I liked being alone in the crowd. It was something that I had grown to find comforting, and I kept a drink in my hand to fend off someone unwelcome bringing me one. There was a famous tenor bullied by his friends to standing on the edge of the fountain, and when he sang the first notes of Parama’s solo in L’Enfer d’Amélie, the air before his lips shaped itself into sinuous twists of golden light. He sang, and the golden notes came down to dance over the head of a pretty man in a cheap suit. He was a hustler from Queens or from Brooklyn or someplace worse, but with the tenor’s grace hanging over him, he was exalted into something else. I watched for a moment until the inevitable happened and someone pushed the tenor into the fountain. The notes went sodden and unhappy before dissipating altogether and then more people were jumping into the fountain, splashing the water as high as the head of the stone nymph who stood at the center.
I wove my way through the crowd, calling to the people I knew, nodding at the people I didn’t know as if I did know them, and keeping an eye out for the man himself. By then I remembered him, but Daisy had gone into a funk after that dinner, as she did sometimes. She went quiet and absent from herself, smiling at me in a vague way, as if she were a ghost or I was. In the end, there was nothing for me to do but return to the city. I had not been out to see her since that day, and I thought there might be a chance that I wouldn’t see her until the Fourth of July or after.
Still I wanted to look at Gatsby, sort out what kind of disguise he had created that had caused this change. I wanted, as my aunt might have said, to examine the lion’s teeth, and of course the best way to do that was to stick my head in the lion’s mouth.
So I was, in a lazy and undirected way, looking for Gatsby, and instead I found Nick.
Despite the slightly poleaxed look and the stammering introductions, he would not have stuck out at all if he had not kept asking if Gatsby were about. He learned better after the third or fourth time he asked, when people told him of course they had no business with Gatsby. It was one of those people who put the first drink in his hand, but Nick apparently didn’t get the hint and only wandered away with it, drinking it faster than he should have.
Nick Carraway was twenty-nine that summer. He had been in the war and killed men, but there was something about the awkward angles of his body in his new white flannel suit, the lost look in his eyes that made me feel oddly soft towards him. I followed him through the crowd, almost at his elbow, eavesdropping as he sought first Gatsby, and then some sort of anchor that would stop him from drowning in the eddies and undertows of Gatsby’s entertainments.
Finally, before he could actually embarrass himself—something he was working up to when he took a third cocktail—I dropped my drink behind the hedge and put myself on the stairs in his path. I knew he recognized me. There were a few foreigners in the place, someone’s Chinese mistress, a pair of rather beautiful Italian brothers, and a wild gorgeous woman whose dark skin and curly hair proclaimed her an exotic of some kind or another, but I was the only one he had been introduced to.
I spared him the trouble of coming up with a reason to talk to me, instead plucking the drink from his hand. It was a bijou, vermouth and gin flavored with absinthe; a strange choice for Nick if it was a choice he had made at all.
“Thank you.” I took a delicate sip. “I was hoping that someone would bring me something.”
“I’ll bring you anything you want,” he said, and I tilted my head at him.
“You ought not say such things to me,” I said gravely. “I might ask you for the moon, and what would you do then?”
“Get it for you, of course.”
I laughed at that, because something in his voice meant it. He didn’t sound like New York at all. The army and foreign travel had rumpled his broad flat northern vowels, but he was still marked out as different from the rest, more subtly than I was, but marked nonetheless. Even then, I knew it wasn’t just the place of his birth that set him apart from the crowd, but I could not say what else it might be.