I felt a kind of bitter twist in my heart as I looked at him. I hadn’t forgotten them at all, and instead of being dresses I could spare, I rather liked them. He stood still dripping in the doorway as I changed into a pale orange dress of figured silk, too fancy for such a dull rainy day, but I hardly cared.
When I turned back towards him, he was watching me with a gaze that was nothing so much as exhausted.
“Did you really love him so much?” I asked.
He hesitated, and I saw the terrible moment when he realized he had nothing left to give me but the truth. He stared at the floor between us as if it held the answers.
“I still do. I’m not going to stop. It was like no matter what I did, no matter who I met or slept with in France or this summer, it was just him, it was always him … Maybe it always will be him.”
I felt as if I had been spun around several times and then encouraged to drink a champagne glass full of what turned out to be top-shelf whiskey. My mouth tasted like smoke.
“Who you slept with this summer?”
“That boy from Amherst, Grayson Lydell, Evelyn Bard. None of them could even … no one else compared.”
“How could they?” I asked, faint and appalled.
You must always be precise when commanding imps, Mrs. Crenshaw said in my memory. Never say wealth when you can say the precise number of dollars, never say eliminate when you can say murder.
And apparently, never say women when you should have been asking about people. No wonder the singed thing had snickered so upon telling me about the girl from Jersey City.
Nick finally looked up, and noticed my surprise. A red blush swept up his face, not embarrassed but exposed.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
“And you wouldn’t have told me if I didn’t.”
“No. God, you always seemed to know so much.”
“Not everything,” I had to admit. I suddenly felt very young and very lonely.
I sat on his bed, wiping my eyes. Outside, Daisy’s storm had slowed to a kind of soft patter. I imagined tears pouring ceaselessly down her face as she sat at the dinner table. I shut the thought away because I did not want to think about Daisy Buchanan again.
Nick stripped off his jacket and came to sit sodden and sad on the bed beside me. Two broken hearts, I thought with a kind of strange pleasure at it.
He touched my chin to make me look around, and he kissed me. This time, I was searching for it, and I could taste something pulpy and dry in his kiss, something I knew. A lion, a paper girl, and now a paper soldier. I would have laughed if it wouldn’t have hurt his feelings.
“Tell me the first thing you remember,” I said softly, and he kissed me again, open and gentle and searching. “That you really remember, I mean.”
“I remember muster at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin,” he said between kisses. “I remember hearing my name, my rank, and my service number.”
“And that was you, Nicholas Carraway, forever and ever.”
“Lieutenant Nicholas Carraway, five-two-seven-one-one-five.”
He felt good kissing me. I wondered again if I had always known, but then the question came back—always known what?
I pushed him back on the bed, straddling his hips as I bent down to kiss his throat. He watched me, docile not just because of the tingle in my fingers or the strange and new hunger I had for him, but because he had been made to be so. I wondered if the original Nick Carraway had been like this. I decided not, and that I probably wouldn’t have cared for him at all. I heard in passing that that tragedy that had kept the St. Paul Carraways from Daisy’s wedding was a car accident, and now I knew who the mysterious casualty was. What a blow it had been for his parents when he died just as the war was ending, all that work by their shameful foreign secret gone to waste.