IN LATE JULY, I went into the city one afternoon and stopped at Aunt Sigourney’s. I was supposed to meet Nick at the Plaza later for dinner. A date—and one of several we’d had this month, much to Daisy’s delight. A few weeks earlier, we’d been to the Plaza for tea, a party at Jay Gatsby’s, and even another tea in West Egg at Nick’s house.
I stopped at Aunt Sigourney’s first to say hello to the old bird, which she insisted on as a condition of releasing my pitiful monthly allowance. When I walked in, she handed me a pile of mail, and there, right on the top, was a thick cream-colored envelope with a Nashville postmark.
“When did this come?” I asked Aunt Sigourney, feeling around the plump edges of the envelope with my thumb.
She shrugged. “The other day. No… last week.”
It was thick, heavy. My name had been scripted in unfamiliar handwriting. And still my heart rose and fell in my chest. Mary Margaret. It had to be. I didn’t know a single other living soul in Nashville.
I tore the envelope open quickly, pulled out the thick cream card from inside:
Dr. and Mrs. Harold T. Smith request the honor of your presence
at the wedding of their daughter, Mary Margaret to Whitaker Witherspoon III
on Saturday, the twenty-sixth of August, nineteen hundred twenty-two…
I put the card down on Aunt Sigourney’s parlor table, unable to read the rest. My hands shook, and I suddenly felt like I was about to throw up.
Mary Margaret was getting married? And to a man called Whitaker Witherspoon, the third? What sort of ridiculous name was that?
No more ridiculous than Jordan Baker is for a lady, I could hear Mary Margaret’s response in my head, her voice rich with laughter. I closed my eyes.
“Jordan?” Aunt Sigourney questioned, bringing me back to her apartment. “You’re pale as a ghost. Was it bad news, dear?”
“An old friend,” I said slowly, trying to swallow back the bile that rose in my throat. “She’s getting married. To a man she doesn’t love.”
Aunt Sigourney laughed a little. “Well, she wouldn’t be the first, and she certainly won’t be the last. A woman who marries for love is a foolish woman, Jordan.”
“And what about a woman who never marries at all?” I shot back.
Aunt Sigourney grimaced. She’d been a widow since I was a baby, but at least she’d been in a respectable marriage once. I’d dared to speak aloud her greatest fear for me. “So you plan to spend the rest of your life sleeping at the Buchanans and golfing, do you, Jordan?” The way she said golfing she might as well have said robbing banks. And if only she knew the truth, that I wasn’t even golfing at all anymore, only lying about it. I’d told her that little white lie that I’d rejoined the tour in the beginning of the summer, too. The truth, the desperate, terrible truth, was that I wasn’t sure they’d ever have me back. But that truth was so terrifying, I barely ever allowed myself to think about it.
“I have a date tonight,” I finally said to Aunt Sigourney, an attempt to mollify her a little. But even as I said those words, all I could think about still was Mary Margaret. The warm feel of her skin, the sweet and sour taste of her, the rich sound of her voice. She was getting married. Grief really was a river. And now I was drowning again. Aunt Sigourney’s words were tugging me underwater and holding me there, making it nearly impossible to breathe.
“Well, try not to muck it up, Jordan.” Aunt Sigourney emphasized that, her final point, by tapping her cane on the hardwood floor. Then she turned to shuffle off into the dining room to eat her own early supper.
* * *
A FEW HOURS later, sitting across the table from Nick at the Plaza, I was highly distracted. And I was most certainly about to muck it up.
I fiddled with the diamond pin in my hair and thought about Daisy, back in East Egg. After leaving Aunt Sigourney’s I’d longed to skip this dinner with Nick, flee back there, tell her the truth about Mary Margaret, the whole entire truth. But what was the whole truth, exactly? That night in Atlanta with Mary Margaret felt like a fever dream now, all these many months later. She was getting married. Maybe it had never even happened at all.
“Jordan,” Nick said now, interrupting my thoughts. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Hmm?” I murmured. I took a sip of my water, wishing it would sting my throat, numb my thoughts like gin. Nick wasn’t Tom or Jay. All we had to drink with dinner was water and too-tart lemonade.
“Daisy and Gatsby. I was saying, I think she might leave Tom for him.”
I laughed, nearly spitting water across the table. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, coughing, sputtering for air for a few seconds. Well, listen to Nick. In Daisy’s life all of one summer and here he thought he was some kind of expert on her. But Nick wasn’t there when Rose died, or when Daisy got so drunk before she married Tom she tried to punch me, or at Daisy’s sweltering hot wedding when I saved her from Blocks Biloxi, or on her beach in Cannes. What did he know about Daisy?
“You should’ve seen them together at my house a few weeks ago,” Nick insisted now. “They’re in love.” Nick looked practically doe-eyed when he got so emphatic. Another girl might have found it adorable, in a foolish sort of way. But it did nothing for me. And really Nick was no better than Tom or Jay, or any other man who believed that whatever he wanted, whomever he wanted, was simply his for the taking.
I thought of Daisy, the night after she’d been to Nick’s little setup. I’d found her sitting in Tom’s study, clutching his gun, staring out the window at Jay’s bright obnoxious party. She certainly hadn’t been acting like a woman in love. In fact, seeing her there, that fragile, it had terrified me.
“Anyway—” God, Nick was still going on. “Jay made me promise to bring you back to his house tonight after dinner, so you can help him. I’ll take you there when we’re done. I have my car.”
“Really, Nick,” I said curtly, “are you dating Jay Gatsby or are you dating me?”
“What kind of a question is that?” Nick’s face turned bright red.
“I think it’s a very logical question,” I shot back. “Given that here we are on a date and you can’t stop talking about Jay Gatsby.”
His cheeks were positively beet-colored. “I thought you’d want to help Daisy. Since she’s your best friend and all.”
“Exactly.” I guzzled my lemonade, wishing it were gin, puckering my lips at the tartness. Across the table Nick just stared at me, like he wasn’t at all sure what to make of me. “That’s exactly what I want to do.”
* * *
AFTER DINNER WE drove toward West Egg in silence. Maybe Nick finally understood there wasn’t really anything between us. Or he was just afraid to say anything more to me about Jay and Daisy. Or maybe he realized that, if we didn’t talk about Daisy, we didn’t have anything much to talk about at all.