The Great Gatsby Page #7

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

								

At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of
apartment-houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the
neighbourhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other
purchases, and went haughtily in.

“I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced as we rose in
the elevator. “And, of course, I got to call up my sister, too.”

The apartment was on the top floor—a small living-room, a small
dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded
to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for
it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of
ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an
over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock.
Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a
bonnet, and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the
room. Several old copies of Town Tattle lay on the table together with
a copy of Simon Called Peter, and some of the small scandal magazines
of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant
elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk, to which he
added on his own initiative a tin of large, hard dog biscuits—one of
which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all
afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whisky from a locked
bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life, and the second time was that
afternoon; so everything that happened has a dim, hazy cast over it,
although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful
sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the
telephone; then there were no cigarettes, and I went out to buy some
at the drugstore on the corner. When I came back they had both
disappeared, so I sat down discreetly in the living-room and read a
chapter of Simon Called Peter—either it was terrible stuff or the
whisky distorted things, because it didn’t make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle (after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called
each other by our first names) reappeared, company commenced to arrive
at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty,
with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky
white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more
rakish angle, but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the
old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about
there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets
jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary
haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I
wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed
immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a
girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just
shaved, for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he
was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He
informed me that he was in the “artistic game,” and I gathered later
that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of
Mrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His
wife was shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible. She told me with
pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven
times since they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before, and was now
attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-coloured chiffon,
which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With
the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a
change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage
was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her
assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she
expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed to be
revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

“My dear,” she told her sister in a high, mincing shout, “most of
these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I
had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave me
the bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitis out.”

“What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs. McKee.

“Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own
homes.”

“I like your dress,” remarked Mrs. McKee, “I think it’s adorable.”

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

“It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes
when I don’t care what I look like.”

“But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” pursued Mrs.
McKee. “If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could
make something of it.”

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson, who removed a strand of hair
from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr.
McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side, and then moved
his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.

“I should change the light,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to
bring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of
all the back hair.”

“I wouldn’t think of changing the light,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think
it’s—”

Her husband said “Sh!” and we all looked at the subject again,
whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

“You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and
mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.”

“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair
at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to
keep after them all the time.”

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to
the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying
that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

“I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

“Two of them we have framed downstairs.”

“Two what?” demanded Tom.

“Two studies. One of them I call Montauk Point—The Gulls, and the
other I call Montauk Point—The Sea.”

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

“Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she inquired.

“I live at West Egg.”

“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named
Gatsby’s. Do you know him?”

“I live next door to him.”

“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s
where all his money comes from.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”

This absorbing information about my neighbour was interrupted by Mrs.
McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:

“Chester, I think you could do something with her,” she broke out, but
Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way, and turned his attention to Tom.
								Rate this book:5.0 / 1 vote