They called it the Great Gatsby summer even though it was not yet summer and nobody was named Gatsby.

I was twenty-six years old and I had two jobs. One was wife to Julian Carter, an investment banker who looked at the stock market the way a priest looks at a stained-glass window—with reverence and a vague suspicion that he did not fully understand. The other was proprietor of The Blue Note, a speakeasy in Greenwich Village that I ran with the precision of a Swiss watch and the discretion of a tomb.

The Blue Note opened at nine and closed at two. On good nights, we made enough to cover the rent and the bribe to the police sergeant. On bad nights, we made enough to buy milk. The jazz was good. The bootleg was decent. The clientele was a cross-section of New York City as it existed in 1925: journalists, politicians, bootleggers, socialites who preferred their scandal unfiltered, and men in suits who spoke in voices just below the level of polite conversation.

Julian came to The Blue Note every Thursday. He sat at the far end of the bar, ordered bourbon, and watched the room the way a detective watches a room—attentively, without committing. He never danced. He never drank more than one glass. And he never, in eight months of Thursday appearances, said a word to me.

I did not mind. Silence is a commodity in New York, and Julian was wealthy in it.

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