The Great Gatsby
“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.
“I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable,” Tom was saying to
Gatsby, “but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a
garage.”
“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.
She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was
astounded. His mouth opened a little, and he looked at Gatsby, and
then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as someone he knew
a long time ago.
“You resemble the advertisement of the man,” she went on innocently.
“You know the advertisement of the man—”
“All right,” broke in Tom quickly, “I’m perfectly willing to go to
town. Come on—we’re all going to town.”
He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one
moved.
“Come on!” His temper cracked a little. “What’s the matter, anyhow?
If we’re going to town, let’s start.”
His hand, trembling with his effort at self-control, bore to his lips
the last of his glass of ale. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet and out
on to the blazing gravel drive.
“Are we just going to go?” she objected. “Like this? Aren’t we going
to let anyone smoke a cigarette first?”
“Everybody smoked all through lunch.”
“Oh, let’s have fun,” she begged him. “It’s too hot to fuss.”
He didn’t answer.
“Have it your own way,” she said. “Come on, Jordan.”
They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there
shuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon
hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed
his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.
“Have you got your stables here?” asked Gatsby with an effort.
“About a quarter of a mile down the road.”
“Oh.”
A pause.
“I don’t see the idea of going to town,” broke out Tom savagely.
“Women get these notions in their heads—”
“Shall we take anything to drink?” called Daisy from an upper window.
“I’ll get some whisky,” answered Tom. He went inside.
Gatsby turned to me rigidly:
“I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”
“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I
hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that
was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of
it, the cymbals’ song of it … High in a white palace the king’s
daughter, the golden girl …
Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed
by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and
carrying light capes over their arms.
“Shall we all go in my car?” suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green
leather of the seat. “I ought to have left it in the shade.”
“Is it standard shift?” demanded Tom.
“Yes.”
“Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town.”
The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.
“I don’t think there’s much gas,” he objected.
“Plenty of gas,” said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. “And
if it runs out I can stop at a drugstore. You can buy anything at a
drugstore nowadays.”
A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom
frowning, and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar
and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in
words, passed over Gatsby’s face.
“Come on, Daisy,” said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby’s
car. “I’ll take you in this circus wagon.”
He opened the door, but she moved out from the circle of his arm.
“You take Nick and Jordan. We’ll follow you in the coupé.”
She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan
and Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby’s car, Tom pushed the
unfamiliar gears tentatively, and we shot off into the oppressive
heat, leaving them out of sight behind.
“Did you see that?” demanded Tom.
“See what?”
He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known
all along.
“You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” he suggested. “Perhaps I am,
but I have a—almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to
do. Maybe you don’t believe that, but science—”
He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back
from the edge of theoretical abyss.
“I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,” he continued. “I
could have gone deeper if I’d known—”
“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously.
“What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”
“About Gatsby.”
“About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small
investigation of his past.”
“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.
“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink
suit.”
“Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.”
“Oxford, New Mexico,” snorted Tom contemptuously, “or something like
that.”
“Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?”
demanded Jordan crossly.
“Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married—God knows
where!”
We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we
drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded
eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution
about gasoline.
“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” said Tom.
“But there’s a garage right here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to
get stalled in this baking heat.”
Tom threw on both brakes impatiently, and we slid to an abrupt dusty
stop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged from
the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car.
“Let’s have some gas!” cried Tom roughly. “What do you think we
stopped for—to admire the view?”
“I’m sick,” said Wilson without moving. “Been sick all day.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m all run down.”
“Well, shall I help myself?” Tom demanded. “You sounded well enough on
the phone.”
With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and,
breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his
face was green.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he said. “But I need money
pretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going to do with your
old car.”
“How do you like this one?” inquired Tom. “I bought it last week.”
“It’s a nice yellow one,” said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.
“Like to buy it?”
“Big chance,” Wilson smiled faintly. “No, but I could make some money
on the other.”
“What do you want money for, all of a sudden?”
“I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go
West.”
“Your wife does,” exclaimed Tom, startled.
“She’s been talking about it for ten years.” He rested for a moment
against the pump, shading his eyes. “And now she’s going whether she
wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.”
The coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a
waving hand.
“What do I owe you?” demanded Tom harshly.
“I just got wised up to something funny the last two days,” remarked
Wilson. “That’s why I want to get away. That’s why I been bothering
you about the car.”
“What do I owe you?”
“Dollar twenty.”
The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a
bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions hadn’t
alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life
apart from him in another world, and the shock had made him physically
sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel
discovery less than an hour before—and it occurred to me that there
was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as
the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that
he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty—as if he had just got some poor
girl with child.
“I’ll let you have that car,” said Tom. “I’ll send it over tomorrow
afternoon.”
That locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broad glare
of afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had been warned of
something behind. Over the ash-heaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J.
Eckleburg kept their vigil, but I perceived, after a moment, that
other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than
twenty feet away.
In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved
aside a little, and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So
engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed, and
one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a
slowly developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar—it
was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces, but on Myrtle
Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized
that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on
Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we
drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his
mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping
precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the
accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving
Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an
hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in
sight of the easygoing blue coupé.
“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested
Jordan. “I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away.
There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of
funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”
The word “sensuous” had the effect of further disquieting Tom, but
before he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop, and Daisy
signalled us to draw up alongside.
“Where are we going?” she cried.
“How about the movies?”
“It’s so hot,” she complained. “You go. We’ll ride around and meet you
after.” With an effort her wit rose faintly. “We’ll meet you on some
corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”
“We can’t argue about it here,” Tom said impatiently, as a truck gave
out a cursing whistle behind us. “You follow me to the south side of
Central Park, in front of the Plaza.”
Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if
the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight. I
think he was afraid they would dart down a side-street and out of his
life forever.
But they didn’t. 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