“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”
“With me?” I asked, glancing up. He had disappeared from the steps now.
“Yes, madame.”
I got up, exchanging a look with Nick. From him, confusion, longing, a little jealousy that was extinguished before he recognized it for what it was. I threw him a casual salute before I went off to follow the butler wherever he would lead me.
CHAPTER FOUR
During the brief time that Nick and I were stepping out together—and afterward, I’m sure—he liked to call me careless. Sometimes he said it with a kind of admiration when I bluffed us past a steel door into an underground gin joint （“Well, that was the password that Arthur Clarence told me last night, wasn’t it?”）， but towards the end, it was said with a kind of wondering disapproval, as if anyone with any sense would have learned some kind of caution.
He called me careless because he didn’t have the words to sort out how jealous he was of my money and my freedom and how very few people in the world could act as I did. I never gave him a real answer because the real answer wasn’t one that men got. Men had no idea how careless the women of their set weren’t allowed to be. They laughed at how fussy we were about which cars we got into, and they never wondered about the long stretches of bad road between glittering place and glittering place. It was a kind of darkness that could swallow someone whole, and whoever walked back, shoes in her hand, stockings shredded and calling for help from some dingy pay phone, she wouldn’t be the same girl who roared off in that unwise Tourister.
There are some kinds of careless that a girl in 1922, if she was rich, if she was pretty, if she was arrogant, could be. I was foreign and orphaned as well, and that added a few more. I might choose to stagger in just past dawn and find Aunt Justine still at the dinner table with her old friends from the suffragette circuit, a demolished plate of baked meats between them and the air thick with the fug of their cigar smoke. There was always a chittering around them, of the imps they had inherited from their Puritan witch ancestresses, and more than one of them trucked in the minor trade of souls that was such big business down in Venezuela and Argentina. They looked like every cartoonist’s idea of the ugly suffragette, raucous, crude, and sly, some widows, some spinsters, all with a very certain idea of the place that should be made for them in the world. When I came in in the morning with my stockings hanging down to my ankles and a very respectable bite from Nick at the base of my throat, they laughed and pointed at me, but none of them would ever have troubled themselves to stop me. They had been careless themselves at my age, and they had mostly survived it.
As far as I was concerned, careless when it led to a love bite and some mussed hair was fine. It was another kind of carelessness entirely that sent Daisy around to my house one crystal March day in 1919.
Daisy debuted straight after Armistice in a grand and lovely event that Louisville sorely needed. There were six other girls along with her, and everyone had sighed with relief that things were getting back to normal after all of their sons had been taken away. It would be another few months before their sons came back, missing limbs or carrying a kind of gnawing weight that would eat at them unchecked for the rest of their lives, so the relief was a kind that some of them would never find again.
I was too young to debut with Daisy, and the suspicion had set in, meanwhile, that I never would.
Doors were closing against me that year. Walter Finley was still to come, but I could see patterns developing, growing up around me like the vines around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. There were things I could do and things I couldn’t, and girls who had been my friends the year before cut me loose. Slowly but surely, I was being left off lists, pruned away as the girls of my class grew up and became gracious ladies.
It was becoming obvious to me and to them that I couldn’t follow them into marriage and luncheons and good works. They wouldn’t introduce me formally to their brothers and their cousins, and while I had been a delightful pet and mascot, I simply had no place beyond their girlhood days. They knew it instinctively, their mothers knew it definitively, and eventually, I had no choice but to recognize it as well. I existed in a kind of borderland of acceptable and not, sometimes more on one side, sometimes more on another.