She picked up my hand again and squeezed it. “Damn all those wrong numbers to hell.” She giggled a little.
I opened my mouth, poised to tell her the truth, but then I couldn’t make the words come out. It was as if saying it out loud would make it undeniably true. And I wanted so badly to believe still that everything would be different here than it was in Lake Forest. That East Egg truly could be our permanent home.
* * *
A LITTLE WHILE later, Tom walked back into the house from the stables, and Jordan and I still hadn’t moved a muscle from the couch. The breathing on the other end of the line had magnified in my head, become something bellowing in the hour or two since it had happened. Tom leaned down and kissed my cheek. He reeked of sweat and whiskey, and I flinched. He acknowledged Jordan by patting her on the head, like a dog.
“There was a telephone call for you,” I said, sitting up to glare at him, not able to keep the anger from burning up my voice.
“A wrong number,” Jordan slurred, tracing her finger around her sweaty glass.
“Yes, very, very wrong.” I shot Tom a withering look.
He shrugged, pretending he didn’t understand the implication, that the breather on the other end of the line was a woman, calling for him. Two and a half months. We had only been here two and a half months!
“Daisy,” he said, changing the subject altogether. “Your cousin’s coming for dinner in an hour. Shouldn’t you get ready?”
“Ready?” I laughed. “I’m ready enough right here.” Sure, I was in a day dress, not an evening dress, and I was lying on the couch holding on desperately to my dear, sweet, slightly drunken Jordie. But I wasn’t going to let Tom decide what I did at the moment.
“All right.” He frowned, then shrugged. It would be hard for him to care less about me if he tried.
“Dinner with your cousin?” Jordan’s voice slurred a little. Her eyes were still closed and she’d missed the bitter dynamic between me and Tom altogether. “But we just ate lunch,” she exclaimed.
“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon,” Tom said, sounding disgusted, and I didn’t at all like his tone.
“You stink,” I said to him. “Go wash yourself up. Or else Nick might think I’ve married a polo pony not a polo player.”
Tom shot me another look. And then he clarified to Jordan that he’d known Nick in college, that Nick had stayed with us for two nights once in Lake Forest.
“I’d say this cousin, Nick, already knows you married a pony,” Jordan said, snorting a little, amusing herself. And then Tom just shook his head and walked off upstairs.
Jordan opened her eyes, turned back to me. “Who is this cousin of yours, Daise?” she asked. “And how come I’ve never heard of him before?”
I told her: Nick Carraway was a second cousin, once removed, Daddy’s cousin’s son. He was a few years older than us, and I’d never known him very well. He’d been raised in Minnesota and we’d only met once as children, in Chicago. Later, he was at Yale with Tom and then in the war without him. He hadn’t ever been to visit us in Louisville and hadn’t been able to make it to my wedding, either. I couldn’t even remember why now. Other than the two pleasant enough days he’d visited us in Lake Forest, I truly didn’t know much of Nick at all.
It was Mother who’d told me Nick had moved to West Egg just after I’d moved to East Egg, and then I’d wondered to her if maybe it was his house, right across the sound from mine. What a coincidence that would be, east and west cousins, staring across the great wide sound at each other. But Mother had laughed and said Nick certainly didn’t have the money to stay in a house like that, even just for the summer.
“I can’t believe I never mentioned Nick,” I said, glancing at Jordan now. Her face looked far away, a little sleepy. Really, I could believe it. Nick had been of little consequence in my life, and I’d forgotten all about this dinner I’d scheduled weeks ago, too, until Tom had just brought it up.
But Nick was unattached—Mother had told me this much, repeating Cousin Marianne’s lament that her son was almost thirty and in no great hurry to marry. And Jordan was single, as far as I knew. If I could get Jordan interested in Nick, maybe that would keep her here for the entire summer, with me, too. I already felt so much better, so much happier, since she’d sped up the drive earlier this afternoon. This new plan hatched in my head, and excitement over it bubbled up in my chest, replacing the anger I’d just felt for Tom. “Actually, I think you might really like him, Jordie,” I added, nudging her with my elbow.
“Hmmm.” Jordan swallowed down the rest of her gin and rested the sweating glass on the end table. “I don’t know, Daise.”
Jordan had never had a beau. At least not one she’d told me about. Of course, she had her golf game to worry about, but she was twenty-one now! Her daddy was gone and her aunt Sigourney was, by all accounts, dreadful. It was time for her to start thinking about marriage. It was well past time. “Well, I know you have impossibly high standards, Jordie,” I said now. “But just give him a chance at dinner. You might really feel sweet on him. Even though they were at Yale together, he’s nothing at all like Tom, I swear it.”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” Jordan cackled. “The world couldn’t handle two Tom Buchanans, now could it, Daise?” Her tone was light, but we both knew she was only half joking.
She squeezed my hand again, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the couch. I did the same, slinking down until I rested my head on her shoulder. She reached up and twirled a lock of my hair around her finger the way she always had when we were girls, but now her finger caught on one of my diamond hairpins.
“I’m surprised to see you wearing your hairpins still,” she said softly. Though I hadn’t explicitly told her the details of Tom’s little spree in Lake Forest, it felt like she somehow knew, like she could sense it. Like she saw Rebecca Buckley’s plump pink cheeks when she closed her eyes at night too.
“I only wear them knowing you picked them out,” I told her, and that was the honest truth. The hairpins might have been paid for by Tom, but they were chosen by Jordan, and that made them more her gift than his.
“I always loved those pins,” Jordan said, touching one again, rolling her finger across it. “Just a little row of diamonds in your hair. Elegant and simple all at the same time, just like you, Daise.”
Elegant and simple. Inside I felt like neither one of those things. My life, instead, felt like one great big, complicated, devastating storm. I reached up and pulled one of the pins out of my hair. Then I gently leaned over and pushed it into Jordan’s hair. “Actually, Jordie, I think it suits you much better, what with your cute little pixie cut.”
She smiled at me, then reached up and ran her fingers across the pin in her own hair. “But Daise,” she protested softly. “It’s yours. It belongs to you.”