes, I felt like a prop in my own life. Like a marionette who everyone assumed didn’t know how to move without a man pulling her strings. That wasn’t true. That wasn’t right. Only I didn’t have the strength to make them believe it. Didn’t they know it was too hot?
“She’s never loved you,” Jay was saying now. “She loves me.”
“You must be crazy!” Tom shouted back.
“She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake.”
They shouted, on and on. I knew they were yelling about me, and I heard them saying something about Jordan, too. But their voices, their nonsensical ramblings about love, hovered somewhere above me in the thick, hot, drunken air. Their words were stupid, meaningless. Foolish. Untrue.