The Great Gatsby Page #27

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922

• Fiction
• Novel

								

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
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.”

He unrolled the bottle of whisky from the towel and put it on the
table.

“Why not let her alone, old sport?” remarked Gatsby. “You’re the one
that wanted to come to town.”

There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its
nail and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered, “Excuse
me”—but this time no one laughed.

“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.

“I’ve got it.” Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered “Hum!” in
an interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.

“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.

“What is?”

“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”

“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, “if
you’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute.
Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.”

As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound
and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s
Wedding March from the ballroom below.

“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan dismally.

“Still—I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered.
“Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?”

“Biloxi,” he answered shortly.

“A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes—that’s a
fact—and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.”

“They carried him into my house,” appended Jordan, “because we lived
just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy
told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.”  After
a moment she added. “There wasn’t any connection.”

“I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,” I remarked.

“That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he
left. He gave me an aluminium putter that I use today.”

The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer
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