A quick summer storm blew up and it started to rain as Fogarty drove Kiki, Jack, and me back to Haines Falls after the golf. There was talk of dinner, which I declined, explaining I had to get back to Albany. But no, no, Jack wouldn't hear of my leaving. Wasn't I done out of a champagne lunch by the canary scene? We went to the Top o' the Mountain House to freshen up before we ate, and Jack gave me the room The Goose had been using, next to Kiki's. Jack joined Kiki in her room for what I presumed was a little mattress action, and I pursued a catnap. But the walls were thin and I was treated instead to a memorably candid conversation:
"I'm going back to New York," Kiki said.
"You don't mean it," Jack said.
"'I don't care what you do. I'm not staying in this prison with that goon. He never says a word."
"He's not good at talking. He's good at other things. Like you."
"I hate having a bodyguard."
"But your body deserves guarding. "
"It deserves more than that. "
"You're very irritable tonight. "
"You're damn right I am."
"You've got a right to be, but don't swear. It's not ladylike."
"You're not so particular in bed about ladylike."
"We're not in bed now."
"Well, I don't know why we're not. I don't see you for two days and you show up with a stranger and don't even try to be alone with me."
"You want a bed, do you? What do you want to put in it?"
"How's this? How does it look?"
"Looks like it's worth putting money into."
"I don't want money in it."
"Then I'll have to think of something else."
"I love to kiss your scars," Kiki said after a while.
"Maybe you'll kiss them all away," Jack said.
"I wouldn't want to do that. I love you the way you are."
"And you're the most perfect thing I've ever seen. I deserve you. And you don't have any scars."
"I'm getting one."
"Where?"
"Inside. You cut me and let me bleed, and then I heal and you leave me to go back to your wife. "
"Someday I'll marry you."
"Marry me now, Jackie."
"It's complicated. I can't leave her. She's in a bad way lately, depressed, sick."
"She goes to the movies. She's old and fat."
"I've got a lot of money in her name."
"She could run off with it, wipe you out."
"Where could she run I couldn't find her?"
"You trust her, but you don't trust me alone."
"She's never alone."
"What is she to you? What can she give you I can't?"
"I don't know. She likes animals."
"I like animals."
"No, you don't. You never had a pet in your life."
"But I like them. I'll get a pet. I'll get a cat. Then will you marry me?"
"Later I'll marry you."
"Am I your real lay?"
"More than that."
"Not much more. "
"Don't be stupid. I could lay half the town if I wanted to-Catskill, Albany, New York, any town. Unlimited what I could lay. Unlimited."
"I want a set of those Chinese balls. The metal ones."
"Where'd you hear about those?"
"I get around. I get left alone a lot now, but I didn't always."
"What would you do with them?"
"What everybody does. Wear them. Then when nobody's around to take care of me and I get all hot and bothered, I'd just squeeze them and they'd make me feel good. I want them. "
"Will you settle for an Irish set?"
"Can I keep them with me?"
"I'll see they don't get out of range. "
"Well, see to it then."
"Everything was still incredible with me and Jack back then," Kiki said to me much later, remembering the sweet time. "It was thrilling just to see him from a new angle, his back, or his stomach, any part of his bare skin. He had gouges and scars from knife fights when he was a kid, and where he'd been shot and kicked and beaten with clubs and boards and pipes. I got sad up on the mountain one night looking at them all. But he said they didn't hurt him anymore, and the more I looked at them and touched them, the more they made his body special, the way his head was special. It wasn't an all white and smooth and fatty body like some I've seen but the body of a man who'd gone through a whole lot of hell. There was a long red scar on his stomach just above his belly button, where he'd almost died from a cut in a knife fight over a girl when he was fifteen. I ran my tongue over it and it felt hot. I could almost taste how much it hurt when he'd got it and what it meant now. To me it meant he was alive, that he didn't die easy. Some people could cut their little toe and give up and bleed to death. Jack never gave up, not his body, not anything."
Well, we all did have dinner on the mountain, and then I insisted on leaving. "It's been a special day," I told Jack, "but an odd one."
"What's so odd about it?"
"Well, how about buying a paperweight for starters?"
"Seems like an ordinary day to me," he said. I assumed he was kidding. But then he said, "Come to dinner next week. I'll have Alice cook up another roast. I'll call you during the week to set it up. And think about Europe." So I said I would and turned to Kiki, whom I'd spoken about forty words to all day. But I'd smiled her into my goodwill and stared her into my memory indelibly, and I said, "Maybe I'll see you again, too," and before she could speak Jack said, "Oh you'll see her all right. She'll be around."
"I'll be around he says," Kiki said to me in a smart-ass tone, like Alice's whippy retort had been earlier in the day. Then she took my hand, a sensuous moment.
Everything seemed quite real as I stood there, but I knew when I got back to Albany the day would seem to have been invented by a mind with a faulty gyroscope. It had the quality of a daydream after eight whiskeys. Even the car I was to ride down in-Jack's second buggy, a snazzy, wire-wheeled, cream-colored Packard roadster The Goose was using to chauffeur Kiki around the mountains-had an unreal resonance.
I know the why of this, but I know it only now as I write these words. It took me forty-three years to make the connection between Jack and Gatsby. It's should have been quicker, for he told me he met Fitzgerald on a transatlantic voyage in 1926, on the dope-buying trip that got him into federal trouble. We never talked specifically about Gatsby, only about Fitzgerald, who, Jack said, was like two people, a condescending young drunk the first time they met, an apologetic, decent man the second time. The roadster was long and bright and with double windshields, and exterior toolbox, and a tan leather interior, the tan a substitute, for Gatsby's interior was "a sort of green leather conservatory." But otherwise it was a facsimile of the Gatsby machine, and of that I'm as certain as you can be in a case like this. Jack probably read Gatsby for the same reason he read every newspaper story and book and saw every movie about gangland. I know he saw Von Sternberg's Underworld twice; we did talk about that. It was one way of keeping tabs on his profession, not pretension to culture. He mocked Waxey Gordon to me once for lining his walls with morocco-bound sets of Emerson and Dickens.
"They're just another kind of wallpaper to the bum," Jack said.
I accept Jack's Gatsby connection because he knew Edward Fuller, Fitzgerald's neighbor on Long Island who was the inspiration for Gatsby. Fuller and Rothstein were thick in stocks, bonds, and bucketshops when Jack was bodyguarding Rothstein. And, of course, Fitzgerald painted a grotesque, comic picture of Rothstein himself in Gatsby, wearing human molar cuff buttons and spouting a thick Jewish accent, another reason Jack would have read the book.