It should have felt as if we were intruding, but these two were made for an audience. I could feel that Nick was quite taken with the picture that they made; for my part, I only wondered if I should clap.
Finally, it was Gatsby who broke the spell, standing back and helping Daisy to her feet.
“Come on,” he said. “Let me show you around the place.”
There was a something Middle Western about the way he said it, I thought as we followed him into the halls, like the place might have been a hundred-acre spread of timber or perhaps some prime riverland that would be good for leasing out to hunters once the weather turned.
Nick briefly tried to excuse himself, but Gatsby and Daisy wouldn’t hear about it, and I wound my arm through his.
“Don’t you dare leave me with just the two of them,” I said with a grin. “I do hate being a third wheel. With you along, we rather complete the coupe, don’t we?”
Daisy insisted on seeing Gatsby’s room before we went farther afield, and we wandered through a room that was only Spartan compared to Daisy’s, and if a room with its own mahogany bar could be said to be in any way lesser. She cooed over a solid gold mirror and comb while I inspected the drawers where pocket watches and cuff links were stored like prize jewels. In one velvet tray, I found a pigeon blood ruby the size of my thumbnail, and for some reason, it made Nick laugh. Where Daisy’s were gracious and sprawling, Gatsby’s rooms went up, his beautiful clothes located not in polished inlaid wardrobes but in open cabinets and racks a story above, accessed by a winding staircase that uncurled into a brass walkway all the way around the room.
“I made Nick come up and choose something for himself,” Gatsby said with a conspiratorial wink. “I couldn’t get him to choose something nicer than that old thing.”
“I like it,” Nick said with a shrug and a slight smile.
“No, no, old sport, you should have had the peach or the aqua, certainly…”
Gatsby sprang up the delicate staircase to the mezzanine, drawing out shirts for me and Daisy to see.
“Look at this,” he cried, shaking out a pale orange shirt with a winged collar. “Wouldn’t this be splendid on our boy? It’s from England, and before that, Egypt. Or this, they call it Nile Blue…”
Nick tried to laugh, Daisy clapped her hands for the colors, and Gatsby threw them down towards us, grabbing at linen shirts and cotton shirts in a mania, tossing them down to us by the handful. There was something here directed at Nick, but before I could figure it out, the shirts tumbling down towards us spun and stretched out wings, sleeves stretching into long and graceful necks.
As a dark blue shirt Gatsby had named faience from London spun past me, I caught a glimpse of a mother-of-pearl button eye before it swept up to the glass skylight above, followed in turn by the rosy plum from Paris and the lemonade yellow from Quebec.
We gaped as the shirts flew around our heads in a rush of crisp fabric, rising up towards the gray glass sky. I saw Daisy closed her eyes, but I watched as they gained the ceiling, and then, freedom just a shower of shattered glass away, they fell back defeated as shirts, coming back to the ground limp and disappointed.
Gatsby opened his hands like a stage magician, and Daisy clapped, her eyes filled with strange tears. It struck me that there was something in her that seemed to want to speak, to cry out perhaps in protest or in question, but she only smiled, smiled.
“What beautiful shirts they were!” she cried, but for a moment they had been birds.
* * *
We trailed after Gatsby, who was pointing out all his particular treasures to Daisy, like the rose window set at the top of the stairs, preserved from the wreckage of a cathedral in Mont-Louis and shipped all the way to the United States, or the statue of the Venus emerging from the mountain, missing only her right raised hand and flecked with bits of ancient paint.