Chapter Fifteen #2
We made it home, and I’d rarely been so glad to stumble through the front doors of Pilcrow House. No time to rest, we headed straight up to the attic to dig through our costume closet.
Flapper dress? No, a bit too flashy for me. I found a black drop-waist cocktail dress, silk and sequins but blessedly free from ticklish fringe. I put my hair in a bun at the nape of my neck and added a sequined headband.
For Duke, there was my grandfather’s old tuxedo, which I hoped would fit.
“Ready,” I called out.
“Two minutes, love,” Duke called back. “I might need braces. Or glue.”
“Oh yeah, Pops has about twenty pounds on you.”
I found a pair of black suspenders and handed them through the dressing room door.
“Earlier you said Burners leave The Great Gatsby alone. What’s the story on that?” Duke asked from inside the room.
“Honestly, I think it’s because they like the depressing ending, which tells people to never dream big. Gatsby takes a bullet for the woman he loves, and Daisy walks away scot-free and goes back to her husband. The title of the book could’ve been Why Bother? ”
“Not the most cheerful of endings,” Duke agreed.
“As usual, the Burners are missing the point if they really believe that’s what the story means,” I said while adjusting my stockings.
“Are they? What do you think it means?”
“ Gatsby isn’t about the death of the American dream,” I said as I applied my lipstick in the mirror. “It’s about a man who wants to write his own story, not let someone else write it for him.”
“A lovely sentiment, my dear, but the man was a bootlegger,” Duke said. “A nobody from Minnesota who wanted to cut the line and achieve greatness without actually doing great things.”
“You’re being very judgmental.”
“I’m English. Of course I am. You only like him because he’s handsome and he sacrificed his life for the woman he loved. Although, for the record, she did not deserve it.”
Nick Carraway, the forlorn narrator of The Great Gatsby, has said as much himself. They’re a rotten crowd…You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.
Then again, Nick Carraway was undoubtedly in love with Gatsby, which may have clouded his judgment.
“Not true,” I said. “Actually, I like him because he tried to escape the life he was born into, and there is something noble about that. Sound familiar?”
“Surely you’re not talking about moi?”
“I’m not talking about me, am I?” I said. “You were the one born into an aristocratic family. You didn’t like it, and now you’re in Chicago working as a detective. Sounds like you wrote your own story.”
“Hardly, darling. If I were writing my own story, we would not be having this conversation.”
“What would we be doing instead?”
“I have an extensive mental list, none of it fit for mixed company. Are you ready? Brace yourself. I look devastatingly handsome, and you might have a fit of the vapors.”
“Hit me,” I said.
He threw open the dressing room door.
While I looked like a modern gal playing dress-up in her great-grandmother’s closet, Duke, who had the Roarin’ Twenties in his fictional veins, looked like he was born to wear a tuxedo. He’d even slicked back his hair. He looked dapper, debonair, and ready to dance.
“Wow,” I said. “I am vaporized.”
“Rainy, love, you look absolutely beautiful.”
He took my hand and spun me in a quick, dizzying circle.
“To the library, old sport,” I said. We started down the stairs, which was not easy in high heels.
“Will we need to take Victorian clothes with us to change into?” Duke asked.
“It’s Wonderland. The weirder we look, the more we’ll fit in.”
In that regard, it was not unlike Portland.
Koshka was waiting for us in the library, sitting on the reading table by the bookstand.
“Buddy, no, you can’t go to Wonderland with us,” I told him. “The Cheshire Cat is even weirder than you are.”
He let out a whine pitiful enough to break the hardest heart.
“Darling, don’t be cruel. Maybe he could come to the party?” Duke said. “Keep watch in the library?”
“You are a sucker,” I told him. “A sucker. And that cat is a con artist.”
Duke petted Koshka. “It never hurts to have backup.”
“Fine,” I told Koshka. “You can go to the Gatsby party, but you have to stay there. No Wonderland for you. Deal?” I held out my hand, and he put his paw in it. “Good. Let’s go. Book me.”
Duke handed me the hardcover copy of The Great Gatsby.
I flipped through the pages to an early scene where Nick Carraway and his date, Jordan Baker, are wandering through Jay Gatsby’s mansion during a party.
They enter his enormous library, where they meet a man looking through the books, utterly dazzled that Gatsby’s books are real, not cardboard fakes.
But the pages, he sees, are uncut, unread.
It seems like a throwaway scene the first time you read it, a moment of comic relief, but to me it shows that Gatsby is a man of great potential never fulfilled.
I only hoped his library was as impressive and extensive as F. Scott Fitzgerald described.
Koshka didn’t wriggle when I scooped him off the reading table. He was ready for a mission. I also didn’t wriggle when Duke put his arms around me from behind, which sounds a little saucy, but if he’d held me from the front, he would’ve squished the cat.
“I’m enjoying this more than I should,” Duke said.
“I can tell. Now hush, I need to find a place to land us.”
Everyone remembers the last line of The Great Gatsby, but there are many other beautiful lines that go unnoticed. I only needed one to draw us into the story, but which one? I turned to a page from the party scene and found what I was looking for.
Quietly I whispered the words like an incantation. “ In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars… ”
With a flick of my thumb, I opened my black umbrella over our heads and turned us into the dot in the first “i” in the word “whisperings.”
Think of a moment when you slipped and fell and you saw your life flash before your eyes as you went down, stomach lurching, the sudden scream, learning in an instant that we are all gravity’s prisoners…
We felt that, all three of us and all at once, and then the coldness of nothing, of leaving the solid rock of the real world for the mists and the fog of the ethereal, unreal realm of stories.
Like a swimmer knocked sideways by an ocean wave, I sought purchase only to find shifting sand under my feet.
But then I felt a floor, a floor made of words, and I could stand on those words and see them, not for what they said but for what they meant—gleaming hardwood in a magnificent house by the bay built out of one man’s impossible dream.
Gatsby’s house in West Egg.