“Oh,” he said, recovering badly. “Just at my exercises, you know. They are for—for my liver … I will get out of your way in…”
“Oh I don’t care about that,” said Gatsby. “Only play for us.”
Klipspringer peered at us in a near-sighted fashion. With his small horns, he looked startlingly fawn-like, tentative and sensitive.
“Ah, I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all out of prac—”
“Don’t talk so much, old sport,” Gatsby said sternly. “Play!”
He turned with every expectation of his orders being followed, squiring Daisy to the rear of the room to settle her on a velvet chaise. He lit her cigarette before sitting down next to her, and I took Nick’s hand in mine as Klipspringer approached the grand piano like it was some kind of slumbering beast.
He was a ridiculous sight as he sat at the keyboard in his underthings, but at the first touch of his fingers to the keys, a shivery silvery tremolo went through the air. He curled the melody around his fingers, and I realized that he was playing something he had only heard before.
Nick pulled me around so I was facing him, and we swayed together in surprise. Elsewhere it was a bright kind of song, tinkled out on some small upright piano. Here, as the twilight finally came on and stretched our shadows over the tile, it was something else entirely.
Night or daytime, it’s all playtime
Ain’t we got fun…？
Under Klipspringer’s fingers, the jaunty little tune turned into something sad, something too wise and too bitter by half. As he played, Klipspringer closed his eyes, tears running down his cheeks. In the back of the room, Gatsby pushed away Daisy’s hand holding the cigarette and hid his face in the crook of her neck.
Nick and I had come to a full stop, watching them. The air in the room was thick with summer and the fact that at Jay Gatsby’s house, it wasn’t too much to expect that summer, this summer, might go on forever.
Nick’s arm was around my waist, and finally I turned towards him.
“Come on,” I said quietly. “We’re not wanted here, are we?”
Nick hesitated, and then one or the both of us must have made a noise because Gatsby looked up at us. He wasn’t angry or sorry. Instead he was only confused. Wherever he was with Daisy, there were no names for other people. He had no idea who we were any longer.
Nick could see it too, and he nodded reluctantly. Hand in hand like fairytale children leaving a burning gingerbread house, we made our way out. We were in no particular hurry but both of us were done with the pleasures that Gatsby could provide for the moment. We couldn’t find the front door, but we could find the servant’s entrance. In the end, we climbed over the narrow hedge that separated Gatsby’s property from Nick’s. The rain had come back, solid and drenching, and we fled to the cover of Nick’s doorstep, catching our breath and peering back across the way at the garden we had left.
“Oh!” I said with some hilarity. “My clothes. My shoes. I’ve left them at Gatsby’s.”
We ended up sitting on his back step together, his jacket—Gatsby’s jacket, just as my clothes were Daisy’s clothes—slung over my shoulders, sharing a cigarette of harsh Turkish tobacco. Nick told me that he had gotten a taste for the stuff in the war, and I liked it better than I thought I would.
“You should come to France with me someday,” he said. “Just you and me. I could show you Rouen and Le Havre.”
“Paris or nothing,” I said, but it wasn’t a no.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Summer in New York goes by slowly until it goes by fast, and for the four weeks that took us out of July and into a sullen and ferociously fevered August, I could barely catch my breath. First there was Aunt Justine’s difficulty, where we ended up with a few sleepless nights and a live-in nurse, and then there was the riot that took over Brooklyn and Harlem for a full weekend over the Manchester Act, which would bar the way for all unwanted unworthies from a long list of places, while starting the repatriation of those who had, as so many of Aunt Justine’s friends put it so delicately, overstayed their welcome. Naturally it didn’t specify whether it meant the Chinese, the Irish, the Mexicans, the damned, or the dead that occasionally returned with them, so it was a terrible mess.