The Naked And The Nude

“A man like you is only fit for one thing,” he says, pressing Nick’s leg back, the hard crescent of his hand pressing into the soft underside of Nick’s knee. “After this you’ll run off and write your book.”

There were men like this during the war, and before — hardy, hateful men. Men defined by their bodies and not their minds, practically imprisoned in their bodies, and all their efforts to understand the world as it moved past them were in vain. With men like that, one needs to be generous. He moves into him, too-rough, and Nick stifles a sound against his shoulder. His prick is aching and so close in proximity to Tom’s Olympian strength his own body feels like a blasphemy. He’d never had any reason to be ashamed of it before.

He grasps at him, leaving white marks on the flushed skin of Tom’s shoulders — he has beautiful shoulders, like one of those bronzes of a pugilist in repose, and Nick is greedy for him. The ache of him pierces to new places, new terrain of the body — another body heaving and straining against his own, slippery with wealth and stinking with salt and seawater and the scent of cut grass.

Afterward, Buchanan’s straw-colored hair is darkened by sweat and hanging close to his forehead — there’s something about his body at close range, something that seems badly-matched to polo ponies and fine tailoring, an animal hardness. The bed is sized for both of them, and could accommodate a half-dozen more.

How strange that he can lay with him here — his second cousin’s husband whom he had known at Yale — and feel nothing at all. The man is only another text for him to read, or another formula he must know by heart if he wants to do business in the city. But you can’t cherish your vices forever, not even in East Egg. Tom carries East Egg and New Haven with him wherever he goes, even so far as the valley of ashes. Pitiable Myrtle, half-bullied and half-willing, thinking to herself you can’t live forever. Myrtle with the blood streaming from her nose. Nick stiffens.

“This isn’t my habit,” Buchanan says at last. His handsome head is propped up on one hand. “I wouldn’t have thought you were the sort of man for it.”

Remorse after the act, and censure. There’s a smoky indistinctness in his voice that underscores that he is drunk and Nick is perfectly, brutally sober. This isn’t his habit either, and he can’t bury the prickle of offense that rises at the suggestion. If Buchanan thinks he’s one of the men who does this out of compulsion, one of those men who can’t stop themselves — but there’s Daisy and Jordan between them, perfectly well-bred women. He blames Nick for this, or he hates him for it. Or he envies him his liberty, or he fears him.

Nick doesn’t know what to say to that. Tom Buchanan’s grave face and his thick neck and the soft pathetic shadow of stubble on his cheek — the dark salt odor of sweat, the odor of West Indian limes and Spanish leather struggling to civilize him.

Oh, Nick thinks, he wants me to know he means no disrespect. Honesty is failing him here. If he is to touch him he should do it only with his finger-tips, only very gingerly.

*

They can meet like this when Daisy spends her evenings elsewhere — when Tom’s other entertainments have failed him, Nick supposes. They have met like this many times, only not quite like this. Tom, in his riding clothes with his banded shirt rucked up and his flies undone, dragging Nick into some steel-and-tile washroom where his razor sits forlorn in the sink — demanding his honest opinion on some unspecified point of objective assessment. Nick begins to protest in a lower voice than he otherwise might when Tom brings his hand down to the split of his groin.

“Tell me the truth. It isn’t quite normal, is it?” With a flash of pained purpose, and a steeliness in his grip on Nick’s wrist that suggested an honest answer had better be forthcoming fast. “Relative to the mean. I’m not what I could be. A man can’t expect to go forward in a marriage when he’s badly equipped.”

“On the contrary,” Nick says, “look, I think it’s very—” An instant flush has risen into his face. Never in all their liaisons has it occurred to him that the man is markedly deficient in any way except between the ears, but he wants Nick’s considered opinion as a homosexual. An absurd laugh rises up in his throat. “Well above the national average, as far as I know.”

Better than his fellow men of Yale, at any rate. Better equipped than a common man in uniform. Nick feels the remembered smart of a bloodied nose. What brought on this sudden paroxysm of inadequacy? Something Daisy said — or Myrtle, no well-bred girl would ever say so.

Buchanan’s face does not suggest a hint of amusement. He looks on Nick with dull reproach. “I can’t be a sex degenerate. I have a child to think of.”

That’s what this is, some terrible chapter from some terrible book has gotten under his skin. The bitter mysteries of sex are no less bitter. Even sullen-faced with his trousers down he’s repulsive and he’s splendid, like something from a full-color advertisement. Nick feels a crooked pang of desire.

“No, not at all. You’re perfectly fine. Put that away, you’ve got nothing to prove.”

“All right, then,” Tom says with faint, slight reassurance. “I wanted another man’s opinion.”

It’s difficult not to wonder what Daisy has to say on the matter. She’s contented in her own love affair. Nick kisses him and presses him back against the porcelain column of the sink, and Tom bends willingly — all the strength and viciousness forgotten, and only the virile solidness of his body left. It is an interesting exercise. When Nick mouths against his suntanned throat he can taste the sharpness of aftershave lotion.

So this is contempt. Contempt for the man, and no pity. Pulling him off through the layers of his underclothes — when skin touches bare skin it’s nearly too much, it nearly topples both of them. His stiffness is so ready and immediate that it’s startling, his cock is heavy with blood. Heated flesh under Nick’s hand — and he himself is feeling something, but at a considerably greater remove.

Tom’s body is strangely pliant in his urgent need. Nick has the reins — and Tom wants it this way, perhaps it absolves him or it excites him. He has other things to tell him there, filthy rasping things in his filthy raw voice. And Tom’s hands — he can taste Tom on his fingertips, the blunt fingertips of that sportsmanlike hand slick and chemical, snagging in Nick’s mouth like just another orifice ready for his delight.

He kisses him and Tom’s hand pinches a bruise into the back of his neck, the rasping spot where the barber draws his finishing stroke.

*

He is woken from a drowse by the sound of a car pulling in, crackling on the narrow gravel drive like an unseasonable bed of snow, and Nick’s heart surges in his chest — one of his books still lies in his lap, spine cracked open at a queasy angle, and he casts it away in a hurry. He doesn’t know who he expects to see standing in his doorway, only that his heart sings for them, in that moment before full wakefulness the light of late summer casts everything in a craze of gold before he can even unbar his front door.

It isn’t Gatsby — it isn’t even Jordan. Tom is standing there on the grass, flushed-faced like a drunken man. The car is drawn up crooked, the motor still running.

“She’s gone,” he says with fire in his face but nothing but stifled despair in his voice, “she’s gone and made a fool out of me. Don’t you understand?” Buchanan in a pristine suit but no shoes, standing there on the grass in his wet socks, a pitiful colossus — and there’s no one around to see them, no one at all.

Nick crosses over to him, down the steps, like one approaches an unfamiliar animal — a dog that may bite. How handsome, how pitiful.

“What’s that?”

He can’t have heard him correctly. This summer has been marked by folly, but not like this — Daisy has a child to think of, and a lawful marriage however much she may regret it, and Tom has a woman in town. Somebody else’s wife. No, this is a mistake — and why come to Nick? Why confide in him?

Tom shakes his head, as if his throat is constricted. She can only be Daisy. Nick puts his arm around him, not like a woman but like another one of the fellows, and braces to have it wrenched away. Buchanan doesn’t lay a finger on him, but sinks against his shoulder like a shipwreck crumbling.

Nick won’t say her name; that would be a grave misstep, somehow, it would topple both of them.

No gentleman loses himself like this over a woman. There are tears in his eyes, falling sideways to spot Nick’s undershirt. It’s strange to see a man weep, even for his wife — the world seems to be slipping, sideways, crooked. Nick supports him there, trying vainly with his hands to make some comforting gesture, but there’s nothing to be done to bear Buchanan up in his stupid, inane, pitiable show of grief. Tom has come to love him maybe, only limpingly. Tom has come for comfort and there’s nothing Nick can do.

Nick knows it now, clearly in his heart. He can’t stay here, among these people. He must go away.