“I’ll wake you up,” he promised me, and I made my way back to his humble little house.
Nick’s house was small enough that you could see into all the rooms if you stood in the hall and all the doors were open, but there was something about it that gave me the creeps. I was too used to living with people on all sides, even if politesse and good manners prevented us from acknowledging it.
At Nick’s place, you could be alone and lonely, and I went straight to his bedroom, firmly closing the rest of the house away. The moon—the real moon—was high in the sky, and I opened the drapes to let the silver light spill onto the bed. I toed my shoes off and hung my dress in the portion of the wardrobe that Nick insisted was mine. As I did so, the card that Khai had given me fluttered to the ground. I picked it up, rubbing my fingers over the characters I couldn’t read and the address that I could.
I told myself that I could just throw it away. I didn’t have to keep it. I didn’t have to do anything. That comforted me enough that I was able to slide it into my purse, deferring my decision a little while. That helped.
I had brought pajamas along—slim, silk, and with my initials embroidered on the cuff—but the night was too stuffy for that. Instead I stripped to the skin and stretched out on Nick’s mattress, hoping that he would be done with Gatsby soon. I wondered if he would bring back a touch of Gatsby with him, whether it was the scent of Gatsby’s cologne or the taste of Gatsby’s mouth on his own. I licked my lips restlessly, turning away from the moonlight, letting my eyes drift shut.
This summer is never going to end, I thought.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next day, I said a cheerful goodbye to Nick, who had come back from Gatsby’s thoughtful rather than half-wrecked. He offered me a lift into the city or over to East Egg, but I waved him off.
“I don’t want you getting too used to my comings or goings, you know,” I said. “Wouldn’t that be boring?”
“I think having breakfast more than a few times a week isn’t going to be considered the height of banality just yet,” he said good-humoredly, but he let me go.
In truth, the calling card that Khai had slid me was burning a hole in my purse. I didn’t recognize the address precisely, but I thought the neighborhood was rather close to the intersection of Elizabeth and Canal, and that meant Chinatown.
Unless the nightly fun wanted to roll over to Alexander’s on White Street, I usually steered clear of Chinatown. It was a place that made me prickle uneasily, made me feel not poised and light on my feet, but anchored in a strange way by looks that I simultaneously wanted nothing to do with and that I also wanted to recognize me. My few accidental forays into Chinatown always left me irritated and insufferably arrogant for a while after I came out.
In truth, I felt less special in Chinatown, and that made me dislike it.
There was no question of whether I was going or not, however, so after a long nap in a proper bed, I got up, asked Lara to do me up a bit of fruit and cheese, and had a long soak in the bathtub. I was still tired. The heat seeped through the cracks of the apartment, coming in from outside to curl, feline and unwelcome, on every available surface.
When the cold water grew tepid, I came out to sit awhile with Aunt Justine, who had managed to prop herself up on a mountain of silk pillows and glare angrily at the paper.
“Really,” she said, referring to the riots in Washington, DC, and Chicago, “if this many people will not stand for it, they must yield.”
Buttering my toast, I glanced at her paper, where someone with a face not unlike mine and Khai’s was being led into a police wagon. The riots had been going on for a few days now, and it was impossible to ignore, even at the kind of clubs that I liked to go to.
“I hope it all dies down soon,” I said with a sigh, and Aunt Justine, in an uncharacteristically soft moment, reached over to lay her thin hand over mine. She wasn’t maudlin enough to squeeze, but she let me feel its papery weight for a moment before withdrawing.