“Drink up,” I told Nick. “This isn’t St. Paul. You’re in New York now, even if you do live in West Egg.”
He blinked at me slowly, that slight smile still on his face.
“I do, though I hardly know anyone there.”
“I do,” I said. “And you must. You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby? What Gatsby?” asked Daisy, blinking at me. Her eyes were dilated almost black and she had bitten some of the lipstick off of her lower lip. I was about to tease her for being no better with demon’s blood than Nick was when dinner was announced.
Daisy came to take my arm, cutting me off from Nick and Tom as neatly as a sheepdog would, and when she leaned against me, I could smell the bitter almond and candied lemon scent of the demoniac on her breath.
“I need to talk to Nick. Alone, do you understand?” she said, her words hurried and slurred, and I stared at her. She sounded nearly drunk, slightly unsteady on her feet. She never drank to drunkenness that I knew of, save once. The darkness in her eyes and the slight unsteadiness in her step was for something else, and I hastily agreed.
Daisy was a fluttering nervy thing at dinner, snuffing out the candles distractedly as we ate only for the servants to relight them when she wasn’t looking. Tom ignored her, but I could see Nick growing more uneasy, his eyes darting between Daisy and me as if thinking there was surely an explanation. There wasn’t, any more than there was for anything else, and it was almost a relief when Nick made an innocent comment about civilization that sent Tom barking after one of his particular hobby horses. He shook his head hard, blowing air through his nostrils like one of his own prize polo ponies.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” he told us all angrily. “Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? It’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out, the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy solemnly. “He reads deep books with long words in them.”
Nick looked back and forth between them as if he wasn’t sure what to make of this, but he relaxed when I winked at him across the table, on the side Tom couldn’t see.
“This fellow has worked out the whole thing,” Tom said, stabbing a finger into the white tablecloth. “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“You’ve got to beat us down, of course,” I said dryly, and Nick covered a laugh with his napkin.
Tom arched his neck, glaring at me suspiciously as if unsure what I might mean, and next to me Daisy giggled, just a little hysterical, though this was hardly anything new to us.
“The thing is, Jordan, we Nordics, we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. That’s what the Manchester Act wants to protect. Do you see?”
There were a dozen things I could have said to that, ranging in order from least cutting to downright murderous, but then the phone rang and the butler came to fetch Tom from the table. Tom went with a kind of confused irritation, and Daisy’s mouth opened, and closed again.
Then she dammed up the coming disaster by turning the full force of her Fay blue eyes on Nick. I was used to them after years of acquaintance, but he certainly wasn’t. He got a slightly dazed look as she leaned in closer to him. Her voice spiraled higher than it usually went, just a hair shy of shrill, shyer yet of sensible.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” Daisy turned to me with a flourishing hand gesture, a magician pulling a rose out of a soldier. “An absolute rose?”
He looked nothing like a rose, but I nodded anyway, watching Daisy warily. Her small hand was clenched into a fist next to her half-eaten fish, and I could see the little bruise on the knuckle, the one Tom had given her by grabbing her hand too hard just a day ago.