Chapter Text
Long Island, NY
July 4, 1922
Leaning out over the railing, Jay Gatsby exhaled a cloud of smoke and surveyed the gaiety below. Every color under the sun sparkled across the dance floor, faux and real diamonds refracting the light and clashing with silks more vibrant than birds of paradise. Grinning, laughing faces turned up towards the starry sky or focused with a lovely impermanence on a dance partner. Champagne and liquor flowed endlessly, music seemed to permeate every corner, and the joyfully cycling crowd trod shattered glass and lost jewelry into the ground beneath.
It was a Sunday night like any other, and everything was going perfectly according to plan.
Jay ignored the twist of hopelessness that pervaded him at the party’s familiar sights. It was a night like any other, and – just as on all the other nights – there was no sign of her or of anyone who might have any hint of a connection to her.
Not yet, he reminded himself firmly, taking another drag. There was still hope that tonight could provide the lucky break he knew he deserved. The festivities weren’t over by any means, and the interesting characters always tended to stay the latest into the night anyway.
Even if he didn’t make any progress towards his dream tonight, there was still the usual benefit to be had. Jay might not feel a need to immerse himself in a haze of alcohol and throw away his inhibitions on the dance floor, but he liked to see people at their happiest, to witness the combined joy of hundreds, to hear their laughter accompany the brass band. To remind himself that it was, in fact, entirely possible and common for some men to live lives full of splendor and love. Even if the splendor didn’t belong to them, and the love likely wouldn’t last the night, both were theirs if just for a moment.
Jay lit a new cigarette and surveyed the crowd once more. This time, his eyes caught on a lithe brunet in slightly outdated white flannels. The man was facing out towards the bay, but Jay’s mind was still able to link him to a name. He had never personally spoken to Nick Carraway, a neighbor even newer to the street than he was, but he had seen him from a distance: taking a turn off their street on his way to work in the city, or giving directions to a confused pedestrian looking for the nearest post-office.
The day before, in the midst of hectic preparations, Jay had looked across his lawn and seen a lanky figure perched on a distant set of front steps, reading a book. There was almost no way that Carraway would know Daisy, but Jay could at least show common courtesy and give his neighbor a chance to bear personal witness to the almost-legendary weekly parties at Gatsby’s.
He would try to personally greet the man later, to make him feel properly welcome. He had heard nothing but good things about one Nick Carraway, and was curious to make his acquaintance. Perhaps he would end up a truly perceptive and trustworthy friend, one in whom Jay could confide everything that weighed him down.
It was nice to imagine such things about strangers, even though they never ended up true.
He turned away from his vantage point and descended the stairs, throwing away the remains of his cigarette. Despite the vibrancy of his emerald green suit and his proud, practiced posture, he remained unnoticed at his own party, strolling through the double doors with barely a glance spared in his direction.
People always saw what they expected to see, and they expected Jay Gatsby to be a resplendent, prideful tycoon of middle age, basking in the center of his newfound fame, surrounded by fawning girls and important connections. Not a fresh-faced thirty-one year old avoiding mass attention and skulking around the party with a single minded focus on his various missions. (Dissecting the evening as he did – striding from one place to another as if there were a timed schedule for every interaction – was the only way he ever made it through in one piece.)
He drifted through the halls of the mansion, hands behind his back, a pleasant half-smile suspended on his face. Each hallway was systematically covered as he established that no one was irreconcilably unhappy and that nothing had been broken or stolen. He had a reputation to uphold, after all – as an admirable, trustworthy leader of this city.
But even more important than living in everlasting security and respectability, something that had been his life’s dream since he knew enough to be ashamed of his family’s poverty, was winning back the girl he had always loved. Jay was sure that he could do it. It had been four years, yes. Daisy was married, horrifically enough. But a love as strong as theirs didn’t just fade away. His determination, his sheer force of will had kept it alive in his heart all of these years.
He was so close.
All he had to do now was get his foot in the door. Daisy would love what he had made here, love who he was now in the way she had fallen short of loving who he once was. He had come all of this way, after all.
Jay was startled to realize that he had made his way back to the balcony, having spent as much time as he could in the quieter – yet not deserted, as that would be too suspicious – areas of the party.
It was time to begin his surveillance, then. He almost dreaded it. But the end result would be more than worth it. If only there were some more business contacts to covertly pull into a corner and harangue for Wolfsheim’s sake first, but he had already done that part tonight, when the contacts in question were sober enough to negotiate.
Jay crossed the patio into the hurricane’s eye of the party, squinting to survey the scene past the flashes of sequins and jewel-toned scarves. He blinked at the sight of a young woman with a head of stylishly short red-blond hair and a purple headband, her face jarringly familiar. His mind connected her to Daisy somehow, and he strained his memory to recall a name.
Ah, yes! Jordan Baker, far older now and with a more flinty, independent look about her than the wide-eyed sixteen-year-old who had venerated Daisy and volunteered at the Red Cross alongside her during the war. This Jordan held her head high instead of bowed, as if daring the world to point out any flaw.
Jay grinned despite himself. He had known from first sight that Jordan had more potential than the other girls, and here she was looking ready to fight the whole world. Thinking about it, he could almost swear that he’d glanced over her name in a newspaper sometime within the past month.
Jordan was sitting at a table near the edge of the dance floor, bobbing her head slightly to the jaunty music of the jazz ensemble and half-paying attention to the man talking at her. A bright lantern at the edge of the dance floor blocked his profile from view, but Jay still recognized the neighbor, Nick Carraway. How fortunate. He could kill two birds with one stone, now.
Neither seemed particularly intent on the topic at hand, so Jay slipped past a flock of scarlet-clad dancers and approached the table, casually not looking at either Jordan or Mr. Carraway. The sort of events he hosted were perfectly conditioned for slipping from one conversation to another with the parties in question hardly noticing.
Indeed, the two didn’t even look up from their conversation as Jay pulled out the fourth chair. He was just allowing himself to acknowledge the enormity of this situation when he heard a voice over the raucous crowd that sent a shiver down his spine. It was a voice that hurled him back almost exactly four years into the past, when he had been an insecure first lieutenant barely used to the name Jay Gatsby.
It was a voice straight from the grave.
“It’s not nearly as difficult as it sounds – you know, finance and economics and everything else over there. You’ve just got to think about it along the terms of the money – and the money represents… well, the goods, of course. It’s not the most interesting thing, but I think there’s something to be valued in the acquisition of new knowledge in any matter…”
Jay’s knees gave out. Fortunately, he had enough sense to collapse into the fourth chair at the table, an action that would have looked nearly normal to those around him. Jordan glanced but once in his direction, and the man didn’t even look up.
The man.
Nick Carraway.
A slender fellow with mahogany hair, posture military-perfect under the shoulders of his ivory suit jacket.
Words tripping out hesitant yet assured, as if he doubted every second that you still cared to hear what he had to say – but every time he met your eyes and saw that you were listening, he felt such a sense of internal gratitude as to promise himself to make the rest of the conversation more than worthwhile.
Voice a clear tenor, entirely unchanged from the night Jay had last heard it.
The night–
The night they had–
Smoke in the air. A young man with bright green eyes, a perfect mouth, a bruise under his eye, shoulder-to-shoulder with Jay in the trench. Grinning in a familiar, unguarded way. Turning his head to listen in the distance, lips parted slightly in concentration. Sliding his hand up Jay’s thigh, watching him out of the corner of his eye. Not hesitantly. It had happened enough times by then.
It had been years ago. They had been in gas masks or cloth face-covers for most of the day, and there had been few other lights in the trenches – for the sake of stealth, supposedly. But Jay hadn’t forgotten the cadences of the man’s voice, his eyes full of hope and bravado, the shape of his collarbone under Jay’s mouth.
No. No, it couldn’t be. That man was dead. He had taken a battalion around the enemy’s south flank the next Sunday and been ambushed. All 70 of the men who had gone had been reported missing. Wiped out entirely, with no hope otherwise. Their bodies irrecoverable. Jay had been there when the telegraph had arrived, forced himself to nod grimly along with the rest of the ranking officers. Forced himself not to collapse to the ground and rage at the heavens, to demand what he had done so wrong for everyone he cared about to be torn from him. To scream out, but I didn’t even know his name. But he didn’t even want to die. But he was mine – but I might have loved him.
That had been a very, very long time ago.
Surely Jay was hearing things. That was all. It had been a long night, and he was finally within sight of his true love, the girl who had changed his life, who had meant more to him than anything else. Stress, perhaps even delusions, were natural responses. Poor Nick Carraway was just a stranger for him to project that stress upon.
This resolution was highly relieving. Jay breathed out shakily, regaining control over his facilities once more. That had certainly been a scare. But –
He looked up, directly into the bright green eyes of the man he had fucked during the Great War. Entirely of his own free will. Multiple times.
Nick looked straight back at him, half his face washed out in the white light of a spotlight at the edge of the dance floor. For a moment Jay’s heart leapt at the possibility, the future he saw in those eyes. But then, Nick smiled politely but distantly – as one did at any amicable stranger encountered during a party – and returned to his conversation with Jordan.
Oh.
Of course. Of course he didn’t remember.
Nick didn’t seem to have changed at all during the war, beyond a trendy haircut and a few more anxious lines in his forehead, but Jay was practically a new man. He looked nothing like the scruffy youth Nick had met in the trenches. He dressed at the peak of fashion, had posture befitting a millionaire rather than a recently-reformed farm boy, and washed his face every morning. He had dyed his hair blond as soon as he had moved to New York, hoping it would deflect attention from his dark complexion.
He couldn’t expect Nick to possess his exceptional observational skills, his extraordinary memory and knack for details. He couldn’t expect Nick to have cared enough about the lieutenant from Chemin des Dames to remember anything at all about his face.
Maybe Nick had done the same with dozens of other men, so many that their faces all blurred together. Maybe he had realized the shameful nature of their actions and forcibly erased the memory from his mind. Stranger things happened every day.
Or maybe Jay had finally snapped from the stress of his life and was experiencing a very cruel, detailed hallucination. It was too early yet to tell.
Alright, Gatsby, act natural. He doesn’t recognize you. You have nothing to fear.
But what if he did recognize Jay, and was just hiding it extraordinarily well? Jay had to find out.
When Nick next glanced his way, Jay was ready. He met the man’s eyes and offered a confident, practiced grin. The party had quieted somewhat around them, in the segue between an impromptu dancing act and the fireworks display soon to start.
“Your face is familiar,” Jay ventured. His voice was higher than usual. He pretended to consider for a moment before going on, hoping his acting skills would hold up. “Weren’t you in the third division during the war?”
Nick’s eyes, slightly unfocused from what probably amounted to a healthy dose of champagne, widened in hazy surprise. He nodded.
“Why, yes. I was in the ninth machine-gun battalion.”
I know, Jay wanted to cry. Why don’t you know that I know? Did I really mean so little to you?
He longed for Nick’s eyes to light up in recognition, but realized with a chill that he had no idea what would happen next. Would Nick expect them to continue their secret tryst? Would he run from here, never to be seen again? Would he go to the police? Jay had seen men do more desperate things to bury their own guilt. He couldn’t discount it as a possibility.
Jay had no idea what he wanted, no idea how to proceed. All he knew was that he did not want to be here.
Nick’s response to his question merited acknowledgement, he realized distantly. Both praying and not praying that it would prompt a flooding of the dam of memory, he allowed the conversation to continue –
“I was in the Seventh Infantry until June of 1918.” No reaction. Hope draining away, Jay kept rambling, trying to explain away his odd reaction to Nick’s presence. “So it would make sense that we’ve seen each other somewhere before. Even if just in passing.”
“Why sure. Along the Aisne until early June, right?” Jay nodded. “It was a long time ago.” Nick examined his empty champagne glass, looking mildly disappointed when it didn’t magically produce more alcohol.
“Of course.” Jay snagged a flute off a passing tray and set it neatly in front of Nick, and the other man smiled at him in confused gratitude. That smile... “I mostly served alongside various French armies after that.”
“Did you cross the Scheldt in November of eighteen? I got acquainted with a few members of the Seventh there,” Nick replied, fiddling with the collar of his shirt.
“No, I believe I was in Argonne.”
“I was never lucky enough to schlep that far south. Most of us were stuck drowning in cold rains at Ypres.”
“It wasn’t that warm – really! Much nicer amenities, I will admit. We stayed directly in town during the St. Mihiel operation.” Even as Jay struggled not to unearth anything too detailed or provocative, he found himself relaxing into the conversation. He could almost pretend that this was simply a casual encounter with a possible connection, that Nick was not a ghost from the past but any one of the multitude of guests he exchanged rapport with at every party. It was easy to slip into the role of the charismatic young millionaire, easy to forget both his insecurities and his unprocessed crisis regarding the man in front of him.
“St. Mihiel… by any chance did you know an Orlando? He would have been sergeant, first class. He was in my battalion for a few months.”
“Johnny Orlando – why yes! How odd that you bring it up. He just sold me his boat last week,” Jay exclaimed.
“Small world! I haven’t seen that poor man in years,” Nick grinned fully, eyes gleaming with mirth and the reflected light from the dance floor. The all-too-familiar smile shook Jay to the core, shattering the illusion of normalcy, replacing it with a numbing realization of I can’t do this I can’t I can’t oh god he’s just so goddamned–
“Yes, a fine little hydroplane,” he murmured, mind still tripping and whirling around Nick’s gleam-toothed grin. “I’m going to try it out tomorrow morning. Want to go with me, N– old sport?” Both the proposition and the moniker slipped out faster than he could process them, as if saying it out loud would be akin to admitting how little Nick had truly cared about him, so little that he hadn’t even bothered to share his first name.
“What time?” Nick asked, looking pleasantly surprised at the invitation.
“Any time that suits you best,” Jay answered on courteous instinct. Then he processed the implications and felt thoroughly sick. He had just invited Nick Carraway, a man who he had behaved immorally with and developed an odd attachment to all those years ago, out for an entire morning alone on a relatively cramped boat with no detectable incentive.
There was no comprehensible way that this could end well.
He was so busy cursing himself, wondering what in heaven or hell had prompted him to do such a thing, that he entirely missed the details of a brief exchange between Nick and Jordan Baker, who had been half-observing their entire conversation while engaged in another. The two of them must be involved, Jay concluded, his stomach twisting. He suppressed the violent sense of jealousy as Nick turned back to him, seemingly unruffled.
“This is an unusual party for me,” he confessed. “I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there, and this odd man sent his chauffeur to my door with an invitation.”
Well, then. He should have known to expect this. It was a common occurrence at his parties – he relied on it, actually. But it was shockingly painful coming from Nick, as it proved beyond all doubt that his former companion most certainly did not recognize him. Feeling proud of himself for rationally processing this, Jay let go of the confused torrent of passions and impulses that had been tearing at him since he had heard Nick’s voice. Truly, nothing had changed. There was no reason to allow this to alter his life.
The fireworks were beginning, he realized – the excited murmurs had been replaced by a short hush, which in turn produced a round of distant cheers as bright patriotic lights flared in the distance.
He frowned at Nick, feigning surprise, prepared to in turn educate and reassure him. Just as if he were any other guest.
“Why, you didn’t – I’m the host, old sport. I’m Jay Gatsby.”
A look of utter bewilderment bloomed on Nick’s face as a shower of red sparks lit up the Sound, but it yielded to apologetic concern almost before the firework burned out. Was Nick truly so surprised that the young, finely dressed man before him was the orchestrator of these festivities? Perhaps Jay was less in touch with the fashions of the day than he had thought.
“Wh– you–what? The– I– I beg your pardon, sir.” Perhaps Nick had a touch of nerves, or perhaps the alcohol was finally taking its effect. He had adopted a terrible pallor, eyes stretched wide, looking so regretful at his slight that Jay began to wish he had broken the news more easily.
“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I haven’t been a good one– a good host, I mean,” Jay smiled at Nick as blindingly white fireworks twinkled against the dark sky, trying to reassure him that the mistake was truly of no consequence. He hoped that he hadn’t let any of his unique affection for the man slip into the expression, but at this point there was nothing much he could do about it.
Nick continued to look dumbfounded, his face otherwise unreadable. He reached blindly for his champagne glass, but missed. Jay frowned and opened his mouth to ask if there was anything amiss, but one of his staff materialized at his arm with an important bulletin that he forgot the instance it was whispered to him.
Pathetically grateful for the chance to excuse himself from this purgatory of a garden-table, Jay rose to his feet and bid his tablemates goodbye. He could feel Nick’s eyes burning into his back as he strode away, and hoped that he hadn’t given so terrible of an impression. This entire evening had been a train wreck, and he was running out of time to resolve it.
He reached the house as the firework show reached its grand finale, the concluding rockets streaking across the sky with a sound like gunfire.