Genre – General

Format – 1st person

Couplings – Jordan/Nick

Fandom – The Great Gatsby

Warnings – angst, cynicism, aloof nature of the aristocracy, spoilers

Summary – Jordan Baker's take on love, life and morality throughout the novel 'The Great Gatsby'

Jordan Baker – Not a bad girl

I was never a bad girl. Daddy always said that there's a vital difference between good people and bad people; bad people are poor. Acceptably good men become rich, good men are born rich, and extremely good men are rich in that effortless, careless way that only the unchallengably rich can be, but you can't be bad if you're rich, or at least, not in the opinion of anybody who really matters. Daddy was never an unfair man, he gave everyone a chance, just didn't care for those who threw their chances away. Although not overly devoted to my father I respected him; admired his cold, bored affection and was awed into silence by his indifferent but commanding manner. Either way, I carried his advice throughout my life; rich girls can never be bad.
However, I discovered as I ventured out into the big wide world, that not everyone shares the same opinion as my father.

Nick came down from the mid-west to New York and at first he wasn't of much interest to me; I wasn't quite sure why Tom and Daisy invited him along with them. He lacked money and style and sense of social nicety, and didn't seem to really know what he was doing. However, he had an honest, eager face and a certain charisma which made you feel that you could tell him anything. He seemed to be someone I could go with; steady, careful, honest and dependable. He turned out to be one of the biggest liars I'd met in my life. I remember once that we had a conversation where he accused me of being a rotten driver, "I don't need to be careful" I told him "Other people are careful", or words to that effect. Sometimes I think he got tired of being careful for me, sometimes I think he was never really careful, we just never happened to collide, but most of the time I think that he never thought much about me at all. I thought about him. I came to realise he was never honest or cautious, and I mistook him to care about me in a slow burning, impassionate kind of way, when really the affection was all circumstantial. He loved me because I was there to love.
After I'd noticed it one of the things I found the most bemusing about Nick was the way he was always concentrating on something bigger than me, like I wasn't as important as all that. It was as new to me as being thrown over. It wasn't that he didn't care, or didn't like me; it's just that I was an extra in a bigger picture to him. He threw me over without blinking; just turned around, left, and we never talked again. He associated my actions with the situation that occurred, when I can't see what I did wrong.

What Nick never understood was that whilst I'm good, I've also always been sensible. I realize that things don't just happen for most people, and that fate and occasion have gotta be given a little push in the right direction to get what you want. Sure, my methods are sometimes a little unorthodox for getting ahead, but who's to judge me? I came to a realization fairly early on in my life, connecting the ideas that you waste a lot of time and energy always striving for things the way you're told to, and it's often more rewarding to alter the parameters of a situation to be more practical for you. It's not cheating; it's making sure you can't lose. Ever since I was younger I've been putting precautions in place to avoid this; I always knew how to position my books on my lap so that teacher wouldn't see them during a test, how to get in the way of the other girls when track running and sometimes trip 'em up so I came first, how to get the servants in trouble for letting the dog in when I was the last person to touch the door, I knew how to smile sweetly and say 'I would never do that' or 'I'll never do it again' and you knew it was true, because Jordan was a good girl, and good girls don't lie. In all honesty, I think Daddy suspected me sometimes, but he thought it was cute I guess, in the same way a lot of men do. I also think he was proud of me, in a detached, emotionless kind of way, because I'd become just like him, and I understood his priorities. It's just a shame that Nick didn't.

That day I hooked Daisy back in her wedding dress, and sent her out on salts, I knew what I was doing was fundamentally brutal, but at the same time entirely unavoidable. It wasn't like she had any option other than marrying Tom, and I knew in her heart of hearts she understood it was the only thing she really wanted. There was nothing a poor soldier from nowhere could have given Daisy Fay that would have made her happy, not even if she loved him one hundred times more than she did. Someone as narrow minded as Nick would probably tell you that the day Daisy walked down the aisle, she chose money over happiness, but in her world it wasn't quite as simple as that. What people like Nick fail to understand is that things are never a question of caring or not caring, wanting or not wanting, and choosing between things that are entirely incomparable. How can you relate something as abstract and unreachable as love or happiness to something as concrete as money? A rich girl like Daisy wouldn't have lasted ten seconds in a poor man's world, and as her soldier boy realised that, their love for each other would have faded; Daisy would have missed the society she came from, and he would have wanted a girl who could cook and clean things for him, and keep him warm at night after long, hard days working.

These things; love, money, happiness, right and wrong, they aren't as black and white as Nick sees them. I never believed in black and white, I don't approve of absolutes. The shades of grey are there for understanding. Just because I don't always stick by the rules when playing golf, and just because I can't always remember all of the details correctly when trying to find out who left a car roof open in the rain it doesn't mean I'm a bad or a dishonest person. It's not like I've ever robbed a bank or killed someone. That's much too glamorous for me.

Daisy was always the glamorous one, and that suited me fine – I'm much too sensible to be glamorous. When I was younger I admired Daisy because she was beautiful and could say beautiful things, and her house was beautiful and it seemed that whatever she touched could be beautiful with her. Her words were her strength and her downfall; she'd say anything to make people love her, even if it led ultimately to her demise. But she was like the perfect proverbial white princess, with never a blemish on her, and so it remains. Whatever Daisy Buchanan does, she never does wrong, and whatever Jordan Baker does wrong it blows away with the summer breeze and is forgotten by the fall. And that's why I'm a good girl, because from one year to the next I start another new life and each one holds something different to the last.

The inconsistency of my life I think offended Nick, as though because I don't live by the same rules he does I'm wrong. Now I look back on it, Nick treated me with a certain moral disdain which is only achieved by those who view life as some test of conscience. He had this look about him, like somehow he was doing everything right and I was doing it all wrong, that I was always doing something I shouldn't be, and how this somehow made him a better person than I was. Maybe that was why I tried to hold on to Nick. He started out like all the others; acted like I was the most important thing in the world. We had our positions carefully crafted – I was the perfect, famous rich girl, and he was lucky to have me. Somewhere over last summer positions changed. Rich wasn't everything to him, and not until it ended did I realize that was what made him different; he was on this artificial moral high ground, living in his head where money was secondary to self righteousness.

Nick never had the moral high ground on me. I don't understand how he could have thought that, considering the way he treated me. What kind of a man takes his disturbed grievances with the world out on a girl who supported him through everything, just when he loses faith in things, when the structure of the East starts to fall down around him in huge great skyscrapers. It all started going downhill after that woman's death… what was her name again? I don't understand why Nick was so bothered about it; it wasn't like we knew her. At the end of the day – other people's business is other people's business. The best thing to do is get on with what you want and let them get on with what they want. That's what the East is for; you come, you do what you like, you go, there's limitless freedom. It's where you focus on your own, and Nick's own was me. He never had his priorities straight.
I guess he thought maybe he should have helped that Gatsby fellow more, and I should have helped Daisy. But Gatsby wasn't the mysterious, immortal assassin, the demi-god he was painted out to be. At the end of it all Gatsby was only one man, and who can care about one man? Not even Daisy Fay, the girl I'd admired my whole life, and who Nick didn't realise I'd helped out more times than I can remember.

Last summer nothing really happened to Nick and me, but at the same time, everything happened to us. As two observers looking in I think we would have gotten completely different ideas about the whole sequence of events. He's probably under some self righteous impression that I should care more, when the likelihood is that he cares no more than the rest of us do. He probably even thinks its Daisy's fault, and what did she ever do other than love a man it didn't make sense for her to be with, and that makes her more human than any of us.
I never was a bad girl, and if there's anything the events of last summer taught me, is that I don't like being treated like one.