Dirty Work

Great Gatsby "I don't understand, why…I never heard from you again. How can you show up here, now, expecting anything?" It was one of the rare times Daisy's face masked its natural resplendence, and harbored a look of puzzlement that bordered, at the corners of her tiny mouth, on contempt. "I got called overseas. You think I wanted to go? My heart, everything I had up to that moment, was with you.

They don't ask you when it is time to be shipped out, they simply tell you and do it. Besides," Jay added, looking incredulously at her, "I'm here now. Things can be different." The shriek of Daisy's cry alarmed Gatsby and Daisy both, the latter of whom rose to her feet to better shatter the forced amicability of the waning afternoon light.

"Forgive my memory, but when did the armed services ever forbid the passage of written correspondence! What executive order was created to prohibit only Jay Gatsby from showing the slightest common courtesy to a woman he claimed he would love forever? There has been no shortage of propaganda disseminated since the Great War; how might that fascinating tidbit have escaped front page news? Besides," she added, perhaps calmed somewhat by his alarm, "I'm married now." "Think Daisy," Jay stammered, slowly rising to his feet.

"There is nothing I could have said that could have brought me back before now. How would that have made me feel, hearing the tickle of your words, smelling the perfume of your letters, visualizing the slope of your penmanship every night, not knowing if I would ever see that delicate wrist of yours again, or…" he faltered off, suddenly breaking her gaze and evincing an unnatural preoccupation with the table lantern, as though he had just seen it.

Suddenly he whirled on her, with a fervor and candor that she had not seen in years. "Listen Daisy, I'm a realist. No matter how I color the thing, you're absolutely right. I couldn't handle the situation. It would have been torture for me to go all that time thinking of you, wondering who you're with, and writing congratulations at the mention of your-*." He quickly regained his composure. "You are married, and I acknowledge that in much the same way that any other man would.

But my question to you is, is this," he gestured at her, her clothes, the vague direction in which her house was, "happily ever after?" "I don't believe in forever anymore," she quipped, averting her face from his. "You ruined that for me." "But," he said, walking towards her so that she had to make a concerted effort to conceal her face again, "I'm here now. And so are you. If you're not getting out of life what you wanted from someone else, then.