“I am glad you came when I called you,” she said with a slight hiccup. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t.”
“Been prostrate with grief and pined for me, I imagine,” I said lightly, and she smiled with relief.
We both looked up when we heard the distant slam of the front door, and then, louder and more insistent, the boom of Tom’s voice. There was a briefly startled look on Daisy’s face, as if she had forgotten any world where we did not merely drift along the ceiling of her enormous house, and then she took my arm.
“Of course, that’s right,” she said, pulling me towards the door. “We’ve arranged to have my cousin to dinner tonight. Come along, my darling, I promise you will find him utterly delightful.”
“Well, if you say so, I’m sure he is.”
It was Daisy’s avocation, setting up her friends and making connections between the members of the right set. She was somewhat famous for it, leaving plenty of variously happy couples and namesake babies in her wake. I had always been a bit of a failure for her, something that I decided was more amusing than anything else. I did well enough for myself, after all, back in Louisville and now in the years since I had come to New York.
We came back in the tall sun porch where we had started, settling on the enormous couch at the center of the room. We tamed our ruffled hair and smoothed down our dresses just moments before Tom appeared in the doorway. He was followed, with a touch of reluctance, by a rangy young man in shirtsleeves, his jacket thrown over his arm and his quick dark eyes taking in everything around him with interest.
He entered with an easy smile and a certain dislike for Tom, which made me like him right away. He gave me a second look, but didn’t stare, and he came to kneel next to Daisy’s end of the couch, paying her the court she liked best. They spoke of the time they’d passed in Chicago while I was allowed to do what I liked best, which was to watch from a cool distance before I had to chance an engagement. Tom hovered close by, finally trampling their conversation with a question of Daisy’s cousin’s occupation and by coincidence giving me his name: Nick Carraway of the St. Paul Carraways, only son, war hero, and apparently at loose ends after coming back from overseas.
I remembered vaguely that I had heard of some kind of trouble between him and a girl from St. Paul, a Morgan or a Tulley, something dishonorable, but you wouldn’t know it by the way he sat as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He looked like a polite man, though of course you can never tell.
I wondered that Tom couldn’t seem to recognize the barbs in Nick’s words to him, barbs that made Daisy’s eyes glint a little. Acid under the good manners, and I liked that quite well. More interesting by far than the war hero was someone with some bite to him, and I thought that rather a lot of people might not know that about Nick.
When he scored another point off Tom, making Daisy’s husband snort and declaim, I sat up with a laugh.
“Absolutely!” I said in agreement, giving Nick permission to look at me fully. I smiled at him, levering myself off of the couch and letting him see a little more. I was in my low gray suede heels, giving me a soldier’s jaunty carriage; when I rolled my shoulders back to ease the cramp that was forming there, I saw him lower his eyes briefly with a slight smile.
The butler entered with four tall glasses filled with something delicious, and at a murmured word from Daisy, he added two garnet red drops to each tumbler from a rock crystal vial.
“I’m in training,” I said with a regretful sigh, but I took my glass anyway, sipping appreciatively. The cocktail was a good one—the Buchanans hadn’t ever been ones to stint where it truly counted, and it was no different when it came to the demoniac. The ban on demon’s blood had come down just four months before the one on alcohol, and now two years later the good vintages were disappearing from even the better clubs in Manhattan.
Daisy licked her lips like a pleased cat, and even Tom sipped his drink with a kind of somber respect for its quality. Nick drank more cautiously, and I remembered that the Middle West had crashed into Prohibition faster and more readily than the rest of us had. The demoniac was older and richer than what even Aunt Justine kept carefully locked away in the Park Avenue apartment we shared. It stung my lips and warmed my throat until I imagined myself breathing out flickers of candle flame. Legend said it could make tyrants from good men, but it only made me a little mean.