Chapter Text
I had meant to go to the office. There was a terrible weight on my shoulders—the heaviness of inaction. I felt a need to accomplish something, even if it was only the job I can now say for certain I had even less interest in than Gatsby had in his parties.
I had just stepped off the train car when a sudden horror gripped me. A realization, triggered by the passive musings of a regular commute.
I whirled around before I was out of the car’s doorway, nearly slamming bodily into a woman in a dress the same yellow as Gatsby’s car. Her lips, parted in a sudden cry of shock, were painted scarlet.
Too terrified by what I had potentially allowed to occur to apologize, I took her by the arms, just above the elbow, and turned us, so that she was on the platform, and I was back on the train.
Letting go of her and stepping back, I fell into an unoccupied seat and prayed.
*
As I was going up the steps of Gatsby’s house, my brow lined with sweat from the rush, I heard the shots. One, then a pause, then another.
The noise barely reached from Gatsby’s back lawn, through the halls of his emptied mansion, but I had been listening for something of the sort.
The butler and I acquired a procession as we tore through the house and out the back gate—cook, gardener, a maid who rushed ahead of us on the path and was swearing in some rough language—Russian, maybe—before the rest of us reached the poolside.
For a long moment, I couldn’t comprehend it.
I saw the mattress, and its terrible burden, I saw the blood swirling in its wake like red ink into water. I think I even saw the wound, dark as a shadow beneath one splayed, pale hand.
But I didn’t process it. It wasn’t possible.
Gatsby, for all his mystery, for all his solitude, for all his terrible melancholy, was so viscerally alive . To see him floating there, eyes shuttered, fantastically communicative hands limp on his chest...
It was anathema. It was unthinkable.
I crashed forward into the water.
Later, the sour-voiced butler told me that I had cried out Gatsby’s name, reaching for him like a desperate lover. Perhaps I was.
A desperate, jilted lover. Realizing only at the climax that the story wasn’t mine—that I had been nothing but a carrier.
I seized Gatsby’s hands, squeezing them tightly as if I expected a miracle.
I hadn’t expected anything of the kind, and I nearly screamed when Gatsby’s eyes opened.
“Hello, old sport,” he said, dazedly. “I do think I’ve been shot.”
*
The doctor told me, in the stiff, graphic language of one deadened to suffering, that the bullet had gone through Gatsby’s left shoulder. It had splintered two ribs, clipped the joint of his arm, and lodged in his shoulder-blade.
Removing it without irreparable damage had taken two surgeons five hours. I spent the whole time in the waiting room, hands clasped between my thighs so I wouldn’t chew my nails, shaking violently.
When I was allowed to see Gatsby again, he was sitting up in bed, his face grey against the white sheets, his arm in a sling.
I sat down, hard on the edge of the bed, fearing my knees would give out.
“Nick,” Gatsby said, and I pressed my fist over my mouth, seized by the urge to shout at him.
For what? What had he done, that I hadn’t done in turn? Hadn’t my idolization of him damned me as much as his adoration of Daisy?
Would I have run down Myrtle Wilson, if I had spoken up in that hotel room, taken Daisy’s place? Would I have stopped the car? Would I be lying dead now? Would Gatsby have worried for me the way I worried for him?
“I didn’t know you cared so much, old sport,” Gatsby half-laughed, watching me struggle to swallow tears.
And wasn’t that the crux of it.
He’d been so caught up in her, in the staggering importance he’d given her, he’d been so stupid—
I was crying in earnest at that point, and Jay reached out for me. He was Jay, then. Not Gatsby. Boyish and strange and unsure, clasping the one hand I hadn’t clamped over my mouth between both of his.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still nearly laughing. “I didn’t mean to—”
Of course he hadn’t meant to. But it happened, nonetheless.
I cried myself out, sitting there on Gatsby’s hospital bed. I was quite embarrassed afterward, but not enough to leave.
In a different time, maybe, I would have crawled under the thin hospital sheets and fallen asleep with my head on Gatsby’s chest.
As it was—as we were—I dozed in the chair beside his bed for the next few days, until the doctor, shaking his head at the miracle of my quick intervention, let us go home.
We went back to Gatsby’s great, empty house.
The staff, which had dwindled to the sour-mouthed butler, and the foreign-speaking maid, both of whom seemed to have nowhere else to go, and the cook, who I believe took pity on the other two, told us that the house had been a great mess of reporters for a couple of days, but that they had all been turned away.
For the next week, we fielded calls—both on the wire and to the door, sharing with friends and near-strangers alike what had transpired.
That was to say, I fielded calls. My fortuitous arrival and subsequent proximity had made me somewhat possessive of Gatsby, or at least of this event.
Gatsby spent nearly the entire time sprawled out on the couch, looking pale in comparison to its rosy hue, but at least no longer ashen.
Of all the visitors, I recognized at least a third, and Gatsby, impressively, could recall the names of more than half.
None of them seemed too horrified at what had happened. Gatsby wasn’t much of a person, to them. He was just a host.
Though he barely moved from the couch, and when he did, shuffled at a wretchedly slow pace, most of his weight on his formerly decorative walking cane, he still made his best effort to be my host.
The first night, he made to usher me out, and I confessed, in a sudden moment of verbosity, that I couldn’t imagine leaving him alone. Not again.
He seemed grateful for my company, at least, though perhaps I was imagining it.
The first night, I fell asleep in an armchair, watching Gatsby struggle not to doze off on the couch, and woke up with a crick in my neck and a blanket draped over me.
Gatsby lay very still and small on the couch, and in the haze of sleep I rose, shaking him in sudden terror.
He jolted awake under my hands, wincing back into the cushions at the jostle to his wounded shoulder.
Abruptly, I was ashamed. I apologized, but he only laughed.
“Lie with me, if it’ll make you feel better,” Gatsby said, perhaps teasing, perhaps not. Either way, I nearly took him up on it, but contented myself with sitting on the floor, leaned up against the couch, with Gatsby’s wrist in my hand, his pulse under my fingertips.
I slept again, with the reassurance of his heartbeat. When I woke, it was with the paradoxical terror of peace.
I could have stayed there forever, with Gatsby’s hand in mine, forever. I would never tire of examining the way his face lay smooth with unconsciousness.
As it happened, we spent most nights that week on the first floor, having decided the stairs up to the hallway of guest bedrooms weren’t worth the pain of climbing them.
Gatsby slept on the couch, and I slept wherever I ended up, once the calls had ceased. In an armchair, or in the narrower sofa in the adjacent room.
More often than not, I found myself nearer to Gatsby by the morning than I’d been at the beginning of the night.
There was no comfort to be found, sleeping on the floor beside the couch in a pile of linens, but the terror of my mistake continued to draw me back to Gatsby.
On the fourth night, as I was repositioning myself in the armchair, Gatsby lifted his head.
“Make up your mind, old sport,” Gatsby said, irate with tiredness. “If you’d like to be certain I’m alive, come lie with me.”
A jolt went through my stomach. I could have guessed, given the suits, and the fact that he’d left Oxford in a rush.
Daisy could have driven him to New York, even to West Egg, but not out of Oxford.
“But…” I stammered, thinking of my own college days. “Your shoulder…”
“I have two shoulders, old sport,” Jay said, softly. He was grinning at me, that disarmingly bright, but nearly tenuous smile. Then, softer still: “Come here, Nick.”
I went.
The couch was nearly wide enough for us to lie side by side, but Jay coaxed me to lie with my head on his shoulder. His left arm was tucked, in its sling, between our bodies, and his right laid over my back.
He smelled faintly of hospital antiseptic, and perhaps less faintly of sweat, but beneath that, I could smell the sweet scent of his skin.
“Nick,” Jay said, softly. His voice was so quiet that I barely heard him, even in the room’s complete silence. “Might I… I suppose by now I can assume…?”
I kissed him.
Jay’s lips parted, and it took a long moment, but he did kiss me back.
I’d like to say we overcame our personal misgivings and physical limitations and made love there on the couch, but we didn’t. We only kissed, Jay’s hand in my hair and my hand on his jaw, until we were too tired to keep our eyes open.