“To the library, old sport,” I said. We started down the stairs, which was not easy in high heels.
“Will we need to take Victorian clothes with us to change into?” Duke asked.
“It’s Wonderland. The weirder we look, the more we’ll fit in.”
In that regard, it was not unlike Portland.
Koshka was waiting for us in the library, sitting on the reading table by the bookstand.
“Buddy, no, you can’t go to Wonderland with us,” I told him. “The Cheshire Cat is even weirder than you are.”
He let out a whine pitiful enough to break the hardest heart.
“Darling, don’t be cruel. Maybe he could come to the party?” Duke said. “Keep watch in the library?”
“You are a sucker,” I told him. “A sucker. And that cat is a con artist.”
Duke petted Koshka. “It never hurts to have backup.”
“Fine,” I told Koshka. “You can go to the Gatsby party, but you have to stay there. No Wonderland for you. Deal?” I held out my hand, and he put his paw in it. “Good. Let’s go. Book me.”
Duke handed me the hardcover copy ofThe Great Gatsby.
I flipped through the pages to an early scene where Nick Carraway and his date, Jordan Baker, are wandering through Jay Gatsby’s mansion during a party. They enter his enormous library, where they meet a man looking through the books, utterly dazzled that Gatsby’s books are real, not cardboard fakes. But the pages, he sees, are uncut, unread. It seems like a throwaway scene the first time you read it, a moment of comic relief, but to me it shows that Gatsby is a man of great potential never fulfilled.
I only hoped his library was as impressive and extensive as F. Scott Fitzgerald described.
Koshka didn’t wriggle when I scooped him off the reading table. He was ready for a mission. I also didn’t wriggle when Duke put his arms around me from behind, which sounds a little saucy, but if he’d held me from the front, he would’ve squished the cat.
“I’m enjoying this more than I should,” Duke said.
“I can tell. Now hush, I need to find a place to land us.”
Everyone remembers the last line ofThe Great Gatsby,but there are many other beautiful lines that go unnoticed. I only needed one to draw us into the story, but which one? I turned to a page from the party scene and found what I was looking for.
Quietly I whispered the words like an incantation. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars…”
With a flick of my thumb, I opened my black umbrella over our heads and turned us into the dot in the first “i” in the word “whisperings.”
Think of a moment when you slipped and fell and you saw your life flash before your eyes as you went down, stomach lurching, the sudden scream, learning in an instant that we are all gravity’s prisoners…
We felt that, all three of us and all at once, and then the coldness of nothing, of leaving the solid rock of the real world for the mists and the fog of the ethereal, unreal realm of stories.
Like a swimmer knocked sideways by an ocean wave, I sought purchase only to find shifting sand under my feet. But then I felt a floor, a floor made of words, and I could stand on those words and see them, not for what they said but for what they meant—gleaming hardwood in a magnificent house by the bay built out of one man’s impossible dream.
Gatsby’s house in West Egg.
Chapter Sixteen
When the three of us arrived in the book, we were immediately swept up in the flow of the plot. We came to on a sofa in a side room, draped over each other like we’d had too much to drink and passed out.
Slowly, I sat up, rubbing my head.
“You all right, toots?” asked a man in a tuxedo who’d paused in the doorway to light a cigarette.
“I lushed too mush,” I said, playing the part.
“Drink a little water, dame. You’ll be kickin’ up your heels in no time.” He gave me a wink as he did a little Charleston into the next room. Or maybe a Lindy Hop. I’ve never learned the difference.
