《了不起的盖茨比》

Nick crept to the pantry window and saw Daisy and Tom at the kitchen table, hands touching across the cold fried chicken, conspiring in their unmistakable air of natural intimacy. He walked back to Gatsby and told him all was quiet. Gatsby, putting his hands in his coat pockets, turned back to his vigil. Nick left him there in the moonlight, watching over nothing.

VIII

I couldn’t sleep a wink that night, the foghorn on the Sound groaning without pause, tossing between half-real nightmares and the sharp, ugly truth of Myrtle’s death. As dawn began to grey the sky, I heard a taxi pull up Gatsby’s drive, and I threw on my clothes in a hurry, heart pounding with the need to warn him before it was too late.

His front door was still hanging open when I crossed the lawn, and he was slouched against a hall table, heavy with exhaustion and defeat. “Nothing happened,” he said, voice thin as paper. “I waited, and around four she came to the window, stood there a minute, then turned out the light.”

The house felt impossibly vast that night, dark and stale, like it hadn’t been aired in weeks. We groped through the cavernous rooms for cigarettes, pushing aside heavy curtains like pavilions, fumbling for light switches, until I stumbled over the keys of a dusty piano with a wet, echoing splash. The humidor on a side table held only two dry, stale smokes; we threw open the French windows of the drawing room and sat on the step, smoking into the dark.

“You need to get out of here,” I told him. “They’ll trace your car soon enough.”

“Go now, old sport?” He shook his head, unmovable. He couldn’t leave Daisy, not until he knew what she was going to choose, not when the last thread of hope he’d clung to for five years was still in his grasp.

That night, with his dream already shattered by Tom’s cruel exposure of his fabricated past, Gatsby told me everything, no more secrets left to guard. He told me of Dan Cody, the first man who’d ever taken him in, the ghost of the life he’d built before he was Jay Gatsby. But mostly he talked about Daisy.

She was the first “nice” girl he’d ever known, a bright, unreachable thing from the world of wealth he’d only ever watched from the outside, separated by “indiscernible barbed wire.” He’d first come to her house with other officers from Camp Taylor, awed by the soft mystery of her home, the sense of fresh, living romance that hung in the air, not the musty, stored-up love of the poorer world he knew. He’d known he had no right to her, that he was a penniless nobody in a uniform that could be stripped from him at any moment, but he’d taken her anyway, one still October night, lying to her about his background to give her the security she craved. He’d meant to take what he could and leave, but the moment he kissed her curious, lovely mouth, he was hooked, committed to chasing a grail he’d never be able to hold.