A growing certainty came over me that I should let go of Nick’s hand before something terrible happened to him and I was pulled along. Before I could, a butler appeared to let Gatsby know that Chicago was calling him on the wire. Gatsby made a face.
“Business, business, business,” he sighed.
He rose, gave us both a small bow, and me a second look that held nothing of want and everything of estimation. It was an oddly sexless look, almost bracing after what he had been throwing around before.
“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he said to Nick. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”
The moment he was gone, Nick turned to me, blinking a little as if one of the girls walking by had slapped him and kept walking. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t that, and to be fair, there was no expecting Gatsby in that kind of form at all.
“Who is he? Do you know?” he demanded.
I shrugged, taking my time and making him wait for it.
“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
It was at least the truth. It was better than bringing up any of the rumors we had heard before, whether they were true or not.
“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”
I sighed, because now he was looking at me almost desperately. I liked that, even if it wasn’t for me, and I remembered a conversation I had had with the man himself weeks ago. I was rather more drunk than I should have been, and I had somehow found myself talking to him beside the fountain. He stopped me from going in once, but his grin said there had been a chance he would just let me fall in and ruin my dress.
“Now you’re started on the subject,” I said. “Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man. However, I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. I just don’t believe it.”
Lieutenant Gatsby with his one pair of good shoes had never been to Oxford, but we weren’t talking about him now. This was another creature entirely. I still doubted him, but, if you understand, in a different way.
“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” I said abruptly. There were deeper waters here than I wanted to go swimming in. It was too much to handle for Nick, who I after all had only known for a night, and Gatsby himself, it was clear, was too much trouble for anyone.
“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” I said it defiantly, daring Nick to bring us back to our host.
Before Nick could answer that, thankfully, a bass drum boomed, and some little man in a tuxedo came up to introduce some music for us. It had apparently been a sensation, and half of the audience laughed in agreement and the other half laughed not to be left out.
The music started, and Nick turned entirely in his seat, looking up with the attention of a dog to his master at the steps where Gatsby now sat. He reclined on the steps, watching over the party not with an emperor’s pride but a boy’s possession. We were his garden, or his ant farm perhaps. He approved, for the moment, and God only knew what happened when he didn’t.
Nick saw, and I did too, how alone Gatsby was. No one came close. No one leaned their head on his shoulder or took his arm to pull him into a dance. The music was good, the moon was setting. It was after midnight with that tired charm that all parties on the downturn acquire. The fact that a man like him sat alone, no matter the rumors about him, was an unnatural thing. I was used to being alone, and apparently so was Gatsby, but he shouldn’t have been, not a man like that, not ever.
There’s something wrong with him, I thought, clear as a bell.
I didn’t have time to ponder that further when a butler—perhaps the same one as before, perhaps not—appeared next to me.