I was staying with the Fays for the week when Daisy was set to meet with a few dashing young officers from Camp Taylor. By that point, we were all well and tired of doing that, but her father was old friends with the commandant there, so of course she had to, and since she was, I had to as well.
She dressed me in a soft cream dress that smelled faintly of lavender, and she put on a rather dreamy blue thing that floated around her like mist from the Ohio River.
“Should I have the headache or should you?” I asked her as she pinned her dark hair back, and she smiled at me in the mirror.
“Oh, I will, certainly,” she drawled. “You can put me to bed, and after it gets dark, we can run off to see about Barbara Blake and that cousin of hers from Virginia.”
I descended in Daisy’s wake into a parlor full of officers and we set about the surprisingly difficult and tedious work of being just the right kind of charmed without giving out the impression that we wanted to do more than sit and converse. Mrs. Fay told us that the right kind of welcoming was “parlor and no farther,” and that was occasionally a fine line to tread.
Daisy had to be as bubbly as champagne, and I was allowed to be quieter and mysterious, and that was how I knew that I saw Jay Gatsby first. He hung back from the others, stood up by the window like a toy soldier while the others scattered around the Fays’ formal parlor. He looked, I thought from my hard straight-backed chair, a bit like a man awed in church, gazing around at the Persian carpets that were meant to be walked on, the brass table that came all the way from Turkey, the lofting windows that recalled the Fays’ French ancestors. His quick eyes darted over me as well, and I thought with some wry distaste of him cataloging me as some Oriental handmaiden, brought to beautify the place like the stained glass rose window and the elephant foot umbrella stand.
He didn’t even dare look at Daisy until she called out to him, saying something silly about not being shy.
Then he looked at her, and everything in the room just … stopped.
“Oh,” Daisy said, her voice small, and I could almost feel the breath catch in her throat as her hands fell into her lap. She looked dazed, and when I followed her gaze to the young lieutenant at the window, I could see why.
You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.
In that one still moment, it was as if Daisy had, all unknowing, taken Jay Gatsby’s heart for her own, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to get it back.
“Oh, ha, my—my goodness,” she stammered with a charming laugh. “Aren’t you just the thing. Why, you make me think of that song, what was it, Jordan, ‘Poor Butterfly’？ Why, I could not get that song out of my head, isn’t that silly, everyone, why don’t we just have a chorus now…”
Somehow, she got the whole room obediently singing the song with her, and the strange moment passed, though somehow, I think it never did.
She did fabricate a headache after that, but she pushed a slip of paper into Lieutenant Gatsby’s hand on his way out, and that night, she didn’t go out to meet Barbara Blake’s cousin at all, even if he was educated in Paris and heir to a steel mill.
I did, however, and I was having my first taste of absinthe on the hidden dock on Twelve Mile Island when someone cried out to look out over the river.
It was like the moon had settled on the water, casting shards of light on the broken waves. A man and a woman sat in a rowboat, no lantern on the prow, but a white glow charting their figures, the shape of the man’s profile, the softness of the woman’s arms as she reached for him. The darkness and the distance made it impossible to see who it was, even when they stood and kissed like something out of the old Shawnee stories about doomed lovers and descended stars, and all along the shore, the mischievous girls and dangerous boys of Louisville were silenced.