a ruby in the vine

There in that white-gilt bedroom like a tomb, where I believe none of Gatsby’s guests had ever before set foot except by mistake — none until Daisy, and I was only her adjunct and proxy, an accessory to her presence there in the house. He had forgotten about me then. He had forgotten about me now. I was his only witness.

He had left the gun on the dresser, like any other ornament. There were dark flecks scorched onto his pink suit.

“I’m terribly sorry you had to see that, old sport,” Gatsby said. He was washing his hands in a basin, needlessly, for the only blood on them was a single straight track across the backs of his fingers. I could study it in my mind’s eye at my leisure now; I’d seen how it had gotten there. How I wanted him to touch me with those rust-dripping hands.

I too had killed a man before, at close range. He had been a deserter, a haggard German who meant nothing to me. It had not bothered me very much. But in this much the gossips were correct: Jay Gatsby had shot a man in cold blood. There seemed to be no point in asking if the dead man deserved to be killed. More than a few of Gatsby’s guests needed killing by one measure or another. By measures of good taste, certainly.

I had never met a criminal of his stature before, not even Wolfsheim. That man seemed pale in comparison to what I had seen and heard, Gatsby was no common criminal, he was worse — a glossy, smiling criminal who had ingratiated himself with an old man in his feeble years, who had fooled the careless rich into accepting him as one of their own, even the girl he supposed himself to love. A splendid liar, and now a murderer, perhaps many times over. Here in this glittering house paid for in blood and graft, swarms of rumors so romantic no one would scent out the truth — and when circumstances required it he would pick up a gun and shoot a man at close range, as easily as saying hello. It excited me.

He came and sat beside me. His neat mannerly body made creases in the bedclothes. His presence was disconcertingly real, after a long intermission in which nothing had seemed real, and was very near to me. This invented man, this paper man. He smiled at me then, and prevailed on me by smiling.

“He came to me to beg. How do you like that? Have a cigarette, if you like.”

The brown-skinned boy banished from college at St. Olaf, some admixture of greatness I could never have guessed looking at him — and it was so remarkable it could only be true. I was there on his bed, and I had removed my shoes at some point in the proceedings.

Gatsby placed a cigarette between my lips, and lit it. I made some sound.

“He could have spoiled everything,” Gatsby said firmly.

“I understand, I understand completely.”

“It’ll be taken care of — without my lifting a finger. You’ll see how it is.”

The killing had gotten his blood up as well as mine, and that excited me too. I wanted it the way I had wanted it before, out in the garden beneath the extinguished lamps, with no lights in the windows to silhouette him. It occurred to me that Jay Gatsby’s change of staff had not only been to ensure privacy for his love-affairs. It was for business, after all.

He hung over me like a silk-gilt cloud, bracing me for emphasis. There was something masterful in the strength of his hands — it was the strength under the surface, the hardy muscle that comes from crewing yachts and not sailing them for pleasure, the vigor of the exultant boy with the pompadour in a photograph I’d seen once. On an impulse, I straightened the collar of his shirt, and he let me. It was a silly, vain gesture when nothing about him had ever seen less silly or less vain. There was a golden hollow at the base of his neck. Gatsby smelled like blood and money. When I kissed him, his smiling mouth yielded under mine. It was just the same as being an undergraduate again. Few have had that pleasure, I think, at least since Daisy. It was some clinch. His arm went around me with boyish readiness.

When we broke apart my lips were smarting. Afterward he patted my shoulder in an affable sort of way. He had a murderer’s hands.

“It couldn’t bother me in the least, old sport. I’ve always gotten along well enough with pansies.”

And what did that make him? Something different than myself — the glittering cloud that followed him wherever he held court was nothing like the glamour of a Harlem ballroom, one of those places I’d only heard about. But Gatsby’s parties had been like that once, too, only heard-about. I thought of McKee.

“I’m glad to hear it.” I chafed at my mouth with the back of a hand.

And he told me everything — nearly everything, the way he himself knew it. The dead man was Walter Chase. Gatsby knew the man from an affair of business that had gone awry, and in a panic or a fit of stung pride Chase had spilled everything — or nearly everything — to Tom Buchanan. Everything but their latest undertaking, and how that mattered. The effect was like a lightning-strike, to know this man as a lover — the attitudes he had taken with Daisy, the strange and vulnerable fullness of the story, his surprise at loving her — and to know Gatsby the criminal, and all this before breakfast.

By the end of it he lay next to me, careless and indifferent. I wanted to kiss him again but thought better of it.

“I suppose I’d better go.” I was acutely aware of how bedraggled I was, how it felt to stay awake through the night as a man nearing thirty. My suit had new and unfamiliar creases in it.

His brow furrowed a little. Anyone would have imagined some kind of deep thought to be going on behind that innocent face. “Can I ask a favor first?”

“Oh, anything.”

For I would have done anything to please him, then.