“So is that what you thought I was going to ask?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I thought you were going to ask exactly what kind of work Jay and I do together.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, if you’re offering.”

  As Martha spoke, the reflected light off the road glossed her lipstick. “When I met Jay, he didn’t have much. It was something, but nothing near what he’d need to buy that house or throw those parties or any of that. But he had just gotten a little bit of money from the officer.”

  “What officer?” I asked.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Martha asked. “Of course he didn’t. Jay doesn’t tell much of the good things about himself. Speaking of which, I think you should know that the people who work for him, he pays them for the whole week but only calls them in on the weekends for those parties.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t,” Martha said. “But he’ll never tell you that, so I’m telling you. He’s a decent man. Don’t let the Tom Buchanans of the world tell you what to think.”

  “I never do,” I said.

  She turned down another road. “Anyway, there was a man in the war, an officer, and Jay saved his life in the trenches. And when that man died, he left him something. By then Jay was already in New York. Meanwhile, I was making my living by teaching men like Tom Buchanan and his friends and their girlfriends how to sound smart when they talked about wine. And Jay thought that if we put our heads together, we could get somewhere.”

  “So you already knew each other?” I asked.

  “Oh, not at all.” Martha looked over. “We hadn’t even met at that point. Before then he’d been working as a breaker boy in the Ash Heaps. Do you know what a breaker boy is? Do they have those in Wisconsin?”

  “I know what they are,” I said. I wished I didn’t. In years that harvests were so bad my abuelos couldn’t get work, they’d been breaker boys themselves. Hours of separating coal from slate and sulfur, from ash and clay, had ruined their hands and lungs. My mother blamed the industry for how I never got to meet her father. “They’re still using breaker boys here?”

  “Not so much anymore, thank goodness,” Martha said. “But there were a few still when Jay was doing it. That’s why he doesn’t have any fingerprints. They made the boys work without gloves so they could handle the slicker pieces better. And when the coal was washed, it made sulfuric acid. Burned their prints off. When you do work like that, you don’t even get to keep the ridges in your skin that tell who you are.”

  Martha’s words threw light on that shame I saw in Gatsby sometimes. It wasn’t just from growing up poor in North Dakota; it came from the coal dust he’d forever feel under his fingernails. His guests could speculate all they wanted that he’d gotten his fortune from Nevada silver or Montana copper. Gatsby knew that silver and copper and coal were things that got their shine from being slicked with blood.

  “Then how did you meet?” I asked.

  “He was eating a lot of his meals at the speakeasies,” Martha said.

  “How could he afford that?” I asked.

  “You can eat well in those places for below cost, because the real money’s in the liquor,” Martha said. “But if you’re going to eat that way, you have to do it fast before they realize you’re not drinking. He rotated where he went, which was smart of him, because a boy with soot stains on his clothes tended to be remembered. It turns out he wasn’t just doing that to get away with not buying drinks. He was looking for me. Apparently my reputation preceded me, or the reputation of my palate anyway. And he knew that what I’d been doing meant I already knew something about the polo pony set. Even though I’ll never be like them. Or love like them.”

  I tried not to look over at her suit, the skirt with the menswear jacket she’d had altered. I’d seen the way girls looked at her—with thrilled interest, like they hadn’t known until that moment that anyone like Martha was possible.

  “And no one ever makes you feel like you need to apologize for that?” I asked.

  “Oh, they do,” Martha said. “Of course they do. There’ll always be someone trying to make you apologize for something about who you are. But you learn not to feel it quite as much. It helps to choose my own company whenever I can. People who don’t want those kinds of apologies. That’s something I liked about Jay right away. He doesn’t think anyone owes him an explanation.”

  As the headlights turned the rain to a million sewing needles, Martha told me about Gatsby’s idea, how it put together her talent and the money the officer had just left him. She told me about the art of importing champagne and limoncello. The liqueurs made with violets and roses, with elderflowers and lavender. Martha could tell even from the scent whether a bottle had been faked, sure as a museum curator could tell a forged painting.

  They had competition, of course. There was already a brisk business in Cognac, which grew more and more popular. People were catching on to the fact that it was nearly impossible to fake, and so less likely to be contaminated with the poison of denatured alcohol. A similar principle apparently held with champagne and wood alcohol. But Martha’s reputation meant that she and Gatsby could import anything and know upon arrival whether it was counterfeit, and as word spread of how nothing false got past Martha Wolf, few even tried it. If rich New Yorkers wanted an illegal bottle of Aperol or Sauternes, and to know it was genuine, they knew who to get it from.

  “We’re selling the stuff the rich people will pay anything for,” Martha said. “The bottles they want to show off to their friends. If Jay hadn’t found me and talked me into this, I might still be tutoring at eating clubs.”

  The rain came down harder, then softer, and Martha took inventory of my face.

  “You like him,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean you think he’s a fine citizen,” Martha said. “I mean you’re in love with him.”

  I shifted to look at Martha. The bounce of the headlights off the wet road showed me her face.

  “You think I’m gay?” I asked.

  “Aren’t we all?” Martha gave me a smiling glance. “Young and gay and radiant, and ready for all sorts of gay exciting things?”

  I tapped the window as though starting a toast. “Gay and radiant, all of us.”

  Gay was far from the only word I ever heard for boys who loved other boys, but it was the nicest one I knew. It was the only one I had ever been able to live with considering.

  “I don’t know if I’m gay,” I said.

  How could I have asked my parents to do everything they’d done for me so I could live as a boy, as a young man, if I was just going to go love another boy, another man? Most of the men like me I’d read about, the ones who had lovers at all, had lovers who were women. Some even had wives.

  Were there any who loved other men?

  Did those kinds of self-made boys exist?

  If I loved another boy, did that make me less of one?

  “Maybe the word doesn’t matter so much,” Martha said. “Maybe the person does. The person you are. The person you love.”

  “I don’t love him,” I said.

  “All right,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t matter if I did,” I said. “It’ll always be her.”

  “That’s all a mess, isn’t it?” Martha asked. “Boys get funny about girls like that. They think a woman like that proves something about what kind of men they are. It’s the other side of the coin from the Tom Buchanans of the world. The Toms want the Daisies the same way they want an expensive watch.”

  “You’re honestly comparing Tom and Gatsby?” I asked.

  “I’m not comparing anybody,” Martha said. “I’m telling you everyone in this picture has their problems. The Toms want to slip the Daisies onto velvet alongside their cuff links. The Jays want the Daisies to prove something to them about themselves. If you really want to know what I’m telling you, I’m telling you that if I were Daisy, I’d leave them both alone.”

  I shifted on the seat. “Are you going to tell people?”

  “Tell them what?” Martha asked.

  The smoke-tinged thought of a single word drifted toward Manhattan. If it landed there, I’d be out of a job before I could neaten the papers on my desk. Martha may have had the power and glamour to survive rumors, but I didn’t.

  “That you think I’m gay?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” she said. “First, it’s none of my business deciding what you are. Second, every word they call people like us is an insult. That really tells you something. Even gay, they say it as an insult. Even lesbian. But I don’t much care how they use it. It’s our word.” She shifted her path to avoid a car drifting over the center.

  I tried to acquaint myself with the idea that an insult could be reclaimed into something softer, something fit for the space inside a heart or between sheets.

  “Of course, I’ve also been told I’m dreadfully boring,” she said. “I have to fall at least a little in love with a girl before I can let her smudge my lipstick.”

  “Why would that make you boring?” I asked.

  “People always find something wrong with how much or how little women are doing,” Martha said. “We don’t do as much as they think we should, we’re boring or frigid. If we do more than they think we should, we’re easy or fast. There’s no winning. So I kiss exactly as many or as few girls as I want.”

  “No lavender marriage for you?” I asked.

  “Those sorts of things are best done in twos if you can manage it,” she said. “A sort of lifelong double date if it works out.”

  I remembered the couples at the bar, wives staring into each other’s eyes as husbands did the same a table over.

  “But that would require me to act enough like a proper wife to play my role in the whole dramatis personae,” she said. “People are very threatened by women who do well for themselves, especially women like me.”

  I wanted to ask her more questions. How old she was when she knew. How much of her family knew; if she even knew for sure how much of her family knew, or had guessed. If they saw her as fashionable in her tailored jackets, her lipsticks brighter than the deep Bordeaux of the typical shade, and thought she was some incorrigible daughter, just a different variety than the ones in beaded dresses and pink side lacers.

  But then we were on the tree-crowded lane just before the cottage.

  “I’d take you closer,” Martha said, “but I don’t care to lose an axle in the mud.”

  “This is fine.” I reached to open the door. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?”

  “I thought I made it quite clear that I don’t like boys,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said.

  “I know.” She flashed me an older sister’s smile. “I have somewhere to be.”

  Just before I opened the door, I said, “I hope you find her.”

  “Who?” Martha asked.

  “A girl you want to smudge your lipstick.”

  * * *

  I started packing. I wasn’t waiting for Tom to send someone over who’d throw my suitcases into the sound and trample the pastel heads of the tulips Gatsby had planted.

  Whatever the Tom Buchanans of the world let you have, they could take away with little more effort than dialing their desk phones.

  I threw in everything without making sense of it. Suspenders and side lacers. Shirts and books.

  It didn’t matter if I made my way as a quantitative analyst. It wouldn’t matter if I made a hundred thousand dollars. I would still be a brown boy from a family of betabeleros. I had come into the world smelling of red beets and damp earth. I would forever vanish into the shadows of men like Tom Buchanan and his family’s aged money.

  “Nick!” Gatsby’s voice parted the rain.

  I took it as fact that I was imagining that voice. Gatsby wouldn’t be calling my name. Faithful suitor of Daisy’s as he was, he must have been watching for her at the edge of the sound. Or still in East Egg, under the one stretch of shoreline where the moon came through the clouds, turning his pink suit to rose quartz.

  “Nick!” His voice cut through the rain again.

  A car door slammed, the headlights left on.

  Gatsby came running toward me. “I’ve been driving the roads looking for you. Jordan said you took off on foot.”

  “Martha brought me home. I”—I cleared the knot from my voice and knocked my heel against a suitcase—“I think I’d better head out.”

  “What?” he asked. “No.”

  He came closer, and behind him the beams illuminated the silver confetti of the rain.

  “Stay,” Gatsby said. “Please.”

  The rain soaked the pink cloth of his jacket.

  “Your suit,” I said.

  “I don’t give a wheel spoke about my suit.” He stripped off the jacket and threw it aside, leaving a pale shirt over the pink trousers. “Don’t leave.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  He brushed past my question. “You don’t have to decide anything right now. Just stay the night.” He blinked through the rain. “I think I might have the room.”

  He wanted me to laugh, and I wanted to laugh. But neither my face nor my throat managed it.

  “Come here, will you?” He drew me in slowly enough that I could have pulled back easily. I didn’t, even as my heart rivaled the sound and force of the rain on the flagstones.

  The downpour soaked our shirts and lacers so they felt filmy as water. They were nothing but veils of ocean between his skin and mine.

  But I knew what this was. His firm grip on me, the curt way he’d patted his hand twice against my back, the hold that was more strong than intimate. This was the embrace of friends, nothing more.

  The only Caraveo who would ever have Jay Gatsby’s heart had already broken it.

  “Please,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you here.”

  His hand was still on my back, and trails of rain crossed between our bodies.

  One night. I would sort out the rest in the morning.

  * * *

  Querido Nicolás,

  I’m absolutely furious at Tom and his little fit of pique. I’m just fuming.

  I’ve vowed not to speak to him from now until the night of my debut. If I need communicate with him at all, I’ll post a note on one of my letterpress cards.

  I know he regrets speaking to you that way, and I know he didn’t mean to threaten you, not really, but his pride won’t let him do a thing about it. He stands outside my bedroom door with his exhortations. “Oh, come on, Daisy.” Or “Nick’s all right, you know that.” Or “I just get carried away sometimes.” Or, most nauseating of all, “I’m better with you, Daisy. You make me better.” Why must it be up to me to make a man better?

  He keeps sending me little gifts. A set of periwinkle lace gloves. A seed pearl necklace that wraps around three times, as though he means to tell me I can now be trusted with pearls and not to fall off a boat with them. Some perfume in an angular bottle that smells pink with flowers, and another in black glass that smells of peaches and geranium (I made a note of the name. I’ll have to get a bottle for Mamá and your mother).

  But I refuse to be placated about how he’s treated you. You might be amused to see it, me turning away his offerings like a soignée house cat unsatisfied with a dish of food. (Today brought a rare orchid. I don’t even like orchids, doesn’t he know? They’re so temperamental. I’m just sick to death at the thought of destroying anything so beautiful on account of my carelessness.)

  To happier subjects, Jay says you’re staying with him now, and I’m just over the moon about it. You two are such a pair, and I think you should get to know each other better. You’re so terribly serious and practical about everything. Perhaps he might help you have a little fun?

  It will be such work teaching Tom not to be so spiteful. But I’m glad his deplorable behavior at least had the welcome benefit of throwing you and Jay together. So really it all worked out, didn’t it?

  Yours in eternal devotion,

  Daisy

  CHAPTER XXV

  “You’re really still going to do this?” I asked.

  “I still want her to have the option of something other than a life with Tom,” Gatsby said. “Even if it’s not a life with me.”

  Gardeners carried in wooden crates filled with dark earth and topped with bulb flowers. By afternoon’s end, a river of grape hyacinth deeper than the blue of the bay ran through the grounds. The indigo flowers clustered so closely and densely, the ocean breeze rippling the stalks, that a few drinks might have made them seem like real water. Banks of daffodils shouldered either side. Islands of coral tulips and fields of hyacinths in every shade of pink broke up the expanses of grass.

  “And what do you think of how it’s coming along?” the lead gardener asked.

  “Absolutely splendid,” Gatsby said. “I wish you could landscape my dreams themselves.”

  The man pulled off his gloves, letting his hat brim shade his proud smile. “We’ll get to shaping the cypress trees tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I think they’re fine,” Gatsby said.

  “Do you trust me or not?” the man asked on his way out.

  Once we were alone, I asked, “And you’re sure about this? You’re publicly admitting defeat. You know Tom can’t wait to flaunt his victory in your own home.”

  “This isn’t my home,” Gatsby said. “Not really.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He surveyed the mansion. “I can’t hold on to this place. The upkeep alone would ruin me.”

  I looked at him. “What?”

  “With what I’ll have left after this and the parties,” he said. “It’ll be enough for a good life, but not a life like this.”

  “Then why did you buy it?” I asked.

  “I suppose I had something to prove,” he said. “It all sounds a bit silly now, doesn’t it?”