“Then I hope you are prepared to run, Miss Baker,” he said, obviously sorry that I had to go ruining his polite intimidation.
“I’m not,” I said, trying to sound bored. “Fine. I’ll tell Nick. Happy?”
“I will be.” He hesitated. I wondered if he was getting some inkling that his grand romance was involving an awful lot of underhanded threats.
“This isn’t real,” he said abruptly. “What I have said here with you. It’s not real.”
“It feels real to me,” I responded, and he gave me the most charming and oblivious smile. This was never a man who could tell me to run. This was in fact someone that Daisy might have been in love with, someone she really would cheat on Tom for. He looked boyish, endearingly regretful. It was enough to give me whiplash.
“I’m so sorry you got the wrong idea,” Gatsby said, reaching over to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “But you will tell Nick?”
“Of course I will,” I said, and I must have sounded forgiving or chipper enough to make him beam.
He took my hands in his, kissing them in grand style.
“Thank you again, you’re an absolute darling, Jordan Baker.”
What Jordan Baker was was alarmed, overly warm, and intensely ill at ease. I was back in the main hall of the Cendrillon, and though Miriam was long gone, clever thing, Maurice Wilder had just gotten his heart broken over something, so I dragged him into one of the rear booths, hanging on to a fold of his dress and letting him drape half over me. I held on to him and drank something light and fizzy to clear my mind, but there was really no clearing it of something like Jay Gatsby. I kissed Maurice all over his face and shoulders, but in the end I couldn’t sustain it.
He sat up, cupping his sharp chin in his hand, sighing.
“Bit of a wash for both of us, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
I rolled my cool glass over his shoulder, making him shiver a little.
“Well, Jordan, should I see you home? I think I’m about done for.”
“No, I—yes, actually. That would be ever so good if you came by car.”
I would go home, I decided, but I wasn’t there to stay.
No, in the morning, I had to take the train out to East Egg to see Daisy.
CHAPTER NINE
I didn’t end up going to sleep when I got home after all, and I made myself some very strong Turkish coffee to compensate. The harshness of the drink made me feel as if I was vibrating two inches beyond the barrier of my skin, and I knew my mouth would taste dark and a little gritty all day, but that was fine.
I ended up on the first train to East Egg, and in a plain cotton dress in Oxford blue, I curled up next to a window to watch the world go by. The tall buildings of Manhattan gave way to smaller residences, marble and glass to brick and wood, and I felt something in me ease up slightly, as if relieved to see more of the watercolor blue sky.
With a slightly superstitious air, I crossed my fingers as the train surged through Willets Point in Queens, where all the city’s ash came to rest. Even this early in the morning, fine light white sediment billowed up from the ground in a feathery fury, curling up into the air like some kind of secret. Wind cut the tallest and broadest heaps with intricate desert-like ridges, making me think of the far-off deserts of the Sahara or the Atacama, and watching over all of this was a perfectly horrid, perfectly tacky billboard of some long-defunct spectacle maker, two great eyes staring down with lurid interest over what went on below.
Down among the ashes, their faces and hands turned gray and grimy with the refuse of New York, I could see the men who lived and worked in the ash. It was their lot to shovel the ash that came in. It was a titanic struggle that I imagined they could only cope with by realizing that they were after an impossible goal and therefore were free to ignore it. Their shapes flickered among the little shanties that they had put together, made from spare pieces of wood and the odd bit of cast-off wealth of the city. From my spot on the train, as we pulled into the station for a brief and pointless stop, I could see them plodding with a kind of dull and frustrated purpose among the ash heaps, armed with shovels and clothed in grime. I imagined their lungs were protected in their youth by keeping their mouths shut tight. Then as they grew older themselves, more prone to voice their opinions, more eager to make sure that the world did not go one second longer without their words than it absolutely had to, the ash won over, sliding over their skin and then into their open mouths.