#09 Beating the heat

Brooklyn and New Jersey 04.07.24

From the Great Gatsby chapter IX

We drank in long, greedy swallows.

“I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom genially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year.”

“Come outside,” he suggested to Gatsby, “I’d like you to have a look at the place.”

I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay.

“I’m right across from you.”

“So you are.”

Our eyes lifted over the rose-beds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog-days alongshore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles…

We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened too against the heat, and drank down nervous gaiety with the cold ale.

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

“Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“But it’s so hot,” insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, “and everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!”

Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding its senselessness into forms…

“Who wants to go to town?” demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

“You always look so cool,” she repeated…

…And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as “a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it was a “crazy idea”—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny…

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o’clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing her hair.

“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully, and everyone laughed.

“Open another window,” commanded Daisy, without turning around.

“There aren’t any more.”

“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe—”

“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” said Tom impatiently. “You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”

The tension and drama of the Great Gatsby’s last chapter is set against the backdrop of New York summer: the intense heat, the sweat beading down into Nick’s underwear, the mint julep hankering, the crabbiness, the desperation for a window, the belief that right now is the best time to bring up long-harboured love, hatred, and resentment. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Do the Right Thing (1989) and Florine Stettheimer’s painting, Heat, share this theme with Fitzgerald: media about how New York in the summer is a kind of sticky, smelly, muggy inferno that causes a cesspool of tension, aggression, and madness in its New Yorkers that makes preexisting issues come to a head—fertile ground for storytelling. I find myself, now, in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Brooklyn and I find myself, now, turning to this New York Summer media canon.

It is the beginning of July. Temperatures are just reaching 30°C (~86°F) so, seriously, not that hot. But when I am stuck on a subway platform for 15 minutes or there’s some issue that means I have to walk for a while in the full sun to a different stop or I’m wearing the wrong kind of clothing, I momentarily leave the present moment and imagine myself as Tom-Daisy-Nick-Jordan, sprawled out on some luxurious Plaza Hotel chaise lounge in a red-and-cream colorway holding a fan with my head flung back, a small bead of sweat falling gracefully down my temple, saying, in a mid-atlantic accent, “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” or “Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.” Driven to madness. Driven to chic, New York summer madness.

My serious heat problems were actually in June, at the height of my taking-myself-seriously art historical work which took me to Modena and Ferrara and around Bologna. Because of the Saharan dust cloud, all of the heat and humidity was kept in the atmosphere in a supernatural way, and temperatures were regularly 33°C (91.4°F) in a sustained way (ie. all afternoon, from 2pm to 6pm, the same high temperature and same muggy conditions). And so, me: not properly following a direct and easy route because I am a badly planned art historian and with my phone already overheating because it is old and upset with me AND dressed in church-appropriate attire (no shorts, no tank tops, etc) AND it’s inevitably the mid-to-late-afternoon because I missed the morning and churches close for a long lunch AND etc etc. Absolutely roasting. So I began to delight in the feeling of beating the heat.

“Ok, well, obviously,” the ungenerous reader responds, “that is a survival instinct.” And to that, I say, “yes!” It is very satisfying to feel like one is operating as nature intended. I felt satisfied and self-congratulatory in a very base way when I crossed the street to get out of the sun, when I walked slower, when I stopped for a caffè in ghiaccio and used the cafe napkin to wipe the sweat off of my forehead, when I took an air-conditioned Ferrarese bus to and from the train station, when I brought myself into air-conditioned galleries. My trains from Modena and Ferrara were both delayed on hot platforms for at least 30 minutes, and I delighted in the opportunity to look down at the other suffering platform-dwellers with my McFlurry and Magnum Classic, respectively, winning the survival war. In these moments, I felt like I was getting away with something, cunningly outsmarting Mother Nature, carving a path for myself in the unrelenting world, and, at base, taking care of myself.

When Victoria visited me for two nights, we had an ongoing bit about beating the heat. We didn’t succeed very well. We took beers and peaches and nectarines down to Giardini Margherita and planned on lying on the grass to beat the heat. Too hot for me, and I lay there broiling and getting crawled on by ants and getting scratchy because the grass was so brown and dead. I spent the entire time dreaming of jumping in the laghetto or finding someone with a pool. Days before Victoria’s arrival, I tried to beat the heat by doing something similar, and my beer bottle exploded in my tote on the bike ride to the park, covering my cloth bag and books and papers and valuables with the stench of beer. So, in those cases, the heat beat me. But, underlying all of this was the safety net that when I got back to my perfect Bologna apartment, AC was waiting for me.

I no longer have this luxury. Nothing is waiting for me in the Brooklyn apartment other than a feral cat and a large fan. Thusly, I have taken it upon myself to seriously beat the heat, New York style. This involves googling NYC Parks public pools and lakes to swim in upstate. This involves taking cold showers every few hours. This involves perking my ears up when I hear the song of the ice cream van. This involves American-sized iced lattes and frozen margheritas! It’s a kind of fun game about how I will beat the heat next. It involves planning to spend the Fourth of July on the Jersey Shore and buying a beach ball at the dollar store.

The Jersey Shore and the journey to it is hot and overwhelming, but not uncomfortable. The people there are bright red with sunburns and when we go home, we are too. The water is freezing and kids are squealing and Sona buries my legs in the sand. Advertisements go by in an unobtrusive way, pulled by planes that circle the coastline. One reads: “EMMA MARRY ME? JK BEER ME.” I’m not sure we beat the heat properly, considering our sun burns and inedible overheated cucumber and failure to procure a cold beer. People around us have all the fabulous gadgets of seasoned heat-beating: massive coolers, gaily colored wind screens, and some kind of hybrid tent-umbrella. We are not too jealous, there are no outbursts of Gatsby drama nor flapper dresses soaked in sweat; the simple fact that we went to the beach on the Fourth of July satisfies me. My American aesthetic sympathies mirror my Catholic ones, I am very willing to get caught up in them.