“Daisy, you are going to get someone killed.”
“No, darling, not me,” she said. “We’ll be well away before anything happens.”
“You and me?”
She blinked.
“Me and Jay. You and Nick. It will be fine, I promise.”
She leaned to kiss me, I guessed, on the cheek, but instead she slipped or I did, because she was kissing me on the lips. We both tasted of gin and lime, and my lipstick was fainter, ghostly on her mouth. The kiss sent a shock through me because it didn’t seem to shock her at all. She winked at me, pressing her thumb against my lower lip as if to wipe the kiss away.
“Shh, it’ll be fine.”
The maids hung the dining room with swathes of dark blue silk, barricading us from the sun as the infrequent gusts of wind billowed the makeshift curtains like sails. Lunch was a plate of cold meat and more gin, and we picked at the platter in a depressed way. Nick had given me a significant glance upon coming back in with Gatsby and Tom; I would have to get that story out of him later.
The talk wound back and forth like a dazed mouse caught in a box trap; if I had to hear Tom talk about turning a garage into a stable one more time, I might save Gatsby the trouble and simply stab him myself.
Daisy, seated between Tom and Gatsby, seemed to turn thinner and tighter, and when she jumped up, it was like a steel guitar string had been plucked too hard.
“Well, what in the world are we going to do with ourselves this afternoon?” she cried. “What are we going to do with ourselves tomorrow, and then for the next thirty years?”
“You’re being morbid,” I said, because I mistrusted that look in her eye. “We don’t have to do anything. We can just wait for fall. Life starts over again in fall.”
Daisy shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. It made me think of the night she wanted to see a lion. They were real tears at the moment. They were real tears in the moment.
“But it’s so hot,” Daisy said. “I can’t take much more of this. Let’s all go to town!”
Nick and I stared at her, too stunned by the heat and the awkwardness to do much more than watch her politely. While Gatsby probably would have liked nothing better than to make it snow for her, Tom was monopolizing him with talk of horses that Gatsby obviously didn’t have and didn’t care about.
“Who wants to go to town?” Daisy said, raising her voice insistently, and when Gatsby looked up at her, she stopped.
I had always thought that Daisy was like the rest of us Louisville girls, liars every one for the right cause, though of course you would never convince any of us of what one right cause that should be. Now I could see that she was no kind of liar at all, as her hand came out to touch Gatsby’s face right in front of her husband.
“Oh,” she said in faltering tones. “Oh but you look so cool…”
At the last moment, she pulled back. That feeling of disaster that had hung over us all day finally disappeared, because the disaster had come.
And Gatsby, who turned out to be nothing more than the son of a dirt farmer and his half-Chippewa wife, who had constructed a palace so profoundly beautiful that we need never look for the truth, simply forgot to lie with any part of his body in that moment. In that moment, they were alone together in the dining room, in the mansion, in the state, in the country, in the world, and the rest of us were left to beat our fists on the wall outside.
“You always look so cool,” she said, and then the spell was broken.
“All right, then,” Tom said, pushing away from the table. “Let’s go to town. That’s what you want, right, Daisy?”
Gatsby’s eyes narrowed at Tom’s tone, but Daisy turned conciliatory, looping her hand through Tom’s arm.