Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner bondsman, rents a cottage in West Egg next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Drawn into the world of his cousin Daisy and her brutish husband Tom, Nick becomes the confidant for Gatsby's singular, five-year obsession: to win back Daisy and recreate a perfect past, a dream that ultimately collides with reality and ends in violence.
In Santa Barbara, Jordan saw them after the honeymoon. Daisy was mad about Tom. If he left the room, she’d look around anxiously: “Where’s Tom gone?” She’d sit for hours with his head in her lap, rubbing his eyes with unfathomable delight. It was touching, and a little frightening. A week after Jordan left, Tom crashed his car on the Ventura road, a front wheel sheared off. The woman with him—a Santa Barbara hotel chambermaid—had a broken arm. The papers made much of it. The next April, Daisy had her little girl. They spent a year in France, then settled in Chicago. Daisy was popular there, moving with a fast, young, wild crowd, yet her reputation remained perfect. Perhaps because she didn’t drink. “Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all,” Jordan mused, “and yet there’s something in that voice of hers…” Then, six weeks ago, Daisy heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. Jordan had asked Nick if he knew Gatsby in West Egg. After Nick left, Daisy came into Jordan’s room and woke her. “What Gatsby?” When Jordan described him, half-asleep, Daisy said in a strange voice, “It must be the man I used to know.” Only then did Jordan connect this Gatsby with the officer in the white roadster.
As Jordan finished, they had left the Plaza and were driving through Central Park in a victoria. The sun had set behind the movie stars’ apartments; children’s voices rose in the hot twilight, singing a popular song. “It was a strange coincidence,” Nick said. “But it wasn’t a coincidence at all,” Jordan replied. “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” The stars he’d aspired to on that June night were not the only goal. He came alive to Nick then, delivered from the womb of his purposeless splendour.
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