“No.”
“Oh come on, the Buchanans have just the most lovely plates,” I said, trying to tease, but he turned to me with a look that stopped just short of being fury.
“I said no, can’t you understand?” he cried.
I might have taken it better if he had been sorry immediately, stumbled all over himself with an apology for the terrible thing we had seen and for the conclusions we were all drawing. Instead he glared at me, and I glared right back.
“Of course I understand,” I said coldly. “Good night, Nick.”
I went in the front doors. I had some idea of going to the kitchen and getting some kind of food for my poor empty belly, but the moment I was in the house, I wanted right out of it again. Going through the sitting room, I picked up the dusty bottle of demoniac that Gatsby had so thoughtfully left, and I took the stairs two at a time. Tom and Daisy were in the middle of what sounded like a council of war in her sitting room, and though I pressed my ear hard against their door, I could not make out more than a few scattered words. I heard Spain. I heard Shanghai.
I thought of Chicago and how they had left so quickly. I had thought for a long time that it was some issue of Tom’s, some little Pilar Velazquez or some Mrs. Wilson. Now I was beginning to wonder.
Try as I might, I could not make out more than one word in a dozen, and I was just about ready to give it up for a bad job when I heard Daisy take a sharp breath of surprise. It sounded like she had seen a mouse or found some unpleasant news waiting for her in the paper. Then there was a soft clatter of something falling onto the carpeted floor, and I drew back as I realized what was happening.
They would be at it for a while. Tom had little to trade on back during his football game except for his animal endurance, and that hadn’t changed. I decided to give them some time for the occasion, and that perhaps everything would be a bit more sane when I got back.
As I passed through the dining room, Providence offered me a corkscrew on the table, and some imp of the perverse convinced me to use it on the bottle clutched in my hand. If I were in good company, someone would surely have protested my rough handling. The cork came to pieces as I roughly yanked it out and dropped the gritty pieces on the floor. I didn’t care, and I took a hurried sip from the bottle, compounding my sins by swallowing fast. It hit my throat like a controlled prairie fire, too hot and almost out of control, and it burned all the way to my belly.
I opened my eyes to see an old woman with disheveled hair streaming down over the shoulders of her antique gown glaring at me from the window of the dining room. The moonlight shone through her like silver arrows, and she started to raise her finger to point at me. I ducked out of the dining room double quick because whatever ghost or phantom that might have been, I certainly didn’t want any part of it.
Impulsively, I took another sip of the demoniac, and then another and another until I bounced myself outside. I came down the broad steps, staggering to the side yard, and half in the bushes and half out of them, I was startled to see Gatsby and Nick.
Gatsby looked like a plucked rooster, shoulders hanging and eyes cast up to Heaven—no, only to Daisy’s window, and if I didn’t remember what kind of thing he was, I could hate her for making someone look at her like that. I could almost hear the chorus, his only sin was loving her too much, and at the same time, I could hear the rejoinder in my own voice: his sin was in only loving her and nothing else.
Nick put his hand on Gatsby’s shoulder, murmuring something soft and urgent to him. I was suddenly as sick of him as he apparently was of me, and taking another pull from the bottle in my hand, I circled around them, giving them both a wide berth that neither of them noticed or cared about.
I briefly interrupted a huddle of horses in the paddock closer to the house, and as I walked through the tall grass, they came to investigate me, whuffing at me with their velvety noses, their flanks shining silver and gold in the risen moon. The demoniac gave them great purplish eyes, big and dark like the deepest wells in the country around Louisville. You could lose almost anything in those eyes, and it felt as if the horses were inviting me to do just that, to drop my secrets into their eyes, to open the locked gate and to let them run away.