Author's Notes: This was written for a holiday request. It's Jack and Ennis Great Gatsby style. I'm not sure if I'll continue it or not; depends on how the muse inspires me.
The lights glinted like strings of stars, extemporaneous bridges that linked the sentinel stands of brush that bordered the east end of the lawn. The festivity of Twist's parties was never a question of presence, but degree; the jaded laughter of the crowds that migrated here refused to be silenced, especially for matters so insignificant as a holiday of dubious merit and the unwavering certainty that, no matter how deeply they immersed themselves in the revelries, the illusion could never last. In a valiant effort to manifest the illusion into stringent reality, however, the degree of festivity was being edged ever higher. As the Christmas moon graced the sky, a luminescent reminder of time's passage, each song of the pit orchestra agitated into sharper highs and reverberant lows, the deep bass of the drums trembling through the grass beneath our feet and the piccolos and oboes climbing with shrill defiance into the blue velvet sky. The dancers moved with the music, celebration bordering on frenzy, champagne spilling over from their glasses to water the lush lawn, bubbles bursting when their feet trampled down the green.
I am not, by nature, a reveler or celebrator; I watched the affairs with an attached disinterest. I had an attachment to deciphering the scene before me, but could not participate, unless it was as a witness. The lights invited me to come closer, alternately lurid and brilliant to match my temperament—the flames of the candles flicker in the wind, the hard diamonds of stars wink temptingly in between the stands of dark evergreen.
I clutched my fingers more tightly around my glass and turned my gaze to the house when the tug of fascination pulled too hard. Sipping in lung-filling gulps, I made my way to the beacon of civilization, cutting an unseen path across the Bacchanalian worship.
Though Twist had invited me with a cordial formality that would not do well to be refused, I wondered if I made a wise decision in accepting.
I had observed his parties from a distance enough times to know the sequences of events, enough to understand the ingredients that were combined with careful crafting to produce what I now saw before me. But I was becoming acutely aware that watching from the safety of my small eyesore of a house and being stirred first-hand into the stew of fragrant and overly vibrant bodies were diametrically opposed perceptions of reality. In my small house, I felt a level of containment, as if I could touch all the walls and know where I stood at all times; in Twist's sprawling mansion, I was losing steps in the violent flow, over-stimulated to the extreme.
Yet, as I came to the doorway signaling the beginning of the building, I could not enter. A rapid expulsion of guests from the wide structure solidified my forming hypothesis: inside the flow was just as strong. There was no relief in there.
Snatching a new glass from a harried waiter being carried in the wake of the tight knot washing around me, I diverted to the side of the house, walking along the softly glowing French windows, flanked on my right by marble columns and the shuddering edges of the festivity, noise and light washing faint tide the farther I progressed.
By a turn of fortune that would seem divine if it were any one but Twist, his mansion was cradled in an accommodating stretch of land that gave him water on three sides and access to the main road on the other, as if the land had bent to his will to give him the perfect enclave even on such an unfashionable isle as the West Egg was. I walked until I reached the softening shores, the sounds of the Sound replacing the jagged intrusions of the party. It was a calm to my nerves, and I smiled wryly thinking that the gentle touch of water on sand was more of a celebration than the false gaiety I had just left behind.
I approached with a tentative reverence, humbled awe stirring in my soul as I came to stand before the blue-tinged-evening-black. The power of nature, so stilted and stunted at every turn in the metropolitan minds, roared free here, so confident in its reign that it but needed to whisper promises on the wind. True power rarely needed to announce its presence in large letters and twenty-foot billboards; the faded eyes and yard-high pupils of T. J. Eckleburg would be eased into oblivion in a mere fortnight if it rested where I stood.
I bent at the knees, not in supplication but forbearance; I would not taint the water with impulses, the desire surging in my tightly bound feet, my limbs, sluggish with champagne's warm kisses, spasmed slightly with a knowledge that the means to awaken them lay before me, in all its unbound glory.
I remember thinking that it was because I closed my eyes that I did not hear his approach.
I had been preparing to return home, satisfied that I had derived all I could with ten feet of lapping dunes separating me from the siren's call. Opening my eyes, I prepared to stand, melancholy, desolate, but revived to a small measure by my visit. I didn't notice anything amiss in the nightscape, but he shifted like a wind's turn, a mere tilt of shoulders like the slant of a mountain as it was worn down by the years.
"A beautiful night," he commented. The words were idle but the tone had the depth of the tide, rich, resonant, expansive.
"Indeed," I said, shocked into speech by his demeanor, turning to face me as if we were the longest of friends, as if we were picking up a conversation and it didn't even matter when we'd last left it off.
"The best part of this property, wouldn't you agree?" The question may have been imperious had he not smiled. One side of his face was lit by the moon, a division between light and dark that echoed the ages in a face just this side of thirty, worn into handsome contours and as much as part of the landscape as the sand gritting in my fingers, the foam prickling at my ears. His smile partook equally of the light and the dark, shining and darkening me with such equal measures of understanding and acceptance that I could not breathe taking it in. I could do nothing but return it, pray to give as much as I received. In a world where it is rare to meet one such as this man, it is even rarer to have the privilege of acquiring his friendship because in all likelihood, it is given for life.
I breathlessly smiled. "Yes. It truly is."
When he extended his hand to shake mine as if we were sealing a pact in tacit understanding of the world around us, my lethargic limbs began to tingle at the point we touched, awakening at just the slightest brush with his skin, blazing warm even in the cool Christmas eve.
Looking into his eyes, I realized then that since I had not gone to the ocean, the ocean had come to me.