No wonder they had sent this one east, this one made of paper, this one with a heart that he ripped to pieces and threw like trash in front of the worst people. This one was mine.
“I like you best,” I told him, and he smiled at me, halfway happy.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You like Daisy best.”
“Not anymore.”
It would be true in a while. I would make it true. I would tear her straight out of my heart if I had to, and fill the hole she left behind with paper flowers.
“Besides,” I said, “you never liked me best either.”
“Oh, I love you,” Nick said regretfully as my hands tightened on his shirt. “It’s just that my love only goes so far.”
I laughed at him, and then I reached for the small penknife on his shabby nightstand, kept terribly keen through countless night watches of idle sharpening. His breath went soft and long, so long it seemed he stopped breathing entirely, and his eyes fluttered closed as I cut a long line from the base of his throat down to his belly.
Eyelashes wasted on a boy, I thought as I had years ago earlier this summer, and his hands fell lightly on my thighs, the fingers twitching slightly with a papery dry rhythm. He opened like a song; it occurred to me that I must have a talent for this. That pleased me, and it was strange to find any kind of pleasure on a day like that one.
I pulled out his heart so easily that I could see why he had been so free with it. His great-grandmother, out of some sentimentality, had cut it from a map of Minnesota and carefully glued to it a picture of the Carraway clan, two-dozen stern-faced Lutherans at some church picnic or another. I looked closely, squinting under the soft light from Nick’s lamp until I thought I found the ancestress herself, off to one side, hair as white as poplar bark, and a stern expression on her crabbed face. I traced her face, feeling an odd kinship with her. She had at least had the courage to choose a picture she was in rather than erasing herself entirely.
When I flipped it over, I saw a page from his yearbook at Yale, perhaps just pasted there to give him a little more sturdiness and strength, perhaps to give him some personality. It was the page featuring Yale’s football team, and I picked out Tom from the lineup of similar, serious, slab-faced men. What a mess.
Over all of this, inscribed with what looked like heavy grease pencil, were names, names written large and crude and without understanding of what such a thing would mean. Largest of course was Gatsby’s—not Jay, but Gatsby—and there were a few other men’s names scrawled there as well, men I thought he must have known in the war.
I was touched to see that my own name was written neatly and with care paid towards the shaping of the letters. He had written it more deliberately, perhaps with more purpose and with more duty and fear involved than with the others, but I didn’t blame him for that. It was still there.
“Poor love,” I said, looking down at him. His head was turned to one side, his lips slightly parted. He was lovely. I had always thought so.
I folded up his heart and slipped it into my purse, and from my purse I drew out my planner, which only let me see two weeks in advance. I used the penknife to cut one of the pages into a pretty heart shape, like the Valentines I had refused to cut in school. I looked at it, toyed with writing my name on it and taking up all the space so that it could not be taken up with any other, but I didn’t.
Instead, I only pressed a lipstick kiss to one edge, because I’ve never been so keen on being forgotten, and slid it back into his chest. A moment later, he shifted into a true sleep, and I climbed off of him, giving him another kiss on his forehead.
I put my shoes back on, and I found his car keys on the nail where he had left them.
I took one last look at his house, and when the door closed behind me, I heard the lock snap into place. The rain had stopped, leaving the sky a leaden gray, and I forced myself not to look across the Sound, where Daisy waited to be packed away like the good china and the delicate furniture.