“Shouldn’t stare,” I murmured, and he looked at me instead. Long eyelashes, of the kind they say are wasted on a boy, but I never found them wasted. It made him prettier, and gave him an appearance of innocence I doubted he deserved.
For a moment, I thought he might kiss me right there, but I turned and drew him briskly along. I liked the tingle on my skin, the blush and the way I could feel his gaze on the bare back of my neck, the indent of my waist and the sway of my hips. There wasn’t much there, but they did sway, and he followed behind. I liked the anticipation as much as the thing itself, and though I hoped Nick wouldn’t be one of those, sometimes more.
No Gatsby at the bar or on the veranda. No Gatsby in the music room or the armory or in the private dance that had sprung up in the blue parlor. We ended up in the library, where I had few hopes of finding Gatsby, but where I thought we might be alone for a while.
The library I later heard was a true Gothic miracle. It had burned down sometime in the 1500s, its ashes tilled under the earth. A rather pedestrian apartment block stood there now. Gatsby, they said, resurrected it the way he might resurrect a beloved dead ancestor. As we walked down the cavernous space, our footsteps echoed and the tall stained glass windows flickered with a hot orange light from beyond, a far cry from the cool twinkling stars that lit the party.
There were alcoves set between the shelves, and I had been back there before with Coral Doughty to find that the reading sofa was very comfortable. Nick looked a little sharper when we were alone, as if he had finally figured out what he was for.
“Jordan, wait a minute,” he said.
“Are you going to talk to me about your girl in St. Paul?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. It would have surprised me, but I could stand being surprised.
“Shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t get out of the city much,” I said, and slid my fingers down the lapel of his jacket. I didn’t touch his skin, not yet, but his breath stuttered.
“Come here,” I started to say, and then I had to stifle a yelp when a rumpled gray man sat up from the very sofa that I had had my eye on. He peered around, his eyes enormous behind thick owlish spectacles, and he squinted at us both before looking me up and down. He pointed at the books.
“What do you think?” he demanded.
“About what?” I snapped. I was still blushing, and I hoped it looked like anger.
“The books!”
He had made something of a nest for himself in the little alcove. There was a pile of blankets on the cushion, and a small table close to one side that held a glass of water and the remnants of a sandwich. A pair of slippers peeped out from under the sofa, and he had dragged a lamp over to light the whole affair.
“They’re real. They’re the real thing. About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained.”
Something in our faces must have suggested we were in the least interested, because the man rushed to the bookcase and came back brandishing a leather-bound copy of a Renaissance treatise on the machinations of the princes below. It was a gorgeous thing, a volume that I knew Aunt Justine would have coveted, and if it had not made such an obvious gap in the shelves, I might have considered taking it to her.
“See! It is a bona-fide authentic piece of demonologica. He fooled me at first. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn’t break the seals. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
He showed us the pages that were still shut with old wax and imprinted with the seals of Great Solomon. Terrible things could be learned from the pages underneath those seals, but they were as unbroken as the day they were made.
“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”
“He was invited,” I said a little spitefully, pointing at Nick, but the man bobbed his head knowingly.