I was just thinking about suggesting we go to the garden maze or perhaps into one of the intimate little rooms in the house when a pair of girls in yellow came down the stairs towards us. I saw them too late to turn, and they came up to us, their cheeks glittering with a dusting of mica and petroleum jelly and their teeth set in identical smiles. I had no problem with Ada, but of course wherever she went May came along, and May was terrible.
“Hullo Jordan,” May said sweetly. “So sorry about your match!”
I smiled, because anything else would have been a victory for her. I had lost in the finals, and I mentioned it to Nick, who nodded sympathetically.
“Do you remember us?” Ada said hopefully. “We met you here last month.”
“I do remember you,” I said. “You’ve dyed your hair since, haven’t you?”
I felt Nick startle slightly. St. Paul still had a deep streak of Protestantism that would see makeup, let alone hair dye, as more than a little morally suspect. He looked closer at Ada, as if to see what degree of fakery he could find in her. He would have found none; Ada and May were on the chorus line at one of the better theaters, and part of their stipend was time at a decent salon.
They asked us to come sit with them, and because it was easier to sit for a few moments and leave than to say no, Nick offered me his arm and we came down the stairs to the veranda. Someone had fished the tenor out of the fountain, and now, drip-drying, he had someone else’s plump and pretty wife on his knee as he burbled little amber notes for her. Behind him, still hopeful and a little pathetic, was the hustler from Queens or Brooklyn, but no one was paying any attention to him any longer.
At a table with the girls were three men whose names were deliberately obscured. One wore a black fingernail, but the chips in the finish told me it was only painted on. All three had the self-important air of men who I should know, but I didn’t know any of them. They knew me of course, and after the usual pleasantries, I turned to Ada, who was, besides Nick, perhaps the most tolerable of the lot.
“Do you come to these parties often?” I asked. The group’s eyes fell on her, allowing me to lay my hand gently over Nick’s. There was a minuscule flinch, and then he went still, as if he were afraid my hand were a butterfly he might startle away.
“We were here last month and met you,” she reminded me. “But I like to come. There are always so many wonderful people to talk to, so many things to see. Why, just a couple of weeks ago, someone brought a firespeaker from Borneo! She pulled the fire right from the torches and made them dance in wheels and whorls, big as anything. I barely noticed that a spark got on my dress and put a hole straight through the trim until later.”
She paused, and then like a bride flourishing her wedding band, she brought out the rest.
“You know, he saw? He asked after my name and address, and three days later, a man came from Croirier’s with a new evening gown for me!”
Something about fairy gifts and Trojan horses nibbled at the back of my head, something that Daisy’s own mother had told us when she walked in on us at play one afternoon. Her eyes were red from crying, and the velvet dressing gown fell half off of her shoulders, and I thought from the way her voice shook that she knew something about the family name of Fay and unlooked-for gifts.
“Did you keep it?” I asked. I wouldn’t have been so sanguine about taking gifts from someone like Gatsby, but she gave me an indignant look. Things were different where she came from, apparently, or perhaps she wasn’t so very bright.
“Two hundred and sixty-five dollars, gas blue with lavender beads? Of course I did!”
“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said May. “He doesn’t want trouble with anybody.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Nick’s sudden question reminded me of Daisy’s What Gatsby? That moment, I felt, should have been edged with sable, marked for the disaster it would bring, but of course it wasn’t, and I could say many similar things about other moments that were still to come.