I thanked her, but I knew I’d never do it. What use did I have for diamond hairpins anyway? And nice things, bought for her by her married lover? They felt… tainted. “So fill me in, how’d you even meet Tom?” I asked her. Myrtle didn’t get out of Queens much, except to visit me, and I certainly hadn’t introduced them.
“It was the funniest thing, Cath. And really, I guess I owe it all to you.”
“Me?” I shook my head, not understanding.
“Yes, your friend, in the fancy yellow car. He set us up.”
* * *
IT HAD BEEN months since I’d seen Jay.
On a chilly evening at the end of last January, he’d climbed up the fire escape, knocked on my window. I’d gone to open it and noticed a creamy yellow convertible sitting in the alleyway below. “You bought a car?” I’d asked, laughing at the sheer impulsiveness of it, as I’d opened the window for him to climb in. He hadn’t telephoned first, just showed up. And when I’d seen him last, at his place, he had not even owned a car. Certainly not an expensive yellow one.
“Rolls-Royce. I just bought her,” he said, breathless from the cold. He climbed in through my window, his face ruddy with excitement. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she, Cath? Any girl would love her, wouldn’t she?”
I nodded, though I couldn’t care less about a car. But I was happy to see him. I’d had a long day, my feet ached, and I’d just taken off my shoes before he’d shown up. “Sure,” I murmured. “Your car is lovely.” I stood on my stockinged tiptoes to kiss him. But he gently pushed my face away, and he offered me a cool smile instead. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he breathed out slowly, his voice still quivering with excitement. “Everything is right. Daisy is moving to East Egg.”
Daisy. I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “Just Daisy?” I asked gently, instead. “Not… her husband, too?”
“No, no. Him, too. But I can deal with him.” Deal with him? I let out a nervous laugh. “She’s going to be so close, Cath,” he said, still talking excitedly. “I can see her again. I can make her love me again. I have money now. I can make her happy now.” His voice was higher than usual; he spoke faster than usual, and he reminded me suddenly of a desperate rat trying to claw its way up the sewer grate before it drowned.
“Oh, Jay.” I put my hand on his cheek. His soft, familiar cheek. Daisy had married another man several years ago; Jay hadn’t seen her since before the war. There was no way she still pined after him the way he pined after her. Or else why would she have gotten married at all? But poor Jay would never believe me if I told him that. He was going to have to find that out for himself. Still, my heart ached for him, for the pain he was about to feel when she rejected him. Again.
“I know I promised you I was going to help your sister,” he was saying now. “And I’ll still try to find some way, Cath. But I just used almost all my savings to purchase a house in West Egg. It’s beautiful and grand and quite impressive. And right across the water from where Daisy will be in East Egg.”
It was stunning, the amount of calculation that had gone into this, and in such little time, too. A few weeks earlier, just before Christmas, Jay and I had lain in my bed, naked and restless and hungry for each other. And now, suddenly, he’d used all his money to buy a house and a Rolls-Royce and god knows what else, to impress Daisy. I could hardly believe or understand it. “So you’re leaving the city then?” I asked, still trying to make sense of it. He nodded. “Is this good-bye?”
He leaned in and gently kissed my cheek. Tears stung my eyes, but they annoyed me and I tried to will them away. We’d both known this wasn’t forever. I just hadn’t expected it to end quite like this, with Jay Gatsby fleeing the city, choosing a ghost of a woman—a married woman at that—over me, all in the blink of an eye. “Good-bye, Cath,” he whispered.
And then just like that he was back down the fire escape, gone from my life forever.
* * *
AFTER I GOT drinks with Myrtle, I walked uptown with her to see her new apartment. It was the end of May. Jay was far away and hazy and back inside my chilly January bedroom. Now the air was redolent with flowers and trash seething out on the sidewalk for pickup. And I was sweating straight through my sundress as we walked arm in sticky arm uptown.
I’d had two gin rickeys as Myrtle had told me her story about Jay, and maybe it was the alcohol, or the way I’d just found myself caught up in my own memory of the last night I saw him, but none of it made sense. Even now as we walked, I still couldn’t understand it. Her man in the yellow car had to be Jay. But why had he paid her $100 to sit with Tom on a train? Had he felt some sort of wayward loyalty toward me after all, remembering the promise he’d made to help Myrtle? Had he known, somehow, that Tom and Myrtle would fall in love? That Tom would make her happy? Did he believe that Tom could do what Jay had promised once, pull Myrtle from her small, impoverished life in Queens? But how could he possibly have known that? It made no sense.
To hear Myrtle tell it, there’d been an instant attraction between her and Tom on the train. She’d sat across from him, touched the beautiful white silk of his shirt. Then she hadn’t been able to stop herself—she’d gotten off with him in the city and followed him into a taxicab, into a hotel, her body barely even realizing she’d left the train. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other, Cath. It was like he was my destiny.
A destiny orchestrated by Jay. But why?
“Did I tell you he’s a polo player?” Myrtle was saying as we walked into her new building now. It was one of those nice apartment buildings with a doorman and everything. My sister’s demeanor changed as she walked inside; she stood up straighter, held her head higher, and got a sly, entitled smile on her face I’d never quite seen before. It was almost an arrogant smile. “Did I, Cath?”
I shook my head and didn’t admit I wasn’t even exactly sure what polo was. Something with horses, a game rich people played, and I had never concerned myself with any more detail than that.
“Yes, in fact, Tom Buchanan is one of the best polo players on the whole Eastern Seaboard,” Myrtle bragged with pride now, like she’d invented both the man and the game herself. It was the first time she mentioned his full name and it rang a little funny in my ears.
Buchanan. Buchanan. Where had I heard that name before?
“Myrtle,” I interrupted her, as she was still going on about polo. “What did you say his wife’s name was?”
“I didn’t,” she huffed. “And why do you have to bring her up, Cath? He doesn’t even love her.” She pouted.
But suddenly it all made sense, and the reality of it swelled in my chest, the gin threatening to come back up right there in the beautiful marble lobby of Myrtle’s new building.
“Daisy,” I said softly. “Daisy Buchanan.”
Daisy June 1922
EAST EGG, NY