I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of Sauterne[66] in one hand and a letter in the other.
Gratulate me, she muttered. Never had a drink before, but oh how I do enjoy it.
Whats the matter, Daisy?
I was scared, I can tell you; Id never seen a girl like that before.
Here, deares. She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. Take em downstairs and give em back to whoever they belong to. Tell em all Daisys change her mine. Say: Daisys change her mine!
She began to cry she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mothers maid, and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldnt let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap-dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.
But she didnt say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress, and half an hour later, when we walked out of the room, the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five oclock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver, and started off on a three months trip to the South Seas[67].
I saw them in Santa Barbara[68] when they came back, and I thought Id never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute shed look around uneasily, and say: Wheres Tom gone? and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour, rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura[69] road one night, and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.
The next April Daisy had her little girl, and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes[70], and later in Deauville[71], and then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps because she doesnt drink. Its a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they dont see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all and yet theres something in that voice of hers
Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you do you remember? if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said What Gatsby? and when I described him I was half asleep she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasnt until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.
* * *When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of children, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:
Im the Sheik of Araby.
Your love belongs to me.
At night when youre asleep
Into your tent Ill creep
It was a strange coincidence, I said.
It was a strange coincidence, I said.
But it wasnt a coincidence at all.
Why not?
Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.
Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour.
He wants to know, continued Jordan, if youll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.
The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could come over some afternoon to a strangers garden.
Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?
Hes afraid, hes waited so long. He thought you might be offended. You see, hes regular tough underneath it all.
Something worried me.
Why didnt he ask you to arrange a meeting?
He wants her to see his house, she explained. And your house is right next door.
Oh!
I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night, went on Jordan, but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York and I thought hed go mad: