“Oh three for tea, that sounds splendid to me,” she caroled, the telephone cord wound strangling tight around her fingers. “How wonderful. Of course I will cancel my brunch with the Boston Prestons to be there. It shall be the very delight of my summer season!”
Nick laughed dutifully at that.
“Don’t bring Tom,” he said, his voice a little different.
“What?”
“Don’t bring Tom,” he repeated. “That is, it would be rather…”
“Who is ‘Tom’？” she asked, letting him off the hook.
She hung up and turned to me with a rather pitying glance.
“He’s not very good at this, is he?”
“I don’t know that I want him to be,” I retorted, and she reached out to pinch my cheek lightly.
“So you want to be the one to do all the sneaking about? How selfish, my dear!”
It rained for the rest of the week, giving us what felt like a delivery of fall in the heat of the summer. In Daisy’s mansion in East Egg, we had somehow become unmoored from the mainland. Tom, in a high sulk, was still off in the city, likely with his girl from Willets Point or one from some other such exotic place. We were all alone in the house, the servants coming and going with a dignified hush that was more pointed than silence could be.
We smoked on the porch, we ate dinner at midnight, and we went through Daisy’s yearbook from Louisville, guessing where everyone else had ended up. The answer was largely Louisville, and looking at the blur of black-and-white faces in the yearbook pages, I felt a kind of pride in how far away I had gotten, even if it was through no special effort of my own.
When Saturday rolled around, I woke up at a thundering and rainy dawn to find that Daisy had not slept at all. Her suite looked as if a modiste’s shop had grown too full and simply split apart at the seams, throwing vast drifts of silk and cotton and beads and lace on every spare surface. Still in my robe, I dodged Valerie, Daisy’s maid, as she ran out in tears, a bright red handprint on her face.
“A little early to be beating the help, isn’t it?” I asked, and Daisy spun towards me, her eyes red and her pearly white teeth bared.
“It won’t do, Jordan,” she insisted. “It won’t. I haven’t a single thing to wear here. I shall have to go to New York to find something new, and there simply isn’t the time for that, but I can’t be seen in this last season tat…”
I took the gray silk frock out of her hands before she could ruin it, and then I made her sit down at her dressing table. When Valerie, cringing but dry-eyed, returned, I sent her for a little bit of beef glanced at the skillet, and a glass of orange juice.
“With champagne, of course?” she asked hopefully, and I nodded. She wouldn’t get through this drunk, but I doubted she would get through this entirely sober either.
When Daisy had gotten some barely singed beef in her and had a refreshing drink, we sifted through the ruins of her closet to find a rather unassuming little Worth number, a pale violet decorated with the softest, dreamiest cream fringe. It made her blue eyes even bluer, and when matched with a pair of satin shoes with elegant wooden heels stained to match, she calmed enough to let Valerie set her hair.
“My darling, what are you wearing?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I hadn’t thought I was coming.”
“Well, of course you are, if only to make sure that poor Nick doesn’t feel like a third wheel.”
“So you’ll have a pair of them.”
In truth, I didn’t mind. Like a cat with that fatal old flaw, I wanted to see how this all turned out. In addition to that, I hadn’t seen Nick all week. I wasn’t sure he even knew I was in East Egg, and I suddenly wanted to see him again, his game smile, the easy way he held his body after a few drinks.