“There’s a lady present,” I said from the couch, hoping she would knock it off before Tom came down on her like a thunder bolt, but she only looked over her shoulder at me, batting her eyes.
“Then you must kiss Nick as well, mustn’t you?”
“Vulgar,” I said, affecting both disinterest and disdain, and Nick squeezed my hand a little, mouthing thank you at me when Daisy returned to Gatsby’s mouth. He had a horror of performance and was typically at his best when he thought no one looked or cared.
I rolled my eyes at Nick to show him how very silly I found them both, and he rewarded me with a dim smile.
Daisy nearly toppled off of Gatsby’s thighs when there was a swift knock at the door. Tom never knocked, and after touching a clean piece of tissue paper to her eyes and her lips, she stood up and away.
“Come in,” she said.
To my surprise, it was Pammy and her nurse, and as Daisy cooed with delight in a language that she shared only with her daughter, I glanced at Gatsby.
He was frozen in place, quietly absorbed and fascinated, and a little horrified as well. I wondered with some cynicism where Pammy fit in with all of Daisy’s plans for Europe and the Mediterranean.
Oh God, what if she wants me to look after her?
The thought was sudden and sobering, unlikely, but not as unlikely as all that. Daisy might as easily ask an old school chum to look after her daughter as she would to take a cat she had adopted for a short while.
“Here’s my darling, my darling, my love and my life,” Daisy said, taking Pammy’s hand and encouraging her in a bashful pirouette.
Pammy’s eyes were full of Daisy, but when her mother pushed her towards us, she went easily enough. She called me Aunt Jordan and kissed me dutifully on the cheek, and she curtsied prettily for Nick and for Gatsby. Nick treated her with the grave courtesy that makes some adults so very popular with children, and Gatsby seemed oddly shy of her, darting glances between her small face and Daisy’s almost askance.
“Doesn’t she look an awful lot like me?” Daisy asked. “She’s all of me and none of Tom, isn’t that nice?”
She had the nurse take Pammy away again, the delicate child and the woman in white narrowly dodging Tom, who had reappeared with a tray of gin rickeys and a newly suspicious look. He handed me my drink without glancing at me, so I took the opportunity to look at him, taking in the clench of his jaw and the way his brows lowered like the horns of a bull considering a charge.
In the middle of Daisy saying something about the earth falling into the sun, he interrupted her.
“Say,” he said, looking at Gatsby, “why don’t you come out onto the veranda with me. Let me show you a thing.”
I couldn’t have been the only one who noticed the subtle darkening of Gatsby’s eyes, the way his shoulders came up like those of a young prizefighter. The genteel courtesy rippled and for a moment, I saw the willing brawler underneath.
“Why, of course, old sport. Nothing would please me better.”
The gin had gotten to me, I decided, freezing the inside of my head. For a moment, I was utterly sure that one of them would kill the other, and then we would be in some kind of wretched murder mystery, trying to decide how to cover up the crime and falling into paroxysms of paranoia as we offed each other one by one.
They rose almost in unison, and Nick rose a half-beat later, a serious look on his face, and followed them out.
They tromped out to the veranda like hunters going off into the marsh, and I took Daisy’s drink away from her, setting it on the table. She wasn’t drunk, she had barely started when my glass was already drained, but it was hard to remember that when she looked at me with such a fuzzy expression.
“Why hello, Jordan,” she said, and I resisted the urge to shake her.