“Well, of course it’s real,” he said with a hopeful smile. “It’s just real and made of paper.”
I bit my lip. Somewhere in the back of my mind lived a paper lion and a paper Daisy, tottering on her high heels and grinning to make her babyish cheeks even rounder.
“But how real?” I asked, and he gave me a curious look.
He bent gracefully to pick up a yellow blossom.
“This real,” he said, brushing the petals over my cheeks.
“This real,” he said, splitting the blossom in half and letting a torn sheet of thin yellow tissue paper drift to the ground.
“Silly, really,” I said, but he didn’t seem to have the sense to be cut.
“Of course it is,” he said with a grin. “Silly is all we can do at a place like this.”
He spoke with a kind of scorn that made me catch a laugh in my mouth. People called Gatsby’s parties brilliant, de rigueur, the most exciting thing since M. Bartholdi and M. Eiffel raised first an island out of New York Harbor and then a gorgeous woman clothed in copper from the island. People also called it the new return of Babylon, surely a sign of the rotten heart of the twenties, and excess that would make us all ashamed if we had anything like a sense of honor to shame.
I had never heard them called silly before, and Khai grinned to see me surprised.
“Look, Bai is going to have my head if I don’t actually step up,” he said. “Don’t come to watch us right now.”
“Why not?” I asked, piqued, because that was probably the best way he could have gotten me to come and see.
“Because like I said, this is silly. Here…”
He produced a card from his sleeve, tucking it under the strap of my dress like some kind of reverse pick-pocketing.
“Come see us Tuesday,” he said. “I’ll put you on the list.”
“Well, I do like being put on lists,” I said, and with a slight grin, he turned and made his way across the lawn towards a troupe of people in similar clothing. I must have missed them when they were at Gatsby’s last. They were all Asian, all weaving around each other in the steps of some intricate dance, and then I saw them spread out an enormous sheet of paper between them, pale cream, and as it spun faster and faster, opening up into a lotus flower the size of a dining room table. The petals, the same cream as the paper, opened to reveal a slender girl no taller than a mailbox, and I turned away.
A while ago, I would have been as charmed as anyone, but after what Khai said, I could see it for what it was: cheap, showy, silly.
I ventured around to the pool, where Nick had swum a few times, but as far as he could tell, Gatsby, never. From his stories, I expected the pool to be an eerily silent place, but of course it wasn’t.
The pool was enormous, clad in marble tile with a mosaic of a beautiful woman covering her face at the bottom. The water was the turquoise you imagined the Mediterranean must be, almost silky when you slid in. Some people had brought along bathing suits, but more simply dropped in in their clothes when the spirit of the evening moved them. I watched the fun for a while, and as I did, I saw that the people who dove under the surface took on the long and sinuous shapes of enormous swimming carp, gliding through the water as if they were flying through air. They flashed green and copper and vermilion as they swam by, turning their round gold eyes towards those above as if we were wonders or gods.
When they rose above the surface, they were human again, offered towels and drinks by a small army of pool attendants standing by. I couldn’t tell if it was only a clever illusion or if something had changed their forms, and the swimmers themselves were unclear on the subject.
At the eleven o’ clock dinner, I held myself aloof, sitting on the balustrade above the dining area with a cocktail in my hand, watching the kingdom below me with interest. It was the place where Gatsby had stood often enough, waiting for Daisy, hoping for Daisy. It was where he had stood when he saw me and Nick the first night, and I wondered what he felt now, dragged into the common tumult with the rest, because I could see him sitting at the table with Nick and with Daisy.