“All right, Daisy. And if I want Nick in a linen closet, I can lure him there myself. You do keep some of Gatsby’s cologne around, don’t you?”
“You awful thing. Come soon, darling.”
Aunt Justine insisted that I take the car （“after all, dear, it’s not as if I am going to get to use it for a while”） and I went out to West Egg with a goodly supply of dresses and shoes so that I would not have to borrow.
The house was unbearably hot when I showed up close to sunset, so I went to find Daisy in the garden, dozing on a long low couch under a sunshade, her feet bare and her eyes gazing towards the sea. I came to sit on the couch opposite hers, taking a sip from her untouched highball before choking a little.
“Demoniac before dark?” I asked, and she offered me a hazy smile. Now that I looked, I could see a lassitude to her limbs, something unfocused in the way her fingers ran along the edge of the cushion under her head.
“Oh, but it’s from Warsaw,” she said. “Better than what we’ve been getting from Berlin. It’s ever so good, and Jay brings it over special for me.”
I cautiously took another sip. It was better than the kind coming from Berlin. Of course with the trouble in Vienna, the Viennese demoniac had disappeared, but Warsaw made up for it. I let it sit on my tongue before swallowing it. It was good, hot enough to make the day seem cool. I stretched on the couch and reached over to take Daisy’s hand.
She was flattened by the heat, her dark hair curling lank against her damp cheek, the edge of her white chiffon skirt fluttering like the flag of a defeated city. My eyes half-closed and shining under the lids, I thought I could see what kind of monster she was.
Daisy Buchanan was, underneath her dress waving surrender and her face like a flower, a rather handsome and lazy monster. She wasn’t something that stalked her prey for miles through the underbrush. Instead she would lie so still that something unwary might think she was dead, and when they came for her skin, for the reputation of killing her, for her virtue or her wealth, then she would be upon them.
Don’t get too close to Daisy Fay, a voice told me. Only disaster, my girl.
Didn’t I know that already? Hadn’t I risked my reputation in Fulbright’s for her? Hadn’t I made a girl out of trash and let Daisy murder her?
I remembered more of the night in Chinatown now. The demoniac helped, and apparently the kind from Warsaw was especially merciless. In the hazy vision that wasn’t truly vision, I saw faces like mine far above where I slumped on the filthy tile floor. They were the members of the paper cutting troupe that was performing all over New York that month. At the same time, I saw them with animal heads, cats, oxen, dogs and snakes, and Khai I could see had the face of a pig, just as I did.
No, I don’t want that, I told them, but Bai, who had the fat-cheeked and comical face of a rat, shook her head.
Should have thought of that before you did what you did.
There was a pair of shears in her hand. Unlike the ones they had given me that night, they were heavy as gardening shears, the blades dark and rusty. They didn’t have to be sharp as long as Bai was strong enough, and I knew she was.
She took my hand, the shears opened, and the blades squeezed shut over my littlest finger, bouncing a few times to let me feel how blunt they were. The next pass, she would take my pinkie off at the second knuckle, but then there was a heavy tread on the stone path leading to the sunshade.
I was faintly surprised to see Tom making his way towards us. He looked hot and uncomfortable, his hat tucked under one arm, his face shiny with sweat and his hair faintly sodden.
“Hello there, Jordan,” he said, and instead of greeting Daisy as well, he bent down to kiss her lightly on the forehead.
For a moment, I expected her to rise up and devour him, but instead she sat still, eyes half-shut and mouth unsmiling. Tom smiled at her, and I realized that he had no idea what she was thinking of him, the slow animosity that rolled off of her like a wave over a sandbar, the narrow-eyed malice that would make any young girl in Louisville nervous.