“There was music from my neighbour’s house throughout the summer nights. In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars….”
The food grew more lavish with each party. Buffet tables groaned under the weight of exotic meats and cheese, jellies and cakes. Huge crystal bowls housed concoctions of cream and chocolate and liqueur and were consumed messily and frantically by the assembled masses. I once saw a man press his entire face into the bowl and emerge, mouth brimming, with a look of triumph in his eyes. These excesses disgusted me and yet I still went back week after week driven by some need to stoke my wasp-ish disdain for these dancers, actresses, self-made men, and gamblers. Glorious hoi polloi with all their joy and merriment and discarded inhibition.
The pièce de resistance on the buffet table each week was a three-bird roast – a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. The whole idea made me gag but I had to admit that Gatsby’s chefs were skillful. They had been lured from the best hotels in Manhattan by cold hard cash to let loose their creativity every Saturday night. Encouraged by the voracious appetites of the revelers they grew bolder. One night a swan encased the usual three fowl and another, to whoops of delight from the crowd, an emu presented its swollen belly on the groaning buffet table. What next?!, the people cried and hurried back the following week to see. The night of the ostrich, I caught sight of Gatsby on the steps watching the crowd as the huge mass of meat was carved to reveal that the thing had developed inwardly as well as out. Inside the chicken was a partridge and inside its hollowed-out body cavity was a tiny gold-painted egg. Hardboiled I assumed until, warmed by the cooked birds around it and uncannily timed to perfection, a little beak emerged and then a wing. Howls of delight erupted from the crowd. I saw Gatsby smile and nod ever so slightly as if he had decided something.
The next week the crowd arrived again with the usual anticipation. The speakeasys and dancehalls of the city had talked of nothing else all week but Gatsby’s “Golden Goose” as it had become known. Something made me uneasy that night. There was a charge in the air and the atmosphere felt sharpened as if the very air itself had been honed to slice the meat. When the six chefs – six! – carried out the platter with that week’s Golden Goose something in their faces, dull eyes over sweat-beaded cheeks and tense mouths, filled me with dread. Gatsby stood at the top of the steps glowing with anticipation. He was absolutely still but, like a sprinter before a race, his body hummed with unleashed movement. He couldn’t wait for something. I should have left then. So many times since that night I have wished I had done that and never had to witness what was to come.
A huge ostrich – bigger far than the previous week’s – was laid on the table. Its body was plucked and basted but its neck and head, as ugly in death as in life, reared up from the table to regard us with stuffed-olive eyes. The crowd drew closer and, at a signal from Gatsby, eyes shining, the head chef took a knife from his belt and began to cut. I could see immediately that something was different. The way the knife went in, the way the man applied the pressure, the look of pride mixed with fear on his face. He cut out a wedge of ostrich meat but instead of a matryoshka of avian forms beneath, a curved, gleaming surface was exposed. The man peeled back the ratite flesh, still steaming from the furnace, discarding it to the ground, to reveal a huge golden egg. A hush fell on the crowd then, excited glances were exchanged. What wonders were about to be unveiled? I could almost hear their simple, pleasure-seeking minds explore the possibilities – chocolate! champagne! doves! The roar of their joyous imaginations was deafening. I felt a burn at the back of my throat as the bile rose, as if my stomach already knew what my mind did not.
Gatsby spoke then, “Friends – if I may call you that although I hardly know you – you who devour my food, drink dry my cellars, and carouse on my lawn. Each week I’ve striven to give you what your hearts desire, sparing no expense nor fearing any limits of decency. Many of you have commented on my solitary state. You’ve speculated – now don’t deny it -on my interests and my history. I admit I have felt alone and have thought that I would never achieve that which has long been withheld from me. But at last, tonight, ladies and gentlemen, from one Egg to another, I give you…Marguerite!”
At this a crack appeared along the shell of the golden egg, then a little hole through which a tiny pale hand appeared pulling at the edges of the shell. The crowd gasped in horrified excitement as a woman emerged. She was petite and blonde and beautiful in a silver dress that draped over her body like liquid mercury. Her skin, I saw, had a strange, unnatural sheen as if made of wax or lacquer. Around her neck and on her fingers sparkled brash diamonds and sapphires. But her face….her face – one I knew so well from my Midwestern childhood. The achingly familiar Louisville beauty of Daisy Fay. I lost consciousness then, dropping awkwardly and unseen to the damp, dark lawn.
When I came to my head throbbed and my shirt was wet and sticky with spilled champagne. I got up carefully and looked across towards the house. The crowd had drifted and spread across the lawn and terrace, returning to their usual Saturday evening groups and entertainments. Gatsby stood at the open door to the salon silhouetted by the bright lights within. Next to him stood Marguerite. They weren’t talking or moving, just looking out across the bay. I moved nearer and saw Gatsby’s look of contentment and satisfaction. I followed his gaze and saw that it seemed to be fixed on the green light at the end of the Buchanan’s pier. Moving closer, I looked at Marguerite’s face, trying to discern the focus of her gaze. I tried in vain, ice cold dread creeping up my back. She had the blank dead stare of a doll. She looked like Daisy in every way except for those eyes. Daisy’s eyes were always so alive – flitting from one sweet amusement to another. I turned to leave but Gatsby had seen me.
‘Nick, my good man!’, he called jovially. ‘Come and meet my beautiful flower!’ He had the air of a man who’d won with a seemingly impossible hand of cards. In my experience that usually meant the deck was stacked. ‘Isn’t she perfect?’, he cried.
The woman turned to me then and her beautiful Daisy-mouth opened in a wide smile. For a moment I thought she’d sling her arms about me and they’d laugh and tell me all about their great scheme with the egg. But she didn’t. She just smiled and looked at a point behind my right shoulder with her glassy stare. I shivered again and felt acid rise in my throat for a second time.
Gatsby, oblivious, went on, ‘I was at a crossroads, Nick, not sure which way to go, what to do next. Then it hit me. They make these roads and fool you into thinking they’re all there is. The only possible ways to go. But they’re not!’ His eyes were wild as he looked at me with an intensity I’d never seen. ‘There’s always another way to be negotiated.’ A terrible understanding came to me then and I left him, heart pounding in my chest. He didn’t call after me and I didn’t look back.
I called up Daisy’s house the next day when I woke, needing to hear her playful, happy voice. “Darling Nick”, she’d say, “you sound dreadful. Have you been at wild parties with beautiful women?” But she was still asleep they’d told me in earnest tones. They hadn’t been able to wake her that morning at all. She was pale and floppy, her breathing shallow, and she couldn’t be roused with salts or shouts. Most probably a flu they’d said, although she wasn’t fevered. A doctor had been called and they’d be sure to ask her to call when she woke and was well again.
I didn’t wait for that call. I called work to resign and left immediately for Europe where I spent some months – and most of my savings – wandering aimlessly in gothic cathedrals and galleries of that continent’s ancient cities. Some time later, I heard that Gatsby – and Marguerite – had disappeared. He’d staged an elaborate party for Halloween. The house and grounds were lavishly decorated, and he’d even had a mock tomb built from the boathouse on his pier. Dressed in black, he and Marguerite had processed around the garden followed by a howling, shrieking mob of partygoers dressed as ghouls and devils and witches, as the orchestra played a funeral march. They withdrew into the tomb and a papier maché “stone” was rolled in front. When the revelers had finished their danse macabre and went to welcome the host back to his own party, they found the boathouse empty and Gatsby and Marguerite gone. Some assumed they had simply rowed away although no boats were found missing, while others described knowingly the elaborate concealments of theatre magicians. Weeks later, when there was still no sign, the house was boarded up and the staff all left to seek new work in the city.
News of Daisy’s death reached me a few weeks later in Heidelberg.
November 2020
This piece arose from a genre exercise in a writing class. Taking F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ as a basis, it reimagines one of Jay Gatsby’s parties through a magical realist/fantastic lens. I’ve also drawn on elements of The Satyricon by Petronius which seeded the origins of Gatsby.
Hilary Coyne 