Gatsby was as good as his word. He sent me a new party dress.

It came on a Saturday afternoon. I was reading by my window, the pale sunlight shining on the page of my book, when Anne screeched from downstairs, "Luce, come quick! Mr. Gatsby sent you a package!"

I set my book down and rose slowly, making my movements measured in an attempt to gain control of the situation and calm my rapidly beating heart. Although I knew it must be the dress he had promised to send, the very mention of his name brought an upsurge of strange emotions which I did not quite know how to process.

I went downstairs and found impatient Anne had already torn half of the paper off the box. It was from Croirier's, and the paper itself spoke of elegance and wealth.

I took the box from Anne and opened it. A beautiful dress was inside. It was like my old dress, yes, but it was far more splendid. Every detail seemed to have been stitched caressingly by a skilled hand. And the beads, oh the scintillating silver beads. They caught the sunlight falling into the room and reflected it back with even more resplendence. The whole dress was sunshine and raindrops and magic.

Anne gasped and reached out to take the dress, but I possessively tightened my grip on it. Not only was it the finest gown I had ever seen; it was also a tangible piece of the mysterious Gatsby.

Anne frowned and I realized I owed her an explanation. "I . . . I tore my dress at Gatsby's party, and he saw, and he promised to send me a new one."

That certainly was the truth, but it left out so much—blue eyes and white teeth and green light. Some things I knew I could not speak of, could barely even think of, because I felt myself falling in love with the intriguing Jay Gatsby and I didn't know what to do with those unfamiliar feelings.

Anne laughed long and clear. Then she grabbed my arm and began dragging me upstairs.

"Put it on, Luce, we're going back to Gatsby's! You know he throws a party every Saturday; I'll phone Evelyn and tell her to pick us up."

I held the dress in my hands for a long while as Anne's voice floated up from the phone. Finally, I put it on.
"Ooh," Anne said, coming up the stairs and seeing me standing in front of the mirror. "It's beautiful. You're beautiful, Luce."

There was no hint of jealousy in her voice; rather, it was full of quiet pride, and for that, I loved her. And it was beautiful. I was beautiful. There are times in a girl's life when she feels truly beautiful. Not that she knows she is beautiful, or that she knows others perceive her as beautiful, but the moments when she truly feels beautiful, right down to her very soul. And right there, in front of the small mirror in my bedroom, wearing that rich yellow gown, I felt wholly, utterly beautiful.

Anne got ready too, putting on her flashy red party dress, and then Evelyn arrived, honking boisterously from her car.

"Why, what a beautiful gown, Lucille," she said as I took my place in the backseat.

Before I could respond, Anne filled her in. "It's from Gatsby," she said impressively. "She tore her other one at the last party and he sent her this one. It's from Croirier's. Must've cost hundreds of dollars, don't you think?"

But Evelyn didn't care about the price. Even though she was driving, she turned around and looked at me. "You MET Gatsby?" she hissed enviously. Then, without waiting for me to answer, she added, "Do you think he's really killed anyone?"

"I . . . I don't know. I only met him very briefly," I said, feeling that an intense expression of opinion of Gatsby, whether of laud or censure, would betray the depth of my feelings for him.

Evelyn returned her eyes to the road with a sigh of exasperation, realizing she wouldn't get any information from me. Anne gave me a glare as if annoyed with me for disappointing her friend.

I shrugged and turned my eyes to my lap, gazing at the rich detail of my dress. The silver beads made patterns like constellations of stars, and I traced them with my finger.

Anne and Evelyn quickly returned to other gossip, forgetting about Gatsby, who was to them nothing less than a legendary figure. But, having met him, I could not forget him.

We arrived after the party was well in motion. Drunken hordes of shallowly happy people swarmed about. I did not care about any of them. I only cared about the man behind the party.

I soon lost Anne and Evelyn in the flood of people, and I went to make my way into the house, where I was sure Gatsby would be, examining the party from the safety of some private room.

But then I saw a flash of blond hair in the crowd, a splash of golden richness floating above the unanimous dark suits of the men, and I turned, and it was Gatsby.

He had a woman in his arms. She had milky white skin and a sleek blonde bob and slender arms littered with jewels. Even from a distance, I could tell she was beautiful.

None of this would have mattered to me, if not for the way he was looking at her. He was wholly absorbed in her, or maybe she was absorbing him. He was looking at her the way all young girls want to be looked at by a man. The way I wanted to be looked at by him.

Losing all purpose, I blindly made my way up the smooth stone steps and took a seat at a table on the balcony, where I could see the whole party spread out below me. I saw those two blonde heads spinning around at the center. The colors and people and music seemed to swirl and converge around them until they were the sole focus, the epicenter.

There were two men on the other side of the table, and they too seemed to be absorbed with something below them.

"How do you think she knows him?" one of them said in a gruff voice. He was a solid, belligerent looking man with a mustache which made him look even more stern than the deep lines of his face.

"I don't know," the other one replied. He was a small but handsome man with a thin smile and eyes of such a dark shade of blue they could almost have been called navy.

"Who is he anyway?" The angry man was relentlessly shooting out questions without waiting for an answer; attempting to control the situation by ensuring that no one else knew what was going on either. "I don't think I much like this fellow. I heard he was a bootlegger."

"Not Gatsby," the other one said firmly.

"Well, I don't care who or what he is, I don't like him hanging out with my wife."

So the beautiful blonde woman was his wife. But then what was she doing looking at Gatsby in that way?

Apparently the man didn't know either, because he got up and followed a sleazy looking girl into the house without a backward glance.

The man with the dark blue eyes and I were at the same table, but we might as well have been on different planets. He seemed preoccupied by something, and he kept looking out at the party and then back at his hands, which were folded neatly in his lap.

And then Gatsby and the woman disappeared, and my hope left with them. I felt utterly lost.

I am ashamed to say that I got hopelessly, irrevocably drunk. I grabbed glass after glass of champagne from nearby waiters and gulped them down, hardly even tasting their fizzy tang. The green light in the distance seemed to get bigger the more I drank; the pulsating illumination waxed larger with each throb until it consumed my horizon. Drunkenly I wondered if the green light was in my eyes now, as it had been in Gatsby's the first night we'd met.

Hours disappeared unaccounted for and the party was dying. The man was still sitting across from me, and I noticed that he was drinking, too. I wondered what he was trying to drown out.

I wandered inside, staggering blindly, and found myself at the grand piano, which had been abandoned by the musicians who'd been playing earlier. I ran my hand over the sleek ebony wood and took a seat. Fingers found keys and I was playing, playing as I'd never played before, playing as I'd never even known I could play. Each haunting note lingered in the air until it was pushed aside by a new one.

A sudden motion from the corner of the room made me stop playing. It was the man from the table, slouched hopelessly in a chair. His head drooped onto the hand that was attempting to prop it up. He'd moved abruptly and was now looking at me, as if startled by my music, and I looked back, into his long blue eyes that seemed pools of sadness.

We looked at each other for a while, until he was reduced to his eyes. I saw my own sorrow and uncertainty reflected there, and I realized that everyone at this party had deep wells of anguish which they disguised with drinking and dancing and shallow, fleeting joy.

Suddenly, a man in a dark suit entered the room. He strode purposefully to the chair the blue-eyed man was sitting in and grabbed his arm.

"Come on, old sport, you've had too much to drink."

It was Gatsby. Even in my intoxicated state I recognized his voice; deep and smooth with a hint of an unexplainably intriguing accent.

He helped the drunk man out of the chair and the two began walking out of the room, Gatsby supporting his friend.

I saw his face as he passed by, not even seeing me. His lips were slightly parted, his tanned skin glowing. Love for the woman he had just left was etched on his skin. The green light in his eyes was gone; they now sparkled with the brilliance of love.

And so, he loved her. I had known it all along, really, had known it since I'd seen him dancing with her cradled in his arms. But now, I had no doubts. My illusion was fractured.

I sat on the piano bench and scrunched the fabric of my yellow dress in my hands and cried, and cried, and cried, over the love of him.

I had no idea how much time had passed before I felt slender arms lifting my crumpled figure off the bench. It was Anne and Evelyn, come to wrestle me into the car and take me home.

As we drove away, I saw Gatsby by the pool, talking to the man with the dark blue eyes. He spoke animatedly, gesturing with his arms. I wondered if he was talking about her.

I turned towards them, stretching my arm out of the back of the car, reaching for some unexplainable thing just as Gatsby had reached for the green light the first night I'd met him.

And then the distance faded him, and I took my seat, a tear rolling down my face.

That was the last time I ever saw Jay Gatsby.