The grand glass doors with the late night behind them were a perfect mirror of the room. In their reflection, I saw Nick’s hungry eyes on me as I walked away, and I could see as well the moment they turned from me towards Gatsby too.
CHAPTER SIX
And then? The whole thing slipped my mind.
At a distance, it might have seemed as if my entire summer was occupied with time at Daisy’s and a rather remarkable party at Gatsby’s. However, it was a crowded summer, and it was not until later, when I could thread the steps to disaster together like glass beads on a string, that those times stood out at all.
The undergrad that I had attended that particular party with disappeared, and since his family was a good one, there was a slight commotion over it. He wasn’t seen again after that night, and there were some dark rumors before his sister told everyone he had gone to study abroad. No one believed it, but then, we were not required to. I took up one of Aunt Justine’s causes, campaigning against the dress trade down in the garment district. Young girls would rent out their bodies for ten minutes, an hour, or a day, and though there were charms to prevent pregnancy, injury, and disease, more than one girl opened her eyes to find herself in trouble with some group or other, whether it was the law, one of the organized crime factions, or some duped man who had been entranced by canny eyes in a fresh young face.
The dress girls, or vêtes, as they were called after the French Caribbean tradition, were mostly white, mostly too young, and variously clever. Under Aunt Justine’s instruction, I posted bail, took accounts, wrote determined letters, and mainly just came to the conclusion that if I were in their position, I would be a fair amount more clever than they were about who got to sit behind their faces. It took me around the city from the precincts to the courthouse to the poorhouses, and though I was never terribly diligent about it the good I did piled up willy-nilly like a careless mound of coins close to the laundry bin.
When the good work got to be too tedious, there were plenty of people to see. New York in the summer was a playful kind of purgatory. The men sent their wives and the kids to the shore or the countryside, and then they sent for their pretty girls and boys who could bear the heat. Despite the lack of actual children, there was a childish, carnival air to the still summer months, of a breeze that would carry a hint of saltwater taffy and the soft shrill cry of a carousel carillon.
The summer of 1922 came with a whoosh of hot dry air. Upstate the fires had begun, and they wouldn’t stop until the autumn rains came. Sometimes, the ash that blew down from the Catskills tumbled over the city, large fat black flakes settling down on our shoulders to mar crisp white linen beyond repair. In the city, we started out the summer irritable and indolent, and we only grew worse as time went on.
I lost sight of Nick for a few weeks after Gatsby’s party. I wondered in an absent kind of way if Gatsby had gotten him or if perhaps he had lapsed into that genteel kind of obscurity that affected so many who came to the city from the Middle West. They came East looking for some kind of excitement they thought they lacked, and then they shut themselves up in stuffy rooms like they had never left home.
I thought about calling over at Daisy’s, to see when he might be around, but Daisy, restless and rootless, had blown down to Atlantic City for a short while. One night, while Tom was out with his girl, she wandered into the Toybox Casino and won a hundred dollars in a single bored moment at the tables. She was in the papers the next day for standing high up on the green baize table and casting chips to the less lucky below her. Her mouth was opened in a smile, and for a short moment, captured forever in inky, blotchy tabloid newsprint, she was a goddess.
So no Daisy, and I figured that that meant no Nick, until one evening when I was leaving the Bijoux with Nan Harper, a handsome girl who was more than a little stuck on herself. The show had been a good one, and after bidding her a pleasant good-bye, I scanned the street for a cab. I was distracted or else Nick would never have been able to come up to me.
“Where can I take you?” he asked, his voice welcoming and soft.
“Oh!” I said, looking him up and down and back again, and instead of telling him that I was rather looking forward to going to bed, I had him take us to the Lyric, a speakeasy built straight underneath a subway station that didn’t strictly exist. You had to get on the subway at Wall Street, take it across the river to the Henry Street station, and then ride back again. If you did this at least twice, you might find that on the return trip, there would be a station stop that hadn’t been there the first time around, the Columbia Street station. It took three trips back and forth before the train paused at the Columbia Street station for us, and I tugged him onto the platform by his tie, careful not to get my heel caught in the gap. I pulled him across the platform and partway down the tunnel, making him nervous as we heard the distant rumble of another train.