Tom Buchanan, Misunderstood

Chapter Three: That Shrill, Metallic Urgency

While driving home, it felt like other drivers were aiming at me. Hell bent, they straddled the middle of the road, accelerated like airplanes, swerved toward and away from me, and bore down on me like the Red Baron. Terrified, I rode the edge of the road, my car fishtailing, but all I could picture was our engines smashing into each other and our cars exploding in fiery balls of gasoline. When I finally staggered into our mansion, I was drenched in sweat.

Daisy, I thought. I have to speak with you.

I wandered into a sitting room. Dressed in white, Daisy and Jordan lay on separate sofas. Each was dressed in white: Jordan, in a golf outfit; Daisy, in a silk flapper's dress. Distracted, hassled, feeling my head buzz from the punch or the bomb, I noticed that hemlines were rising this year. Each woman was impossibly lovely—Daisy with her new summer bronzing, and muscle tone from golf and tennis; Jordan with her immaculate skin from her perfect diet.

Jordan gave me a warm, happy smile—until Daisy glanced at me suspiciously, and then whispered something. And then—well, it was subtle. That's how they do it in the upper classes,. But Jordan, being young and formerly middle class, hadn't mastered the intricacies yet. Nonetheless, her eyebrows narrowed and she regarded me suspiciously.

I sweated. How could I get Daisy alone?

"Ladies," I said.

"Tom, you're a sopping mess." Daisy looked me up and down. "Nick will be here in fifteen minutes. Go refresh yourself.

"Hide the giggle juice," I said bluntly.

"Tom!" Daisy said. "You know Nick likes a highball before dinner."

"I mean it," I said. "It's in his best interest. He's a real high-hat dewdropper when he drinks." When Jordan looked at me like I was an ape escaped from the metropolitan zoo, I added, to be nice, "Last time he was here, he went through two bottles of claret."

An airy laugh effervesced out of Daisy, and she was on her feet, talking my arm, and breezing me out of the sitting room and into the grand hallway. "Oh, Tom, you're a cut up." Daisy's eyes indicated Jordan, and she murmured Shut up to me. "Mmm, are you a little sunburnt? Let me help you." Abruptly, I felt like one of the Romanovs fleeing the palace before the Bolsheviks arrived. Jordan was gaping at me in shock.

She was pulling my arm down the hall. "See here, Tom, if you're going to be nasty all night, I don't want you anywhere near my favorite cousin."

Her lovely, blonde bob framed her radiant face as her silk dress, despite the breeze, clung to her taut body...

...and I smelled a whiff of a man's cologne.

Where were you this afternoon, Daisy?

"Were you on a toot?" she asked.

"A doctor gave me one drink," I said.

"And how many did you prescribe for yourself, all on your own?" she asked casually. "Because you should have another. It might take the edge off of you. Where were you this afternoon?"

If only I could think clearly. My head was still buzzing.

"Wall Street."

"Wall Street!" she whispered fiercely, glancing back at Jordan, who—fifty yards away, I could see was now turning pages in a book. She wasn't just a golf pro; she also read French literature. A year after Daisy's first affair, I realized I'd wasted my school days. Smart girls don't marry average boys.