The Great Gatsby Page #6

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

								

hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was
because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His
acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular cafés
with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with
whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire
to meet her—but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one
afternoon, and when we stopped by the ash-heaps he jumped to his feet
and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.

“We’re getting off,” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination
to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption
was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked
back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s
persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of
yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact
Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing.
One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an
all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a
garage—Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold.—and I followed
Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the
dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had
occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that
sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the
proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands
on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and
faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his
light blue eyes.

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the
shoulder. “How’s business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you
going to sell me that car?”

“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”

“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it,
maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.”

“I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant—”

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage.
Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish
figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was
in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her flesh
sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark
blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there
was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of
her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking
through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands with Tom,
looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without
turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”

“Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson hurriedly, and went toward the little
office, mingling immediately with the cement colour of the walls. A
white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled
everything in the vicinity—except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”

“All right.”

“I’ll meet you by the newsstand on the lower level.”

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with
two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days
before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was
setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor
Eckleburg.

“Awful.”

“It does her good to get away.”

“Doesn’t her husband object?”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so
dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York—or not
quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom
deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might
be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin, which stretched
tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in
New York. At the newsstand she bought a copy of Town Tattle and a
moving-picture magazine, and in the station drugstore some cold cream
and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive
she let four taxicabs drive away before she selected a new one,
lavender-coloured with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from
the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she
turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the
front glass.

“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly. “I want to get
one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.”

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John
D. Rockefeller. In a basket swung from his neck cowered a dozen very
recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

“What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly, as he came to the
taxi-window.

“All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”

“I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got
that kind?”

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and
drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

“That’s no police dog,” said Tom.

“No, it’s not exactly a police dog,” said the man with disappointment
in his voice. “It’s more of an Airedale.” He passed his hand over the
brown washrag of a back. “Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog
that’ll never bother you with catching cold.”

“I think it’s cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. “How much is
it?”

“That dog?” He looked at it admiringly. “That dog will cost you ten
dollars.”

The Airedale—undoubtedly there was an Airedale concerned in it
somewhere, though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and
settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the
weatherproof coat with rapture.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.

“That dog? That dog’s a boy.”

“It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here’s your money. Go and buy
ten more dogs with it.”

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the
summer Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great
flock of white sheep turn the corner.

“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”

“No you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly. “Myrtle’ll be hurt if you
don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Come on,” she urged. “I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said
to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.”

“Well, I’d like to, but—”

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds.
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