ENTITLED: I Painted Him Blue
FANDOM: The Great Gatsby
LENGTH: 1,500
SETTING: A little more than halfway through the book, just after Daisy fails to leave her husband.
DISCLAIMER: Fitzgerald is my writing hero, sorry for stepping on your toes, Mr. Great Man.
NOTES: Chill out, I've read the book.
SUMMARY: The thing is never over. — Daisy, Gatsby
The baby won't stop crying.
Daisy puts her face further into her pillow, and admits that she is never going to be a good mother, but maybe she could at least be better than her own. Her own mother, who'd been hysterical the day she found her daughter unconscious in bed, with blood making a mess between her legs. Her first child, reduced to nothing but an ugly secret, and Daisy had been safely married only months later.
Fact: other girls have never liked Daisy.
She supposes this should say something awful about her; that the only people who enjoyed her company were the ones who hoped for a flash of her chemise, a slip of her neckline.
Two rooms over, her baby screams, a woman lies dead in the street, her husband is coming up the stairs, and there is a man waiting for her, out in the garden.
In a state of perfect calm, she stands, and makes her way to the bathroom, where she is violently sick, but at least away from all the windows. The door opens and her husband leans his big, powerful body against the frame.
"You shouldn't look at me so easily," she says.
"Shall I wake the nurse?" is all he asks. Weakly, she chuckles. And then she nods.
When he leaves she goes to the sink—her beautiful, gold and white marble sink—and runs water through her mouth. She pulls her fingers across her teeth and against the insides of her cheeks, scrapes her fingernails down the bed of her tongue. She doesn't feel even a little bit better, and she's still married to the wrong man.
Love is a gamble.
As a woman who is beautiful and therefore easily with options, this is something that Daisy understands very well, even when she is little more than a girl, unwed but bedded and abandoned. Tom Buchanan, she reminds herself, is not that bad. Tom Buchanan, her mother reminds her, could be her salvation.
When she thinks about him like that, it's hard not to hate him. It's a very new emotion, for Daisy. It took a lot of work.
But. There is the promise, that if she is married, she will be away from her mother, and away from her shame. Because Daisy thought—she was sure—that if she could just manage to get away from that morning, that fever-nightmare of sweat and blood and an intense, seeping sort of burn in her lower belly and the sense that something was horribly wrong, so wrong that maybe it would kill her and she still wasn't sure if she wanted that—?
In summary: Daisy hoped to trade her mother's company for the return of her virginity.
"I've heard," Tom began over lunch, speaking around the duck bones in his mouth that he was still sucking the meat from, "That it is not uncommon for a girl to start planning her wedding as early as when she's three years old."
Daisy drew a smile across her face. "If any of us can wait that long."
Tom guffawed. She found it repellant, but could not say why. "So?" he reached to refill his wine glass, and the topped off her own as well. Daisy reached for it instinctively. "Is there anything in particular that you've planned for our own wedding?"
Daisy giggled to stall for time. "Mr. Buchanan, are you asking me to marry you?"
"I have to ask?"
Daisy wondered how long one was allowed to hide in the bathroom before it became socially unacceptable. She peered down the drain, tried to fill up her mind with that same empty darkness.
For God's sake, she'd killed someone.
The nurse was up now, clucking at the baby, making it be quiet. Daisy closed her eyes with unfathomable relief, and pushed her forehead against the glass. She wished she knew how to just push through, step into a world without mistakes, instead of being stuck looking at the reflections of her own.
She should have gotten in the other car. Should have chosen the other man. Love is a gamble, she has only ever lost.
Tom Buchanan is your salvation.
Daisy opened the door. Her bedroom—their bedroom—was empty. She crossed it with dreadful, whimsical steps, and looked miserably out the window. The room was too well lit, the night too dark. If Gatsby was still in the garden, watching her, she couldn't see him.
She went down the stairs, both feet on every step, holding her dressing gown tightly around her. She stopped on the last step, staring into the lounge where Tom was sitting, his dark, handsome face waiting for her.
"I got a bit," she hesitates. "I just got a bit swept up in it all."
After a moment she dares to come down from the stairs, and slip into the chair next to his own. The baby has gone back to sleep, and the house is very quiet now. Daisy pushes her lips together as hard as she can, because she wants nothing more than to laugh, but cannot understand where the dreadful urge has sprung from. She looks, almost desperately, at all the beautiful things Tom had promised and later given to her. The expensive, uncomfortable furniture, sitting atop an enormous, richly woven rug from Asia, or maybe Africa—she could never remember. Books that neither of them had ever read, lining the walls around them. Senseless, glittering machinations of glass and silver and gold scattered tastefully across the tabletops. The things that had never made her quite happy enough but were better, surely, than a raw womb and a dead woman in the road and an empty, horrible longing.
Tom sits across from her. He plucks up one of the hands hiding in her lap and holds it tenderly in his own. "It's alright, my darling," he says, and when she manages the courage to look in his eyes, she sees genuine sorrow. Her stomach turns over. She hadn't thought herself capable of truly hurting him. Somehow, she feels almost flattered.
"I love you," he said.
Daisy smiled. Her index finger pulled itself in slow, indifferent circles around his naked shoulder. "It's easy for a man to say that, after doing what we just did."
"No," Jay said, his eyes bright. She tried not to think about that, too much, or else it started to frighten her. He rolled up onto his elbow, them moved so he was half-draped across her again, plucking gently at the hairs surrounding her face.
Daisy blinked, hard.
"No, Daisy, don't you understand?" he whispered, "Can't you understand that I've been going around without my heart, for all these years? But now that's done. You've come back to me."
Daisy pressed her lips together, staring up at him. There was something still horrible and young about his handsomeness, something too close to hope for her to be comfortable with it.
"How can I come back, when you're the one who left? You say a lot of silly things."
"I would take you anywhere, give you anything," he whispered, dropping now to press the words against her neck, and ear, and hairline, until she gasped and swelled with dreams.
"I'm married," she whispered, "I'm—I'm a mother. I'm older. I—look—"
She lifted one breast, perversely, daring him to look away from the faint, shimmery stretch marks she had won through pregnancy. He pressed one finger against the skin there, and traced the lines gently.
"Daisy, Daisy, don't tell me you think—you think that you've grown roots, sunk yourself into something inextricable, and that I should go on flying past you."
Her throat closed up. That was precisely what she thought.
"Everything I have—all of this—" he threw a careless arm around him, not even looking—though Daisy could barely bring herself to stop looking, could hardly understand the magnificent, shining opulence of his life. "—for you."
Daisy sat up, and pressed a hand against her stomach, taking in the huge bay windows, the gleaming wooden floors, her lurching desire to fall back into the tangle of silk and satin and warm, new skin.
She thought that she might scream.
"It can't be," she mumbled. Her head was pounding.
"Of course it is. I love you."
She put her teeth together, biting off the words undeserving, delusion, and too late.
"We'll tell your husband, remember? We'll tell him, you're coming with me. Just leave everything to me, it will all be taken care of." His hand finds hers, pulls his beautiful, tanned fingers between her cold, pale ones. "I'll take care of you," he promises. And, again, "I love you."
This has to end, Daisy realizes, car flying over the road. Too fast. Jay is too fast, she understands now. Too fast, too rich, too big, too in love. The sort of love she'd read about, dreamed of, yearned for as a girl. The love that had ripped her in half, the love that had torn her body and life apart. Nobody should feel that strongly. She was an adult now, married. She understood. Life was about accepting what you got out of it, driving at the speed limit, swallow instead of spit.
"Daisy, Daisy slow down—"
Because—
"Daisy!"
(No one had ever really taught her how to drive but it felt good to go fast, it felt right—)
—she had wanted for love to hurt, as proof that it was real, and she'd hated Tom for only ever doing damage in the periphery. She'd wanted to explode and die on romance and well, she'd certainly gotten that, hadn't she, but now—now the catch, there was always a catch, the catch was the baby bleeding out between her legs and her mother's shame hanging on her shoulders like a noose and the catch was five years and her acting like a girl all over again when it was time to GROW UP—
(She saw the woman and she thought, stop, but hit the acceleration and that was the whole goddamn story of her life, that moment right there.)
—she loves Jay because is her diamonds, her true love, her pain. He is her acceleration and her victim in the road. Her is her birth and her ending. The end.