Tom groaned, but pulled over. As Nick helped me out, Tom engaged in a surprisingly spirited banter with the crabbed owner, Wilson himself. The man had always pointedly ignored me when I showed up with Nick, so I did him the same favor now, looking around at the tall piles of ash pushed up against the high wooden fences. There was no wind to blow the ash around, but the ash heaps loomed ominously, threatening to bury us all if we so much as took a step out of place.
There was a small store inside the gas station, but no one to mind the till. I picked up a pack of violet-flavored gum, leaving a penny on the counter, and I came back out popping it loudly. Wilson had finally got the gas going, and he was exclaiming to Tom about money woes and infidelity while Tom only grew more and more red.
“Like they have anything in common besides having two legs, two arms, and barely a brain between them,” I scoffed to Nick, who still looked slightly sick.
“Oh poor darling,” I murmured. “This is going to be an absolute disaster. What do you say we have a few drinks and then vanish to my place? We can get just as drunk and be just as sweaty on Park Avenue as we can wherever Gatsby and Daisy want to go.”
Nick shook his head.
“No, I want to stay. I want you to stay too.”
“Fine, fine,” I sighed. “I do spoil you.”
He smiled a little at that, and by then Tom, shaking over some slight or another, was wrapping things up with the odious Wilson. Wilson gave me a perfunctory look of dislike as Nick handed me back into the car.
As I climbed in, I happened to catch a glimpse of a red-haired woman at the window above the shop. I only saw her for a moment before Nick shut the door, but she was furious, anger making two deep and abyssal holes out of her eyes, her lips peeled back over teeth that were shockingly white. She looked half-mad, and it shook me for a moment as we drove off.
We passed under the eyes of the same hideous billboard advertising some defunct optometrist’s office, a pair of eyes that gazed at us with avuncular malice as we left the ashes behind. I always felt an obscure kind of relief when Nick and I passed under its gaze, as if we had escaped some kind of calamity or other in Queens, and I was happy to leave the gas station and the madwoman in the attic behind us.
Tom grew insufferable as we got closer to Astoria, alternately speeding and tapping on the brakes to curse the speed of the other drivers around us. He almost ran us off the road coming up too fast on a corner, and even Nick barked at him to keep him from hitting a pair of veiled women dressed in black. The women shook their fists at us as we sped by, and I shrugged and waved as we passed.
We came up around Perry Street to find the blue coupe snug on the shoulder, and Daisy stood up to wave us over.
“Oh there you are,” she laughed, her cheeks flushed and her hair a mess after the ride with the top down. “We were afraid we’d lost you.”
“Fat chance,” Tom said shortly. “We’re in the city like you wanted, Daisy, what do you want to do now?”
“Let’s take in a movie,” I suggested. “The theaters are always cool and quiet.”
And we wouldn’t have to talk, and maybe that would mean we would survive the afternoon without someone getting a fat lip or a black eye. At this point, I couldn’t even figure out who was going to be the most likely victim.
Daisy shook her head, patting down her dark hair with birdlike flutters of her hands. She was pretty, if common, like this, and Gatsby almost reached up to smooth her hair back before he remembered himself.
“No, no, you go to the theater,” she said. “Jay and I will ride around and meet you afterward. You’ll find us on the street corners like buskers or streetwalkers, so very shameful…”
“Absolutely not,” I said to forestall Tom’s explosion. I was wondering if she was hoping to provoke him into one, but if so, she should have told the rest of us so that we could be good witnesses or, better yet, have stayed home. “No, come on. The city’s empty, and it’s all ours, let’s not waste it…”