Careless People (35 page)

Throwing themselves on the mercy of the killer, Mott and the other state officials announced that they were “
hoping for a ‘break' in the form of a confession.” A confession is certainly one kind of a break—and possibly nothing less than having the solution handed to them on a silver platter would have enabled the New Brunswick authorities to make any progress at this point. No wonder they wanted to believe the killer had a tender heart.

I
t should not be surprising that Gatsby's second party does not go as well as the first—and the first ended in mayhem. Having grown perturbed by the idea of his wife running around alone, although unaware that she's begun an affair with Gatsby, Tom decides to accompany Daisy one night to Gatsby's house. For the first time, Nick doesn't enjoy himself at one of Gatsby's revels. Despite the “same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion,” Nick feels “an unpleasantness in the air.” Perhaps, he thinks, the change comes from his suddenly looking at West Egg
“through Daisy's eyes,” instead of through Gatsby's. Nick has become accustomed to West Egg “as a world complete in itself,” which has no idea of being inferior to anywhere else, because it is unconscious of its own crassness—but its vulgarity becomes clear in Tom and Daisy's affronted reaction to it.

Covering her discomfort with brittle gaiety, Daisy offers to hand out green cards to young men who might want to kiss her, her card color-coded by Fitzgerald to match Gatsby's green light. Daisy spends the party protesting too much but abandoning her protests (“I'm having a marvelous—”), while Tom makes cutting remarks that Gatsby misunderstands. He innocently tells Tom that he will see many celebrated people, people he's heard about, and Tom replies, underscoring the Buchanans' social exclusivity, that they “don't go around very much . . . In fact I was just thinking I don't know a soul here.”

It is at this point that they see another of
Gatsby
's enduring images, the gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman, a movie star sitting in state under a white plum tree, with her director bending over her. “Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.” The movie star and her director remain in this tableau for the rest of the party, as Fitzgerald offers an Art Deco update of Keats's lovers on the Grecian urn, forever young, forever beautiful, frozen in time. In the
Trimalchio
drafts
Daisy draws the line at sharing her hairdresser with the movie star, although Gatsby tells her “impressively” that it will make her “the originator of a new vogue all over the country.” Daisy responds, “Do you think I want that person to go around with her hair cut exactly like mine? It'd spoil it for me.” In the final version Fitzgerald has eliminated this exchange, allowing the aristocrat to stand silently bewitched by the star.

When Daisy and Gatsby dance, they do no wild Charleston, but instead “a graceful, conservative fox-trot” that Nick finds as surprising as will readers whose expectations have been created by film adaptations. Meanwhile, Tom amuses himself with a young woman whom Daisy dismisses as “common but pretty,” as she mockingly offers Tom a “little gold pencil” to take
down phone numbers of the women he picks up. Nick and Gatsby both realize that Daisy is not having fun; they are at a “particularly tipsy table,” with people whose company Nick had recently found amusing. But now these people's behavior has turned “septic”—the tawdriness is showing: “When she's had five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that.” Doc Civet has stuck a drunken girl's head in the pool to sober her up, and gotten her dress all wet. “Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,” Miss Baedeker says, and begins to mumble about death in New Jersey.

Daisy is offended by this “place” so unlike hers that it must be marked by skeptical quotation marks, so appalled by a society that has liberated itself from any constraints of decorum that Fitzgerald repeats the offense to her pride: “But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented ‘place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.” Daisy is playing at love—she offers only gestures, not emotions. She was raised among the same aristocracy that Edith Wharton described as a world in which people with emotions were not visited, sharing Jordan Baker's urbane distaste for the concrete. The raw vigor of West Egg is also the raw vigor of Gatsby—and, indeed, of the Jazz Age.

Daisy's banter reveals her distaste for it all. “I've never met so many celebrities!” she exclaims. “I liked that man—what was his name?—with the sort of blue nose.” When she insists that she found Gatsby's guests “interesting,” Tom laughs and asks Nick, “Did you notice Daisy's face when that girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?” Tom is no more impressed than Daisy by “this menagerie,” demanding suddenly who Gatsby is: “Some big bootlegger? . . . A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.” Both Daisy and Nick are indignant at the slur. Daisy declares that Gatsby earned his money from a chain of drugstores, adding suddenly, as it occurs to her, that all of these vulgar people must be gate-crashers, not his friends: “That girl hadn't been invited. They simply force their way in and
he's too polite to object.” She's right, in one sense: they are not his friends, for Gatsby has no friends—just uninvited guests.

As the party unravels to its disillusioning end, “a neat, sad little waltz of that year” called “Three O'clock in the Morning” is playing, one of the biggest hits in recent memory. The song was recorded by Paul Whiteman, whom Scott and Zelda often heard play at the Palais Royal on Broadway.

Palais Royal, 1920.

Zelda tended to hear the ripple of music throughout life; her memories were often washed deep in musical images. “
Paul Whiteman played the significance of amusement on his violin,” she said later. “Three O'clock in the Morning” was recorded at least once more that year, and advertised in the pages of the
New York Times
on Saturday, November 18, 1922, as the Fitzgeralds took the train through New Brunswick to the football game.

“
In the real dark night of the Soul,” Fitzgerald wrote much later, “it is always three o'clock in the morning.” Perhaps this is the waltz Zelda was asking him to save:
she found her novel's title,
she said, in the Victor Record Catalogue. Music measured life into beats: “Listen,” David tells Alabama, “you're not keeping time.”

A
n American industrialist was asked by a woman's college to consider making a donation to support women's education. He responded that he thought that
all women's colleges should be burned, and those studying there sentenced to hard labor. The story made the front pages on November 23; Americans could peruse it at their leisure, for it was Thanksgiving Day. If they kept browsing the
Times
, they would also have seen the story of a seventy-year-old “spinster” who had been released from police custody after threatening to shower eggs upon a young woman selling birth-control pamphlets outside Grand Central Terminal.

Neither Scott nor Zelda left any record of how they spent the day, or what cooking—if any—was attempted, but some years later Fitzgerald offered some useful thoughts on what to do with leftover Thanksgiving turkey. A recipe for a turkey cocktail was his first suggestion: “
To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.”

The day after Thanksgiving, the
New York Times
reported the indictment of a “Bootleg King” named Mannie Kessler. He was only the latest in a long line of Bootleg Kings crowned by the press in 1922. Far and away the most notorious bootleg king of 1922 was a lawyer from Cincinnati named George Remus, who had begun selling alcohol from drugstores as soon as the Volstead Act came into force; some credit Remus with singlehandedly transforming drugstores into a byword for bootlegging. In just two years Remus became fabulously rich, building a lavish mansion with a marble pool and a solid-gold piano. For the previous New Year's Eve he had thrown a party at which it was reported that
champagne “flowed like the Rhine,” and a hundred girls, “garbed in Grecian robes of flowing white,” served a
midnight banquet graced by “water nymphs” who gave a diving exhibition. Remus was arrested in May 1922. Over the summer the papers were filled with tales of the flamboyant parties he was supposed to have thrown. Swope's
World
ran a full-page story saying Remus “Ruled Like a King, Lived in A Palace, Scattered Huge ‘Overnight' Fortune in Revelry and Largess.” The story was accompanied by novelistic illustrations of Remus's revels.