I held my breath because something was going to die in that room. I might have wanted to leave before, but now I couldn’t take my eyes away.
I saw the moment when Daisy broke, when it all became too much for her. Gatsby was beautiful, but there was a history he would never have, a kind of homey and dignified pleasure he would never provide. He might take her dancing every night under the moon, but there would always be a sting of dirt and scandal to it, and as a Louisville Fay, she could never abide by it. When she broke, it was real, even if she allowed it to happen.
She shook her head, her hands pressed to her eyes. Gatsby went to her, and Tom let him, something that told me the game was nearly over. The sun came back out, the wind died down, and any hope for the storm died without a whimper.
“Daisy,” Gatsby said softly, holding her by the shoulders, his fingers digging into her pale arms before he remembered himself. “Tell him…”
“I can’t,” she cried helplessly. “I can’t. If you can love more than one person at once, then why can’t I?”
“I only love you,” Gatsby insisted in confusion, and without looking I laid my hand on Nick’s arm. I didn’t think he had been such a fool, but I would have believed it.
“You see I’ve been doing some of my own investigations,” Tom said after a tactful pause. “You didn’t just sell your soul for some drug stores and way off the dirt farm, did you? No, you let Meyer Wolfsheim broker you some kind of deal. You traded up, old sport, until you got to someone grand, and then…”
Tom turned to me and Nick, frozen on the divan and by then entirely a captive audience.
“And what do you think they wanted from him?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell us,” I said acidly, and he nodded as if to say thank you. Jesus Christ.
“You kept the party going for Hell and for New York. You opened the doorway to all the fun, and you turned an old-world tipple into big business, got it running like blood throughout the East and the Midwest. You became the linchpin holding Hell to Earth, and how they all loved you for it.”
It was more than that, I realized, thinking over the nights I had spent at Gatsby’s. His house bridged the gap, and it was safe. It was safe for all of us, for me to kiss who I liked, for Nick to kiss Gatsby, for Gatsby to love Daisy, and for Hell to play its games.
“And then,” Tom said with satisfaction, “the party stopped.” It had, because of Daisy—who didn’t care for his parties—and I wondered with a pang of contagious panic how that must have looked, what would happen when you didn’t hold up your end of a bargain with Hell.
Daisy cried out, pushing at Gatsby in a panic. When she stepped back, we could all see a red handprint high up on her arm, the fingers distinct and visible. It was blistered a little, like she had spent too much time in the sun, but even for that he might have been forgiven. Just before he let her go, however, just before he realized what he had done and started to apologize, I saw the look on his face, cold and sick and furious. He had sold his soul, and in exchange for the power to be a man worthy of Daisy Fay, he had created a way station for Hell, a little piece of the infernal in West Egg where the demoniac never stopped flowing and where no one ever noticed if someone disappeared and came back strange and hollow, or never came back at all. Hell was as expansionist as France or England—and Jay Gatsby, with his singular focus and ability to harness the power of human desire, was the perfect envoy to gain them a foothold in the world above.
He had never asked them for Daisy. He had instead built and baited for her a gorgeous gold and velvet trap, as much like Hell as Hell was like itself, and I knew that Daisy had seen it too.
After that, it was just about over, and it was time for us all to limp back to West Egg.
With a kind of brutal sangfroid that I almost had to admire, Tom sent Daisy along with Gatsby in Gatsby’s own cream Rolls, which the papers afterward called the death car, and Tom, Nick, and I bundled across the bench seat of the coupe. The sun was down all the way, and the black road unrolled in front of us like a mourning ribbon.