Gatsby refused to care about the menace in Tom’s voice, but Nick stiffened next to me. I frowned, putting fingers chilled from my glass against the back of his neck, and he relaxed a little, though not all the way.
“Those parties,” Tom said, shaking his head with theatrical disgust. “I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world. Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between Black and white.”
“Well, no one’s Black here,” I snapped. “Really, Tom.”
Tom spared me an irritated look.
“There’s nothing for you to get so hot over, Jordan. You know I wasn’t speaking about you.”
“In this heat, you needn’t bother speaking at all,” I started, but he was already blundering ahead, lurching to his feet, and glaring at us all in turn as if we had all in our own way challenged him and his American family values. I realized that leaving aside the issue of his marriage, if it was Gatsby, Nick, and me, we did.
“What I want to know,” he continued, gesturing emphatically with his almost empty tumbler, “is how long a man is expected to tolerate this kind of perversity in his own house. They may say it’s all in good fun, there’s no harm to it, but they never think about the way it erodes the values on which we built this country.”
“We?” Gatsby asked, and Tom gave him a startled look, as if not expecting him to admit to his own perversity so quickly. Tom hadn’t yet twigged to the fact that there were in fact several kinds of institutions attacking his precious country stretched out in the suite.
“Tom, stop,” Daisy said. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
There was something tense in her voice, and she was turned towards the mirror again, stroking her hair with agitation. It occurred to me that she could see our reflections in the glass. I wondered if the versions of us in the glass were doing much better than we were.
“No, you are,” Tom shot back. “You think you can get away with so much more just because you’re a woman? You and your little China doll…”
My hand tightened on the glass in my hand. The whiskey was mostly gone so I could likely throw it and storm out without much guilt, but Nick’s hand tightened on mine, his face pale. In that, he matched Daisy, whose face peeking over her shoulder was as colorless as a mourning lily. They never looked more alike than when they were afraid, and I wanted to scold them both for paying Tom any heed.
“Oh we’re all being so very silly,” Daisy said mechanically. “Do let’s go home, won’t we?”
“No,” Gatsby said, in the manner of a man who has not been listened to enough in the last quarter hour. “No, Tom. Daisy’s not going home with you. She loves me, only me.”
His mistake, I thought in a distant kind of way, was watching Tom in that moment and not Daisy. Daisy looked untethered to the world, as if she might suddenly take a step and go flying, tumbling through the air like a piece of dandelion fluff. She gazed between Gatsby and Tom, and she looked unsure, her footing wrong. The light in the suite dimmed as clouds scuttled across the sun.
“Oh yes?” Tom said, scanning Gatsby from top to bottom. “And why don’t you tell me where you’ll take her to live? Do you have rooms at that damned perverts’ club, or is it a little pied-à-terre in Hell? What about a tipi in—”
“Oh my goodness, look at the time!” I burst out in my gayest voice. I thought that I should just get out of the room, taking whoever wanted to come with me, but this was beyond salvaging. “I’m so sorry, but my aunt Justine—”
“Her aunt Justine,” Nick agreed. “She’s expecting. Us. Can’t disappoint her…”