“Just your mind, your memory, and your dignity,” Nick offered, and I smiled.
“Nick and I decided we were done doing things by half measures,” I chirped. “The rain half-wet us, so I thought the sea should finish the job. We do look rather too awful, don’t we?”
“Not at all,” Gatsby said with friendly indifference. “But you can hardly stay like that all day. Come on.”
“It’s fine,” Nick said hesitantly. “I mean, it’s stopped raining…”
It had, the clouds rolling back to let some refugee sunshine through, and Gatsby grinned.
“So it is. Come on, we’ll take my car.”
I started to say how silly it was when we could simply go out the back and cut through his small orchard, but Daisy seized my hand.
“Oh, just give us a moment to powder up a little! We’ll meet you on the lawn…”
She crammed us both into Nick’s tiny little bathroom, closing the door behind us. The moment we were alone, she fell into my arms, shaking as if she had a fever.
“Daisy?”
“Oh God in Heaven, he loves me so much,” she said, hiding her face in her hands.
“I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” I muttered, but she shook her head.
“There’s just so much, and so deep, and oh Jordan, I don’t think I could reach down to the bottom of it if I drowned.”
I shivered, nervously running my hands up and down her arms. I had just been in the freezing ocean, but there was something even clammier and colder about her. He hadn’t warmed her at all, him or his love.
“Don’t do that, Daisy. Do you want to go? Should we just call Ferdie back, or ask Nick to drive us back to East Egg?”
Her eyes were wide and startled, and she looked at me with a delicate little kiss on her pursed mouth.
“Oh Jordan, but he loves me—”
“Daisy…”
She shook her head, as if all that it took to tip her one way or the other was me saying her name with disbelief.
“Oh Jordan, he loves me so much. I’ve never felt anything like that. There’s nothing like it in all the world, being loved by someone like Jay Gatsby.”
She said his name like some kind of incantation, a god if you could own a god.
“What are you going to do?”
I thought of the night of her bridal dinner. She straightened, pushing her shoulders back, and then went to splash some cold water on her face, scrubbing away the little touch of lipstick which was all she ever used.
“Why … we’re going over to his house, darling.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
And so we did. The entire time, I felt unreal, a little as if I were floating, a little like I was getting ready to fall. Daisy and I bundled into the back of Gatsby’s car with Nick in the front, and we drove down Nick’s drive and up Gatsby’s, tumbling out in front of his gracious marble steps like so many puppies.
If I had thought about it at all, I would have guessed that Gatsby’s house would have a haunted air to it during the day, when the only people who walked its gorgeous halls were servants, when the only people enjoying themselves might be the ghosts. For some reason, it had never occurred to me that Gatsby himself actually lived there. It was too big to live in, but now he proved me wrong as he led us in the doors, nodding an absent hello to his butler.
He showed us Daisy’s suite, done up after the fashion of Marie Antoinette, and he pulled Nick through the door to his own, shutting it firmly behind them.