Bedtime Stories

I left West Egg on a morning thick with the promise of autumn, the leaves already beginning their slow surrender to colors that seemed, in their dying, more vivid than anything the summer had offered. The Buchanan house stood white and enormous across the bay, and I wondered if Tom and Daisy were at breakfast, careless as ever, letting others clean up the mess they had made of several lives.

The train carried me back toward the Middle West, and I watched Long Island recede like a dream one struggles to remember upon waking. There would be no more parties at Gatsby's mansion, no more orchestras playing through the blue gardens, no more faces drifting like moths among the whisperings and the champagne. The house itself would stand empty, I supposed, a monument to wanting, its windows dark as closed eyes.

I thought of Gatsby often in those first weeks home. The bond business seemed smaller somehow, the offices cramped with their modest ambitions, and I found myself looking east at night, toward where the green light had once burned at the end of a dock. My father asked few questions, sensing perhaps that I had returned from something that had marked me in ways I could not yet articulate. Over dinner, he would study my face with the quiet concern of a man who has learned that some silences are meant to be respected.

"You seem different, Nick," my mother said one evening, passing the roast with hands that had never known the peculiar exhaustion of keeping up appearances among the careless rich.

"I suppose I am," I told her, and that was all I could manage.

The days shortened, and with them came letters from Jordan Baker—brief, angular notes in her distinctive hand, full of tournament results and social observations that seemed to arrive from another planet entirely. I answered the first few with diminishing enthusiasm, then stopped altogether. What was there to say? We had seen something together, she and I, and she had looked away first, choosing the blindness that her world required of its inhabitants.

It was in late October that I received word of the fate of Gatsby's house. A letter from a lawyer informed me that, as the only person who had attended the funeral besides the servants and the owl-eyed man from the library, I had been named in a small codicil to Gatsby's estate. It was nothing much—a first edition of a book about the West that Gatsby had acquired, God knows where, and never read. The pages were still uncut.

But it was the accompanying note, found among his effects, that arrested me entirely. It was addressed to me, written in Gatsby's careful, almost childish hand:

"Old sport," it began—and I could hear his voice, that elaborate formality that had always seemed both touching and absurd—"if you're reading this, things didn't turn out the way I planned. But then, they never do, do they? I wanted you to know that our friendship was real, even if nothing else was. You were the only one who saw me clearly, and you didn't look away."

I sat with that letter for a long time, watching the sun set over fields that had nothing in common with the manicured lawns of Long Island. Gatsby had been right about one thing: I hadn't looked away. But I wondered now if seeing clearly was any kind of gift at all, or merely a burden that some of us are born to carry.

That winter, I took to walking the frozen streets of my hometown, past houses where I had played as a boy, past the church where I had been confirmed, past the cemetery where generations of my family lay in patient rows. It was a good place, I told myself, an honest place, where people said what they meant and meant what they said. But there was a part of me now that knew such places were becoming rare, that the whole country was moving toward something faster and brighter and more careless, something that would consume Gatsbys by the thousands and never pause to wonder at the cost.

In March, a notice appeared in the New York papers: the Gatsby estate had been purchased by a syndicate of businessmen who planned to tear down the house and subdivide the property. I read the article twice, searching for some mention of the green light, of the parties, of the man who had believed so completely in the future that he had willed it into being through sheer force of hope. There was nothing. History was already forgetting Jay Gatsby, as it forgets everyone eventually, the great and the small alike.

I thought of writing to Daisy then, some final communication that might bring closure to the whole sad business. But what would I say? That her carelessness had killed a man? She knew that already, and it hadn't mattered. That Gatsby had loved her with a purity that she could never deserve? She had known that too, and had chosen comfort over love, security over passion, the vast indifference of money over the transformative power of dreams.

No, there was nothing to say to Daisy, nothing that her world would allow her to hear.

Instead, I began to write. At first it was just notes, fragments of memory that I jotted down in a leather journal my sister had given me for Christmas. The way the lights looked from the water. The sound of Gatsby's voice when he spoke of the past. The expression on his face when he watched Daisy across a crowded room, as if she were not a woman at all but the embodiment of everything he had ever wanted.

The fragments became pages, and the pages became a manuscript, and by summer I had written something that might have been a book, though I wasn't sure anyone would want to read it. It was the story of a man who had invented himself, who had believed that the past could be recovered and improved upon, who had reached out toward a green light at the end of a dock and found only darkness.

It was, I realized, a very American story. We were all of us reaching for green lights, all of us convinced that the future would redeem the past, all of us running faster and faster toward something that receded even as we approached. Gatsby had merely done what the rest of us only dreamed of—he had given everything for his vision, and the fact that the vision was impossible made his sacrifice no less magnificent.

I returned to New York in the autumn of the following year, older now and warier, carrying my manuscript in a battered suitcase. The city had changed, or perhaps I had; the buildings seemed taller, the streets more crowded, the pace of life accelerated to a blur that left no room for contemplation. I found a small apartment on the East Side, far from the water and the memories it held, and I took a job with a publishing firm that specialized in books no one read.

But at night, when the city grew quiet and the lights of a thousand windows glittered like earthbound stars, I would sometimes walk down to the river and look out across the dark water toward Long Island. The green light was gone now, of course—Daisy and Tom had moved on to other houses, other lives, other casualties of their magnificent carelessness. But I could still see it in my mind's eye, burning with all the promise of the republic itself.

Gatsby had believed in that light, had organized his whole life around its distant gleam. And though his faith had been misplaced, though Daisy had proven unworthy of such devotion, there was something noble in the believing itself. We are not measured, finally, by what we achieve, but by what we are willing to risk for our dreams.

I thought of the Dutch sailors who had first seen this island, their eyes adjusting to a new world that seemed to offer everything. I thought of all the Gatsbys who had come after them, each one reaching for his own green light, each one certain that this time, this dream, this love would be different. And I understood at last that this was the American story—not success or failure, not wealth or poverty, but the eternal reaching itself, the belief that tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

The green light was extinguished now, but others would take its place. They always did. And men like Gatsby would continue to reach for them, borne ceaselessly into a future that looked remarkably like the past, believing against all evidence that this time the dream would hold.

I finished my manuscript on a night when the first snow of winter was beginning to fall, covering the city in a blanket of white that made everything look new and possible. I sat for a long time with the final page in my hands, reading the last words I had written:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

It was Gatsby's epitaph, but it was also something more—it was a promise, a warning, a love letter to a country that was still young enough to believe in green lights. I set down the page and looked out at the falling snow, and I thought of Gatsby's smile, that rare smile with a quality of eternal reassurance in it.

Somewhere, I knew, another young man was standing at the end of a dock, looking out at a light that seemed to promise everything. And though I could have told him that the promise was false, that the light would only lead him deeper into darkness, I found that I didn't want to. Let him believe, I thought. Let him reach. That reaching was the best of us, even when—especially when—it broke our hearts.