“But then, how do we know we’re wanted?”
I forgot who replied to her and how unkind they might have been when they did it, but just a few hours later, just five minutes until midnight, I saw her dancing madly under the harvest moon with some boy from Queens. Her eyes were dilated to bright black shoe buttons and her hands fluttered like sparrows caught on a silvery wire. She came out once or twice after that while I was still passing time with Henry and his crowd, but she disappeared soon after, back to Atlanta, probably, though of course there were the standard rumors of things far stranger.
She was right in the end, and we none of us were wanted, but you never would have guessed it then. The lights that draped the gardens twinkled as if Heaven had come down at Gatsby’s command, and the fruit borne in the delicate domestic little orchard by the house was like nothing I ever had before, something smaller than an apple and darker than a plum. When I plucked one down from curiosity, it was so ripe that my fingers bruised it, and licking up the red juice made me dizzy and slightly delirious. For a moment, I saw among the twisted branches a figure that looked like my own, back against a twisted tree and pushing someone down to kneel in the moss, but then I spat and the image was gone.
There was really no need to go picking fruit at Gatsby’s mansion. The food on the long white tables—baked ham glazed in sweet apricot, milky clam broth, delicately cut fruit that bloomed like flowers on their celadon platters—were so perfect that you thought it must have been magic rather than the machinery of more than four dozen waitstaff and caterers who made that kind of magic their business.
Gatsby never tried to hide the underpinnings of human work that aided in creating the wonder of his five before midnight world. It would have been gauche. It would have put him with the new money of Astoria, where every meal was whisked to the table by unseen hands and where every fire on the hearth was lit by a snap of the fingers. His servants were more than visible in their crisp black and white, more dignified, more sleekly dressed and more sober than his guests would ever be. For him, as in the hallowed halls of the elite from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, there would always be a human price for his luxury. Otherwise, I could see him musing, what was the point?
What Gatsby’s parties were was easy. It felt as if every wish you had while within his domain might be granted, and the only rule was that you must be beautiful and witty and bright.
I went first with Henry’s set, and then at the end of May with Coral Doughty. I liked going to Gatsby’s, the drive along the bridge and through the warmth of the setting sun to emerge into the sweet coolness beyond his gates, but there were other things I liked just as well. There were séances held weekly at St. Regis, a circus of gargoyles in Soho, and of course the delightfully endless round of dinners and soirees to be had if you had some money and just a touch of charm. There was plenty to do that summer, and I had started taking over the odd social responsibility from Aunt Justine as well. She was in no way weakening, she said, but thought it important that I learn to handle my responsibilities as befit my place in her world. We both knew, of course, that my place in her world was tenuous at best and only growing more tenuous the older I became, but she acted as if she could wave that all away with the force of her personality and will.
I was busy, but nevertheless, Gatsby threw a good party, one where I could secret myself in the corner with someone, nursing a drink while they told me what was in their heart.
I was a little crazy after secrets that year. I liked collecting them, and though I seldom told, I did gloat. I was years from who I had been in Louisville, some of those scars healed over to give me a kind of hard polish that made me more mean but less vulnerable. The shades of Louisville were worn away to a few stories that I told to entertain and to disarm. When they asked where I was from, and when the first answer did not satisfy, I asked them where they were from; a question they weren’t used to and a sincere look spilled all sorts of things between us.
One night in early June, I quickly realized that there were no secrets to be had from the undergrad with whom I had arrived. We were there with his older sister and her husband, and at first, their presence kept the undergrad from being too obnoxious. Then the music started, the first imported California starlet danced out onto the canvas that covered the garden green, and the taps opened. The sister and her husband had a taste for straight gin, and the undergrad was crossing the line from being obnoxious to becoming a serious incident. I sent him to fetch me something with a wedge of lime in it, and under the flickering, foolish lights and the strains of “Sweet Summer June,” I slipped away.