I tried to keep myself from being touched, because it was easy sometimes, when it came to Tom. Brief moments of sympathy and absent-minded kindness did not make a good man, but Tom was also good-looking in a blocky, vital kind of way. Sometimes he forgot that I wasn’t a Nordic like he was, and in that forgetting, he could be kind and thoughtful. There are women who will forgive a great deal for a moment of kindness from a handsome man, but Daisy and the other older girls who had taken me under their wings had taught me not to be one of them.
Nick and Daisy came in just as I was finished reading, and I stood as they did.
“Ten o’clock,” I said. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”
Nick looked startled, and the penny finally dropped.
“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
I smiled, because I was. He knew my face from the photographs and the sporting magazines. If he was in contact with his gossip-prone Louisville cousins （or more likely, if his mother or aunts were）， he might know more than that. Well, I didn’t care. It was up to him to decide what he might make of it.
“Wake me at eight, won’t you?” I asked, squeezing Daisy’s shoulder as I went by.
“If you’ll get up,” she said with a smile. She looked more normal, less desperate, and I nodded at Nick.
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” came Daisy’s voice, following me up the stairs. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing.”
“Good night,” I called back, rolling my eyes. “I haven’t heard a word.”
As if I needed Daisy’s help getting into the closet with a man who looked at me like Nick did. My history in closets was well established from Louisville, and in New York, with its wealth of cars, breakfast nooks, private balconies, and boathouses, I scarcely had to rely on them at all.
I fell asleep immediately, and didn’t dream. Daisy woke me up two hours later. She climbed into bed with me as we used to do, and as I rolled over to make room, she curled against my side. The moonlight streamed into my room, silvering her hair and shadowing her eyes.
“Tom’s asleep?” I asked groggily.
“Gone,” she replied, but there was nothing in her voice that cared for him in the least. Gone, and unlooked for, she might have said. She was still, except for her fingers playing restlessly with the ribbon on my camisole.
“Well?” I asked finally, and her face crumpled.
“I couldn’t,” she said, her voice small. “Oh Jordan, I couldn’t say anything at all, I couldn’t make myself say it—”
She sobbed just once, utterly miserable in the way that only a person who is capable of being utterly happy can be, but it had been a long time since she could be utterly happy.
The thought of her happiness struck a chord, and now I remembered Jay Gatsby.
CHAPTER TWO
One lazy summer evening in 1910, Daisy Fay sneaked up the stairs during a dinner party to find me. She made it past the extra servants Mrs. Baker hired for the occasion, the squeaking floorboards, and the insubstantial ghost of Anabeth Baker in the hallway, and she didn’t stop until she opened the door to my bedroom.
The house on Willow Street sold when I was thirty, and I went back one more time to see it. My room was untouched from the time I was a child, possibly from the time Eliza Baker, fatal fragile zealot, had slept under the lacy pink canopy and pored over her atlas of foreign places. The bed was always too large, soft like a peppermint marshmallow, and the furniture had a kind of bone-like dullness to it that the polished brass chasings could not alleviate. I was not sorry to see it all sold off in one job lot, destined for some other child to dread.