“You’re not going anywhere, old sport,” Gatsby said seriously to Nick.
“Oh no, don’t go,” Daisy said to me, her mouth drooping down excessively at the corners and a distant thunder rumbling somewhere over the bluffs. “Stay, stay, we can still have such a lovely time together.”
I tried to exchange a speaking glance with Nick—these people have all gone mad, and I am afraid that madness is catching—but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Tom gave him a scornful look, shaking his head, before he continued.
“So you think you’re taking my wife,” he said, his voice flat and inviting.
“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby, climbing to his feet. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”
He said those words with a kind of set-in-stone belief. It was true, or he would make it true by believing in it hard enough.
“She never loved you, do you hear?” he continued. “She only married you because I was poor, and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved anyone except me!”
We all flinched from the theatrical sound of his voice. It was too much for people like us, too genuine and passionate. Some love could survive being put on show like that, but almost every kind of love that I knew would wither through it, curl up from shame and exposure and die.
“Jay…” Daisy said, faltering. “Let’s go home…”
Tom turned to her, incredulous.
“With him? You’re going to go home with him? Give up me and Pammy and Chicago and Louisville?”
“Five years,” Gatsby continued, as if he had planned this out so well that he couldn’t bear to deviate from the script. “We’ve loved each other for five years now, and you never knew—”
For the first time, Tom seemed genuinely appalled. He looked at Daisy in shock.
“You’ve been seeing him for five years?”
Before Daisy could answer, Gatsby cut the air with his hand, shaking his head.
“No, old sport, it was in our hearts. We met, we fell in love with a kind of passion you could never understand, and then fate split us apart. She never loved you, not for a moment.”
It was like a romance out of the pulps, but he wasn’t a dime store hero, and Daisy was certainly no one’s pure and pale lady.
“Jay,” she said, her voice warning, but Tom was shaking his head, rubbing his hands over his face as if he could rid himself of this confusion that way. We could all feel the shifting pressure in the room, water drenching the air and making it rest heavy in our lungs.
“She loves me,” Tom said, his voice cold. “Of course she does, and I love her. We don’t love perfect, and I like my little sprees. I make a fool of myself sometimes, but she always takes me back. We’ve got Pammy, and the property in Lake Shore Drive, and the big house in West Egg. We’ve got her people in Louisville, and mine in Chicago. What have you got, Mr. Drug Store, Mr. Damnation?”
“The rest of the world,” Gatsby said extravagantly, but Daisy was biting her lip, looking back and forth between them, as if suddenly realizing what was at stake and what she might lose. Daisy wasn’t used to losing, not at all, and I could feel the wind changing course around us, whipping first into one window and then into another.
“Oh, we should just go home,” she said faintly, but I doubted she could say then where that home might be.
Then Gatsby turned.
“Tell him,” Gatsby insisted. “Tell him you never loved him. Tell him it was all a lie.”
“Yes, Daisy,” Tom said, his voice a little quieter, a little more beguiling. “Tell him that you never loved me at Kapiolani, the day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry…”