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.
Overwhelmed by the heat and the emotional pressure of the gathering, Daisy suddenly proposed they all drive into New York. Her voice carried a frantic edge as she insisted they escape the house, and Tom agreed with a tight control that suggested he understood the need to reassert his authority. The decision was made to take two cars. Tom would drive Gatsby’s yellow vehicle with Nick and Jordan as passengers, while Daisy would follow in Tom’s blue coupé with Gatsby beside her.
Behind the wheel of Gatsby’s car, Tom began his assault. He revealed that he had been investigating Gatsby’s background and dismissed the claim of an Oxford education with contemptuous disbelief. He mocked Gatsby’s affectations and made clear that he knew the man was not what he pretended to be. The interrogation was interrupted when they stopped for gasoline at Wilson’s garage in the ash-gray valley. George Wilson emerged looking haggard and ill, his face pale with some internal sickness. He told Tom he had discovered that his wife was involved with another man, though he did not know who, and he was desperate to take Myrtle away before the situation destroyed them both. He hoped to buy Tom’s old car and sell it to raise money for the move west.
Tom, who had been conducting an affair with Myrtle himself, absorbed this information with visible strain. He agreed to the sale to keep Wilson placated. In the window above the garage, Myrtle Wilson watched the scene below. Her gaze fixed on Jordan Baker, whom she apparently mistook for Daisy, and her expression twisted with a desperate, frightened envy. She did not know that the woman she envied was not her rival at all, nor that her own fate was already rushing toward her on the road ahead.
In New York, the group rented a suite at the Plaza Hotel, seeking relief from the heat in rooms that offered only stale air and the faint smell of shrubbery from the park. The confrontation that had been building all afternoon finally erupted. Tom turned on Gatsby with undisguised contempt, mocking his manners and his pretensions. Then he delivered the blow he had been holding in reserve: Gatsby was a bootlegger, a criminal who had built his fortune selling illegal alcohol through a network of drugstores. The Oxford story was a sham, the wealth was dirty, and Tom had the evidence to prove it.
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