“I was brought,” he continued. “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
“Has it?” Nick asked in a tone just a fraction off of mine.
“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”
“You told us,” I said with mock kindness.
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.
The dancing had started, and of course it was far too late for anyone who wasn’t a good dancer to begin with. Men walked girls much too young for them in awkward circles, and the famous couples competed for the best angles even while keeping in the dimmer reaches of the space in a half-hearted attempt at privacy.
“Should I ask you to dance?” Nick inquired.
“Another time,” I said absently, because something had caught my eye. We stood at the base of the steps. In front of us were the garden and all the pleasures that Gatsby had implicitly promised us, but the man himself was not down enjoying them. Instead he stood on the veranda behind us, and he was staring straight at Nick.
“Hey, it’s the girls from before,” Nick said, pointing towards the stage. Ada and May were doing their baby act, grown women toddling around with big eyes and singing nonsense songs in their high squeaky voices. It was a spectacle all right. Nick had apparently never seen anything like it, because he watched them, allowing Gatsby to watch him, allowing me to watch Gatsby.
I couldn’t believe more people weren’t watching Gatsby. He stood at the balustrade like an emperor overlooking his kingdom, but in this moment, the only thing he had eyes for was Nick. Everything else was faded for him, all sounds muted. It was almost indecent, and something in me responded to it.
He had the gravitational pull of the sun itself, drawing planets into his orbit even as he summoned up all of New York’s smart set for his parties. I couldn’t imagine what would happen if he turned that look on someone who saw it, but of course I could. He had looked that way at Daisy, and I knew what had happened to her.
Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him. I knew Gatsby right then for what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true. I was feeling the reflection of it rather than the thing itself, and I charged myself to remember it as well as the pit of cold wariness that had come to curl in my stomach.
Nick clapped for the girls on the stage, waking me from my reverie. I avoided looking up at Gatsby, and instead took Nick by the arm. Somewhere, he had gotten another finger-bowl of champagne, and his smile was silly and a little puppyish.
“Where shall we go next, Jordan?”
“Right here,” I said, sitting him down at a table. I waved away a couple who wanted to join us, and I sat with Nick at the edge of the crowd, clearly visible from the veranda. There was a flushed look to Nick’s face, and I stopped myself from reaching to brush the dark hair out of his eyes. I felt strange about it now, as if I was trespassing on territory that Gatsby had claimed with only that one desperate look. It was irritating to say the least, but at least he didn’t keep us waiting.
One moment I was collecting a gin rickey for myself, and the next, the man himself was seated at the table with us as if he had been there all along. Up close, he was less handsome, more vital. I could see a faint scar at the point of his chin, old and white against his tanned skin, and his hair, cut so very short, made me think of an army man who had not quite acclimated to life at peace. He had eyes for no one but Nick, and when Nick’s head came up from a second finger-bowl of champagne—where was he getting them from?—he gazed at Gatsby with a kind of curious wonder. It might have just been the drinks, but I thought it was more than that. Even I wanted to scoot my chair closer to Gatsby’s warmth, touch his bare forearm where it rested on the table, and he wasn’t even looking at me.