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April showers bring May flowers, or so the proverb goes, but it’s only a week until May Morning and still the slatey Sound mingles with the misty horizon until the whole of the view down the lawn is one shimmering mass of grey. The grass trembles beneath the dew in the mornings, plated with silver and opalescent with moisture, and the emerald dock light over on West Egg blinks frenetically all night and into the afternoons, which should be, by rights, gilded with sun instead. Instead, the sky is sodden, and Daisy traps herself behind bay windows, looking out into the oblivion of fog.
Today, the rain falls in sheets, and somewhere upstairs, the baby cries maddeningly. And then there’s the longing that Daisy sometimes gets, that desire to rise and fling herself out of the house and into the filthy freshness of the air, screaming her throat raw. This eggshell-colored, eggshell-fragile house is close to breaking, and she wakes up some mornings half-frightened, half deliriously hopeful that she might see the shadows of the swan-boats on the Sound and hear, borne on a hot summer wind, the dewy, bell-like chanting of the Otherworld. But the breeze is damp and clinging, and every sound but the foghorn is drowned in the clouds.
Lately, Tom has been red in the face over losing the endorsement of the Court, raging quietly and trying not to show it. For him, this year is already a disappointing failure. But are always cycles, and if one is not King one year, one can be King the next. And one does not marry a Fay if one does not have designs on the Summer crown.
Daisy stretches out, languorous and already bored, though it is only noon. The rain shows no sign of stopping, and the baby’s cries are slowing, and Daisy doesn’t quite know what to do with herself. It’s a childish sort of feeling, but she can afford to be childish, because she feels all but widowed in this house with this man she doesn’t love, far from the Courts of the Midwest and the fae she knew there. She glances up and out of the windows, down the slanting, pearlescent lawn, and sees a figure, draggled as it drags itself up, at the end of the boat-dock. It moves too fluidly to be a human.
Daisy sinks instinctively into the couch, trying to look through the fog and ascertain the threat. In her girlhood, and during the War, she had grown uneasily used to bewildered newcomers, fleeing the human violence they’d been thrust into when they awoke from their long sleeps in the Otherworld. But this figure does not resemble those shambling, frightened fae. It walks with too much purpose.
Turning back towards the door of the drawing room, Daisy steels herself to call for a servant. She will not face this threat alone, she thinks, and then she hates herself for the thought. She is Daisy Fay and she will stand her ground. But she is also Daisy Buchanan, and she must be a beautiful fool, gentle and yielding as a hothouse orchid, and just as susceptible to cold. Yet she remains silent, watching warily, ready to flee or to yell at the slightest provocation. The figure moves closer, and Daisy recognizes auburn hair and a freckled nose, and she runs to the window and throws it open, reaching out her own pale, weak arms to meet strong, familiar ones made golden by the sun.
The stranger-not-a-stranger nearly bowls her over, and they fall backwards through the bay windows and into an undignified girlish tangle on the expensive rug. Daisy half expects a ray of sunshine to come beaming in through the doors, but this is no novel, and so the sky continues with its unbroken downpour. The person on top of her, Daisy thinks, must be getting grass stains on the carpet. She grins at Daisy, her hair drenched in rain and salt water.
“Jordan Baker!” Daisy exclaims. “However did you get here? You’re soaking wet.”
Jordan grins, her smile flashing mischief. “I swam.”
“You should have told me you were coming! I could have prepared you a bath!”
Jordan gives Daisy a sideways glance.
“You seemed like a woman who needed a surprise. How has life been since you moved out East?”
“Oh, fine, fine,” Daisy says as breezily as she can. “Tom’s awfully cut up about the Court, but he’ll be just fine soon.”
“You’re saying fine more than usual,” Jordan says. “How’s the baby?”
“Fi- wonderful! I’m so sorry, Jordan, but I’ve been rather preoccupied. My second cousin-- do you remember Nick Carraway? No, I’m certain you wouldn’t—anyhow he’s coming out East for business, and I’m awfully excited! I’ll have to introduce you both!”
“He sounds charming.”
Jordan arches an eyebrow, her voice dry. Daisy laughs, too brightly. She doesn’t know why she does it, for Jordan’s always been able to see past her smiles and into her soul. She was there at the wedding breakfast, saw Daisy drunk on champagne, saw her belligerent, saw the flying, falling pearls. They have been connected for so long that truth has become undeniable, but Daisy has grown used to hiding and now she finds that she cannot crack her shell open as she once could.
“Why are you here?”
It’s not the politest thing she could have said, not the most delicate turn of phrase, but it’s enough. Jordan’s face freezes in its smile. Daisy freezes in her own assumed pose. They have been playacting for each other when there should have been no secrets between them.
“The Court’s in West Egg this summer,” Jordan says carefully. “The Summer Court, I mean.”
“That’s ridiculous. It’s never there! Who’s the Summer King?”
“Someone you knew a long time ago,” Jordan says. “It doesn’t matter.”
Her voice is firm, but wary. Daisy doesn’t press further.
“I suppose I’ll have to put in an appearance at one of the parties, won’t I?”
The if Tom will let me hangs unspoken in the air, and Jordan, prudently, says nothing. She looks out instead, over the dew-pearled grass and the grey Sound.
“The rain is slowing,” she says after a thoughtful moment.
“It doesn’t look any different to me.”
“Oh, it won’t end properly for another day or two, but by the time your cousin arrives, we ought to have some brilliant May weather. Enough for a proper Beltane revel.”
Jordan has always been attuned to the weather, and though, of all the fae Daisy knows, Jordan has always been best at concealing herself to walk unseen amongst the human world, she still has an uncanniness about her that all her clever disguises will never quite conceal. She smiles again at Daisy, but it’s a wary, wan smile, her lips pressed tight over her teeth.
“It’s May Morning today. They’ll be passing the crown to the Summer King in Manhattan, giving him authority over the Court. Tom is in attendance. I’m remaining home with the baby,” Daisy says. “It’s no good weather for a coronation, especially not for Summer.”
Jordan arches an eyebrow.
“I thought you didn’t go to parties anymore. Why do you care if the first Court party is postponed?”
“I don’t drink. It makes it harder to watch people when you’re drunk, and you know how I get when I’ve had a bit too much.” She throws her arms out wide. “I daresay I’d wind up turning the Sound to milk or summoning a storm of glass hornets made from New York office building windows, and then any veneer of secrecy we had would be quite ruined.”
Jordan laughs, but her genuine smile bleeds away.
“You deserved better, Daisy Fay.”
She looks sybilline, sitting there in the living room. There is a light breeze suddenly, although the windows are closed, and it lifts the white summer curtains in a cold, pale flutter.
“What better? I have everything I could ever want.”
The breeze intensifies as Jordan leans in towards Daisy, reaching a long pale hand to stroke the line of her face. When she brings their mouths together, Daisy sighs, remembering long, languid girlhood days. In that far-off past as distant as the Otherworld, in the humidity of a Louisville summer, Jordan summoned her breezes, making all the curtains flutter so that they could kiss in the cool and quiet, shielded from the prying, judging eyes of the world and the war raging in Europe by diaphanous fabric.
Today, unlike those halcyon days, it is grey and chill, and the breeze brings goosebumps to Daisy’s arms, but Jordan tastes like summer and unlimited possibility, and it is only when she tastes salt again that Daisy realizes that they are both crying.
She breaks away from Jordan, furiously wiping her eyes. The breezes subside, and the curtains float lazily back into place. Outside, the rain continues unabated. It looks, perhaps, as though it has grown heavier.
“Does that answer your question?” Jordan asks.
Her eyes are bright with some kind of hopeless longing.
There is a knot in Daisy’s throat when she answers.
“Jordan, we were practically children then. It’s too late for us to, oh, I don’t know, run away to Paris and join a salon or whatever silly thing we dreamed of.”
Jordan looked away. The rain grew louder.
“I don’t know why anyone would think you were a fool, Daisy. You’re beautiful, yes, but you’re too practical for your own good, and too pragmatic. And that will be your downfall this summer, unless you make the right decisions. That’s what I came here to tell you, not that the Court is in West Egg, but that this is a summer of endings and beginnings.”
Jordan walks towards the window, and Daisy follows her, extending a tentative hand, almost but not quite resting it on Jordan’s shoulder.
“Jordan, don’t be so cryptic! I love you as a sister, as a friend. Can’t we be happy with that?”
“You might be able to fool yourself that you could be, that there’s nothing more than that in whatever it is that we have, but I don’t think that I could ever do that. The swan boats are circling on the Sound, and the horns of Elfland calling, and we will all be returning to the Otherworld unless someone can stop the swirling of time. Past and present will collide, Daisy Fay. Please, please be ready. I wish I could have brought you something better.”
She turns to Daisy, who looks at her, uncertain and alarmed.
“I don’t know what to say to that. I’m young still, and we lead long lives. Who’s going to die, Jordan? Who’s going to go back to the Otherworld?”
“I don’t know. I just know I hear their bells, and see the curved necks of swan boats in the gloom. There are endings near at hand.”
Daisy reacts as anyone would to an impending apocalypse: impulsively. She grabs Jordan’s hand.
“Stay,” she commands.
“What?”
“Stay. My husband’s out and won’t be back for who knows how long, and the baby’s asleep, and I’m too lonely in this house. When he returns, we can say you’re just here as a houseguest. Tom doesn’t need to know what we did while he was out.”
Jordan catches her meaning and nods, taking Daisy’s hand. She turns back to the windows for one final glance at the sea. A wind has blown in across the Sound, and the waves are frothing upwards, the rain driving in sheets. Daisy smiles at Jordan, pulls her down into another kiss.
What better? she thinks again, remembering the question before the kiss. In her present life, in this life where every need she’s ever even thought of is so scrupulously attended to, Daisy Buchanan has none of the things that she wanted when everything was good and golden and she and Jordan Baker inhabited a world of wafting curtains and golden possibility. But with Jordan here, it’s easier to forget that. In this haze of love or lust, Daisy can pretend that the swan boats are not circling inexorably towards autumn. After all, it is easy to forget that summer soon ends when summer is just beginning.